TikTok’s Poison Pill
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Similarly, there is no such thing as a backdoor in apps for good guys (3 letter agencies) vs bad guys. Just make one rule for all. Otherwise, it is all grey areas open to abuse. Also, it is not just geopolitics; big social media like YouTube, Insta, FB and others face colossal competition from TikTok. As a result, they are losing users to TikTok. So they want this kind of ban (emphasis mine ), at least they won't object to it, and it is a slippery slope.
Unfortunately, the only option is to just leave.
This wouldn't address the way the CCP can use TikTok for subversion of America, vis-a-vis foreign election interference by Russia on social media in 2016.
> Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co
The American government has more options with American corporations, these companies aren't intrinsically linked to foreign governments in the way that TikTok is to the CCP. However, the EU should probably kick these American social media companies out of the EU.
And also a policy that forbids UX addictive-by-design patterns to induce bad habits.
Now that I reread that, I think it's entirely possible. Man the future is weird.
It's hard to say no to the idea of more education, but I believe this is a non impactful solution. We've been teaching about the dangers of alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs, unhealthy food, and much more for decades - if not generations. It only goes so far. I don't believe most addicts are addicted because of ignorance or a lack of rationality. I believe the primary driver is biological rather than a lack of knowing better.
The US has massively failed addicts for some time, wanting to just put them in jail instead of treating them.
1: https://deserthopetreatment.com/addiction-guide/drug-industr...
So the solution should be to force them to open up to third party clients. This won't magically make the problem go away completely, but not having so much content locked inside a Skinner box would certainly be helpful.
Now how about "bad habits"? Have Republican politicians appoint their "experts" to draft it? Or perhaps your politics sway the other way and you'd prefer Democrats to appoint their experts, perhaps the Catholic Church, given the persuasion of their current leaders.
As for trade - FB, Google etc. - none of it is even allowed in China. So purely from a 'trade parity' basis, Chinese social apps simply should not be allowed in the US. If we can't have apps 'there' then our policy should be 'tit for tat' and do the same thing our side.
But US would first need a law, now you just surrendered before you even tried. It could be possible to enforce it, you find an illegal action you slap them with a fine, find a new infraction slap them again and again.
Do I need to spend my time thinking for americans? Make a law so Tik Tok keeps US people data in US, force them to have US employees and offer a bounty to this employees to report illegal stuff. The only downside is that most US citizens and companies will have no choice then to accept EU privacy laws as really good and valid (but I am sure the world can find soem other laws to make fun off, like something about bananas shape).
Which is the point: TikTok can't really be TikTok with those laws in place.
There's no way to make any US or European privacy laws gel with CCP policy and there's no realistic way to 'segregate the data'.
The only 'solution' would be to have a complete and total separation of the app in almost every way, essentially meaning TT as an operating entity would be an American/Western company, which happens to be 'owned' by a company in China, but that's it. Literally everything else, except for maybe some code-sharing, would be completely different.
FB selling ads to people and allowing agencies to 'target' people based on whatever just isn't causing a lot of harm to anyone. Nobody in Europe is being 'put off' because they're seeing Kid's Clothing ads because they are parents. I mean, it's odd, but not that bad.
The American Gov. are not going after Europeans for arbitrary reasons. If the NSA is targeting a European for something, you can be sure it already rises to the level of 'international shenanigans' anyhow, and that probably something is very wrong.
FB could very well remove the possibility for the NSA to directly get data on some random European but it largely won't make a difference.
Right now, the CCP has access to anything they want, for any reason they want, including arbitrary malicious things such as harassing NGOs etc..
1 some EU person has social media account sicne a child, NSA,CIA know everything about this person
2 this person manages to reach top leadership role in politics
3 This person is involved in a decision to use say USA or EU stuff(airplanes, guns, software)
4 CIA, NSA other 3 letter agencies popup this person files and blackmail them so the Americans get the contract.
Or it could be that americans want to invade something and EU population don't like it, but the politicians get blackmailed to support he US anyway. We know as a fact that Americans spy on our politicians , I will not be surprised if blackmailing and bribing is happening, so why give the CIA,NSA access to our entire population for free, make those bastards work for it, make them do illegal shit to obtain it not just offer the data like idiots.
I am just saying, force TicTok out or ask them to keep the data in US, EU and the same force FB, Google to do the same because US does not want to do the reasonable thing and offer EU citizens same righs as US citizens when it comes to data privacy, sorry dude but fuck your US gov , privacy and other values are applied only for citizens and we the rest are just economic markets, idiots to be exploited and screwed over
This is the correct solution of winning the moral high ground.
What Russia has been doing for several decades (see Yuri Bezmenov [1]) is leveraging the "west's" inner discontent. Every time a Watergate or Snowden happens it's a gift to them. It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt.
We're in a bind because the kind of medicine that would fight the even more sophisticated Chinese tactics now would also hurt our own corporations and agencies. But we must take it. Targeted advertising and domestic surveillance must go if our values are to survive in the world.
All you need to do is look at wealth inequality over time:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Wealth_i...
Also there are quite alot of ideals at work, for example when it comes to free trade. Anybody can sell his product and ideas in the us, meanwhile alot of beligerents, have walled of their societies from free discours and sabotage any external market contenders.
Because when power is unevenly distributed a few people can make boneheaded decisions that create misery for the many.
To point to the Russian experience the Tsar made the bad decision to take an odyssey the long way around Asia (and Africa for some ships) to attack Japan and they got their asses handed to them in a few hours. That was the first time Lenin and company tried a revolution and ultimately they made this feature film about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin
A few months back we had the spectacle of Elon Musk possibly buying Twitter (maybe he was in the running for asshole-in-chief) but I think he got some sense scared into him and he is keeping his head down these days.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_url?url=http://web.hks....
I don't know why though. It should be clear by now that nobody in the west cares about hypocrisy, democracy, standards or corruption.
I see the claim that nobody cares about democracy as another piece of right-wing propaganda.
Where is it that you live that you fought and won the good fight so handily that you’re able to criticize us from afar?
After action reports, critical evaluation with a goal towards improvement, great. Apathy, the world sucks, give up? F that.
In the 90s the USA had the developed world's worst infant mortality rates. But if you look at the way we gather our statistics, it is different from all other countries. Why? Because unlike others we didn't manipulate the metrics because it was more important to us to have actual data to help save/improve lives. So who sucks? Who is failing kids? The country who is willing to make itself look bad with the worst metrics so that it can change things, or those not honest enough to be willing to look bad or make self examination?
Yeah, America sucks, but it's 10x better than it was when I was a kid in the 70-80s, or most places I have traveled. I would rather have public suck that can be addressed than the general apathy that this poster has.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...:
> But the picture changes markedly when all three independent variables are included in the multivariate Model 4 and are tested against each other. The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level. Clearly the median citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against economic elites and organized interest groups. The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.
> […]
> When both interest groups and affluent Americans oppose a policy it has an even lower likelihood of being adopted (these proposed policies consist primarily of tax increases). At the other extreme, high levels of support among both interest groups and affluent Americans increases the probability of adopting a policy change, but a strong status quo bias remains evident.
Did any harm come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Adam Driver for portraying real life events depicting US government in lesser light?
Can the same be said to Fan Bing Bing if she is to portray Li Wenliang in a movie? Or Viktor Bychkov playing Navalny in some sort of biopic produced by Russian production house?
Anyway, our government isn’t designed to be steered by protest but by voting, which despite all its flaws does shift inertia.
Even voting within states are completely rigged with gerrymandering and popular vote means nothing in national elections.
Other similar examples of this argument:
"Everyone knows taxes go to corrupt corporations, they are completely useless get rid of them"
"Everyone knows masks dont block 100% of airflow, theyre completely useless!"
Possibly because those seats are worth money. I don't know that people competing for them means voting 'works' in any definitive fashion.
Princeton recently released a study (this one[1], I think?) that basically says as much: voting does very little.
1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Currently, of those 4 seats, 3 are in their high 70s or even 80s and the 4th was appointed by the governor.
I'm in my 30s. My interests are either entirely not, or very very poorly represented in Washington.
Tell me again how my never missing an election has made a difference?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/...
Even if you live in WA/CA your vote still matters. At the federal level there are 4 elected positions, 14 at the state level, and more at a local level. There are also primaries, so even if your Governor is guaranteed to be a Democrat you can at least pick which one.
The people that do vote have an outsized impact because, like you, most Americans are too lazy to vote.
I do also vote in primaries, those have typically gone opposite to how I voted, or else were a foregone landslide for my pick.
I also never implied I live in WA. Apparently you got confused because I spelled out the name of the capital city of this country.
I see your point that district style voting can feel pointless unless you you're in a swing district. I still think there are smaller positions you can influence over but I agree with you on that.
You cannot meaningfully vote in the US, you have two options that have similar fascist views of the rest of the world and are unlikely to change anything. That is a false choice, meant to lull the chooser into a false sense of agency.
It is simply wildly untrue to imply that the two major parties don’t hold opposing views on at least a few important topics or that voting doesn’t help determine which party holds the power to realize their worldview. There’s a lot of overlap and a lot of ineffectiveness but this does not make them the same.
It's unlikely you wouldn't know someone has disappeared, especially if they were important enough that the government decided to illegally disappear them.
Assange rots in prison, Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment, FBI raids James O'Keefe and leaks his phone data to NYT (which he is suing), and to top it all we have a soviet-style shitshow trial directed by politicians in January 6th Committee.
Now, I will see some awesome mental gymnastics of people explaining how none of these things have any effect on freedom of speech.
Given that Alex Jones has in the last 24 hours been found to be lying under oath repeatedly during his trial, since his lawyers accidentally gave a full digital copy of his phone to the prosecuting attorneys (which they were supposed to have done already during discovery, but did not), this may not be the most effective example.
I recall the debates around banning Jones from YouTube. It was "sold" as an unprecedented step to combat unprecedented violation of basic decency. And here were are a few years later, when simply mentioning some wrongthink words automatically demonetizes your videos, splatters them with warnings and even cuts live streams from air. People are banned from YouTube left and right (pun intended). It's the new normal and brave technologists who posed as defenders of "real" free speech are mostly rationalizing and cheering it on.
BTW, would you care to explain how something that happened in the last 24 hours is relevant to the issuance of default judgment that occurred in November last year?
he putted around with blatant disregard for the trial and cries crocodile tears when he's found lying under oath during the damages hearing...
Alex 'you may be my neighbor but i'll eat your ass' jones is not some Bastian of freedom - he's a snake oil salesman profiting off other's pain and misery. selling 'real' pills his family makes.
He had due judgement - he had 6 months to do literally anything (He didn't raise a finger in this regard).
You don't 'not go to trial' by ignoring it... that's not how this works... not how any of this works.
BESIDES ALL THAT:
I agree with you: platforms are censoring people... that's in reaction to malicious (not just false - but intentionally crafted and designed to cause harm) information propagating through our social networks - mind viruses just like bulimia and anorexia that are shared socially - only far more potent: things like QAnnon.
information is spread not by how true it is - but by how sticky.
if malicious actors infect a network - besides censorship - the alternative is violence - either by inaction allowing the malicious mind virus to flourish - or by taking action against it.
We are in a brave new world - and we don't even know the tools we need to protect ourselves as a species from the existential threat of memetic viruses...
Maybe we just all need to stop sneezing our thoughts out onto the internet letting them congeal into this amalgamations of ideas that seem to have a life of their own.
the life status of biological viruses is suspect. I suspect viruses made of thoughts and memetic imagery can potentially reach agent-hood.
Here's another one: Show me a China documentary that outlines the overreaching adverse effect of state digital surveillance on China population. I can show you at least 5 docs on NSA and Snowden, produced by HBO / published by Harper Collins.
Civilly liable, not “guilty”, and how is that not his own fault?
Kick out the hostile state. That's not hypocrisy.
Kicking out the hostile state solves the immediate threat from China. But what about threats from our own (current and/or future) government?
Because the U.S. has access to and therefore benefits from the data that these companies collect. The exception on that list is TikTok - the U.S. can't access that data, but their rival can. That's why they're keen on banning it.
Does anyone really think the NSA are not able to access Tiktok? Or that Chinese equivalent orgs are not able to access Facebook etc? Really?
This whole thing is just the cultural side of people pushing a new cold war for self serving purposes (increase my budget, grant me more powers, buy my newspaper etc).
I'm not saying China is great, I'm just saying this seems very much like a made up issue to me.
Basically the discussion we're having about Tiktok is the discussion we'd be having about all these data haystacks if it weren't for the fact that there are powerful government interests that like the domestic haystacks.
Something that frankly won't happen since that would put those companies out of business. Not to mention actual collusion between US gov and some of those corporations (all of them depending on the subject: from military to political data mining). Collectively they have more influence than the US government,so even assuming that the politicians would correctly try to protect the citizens from what are de facto surveillance machines it would be a big stretch. Again, that would actually go against their interests, so let's not hold our breaths on this.
Hate to dig up old skeletons, but if most of the tech consumers (not even all the knowledgeable and principled individuals, let alone the mass of users) stood by Snowden & Assange, what kind of chance do we stand now? Some of the criticisms of Snowden(undermining US influence thus helping China) let's say was "half-tolerable", but with TikTok (which is de facto China's spying & "hypnotizing" tool in the west) we have no excuse of tolerating that here. People brushed it off when Trump said it, but he was right.You need to clean house with external players(Tiktok) before you move on towards harder, "more legitimate" opponents(FB,etc), which were dying anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_the_iTunes_Store
But, for the most part, they've seen little fanfare outside of China. Even the breakouts, like Alibaba and WeChat, have really only succeeded where they are able to bridge connections with China. They hadn't proven they can develop software for a wide audience. TikTok changed the landscape. TikTok is an app that could have come straight out of Silicon Valley and is successfully going head to head with American players on their own turf.
This was a blunder writ in hubris and xenophobia from the start.
Letting most Silicon Valley-style platform stuff into your country is a bit crazy: why would you want network lock-in effects to mean 30% of taxi revenue or whatever flows back to the US, or that a US AI matchmakes your dating population and drains money out of the country having people pay to get more swipes than each other in a zero-sum competition?
For most countries Silicon Valley-style companies with strong moats aren't entering in and helping with comparative advantage: they are just a taxation that goes overseas, capturing people through failures of collective action causing inability to shift platforms when something competitive comes along.
Nothing's going to happen for at least a generation. Boomers/Gen Xers in power need to die off, they don't/refuse to understand the Internet.
What you wrote here has nothing to do with the linked article. The article doesn't discuss what American government policy is or should be toward TikTok. It's entirely about the business implications of Facebook potentially losing a competitive edge from its social graph if it adopts TikTok's content model that does not use a social graph.
You've hijacked that topic to talk about a completely different and more divisive topic du jour that is already discussed every other time TikTok comes up.
Purposefully over-regulating to such a degree that only the existing behemoths can survive and no startup could reasonably navigate the costly labyrinth of policies in that sector.
I think California has been doing OK recently in creating tiers of companies based on employee size and applying varying degrees of requirements based on that.
The "poison pill" in the title actually refers to TikTok's recommendation model that disregards (or at least de-weights) social graph, versus Facebook/Instagram's approach.
No one knows the totality of how and where these modern day digital East India companies truly operate, and there will never be legislation that broadly protects citizen privacy like in the EU because of it.
I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok.
I had TikTok installed for one day and vowed never again.
Is this how gambling addicts feel about casinos? Or how smokers feel about cigarette companies?
I did see a few interesting videos, but nothing very compelling. How many dog videos or welding videos does one person need to see?
Instagram, on the other hand, is super sticky for me because I know the people I follow and it’s wonderful to see a photo of them and message back and forth once in a while.
These platforms are clearly utilizing super-normal stimuli to overwhelm our brains and elicit addiction-like behavior. Is that legal? Yes. Is that moral? Hell no.
Yes we shouldn't ban everything, but there's a large spectrum of acceptable regulations with different tradeoffs and it's fine to discuss what your society wants in that regard instead of precluding any kind of regulation.
OP is clearly an adult capable of making their own decisions, so this regulation wouldn't help them.
So what is your point?
It’s just hunger, use your wallet, just go buy some food and eat it.
Open the list, select 'TikTok' and click 'Uninstall'
This is not to be demeaning. But if you're having too much trouble disconnecting from it, then that should be the way. You can still see videos in a browser.
But still, kind of unhelpful. What do we do about them?
Everyone might get addicted to TikTok for some period. But everyone needn’t stay addicted to TikTok. (Of course I use “TikTok” as a placeholder for any infinitely consumable feed of targeted content.)
Regulation has a place. For example, an obvious and easy win would be to pass a bill requiring any product with a consumable feed to offer and default to an option to sort it in reverse chronological order.
But regulation is a reactive and slow strategy to shrinking a problem that continues to metastasize. There are more proactive social strategies available to us. Education is free. Self-control is free. Unfortunately, they’re only “free” modulo the minutes of attention we can allocate to them from our finite lifetime supply.
I wonder, how many minutes of education or self-introspection is required to prevent one future minute of app usage? I’m optimistic this ratio is favorable, so that once people sufficiently internalize the effect of infinite consumable feeds, they will naturally reduce their self-sabotaging usage of them.
People will adapt. It will just take a while. Sometimes you gotta get burned to learn not to touch the stove. In the meantime, we could require the products to provide resources and tools to reduce addiction (like HN’s noprocrast). And we should also find a way to blunt the impact of social media on those who have not yet begun their journey with its addiction (like children, or people yet to be born into our satirical dystopia of a society). If kids are glamorizing social media before they are old enough to use it, they will not have an easy experience separating themselves from it later in life.
Cigarette smoking rates are way down since twenty years ago when we started convincing children it was gross and uncool. We can do that with social media too.
Is this a self-serving idea you apply only to the industry you work in, or is this a general principle you apply to all industries? Do you feel this way about the petroleum and chemical industries? The pharmaceutical industries? Food processing? The nuclear industry?
Are all industrial regulations instances of 'victim mentality', or only those that apply to your industry?
My goal was simply to highlight the naïveté of thinking regulations alone will solve the problem, unless the USPS is going to send a weekly pill bottle of amphetamines to every citizen who is vulnerable to the dangers of social media addiction.
We are responsible for our own choices until we aren't. Until we are deceived, directed, subverted to some choices. If that wasn't true then the whole PR + advertisement industries wouldn't be as massive and effective as they are.
I do recommend watching Adam Curtis' "The Century of the Self" to dispel a little the myth that we are solely responsible for our choices...
We are accountable to them, we suffer the consequences of them but definitely not solely responsible.
"Victim mentality" is too big of a sweeping statement for this case, actually I'd consider it extremely dismissive of pretty complicated human behaviours.
Some of the most brilliant minds in the world are working on anything you could name.
> their literal job is to figure out how to subvert this.
I mean sure, but at the end of the day all we're talking about here is an app that shows you a sequence of entertaining videos, it's not streaming directly into your brain stem, it's not fundamentally different from any of the other addictive things that have existed on the internet for years.
Frankly, it's not even that important... So what if you waste your time looking at a bunch of random videos? I personally know people who spend 6+ hours a day on twitch, youtube, minecraft etc, they don't frame themselves as victims being subverted by the insidious machinations of majong, it's understood that they simply enjoy minecraft so they play it a lot, sometimes more than they know they should, but that's just life, there is nothing special about tiktok that merits this subversion of agency narrative.
Those are facts. Up until now I haven't said anything about whether this is good or bad, and I'm still not saying "this means we should shut it down."
But I've seen too much to suggest that it makes sense to hand-wave this phenomenon away and say "it's just life."
No. It's worth studying and doing our best to determine how dangerous this is.
It’s one thing to show you stimulating content once you open the app but it’s a whole another level of self-deception to convince yourself that you can’t prevent yourself from opening the app.
I understand you literally removed the app from your phone, but framing yourself as hapless prey without any agency negates the ethos of self accountability and self discipline.
So the addictive forces are quite powerful and for the average individual, it's really hard to get out of this addiction.
The answer to treating alcoholism actually is some amount of personal responsibility and strengthening of willpower, not blaming the companies that manufacture alcohol.
Imagine if, guided by your analogy, I were to have instead replied to the OP with "check yourself into rehab". Most likely, I'd have been downvoted for snark, because everyone understands a sequence of entertaining videos is a different kind of thing than a drug which you ingest and become physically dependent on.
That's most social media and even products in general. Profit comes from consumption, and the best way to keep you consuming is to keep you engaged. Products thrive off of outrage which is why platforms like social media and the news optimize for outraging consumers rather than efficiently delivering information, which is why I actively avoid typical social media or the news. Just don't use it
I can't answer how gambling addicts or smokers feel, but I will share a similar experience - I had to uninstall Candy Crush Saga from my phone, because I would literally open it, and then "come to" ~40 minutes later at the end of my drive (carpool, not me driving). This went on for about two weeks before I decided to uninstall the game.
I've never been on TikTok, but I do know that mobile games like Candy Crush are designed specifically to be addictive/habit forming - look up "gamification" for some related aspects, though that's really more about applying those sorts of mechanisms (mostly daily login bonuses / streak rewards, but also carefully spaced repetitions / cooldowns to get you to come back multiple times a day, highly stimulating audio and visual feedback for that "dopamine rush") to form habits around other domains (exercise being a theoretically "positive" application).
All that is to say, good on you for recognizing your negative interaction with that app, and for uninstalling it. I don't know where the balance lies when weighing personal freedom (of both you to install whatever you want, and developers to release whatever they want) vs. legislation and regulation, but I do think awareness of the techniques that are being used (similar to how I learn as much as possible about scams / social engineering) is extremely important on a personal level.
One final note - 2048, a few years after Candy Crush, hit me in a pretty similar way. The interesting thing there is, with no ads, microtransactions or fancy animations, it really was the core gameplay loop that I got hooked on. After finally hitting the titular number, however, I uninstalled it and haven't gone back.
Ever since reading this book, I've noticed patterns in the way apps are developed.
Candy crush and other similar game apps are a bit obvious, but for me the most sticking one for me is the facebook app. They introduced a few years back these emoji that flash in the screen when you received a hearth or a smiley face in the chat. This is almost a direct copy of a technique used by the gambling industry where they flash coins in the screen of a gambling machine. In the book, I believed they explained that by making positive results / feeling of result stronger, you can trigger more deep rooted habits.
Question to gamification engineers: do you play addictive “gamified” games, or does the internal knowledge of how the sausage is made ruin the joy?
Have kids. They will claim your agency for themselves, and you’ll have none left for TikTok.
Now in retrospect, I am glad that those regulations, taxes, and judgmental stares slowly nudged me towards quitting.
My guess is that the most TikTok/social-media users don't realize that they are addicts.
EDIT: And yes TikTok is indeed extremely good at giving you dopamine hits. I don't keep the app on my phone but every once in a while if I am extremely bored or feeling very low, I will download it. It makes time go by so fast.
I think, ultimately, the only solution will be stripping platform owners of their power. Google and Apple have both undeniably abused their market position to promote harmful content and shelter the problems that TikTok causes. We'll either die in the shackles of our own corporations, or live long enough to watch them topple over.
The gas stations of the digital era are just doing their job, ensuring that there is enough gas supply. What's ironic is that the biggest gas company also created the first automobiles, and basically told the market, everyone is welcome to build an automobile to use my gas as long as you give me 30% of your profits. Oh BTW, your automobile can run only using my gas. Boy, imagine this in the physical world.
Now, if we were talking about whale-chasing F2P games, I'd see your point, but I don't see the connection with social media.
If the majority of this cultural change happened during the age of the internet and the leaked info from manufactures around tweaking recipes to be more addictive, falsifying research, etc was being dropped on Twitter, Reddit, etc on a weekly basis, I imagine that would have played out differently
And also videos somehow are relevant to current situation in my life. For example, if I have a tight deadline at work, Tiktok will show me videos related to work, productivity, mocking deadlines, etc. Not sure if it is just the numbers game since you can go through 10s of videos in a few minutes. And you just remember videos that were right or if their algorithm is really that good.
Can you share any evidence that TikTok was designed to exploit people with ADHD? Where do you get such confidence for this claim?
I'm not being intentionally rude. I'm trying to understand your comment. TikTok was previously discovered to be reading your phone's clipboard on every keystroke: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/tiktok-seems-to-b...
Your claim that TikTok deliberately targeted users with ADHD would be consistent with some of TikTok's previous behavior but I wanted to better understand what evidence you had for it.
You stated that TikTok was _almost certainly_ designed to _directly_ exploit the fact that you ADHD. I realize now that you meant something less direct but please re-read your comment and understand why someone might come to the same conclusion I did.
Part of it having that stuff is the reason it's so addicting. I get in a loop of "maybe the next video is The One". That's why short form, title-less videos are such an addicting thing to consume. Especially when you can't see the next until you're playing it and by the time you've played it, the video is over.
When the time limit is up, I can still keep using the app if I want to, but often that is a sufficient reminder ("I've already been using this app for an hour?!") that I can stop.
I appreciate this feature because I can enjoy the app but also still feel in control of my time.
the CCP probably see it as some sort of poetic revenge for the real opium trade and the ensuing Sino-British war that they see as the start of the "century of humiliation"
More like how gamers feel about modern games. Just gotta swipe…
Nowadays my main vice is Reddit with the occasional YouTube binge. I find I *can* manage using both in moderation but it's a slippery slope. It's even harder if I don't have a healthy outlet to focus on instead, like an interesting project, hobby, or class. But honestly, complete avoidance of those platforms paired with really good internet hygiene ("digital minimalism") are only consistent solutions for me.
Well, you are. That's true for all of the "attention economy".
I uninstalled it and haven't looked back. I don't feel angry at the company, but I do feel exploited and preyed on. Makes me worried about the kids that use this app and have even less self-control than I do.
I mean that genuinely. I feel like I'd be upset in your shoes. Are you looking at it differently somehow?
I like to enjoy a nice beer after a hard day's work. Sometimes I also like to enjoy TikTok for a bit to get my mind off of work and other challenges. Neither company should feel bad about providing a great product that people enjoy just because some folks have a problem enjoying it in moderation.
> Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok
> The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children.
> “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
Also dudes working in ad industry, tell us why should we not install ad blockers when you put this kind of ads in front of children? FB knows 100% the user account age so is it stupidity? is it "we don't care", "a innocent bug"?
Has WaPo every managed a similar article on Hollywood catalyzing attacks on tech? Or maybe that's the commonplace politics... Still, nice to see mention of press coverage artifice.
Other platform owners are bad, I don’t need them to be equal to China before doing something about it.
I agree. But by the same token, we don't need to do something about the others before doing something about TikTok. Where would we be today if we accepted the argument that before addressing tobacco companies we must first address alcohol companies, and before addressing alcohol companies, we must first address tobacco companies?
Arguing that X shouldn't be regulated because Y is not yet regulated is never a legitimate argument.
> Arguing that X shouldn't be regulated because Y is not yet regulated is never a legitimate argument.
Either you've got the question wrong, or your position is more disagreeable than you think. It seems to me that the question is whether Chinese X should be regulated when American X is not regulated. It is still technically X vs Y but the justification is far less obvious to me (when compared to justifying that we can regulate tobacco despite a lack of regulation of alcohol).
For example, imagine if your email password was given out to two individuals - one is your significant other, and the other is a random dude on the internet. In theory, good password hygiene should be maintained no matter who the individual is. In practice I would be (and should be) vastly more worried about this random dude than my partner.
Trying to figure out a generalized solution for big tech may prove to be too hard, and is frankly a waste of time when there's a credible geopolitical threat on our doorstep.
This kind of thing seems to happen really often.
But I think it's easier for them to centralise advertising operations where possible and steer the most malleable and lucrative audience rather than appease (what they thought of as) a minority of people.
I've not had a FB account for years, and didn't use it other than for messenger for years before that, but when I was on there, I felt that most of their growth came from 'copy what other sites are doing, extinguish the competition by doing this' strategy, as everyone is on facebook anyway. It's worked for them so far, just now it's a bigger shift to try to emulate TikTok rather than try to destroy local ads sites or small business site hosting.
That's because of unrealistic expectation from the stock market, not due to the company's health. A stall in user growth means a limit to the company size, and investors were betting that after the IPO Facebook (that was already used by a large share of the humanity) would still grow by two orders of magnitude.
they seem to be making a bet that existing users are addicted enough to the product that a change to it won't drive them away. and so far that seems to have worked for them.
May not have killed the golden goose yet, but they've sure sharpened the axe, stretched the neck over the block, and drawn a little X right in the middle.
TikTok is not a social network. It's a short-form Youtube competitor. It's an entertainment system.
China has WeChat, which is much closer to Facebook in style. It's mobile-first, which turned out to be a good decision. It handles messaging, shopping, ads, banking... It's a closed replacement for the Web. TikTok is mostly push, for timepass (a useful term from India), and WeChat is mostly pull, for doing stuff. Users have both, and they don't compete much.
Facebook is trying to be both, and is now doing both badly.
I mean... it's made up of people "socializing", just through videos.
People dancing to trends, doing duets.
"hey what's your tiktok so I can see what you post/who you follow/what you like/what defines you as a person socially partially"
It for sure has a social aspect.
It's kind of splitting hairs to say it isn't a social network. I agree. It isn't Facebook. I'm not catching up with relatives in the DMs of TikTok.
But scrolling through "people" and what they post certainly does feel social. People can build a brand for themselves (good or bad).
You can interact by commenting + tagging / @ mentioning users, that can lead to jokes/followup videos, etc.
Trends/dances/sounds/songs can go viral. What makes something viral? People thinking it's viral.
Sounds like social/society to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Google_data_breach
>In October 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an article outlining the initial breach and Google's decision to not disclose it to users.[18] At the time, there was no federal law that required Google to inform their consumers of data breaches. Google+ originally did not disclose the breach out of fears of being compared to Facebook's recent data leak and subsequent loss of consumer confidence.[4] In response to the Wall Street Journal article, Google announced the shutdown of Google+ in August 2019.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but never on Google+.
I'm not sure how this metaphor holds up under scrutiny but disclosing all vulnerabilities might be akin to considering yourself having had a break-in every time you forgot to lock the door.
> unauthorized access to private users' names, emails, addresses, occupations, genders and ages.
Dislaimer: I work in Google, but don't know anything about the breach that isn't in the linked article.
Is it really a competitive advantage if a competitor is doing better without it?
A graph of details about rich media is still, in some sense, a social graph.
Rather than documenting: who do you know? when did you meet them?
Capturing: what do you know? when did you learn it? who did you learn it from? what do you call it? how should it be presented? And so on...
If the issue with social networks is the time we waste on them, why would an algorithmically generated feed be less addictive than a social network feed?
I think he's just pointing out that FB's change into a TT-like graph isn't in their wheelhouse. FB built up a social graph. TT has built up an attention profile. Though they look similar, Cal is saying they are different. FB will be starting from the near bottom and years behind.
Yes, but it's a kind of graph that the user can generate from zero without needing friends or following anyone. It's not social from the user's POV.
Facebook also have long abandoned their competitive advantage with their outrage porn focused recommendations since at least 2015/2016, they were just doing it badly. Tiktok is showing them how it's better done.
Wheras YouTube recommendations are seen as exploitable by an adversary to undermine ad revenue and platform trust, TikTok has the benefit of being "nascent" with a "runway" to survive without a real business model, on the relative strength of the current user base.
This isn't a new frontier, and ByteDance hasn't solved the robustness problem, they're just receiving the going discount on ignoring it. It'll work itself out.
Looking from addiction perspective, TikTok is even worse. But, as the author said, it's more shallow, so it should be easier to move away from.
I hope that people (or at least majority) will find a way to move from this mindless fun and finally start using all the technology we have at our disposal in some more meaningful way.
But, let's be realistic - percentage of people using TikTok to learn something is... probably negligible.
But there's an example on how the technology can be used in good purpose.
About half the videos I watch on TT are 'educational'
So you might be right. My kids (6 and 8) told me a couple of times about life hacks that they saw on YouTube. And that's the only place they visit online, even that being restricted to less than an hour a day on average.
So yeah, new generations might be using that content a bit differently from what I thought.
If true, that is great news.
DALL-E is very, very good, but still obviously flawed. But behind the flaws I know it will get better. Like the original iPhone vs. the crazy powerful phones we have now. Or the original 3d games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3d compared to modern PC graphics. Or the insane quality of modern movie CGI. In 5 years or 10 years this AI tech to generate incredible images will advance at a similar pace. (Shout out to GPT-3 in this space as well)
I don't think we fully understand how TikTok is connecting to our subconscious but it is doing it in a way that most people agree is unsettling. And we are at the very beginning of this journey. There is no way to predict if this is going to be good or bad without us doing it. And every company now realizes that it is both easy to achieve and tremendously effective.
https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/
for anybody else out of the loop
it's the same channel surfing that people used to do with TV, only more with more channels and better timing, plus a content recommender.
the mechanism is the same dopamine drip. there's a chance to see something that's exciting/interesting/relevant/pleasing/arousing/etc.
coub is almost the same (but a lot smaller, caters to an Eastern European audience mostly, plus has a baseline video+music remix content)
Like talking and writing directly to a chosen audience of friends instead of acting as an unpaid or low paid content creator / publisher for a social media company?
Any examples of recent apps that might accomplish this goal pf authentic human online engagements? Seems like the difficulty is getting enough users on a platform to facilitate a broad level of interests without a company being tempted to turning their users into neurological lab rats to be milked for ad revenue.
But that said, the use of the term "poison pill" is excellent, and something that I've been using to describe modern tech in general. It'd be wrong to say that Google maps is "bad." Really, it's incredibly convenient. But it's got a poison pill: it tracks you obsessively, it can be used in a geofence warrant, etc. You could say the same for facebook. It's quite convenient to be able to contact everyone from your life, but it's got a poison pill: (Fill in all the complaints about Facebook over the last 10 years.)
I bring this up only because we often get caught between a simple binary: are things better now, or were they better in the past? Usually it's both: one component of things was better in the past, and one component of things is better now.
The fact that we don't, show we think the new ways are, on balance, better.
"The fact that we [on average prefer unhealthy foods], show we think the new ways are, on balance, better."
We might think so, but our preferences are often short-sighted and destructive.
I think this is somewhat true. It's definitely more accessible, which makes it better in the sense that more people can use it because it is simpler.
It's not immediately obvious how to use a paper map. There's a lot of information in there that one has to either know or learn how to interpret. Sitting down with a stack of paper maps and planning out a route is more complicated than letting the googlemachine tell you what to do and how to get there. But, if you're a certain type of person, there is a definite thrill about making the plans, marking out your route, and doing this interactively with another person (who will be the navigator) that is a bit lost in the translation to digital.
While the googlemachine may tell you about all of the restaurants or interesting sites along the way (that it knows about, or that have paid for prominent placement), it won't give the sense of adventure that "we'll figure it out when we get there" does, even if "figuring it out" means asking the waitress at the un-googleable diner over pie.
Paper maps have a lot of advantages, but it takes work, and you have to be willing to accept that your seat-of-the-pants judgements about where to eat won't have the data-driven information of crowd-sourced reviews, so you might get a crappy meal or two.
TikTok is especially a wildly mixed bag for me. I fully acknowledge that its manipulation of attention is disgusting and the data it holds is wildly dangerous.
And yet, more immediately, it is serving very well the job of being Cory Doctorow's Little Brother which in our current political times (at least in the US) is wildly beneficial. As a black man I especially appreciate the light it shines on behaviors and practices I knew to be valid and yet was repeatedly told "that doesn't really happen." So, next, how to separate one from the other.
The entire world revolves around the American Race Problem. As it always does from inside your bubble.
Evidently something is quite different from Reddit and Twitter since those platforms have about a quarter to a half of the MAU of TikTok despite being around much longer. "Algorithm" is a hand-wavey explanation. No amount of algorithmic content selection can keep me engaged when the content itself is of lower quality.
cough cough OSINT treasure trove cough cough
E.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shows-russian-troop-b...
Where they live, what they're doing right now etc. And from point of view of braindead attacker. All this can be done manually.
What if I reverse Tiktok and have everything automated.
A lot of people start to stream just for fun or by mistake, for few secs. Post a video by mistake.
Bot which watches specific profile 24/7 .... catches everything and more...
TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32273083 - July 2022 (441 comments)
For me, it's worse and I open Reddit less.
Just stop participating in the attention economy. Well that's impossible of course, but seriously try to minimize your participation. It's a system designed to glean consumer preferences and then engineer marketing strategies for optimal sales. We don't need it. Stop over-consuming and stop feeding the system.
> If TikTok acts as the poison pill that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution ...
"Digital dictators"? "Web 2.0 revolution"? Seriously?
Behind this self-congratulatory word ooze there is a point: the market will "solve" the Facebook "problem". In a decade we've had 2 existential threats to FB (the other being IG). That's just not a monopoyl that requires immediate government action.
The social graph will still have value but I think people overstate its importance. Tiktok (as noted) didn't rely on it to grow. And neither did Twitter. Nor Reddit.
Tiktok's UI/UX is really top notch. It reminds me of the IG of old before Facebook's Directors of Product Management really sunk their MBA claws into it.
There are legitimate security concerns with Tiktok however. The US still has a level of separation between corporations and the government that China doesn't. Chinese companies are extensions of the state. if anything, the US government is an extension of US corporations rather than the other way around. But there's still a level of separation and rule of law nad order in the US.
But here's an even bigger issue: trade. Specifically, China cheating on trade. I support reciprocity here. China blocks access to its market to the likes of Google and Facebook. This is protectionist and I personally have no issue with the US doing the same to Chinese companies.
YouTube is all about long videos and there is basically zero social graph on there.
According to his parallel discussion [1], suggestions on YT were much better.
[1]
Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?
I slowly forgot about it once they required the Messenger app (which had its own data/privacy issues). I seem to recall that coinciding with a WhatsApp exodus among friends with family overseas, but I forget the deal. Anyway, it just ceased to be relevant one day, and we just text or use any of the 93024832048932 other apps now.
It's not a bad platform for viewing ads, though, I guess.
That said, I hope so. I hope that these other empty social bahemoths chase tiktok to irrelevance, I hope the population gets burned out on the empty calories, but history tells us that this won't happen really. Some people, enough to keep it all going, just can't stop no matter how miserable it makes them.
HAHAHAHAHA no. What we'll end up with is a different behemoth or small set of behemoths indistinguishable in their behavior from predecessors. Meet the old boss, same as the old boss. (The longer I live, the more prescient that verse seems.) And in this case, the behemoth will be in a country that is even more willing than the US to exert control over such companies. Not really a great deal for anyone except TikTok's owners.
I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos anyway...
Misinformation campaigns are very powerful and this is especially worrisome when the most popular platform is controlled by an authoritarian regime with no regards to human rights, democracy, and free press.
1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-diagnosis-videos-leave-s...
Ya, you're right, China isn't known to collect or do much with population data.
China and the US officially regard each other as adversaries. The CCP outright declares the US to be an enemy. The CCP is also not subject to the rule of law within its own borders, even in theory.
Then you get into the economics of it. The liberal west is generally in favor of free markets, but to what degree do we remain free when dealing with a trading partner who doesn't operate as a liberal democracy? China has banned Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram...because they don't want their citizens giving business to foreign powers which they could be directing to their own growing businesses, and they don't want their citizens giving data to foreign powers.
So please clarify, is the US banning TikTok "sinophobia" but China banning Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc just something else entirely?
This is mainly because they embed their logo into everything that's shared of course. It's like the tramp stamp of stupid memes.
In this case it works out negatively but I guess there's a lot of people loving mindless entertainment so I guess this is why they still mark their stuff this way.
So in my case it has nothing to do with China even though I'm admittedly opposed to their government. But that's a different thing. FWIW I hate Facebook and Twitter too (for other reasons, Facebook because their datamining, Twitter because of the huge amount of nonsense ("Look I just had chicken wings"). But I use Instagram to follow certain artists.
I'd love for that to be an option. I've tried looking at Youtube Shorts and it's pretty much 500 TikTok videos being uploaded by dozens of channels and dumped on everyone. Making it possible to filter by "the TikTok voice", "the TikTok laugh" and the top 5 songs used for TikTok would improve the experience by a lot and I might actually see something I care about. Downvoting doesn't change anything either, they'll even start looping around and showing me Shorts I've downvoted before. Or maybe it's really not used by anyone and automated TikTok uploads are all there is, I don't know.
They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared. Or, they could flood your child’s feed with videos from children their age discussing perceived mental illness self-diagnosis to encourage the youth of a nation to consider themselves mentally ill. They could flood young people of primary child-bearing age with videos of other children discussing their homosexuality in order to lower the reproduction rate within a country. They could flood videos that are critical of key practices or institutions within a country to promote dissent.
This is what every US social media company has been trying to do forever, except they didn't focus on schoolkids, they focused on everyone. It's called "maximizing engagement".
I’m, aren’t parents supposed to be keeping track of their own kids, not some company?
The stuff you said in the last half there is insane to me, so I’ll assume you’re either trolling or perhaps we have a very different view of certain things.
I don't believe the theories around the Chinese government controlling children's minds through TikTok are likely to be true. It's probably just a dumb app. But there's nothing impossible about it.
The claim that you can *control* people's minds via TikTok is a pretty big claim. You can influence behaviour, but what the OP is suggesting is highly outlandish and almost certainly impossible (particularly the homophobic fear that TikTok can turn kids gay).
Remember that the advertising industry has been trying to control people's minds via all kinds of media for over a century, but is still only moderately successful at it.
Historically, the Soviet intelligence services used to think that they were very good at spreading Communist propaganda within Western countries. In many ways they were. And yet, not many Westerners became Communists. Just look at this guy explain how successfully the Soviets are subverting US public opinion only a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
(I assume this is why US Gov has been going after TikTok -- it's the only major social site not more or less under their control.)
If the Snowden leaks haven't shown you that the schizos are starting to become more right about many things, then I don't know what else to say. You're being willfully ignorant I guess.
Are you suggesting that ones sexuality can be changed by being exposed to other sexualities?
Don't forget we talk about 6.5 billions humans that US already treats as sub-humans as in being entitled to less basic human rights than US citizens. If US wants rest of the world to actually give a damn lets start with this simple issue.
Till then no, I don't care much if also chinese have my browsing data.
In the old East Germany, it wasn't a problem that the CIA knew everything about you. It was that the Stasi did.
But there are Chinese dissidents and Tibet independentists in your country which are at risk, so it's OK if China spies on those because "they are not your government"?
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/13/opinions/j-michael-cole-o...
But let's not forget what started the discussion: we play here the game of relativization to justify the CCP spying on tiktok users. That's all there is to know.
However, you shouldn't put too much weight on the absence of proof for Chinese invasion of your privacy. China is an authoritarian regime, what this translates to in practice is that, while a "democracy" like the US or a European country will spy on you and violate both your and its own citizens rights, it can be caught and its PR will then cry and act really sorry (for whatever good this does), while a regime like China or Russia will brutally lock away or assassinate anyone digging dirt, and in the rare case they do get caught they will just smirk smugly and ask you what you're going to do about it. Both of those options suck, I know, a sane man will get far away from both of them, but one of them is strictly worse than the other in a very clear sense.
>I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos
Why, they are going to breed feline supurr-soldiers and subjugate your people with them off course. Meowahahaha.
Jokes aside, you're underselling the amount of power they have over you. Just off the top of my head, and I'm not remotely knowledgeable in security, smartphones put geotags and timestamps in photos and videos. The PLA and their friends are probably not interested in your Mr.ButterMeow, but they are interested in where you live and when you are glued to an app that monopolises your attention. What are they going to do with this ? I don't know, but it can't be a good thing.
There is such a thing as a "I don't have anything to hide" fallacy, it's a fallacy because (1) you don't know your attacker's mind, anything you do could be something you would very much want to hide if you only knew what your attacker intends to do with it (2) Rights are defended on principle, if I broke into your home and stole all the garbage, then that is still a violation of your rights, even if 0 harm or even negative harm was done. A principle is like an algorithm, it has to be followed to the letter even if the circumstances are amenable to a special shortcut.
China may not have been proven to use TikTok data specifically, but their track record about human rights and privacy is what it is.
> I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos anyway...
Ah, the old "nothing to hide" argument.
You might have doubts whether the limits set by Western authorities on Google's use of your data would be effective, or about the ability of those authorities to investigate and enforce, but I think we can all agree the odds are much better than for TikTok where no chance exists at all.
"It's so weird how scared people are of falling under the control of a foreign government. Don't they know their own government is just as or even more corrupt?"
Granted social media have less influence than a government, but that doesn't make the risk go away. And yes, the same logic applies to US (social) media in other countries, though the relationship between countries should be taken into account when assessing that risk. Though that relationship is itself influenced by media..
Do I particularly agree with the CCP politically? No. But I want everyone to be equal to the law and I'm not going to delude myself that Americans give one flying fuck about the privacy of foreigners- or their own citizens even.
China, via a state sponsored outlet, just threatened to shoot the speaker of the house's plane if it went to Taiwan and you find USA's stance on TikTok, an extension of the CCP, "really weird"?
I'm not really sure what to make of Chinese government involvement with TikTok but from the information available, it seems like whatever it is, TikTok isn't being forthright about it.
You can distrust the US government and also think there's reasonable evidence the Chinese government has access to TikTok for domestic or foreign intelligence.
I wish people would stop giving me permission to believe two things at the same time as a way of pairing
a) the thing with overwhelming evidence that I'm worried about and they're trying to minimize, with
b) the thing that there's little evidence for that they're trying to get me to believe.
It's a marketing tactic. a) suffers by association with the innuendo and rumor of b), and b) is strengthened by being associated with the extensive documentation of a).
That said, I would caution against the temptation to “grade on a curve” here. While it’s true what you said, that there’s no direct evidence of spying, the case of proven US spying should demonstrate that government are more likely to be spying and hiding it than not.
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/parents-beware-of-these-...
That doesn't even mention the one about stealing something from school, or the "fractal wood burning" stuff that has actually killed people. Their purely-algorithmic feed denies people the validation they seek from their own circle, encouraging them to dial up the outrageousness to get views from strangers instead, so these things are not accidents. There are lots of cool things on TikTok - I'm a fan of B Dylan Hollis and Amaury Guichon and just about anyone singing a shanty or covering a Pink Floyd guitar line - but overall "TikToxic" captures it pretty well. Why play the sinophobia card when an even simpler explanation is right there?
And yes! TikTok is how we break the shackles of big tech. TikTok on its own we can handle. But a Facebook backed by the full force of the US military surveillance industrial complex. That is going to kill off the whole planet.
You don't actually have a problem with big tech or surveillance, you have a problem with the US.
The same has not been proved for China. There have only been accusations by the US government, followed by an absolute reluctance and failure to provide any proof whatsoever.
The US accuses China of being a bad actor engaging in data surveillance, refuses to back up accusations, and then commits the very same act themselves. The very definition of dishonesty and hypocrisy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/ac...
TikTok almost certainly receives requests from various governments to collect data no differently from Facebook/Google/Verizon etc..
I think it's not a question of if China is doing this as well; certainly they are. No politician is going to publicly say though, "Look we know China is collecting data on you from TikTok because, uh duh, that's what we do with all of your US based social media posts."
I also don't think our government is all that directly concerned that China is monitoring. I think the concern is more on how the data and the outside control of the platform might be used to influence public opinions. Election tampering and the like.
Similarly, the PSBs in some cities have used social media contacts as a means of working out which foreign English teachers to do impromptu drug testing on.
So this is as 'big brother' as it gets.
Edit:
"Government “golden shares”, tiny investments that give a high degree of control over companies, have been rumoured for years; only recently have they been disclosed in the likes of Weibo and ByteDance." [1]
"In April 2021, a state-owned enterprise owned by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the China Internet Investment Fund, took a partial ownership stake in ByteDance's main Chinese entity and placed a government official, Wu Shugang, on its board of directors" [2]
"ByteDance's China business has a strategic partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security for the ministry's public relations efforts.[ In 2019, ByteDance formed joint ventures with Beijing Time, a publisher controlled by the Beijing municipal CCP committee"
"Yiming issued a letter stating that the app was "incommensurate with socialist core values" and promised that ByteDance would "further deepen cooperation" with the authorities to promote their policies.Following the shutdown, ByteDance announced that it would give preference to Chinese Communist Party members in its hiring and increase its censors from 6,000 to 10,000 employees."
"In April 2022, ByteDance announced that it would report users' content on Toutiao and Douyin that engaged in "historical nihilism" in contradiction of official CCP history"
... the list goes on ...
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/chinas-communist-authorit...