I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos anyway...
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?
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.
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?
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.
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"?
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?
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.
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.
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...
"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..