TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy
scribe.rip
scribe.rip
TikTok is seriously affecting peoples quality of life en-masse in a way that social media has never achieved before. Any social media person will tell you how insane the numbers are on TikTok compared to their competitors.
What evidence do you have that its effect is worse than other platforms? Perhaps its scale is worse, but is the actual effect on the individual that much worse than it is with Instagram?
But anecdotally for myself and anyone I know who has used TikTok, the app is just so much more addicting than any other social media has been before. I'm not a social media newcomer, I have used social media nearly all my life. I have used instagram in the past.But never before have I felt the same addiction/compulsion that exists with TikTok. I don't think this is that unusual an experience, have you tried using the app yourself?
From what I've heard it has the hallmarks of a fad: inexplicably engaging, and then dropped by the time it becomes popular enough that I've heard of it. Do you think that is likely here, or does this have something genuinely novel and more enduring?
I'm sure other social media platforms have tried to build recommendation algos that are as good as TikTok's, they just haven't succeeded. And now I'm not sure that a high quality recommendation algorithm is actually in the consumers interest.
2. Some people are worried about the CCP exerting control to learn about sensitive leaders and their families [1] or to persuade populations at scale [2]. The app has been shown to capture all keyboard input [3], clipboard contents [4], and record much more than it needs to function. Furthermore, all US-based social media is blocked in China, and there's an argument for reciprocity. The topic of Facebook being used to gather international intelligence for the US is not typically mentioned in the same conversations.
[1] opinion; https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-tiktok-its-all-fun-and-games...
[2] https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2022/07/09/th...
[3] https://www.notebookcheck.net/TikTok-is-monitoring-all-keybo...
[4] https://threatpost.com/tiktok-to-stop-clipboard-snooping-aft...
Could have been Vine, but we allow leaders in an industry to buy out insurgent, innovative competition and shut them down.
> Furthermore, all US-based social media is blocked in China, and there's an argument for reciprocity.
Reciprocity would be walling off sections of our social networks that could be bound to Chinese censorship laws. We get a special TikTok that isn't bound by Chinese censorship, if we want to be in China we must give them a special Facebook that is.
Content negative to China gets removed all the time while content negative to the US stays up. So I would assume there is still censorship.
Prior to the war there was mostly around articles to do with covid so it was easy to avoid most of it.
It's impossible to avoid now.
I was reading comments about the iPhone 14 and the comments were reduced to 'stupid americans, we make your phones, haha you're too dumb to make iphones'..
Makes me want to quit the internet.
Maybe I don't know enough about what bugs the CCP but I can find content with the hash tags #tiananmensquare, #hongkongprotests or about the social credit system in China, each showing thousands of videos with millions of views.
When a video by "Stopcommunistchina" about Tiananmen Square is the top result when typing it into their search bar, I wonder how bad their censorship algorithm must be to miss this.
So it’s more about telling people who already know that alcohol is bad, that White Claw is also bad.
China's mass production and export of fentanyl strikes me as a literal modern Opium War.
TikTok was literally attacked by US Presidents of opposing parties in two subsequent terms, and has been credibly threatened with total bans.
So it's more like telling people China bad.
Let’s not pretend that all other social medias are loved.
I intend that in all seriousness; I'm sorry I can't find a way to phrase it that doesn't sound fatuous. There seems to be some access to which we're ok when American companies do it and not when Chinese ones do. And I couuld understand that, but just what asset are we hardening?
The problem is not what TikTok is doing to people. The problem is that we don't control it and China does.
This is a sneaky thing those who manufacture consent do. They are very thorough in calling out the bad of the thing that exists outside their control and profit structure, but then accuse you of whataboutism when you try to compare and contrast with the status quo they are implicitly supporting in their criticism.
So, if TikTok was a US-based company (like Meta) fucking up peoples' minds (like Meta) it would be fine? Sounds a bit racist, if not everybody is allowed to destroy lives.
I have heard it said that in China, the TikTok algorithm heavily favors content supporting and glorifying science and engineering, in an attempt to encourage their youths to go into those fields, while here, they prioritize vanity like dancing and bodybuilding.
So I don’t doubt they push content that keeps us dumb while they try to use their own platform for good inside China.
If you mean lots of propaganda meant to bolster racist sentiments.
Crack Babies: The Epidemic That Wasn't
I found myself addicted to consuming and creating tiktoks for about a year and a half after amassing 25k followers in a few months.
There’s many repercussions to being on any social platform for countless hours a day, but for me it was a hard addiction to break.
Not only do you get the feeling of a slot machine when the platform allows you to win to keep you incentivized to keep creating, but you get stuck in a niche of content you probably would never do otherwise. You become a one trick pony or see yourself following trends out of desperation to keep your views.
I find TikTok to be one of the best platforms for manipulating your emotions. It can give you power just as fast as it can take it away. Once you get used to a certain amount of engagement and views, you hardly can settle for less emotionally.
It was a whirlwind for me.
Yes! Even as a viewer, you're (very intentionally, I'm sure) lulled into a Vegas casino-like sleepwalk of infinite scrolling.
It's terrible how the "strategic decisions" of one company (Google/Youtube) have marked the flow/form of information in the web. Even "for pay" content providers (mostly news sites) now shove video when you enter into their websites.
Long lost and forgotten are information dense text sites like HowTOs, Benchmarks, Shoot outs and similar web pages from the 90s and early 2000s.
My understanding was that this was mostly a response to a decision by Facebook to boost their algorithmic ranking of articles that feature video. So maybe "two companies" :)
* The medium of video. It's just a next level experience compared to reading text and looking at photos of dishes.
* I thought I wanted an aggregate vote on a restaurant. I actually like one detailed TikTok review over a ton of shallow, generally extreme Yelp reviews.
Up! Up! my friend, and quit your books!
Or surely you'll grow double.
Up! Up! my friend and close your books
Why all this toil and trouble?
===
There is no doubt, but that study is an occasion of exciting lust, and of giving rise to many obscene actions... Hence, as I suppose it is, that we find, in Euripides and Juvenal, that the learned women of antiquity were accused of immodesty.
===
... he so buried himself in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits.
And that doesn't even count the multitude of ills brought upon society by the television. Perhaps we should take a brief step back and consider before we continue our clamor over TikTok.
Kids being poisoned by halloween candy (no child was ever poisoned by a stranger on Halloween)
Kids being latchkey kids
Violent video games
Jazz
Hip hop
Rap
Heavy Metal
Satanists meeting up to cut up animals
Marijuana
Dungeons and dragons (really https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-1980s-media-panic-over-dungeons-dragons)
People gassing Euro trains and removing everyone's kidneys
The internet
Email (really)
Text chat like aol and yahoo messenger
Sms messages
The dark web
Jelly bracelets (really, on Good Morning America https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/the-great-sex-bracelet-scare-and-other-teen-myths/2197833/)
Most songs sung by black people
Many songs sung by Italian Americans
Homosexual men
Africanized Honey Bees
Facebook
Myspace
Pinball arcades
Video game arcades
Pool halls
And other similar dumb lethal challenges?
If you want to look at past analogous campaigns, tobacco lobby arguments fit better: All the cool kids are doing it, so if you don't do it you're uncool, correlation between lung cancer/depression doesn't equal causation, the science can't prove anything, maybe people who are predisposed to lung cancer/depression are more likely to smoke/spend all day doomscrolling.
The Yellow PerilBan both for kids. Double ban Instagram. If nobody has planted a flag in your moral center, you'll rarely find a reason to mention TikTok by name when talking about the manipulation and surveillance that social media decided it wants to be.
UPD: Yeah I meant "later" and not "former". Corrected.
the rest of he world is not interested on keep perpetuating the status quo
Those of us who want to live in countries without concentration camps.
I'll assume you mean latter, easy mistake to make.
Personally I find the "if you aren't supporting the ridiculous things we're doing you're supporting the enemy" argument ridiculous. I'm capable of thinking both need to seriously change, and think it's a better use of my time to try and change the Western Democracy I am a part of as it's supposed to change if I disagree with it. It's strange how that point of view gets me labeled a (possibly unintentional) traitor.
Disclaimer: I'm not US or EU citizen. I just seen how my home country changed from liberal state of almost absolute freedom into authoritarism and then into fascism. Western democracies do all kind of things I dont like, but at least they dont risk to burn planet in nuclear fire.
Saying anyone who doesn't fully back Western democracies is supporting the enemy is calling them a traitor. Maybe that wasn't your intention, but providing support to the enemy is a textbook definition of traitor.
Facebook and Zukerberg personally obviously have political agenda, influence and censorship. At the same time it's not the same thing as totalitarian state agenda and censorship.
zuckerberg pelosi liz truss elon musk et al are not paragons of virtue and they are the people being defended here
You've fallen for one of the most obvious and silly propaganda techniques there are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
You believe CCP furnished statistics?
This is just silly.
The overwhelming majority of people have no idea of what any of that means thus have not made any such calculus.
The overwhelming majority of people probably know just as much as you and I do about the uses to which TikTok puts the data they gather. Which is why conversations about TikTok immediately move into attacks on the Chinese government and Chinese people rather than discussing a single material effect that their data gathering or use has or could have on anyone's life.
The difficulty with discussing material objections to TikTok is that people would immediately enter areas that they personally have a hand in working on and/or investing in, and would lobby to preserve. They want American data to go to American oligarchs.
As a very technical person in this industry, do you really think you don't have a better understanding of the data TikTok collects and what it will be used for than Average TikTok User?
We like to call users stupid or confused for using something that is bad, then we only give them one choice. People aren't using Facebook because they don't care about what's happening to them, the use it because it's the only/easiest way to get certain things done and they have other problems in their lives to worry about.
TikTok is unique in its control of the user experience, its use of data, and its popularity.
Best not to throw this on the pile of “well duh, it’s social media — of course it’s bad.”
TikTok is spyware. TikTok is an adversary. TikTok must be regulated. Let’s talk about TikTok in this comments section, and not zoom out like we so often do.
Your paranoia is bizarre.
Google and Facebook collect the same sorts of information, they just don't use it as much to curate your experience.
Edit: to the downvoters, do you really think that Google and Facebook don't scan images you upload to them, and save drafts of things you type into their views: email or chat window or what have you? Do you really think they're not creating a complex profile of who you are as a person? That's how ads work. "Show this ad to 20-35 year olds in [Area] with [political affiliation] and a hobby of [thing]. You gain that knowledge by reading and tracking _everything_
In what unique ways is TikTok compromising privacy that Facebook isn't that warrants the labels of "spyware" and being "the adversary?"
If a woman is seeking an abortion, is she better off using a service that collects data for the US or China?
I can't see the Chinese government selling my medical information to health insurers, but could certainly see a local company doing this.
It's very telling when it comes to topics marginally related to general idea of China (the place, the people, the culture, etc.), these so-called free thinker intellectuals seamlessly transition into Goebbel-like devices as if a switch has been flipped on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile#Shadow_profile'...
>No it does not apply just as well to almost any social media.
>TikTok is unique in its control of the user experience, its use of data, and its popularity.
How so? I don't use TikTok, so I might not be aware and I would appreciate you expanding on what you're asserting here.
What is it doing different than other social media in regards to the control of user experience?
What data practices are employed which are different and worse than the other social medias? Is it just where the data is going, i.e. the 'wrong' people have the data? Or are they capturing more data than, say, FB is?
In my book there are many adversaries and TikTok is only an item in a set of adversaries. The solution is to look at the set, this is not zoom out.
There are many children who are target to pederastians in Instagram and we can also say that they should be regulated and/or take this very seriously improving their alerts.
You could say the same about the internet, even pre-broadband, as anyone who spend significant time on websites, message boards, etc during the 90s and 2000s (or earlier with Usenet, IRC, etc) could attest to. Shall we just do away with the whole thing then?
Indeed any media that gives a aspirational view of the world tends to attract the attention of those who want to preserve the status quo.
I mean, there's also racism, sexism, white nationalism, etc. that TikTok occasionally dumps into your feed to test your engagement with it in order to improve the psychographic profile it uses to decide what to throw at you next. (To be clear, this is not hypothetical, this is my personal experience with it.)
>> There is also the matter of lack of consent, as children are sometimes too small to understand what is going on ....
That being said I believe in the EU at least they will have to change a few things.
This is exactly what I've always hated about Twitter. Its length-limited posts actively stimulate stupid crap like people posting what they had for dinner and make real insightful content very hard to read because people have to split it up in 20 different parts which all become their own threads with distracting replies.
Even the sane people I followed posted so much nonsense I had to wade through to find the one pearl that it was just not worth it. If something good comes up it'll make it to HN anyway so I just left Twitter.
I really don't get why Twitter is so popular either but I guess like with TikTok most people like shallow content. See what's popular on TV too, it's the "reality"/celeb crap.
What TikTok does _really_ well is surface hyper specific content to you. I grew up the children of indian immigrants and there's a, let's say shared trauma, to growing up like that. It's a ton of little things that I just swallowed as a kid and now I realize: that's kinda messed up. Things like aunties always asking me what school I got into, am I dating, am I getting married, etc. They seem like innocent questions right now but as the eldest teen in the group, I wanted appreciation and felt like I was getting orders from these questions.
Yes it's a constrained format (though I think you can up to 90 seconds now) but you have to realize, it is near impossible to find this kind of content elsewhere. There's a whole generation of people who find communicating through short video clips more natural than how you and I are talking right now. And they're not afraid to challenge social norms that I had to accept; I can only salute that.
Does this represent all the type of content I engage with? No - the slot machine effect is very real here. For every impactful video I watch, there's maybe 10 dopamine hit videos I consume. I choose to make that trade off (with guard rails - I install TikTok every friday and delete it every Sunday).
Sample impactful video: https://www.tiktok.com/@anncytwinklee/video/7130719838778953...
Can I settle in on Tik Tok and spend an hour gaining a deep understanding of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Note that I don't much care about Tik Tok fear mongering, but pretending the platform doesn't shape the type of content on it is absurd. Why is Instagram different than Tik Tok different than Twitter different than HN?
Unironically, yes, I'd bet dollars to donuts there's some niche creator doing exactly this. As an example, one of the people I follow (@maklelan) is a PhD in theology & religion, and has ~1000 videos on biblical scholarship, the history of various religious texts, different translations/interpretations of scripture, etc.
It's interesting and very niche content. There are probably 1000x more views being had by attractive young women dancing, but TikTok is big enough that it has everything.
I searched "Israel Palestine". I got an Irish guy named Freddy Quinne telling me it's like "coming home from work one day, only to find that someone else is now in your house". It appears to be mostly just guys talking / ranting. This hasn't really changed my mind that the medium shapes the content.
The search does leave something to be desired - the app is very much designed for just endless scrolling.
I don't think things go viral on it quite the way they do on other platforms - like on youtube, to a certain degree, anything viral enough is going to show up in the recommendations for everyone. Less so on TikTok, I think.
> 2020 pandemonium about TikTok being a national security threat looks increasingly like a power play.. dire warnings, and even the threat to completely shut down its platform, subsided only after TikTok began appointing Western officials to important positions within its organization, thereby giving the state considerable influence over the content and direction of the app.
I mean this is just plain wrong given that TikTok has a search function. In fact this seems to work so well for young people that apparently half of Gen Z is now using TikTok as a replacement for Google[1].
>TikTok is newer and much less scrutinized than Facebook and Google
TikTok barely escaped being forced to sell off or open up their codebase to inspection by authorities for what was essentially just nationalistic paranoia. Anything said in this piece applies to American domestic companies. the article follows the typical style of "throw enough shit and hope that some of it sticks" together with spurious assumptions about what, why or how people use the app or get out of it.
>TikTok is not a suitable place for content that is purely informative or educational, that follows a normal learning pace,
well no shit because it's not a replacement for school, it's a short form video app. That's not a crime. There's honestly a decent amount of educational stuff and people do use it for that purpose. This goes for criticism of Facebook and Instagram as well by the way, these are tools, not replacements for parenting or education and it's the parents job, not the companies to see that children use them appropriately.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/nearly-half-genz-use-tiktok-...
> Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan told the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference that according to Google's internal studies, "something like almost 40% of young people when they're looking for a place for lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram."
I'd go as far to say that is a clickbait headline.
You want to stop them? Make a better platform that respects their privacy while still trying to make a living.
Good luck, you'll need it.
Tiktok creators are giving Twitter creators shit for it.
> 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.
> The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
This is whataboutism, although I always do appreciate light being shown on Fb/meta.
There absolutely is. TikTok is Max Headroom blipverts come to life, and the effect is hypnotic. They're relentlessly slicing and dicing you as you watch to a far greater degree than anything that's come before it.
This is contemporary liberal anticommunist whataboutism. Whataboutism once described when you point out bad thing X someone else is doing, and they respond by pointing about totally unrelated bad thing Y that you're doing, such as when the USSR responded to the US criticisms of their economic system by pointing out that the US was an apartheid state. It's an ad hominem.
What you're doing is yelling about your neighbor beating his wife when you're also beating your wife, and you're not going to stop beating your wife.
Use such taxes to pay for PSAs about the harms and let people decide for themselves if or how to change their use.
Counterpoint: Caffeine is bad, too. Therefore, should we also outlaw Coca-Cola for children?
The argument that "TikTok is no worse than other social media" is the Counterpoint.
TikTok is very bad for children and adolescents, and we should do the difficult-but-honorable thing and prevent them from using it. If that's difficult, TikTok will have to deal with it.
I suspect that the EU will do this.
On the one hand it strikes me as being kind of silly, because those same kids could buy a coffee/iced coffee with just as much sugar and often even more caffeine in it just fine.
On the other hand I do see how the differing marketing/pricing on each product means you can't treat them as equivalent. Probably a good case for voluntary age restrictions by retailers rather than actual laws.
> those same kids could buy a coffee/iced coffee with just as much sugar and often even more caffeine in it just fine.
is accurate? Weak energy drinks, or supremely sugary caffeine-rich coffee down there?
285mg of caffeine in a 300ml bottle. Energy drinks are already regulated to max out at 320mg per litre (so that would be 96 mg max in a 300ml bottle, I guess "weak energy drinks" would be the answer to your question).
Although that does have less sugar - 6.5g per 100ml compared to the 11g per 100ml in Red Bull.
Now I'm curious about what qualifies as an energy drink, I guess it must be based on marketing?
In addition, the parents, rather than the state, should also have greater responsibility for what junk foods a child can have access to consume.
I’d rather govt (which has many channels for advocacy even if flawed) influence choices than corporations completely control the panopticon of choices (where small time spenders have very little consumer power).
But we’re not far apart. As you mention schools (of the state) are a good place to start.
I'm sick of explaining to people that tobacco is/contains a bunch of awful carcinogens and will slowly kill you whereas nicotine in isolation is practically harmless, if addictive.
(Note to downvoters: this isn't some stealth argument in favour of vaping - obviously those have a bunch of extra factors outside of the nicotine, and in relationship to the addictiveness of the nicotine that should be evaluated when determining safety too).
One comment:
> I first noticed that half a coke zero results in a "colon cleansing" complete with cramps and loose bowels. Over the last 2 days, four other friends/family have experimented and come up with the same results. What is the ingredient that causes this?
Every generation needs its ultimately inconsequential moral panic after all. TikTok merely got picked out because its background allows easy fingerpointing thanks to a few shifting political trends in the late 2010's.
"Their document is full of misinformation!"
without actually naming any.
It's an opinion. It's supposed to be biased.
Is it? I was under the impression (after some reading of studies, not just dreaming about the topic) that it was not just GRAS (generally regarded as safe), but several studies showed benefits to regular coffee consumption.
The argument that TikTok is no worse than other social media is not a counterpoint, and has absolutely no relation to any rational argument about whether TikTok should be banned. It's a statement intended to raise a simple, obvious question: Why only ban TikTok when we can ban all social media for children? Is other social media better?
Watch me answer that question about caffeine and bad grammar: It makes sense not to ban caffeine and bad grammar along with cigarettes because we ban cigarettes for being dangerous, and caffeine and bad grammar are somewhere between far less dangerous and not dangerous at all.
Didn't have to twist myself into a single knot.
Playing whackamole is physically impossible. This social media vs that social media. This hyperaddictive videogame vs. that hyperaddictive videogame, and 1000 more waiting in the wings. Various shades of (soft) porn, including some very mainstream: hello ad industry. Sales funnels for harmful chemicals, including some very mainstream: hello Ritalin. Instant validation for any quackery under the sun, and then some. Etc, etc, etc.
Some will say: Wait, but there is clean, useful, value-dense content on the Internet. Aren't we throwing the baby with the bathwater? For an entire childhood, you can buy all of it for a few thousand $$$, in book or DVD format. Better, creators of value-dense content now have a way to sustain their lives. Not worth taking chances with "free" Internet.