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Comment by angio | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that Facebook paid a firm to create negative buzz around TikTok [0].

> 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...

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Does it make it any less true? I think this author understates the harm other platforms cause, since the focus was TikTok, but she does explicitly say that many of the addictive engineering tricks are employed by the other platforms as well.

If you can't through to the youngsters with op-eds, I don't know what will.

Maybe we shouldn't place any limits on social media, but instead charge them a nominal tax for dealing with the negative externalities? Perhaps at a rate set by reported hours of human engagement, which will also serve as a balance against robots.

Use such taxes to pay for PSAs about the harms and let people decide for themselves if or how to change their use.

Just because facebook (a soulless ghoul amalgamation trapped in the vortex of a billionaire p-zombie) took shots at tiktok (also a shit company), doesn't absolve tiktok of real, actual harm.

This is whataboutism, although I always do appreciate light being shown on Fb/meta.

tuquoque screams Facebook's massive publicity arm while it gobbles up what's left of humanities neurons into the metaverse(tm)

There's no need to single out TikTok, the same regulation that will make them spy on people less will also work with Meta, Twitter, Google. TikTok does nothing extra compared to them.

> There's no need to single out TikTok…

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.

Nothing extra? You haven't read the article clearly

> This is whataboutism

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.

Any suggestions on software to use for home site whitelisting?

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