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Comment by rufius | Hacker News Reader

> CNBC spoke to a former advertising executive who said that even though TikTok is a Chinese-owned business, it has a recruiting edge over Meta because it is viewed as having less of a “moral downside.”

I actually view the moral downside with TikTok as at least as bad as Meta. The PRC isn’t exactly some bastion of freedom and excellence. Neither is the US, but you’re fooling yourself if you think a highly influential company headquartered in China isn’t being manipulated by the CCP.

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TikTok and Meta are both abominable organizations, but for different reasons. I'm curious what people who work for them think of their employer.

Even completely setting aside the political aspects, how does TikTok have less of a moral downside as a product?

At least Facebook and Instagram can genuinely claim to be built on the idea of helping people build relationships.

As far as I understand it, TikTok completely eliminates the friend and family network. It's simply providing mind numbing bite size entertainment. It's genius is removing everything that might distract someone from scrolling mindlessly.

One could argue that the lack of false pretence at least makes them (slightly) more honest.

It has nothing to do with morals. People use tiktok because their attention spans can only handle 30 second videos.

I view this quote as less about morals and more about Meta's reputation and failing recruiting efficiency.

Yes, the target candidates who buy into this are fooling themselves but only because Meta's recruiting techniques no longer work in the current climate.

Anyone that thinks this fails to understand the impact Facebook has had on the division and polarization of people through the spread of mis/disinformation and what companies like Cambridge Analytica has been able to accomplish through the Facebook platform.

We can say this is true about youtube, twitter and probably someday tiktok, but at least for now Facebook / Meta is absolutely the worst as they not only sold/leaked the PII but they've also been actively encouraging all of this.

So essentially TikTok is no better and is just as bad as Meta if not more worse then? (There really is no fundamental difference)

The media really have new ways of spinning the cauldron and have an extremely short attention span on what is going on with TikTok, don't they?

Amusingly, bytedance does military contracts in my country.

by "military contracts" do you mean selling some sort of non-military SaaS to the military (eg. office 365), or actually selling arms or arms related software?

Here's the trust you can put in Meta to deal fairly with military personnel [1]. If that's how they deal with those who've served, imagine the contempt they have for the service.

[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2022/09/28/meta-ordered-t...

Oh, we're supporting patent trolls now?

It's a British thing; I'll generally pick the underdog, even if both fighters are assholes.

Not entirely sure. A friend of mine works for them and they're doing some sort of simulation stuff for our national navy.

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