U.S. FBI director says TikTok poses national security concerns
reuters.com
reuters.com
* control devices -- if TikTok can take over devices, that's a sandbox problem, but I am suspicious about the accuracy of this claim
* influence users -- here's the rub. The USG is worried about having social media that is owned by a rival power influencing public opinion? The assumption behind this is that all forms of media consumed by Americans must be under US government control or approval (say an allied nation). Moreover, if you accept that this is a national security threat, how are other countries supposed to treat US properties like Facebook? Or USG efforts like Voice of America, National Endowment for Democracy, etc? This is a recipe for total information control based on blocs, with Great Firewalls separating each bloc, and no citizen able to access any social media platform unless it's owned by a friendly government in your own bloc.
Are the above two arguments the only ones? If there is a different reason why TikTok is a national security threat, I'd like to know, because all I see are short videos of old people dancing, young people yelling in their cars, and cat videos. None of that seems like a national security concern to me.
- Run facial recognition on the vast amount of public footage to find political dissidents that tried to go off grid
- Identify when political figures and their family congregate to determine if something important will happen in the near future
I apologize. The conversation makes me mildly upset, because we are saying our information and population control was fine. It is only when control happens to be used by the wrong party everyone is shocked. Just shocked.
Like, we built this tool for mass gathering of data and information on people. How could anyone have predicted that it could be used against us?
I am sure it was predicted, but, well, its the good guys using it so its all-ok.
They feed US users absolute nonsense while restricting that for their own people.
It absolutely is a weapon that people need to take seriously.
US "feed US users absolute nonsense".
It is almost like we keep getting an algorithmically improved media equivalent of a big mac each time we bring it up.
You are, naturally, right about that there is no distinction between TikTok, FB and others. It is all crap. Ideally, it would all just disappear.
Now, that is the hard part.
If China also fed its users nonsense, it wouldn't be a very useful weapon.
Why is the US government as-is a rational actor to get behind? More of its citizens in prison than China, it’s citizens vote against supporting each other through universal healthcare, and education, it’s opioid peddling execs, scandal plagued business leadership makes Mad Men look like Leave it to Beaver. China did not set the US on this path. It’s all homegrown.
Let such exceptional and gritty people be. Get some popcorn. Front row seats to the end of society are waiting.
Why should the US government decide which apps free people download? Free people ostensibly have no obligation to government security concerns.
Assange, Snowden, Swartz. Migrant children in cages.
Along with the list in my original post, and recent history I was alive for that includes numerous other examples; US citizens and its politicians are bullies who ignore their own bullying.
Not saying “China good.” I’m saying “US bad.”
Isn’t this the very definition of whataboutism?
What would be a constructive approach to improving the situation?
Whataboutism is minimizing bad thing by highlighting other bad thing. “Look bad thing parity!”
Shooting someone because your friend shot someone else does not make what you did ok.
A constructive approach would be to build schools, hospitals, and other local social solutions to community vision rather than allowing outside agents to gambling for themselves with the outputs of our agency.
We flip out over the potential for waste in too many hospitals while binning laptops and phones every couple years to save Apple.
There will be literal waste to any human endeavor. What character do we want it to have? Empowering a party drug addicted rocket man filling us full of high minded bullshit about a future no one can predict or helping people exist how humans tend to exist; building communal ties that don’t expropriate wealth and agency for some distant power hording edgelord.
Do you see the possibility for a constructive approach which could address the situation with TikTok?
And, by extension, the toxic destructive influence of social media addiction, especially for youth?
The same was said by elders when DND and comic books came about. The same was said about the internet itself. About secularism and relinquishing maintenance of past spoken traditions of all flavors.
For an increasingly secular society to say “hey wait I meant we bin religion but not my profiteering!” is the height of hypocrisy.
The only past traditions of value are disabusing people their meatbag is more sacrosanct than another, and fighting like hell to improve equality of condition for all meatbags even if that costs some their figurative value whether measured in conviction to scripture or fiat currency.
That’s my two cents anyway. Relativity means reality is relative, and thus so too are individual motives given an individuals time spent close to specific information.
Like Julian Assange who will be locked up for life with no fair trail due to publishing raw war footage? Or is that different?
TikTok/Douyin is just as cringe over here in China too.
Which a lot of people claims to be a good thing, how the algorithm gives a chance to new people instead of just popular
Focus on that please.
1. Unabashed and unhinged capitalism (growth at all costs)
2. Nearly every social media platform
3. The mainstream media
4. Billionaires and more generally the ultrawealthy
As far as I can tell, basically no one in power cares about any of these (likely because they benefit from all of them), and they're tearing the U.S. apart from the inside.
A further and more generalized abstraction is that the biggest threat to any civilization are self-interested power centers of any kind. Those can take the form of states, corporations, unions, billionaires, etc. Any entity that begins to operate in its own interest and has vastly disproportionate power when compared to the individuals of which the civilization is made.
No it’s not absent. The state is controlled by (1)-(4).
See : MS, LA, AL and consort.
At some point you can’t ignore the division between the map and the territory.
At best the USA is a country, with rich people in it.
As opposed to say, Switzerland, a rich country.
Specifically, Biden’s team didn’t do the analysis when they removed the restriction. That’s the dumb move that caused the situation.
Had they followed their own advice and looked at it first before withdrawing the order, then they wouldn’t be in this position.
From the article I linked to: ' It should use an "evidence-based approach" to see if they pose a risk to US national security, Mr Biden said. '
The Administration was sloppy in this, and they undid something that they had to redo because they didn't follow their own advice when the put out the original order (which is here by the way: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... ).
So yes, Irony is appropriate here. It's like a guy who puts down a banana peel and then slips on that same banana peel.
What is so great about it? It's algo, infinite scrolling, monetization models?
These are generally time sinks and engagement is what it's optimized for, but as a platform how is any different than what Vine or any other similar platform made before?
People uploading hours of their skits/rants/dancing etc... and calling it content has never appealed to me, hence why I never bothered with Social Media. But I'm genuinely curious, what makes it a 'great app' amongst technologists?
Definitely a threat though to US and west etc.
I have ADHD and so I am very defensive of my focus and so I will not participate in TikTok or YouTube Shorts or any of that abusive stuff because for me it deprives me significantly of my agency. For some people (most?) dissociating into TikTok (and losing agency in the process) is the point.
Make your case? I don't think so. I don't see why entertaining / not - entertaining and danger to society / not-danger to society are have a correlation.
On the scale of 1 ( social media) to 10 (watching TV), reddit/imgur are to the left of YouTube/tiktok.
Still a problem we use it though.