TikTok ban might have been right after all

It's not just about the data that Tiktok pulls from its users, its also about what it pushes to them. Tiktok feeds in the US and the rest of the world tend to be wildly different than those in China. Douyin, Tiktok's Chinese version, primarily features content related to self-improvement, martial arts, life hacks, exceptional individual achievements, motivational clips etc. Meanwhile Tiktok in the rest of the world primarily features unhinged teenagers doing silly dances, random movie/TV show clips with cringy music added in, "reaction" videos and other immature antics. A clear-cut difference in priorities and intentions baked into their algorithms.

I dunno about all this. This seems like a move motivated by tech industries to make China pay for the data like everybody else instead of having their own personal data vacuum.

If the problem was privacy, there would be reform legislation coupled with the move

If the problem is "China shows its youths this, but shows us that", I mean, yeah, China has regulation around how its youths interact with social media; meanwhile, over in America, we're just gonna keep on with the running social experiment of what happens with unmitigated social media framing the way young people interact w/ reality, and I mean actually building first-hand experience and reflecting on that, not second-hand rendering of such.

Anecdotally, my experience with their algo is that you are in complete control. It adapts faster than any other platform to my training it, whereas IG continues to insist on showing me things in my explore section I've routinely told it not to. Whether or not the Chinese government is tipping the scale of content distribution, I mean, do they really need to do anything, or was America already divisive? Blocking TikTok at any rate probably won't stop that trajectory, our own political sphere, as Jesse Ventura once said, is a sports game in the first place.

Its one thing to block the app on government devices just in case, the wholesale ban doesn't add up to me though.

I'm against this because I'm against setting precedent for government mandated "banning" of Apps, facilitated by the centralized "App Store" cartel.

The privacy angle seems weird, given that US consumers don't seem to care much and domestic companies don't face nearly the same scrutiny.

Still, TikTok creeps me out. It's highly addictive. It has those ties to the communist party. China enforces a nerfed version of the app in their own country.

> He believes that the data China can get from TikTok isn’t particularly different or more useful than what it’s accused of obtaining through hacks or can just purchase from data brokers. Pro-Chinese propaganda is no concern to him, he said, adding, “Your average 15-year-old is not going to tune into a video extolling Xi Jinping.”

> Where he does see some risk is that China could use TikTok to censor, manipulate, or distribute disinformation.

To me, the moderation risk is too high. With any social media company, they have a lot of power to put their thumb on the scales in regards to what type of content gets disseminated. This is a big enough problem at US companies which are not (explicitly) political. This seems like a much worse version of that.

The fact that so many people happily focus on the targets the MIC is currently upset about with no introspection at all makes me sad

Trump was condemned as xenophobe for suggesting this during his presidency.

The data privacy concerns were of no concern to the Democrats back then, so what exactly did the Democrats get wrong?

I wish they'd shut up and actually take action on this issue.

It's both ridiculous and pathetic that China can block all foreign media within it's own borders yet still run one of the most privacy invasive apps currently available outside its borders.