Comment by throwawayiemso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayiemso | Hacker News Reader

I'm feeling very raw about all this. I feel I need to call all that comes this app what it is: an attack on our country via its young people.

An attempt to turn the West's teenagers, especially women, into unserious and manipulable adults. In America, a non-immigrant teenager has little chance to graduate high school knowing the laws of electromagnetism, or other valuable scientific and engineering knowledge necessary for society to face its challenges. Instead, they have every chance to learn all sorts of modern inventions: genders, ever more contrived notions or identity, social justice shibboleths, etc..

The result is an American public that is profoundly unserious in its approach to the world. Factually, they rely of foreign migration to sustain their core functions: healthcare, etc... They don't solve their problems at home.

When I see TikTok I see an act of hybrid warfare. I see foreign aggression against America, no different than if that power introduced a powerful synthetic opioid into the country. Flat-out aggression isn't acceptable, so they strike at us indirectly while maintaining plausible deniability. The advertising on TikTok is valuable, so many influential individuals in business will look the other way.

Only a week ago the media were up in arms about the "revelation" that 30% of teenage girls now state they consider suicide, and a 36% increase in reported feelings of hopelessness since 2011. If politicians do not speak the truth in plain terms, truly I can only consider them traitors, and jointly responsible for the additional deaths that result.

This aggression doesn't go unnoticed!

Interestingly, it'd be the humanities that were most equipped to study this sort of topic. The "tech is apolitical" stembros who never took a history course in their education don't have any experience using the tools to analyze this kind of situation. Maybe... support the humanities that you so deeply oppose in your post?

Ah, come on. Stop with the 'everyone is our enemy' America-centered xenophobic mindset. The issues with Tiktok are of the same family with issues of other social media, or internet phenomena. Other countries, other communities are facing those same problems. It's not like situation in China is different and better. I bet some folks in China certainly blame the west for their newly rising problems, too.

Calm down, America isn’t the only country outside China. TikTok exists virtually everywhere including a version for China itself.

You mean like India? oh wait..no they banned it exactly for this reason.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

What does tiktok have anything to do with your claim that stem education is being replaced by “social justice shibboleths”?

Social justice fads are primarily distributed via social media. In particular, TikTok is notorious for promulgating it to K-12 age students. It displaces more meaningful media, educational and otherwise.

To reiterate: the prosperity of the country depends on young people being educated in stem fields, whereas because of TikTok they are being socialized in a different way entirely.

This is a very important point. We're already seeing the effects of an uncontrolled internet in the West. What greater way to erode a power than to erode the effectiveness of its future leaders and workers?

However, China does have the same app, under a different name. I wonder if these emotionally manipulative fads are allowed there. My understanding is that they are. Plastic surgery is extremely popular in southeast Asian countries, and I see a lot of vapid YouTube Shorts and Instagram Stories from both Asia and the West.

TikTok is extremely accurate in its emotional manipulation. I get targeted ads for it, and despite not using the app, the ads draw very heavily on specific emotions and interests. It's a bit scary, to say the least. It shows the strength of the pull and inability to escape once you're in.

What? American companies started this trend, remember Snapshat?

And if you just realized the danger of foreign tech companies that control social discourse, don't act surprised when other countries do the same to US apps like the EU or China.

This has nothing to do with nations or "The West". The same things are happening in countries outside the West -- look at the health impacts of soda in South America or the culture of plastic surgery in South Korea.

It's just companies optimizing singularly for profit. Your tobacco companies, opioid companies, fast food companies, legacy social networks, gambling companies, alcohol companies and oil and gas companies have been doing damage to regular people for longer than Tik Tok has, and for the exact same reasons.

It's funny seeing American blame other unfriendly countries for their new problems, especially when it's ubiquitous on mainstream media. Odd that no one has blamed China, or Russia, or any aggressive foreign state for their overweight, obesity epidemic.

Do you really think our problem is lack of STEM education tho? are you sure increasing our production rate would benefit our world? last time I checked that line of thought called Modernism and overproduction led humanity to WW1 & 2. Our grandparents tried to warn us their every waking moments but we forgot about it almost up to people in their 70 years old. It's only in books now... and it's very scary seeing people unironically saying this

I regret emphasizing stem in my comment. I meant to offer it as an example of the kind of education that may be valuable. I don't see increasing production rate as the end goal, nor any other kind of "line goes up" political objective. I recognize human flourishing happens at the confluence of factors.

Nevertheless, I see the connection as follows: we are forced to play nice with enemy nations because of our economic independence on them: we turn a blind eye to what fentanyl did to the middle/lower classes largely because nationally we have our own addiction to Chinese products. We could significantly reduce our dependency by producing homespun expertise, despite it being less efficient. I value independence first of all.

Re: modernism, I'm not qualified to comment, but I expect that's just one perspective on the causes of those wars.

If there was an American app that all Chinese teens were hopelessly addicted to it wouldn't take long for the CIA to get access and run influence campaigns. That is incredibly obvious. This is really our own fault that we just don't think China is that capable for some reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com