Doesn't take a huge leap to think it could be intentional..
[1] https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...
Maybe Tiktok is just trying to give the market what it wants? Idiotic stunts were going viral years before TikTok existed.
I'm leftist liberal and I have no particular paranoia about China, but I'm not going to pretend that we are besties
Edit: I won't remove the classification of myself as "leftist liberal" because it would make some of the replies to my comment confusing. I will apologize for it because it has derailed the discussion of China and TikTok. In the future I'll be more specific and avoid labels that no two people can agree on.
Suffice to say that I don't believe China deliberately created and released Covid.
I'm confused. Do you think the CPP is liberal? It's very authoritarian.
Liberal != Leftist
And neither a leftist nor a liberal has to answer for Communist China. Nor do you gain any special "objectivity" about China by being either one.
There is an interesting case made[1] that while this used to be true, it is actually not the case any more and that things are starting to become rather anti-liberal on both sides of the political spectrum.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...
This narrative dominated TV, print and to a lesser extent radio. It really created the notion in people's heads that this narrow band was really what people thought about. What people are reacting to in large part is the newly visible presence of alternative perspectives. They were always there. They were just strategically locked out by people who decided what was "fringe". Basically anything that didn't support institutions was ignored or disparaged.
Waco and Cuba are two prime examples. Waco was written off in the national media because the people in the compound were so "weird". And for years the national media has underwritten the American foreign policy blob's almost neurotic fixation with Cuba.
A quote from the page I was just reading:
> “When Speech First brought a lawsuit against Michigan, alleging that their bias response teams were unconstitutional and “flagrantly violate the First Amendment,” the court agreed, ruling against the school. As of 2022, 456 U.S. colleges⬥ have bias response teams (almost double the 2017 total of 232),49 and very few have been subject to investigations like the one at Michigan.”
Excerpt From What's Our Problem? Tim Urban https://books.apple.com/se/book/whats-our-problem/id64456422... This material may be protected by copyright.
Wrong. They are neoliberal, not classically liberal.
Classical liberalism (belief in naturalistic free market economics) failed in the 20th century and neoliberalism took its place, characterized by top-down micromanagement of economic ecosystem.
In other words, classical liberalism insists markets will thrive only when left to their own devices. Neoliberalism insists markets will thrive only when managed by competent administrators (see Federal Reserve).
The US is plenty authoritarian and China becoming a democracy wouldn't actually change any of the things that people are paranoid about. The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers.
Taken as a single political entity on the national stage China is just USA but in italics. It makes total sense that we would be uneasy in the US but that unease is how everyone not in the US feels about us. The unwavering belief that we're the good guys leads us to project our military might much more freely which doesn't exactly make us popular.
It is crazy that TikTok being a Chinese based company is obviously some ploy to undermine the US while in reality the CCP just forced TikTok to change their algorithm to be educational in China where such a thing wouldn't fly in the US because of the first amendment. China's video game ban for under-18s operates on the same principal.
Ludicrous false equivalency.
The USA doesn’t have laws preventing its citizens from criticizing the government, nor are its corporations required by law to participate in policing speech.
This is the reason why criticism of China is so muted.
The two-party system makes for all sorts of weird alliances of distinct groups getting lumped together- there's really no reason that one's opinions on gun rights should be related to one's opinions on energy policy, or why one's opinion on abortion should be related to one's opinion on foreign affairs policy, but with two parties all these separate issues get grouped into two camps associated with either "Republican" or "Democrat" and then in turn everything "Republican" can also be called "Conservative" or "Right-Wing" and everything "Democrat" can also be called "Liberal" or "Left-Wing".
Using some academic definition of what "liberal" or "right-wing" or whatever meant in Europe in the 1890s or 1930s doesn't really work in popular English-language media today.
Winner-takes-all popular elections have proven to be naive, but I wouldn't say it's a quirk. It's probably the first election format you'd try.
My point wasn't that you need a coalition as much as that people will change their views to align with their coalition.
That's an oxymoron.
I don't really care what you mean by leftist, but you definitely cannot claim to be a liberal and have no "paranoia" about China.
I do think that through malice or neglegence, that tiktok's algorithm is harmful to children.
Compared to other social media it doesn't seem that "debauchery and stupidity" is more prominent there.
The opIndia article says "The flood of such content on TikTok, an immensely popular social media platform among the youth, is a serious problem that needs to be addressed at the earliest."
There's a lot of dumb stuff on TikTok, but trans people not being suppressed isn't really one of them. And there might be _toxic_ stuff on TikTok, but in the context of an article where youth are pushed to material about suicide, linking to an article calling for the suppression of trans perspectives as if that was part of the same problem is super shady.
As for Douyin having a different algorithm, I'd point out that within China it was still viewed as being harmful enough to kids that they put in a 40m daily time limit, and restricted it to specific hours. I'm guessing it's also not great for kids there. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934
On TikTok you largely just get more of what you've already engaged with. If you're using the platform for porn you're going to get a lot of it. If you like and engage with scientific/political content you'll rarely, if ever, see a video of someone dancing.
edit:
It's anecdotal but having taken a look at TikTok's web feed: https://www.tiktok.com/foryou. The content there was less sexual than the purportedly sanitised Douyin.
For what it's worth. Four out of the first five videos I saw on Douyin were sexualised in some way, the first was of a train driver. I scrolled through 20 or 30 of the videos on TikTok's website and didn't find anything close.
It's not proof of what is being claimed, but they are variables that would need to be controlled before being confident that Douyin is or is not adjusting content to foreign or domestic users.
The original claim is that Douyin promotes "wholesome" educational content, whereas TikTok is manipulating the west with pornography and other depravities.
Anecdotal observations gathered through the web UI of each app, as an anonymous user, were that Douyin presented "pornographic" content, whereas TikTok did not.
The original claim only stands if we accept that ByteDance is:
* Allowing a vast quantity of sexually explicit content to be posted to Douyin.
* Not showing that content to their users in China but only to western users of Douyin, despite being presented entirely in Chinese.
While also:
* Targeting western users of TikTok with pornography and explicit videos.
* Not showing any of that content in their web UI, despite it quickly becoming the entirety of the Douyin one.
I find it hard to believe that this would be the case. A sanitised Douyin and depraved TikTok, or both being depraved, would have supported the idea. The behaviour that was observed runs entirely counter to the claim.
Frankly, the opinion does not appear to be grounded in reality but comes instead from a place of insecurity regarding our social values. Consider whether any western platform promotes science and engineering over pornography, Twitter and Instagram allow much more explicit content than TikTok, and then ask why TikTok seems to have been singled out.
By checking douyin.com from my device, my ip and my advertising fingerprint, I cannot have any clue how douyin behaves if I download it from a chinese phone, in china.
The base claim was that ByteDance was pushing sexualised content on TikTok while policing it on Douyin. This makes zero sense given that TikTok's web content was sanitised. Douyin being awash with sexualised content implies an audience for that content in China, further weakening the argument that this is some sort of targeted attack.
The alternative is that Douyin thirst traps are some sort of co-ordinated attack on the west. Despite not being available in the western app or translated in any way.
It may be true on the margin, but Douyin is full of 'Key Opinion Leaders' who at best pay lip service to education and attainment. It's even worse on Kuaishou (Douyin for more rural areas). [0]
I always kind of bristle at the argument that this is somehow impacting what kids want too - PBS exists and spams their content as far and wide as possible, but US kids still end up preferring Cocomelon, Gabby's Doll House, etc.
There's no reason to believe that Chinese youth just take what's given to them when there are literally millions of random livestreams (hard to regulate livestreamed content at that level) going on at any given time.
As usual with China, what's likely going on is that someone is the CCP wants it to be true, so they 'make it true' and US media without local context takes it at face value.
[0]https://jingdaily.com/2022-top-six-chinese-kols-you-need-to-...
This conspiracy theory always gets a good chuckle out of me and my Chinese friends whenever it comes up. I have a good chunk of my family living in China and I can assure you, Chinese kids watch just as much if not more junk over there than they do in the US.
This is similar to trying to argue that America kids only play wholesome games on the Xbox or Youtube because they have parent controls.
But to my first point: surely working in tech right now you have a few Chinese coworkers. I recommend you grab lunch with them sometime (and let them choose the place to eat!)
Isn't the narrative "that's what the western world consumers more of/wants" versus "China values achievements and education more than debauchery and stupidity"?
With parents working insane hours in the US and outsourcing the socialisation and education of kids to electronics and corporations with perverse incentives, with local communities practically gone in an urban lifestyle, we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked.
It's the parents responsibility to curate the world the their kids are exposed to and build up their defences for all the crap that they're going to finally encounter.
Agreed on the first point, disagree on the second. I think it’s a fixable problem. Addicts can recover and further damage can be avoided.
I mean, I can speak from my own personal use case (I think I average 30-60 minutes of TikTok screen time a day per week... yeah... I know, not great). I would agree with you. The only reason somebody's feed would show "low grade" content is if they curated it to be that way for themselves.
Now, is it easier to curate a feed of garbage West vs East? Not sure...
Not that OP's claims are proof - but your anecdata does not disprove it.
Is it inequality and injustice. where pointing it out. would actually threaten the power of the CCP?
When I started reading Chinese language media I was surprised how much apparent criticism there is -- but if you read carefully, anything approved in the PRC is always criticism of individuals, or maybe corporations, more rarely a local government, doing something that's already supposed to be officially prohibited, or which is not too sensitive, and never criticizes core official policy or high-ranking CCP members.
Which is how you can have anti-corruption, anti-sex scandal, anti-pollution news commentary, or even protests and marches, in China. But should official permission to disagree be withdrawn, the topic can very quickly become taboo. A couple years ago there was ongoing discussion in Chinese media about same-sex marriage and a member of the Yuan even introduced a bill to make same-sex marriage legal in China. Voted down. But an acceptable topic to discuss, not officially taboo. I suspect that has changed recently, with the campaign against the apparent feminization of Chinese men and now explicitly linking LGBT rights with the Western agenda. That shift, as I understand it, comes directly from Xi.
The possibility of China abusing content moderation might be enough to throw out the app altogether. But the only "evidence" we currently have is guessing at what China might do and people in media amplifying that discomfort.
To me, it seems much more likely that China is just censoring TikTok like they censor every other platform, while the rest of the world sees a standard recommendation algorithm. "Debauchery and stupidity" is a subjective, sanctimonious phrase that doesn't really mean anything.
As such, apps like TikTok are just following the target population’s specs.
Ironic hotbed of so much technological innovation (but then $$$ is a strong motivator).