Let's say establishing policies to reduce the use of TikTok in the population is the right move. What policies would you suggest?
If it's because of China, then ban TikTok and subsidize a competitor app - but be serious about it. Be ready to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on keeping the app free and servers up for years, sponsoring hundreds of content creators, dragging celebrities in to produce exclusive content, burning tons of money on all kinds of loss-generating marketing bullshit, like "publish a video from $concert, best 100 videos win a Nintendo Switch", for each concert in the state/country for the next few years.
Point being, if you can provide a TikTok alternative and make it extremely attractive, even if by literally giving away hundreds of dollars to each new user, then kids won't care about using TikTok anymore.
Now, if it's not about China but teenage use of social media?
Put an absurdly high tax on smartphones. Like 200%-1000%. That will make sure they become unavailable to a typical teenager.
Beyond that? I don't think you can do much about it directly, or in the immediate term.
Domestic competitors have already published their equivalents though, no subsidied required. It's not a very complicated app - they had clones up in months. Most popular Tik-Tokers already repost their content on these anyways.
Why do we need to subsidize naything? This already exists.
Because the problem presented here is: government bans TikTok, teenagers become experts at using VPN apps to work around the ban.
Social media apps live on network effects - it's near-impossible to compete with a well-established giant directly. But this also means that, if you manage to pull a critical mass of users over from your direct competitor, most of the rest will quickly switch too.
Therefore, the solution to teenagers overcoming the ban with VPN is to prop up a domestic competitor fast - pump money into it until it becomes more attractive to the kids than jumping through VPN hoops to get to TikTok. Once you get there, the problem solves itself.
(This is ofc. only for the scenario where the problem is China, not TikTok-style social media.)
I don't understand why it can't instead be: banning will make domestic alternatives more attractive since now you don't even need a VPN to access it.
Sure some teens will use a VPN and continue to use TikTok, but I'm not sure it'll be to such an extent that we'd be forced to concede that banning was the wrong call.
Also you can do both: ban and subsidize.
My argument rests on "social media is sticky due to network effects".
Which is why "banning will make domestic alternatives more attractive since now you don't even need a VPN to access it" if and only if the domestic alternatives are so good in comparison to figuring out VPN, that a critical mass of domestic users switch over. Ban alone won't make it happen - TikTok is too sticky for that.
Those are teenagers we're talking about. They're resourceful, motivated, have infinite free time - learning how to use a VPN app will be trivial for them, especially that "VPN" here doesn't mean Wireguard or ISO/OSI hokus pocus, but rather a turnkey app that requires about three clicks to make your US Internet connection look like it's coming out of Somalia. It's not hard for them - and will be even easier if a ban on TikTok makes VPN companies target the teenager market directly.
> Also you can do both: ban and subsidize.
That's exactly what I recommended.
I think given I don't use TikTok at all I am bad at intuiting how powerful its network stickiness is.
As said, you don't subsidize the app creation or use. The apps already exist. The users know roughly how to use them.
The solution would be to take the X biggest content creators and pay them Y Million dollars each to stop posting on tiktok, and start posting on the competitors. Everyone else will follow.
What I’m getting at is this isn’t an issue for the state level.
Why waste the free labor?
Montanas politics are such that they you can’t find an OB to deliver a baby anymore, so any “free market” competitor needs to consider what random event will put them out of business.
Maybe at some point this was all going to hit some kind of threshold where it is just no longer reasonable to call the effects of social media a net good. Maybe TikTok has passed that threshold. We can give them a trophy for that, but then plan some ways to finally restrict social media's addictive and anxiety-provoking qualities.
So restrictions on infinite scroll, or require the user to actually press a button before the next video starts. I'm sure there are a lot of ideas, and people more qualified than me to suggest them, but I think these two alone would be reasonable restrictions.
It disturbs me that TikTok being a Chinese company is being used right now as an excuse as to why these social media platforms shouldn't be made to change their deliberately addictive designs.
Let's say establishing policies to reduce the use of firearms in the population is the right move. What policies would you suggest?
(now, people are going to pop up with the obvious objections to those. What is it about US users of TikTok that suddenly makes the 1st Amendment and all those free speech concerns that people bring up not apply?)
Because it's literally their job: Protect the citizen. They may not do a good job all the time, most times they are even very bad. But nonetheless do they try and prevent most of the worst cases. And TikTok is so insane efficient in what it's doing, the line between benefit and harm is so thin, it could easily turn into a "worst case"-scenario if people don't observe it careful enough.
That is not automatically the government's job. At least not in every worldview.
And these things exist on a spectrum. Protecting people from direct external threats is pretty unobjectionable to most philosophical systems that allow governments, but there's a lot more controversy around protecting people from themselves.
As someone who thinks Unrestricted Warfare is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read, the idea most have not read this book in the US military is quite laughable.
Imagine people having no issue with the Soviet Union delivering a free daily newspaper to US teenagers in 1960. The level Americans have their head up their own ass is unbelievable.
Huge fines for being caught knowingly serving ads to minors
I.e. technically everything influences everything else, but some things influence others much stronger than the reverse.
My usual water-based analogy is that culture and society is like a water flowing downhill; economic situation (all the incentives people have) forms the landscape. Technology is what sculpts the landscape.
The flow of water does have its own influence - over time, it smoothens out rough edges, and can even forge its own path when the landscape is opposing water too hard. But mostly, the water conforms to the shape of the terrain. Same is with culture - it softens the behaviors of people following incentives, and can reform some aspects of the economy that just don't feel right - but mostly, the economy pretty much determines what culture develops, what people do, what people think. New technologies alter economic landscape quickly, but we don't have much control over when they show up or how the landscape is altered.
Privacy? Data? Attention? Propaganda?