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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> But I think TT is just magnifying a larger, more human problem: there are some on TT that denounce the bad behaviour, but the majority of people seem to be like "ha ha is funi" when watching a video of some TT'er walking up to someone and assaulting them "it's just a prank bro". Ugh.

The biggest problem is that TT is controlled by China - a nation that's classified in Western countries as anything between dangerous to outright enemy, depending on whom you ask. China has no incentive to invest into moderation more than absolutely required by laws (e.g. German NetzDG), but a political incentive to have Western nations fractured - and promoting antisocial behaviour is a pretty good way to do that.

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> China has no incentive to invest into moderation more than absolutely required by laws

This is no different to any other Western-based social networks? None of them have any incentive to go beyond the bare minimum, especially considering bordeline/offensive/etc content actually generates the most engagement.

The problem is that we just don't have strong enough legislation to discourage harmful content - because back in the day, nobody thought to legislate against it because nobody thought it would be profitable to actually host & encourage production of various harmful/fake/divisive content at scale.

Revoking section 230 protection from any platform that uses opaque algorithms to promote content to increase "engagement" would solve this problem. It would offer them a choice of either being a common carrier, sorting all content by some primitive metric such as user's explicit preferences or chronological timeline (thus no way to promote harmful content that happens to be more profitable), or become an editor in which they can algorithmically choose the content they promote but then they become liable for it (thus forcing them to moderate very well).

> This is no different to any other Western-based social networks? None of them have any incentive to go beyond the bare minimum, especially considering bordeline/offensive/etc content actually generates the most engagement.

Facebook, Twitter/X etc. all can be grabbed by Western courts. Tiktok can just choose to ignore court rulings and summons, just as Telegram does with German legal issues, and continue to operate with impunity because we don't have the balls to do it - unlike China, Turkey, Iran or Indonesia who have zero problems just ordering domain blocks at their telcos.

> Facebook, Twitter/X etc. all can be grabbed by Western courts

Have we tried to (whether for TikTok or the western equivalents)? As far as I know there is no political will to meaningfully rein those companies in because the politicians in power also rely on their misinformation potential and don't want to bite the hand that feeds/brings votes and misleads voters towards them.

TikTok has local subsidiaries in most jurisdictions through which they run their advertising business, which is just as vulnerable to court orders as its western competitors. If push comes to shove, their ability to accept payment from the West can be significantly curtailed which will put a major damper on their advertising business.

The concerns around TikTok evading western law enforcement is FUD that allows to divert the conversation towards a convenient scapegoat (China) instead of addressing the root cause that there's incompetence/unwillingness to actually act on the harmful effects of social media platforms, Chinese and Western.

> The concerns around TikTok evading western law enforcement is FUD that allows to divert the conversation towards a convenient scapegoat (China) instead of addressing the root cause that there's incompetence/unwillingness to actually act on the harmful effects of social media platforms, Chinese and Western.

We are regulating them, at least in Europe, with German NetzDG and the upcoming EU DSA/DMA regulations.

Oh, they moderate in China... https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...

https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...

And for Russia, of course.

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