Nepal bans TikTok and says it disrupts social harmony

If you want to avoid a delusional world view, I think targeted social media is probably what you want to avoid.

Maybe if TikTok could only serve content sorted by newest, or if you get a direct link URL from someone else.

How about each public video is accessible but not in the algorithm scroll structure?

> Banning media from certain countries is exactly how you develop a delusional worldview and ironically become more susceptible to propaganda

You think banning propaganda machines from other countries makes you more susceptible to propaganda?

It's not banning media from a country though, it's banning an app that is country run and can select specific media to show you.

Show the one where the guy gets caught up in an obscure non-state approved religion, falls down on his luck, but the government steps in & sends him to a retreat to get better. Then he enjoys the rest of his life manufacturing goods in a factory as part of his rehabilitation.

They show what they wants to people. Seems extremely scary and suspicious to any parent with half a brain.

On the long term, anthropological warfare is a clever idea... but it's probably a little too optimistic to think you can implement with just one app. The CCP/tiktok hysteria feels overblown to me - public education is what constituents should feel concerned about.

Are you joking or are you just completely uneducated on this topic?

There's been several outlets that have dived into the difference between the chinese version of TikTok and the western versions.

Also, they can affect public sentiment with slight nudges and those would be completely undetectable.

I made a new account last week – totally blank, new device everything. The default FYP so far is all anti-Jewish – not anti-Israel, anti-Jewish – and far left-wing anti-American stuff. it intersperse with really low brow celebrity stuff.

Pretty intense stuff. Lots of “Jews run the world, and hate you” stuff that reporting doesn’t seem to work on. Lots of “America is a nightmare place” aimed at teenagers.

Pretty sure thats the CCP whipping up internal unrest here.

Shit I’ve had youtube try to brainwash me. I clicked on one lecture, that I watched and thought was generally good, if not slightly contrarian. Turns out his later work was hugely influencial in the red pill nonsense. Needless to say, just watching this one lecture led my entire feed to be filled with red pill nonsense.

I have no doubt if I had clicked on similar content on tiktok I would have deluged with similar nonsense.

We have heard about it.... you're just not getting your news from sources that mention it. There are multiple things they allow on American TikTok that they do not allow on Chinese TikTok. They allow these things because they know it helps with social decay in America.

Not a comfortable disclosure, but it matches your observation. That’s what I expect from a pics and gifs site. Tags allow me to filter out material I find repulsive or boring (specific comic authors, topics, memes, “big …”, onlyfans bs, politics). Serious sites don’t do tag filters, they are either non-profit or all business with ads and tracking. I’d filter 98% of the internet if I could.

How is this evolutionarily(?) justified?

Are rewards in nature more valuable if the outcome is not certain? Or is that a trait that stuck to humans because people who try again and again learn better?

I mean even HN employs that pattern (though not necessarily intentionally). Whenever you refresh the page you have a random reward in the form of gain/loss of karma or comment replies.

Should we ban HN?

To be fair I worked for a startup who turned out to be doing exactly that in the UK.

Hinduvta does not exist as a driving political force in Nepal. You are thinking of India. Nepal is secular albeit there is a small faction vying for power based on hindu ideologies but they are a very small portion of nepal politics. Again there is no communal flair that has entered into national discourse like we see in India or some ME countries. Nepal is pretty chill in that regards, surprisingly so given the whole country has multitudes of ethnic groups. There are still caste based incidents in remote areas but not so much in urban cores. Knowing the decisions the nincompoop leaders have done out of whim over the last decade or so I am fairly certain that this decision was also not done with due dilligence.

This is my experience as well (though it is uninstalled as of ~1 year ago).

You get what you look for on Tiktok.

Haha now do YouTube.

Maybe CSAM = 12 year olds posting videos of themselves dancing?

Run by Americans or run by the intelligence and propaganda arm of a govt that is adversarial to America?

They are much much different.

TikTok is full of anti America propaganda. It rarely gets removed. Anything anti China doesn’t last long.

Instagram has hardly any anti China or anti America propaganda. And it’s certainly not recommended to you within minutes of using the app for the first time.

Opened TikTok in Taiwan and almost immediately got anti America propaganda. Blaming America for covid.

What else is it then? An instrument in the hands of a dictatorship.

That's a incorrect and biased piece of sentence. Over 60 apps were banned initially, some before the skirmishes and some after. Kindly do not spread biased political propaganda.

Not the expansionist imperial power in their backyard.

> TikTok directly fuels violence and low IQ

That isn't a very High IQ statement. Facebook is believed to be responsible for violence in Myanmar and other countries.

None of those things should be regulated by the government. Families/communities should be capable of that.

If you change /shorts/ in the URL to /watch/, it'll load the same video in the normal YouTube UI. I like that better because it allows for such advanced features as... changing the fucking volume.

(Shorts will keep the volume set as whatever you last changed it to in the normal UI, with no way to change it without going to a different ("normal") video.)

I used a Firefox add-on called "Stylus" and wrote a custom css rule to hide the relevant divs/elements. It's not perfect, but it's okay. https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

However, after the recent ad-blocker targeting by Youtube I pretty much just stopped watching Youtube entirely. I added my regular subscriptions to the NewPipe app on my phone and just watch what they put out.

The add-on I mentioned above is super useful to personalize my experience with other websites. Particularly online-shopping and other marketplaces that have huge amounts of whitespace for no reason. You'd be surprised how much nicer the web experience is after you add a few "margin: 0px;" css styles to strategic areas.

On Android you could patch using Revanced, there's a checkbox for shorts in the feed.

https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager

Use alternative YT front-end like Piped, Newpipe etc.

I guess you are talking about mobile. There a several ytshorts blocker extensions for desktop browsers.

Do not use their app, then set ad block rules to block whatever you want.

Maybe that's a good thing, and would cause the balance / dynamic to be different and thus requiring a rework in some form

Perhaps it costs real money to submit each video to these platforms as a means to offset the moderation and rating efforts. Similar to what others have suggested to reduce spam emails.

Off the top of my head, requiring money to post videos to these platforms would immediately reduce the sheer huge volume of spam and automated/auto-generated videos. It would also reduce spam from LCOL regions that weaponize their low-value of time in order to game the system.

Not only that, but it would solve identity and age verification (as it'd require a credit card).

>have the censor board be several percent of the population

Easy to scale up nannying to infinite proportions with AGI. (We don't have that yet, but it may arrive very soon. Well, we have a shitty approximation right now, but AI != AGI.)

On the other hand, that (coupled with the NSA thing) also makes the "my FBI agent" meme come true. One Federal Agent Per Child.

Maybe some way of making addiction-inducing products less profitable instead of censorship? Or going further, lessening the role of profit in how society is organized?

I'm also heavily leaning towards Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist. My thought on the matter is that whatever solution we come up with to resolve this particular issue is the same one we need to do to resolve the greater societal issues we are seeing, because I think the root cause is the same.

Beyond that, part of the Libertarian line of thought is that we have to "let go" and let things fall where they may because we have no moral claim over it. The area of effect we have as individuals is quite small so it makes sense to focus in that direction rather. So that would mean things like family, neighborhood, community, shared culture/religion, and the institutions that build on those.

I myself try to be involved with and sit on the boards of HoAs, to add some sanity and fairness to it. I've also been helping pay for close family friends to go through college. I'm also planning on doing charity work for the groups I feel closest to in my local context (South Africa).

Interesting to watch people confront themselves like this. Everyone's libertarian until they see a real harm that actually upsets them and they can't victim-blame.

Adults are not immune.

> Why are all the comments that point out who runs TikTok downvoted?

I downvote them for their potentially misinformative nature, which can lead to delusion and disharmony.

Even Facebook has that vertical short video shit now spread among the other content.

I only visit on mobile. I thought the middle film thing icon was to take your own photos/videos - because that’s what the center icon did on the YouTube app; the last time I had the app installed. Never occurred to me it’s a feed. O_o

They're bad Tiktok clones. Which in this case is a good thing - their inferior algorithms make the result less addicting.

I must have missed it because I don’t follow anyone and just go directly to their pages manually.

You can just switch to “following” mode, but it is an annoying extra step.

You can switch to "Following" on front page and not get any algo recs but I don't think selection sticks.

Algo recs and reels nearly killed IG for me. It desperately tries to become TikTok but that's not why I signed up for IG (which was photos). Photos still exist, but even if you like every photo and "dislike" every reel for months it will still push 99% reel content in your feed--whatever ML they use has been near totally useless.

I occasionally see a post from someone I follow. 90% of what’s in my feed is either and ad or “suggested for you”.

I don't know if it was that recent? I abandoned the app two years ago because of the introduction of the algorithmic feed ( and the explore page, but at least you had to click on that )

That's the crux of the issue, I'd rather actually talk to the people affected instead of reading biased online information. No one, outside of the U.S. thinks China is the scary boogeyman you guys make it out to be.

As opposed to the countries spreading democracy? How's that worked out so far? Better yet, who's got more blood on their hands?

> Greater time spent on social networking websites led to higher psychological distress, an unmet need for mental health support, poor self-rated mental health, and increased suicidal ideation. In conclusion, greater time spent on online social networking promotes self-harm behavior and suicidal ideation in vulnerable adolescents.

The role of online social networking on deliberate self-harm and suicidality in adolescents - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278213/

> In September 2021, Bytedance announced it was making several changes to its algorithm and user interface in China, limiting children to just 40 minutes a day, introducing a Youth Mode for under 14s, and preventing the app being accessible to children between 10pm and 6am.

https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/how-long-can-k...

The astute reader will note that China has no such concerns for children outside of China, to the contrary, encouraging them to spend as much time on the app as possible.

I live in Turkey actually! It is probably the most heavily and forcefully secularized Muslim country in the world. (Ataturk killed ~half a million people for his secular reforms, Islamic alphabet got abolished, European dress code literally became law, religious clothing got prohibited, religion schools closed, scholars executed & prosecuted and Islamic prayer call Adhan was banned for straight 18 years).

It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives (including me) I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (they're less religious too).

From here, it’s hilarious to see Westerners thinking prohibition is impossible and preaching against it. Muslims have been very successful in prohibition of all kinds of mind-altering substances since 15 centuries. Compare this with the failed American Prohibition. There are more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, away from the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.

> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlates_of_crime

Muslims here do advocate for a ban on harmful technologies including but not limited to TikTok. As an example which made its way into law, pornography websites are banned (at ISP level).

Unless you come from a very religious background, many Turks don't care if their meat is halal or not.

Did you read the same article?

> The report also concluded that China had been limiting grazing by Nepalese farmers.

> In the same area, it found China was building a fence around a border pillar, and attempting to construct a canal and a road on the Nepalese side of the border.

Buildings were on Chinese side true, but Chinese roads and canals and fences were on the Nepalese side.

> where the border is remains unclear even to people living close to it.

Thats almost every border in this region.

Is choosing 1 of 2 parties reaaaally democratic?

Is your point that it happened, there was widespread outrage, penalties and then changes made to prevent it from happening again?

> Cambridge Analityca.

I'm not sure you are supporting your case as well as you think your are.

The accusations are only credible if you limit yourself to only looking at stuff on Facebook. If you see posts on Facebook calling for Muslims to be killed and then sometime later you see posts on Facebook of Muslims actually getting killed, you might be forgiven for thinking that the former posts caused the latter posts, and if only Facebook had taken down the former, the latter would never have happened.

But it turns out the posts calling for Muslims to be killed were made by the military's propaganda wing and the killings were perpetrated by the military's armed wing. So the causal chain actually flows through the military, and Facebook was merely a place where you could observe it happen without being there in person.

Blaming Facebook for the genocide seems to be an instance of activists focusing on something they can see and try to influence (Facebook moderation policy) over something they cannot (guys with guns shooting people).

Maybe not only prudeness, but the rise of STDs like AIDS.

“reverting back to prudeness” is a matter of perspective. We’re a species that has domesticated itself for its collective good. Part of making progress towards that was changing our approach to mating from a free-for-all to something strictly regulated by culture. It could be said that we’ve been reverting back to our pre-civilisation free-for-all for the last 60+ years.

Prudeness? You have no idea what you're talking about. This accusation of "prudeness" is precisely the kind of insult predatory men hurled at women during the '60s and '70s to try to coerce women into bed. "What are you, a prude? A square?" It is actually libertinism that has bred the widespread sexual dysfunction that we are seeing.

Pornography is utterly deranging, and in such an insidious way, the poor schmuck doesn't even know how damaged and warped he's become, how enslaved. Its production and distribution at the very least should be criminalized, and taboos that shame and stigmatize its consumption should be revived and promoted in the media. Alas, corrupt governments back pornography because of its utility in controlling the populace.

Free speech is just the best thing ever.

Freedom of speech exists to defend the speech you don't agree with, not the speech you do.

64% of young Americans would rather give up their right to vote than give up TikTok.

Picture how upset kids get when you take away their favourite video game and apply that to a group of people dozens of times larger than the NRA.

That's a lot of votes to risk.

[1] https://reboot-foundation.org/research/the-tiktok-challenge-...

++ I'd be interested to see this study replicated across the entire adult voter base with breakdowns by region etc, but I'm not aware of one.

It wouldn’t matter. The dev office will always exist in China and always be beholden to the CCP.

Love the CCP sympathizers downvoting. Can’t argue with the truth but can downvote.

Not necessarily. A carefully selected set of facts can tell a very inaccurate story.

No.

Consider this simple example of cherry picking data (with made up numbers):

10 000 people every year suffer severe side-effects from vaccines.

If that's all you know it's logical to conclude that vaccines are dangerous.

But what they dont tell you is that vaccines are distributed to hundreds of millions and save the life of millions.

You need the full picture to be more informed.

No information is better than bad information IMHO.

It is psy-op 101 to push people to any extreme you can; left, right, up, down, doesn’t matter as long as they’re mad as fuck.

Let's be real. It's not TikTok, it's social media. Twitter had a reputation as a cesspool where people yell increasingy extreme political opinions at each other long before TikTok was popular. Gamergate was before TikTok.

TikTok is just the most refined version of the same rotten medium.

It's pretty telling how effective China thinks it is, given their restrictions on Douyin ("internal Chinese TikTok"). iirc kids can only use it for <1 hour / day.

Division is everything. It is immeasurably more difficult to control and manipulate a unified mass than it is to manipulate multiple different fragments of said mass. This applies to pretty much everything from flat-pack furniture to society.

Can we please stop pretending China, as a national entity, is doing anything at all with TikTok USA?

It is absurd and not worthy of a board like this. I'm sure many you know people that work at TikTok? This just isn't happening, at all.

The sum total of what China is doing with TikTok is restricting what people in China see, which is what China is worried about.

Yes, until civil war.

I dunno if TikTok should be banned, but Nepal motives are truthful.

Obviously they want social chaos in the USA, pitting right against left is one way of doing that, so maybe just have a self adjusting algo that detects which way they lean and then slowly increase the ratio of right to neutral/left ideas(videos). Slowly push the person in that direction a bit at a time over months. I've been thinking about signup up for a mysudo account and playing with the algos to see how long it takes to become a full on Marxist and also a MAGA extremist.

She is now more of the opinion that anti-Asian hate is primarily perpetuated by African Americans, which seems to be a fringe opinion in left-leaning circles. I don't know if it's true overall: she says it's due to seeing a lot of videos of Asians being harassed by African Americans and almost none of harassment by any other group.

Like Rashida Tlaib, or Ilhan Omar to further your example

Prohibiting a widely used and addictive product?