My problem with this is that it is this design which should be illegal, not one app or another. Instagram and Facebook feeds aren't any better than TikTok.
China banned Instagram et. al. because they're not stupid. They don't want foreign influence on their children.
US politicians are both corrupt and stupid.
Why do you think Tiktok is the only vector for foreign influence, when it's been documented many, many times that domestic social media sites are rife with foreign misinformation?
What do you think Tiktok will do? Destabilize the US? Our politicians are already doing that. No need to worry about a boogyman from the other side of the globe. It's just a distraction.
In my opinion these apps should be banned immediately.
There's a difference between malicious users and malicious platforms.
For tiktok to be special in this regard they would have to allow something different that went way beyond what American platforms allow, and that's thus far not happening.
I'm not sure that's true. There's a big difference between "Some amount of degenerate content exists on American platforms which are constantly fighting to identify and remove it" and "Adversarial foreign platform intentionally creates/curates degenerate content to push it to American audiences while keeping it from their own users"
Even if you're talking about content that both platforms fully allow, if one platform targets a group and floods their feeds with certain content with an intent to harm that group that is itself a problem. The fact that it is possible to find harmful content on youtube doesn't make it the same as a platform that intentionally and relentlessly shoves harmful content in your face. I can't say how guilty tiktok is of doing that however.
TikTok would have to be doing something anything unique in this situation and they aren't. YouTube is the OG radicalization pipeline, Tumblr is more pro-communism than TikTok will ever dream to be, Facebook and IG pioneered doomscrolling before it was cool, and Twitter/Reddit ruined an entire generation of men with the enlightened technoconservatarian nonsense.
I promise you if there is one thing that is absolutely completely certain in America is that we need no help whatsoever in destroying the fabric of our own society and to say otherwise is an affront to American exceptionalism.
This was enough for me to resolve to never use it. And you're right that other social media isn't much better, though I don't think that was being called into question in the first place.
The example cited there seems a lot like it is to conform to local censorship policies, not to manipulate thought around some centralized objective of TikTok or the CCP.
Its a different thing, whether its better or not is a completely unrelated argument.
> Not to mention, being capable of one means they are capable of the other.
Neither one is a particularly deep capability, anyone with an information service with a personalized feed is capable of both, and if they don't conform to local censorship policies they simply will be banned where that occurs.
They allow them in America not China because the government allows them in America and not China.
The “leads to social decay” thing is the argument of people who disagree with freedom of speech in favor of authoritarian content controls.
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.
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.
I have no doubt if I had clicked on similar content on tiktok I would have deluged with similar nonsense.
Several media outlets did a dive on the connections the CCP has into TikTok.
Their security auditors implied that they have backdoors.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It is quite unnecessary to hear you call everyone you disagree with uneducated or similar.
Party is inextricably linked to any large commercial or corporate entity, by law but also culture.
Maybe if TikTok could only serve content sorted by newest, or if you get a direct link URL from someone else.
With social media like TikTok, they decide what propaganda to feed you.
Weird hobby, I know, but it is actually a great place to look at all the different ways propaganda is done. Everyone is doing it..
You think banning propaganda machines from other countries makes you more susceptible to propaganda?
I’m not against TikTok ban because it’s a degenerate format and content. (Main reasons are short videos, no video controls, autorepeat) It’s ADHD plus repetitive voices in your head on top of the usual internet asylum. But what’s the exact criteria for any feed?
- ones you cannot control (manipulation and propaganda)
- addictiveness and personalization (attention grabbing)
- bigcorps only (monetary interest converges to p.1)
?
One observation I have made about sites with a list of images/videos to view is that it is sometimes easy to succumb to visiting the site only to look at 'mindless' media (memes, sexually suggestive material, etc). At least for me, this seems to be the case no matter the ranking algorithm or user interface (no infinite scroll, etc) used by the site.
I have not found Hacker News to be this way. It is both easier to stop scrolling, and I have to exert at least some mental effort to read the news links and comments.
From rats on up to humans this is known to be an extremely addictive behavioral pattern. Social media like Tik Tok can perfectly balance how much reward to give you to keep you engaged while filing the non-reward results with ads and other messaging they want you thinking about.
Should we ban HN?
I think intent matters for a lot here, as does who/what is pulling the levers. If popular content organically rises to the top because people like it that's not really a problem, but if content is artificially pushed to the top or hidden entirely to push an agenda that could be an issue.
[0] except the YC jobs ads
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?
Because it’s the most logical thing to do and not doing so is a national security nightmare
Then why does it have so much philosophy content that can reveal the naivete of the many comments like this one reads about "TikTok"?
The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4
If calling it what it is helps encourage people to stop doing it to themselves (we are after all emotion-first, rationalization-later!)... then your taking offense on my behalf (for the record, I do have brain damage) will have been an acceptable cost.