Tiktok has been scrutinised so much that if they were showing "brainwashing content" to Western children we would've heard about it already.
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.
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.