EU opens formal investigation into TikTok over possible online content breaches
reuters.com
reuters.com
To tackle filter bubbles, you need digital competence, which is also an educational problem.
On some people, not all. There will always be a susceptible portion of people who gravitate towards some influence. Today it is TikTok.
Its nothing special to TikTok, the only difference of TikTok is that for the USA its a first(as a foreign owned social media company). The rest of the world was under the influence of Meta and Google for decades. It was reported that Facebook did experiments like making people sad by curating the feed.
Anyway, TikTok is working great for me. I see no political or culture war content, I enjoy comedians, travellers, scientists, culture, culture commentators, songs, hot women and cats. Its like the good old days of the internet, its fantastic. Also, unlike the traditional social media, it doesn't induce FOMO. I don'y check TikTok all the day, I don't feel the urge to be on top of my feed but once I'm in I can spend hours. Much more healthier than Instagram or Twitter IMHO. Also, I see all the cringe inducing TikTok stuff when on Twitter. That stuff never appears on my TikTok feed.
I wonder if EU will find anything. maybe sharing of private data illegally?
As I said, I don't see political content on TikTok but that's probably due to my engagement patters. People who are into these things, they likely see as much as they like.
I do agree that social media can be a danger to the society though. IMHO, the solution to this shouldn't be suppression of speech or tune algorithms to favor any politics. After all, the world is never simple as the good vs the evil, even though every party tries really hard to depict themselves as the good ones.
I think we would be better off with enforcing transparency. I would love if EU made TikTok open its algorithm and enforce review on the data that the algo runs on.
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
The algorithms seem to feed people what they like, so people with fringe ideas think they have a lot of support. Matched together with mob mentality, threaten and "downvote" dissenters, which makes the "downvoted" people believe they are fringe, I can easily see how Facebook at least increases the risk of genocide mobs, or any other obscene herd mentality action.
Like, people that are considered maniacs by their peers, can more easily find each other and organize, fundamentally. And the algorithm does it for them.
I don't know but I' definitely not happy with the current state.
A radical group seem to self-radicalize in isolation, putting "moderate radicals" away, making the cycle self-enforcing.
If there was no TikTok/Twitter etc, people would have heard of it from politicians and NGOs and some people with other motives would have used it.
I wouldn't say that this is necessarily Twitters fault and I don't think these comments should be blocked. People gravitate towards easy answers to their problems and blocking doesn't help because there's private groups and real life communities where that kind of stuff is discussed.
I think, people concerned of social media are also seeking easy answers like those concerned with the mass killings of Palestinians. They all have valid concerns but their desire of easy solutions is misguided. It's so easy to say its the "evil jews" and its so easy to say that social media companies are radicalising people. Only if they can do this thing they will fix it, they think.
There's no easy solution to Gaza-Israel conflict, there's no easy solution to people communicating BS with each other.
As an example, this event organised by jewish people to talk about peace have been marked as antisemite by the government and lead to funding cancellation of a cultural center.
Can you read German or does your knowledge is based on English sources on this topic?
What bothered me was that those same friends would post dozens of times a day about non political things, posts that would get a lot of comments and likes. I never saw those posts unless I went directly to their page. Facebook only put their posts on my feed which would be inflammatory.
That's why I still use Twitter but my problem with the traditional social media is that it constantly induces anger in me.
Lately, I also begin seeing too much bullying, the red pill alpha male stuff that constantly argues someone is bad/immoral/weak if doing this unimportant or mundane thing and we are all doomed and this one weird trick can fix it(usually crypto, some BS attitude towards someone etc). It feels like high school. Just unbearable.
I made myself a few list of people from different view so I can be aware of their agenda and argumentation but can't stand the "for you" tab.
If Twitter was a real life those people in the "for you" tab wouldn't have survived a day among the society, IRL you can't just go around and spell BS constantly. There's a serious hustler overload in the traditional social media, a functioning society doesn't have space for that many flamboyant people.
Its exhausting. One Dan Bilzerian may be an entertainment, add a Kardashian too maybe but a society of %0.1 Kardashians is too much. That's not a society. Maybe we don't have a real social media anymore due to the engagement wars.
Even they recognize the adverse effect on attention spans.
While lack of attention span is a valid problem, YT has also created the problem of attentions not being rewarded.
I mean there are productive members of our society that are heroine addicts, the vast majority of heroine addicts aren't though
On the other hand, I constantly feel the urge to check what's going on in the rest.
Other people may have a different experience but its up to them to write about it. I can't speak for them and I'm not obligated to repeat the mainstream narrative. TikTok is working amazingly well for me.
Unfortunately I live in the Netherlands. A country in which the government itself carries out criminality against it's citizens (They call it interventions), where prosecutors lie regularly in court, are found out and it's no big deal. A country where the attorney general writes in a letter that if a prosecutor lies in court it's not perjury and he cannot be prosecuted for it. A Country where the head of a court was publically outed as being responsible for the jailing of 9 innocent people on fabricated evidence, one of whom consequently commited suicide and there are no consequences. (See de Villamoord).
I would be great to live in a democracy. However, I don't think that picking on Tiktok is going to make it so.
I guess it is good that awareness is raised, but I feel it is for the wrong reasons. There can be no major distinction between e.g. Facebook and TikTok.
Manufacturing Consent (1989)
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-NekqfnoWIEuYgdZl
Persuasive Technology (1996,2002)