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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> In one clip that Instagram recommended to a test account identified as 13 years old, an adult performer promised to send a picture of her “chest bags” via direct message to anyone who commented on her video. Another flashed her genitalia at the camera.

When it comes encryption and privacy the legislators just can't wait to jump in an "save the children", let's see how vigorous they are going to be investigating and prosecuting Meta for showing inappropriate things to children.

> On TikTok [...] new teen test accounts that behaved identically virtually never saw such material—even when a test minor account actively searched for, followed and liked videos of adult sex-content creators.

Well, isn't that embarrassing? The evil TikTok they are trying hard to ban, and for good reasons I think, is doing a better job "protecting our children" than Meta.

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This is the same "evil" TikTok that has a child predator problem where older men DM sexually explicit content to accounts of 14 year old children*, and generally a problem with predators**, ?

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonchandler/2020/11/02/tiktok...

** https://www.mmguardian.com/blog/tiktok-predators

https://cseinstitute.org/tiktok-and-the-growing-media-exploi...

The reason for the US government banning TikTok is not that TikTok is a worse product (it is superior).

The reason is that it is a massive geopolitical risk.

People often conflate these two.

How is it a risk?? Are the communists cackling with glee as they steal all those 30 second clips of teens doing the cinnamon challenge?

It is probably possible to manipulate people to further your political goals in an automated fashion using these technologies. In fact you can manipulate insane numbers of people in all kinds of ways with them.

This runs into a simple logical problem. The powers that be would love nothing more than to be able to do exactly what you're describing. And they have effectively endless resources at their disposal alongside dysfunctional intelligence agencies, a completely dysfunctional and obsequious media, and social media sites that have no doubt all signed up for PRISM and its likely even more insidious successors. Yet society is absolutely, in no way whatsoever, becoming more compliant.

Exactly!

> Yet society is absolutely, in no way whatsoever, becoming more compliant.

I'm not so sure. People are putting up with a lot of bullshit. Not saying that is due to social media though.

Tim Ferris has a great podcast episode with Matt Pottinger that discusses this topic. https://tim.blog/2024/05/08/matt-pottinger/

If your algorithm can convince large numbers kids to snort cinnamon and eat tide pods for dinner, bending their perceptions enough for them to vote or not vote for something would be a piece of cake.

That’s just the worst reasoning I’ve ever heard. Your if.. then statement just doesn’t logically follow.

Honestly this whole thing reeks of the satanic panic type moral scares of the 80’s or the anti communist rhetoric of the 60’s repackaged in new form. Moral panic over something or other is an American tradition; right now it’s tiktok but god knows why.

Set yourself a reminder to come back to this comment in 10 years once the fervor has died down and you will read your own comments with bafflement.

Lol. Such manipulation is happening now, has been for over a decade.

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

"Using what it called "behavioral microtargeting" the company indicated that it could predict "needs" of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then could be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments and companies, providing "a better and more actionable view of their key audiences."

Boomer brain worms. If you really want to get rid of propaganda, you should take Fox News off the air immediately.

Genuine question: why is TikTok viewed as a risk? How does it differ from Facebook or Twitter with all the fake news, threats, etc.

Imo, the way that some have instrumentalized Western social media for disinformation is a bigger threat than allowing a competitor

A Chinese entity has a controlling interest. We want all of our manipulation to be domestic, thankyouverymuch.

FB/IG will delete or downgrade content that's extremely embarrassing to the US government; TikTok will do the same for the Chinese government. It's amusing when a subject (e.g. US government funding for a Chinese virus lab doing bat coronavirus research right before the Covid pandemic) hits both triggers - but X does allow that content to some degree so perhaps X really is a bit more pro-free-speech than either FB/IG or TikTok.

FB/IG/Threads openly downrank any political content for good reasons nowadays. There was a thread from one of the execs that I saw a few months ago. I actually like that. Not everything has to be "rage bait of the day sprinkled with geopolitical drama". And whenever I have that itch to scratch, I can just doom-scroll through Twitter.

TikTok is a bit different though, I think they were able to capture the audience and put them in correct bubbles, so if you want to just watch your funny memes, you won't see anything else. But looking at my friend's feeds, they see the opposite - extremely polarizing political content from all the possible sides of the spectrum. It looks like IG Reels has started to eat their lunch, but time will show.

Insta/FB/X/TikTok are all massive geo-political risks for a large number of countries. They have been called many times as tools for social engineering against governments.

There is no good side in this debate.

Correct, this is why Insta/FB/X are banned in China.

It's also why a TikTok feed in China is vastly different from the sludge that other countries get from it.

I find it bemusing that people continue to pretend that some TikTok videos can just completely brain-warp people, when domestic politicians paired alongside US intelligence agencies, countless astroturfed social media accounts, and a completely dysfunctional and collaborative media system can't make people think what they want them to.

I'm not saying this is true, but as a thought experiment, imagine you are an agent of the Chinese government assigned the task of weakening the west relative to China over the course of a decade or two given TikTok as a tool. What would that look like?

It can't look like obvious propaganda; people wouldn't use it. It doesn't have to convince people of any one thing to work anyway. Just shortening the average attention span would be enough to weaken a society a little. How about increasing polarization? People produce plenty of polarizing content on their own; just favor that a little more than an algorithm merely trying to be addictive does. Antisocial and self-destructive behaviors should also get a subtle algorithmic boost. Aggrandizing the platform itself is harmful as well - if someone chooses to be an influencer instead of a scientist, damage is done.

If those all sound like things most social media does, that's the point. It's like popularizing a junk food that's just a little higher in sugar, fat, and salt than the rest. Harmful elements of social media are harder to measure than that though.

Correct.

The attacker in the 2015 OPM hack acquired biometric data on every federal government employee. Cross referencing against biometrics collected at ports-of-entry unmasked covert US operations, undermined US interested and put the lives of Americans abroad at risk. This information is valuable to every adversary equipped to use it.

The scandal of Tiktok is that rather than breaching OPM, a foreign entity has simply requested this information directly from future federal employees. Beyond mere facial biometrics, tiktok knows the childhood street address of ~every future spy -- and everyone near and dear to them. Tiktok can generate a psychological profile on ~every future diplomat and international businessman. And the biometrics they can access includes things like sleeping habits, gait, vocal chord structure, vocabulary, and accent -- much more than the OPM hackers got.

I would be interested to know how many people are coming from different social media platforms TO tikTok for this kind of content. I know back in the day almost every subreddit that had porn or women posting pics would also link to their tiktok accounts and many of the videos and accounts were also posted on tiktok so a woman could post a few pics or videos, link to their tiktok account and then get people to subscribe to their accounts there.

There's also an assumption that users are 100% honest with their age. Simply confirming you are 18 gives you an easy end around the filtering of content. Even at 8-10 I had friends who were quite ambitious about getting their hands on porn and other material we weren't supposed to have. If the bar is simply lying about your age, I would say that's not a very good way to try and filter content from underage users.

Even more damming imo is that Instagram is rife with those “young model” accounts.

Makes sense though. When you have a product produced in an authoritarian state, they probably spend a lot more time on censoring for better and worse.

Same for Snap, which is surprising given its reputation:

> Despite their systems’ similar mechanics, neither TikTok nor Snapchat recommended the sex-heavy video feeds to freshly created teen accounts that Meta did, tests by the Journal and Edelson found.

This imo proves that Meta isn't even trying:

> In some instances, Instagram recommended that teen accounts watch videos that the platform had already labeled as “disturbing.”

This could be a very simple toggle, it's disingenuous to blame everything on the "black box" of the "algorithm."

Mostly because Snapchat can't be easily used as a "funnel through discovery algorithms". On the other side of it, it's probably the app where everyone sends their explicit photos to each other, especially within the younger demographics.

It’s almost as if it’s not a single factor issue and insta could stand to improve its under-age content filters AND TikTok can also be a threat because of its ties to China.

The TikTok ban is political and not to save the children, perhaps to stop them seeing the horrors in the middle east, instead tune them into $MindDestorying content instead.

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