TikTok sued by 13 states and DC, accused of harming younger users
reuters.com
reuters.com
How is this unique to TikTok? Should this lawsuit succeed, would that open up American companies to the same claims?
This smells very election-yearish.
So it doesn't matter whether this practice is unique to TikTok. "What about all my competitors doing the same thing" isn't a viable defense in court.
Laws that are enforced very inconsistently aren't exactly the sort of thing that you want in a society with rule of law. They are exactly the sort of thing you want in a society with rule by law, though...
As it states, it's just a case of whataboutism. Various states have sued various companies in the past so we're still in a rule of law situation.
Given it's very spotty track record, I have very little confidence that the US is actually a country where nobody is above the law. I'd be very pleasantly surprised if this actually goes the other way, but I would not bet on it. The entire discourse so far about TikTok has been about how it's bad because it's foreign media, not about a principled approach to why it and other things like it are bad.
What makes you think it'll turn around, and extend to other social media?
Despite this case using the case filed last year against Instagram as precedent? (Tactically speaking, as it hasn’t been decided yet.)
We can wait and see about the reasoning used in the two cases once they conclude.
"Should this lawsuit succeed, would that open up American companies to the same claims?"
It's not [1]. Instagram was sued last year by a similar cohort [2].
TikTok isn't being singled out in this. It's almost suspicious how many people are peddling this false whataboutism. (And if two people are beating up your kid, why is the priority in what order you stop them?)
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/people-of-the-...
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/1/people-of-th...
If you response to evidence that challenges your worldview with Cartesian nihilism, you’re not operating in truth or knowledge but faith.
That’s fine. Faith is powerful. But it’s good to be clear eyed about which beliefs you hold that no amount of evidence will change your mind about.
Would you be willing to share some concrete, context-specific details about what you believe yourself to be referring to here?
> with Cartesian nihilism
Is this knowledge?
Is it necessarily accurate (in no way misleading)?
> That’s fine. Faith is powerful...
Is this to say that I am operating on Faith with respect to a certain proposition? If so, would you mind sharing what that proposition is with the rest of us?
And, does this apply to you as well? Or, are you perhaps under the impression that you have, in fact, a superior methodology to me in this regard?
For example: do you realize that you made a claim of fact above? Do you have the ability to substantiate that claim, in a matter that is resilient to valid questioning?
No. They are spying the kids for your own good. Remember, everybody can be a terrorist. /s
FTA:"Chinese-owned TikTok"
> This smells very election-yearish.
Is there a term for the phenomenon whereby when a conversation is being had by a group of people, and all participants know that the conversation is non-genuine (the talking points of the various parties are knowingly untruthful), but it hasn't yet been explicitly acknowledged that everyone is telling fibs?
I think it's funny that almost everything in the world runs in this general state, but we hardly ever talk about it. And then we whine about how everything is such a mess.
Is there anyone other than me out there that wonders about why we do things this way? No known laws of physics force us to do it, and yet we do almost only this (it is mainly a question of the degree to which "we" do it in any given situation, and there are many very obvious patterns of domains/topics where we tend to do it more so than in others). Might there be some other forces in our midst that we are overlooking?
[1] https://www.nj.gov/oag/newsreleases24/2024-1008_Complaint-Fi...
I don't really like the data collection of Instagram or YouTube either, but at least those are owned by US companies, and as such aren't centralized in a country we have an semi-adversarial relationship with.
This seems like it is political and about removing chinese competition from american markets. The protecting American's privacy from foreign actors bit is pure rhetoric not likely to be applied to american companies in the same market even though there is similar exposure.
The geopolitical angle I can get behind. But these "failed to protect children" lawsuits are a lot more sprawling, authoritarian, and potentially damaging to the internet at large.
There's also the opposite argument that the Chinese government has little ability to influence your life and so surveillance by a US company is worse since there's a higher risk that the information gathered can be used against you.
Under the TikTok ban bill, TikTok being sold to a Canadian or French owner would let them stay in American app stores.
We're not. Instagram was sued last year [1].
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/people-of-the-...
It probably won't play out that way though since the whole political push isn't really about harming kids or addictive behaviors of social media, it's just about destroying an outside interloper that isn't part of the existing propaganda apparatus and competes with American tech giants.
Do you revise your opinion in light of Instagram having been sued by a similar coalion of states for similar reasons last year [1]?
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/1/people-of-th...
https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-us-ban-sale-china-congress...
I'm very glad my kids have never really even seen TikTok. We had to ban YouTube, and doing so was possibly the single best boundary we've set as parents. If we hadn't we'd probably have never spoken to our kids again. They'd get on that thing and just be gone for unlimited amounts of time watching the most mindless idiotic trash you can imagine. These days YT is getting even worse. It's full of AI slop including pop science channels full of completely false AI-generated information. It's absolutely cursed.
I guess TikTok is like everything bad about YouTube but with less attention span and controlled by the CCP.
YouTube has "Shorts", attempting to duplicate the TikTok experience.
There are occasional moments when the fact that "everyone" else is on them, are challenging.
But it's been worth it.
The problem isn't the screen. It's what's on the screen. It's specific products that are engineered to maximize addiction.
Our kids play video games and we don't limit access to kids Netflix and many other things. They'll play games, watch a show, whatever, and then do something else. With YouTube they would watch, and watch, and watch, and watch, forever, to the exclusion of all other activities, and when we looked at what they were watching it was 100% repetitive content-free mesmerizing trash.
The biggest difference we saw is that when friends were around they'd drop video games or shows to play with their friends, but with YouTube they would not. Nothing could compete with trash YouTube videos. Examples included random incoherent blabbering while playing video games, videos of cars running over expensive things, unboxing videos, disturbing AI-generated trash, etc. The algorithm seems to have a bias toward increasingly mindless content. You can start with something mildly interesting and pretty soon you're watching someone smash things for six hours.
I see a few replies here questioning this and being like "but my kids are fine." It's possible that different people vary in terms of their susceptibility to this stuff in the same way that different people vary in, say, their propensity to become addicted to opioids. There are people who can use opioids for a while and then just walk away and there are people who use them once and think about them for the rest of their lives. The difference is probably genetic or brain developmental.
How would you know if you don't watch YouTube? Or I hope you don't, to be morally consistent with your own positions.
Edit: Thinking more about this sentence:
> So two options, either they are hypocritical and inconsistent and actually watch a bunch of YouTube to form such an informed position that it is all slop OR they don't actually watch so they wouldn't really know.
Doesn't this imply that no one is in a position to call YouTube content crap since they either haven't seen it or are hypocrites? Whose opinion that YouTube content is crap would be valid then or are only positive opinions about YouTube valid?
For kids it seem to converge in 'lets play', unboxing of toys and AI spam.
I feel like this experiment in rapid feedback optimization for engagement has yielded a truth about the human condition that ought to become one of those "laws": trash maximizes engagement.
It sounds pessimistic and awful but I think it's one of those things that makes sense in retrospect. Consider the following:
Let's say two people walk past you on the street. One of them says 'hi' and you have a brief light chat with them. The other smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which maximizes engagement?
This implies that any system that optimized for maximum engagement will converge on some kind of trash.
This is interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1bn8gfq/researcher...
It isn't really. I don't know you but what e.g. movie or music taste we have in common is probably quite blend and boring. The art is in the niche.
And for some reason the algorithm thinks we love what we have in common with others. Click one 'blend' video and its genre takes over your feed.
it's like youtube combined with instagram upload fitlers or something like that
Sounds horrible. My young teens have been on youtube for like 6+ years. They can watch hour long videos no problem. So what if they are trash sometimes? They are into it, paying attention and it's their entertainment. But then they also end up watching and learning so many different things they aren't going to see anywhere else. Or randomly come across chess videos then start watching those etc.
My kids have more screen time than 99% of kids I know, yet they are super well behaved, have many interests, do well in school, etc. I couldn't ask for better kids.
>If we hadn't we'd probably have never spoken to our kids again.
Sounds like a You problem. Not a YouTube problem.
I feel like YouTube has more content with actual effort put into it, and if you took the top N videos on each platform on any given day, the ones on YouTube would be substantially better.
Can I prove that? Nope. Does it even matter if the algorithm is just feeding you trash anyway? Perhaps not.
But at least YouTube *can* be used in a way that's not absolute mind rot. If that's even possible with TikTok, it's gotta be done by a substantially smaller chunk of the user base.
I saw a lot of people dismiss the ban bill out of hand after it was signed. However, I see a lot lining up against them:
1) Flat out refusal by the parent company to sell both strengthens the USG's case and cuts off a major 'win-win' outcome that could otherwise save them
2) The fact that they're the only major foreign owned social media company in the whole pool. This means that USG has far more latitude, legally and politically, to go after them then any other major platform.
3) The zeitgeist shifting away from Social Media in general, as seen in these lawsuits and just in... the world lately.
I could be wrong but I'd definitely bet on it.
Forced sale to stay in the country is the same as forced JV to enter. Most media markets have, historically, been regulated with respect to foreign ownership.
Eh, they'll still be on TikTok.com. Keep in mind, too, that the app store monopolies are being dismantled.
I do think that an App Store ban would be an effective tool. I don't think that average consumers would use the .com, over YT shorts or threads or whatever.
Kind of out a big question mark over ‘free and fair competition’ thing.
congress and senate insist its a sinister communist plot.
activist groups grown from whole cloth in the past year insist its causing immeasurable harm to children despite similar stateside competitors having existed for nearly two decades.
but i feel the reality is much simpler. Bytedance is a 120bn private foreign company thats squished all four of its major competitors in the US. Its not open for investment, it wont accept a buyout from FAANG, and most importantly its a massive media outlet that cant be influenced by the manufactured consent of the existing media in the US.
on tiktok you frequently see a very unbiased, very unflattering depiction of the nation that encourages viewers to critique and discuss controversial western topics.
Like what were you doing during the late 2000s and the early 2010s? All of these "controversial" topics, the skeletons in the closet and self-critique have been open and available for viewing from the beginning.
The only difference is that how they are viewed, in the past as lessons to inform the future, today as ammunition to attack, or to distract from one's own misdeeds.
Notice how on TikTok, even accounts you follow sometimes will show up with the + sign, begging you to click Follow eventhough you are already following them. This isn't a bug, rather, it's dark UX tricks to keep you trained on clicking the follow button.
On Meta (be it Facebook or Instagram), you only need to be sympathetic to what people in Gaza are experiencing to begin to see the censorship. It's blatantly obvious.
Coming back to TikTok, similar to Meta, they have crafted an incredible algorithm that will keep you glued to your phone. We have no idea if they have adjusted the levers to increase dissent in young people in the West. Just because they are saying they haven't, or we have not been able to prove that they haven't, doesn't mean they won't. I can tell you with a guarantee that if Instagram or YouTube were allowed to operate in China, they would certainly use these levers to increase dissent against the CCP. We already have an example of what these companies are doing to censor certain content and boost others in places like India and Pakistan.
In general, all of these social media companies are this generations cigarette companies. We need heavy regulation from congress. We need to take tech's lobbyist money and not do their bidding.
We need to shutdown lunatics like Andreessen Horowitz and more.
60% of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors such as the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group
You can read at least New Jersey's complaint here [1]. They do rightly point out the degree to which TikTok is used by the CCP to direct users to videos that serve as whitewashing propaganda, but the vast majority of the complaint is all junk science around dopamine hits and other bullshit.
At this point might as well ban Eragon and Percy Jackson and Harry Potter and all the other "addictive" books my kids read -- they can't help but turn the next page! And even after they finish they're asking for more books! ADDICTIVE!
I continue to maintain [2] that the use of the term "social media" is itself extremely deceptive as it confuses the consumption of content with the creation of content as well as the social network effects.
[1] https://www.nj.gov/oag/newsreleases24/2024-1008_Complaint-Fi...