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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

> Do I use TikTok? No, I've always advocated against it.

This, to me, is a weird stance. On what grounds did you advocate against it?

I just had to create a new account tonight after the ban[0] to keep using it. When you first start TikTok you might be presented with a wave of seemingly crap, bizarre or boring videos, but after several minutes of liking and watching the good stuff the algorithm very quickly starts serving you some excellent content.

There is some really, really great, really smart content on TikTok. I have always advocated for TikTok on those grounds.

[0] my accounts are all on USA servers and you can't log into them even through a VPN

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> On what grounds did you advocate against it?

It is incredibly addictive inducing drug like state:

> You’ll just be in this pleasurable dopamine state, carried away. It’s almost hypnotic, you’ll keep watching and watching. - Dr. Julie Albright

> You keep scrolling, she says, because sometimes you see something you like, and sometimes you don’t. And that differentiation — very similar to a slot machine in Vegas — is key.

I detest slot machines, so many lives wasted away, and I feel like we already spend too much time on computers to the detriment of both ourselves and society, let alone giving the CCP a hand to manipulate people on top of everything else

I find the hard core defenders of tiktok, such as yourself, weird. I know for a fact you get propaganda videos shoved in between your feed of 'good stuff' that you enjoy watching, but I know you wont admit that, or downplay it or say you can scroll past it. It doesn't change the fact the platform is used by the CCP to push a narrative, and while it might not work on you, there's some 120m users in America on TT. That's an awful lot of people who are being fed bullshit and lies.

> my accounts are all on USA servers

Keep telling yourself that ;)

> I know for a fact you get propaganda videos shoved in between your feed of 'good stuff' that you enjoy watching

No idea how you could know this. I have never seen any concrete evidence that there are propaganda videos interlaced into people’s feeds. Everything I have heard is hypothetical. “China could” do this or that. If there were anything more than conjecture it would be huge news.

Casey Newton said on Hard Fork that he started a new account recently as an experiment and didn’t mention anything about China propaganda videos.

Here in my country, Chinese propaganda is vast in TikTok because of the disputes in the South China Sea, Scarborough Shoal and others. Maybe your feed is different since you aren't neighbors with China.

Fascinating, could you share an example link?

I don't use the app personally but I have friends who use TikTok and sometimes they would just casually tell me "oh yeah sometimes it shows me weird stuff like nazi videos, I just scroll past them"

The app's design is to get you to mindlessly doomscroll and not really think too hard about what it's showing you. If it shows you something insane occasionally it's no big deal, it's just the algorithm trying something new right?

It's very difficult to show any concrete evidence for how a secretive algorithm controlled by an adversary behaves. In an ideal world the burden should be on the platforms to prove that their algorithms are fair and not biasing towards certain viewpoints, but that might never happen.

You don’t need to know how the algorithm works you just need to demonstrate an effect it has. As of yet I have not seen that, and I am sure many journalists would love to prove it does.

I've been using TikTok for four years and never once seen anything resembling Nazi content.

I opened a new account in Canada last night due to the ban. I saw a lot of Canadian memes, and a ton of wildly incomprehensible foreign material from every corner of the globe as the algo tried to figure me out. But none of it looked remotely political or ideological in any way.

If there is propaganda it is very covert. Compared with X where my feed is maybe 80% overt propaganda, including from the owner of the platform himself.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"

I mean, if that's the standard, I've also unfortunately been exposed to more Nazi content than I'd like on Twitter/Reddit/etc. Should they be banned as well?

What do these "propaganda" videos look like and how do I recognize them?

I did once see a cat that was named "Chairman Meow" in one video, which might have been very subtle CCP reprogramming now that I think on it.

FYI: They are very subtle.

Usually it is about behavior shifts and/or emotions. E.g. if I’d be watching videos with cute penguins and then seen a politician „adopting” penguins at zoo, that’d be a political propaganda.

Political ads have to be marked clearly but if politician is sympathetic to the platform and platform owner has a stake in keeping good relations then it’s just another penguins video, right?

And it’s omnipresent, so you stop paying attention. It’s not only China who is doing that. That’s why Paris Syndrome exists, car manufacturers don’t allow game makers to show their models in a destroyed form or why actresses don’t like to show their nostrils.

The problem with China (as far as I understand) is lack of the symmetry. They will sell you everything, but refuse to let your merchants in.

And I’d describe message shown to American users as a propaganda.

> I know for a fact you get propaganda videos shoved in between your feed of 'good stuff' that you enjoy watching,

I have been using TikTok for months and I didn't see any propaganda at all. I only get content about my interests (3d printing, game dev, tech stuff). Sometimes it shows random stuff like animals and camping and funny videos or something but nothing like heavy politics at all.

I guess if I started engaging with "slightly political stuff" and started searching for it, it may be possible to get that kind of content, but yeah it's definitely not shown to me.

I expect that to stay unless I start to show intentions to the algorithm that I care about that kind of content.

So, when my feed dipped into politics, it was all anti-trump (though I'm traditionally conservative) and if it were my only news, I would have been flabbergasted by the Trump win. But apparently the app was pushing Trumps victory?

Yes, there is high quality long form content on TikTok, but most people just mindlessly consume the short form garbage, wasting their time and destroying their attention span. Everytime I watch teenagers or kids use TikTok I am genuinely horrified. It is clear that the platform does not optimize for thoughtful content, on the contrary! I certainly wouldn't advocate for it.

To me it is a time-sink that drowns our brains in a perpetual state of climax. Every video is designed to bring you to climax, and before it is done, the next video is loaded only to do the same. It is addictive and breeds impatience.

The medium is the message. I treat YouTube shorts and reels the same way. I'm sure there is smart content, but I'd rather take the time to research a subject rather wait for it to be randomly fed to me in the most exaggerated manner.

Not OP, but the users of it I know my person seem hypermobilized by what I consider brainrot ideologies amd generally seem to have highly destabilized psychologies.

>On what grounds did you advocate against it?

It's owned by the Chinese government and I don't trust the Chinese government.

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