TikTok is now collecting more data about its users
wired.com
wired.com
The impact the Chinese government can have on an individual American is minor compared to the US govt and the same goes for the American and Chinese govts on the average Chinese person.
Nothing a tin-foil hat can't prevent
As if the public needed any manipulation. You can just read what actual public figures, journalists, and such have been openly saying for the last 15-20 years...
When a long-time political player, wife of a President, and presidential candidate calls a big chunk of the population "deplorables", when opposing candidates call for the jailing or even shooting of their opponent, or when the current President is saying what he says and doing what he does, you need more to get "chaos" and "distrust of the neighbor"?
[0] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43vxbytjDSM&themeRefresh=1
It's no secret they do this, they openly discuss it. The things they want can differ but they want to convince you of things. That's obvious.
What makes the game easy for political adversaries (both foreign and domestic) is they don't need to convince the public of a certain thing, they just drive contention. What many people call "engagement". You can see this in 2016 with Russia doing things like forming Facebook groups to spur on protests along with groups to organize counter protests to the protest they helped create. They're not trying to make you pro Russia or pro communist so much as just cause America to be chaotic, ensuring people care less when they do things like invade Ukraine. You also see it in the current administration which, developing the belief in a deep state and saying crazy things left and right so that nothing is to be believed and you're constantly distracted. While we're all talking about Greenland we're not talking about Epstein. Every week it's something new. Even Bannon discussed this strategy early on: throw a million things at them and they'll only be able to focus on a few. It's no surprise this creates chaos and confusion. We argue about the things not being discussed as if it's hidden information rather than logistic overload but there's also not a meaningful difference
The point isn't to convince you, it's to make you exhausted and apathetic
I don't really have respect for this idea; we do this to ourselves far more effectively than people who frankly have a pretty hamfisted cultural understanding- just as we have of china or russia.
IMO influence over real concrete choices is much more alarming. Someone with household-level information has an insane amount of advantage in an election. You can target politcal messaging street by street to play up the worst aspects of your opposed candidate and the least repulsive aspects of your own candidate.
But if you're in china, the most you can do is try to push towards whatever of the two candidates is least bad for you. And spoiler, zero american politicians are pro-china.
America has been trying to spread it's way of life for a hundred years. People liked the fridges and cars but never cared much for the Christianity and croony capitalism.
..Other than, well possibly, Trump. Maybe not directly, but the Tiktok deal, withdrawing from the TPP, the eventual outcome of the trade war, the praise for Xi—all stands to benefit China at the expense of the US.
> I don't really have respect for this idea; we do this to ourselves far more effectively than people who frankly have a pretty hamfisted cultural understanding- just as we have of china or russia.
The two need not be mutually exclusive.
Yes there were very active causes and groups in the US to correct this issue, but that outside pressure forced leadership to be nudged towards corrective action and I wonder if the USSR hadn't been there would we have gotten Civil Rights legislation passed when we did?
Maybe the same will happen with China showing the US how fast they can get stuff done and what they provide as benefits to their citizens vs a declining US. Already TikTok has helped Gen-Z realize how Israel gets so many benefits (universal healthcare, college tuition, benefits for birthing kids etc.) while the US is in massive debt and continues to send money to Israel. That continued propaganda may lead to an eventual backlash and subsequent reform.
The real challenge to this is that most Chinese apps aren't in English.
ICE are fighting hard to change this.
I agree with this completely but I think we all need to avoid the idea that the danger of mass surveillance plays out at the personal level.
The Chinese government can do basically nothing with your individual personal data but if they have the personal data of tens millions of individuals then it suddenly becomes way easier to do things like influencing elections.
As far as I can tell at least among the American left, criticism of israel has become so commonplace and part of the culture that its become a "memeable" event at this point.
I wonder how the Israel lobby will manage to turn that ship around at this point?
The effect of popular criticism of Israel in the US has been the normalization of mass censorship and deportation, and nil on Israeli policy or American support for it (other than being the catalyst for killing Kamala Harris' campaign.) The ship doesn't need to be turned around, it continues on its course unabated.
Last I heard Trump intends to pave Gaza over and sell the land for data centers to the Saudis.
>Last I heard Trump intends to pave Gaza over and sell the land for data centers to the Saudis.
Honestly anything is possible. Maybe they will continue unabated and finish their project before Trump kicks the can. Maybe this upcoming Iran 'adventure' will be a massive disaster and will lead to a step change in hatred of Israel and anyone who supports them. I just dont see any of the old propaganda used in Iraq working this time around.
Maybe Israel completes their complete expulsion of Palestinians and then forms a solid base as the center of the middle east with everyone else being a vassal state. Would they even need the US at that point?
First instinct is USDS stands for usds.gov and it literally turned into nationalized social media. Upon further research USDS is apparently short for U.S. Data Security. WTF is with this naming. Imagine TikTok DHS (Digital High School) JV.
TikTok across Europe and Asia is still run by TikTok Pte Ltd, the ByteDance subsidiary in Singapore, under the old EULA.
It's sort've cliche at this point but we got the worst of both Orwell and Huxley in that our super-invasive surveillance apparatus is also a super-addictive apparatus designed to hit all our evolutionary buttons like a slot machine.
But yeah, the solution is to not let them collect data about you.
Most of what keeps people on it isn't heroin-like dependence but convenience and habit.
My mother used it to communicate with her COPD support group and chat with in-laws in Australia. I use it to follow up on work groups and authors and developers I'm interested in. Most people's usage of social media is banal and mundane, little different than watching television in the 1990s. They use social media because it provides value for them, not because they're addicted to dopamine.
it’s also meaningfully different in structure from tv. tv was 7-10 min of content and a couple of ads in between. and you grew annoyed by the ads. only toddlers were captivated. now most content is designed like ads were. and now they grow annoyed when outside it. and toddlers and older people are captivated.
And I don't think believing social media provides some practical value for people beyond addiction is "very idealized."
edit: I remember a very different past than you do. People of all ages watched tv for hours at a time, everyone was captivated. Saturday morning cartoons (all of which were toy commercials) were a mandatory childhood ritual. And the ads when popular were often the memes of their time. Different in structure but not much different in influence.
Humanity, in person, in the context of common interests, is fulfilling for the soul.
I mean this in all seriousness... you talk to them. Don't wait for them to ask you, you ask them.
Or are you asking how you make friends?
That one's harder but I'll point out something important. You notice how you made friends in school? The reality of it is that you just spent time around the same people constantly. That's the biggest driver. Bigger than any shared belief, politics, or whatever. Join a club. Go to the gym. Spend time outside your home in public in the same location at approximately the same times. You'll meet people who also spend time outside their homes in the same locations at the same times. Repeat this until you gave gained friends.
"Everyone should simultaneously quit doing the harmful thing" is a "solution" to our present surveillance advertising problem in the way that advice to save money is a solution to poverty or "have you tried farming?" is a solution to world hunger.
I.e. not a solution for humans, but a description of a beeline to the desired state as performed by a hive mind.
I don't like or use Tiktok, but clearly it provides some value to the people who do. Telling people to stop using it without even attempting to address what benefit (perceived or actual) it provides is self-defeating advice.
This is inaccurate. The best response is medically supervised detoxification. Stopping heroin without medical supervision can cause severe dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, cardiovascular issues and aspiration pneumonia. To say nothing of the likelihood of relapse overdose.
You should never, ever tell a person addicted to heroin to "just stop doing heroin" (or, to be more charitable to the original claim, "just" tell them to "stop doing heroin") and them continuing do heroin is not the same as "refusing to help themselves."
Heroin's harms are mostly from the fact that it's illegal. Legalize it, make it cost a dollar for a week's worth of it, and the harms we see go away (to be replaced by other problems). Junkies mostly just want more heroin. Meanwhile, everyone's mainlining TikTok to all abandon right out in public, and no one bats an eye. People are losing jobs because they can't get off TikTok but because you can't film them and conclude they got fired from work because of it, it doesn't get the same kind of media attention.
Stop spreading this nonsense. You clearly don't have any idea what heroin addiction is.
Millions of people have been addicted to heroin and got off it. And I'm fairly sure about 0 of the people who got off it did so when one kind soul came up to them and said "you should stop doing heroin it's bad for you"
That’s how addiction works
All for the sake of "security & safety", I‘d assume.
Were you working at TikTok? If not, I don’t see the relevance.
The TikTok app didn’t used to demand precise location data. Now it does. That’s a difference.
It's like saying "don't do drugs" (thinking of heroin, meth, coke and that sort) and someone else says "caffeine is a drug too".
HN may be more normalized, in the way that alcohol is more normal than meth in my circles. And folks my find HN to be more "useful", in the sense that I find being able to have a drink and socialize useful but don't feel the same way about casual adderall usage.
Unlike caffeine, however, (and this is the point I am responding to), I don't think that the HN is any -less- social media.
Caffeine is indeed a drug but has relatively (to alcohol) minor effects, especially looking at the longer-term differences- that's the point of the parent post.
I think that, like most of the social drinkers I know, the users of HN don't feel like there's anything abusive about how they are using it. I also see folks who are definitely getting their social media fix off the site.
Think about the evolution of the term "social media". It evolved from social networks, which themselves evolved from forums.
The "media" in "social media" refers to third-party content that is algorithmically boosted through social signals, with signals from your own network weighting higher, and in the end creating a personalized algorithm of media content.
There is no personalized media on HN. It's the same feed for everyone. There is no network on HN. No friends, follows, private messages.
So there's no social to HN, and no (personalized) media, and no network.
I also think HN has become too general purpose to be similar in spirit to most forums. Being seen on HN has major dollar value just like trending on Reddit does.
Also, have you used Reddit recently?
Open up Reddit on the app. No using old.reddit.com, doesn’t count. That’s not the experience most users are using.
Go to the watch section. I think you swipe left or right or something? I forget, I deleted the app.
Bam, it’s TikTok.
Reddit is definitely not a forum the same way old-school forums were forums. And I don’t believe you can, with a straight face, say that they’re the same.
Also, “Forums are platforms where the main purpose is to discuss the topic of any given thread”. That’s a very broad definition. Depending on how loose you want to enforce that you can convince me that Twitter and YouTube are forums.
Plus, “discuss the topic of any given thread” you say this in a thread about TikTok collecting more data while you’re clearly talking about something unrelated to that.
These definitions are blurry. If I told you “we should set up a forum” you’d not instinctively think we’re creating Reddit, and for good reasons.
But I’ll agree that HN is probably the more forum than social media if we were to place it on a scale. And that’s how these platforms should be judged imo: on a scale.
Now, karma and all that came from a way of making it so that the admins of this site have to do less moderation and let the best participants of this site have that power. It’s ultimate democracy.
Then your argument will be “what’s stopping someone from using someone else’s identity?” in which case we have laws for that. I don’t have all the answers but we can definitely do better.
Overall the site has become social media. Any sub that reaches critical mass gets absorbed into the slop hivemind. Browsing r/all is almost indistinguishable from browsing public facebook posts nowadays. Just loads and loads of bot slop catch-all subreddits like r/interestingasfuck or r/woahthatscool and drama subreddits like r/amioverracting. My filter list is over 100 subs long at this point.
When i log on to an actual classic forum like tacomaforum.com the difference is stark.
So, why on earth are they displaying stuff that you say is disturbing? There is no profit in that and TikTok is all about profit, ideally from abroad, ie market share.
I'm sure that the American population is incapable of being dumbed down any further.
Log a bug.
> it was suggesting feeds featuring clearly mentally impaired people with large audiences throwing money at them for saying their name
I've never seen that. I saw D&D content and discussions about gamedev. The feed is what you make of it, and TikTok's very famous algorithm shows you what you signal you will watch.
Feel free to disagree, and maybe you are the very rare exception, but you watched that stuff for a week or so, and I have no idea what you are referring to.
I suspect that feed is mostly what I look for and enjoy about it.