Certain people can try to turn this into a controversy in our modern hypersensitive hysteria, but this is perfectly sensible and reasonable behavior.
Users want to see attractive, popular, charismatic, entertaining people. They want to be like them. They want to see more of them. TikTok isn't interested in turning off its userbase, no matter how much your sociopolitical agenda might prefer that.
this is a very cogent point. algorithims act as a layer of abstraction and somehow gives people an escape for moral culpability. i wonder what facebooks algorithms would have done during US slavery, in nazi germany, during the apartheid, or any other (countless) horriffic human event?
no doubt we will hoist pitchforks at tiktok for being authoritarian chinese and neglect our own senseless populism.
The difference is that a person with some flaw can compensate by having other qualities and still be popular. But if there is a hard rule, then that's not possible.
I wonder if racists get friend suggestions for people who aren't their "race" in appearance terms; I'm imagining that could be an emergent selection not explicitly encoded for. If that were the case ... would it be so different to people making that selection. It's a question of allowance vs. instigation I suppose ... but if you knew that behaviour was likely to emerge then the line gets blurred somewhat ...
Rarely. I operate several facebook profiles that exclusively look at very racist or politically extreme people, and guess who FB keeps recommending as potential friends.
This is not about low quality content getting automatically filtered out by an algorithm because people don't like it. This is about TikTok using human moderators to prevent users from ever seeing content made by people they don't like.
Moderators of the subreddits in reddit are normal reddit users (normally) compared to the moderators in TikTok who I presume are selected by the company and on payroll (or contractors maybe, I seem to recall Facebook uses contractors for this)
I don't think Reddit gives moderators instructions to remove content if it indicates that the poster has a list of undesirable characteristics like being fat or poor.
This isn't about content being low quality or not liked. It's about content containing specific things that TikTok moderators were told to look out for.
There is plenty of extremely high quality content made by people who appear fat, poor, old, disabled, ugly, etc in their videos.
Sure, the algorithm will try to figure out what you like and put that on the top, but the things being removed by humans don't even get into the algorithm, they are completely removed.
Quote: Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose.
Geez, I thought this might be an overblown piece about algorithms unwittingly optimizing for the wrong things, but the headline is pretty accurate. Discussing how moderators choose content to recommend to people in the “For You” section (not a user — I assume this is something highlighted to users):
> Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose.
A TikTok spokesperson seems to confirm they are real guidelines, but won’t confirm how they were used.
> TikTok spokesperson Josh Gartner told The Intercept that “most of” the livestream guidelines reviewed by The Intercept “are either no longer in use, or in some cases appear to never have been in place,” but would not provide specifics.
That's platform vs editor problem of social media all over again. You're either a communication platform akin to a phone cord that functions regardless of what's communicated on it, or an centrally controlled media with an editorial board which is in charge of what users post on in and is responsible for it.
The only difference with Facebook is that it got crap from people who wanted it to be responsible for it's content (fake news), while TikTok gets crap from people who were not prepated for it to be so moderated, but it's still the same fundamental problem of trying to sit on both chairs at the same time.
Instagram does the same thing; my 'Explore' tab is full of beautiful people even though I don't follow them. From a business standpoint it makes sense to promote the best looking content since it'll lure in more young users. The young kids probably think something like "Hey look at all those beautiful people. I want to be like them and they use Tik Tok so I'm going to use Tik Tok too."
It's not the same result. Ugly/fat/poor people can make engaging content and that will be recommended on Instagram.
The content you see depends on your interests. Making this up: if you regularly engage with topics that have a majority of fat people posting, say weight loss strategies, you will see a lot of fat people in Instagram Explore.
It's the difference between:
- Instagram: "I mostly see beautiful people" (because that's the content I and many users engage with).
- Tiktok: "I never see ugly people" (because the platform has a guideline that prevents that content from being shown to me)
I wouldn't say it's "never" on TikTok. Having used both, I wouldn't say i've noticed a difference in how many non-model type persons I see on either platforms.
Let's say there's 10 people on Instagram and 5 are ugly and 5 are non-ugly people
Suppose 10 users on average interact with 2 non-ugly persons and 1 ugly person. People like commenting on the non-ugly people's content with "wow so pretty!" and "that's awesome! ", etc, etc while ugly people don't get as many comments and maybe even receive neutral to non-positive comments.
Now a new person signs up. They get recommend non-ugly people in their feed since that's more popular based on views and interactions.
Another new person signs up and they get the same recommendation, and so on.
After 100 new sign ups, the recommendation engine has 'learned' that majority of people prefer interacting with non-ugly people.
Another new user signs up and all they see in non-ugly people recommendations.
The end result is pretty much the same. Ugly people will get pushed out enough either by the programmatic learning engine that becomes over trained and biased, or by manual reviewers that filter content based on data that shows that non-ugly people bring in more users, otherwise they'd promote ugly people content if that was driving more interactions.
The point is that at the end of the day people will always prefer looking at beautiful people over ugly people, so TikToks practices aren’t really all that absurd.
No, they are extraordinarily absurd. One is a choice, the other is a directive. Also, lots of people don't even watch other people in Instagram - just pictures of scenes, animals, etc since that is their interest. And the recommendations reflect their choice of interest.
If you cannot see this critical difference between enforced directive and choice of interest, then god help you.
You've got some insight there. But what can we do if humans just like to see and interact with beautiful people and avoid the ugly? It makes things a bit bleak for me personally, but I guess people want what they want :B
I don't know where you see ugly people on instagram because I never saw one. it's not mostly, it's never, unless you specifically look for it. and how do you look for it?
by the same standard, you can see ugly people on tiktok, because they don't delete the post, they just supress it from popular feeds.
I think this is striking at the root. Many people in tech have explained away things that where is a selection that occurs algorithmically even if it unsavoury because the black box is a black box and thus has no ill intent. However, the moderation policy does have intent. It just matters whether you value intent vs. actual consequences when you decide whether something is moral or immoral.
There is a school of thought (not sure if I agree with it) that if the outcome of a process is x-ist (racist, sexist, ageist, etc.) then the process itself is x-ist, regardless of whether there was any intent to make it so.
It kind of makes sense. Bad results can and do come out of well-intentioned decisions. In other areas (business, legislation) we judge policies by their actual effects, not by their creators' intentions.
new account on instagram, click explore, there are people there, nobody ugly.
search for any tag that has mainly people like beach or hiking, all accounts are from very beautiful people with lots of followers.
your algorithm promotes people with more followers and likes, which are bound to be more beautiful people. Unless you avoid any interest in tags related to people and see only beautiful bunnies, not ugly bunnies, your feed will be only beautiful creatures.
And my Explore feed is pretty much just pictures of cute bunnies as that's based on the content I interact with (who doesn't love cute pictures of bunnies?!). I'd say that's very much not the same thing - algorithmic interpretation of what I like, vs a moderator deciding to only promote certain things.
It's just what you've responded to. I've literally got 90% baby yoda memes, I'm not even kidding. The 'for you' is algorithmic, not curated by mods based on beauty like it seems TikTok was.
Hmmm I never used that feature before, I just go through my feed. I checked and yes indeedy if it was a person I would say 9/10 were very attractive humans.
Since you've ignored our many requests to stop doing nationalistic flamewar on Hacker News, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you can email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Maybe you don't owe a country better, but you owe this community considerably better if you want to post here.
I'll assume you know better than I, but while browsing the past few weeks of that account's comments I didn't see any "nationalistic flamewar" talk. Just a few mentions of Chinese authoritarianism and the stiffing of dissent and open discourse.
Maybe in order for it to fully make sense, you have to understand that we'd warned that account four times already, as well as some other things that aren't public.
But even apart from that, there is a litany of comments that broke the site guidelines. It's not like these were hard to find:
Tinder does the same thing too right ? Attractive people are matched with attractive people At the end of the day when it comes to eyeballs, sexiness sells. The rules of attraction are very much gamified at this point.
I'm suprised, I mean normally people themselves are already quite capable of following and watching only the most gifted, beautiful and talented individuals, or at least the ones that appear so. All to feel a little bit worse about themselves every day.
I don't understand why you would need to actively encourage this, I don't believe Twitter would ever have people with “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” features trending.
Twitter is great for people who don't look conventionally attractive, because there's no expectation of having real profile photos. On Twitter you really can go viral just by being funny.
Instagram on the other hand is so beauty centric that it's created its own makeup aesthetic.
In SE Asia, "eye disorders" is code for chinky eyes. In some countries, like South Korea and Japan, women will spend loads of money for blepharoplasty because the culture romanticizes large, round eyes (see anime).
Just as a counterpoint - I (a middle aged man) joined TikTok to keep an eye on my teenage daughter's posts. I didn't know there was a "For You" channel. I thought it worked more like instagram and only followers could see what you post.
Anyway, I uploaded the most recent video on my phone as a test which was me getting my nostrils waxed in a Turkish Barbers. It hit the For You page and it's now got 360k views :-(
To play devil's advocate, presumably they work for some people, people that want to go to a club in which they attendees are selected by looks.
Sounds just like a lifestyle magazine, or a catwalk, or a million other situations that have been normalised in which people are chosen for how they look (just about every prospectus appears to choose people to present their idea of the right type of diversity, for example).
It's not great, but TikTok just seems to be doing the same as most other organisations?
Just because it is normalized in some other parts of society doesn’t mean this isn’t a new front to fight this kind of discrimination on. Especially since this platform is gaining a lot of popularity with younger generations, an order of magnitude more than the nightclub scene’s impacted users https://www.oberlo.com/blog/tiktok-statistics
The biological platform of humans discriminates. There seems to be a greater amount of pleasing chemical reactions happening when people see good looking people, so they seek them out themselves. I don't know how or if one can fight that, it's seems to be one of the fundamental mechanisms of mating.
There is a difference between recognizing biology, and apps weaponizing it to drive engagement. This is like saying that nicotine releases dopamine so no one can fight cigarettes.
Even disregarding social ideals about listening to people who don’t look like underwear models, the potential for harm is very real - look up Body dysmorphic disorder for the kinds of very real mental health problems this can create in younger generations.
I think given the potential risks, we should have conversations about what this problem is and possible policy solutions. Giving children skewed perceptions of the world, or encoding these kinds of biases about who is worth paying attention to is dangerous.
TikTok is presumably doing this to create a better network for their users. Most of their users are watchers rather than content creators. I'd expect most watchers would prefer to watch attractive people over unattractive ones.
To me, this seems most similar to movie producers hiring attractive people to be in their movies. TikTok creators are making content for the platform, and the platform is curating the content to try and find things it thinks the audience will like. In the same way movie producers select specific people to be in their movies because they think their audience will appreciate them.
I don't think it is sad. Attractive people are, by definition, attractive. They are nice to look at. This is not everything, but it isn't nothing. In the same way, some people have massive innate talent, or disposition, or intelligence. They can be fun to watch or listen to or just be around.
Perhaps it feels sad because much of attractiveness is "unearned". Some people are born more or less attractive than others and that is unfair - but I think most human attributes are like this. A smart person didn't earn their intelligence, and while they may feel they earned their knowledge, and perhaps they're right, they'd never have been able to earn their knowledge and intellectual accomplishments if they had been born mentally deficient. Famous basketball players work hard, but it wouldn't matter if they were born into 5'5" bodies, etc.
That some people are more attractive than others is unfair, but that fundamental unfairness shouldn't prevent us from appreciating attractive people in my view. I don't see anything wrong with promoting more attractive TikTok users provided it does actually result in a better user experience. In the same way I don't see anything wrong with selecting attractive people to be actors in your movie or film. If you want people to like the main character then it is probably smart to cast an attractive person.
This is what happens when you mix utilitarian morality with a desire to stop online bullying. You just stop letting the most likely targets of bullying be seen. This is much cheaper and easier than trying to get rid of everyone who has ever been mean online, because that's everyone.
> The documents reveal that it's about curating appealing content to get user retention
Seems kind of similar to what supermarket magazines do. Obviously a social media app is not a supermarket magazine, but the premise of cynically using pretty people to drive up engagement is nothing new.
Magazines are not communication platforms their 'users' expect to use in anything remotely the same way.
A better comparison might be bottle-service bars where looks or money buys your way in. Which I personally don't mind - if that's your thing, I guess, go for it. Not every place has to be somewhere I want to go, and they're pretty up-front that you need to meet whatever standards or pay crazy money.
Tik Tok, from observed behavior, is weaselly about it.
Combine with the fact that it is obviously part of the Silk Road strategy and likely an intelligence tool, and I'm going to continue to treat is as the radioactive garbage it is.
'Regarding the policy of suppressing videos featuring unattractive, disabled, or poor users, Gartner stated that the rules “represented an early blunt attempt at preventing bullying, but are no longer in place, and were already out of use when The Intercept obtained them.”'
> This is what happens when you mix utilitarian morality with a desire to stop online bullying.
What in TFA indicates that these policies were intended to stop online bullying? Just as plausible to think that they were intended to create a saccharine user experience in order to promote growth.
The Chinese solution to "disharmony" is to simply erase anyone who is different. LGBT people are allowed to exist so long as they don't draw attention to themselves. Also the ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang.
I don't think these were intended to stop online bullying as much as they are just another bullying tactic themselves.
Is this all that different from Apple's walled garden? You want a porn app on your iPhone or a Political app, both are banned and no user oriented way to side load. (geek only solutions don't count).
Political apps exist? Bernie has an app and I'm sure the other major party candidates do too.
Porn also seems like a very reasonable place to draw the line for the app store. It's not like the iPhone has a porn filter, you just have to use a browser to watch your porn.
How is this different from nightclubs having a high bar to entry?
I am not saying this is an ethical thing to do, I am saying these apps are no different from nightclubs and they gotta do what they gotta do to survive. And no matter what you may say, humans prefer non ugly people over ugly people. I am sorry but this is simply how humans work. If you disagree, then you are a hypocrite.
So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do (when what their "users" want is exactly non-ugly people) and driven out of business?
Who are they being assholes to? You don't have a right to invade people's private spaces. I don't have to invite you into my home.
Provided it's not a matter of a protected characteristic, the idea that you can push your way through the door by law is silly.
They go there to meet people who titilate them, and who don't remind them of how life can go wrong; that's their business in my view.
I know that I'm not attracted to ugly, unhealthy, or elderly people, and it's not wrong to feel that way, it is basically natural; and people who are themselves ugly, unhealthy, or elderly also feel these same things that you find ugly to acknowledge.
About a decade ago there was a huge controversy where I live about many nightclubs limiting the number of immigrant male patrons per night. I guess you don't see a problem with that either?
"Protected class" is a cop out because the question isn't about what the law says but what is moral.
Well, you want to have an exclusive clientele. If you get people who live in the ghetto going there, it's not exclusive. It just causes a poor vibe.
I mean, some nightclubs have immigrants, but nobody goes there because there are too many immigrants.
It's sort of the same thing here with TikTok: on one hand we say that it's bad to ethnically discriminate in nightclubs, on the other hand we don't go to the 'urban' nightclubs, and take it as a good signal when we read the immigrant patrons online complaining about ethnic discrimination.
If the pretty people don't want an ugly guy like me around, then why would an ugly guy like me want to hang out with those pretty people? It seems like a "nothing of value was lost" situation. I'd rather hang out with people that enjoy my presence.
What would shaming them for this accomplish? Is the idea to shame them so much that they pretend to like ugly people like me? What would be the point of that?
I don't shame people unless I think it will accomplish something productive. I wouldn't think of denying that you have the right to shame people for whatever reason you like, but I choose not to do it myself unless I see a good reason for it.
So back to my question: "What would shaming them for this accomplish? Is the idea to shame them so much that they pretend to like ugly people like me? What would be the point of that?"
What effect on their behavior do you hope to accomplish by shaming pretty people for not wanting to hang out with ugly people? I'm not seeing a productive reason to do this.
That only works on people who aren't shameless and are willing to reevaluate their own behavior based on external criticism. Sometimes you have to pick your battles.
I'm responding to people who are using their time and energy saying they shouldn't be shamed. I wonder why they're wasting their energy with counter-shaming?
That user doesn't speak for me; my time is not so valuable today, which is why I thought to spend some of it casually chatting about a social media website I never had any intention of using. It was never my intention to shame you, nor to deny your right to shame others. If you feel as though I've tried to shame you, then I apologize for the miscommunication.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted here. Everyone knows that there are exclusive cliques and there always will be. If you desperately want to be part of a group that doesn’t want you, then that’s your problem to overcome.
The restaurant counter was one of the first civil rights issues. Not that different from a nightclub. What's the real difference here? That effectively segregating ugly people is more acceptable than segregating by skin color?
The ignorance here is among those who don't understand that people are suffering from this discrimation, and the offense is coming from people who justify and defend it.
Nightclubs and TikTok aren't the most important examples of this, but for people who faced discrimination their entire lives, any victory would make life a little easier.
So no group can select their members anymore? Nonsense. A model agency will continue to hire exclusively beautiful people. Top tier universities will remain a club for well doers in the education system. My group of friends remains closed to most everyone else and so does yours.
No one is trying to end "exclusivity". Harvard is still exclusive even though it now admits a whole lot of people they would never have considered 100 years ago.
But if a group is excluding people based on innate physical characteristics, maybe they should rethink that.
That's a meaningless statement. Bigots of the past all felt their personal prejudices were absolutely relevant, and didn't find the discrimination they practiced at all irrelevant or abhorrent.
Society made progress only because people fought against that. They were all accused of fighting against nature, but over time, more people realized those old standards weren't as "natural" as they were once thought to be.
Do you imagine we've reached the pinnacle of human social evolution and tolerance? Perhaps we still have similar lessons to learn, and people of the future will consider our behavior as abhorrent as we consider the 1800s.
Let's agree to disagree. I'm talking about physical discrimination being not simply valid by the standards of our time, but unavoidable, depending on the context. Short people can't play in the NBA, because they can't compete with bigger players.
The only progress that could push society past that, is genetic engineering. Everyone on equal footing or so different, that sport as we know it ceases to exist.
But how can you objectively establish that somebody is unattractive?
Assuming the world moves into this hypothetical society you're describing nobody wants to be part of that new protected class.
If you're by some semantic classified as unattractive, you will automatically feel segregated and marginalized. This is not like sexual orientation where non-heterosexual people actually have a desire to express their sexuality but this desire is repressed by a regressive, judgemental society. This is exactly why "Gay Pride" is a thing.
Compare that to being unattractive. Unattractive people, whatever that means, don't want to be part of that group. That's a pure factual reality of the human instinct. People want to feel attractive because they have a natural instinct to intermingle and reproduce.
But even if we opt to oversee this particular deficiency when attempting to justify an "unattractive" protected class, the problem is that "attractive" is extremely subjective and usually dictated by societal norms.
What's attractive today wasn't attractive 100 years ago. What's attractive in Africa is not what's attractive in North America. What's attractive for me (even in this dictated herd mentality) is not necessarily attractive to you. The only common factor that all these perspectives share is that nobody wants to be classified as unattractive.
People in this hypothetical protected class are placed there by others. They're already segregated and marginalized, and generally no one asks them if they want that.
We have an example of that right here from TikTok.
"I determine you're ugly but you can still come into my nightclub" is not that much better than "I determine you're ugly and you can't come into my nightclub"
People aren't in or out of a protected class. Protections for race, sex, orientation, etc apply to everyone, even straight white men. Protections for religion even apply to atheists.
The laws prohibit certain behaviors, like excluding people from nightclubs on the basis of skin color. They could easily also prohibit excluding people from nightclubs on other appearance criteria.
Of course no one can control thoughts, and some people will still feel and think hateful things, but that's true for every protected class.
I guess I wasn't clear enough about that. Disabled people certainly don't want to be part of that classification but there's no subjectiveness when it comes to their disablement.
Unattractive people don't want to be part of that classification and their belonging to that class is 100% subjective in any direction. Even them leveraging their status to get some sort of benefit.
Also, where's the line? Does that mean that rhinoplasty should be covered by insurance under the same merits of sex reassignment surgery?
> Does that mean that rhinoplasty should be covered by insurance under the same merits of sex reassignment surgery?
If someone's nose is causing as much distress as gender dysphoria, why not?
Sex reassignment surgery isn't easy to get, and presumably coverage for "corrective" cosmetic surgery would also take some evidence. Patients couldn't just make an appointment on a whim.
Why would it be called a mental disorder? If it's a disorder, it's a physical disorder, whose symptoms are the shitty behavior of other people that it "causes".
Or perhaps a mental disorder in those other people, but that's not likely.
I guess I'm thinking it more from the perspective of third parties like insurance. Gender reassignment is generally covered by health insurance and exclusions may be classified as unlawful sex discrimination.
On the other hand, your health insurance could easily create subjective definitions to deny coverage. Because unlike gender dysphoria, beauty is not binary.
With Gender Dysphoria there is only one direction when it comes to re-assignment options, and it is fully documented that this surgery is beneficial for the patient's mental health.
With beauty/ugliness, there are hundreds of possible permutations and no documented precedence to validate that this is a necessary surgery.
Sure, the line is blurry. But so are so many other lines and we can't simply peer into one's mind and see things. Fatigue is a symptom of at least a few autoimmune disorders, but that line is definitely fuzzy and we can't really tell if someone is faking or not.
Body dysorphic disorder is a real thing (probably spelled incorrectly). There are people out there that feel like their limb isn't theirs - it is alien - and go to great lengths to stop it. Some folks spend lots of time and money hiding "flaws" (like their nose), even when they cannot really afford the costs every month, and avoid dating and going out because of these things. Just because it isn't a specific disorder doesn't mean the people are healthy.
And then there is another category altogether: Folks that have had accidents of different sorts. Sure, facial scars from burns or a disfigured nose might not actually cause a psychological disorder and it might not make things physically difficult, but damn it is hard to argue that fixing these things (when possible) wouldn't improve one's quality of life.
>Unattractive people don't want to be part of that classification and their belonging to that class is 100% subjective in any direction.
The way these laws work would not necessitate that. People who are old, disabled or queer are not required to carry a card or get a face tattoo. You are simply unable to descriminate on that variable, whatever the value is (old or young, able or unable, etc).
>Does that mean that rhinoplasty should be covered by insurance under the same merits of sex reassignment surgery?
Age is a protected class in Canada/Ontario but they don't cover blood boys for seniors under OHIP either (although I will strongly lobby for it in old age).
> Disabled people certainly don't want to be part of that classification but there's no subjectiveness when it comes to their disablement.
You'd be surprised. Being disabled is a spectrum just as being ugly is. It's not just perfectly healthy people vs people missing entire limbs. It's also the person with moderate chronic pain who can do anything they like but not everything they like.
And then there's the whole other subjectiveness that comes from bureaucrats having to classify people into discrete buckets based on how disabled they are. Sure you can't raise your arms above parallel, but does that qualify you for 4C coverage and not just 3D?
I can assure you that most gay people don't want to be gay either. There is nothing substantial that differentiates these attributes. It's just two features -- some have it, some don't and some have both. It is not "natural" for one of the features to be negative but not the other.
> But how can you objectively establish that somebody is unattractive?
It's difficult to prove individual cases of discrimination. Evidence can take the form of written commentary about a person's looks, or a documented policy about hiring practices. That is to say, you don't need to prove that somebody's unattractive; only that damage was done on the basis of that perception / judgement.
It is allowed for by courts for hiring decisions when hiring sales people. And things like commission based pay means it happens even if not explicit.
Aside from beauty, if you do things to signal you are poor as a luxury sales person, I’m not sure the company is required to keep you on, right or wrong.
Which is not a statement of whether it is moral, or a social benefit. Discrimination against an “unprotected class” can still be worthy of criticism.
For a very long time in Ontario, homosexuals were not protected from discrimination by law. The laws protecting them came about because people would not settle for, “if it’s legal, it must be above reproach.”
It depends why they are unattractive. If it is due to a birth defect, dwarfism or some other condition that is also a disability then it is a protected class.
When it’s your money building and running the club, you can decide who to let in or not. There is freedom of association and the freedom not to associate. If a nightclub was a public service, the argument might hold, but it’s not. However, let’s extend your discrimination opposition to universities— should they be allowed to admit or deny people based on their economic, racial, or other non-academic characteristics?
Or news stations, which hire presenters based on attractiveness.
Or fashion products, which hire models based on attractiveness.
Or the music industry, which puts forward pop stars that are attractive while keeping ones that don't have sex appeal off the air.
Or the film industry. Or the literally any other industry that tries to survive via popularity and getting eye time. Attractiveness sells. What TikTok is doing is no different than any other industry, it's just that the models aren't getting paid.
Don't forget the service industry. There's a correlation between how attractive you are and your earning ceiling for bartending and waitering/waitressing.
I can offer real world evidence in support of this correlation. I worked at 2 different restaurants in my life. I didn't get many tips; only pocket change if it was a good night. The hot waitresses could make as much as 1/3 of their monthly salary from tips.
It's not the same though, is it? On Instagram and TikTok and the likes, you don't need "ugly filters", because there's instant feedback: clicks, impressions, likes, hearts, comments, whatever. In the film industry, for example, you won't know whether the product will be a success or not until after the fact that you spent a ton of money on it.
Suppressed is wrong. The for you page is more like free promotion and free promotion is not a human right. You can still promote your content manually even if it doesn't get on the for you page.
It's how sexual selection works in general throughout the animal kingdom. You can teach yourself to behave otherwise, but you're hardwired to behave a certain way.
Humans exist within a fitness gradient and we naturally evaluate other humans according to how they fit within it.
> So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do (when what their "users" want is exactly non-ugly people) and driven out of business?
Nobody's talking about shutting anyone down. People can do shitty things even if they have a right to do them, and everyone else can think they're assholes. No contradictions. Same with free speech- people can say whatever they want, but if they say something that makes someone else think they're an asshole, the other person has a right to call them an asshole. Assholes are not criminals, they're just assholes and deserve to be treated as such.
A bit of a tangent but Mensa is not an acronym and should not be written in all capital letters. Some of their typeface choices over the years may have created confusion about this.
> So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed
If you want to do that, then go ahead.
But you should not use whataboutism to shame people into not fighting bad behavior on other platforms.
At the end of the day, this behavior is not normal on most online platforms. And users have the right to shame platforms that do this, and you are the immoral one if you are trying to attack people for doing what they believe is right.
Do they need human mods to make those decisions. Every other site takes popularity (which would includes looks) as a metrics for content people want to see. Human mods will always be a poor proxy unless the mods are known by name and have their own popularity and taste.
Because TikTok isn't a nightclub, it's a place for people to put their own content out on the Internet. Not just people, but primarily people living in a pathologically authoritarian state that doesn't allow them to access other places on the Internet that they could put their content on.
But even ignoring the authoritarian state angle, surely you'd think it'd be weird and counterproductive for user content from YouTube or Instagram or imgur to have similar policies? Those sites are also not nightclubs or modeling agencies or a Hooters franchise either.
FWIW it's totally shitty for nightclubs to be discriminatory in that way. I get why they do it, but it doesn't make it any less shitty of them, and it sure as hell doesn't let them off the hook for their shittiness in this regard.
Tangentially, this is one of infinitely many reasons that nearly all of humanity hates nightclubs, including the people that feel socially obligated to go to them, and including people still young enough to convince themselves that they must be having fun there because it sure looks like everyone else is, not realizing that everyone else is thinking the exact same thing.
> Not just people, but primarily people living in a pathologically authoritarian state that doesn't allow them to access other places on the Internet that they could put their content on.
No it's not. China has their own version of TikTok called Douyin. If I recall correctly, TikTok isn't even available in China.
Since TikTok isn't even used in China, who exactly are the users you're describing as "people living in a pathologically authoritarian state"?
Because TikTok isn't a nightclub, it's a place for people to put their own content out on the Internet
No, TikTok is a place for a company to sell ads on views of creator content and they, much like those nightclubs, believe having "desireable" creators will get them those views.
Other sites have different strategies (much like the local bar in comparison to that nightclub). Their strategy seems to work for a variety of industries.
I am not supporting it, as being on the other side of the good looking line does tend to make life a pain in the butt around the "pretty" people.
That's a slippery argument, if we consider that letting people post to these social networks is somehow a right, then doesn't that effectively mean that the alt-right folks who complain about deplatforming being a free-speech violation have a point?
Or maybe there's a case to be made that censoring people for being homosexual or looking different is a form of harassment by censorship?
It's not like these platforms offer any kind of critical service. They come and go every couple of years it seems. TikTok seems pretty crap, just tell people to stop supporting it.
Some people feel socially obligated to go to nightclub, others feel socially obligated to use some social networking app. They're probably both wrong.
Their platform, their choice for what goes on. You want something better? Go build in yourself. I have no problem with platforms self moderating. At the end of the day consumers speak with their actions.
How many TV shows feature dwarfs or people with who are abnormal? Don't blame a platform for the inherit flaws in most of us. It really only serves as a black mirror to the truth.
Can't remember what was the country,where the absolute majority of parents give their children away to institutions if they were born with any mental or physical disabilities....Nice not have those nasties around,I suppose,right?
Do you seriously think that getting rid of a child is somehow even remotely comparable to not being able to use an ephemeral social media app that is essentially just Vine 2.0?
Because it's not a good look. They want to use a clean app, but they don't want to see the cleaning being done.
This is what people want. I mean, if they wanted to see ugly people or whatever, then TikTok would show them it. It's not any different than Tinder filtering out the duds.
These days, a lot of what tech companies call "artificial intelligence" is actually outsourced moderators used to train a linear regression.
So there isn't much difference between algorithmic and manual sorting yet, because the AI needed for algorithmic curation is not intelligent enough yet.
Except, it IS a night club. The Web is not what it used to be decades ago. There is no elusive concept as "The Web", it's now just a different way for people to connect, just like going to a nightclub. It's been like that ever since the majority of the world got on it.
You say "it's a place for people to put their content out on the internet", but you don't ask WHY they would do that. And I don't know if you have used TikTok at all, but if you ask anyone who "put their content out on" TikTok, they would agree TikTok is like a giant nightclub.
What kind of night clubs do you go to where there's a high bar of entry — but everybody is still allowed in anyway?
It's more like a strip club, where the beautiful people are unpaid strippers who don't even know that they are strippers. And even that's a poor metaphor.
The way I read the OP's analogy is just as the Night Club places restrictions on who can enter, TikTok is also placing restrictions on who can post content.
And why I think the analogy does have some merit, is because the metric used to decide on who gets restricted is the very similar in both of these cases.
However, if this article is correct, they also seem to favour good looking TikTok users, which is not unlike Night Clubs who also like to favour good looking patrons.
TikTok is like Twitter in that you can follow people.
Something not trending on Twitter isn't the same as not existing or not showing to one's followers. Likewise, something not becoming a suggested TikTok isn't the same as not allowing the post wholesale.
Oh, no, plenty of people who are confident that they're beautiful are getting paid these days. Plenty of them stripping for it.
Spend just a little time on Twitter/Instagram/Tiktok or click on any given Patreon link and you're likely to come across new age digital strippers. If anybody is unpaid and making popular content these days, they're very unaware.
The web was never a commons. It all rests on accessing content hosted by privately owned platforms. The commons is SMTP, SNTP, and IRC. Digital natives don't care about these because they aren't shiny and expect that the free stuff they've been given all their life is an inalienable right.
Rights don't involve being given "free stuff", they exist to prevents it from being taken away. Which is a super popular misconception (or at least misuse) all on its own.
If you read that Wikipedia you linked it supports my position more than negates it. Positive rights are rarely if ever imposed on individuals or organizations of a country and almost always involve some sort of significantly limited contract which outlines the government's responsibility to fulfill them.
For example, there's a massive difference between saying "everyone has a right to healthcare" in a country than saying "the provincial governments of Canada has to provide a public health insurance option to tax paying citizens and temporary visitors".
When I walk into a doctors office as a Canadian citizen or enter the ER I'm still at the whims of the system. All that I know is that the financial costs of the what care I can find will be covered, care which is provided by a limited set of doctors, care the doctors decide to provide me often based on their perceptions of need and a broad definition of 'cosmetic'. If the doctors office is busy and all the ERs are full, or they don't believe what I say or that my symptoms don't require care, there's no one I can go to about my "right to healthcare" or right to spend the health insurance.
Proposing these limited arrangements as if they are positive rights does more harm than good. Once you add enough modifiers to make it accurate, you might as well not say it at all.
I know this matters little during political campaigns and all promises are non-binding so they might as well lie through their teeth as much as possible, up to the point people call bullshit. But it still significantly influences how we debate and discuss important topics, and it's a type of thinking which filters down into a lot of things which have little to do with political campaigns.
The web is still there, you can still dump some HTML in IIS on your crappy windows laptop from bestbuy and plug it into your router and have it show up on google (not that that’s a good idea.) Heck you can dump your html files on github pages with the same effect, you don’t even need to know git.
The web is still the web, most people still don’t bother using it.
Getting a domain on google is not as easy as it used to be. If your domain has few inbound links don’t expect to appear on google at all, no matter how unique your search keywords may be.
I run a extremely small website and I have never had an issue with being found on google. This is with questions to visitors as to how they found us, and google is a consistent answer. Do you also have anecdotal evidence supporting your claim that google does not host niche content?
> it's a place for people to put their own content
Please, please, read the ToS and stop thinking like that! This is not people's own content, it's Facebook's, YouTube's, Reddit's content. If you want to own your content - you should rent a domain name, a server and host it by yourself.
Except typical social network users doesn't want to own their content. They are here for other's attention.
> So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do (when what their "users" want is exactly non-ugly people)
TikTok users aren't aware of filtering yet, so telling them is a social good. Humans may prefer to see beautiful people, but filtering out ugly people means the majority of users will be below average compared to the content they view. They should at least know it's happening.
It also doesn't seem any different than restaurants that require a certain dress code. I remember being denied entry to a night club because I showed up wearing jeans and a t-shirt (it was a big group of us who didn't plan to go to a nightclub, but one member of our group knew the owner and said we should go). The only issue I could see is that TikTok isn't up front about about their "attractiveness" requirements.
Since we are feeding the trolls on the subject of discriminating by appearances, comparing against night clubs is flawed. A night club should not allow just pretty people to enter because simply it is not fair. There might be a hidden rule for some but it doesn't mean that is the right thing to do to begin with. Tiktok is a social network for anyone to join. If they allow anyone to join but only want the good looking people to post, how is that not the hypocritical thing to do? It's increasingly becoming an issue on Social Neutrality (https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-about-social-media-neutral...)
My standard of ugly may not match yours. I can refuse to patronize a nightclub that bars people I like.
Privately-run-and-owned social networks like TikTok tend to attain a critical mass where they're considered a utility when they're really not. So boycotts don't work because it becomes literally where everyone is after a while, and alternatives become difficult because the barrier to entry gets so high.
That's the real problem, and the problem of a centralized Internet. I should be able to broadcast video from my house and participate in a peer-to-peer CDN of my choice.
Tiktok is not a CDN, it's a presentation layer on top of their own CDN or one they rent through cloud providers.
> So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do (when what their "users" want is exactly non-ugly people) and driven out of business?
Business that engage in immoral behaviour should be shamed. Doesn't matter if it is casino sites, drug dealers or nightclubs that discriminate against ugly people. Whether that shaming results in them becoming unprofitable is beside the point.
>How is this different from nightclubs having a high bar to entry?
The nightclub lets you know where you stand at the door. I took a read of tik-tok's about page, and it gives me the impression that they're here for everyone. Just a platform to share short videos. The author of one of the featured videos on that page looks like someone who may have been filtered out.
I don't think the analogy is completely off base, but we can judge tik-tok for being deceptive.
Nightclubs that have physical appearance standards have a business model designed around one end of the beauty preference spectrum. By itself, that's not bad; if you want to have a club for only right-handed people, that's fine.
But it's unethical to then pretend that the club is for everyone, when it's really not. That's more like selling someone a car with a top speed of 120mph, but artificially limiting the speed for poorer people, and not telling them. Just because nightclubs walk a fine ethical line doesn't make other companies that also walk that line a great idea.
It's the scale, purpose and effectiveness that is worrying rather than the similarity. Actually, I wouldn't call them very similar beyond their intent - to keep people coming and making money but everything else is wildly different and doesn't make sense to compare.
Many night clubs want users to have "fun" so they pay for a membership. TikTok wants users to stay so they can collect enough data to give it to advertisers or government to target them better.
A single night club won't have more than 100 people at any given time. But tiktok boasts 1.5 billion+ users and millions of them are active at any given time.
Few people going to night clubs won't decide the future of your country but millions on tiktok or other US centric social media might - facebook? instagram?
> How is this different from nightclubs having a high bar to entry?
Nightclubs tell you if they think you're not up to their standard. This is far more manipulative and cruel. You could even call it gas-lighting to simply encourage these people to post content!
How is this different from nightclubs having a high bar to entry?
Most people going to nightclubs are there for fun. In contrast, it's possible to make money on Tiktok and a lot of handicapped people are desperately looking for ways to make money online.
A lot of those people will not be beautiful people. Their disability makes sure of that in many cases.
So the difference is that nightclubs are not telling people "You can make money from the comfort of home" and then shafting people who have few other viable means to make money.
There may be a few sex workers and drug dealers making bank at the nightclub, but they already know they have to fly under the radar and can be thrown out if caught, etc. The nightclub isn't actively telling them they are welcome to hang there and establish an income, then secretly saying "only the sexy people."
This whole comment basically says, "it is how it is, so you can't criticize it." It is like saying, "racism will exist. Humans are just racist. Should businesses be publicly shamed for being racist if it is what their users want?"
Now as for how we should treat businesses that treat people better based on their looks is not something I have a strong opinion about, but my two cents is that looks should not be a factor of how people get treated because it is possible that representation of "ugly" people in media could make many diverse looking people "attractive" to younger generations. This would be beneficial because it means that talent would have more priority over looks than before.
Really good analogy. I guess the answer is that it isn't ok that the nightclubs do it either, but they get overlooked because no-one has to be there. TikTok, being so widespread, gets closer scrutiny.
A lot of things are like that. One example that comes to mind is that the New York Times, which frequently runs articles criticising tech companies for invading their users' privacy, loads a million trackers every time you access its website. When you're bigger (and more lucrative), different rules apply to you. Maybe that's not a bad thing.
> the answer is that it isn't ok that the nightclubs do it either
Tell me how it could work any other way? nightclubs are "popular" because of this selection, if anybody could come and go, what would make a place popular?
I don't go to nightclubs and I don't enjoy it, but I can understand why it works that way, it may be unfair but if you break that, the whole concept falls apart. It is valid with any type of community, they simply value different things.
Using the word 'survive' suggests that nightclubs are living beings. A better wording would be 'to stay in business'.
The individuals who they reject on the other hand are living beings, more specifically humans. And that is the point where it starts to become a moral issue because the business interest of an organization is directly linked to the discrimination of a group of humans.
Yes, that is the way that kind of business works, but it should also be valid to consequently judge it as immoral.
Most forms of media do this to varying degrees. Most actors, for example, are attractive people. Few unattractive actors are successful, unless perhaps they only play roles which play off of their unattractiveness (like antagonists/villains). TV news anchors are also usually picked for their attractiveness.
Gartner would not explain why a document purportedly aimed at “preventing bullying” would make zero mention of bullying, nor why it offers an explicit justification of attracting users, not protecting them.
PR people really are the worst. It's OK to be rude to them at parties.
> These same documents show moderators were also told to censor political speech in TikTok livestreams, punishing those who harmed “national honor” or broadcast streams about “state organs such as police” with bans from the platform.
This is the story. Why would anyone use a CPC social media platform?
Everything is becoming more curated and centralised, it wouldn't take a stretch to make a dystopian outlook where eugenics and social credit is implemented through a global tech platform.
If you're not gifted with good lucks you are punished in the system.
Like most Hollywood productions, TikTok wants to show the healthy and the beautiful over the sickly and the ugly. This is purely driven by customer demand. The good news is that 1) TikTok a private enterprise and it can set its own rules and 2) it's in China so it won't be vulnerable to public shaming and social pressure to bend its business decisions to please fringe groups.
A TikTok spokesperson said the goal was to prevent bullying on the platform, tying the document to a report from December that showed that the company was suppressing vulnerable users’ videos in a misguided effort to prevent them from becoming the centre of attention that could turn sour.
Now that is some fine spin! Reminds of the Oscar Wilde sketch.
I used TikTok for a while and saw plenty videos of actual bullying. The comments were never too happy about it, but there was clearly no effort to moderate it.
It seems their goal is to make the issue go away altogether by pre-censoring people so they don’t have to police bullying after.
Here it’s humans taking that shortcut, in the future I’d totally imagine AIs resolving to eliminate the source of the problems when dealing with societal issues. And we sure won’t be happy about it.
TikTok would be naive to believe that that tactic would alleviate bullying. Anyone long around knows that the internet will find a reason to take you down if they get salty for some reason. Maybe if you’re unattractive, that itself becomes a bullying point but I’ve seen plenty of youtubers/instagramers being torn to shreds for not wearing the right dress, not choosing the correct words etc etc!
I can see how moderators would be instructed to surface content that is more "appealing" to the audience and beautiful people are no doubt going to be more appealing.
It's like the contestants on reality TV shows tend to not be ugly as well.
For some reason it _feels_ slimy but I am not sure why. Perhaps it is being confronted with the notion that the world isn't fair.
News flash: social media is garbage. What do you expect from these companies? It's just a private entity that makes its own rules about its own landfill of humanity. All of a sudden because anyone can make a post TikTok is obligated to preserve their rights? Not the case.
Not that this is a good thing. It's childish to be surprised and indignant about these companies' policies and behavior like they're your buddy or something.
* TikTok's local moderation guidelines ban pro-LGBT content - Chinese-owned social media app bans such content even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal [1]
* Revealed: how TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing - Leak spells out how social media app advances China’s foreign policy aims [2]
makes sense to me. Isnt this how society works at large? Cute hostess at the front of a restaurant to great you. Top sales earners are usually in decent shape and charismatic. Society segregates itself away from the poor. Sounds like tech imitating real life to me. (to be clear not saying its right, but giving my opinion on what I perceive in society and how this aligns to it)
Well that's no fun isn't it. You warp reality to make the whole social network a complete misrepresentation of only looking at the happiest of everyone's side. There is at least someone keeping a straight face and on TikTok but still feeling ugly or depressed there anyway. It is the same nature that users of Facebook have and it isn't very healthy and promotes one-sided stories.
The interesting observation and funny side to this policy is that there could be a story to be told here where the suppressed "ugly" and "poor" people become the heroes and the TikTok elite and its glamorous fans have become the super-villains.
Whatever 'ugly' means in this century, ugly appearance is much preferable to ugly action.
Another demonstration that centralization is anathema to community. It concentrates power in a few hands, and it creates single-points-of-failure. The internet is not yet routing around that kind of damage.
In other word, the sky is blue, most people would prefer to see attractive people, its not rocket science. It would be stupid for tik tok to do otherwise.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadUsers want to see attractive, popular, charismatic, entertaining people. They want to be like them. They want to see more of them. TikTok isn't interested in turning off its userbase, no matter how much your sociopolitical agenda might prefer that.
TikTok works with AI, but the same would happen on Facebook, where people click on "Like" manually.
Cry me a river.
no doubt we will hoist pitchforks at tiktok for being authoritarian chinese and neglect our own senseless populism.
People need that hope.
No different than the editor of a newspaper or television show.
TikTok doesn't care who made it; they care how the video looks.
There is plenty of extremely high quality content made by people who appear fat, poor, old, disabled, ugly, etc in their videos.
No, it's manually done by humans.
Quote: Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose.
> Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose.
A TikTok spokesperson seems to confirm they are real guidelines, but won’t confirm how they were used.
> TikTok spokesperson Josh Gartner told The Intercept that “most of” the livestream guidelines reviewed by The Intercept “are either no longer in use, or in some cases appear to never have been in place,” but would not provide specifics.
The only difference with Facebook is that it got crap from people who wanted it to be responsible for it's content (fake news), while TikTok gets crap from people who were not prepated for it to be so moderated, but it's still the same fundamental problem of trying to sit on both chairs at the same time.
The older crowd also prefer to look at beautiful people.
No, it does not.
There is a big difference between:
- showing you unconnected content you are likely to engage with
- having rules enforced with the help of human reviewers to prevent any user from getting recommendations with people deemed ugly/poor/etc.
The content you see depends on your interests. Making this up: if you regularly engage with topics that have a majority of fat people posting, say weight loss strategies, you will see a lot of fat people in Instagram Explore.
It's the difference between:
- Instagram: "I mostly see beautiful people" (because that's the content I and many users engage with).
- Tiktok: "I never see ugly people" (because the platform has a guideline that prevents that content from being shown to me)
Suppose 10 users on average interact with 2 non-ugly persons and 1 ugly person. People like commenting on the non-ugly people's content with "wow so pretty!" and "that's awesome! ", etc, etc while ugly people don't get as many comments and maybe even receive neutral to non-positive comments.
Now a new person signs up. They get recommend non-ugly people in their feed since that's more popular based on views and interactions.
Another new person signs up and they get the same recommendation, and so on.
After 100 new sign ups, the recommendation engine has 'learned' that majority of people prefer interacting with non-ugly people.
Another new user signs up and all they see in non-ugly people recommendations.
The end result is pretty much the same. Ugly people will get pushed out enough either by the programmatic learning engine that becomes over trained and biased, or by manual reviewers that filter content based on data that shows that non-ugly people bring in more users, otherwise they'd promote ugly people content if that was driving more interactions.
(I work at IG, but not on Explore)
If you cannot see this critical difference between enforced directive and choice of interest, then god help you.
That's not what happens to me. Instagram consistently pushes model-type people to me even though I hardly ever interact with those types.
by the same standard, you can see ugly people on tiktok, because they don't delete the post, they just supress it from popular feeds.
Half of my explore is memes and infographics because that’s what I interact with a lot.
It kind of makes sense. Bad results can and do come out of well-intentioned decisions. In other areas (business, legislation) we judge policies by their actual effects, not by their creators' intentions.
https://assets.opentoken.com/sha256/yhEqWEExzLtoLZ_fBRrGsyOD...
search for any tag that has mainly people like beach or hiking, all accounts are from very beautiful people with lots of followers.
your algorithm promotes people with more followers and likes, which are bound to be more beautiful people. Unless you avoid any interest in tags related to people and see only beautiful bunnies, not ugly bunnies, your feed will be only beautiful creatures.
I don't know how you can deny that.
Maybe you don't owe a country better, but you owe this community considerably better if you want to post here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
...oh.
But even apart from that, there is a litany of comments that broke the site guidelines. It's not like these were hard to find:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22321296
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22313537
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22447855
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22291539
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22251922
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209247
I don't understand why you would need to actively encourage this, I don't believe Twitter would ever have people with “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” features trending.
Instagram on the other hand is so beauty centric that it's created its own makeup aesthetic.
Anyway, I uploaded the most recent video on my phone as a test which was me getting my nostrils waxed in a Turkish Barbers. It hit the For You page and it's now got 360k views :-(
It's unpleasant, but a handy reminder that TikTok and other social networks don't work for you, but make you into a product.
Sounds just like a lifestyle magazine, or a catwalk, or a million other situations that have been normalised in which people are chosen for how they look (just about every prospectus appears to choose people to present their idea of the right type of diversity, for example).
It's not great, but TikTok just seems to be doing the same as most other organisations?
Even disregarding social ideals about listening to people who don’t look like underwear models, the potential for harm is very real - look up Body dysmorphic disorder for the kinds of very real mental health problems this can create in younger generations.
I think given the potential risks, we should have conversations about what this problem is and possible policy solutions. Giving children skewed perceptions of the world, or encoding these kinds of biases about who is worth paying attention to is dangerous.
To me, this seems most similar to movie producers hiring attractive people to be in their movies. TikTok creators are making content for the platform, and the platform is curating the content to try and find things it thinks the audience will like. In the same way movie producers select specific people to be in their movies because they think their audience will appreciate them.
Sadly, they’re probably right.
Perhaps it feels sad because much of attractiveness is "unearned". Some people are born more or less attractive than others and that is unfair - but I think most human attributes are like this. A smart person didn't earn their intelligence, and while they may feel they earned their knowledge, and perhaps they're right, they'd never have been able to earn their knowledge and intellectual accomplishments if they had been born mentally deficient. Famous basketball players work hard, but it wouldn't matter if they were born into 5'5" bodies, etc.
That some people are more attractive than others is unfair, but that fundamental unfairness shouldn't prevent us from appreciating attractive people in my view. I don't see anything wrong with promoting more attractive TikTok users provided it does actually result in a better user experience. In the same way I don't see anything wrong with selecting attractive people to be actors in your movie or film. If you want people to like the main character then it is probably smart to cast an attractive person.
Seems kind of similar to what supermarket magazines do. Obviously a social media app is not a supermarket magazine, but the premise of cynically using pretty people to drive up engagement is nothing new.
A better comparison might be bottle-service bars where looks or money buys your way in. Which I personally don't mind - if that's your thing, I guess, go for it. Not every place has to be somewhere I want to go, and they're pretty up-front that you need to meet whatever standards or pay crazy money.
Tik Tok, from observed behavior, is weaselly about it.
Combine with the fact that it is obviously part of the Silk Road strategy and likely an intelligence tool, and I'm going to continue to treat is as the radioactive garbage it is.
'Regarding the policy of suppressing videos featuring unattractive, disabled, or poor users, Gartner stated that the rules “represented an early blunt attempt at preventing bullying, but are no longer in place, and were already out of use when The Intercept obtained them.”'
What in TFA indicates that these policies were intended to stop online bullying? Just as plausible to think that they were intended to create a saccharine user experience in order to promote growth.
I don't think these were intended to stop online bullying as much as they are just another bullying tactic themselves.
Porn also seems like a very reasonable place to draw the line for the app store. It's not like the iPhone has a porn filter, you just have to use a browser to watch your porn.
I am not saying this is an ethical thing to do, I am saying these apps are no different from nightclubs and they gotta do what they gotta do to survive. And no matter what you may say, humans prefer non ugly people over ugly people. I am sorry but this is simply how humans work. If you disagree, then you are a hypocrite.
So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do (when what their "users" want is exactly non-ugly people) and driven out of business?
Are you implying that it is only because of a sense of “political correctness” that people would object to discrimination?
Some people don't want to see you, and that's their business.
Provided it's not a matter of a protected characteristic, the idea that you can push your way through the door by law is silly.
They go there to meet people who titilate them, and who don't remind them of how life can go wrong; that's their business in my view.
I know that I'm not attracted to ugly, unhealthy, or elderly people, and it's not wrong to feel that way, it is basically natural; and people who are themselves ugly, unhealthy, or elderly also feel these same things that you find ugly to acknowledge.
I guess you missed the part where I said you can leave them alone.
"Protected class" is a cop out because the question isn't about what the law says but what is moral.
I mean, some nightclubs have immigrants, but nobody goes there because there are too many immigrants.
It's sort of the same thing here with TikTok: on one hand we say that it's bad to ethnically discriminate in nightclubs, on the other hand we don't go to the 'urban' nightclubs, and take it as a good signal when we read the immigrant patrons online complaining about ethnic discrimination.
What would shaming them for this accomplish? Is the idea to shame them so much that they pretend to like ugly people like me? What would be the point of that?
What effect on their behavior do you hope to accomplish by shaming pretty people for not wanting to hang out with ugly people? I'm not seeing a productive reason to do this.
Tell that to the black people who demanded the right to eat in "white" restaurants.
This is an incredibly ignorant and offensive analogy.
The ignorance here is among those who don't understand that people are suffering from this discrimation, and the offense is coming from people who justify and defend it.
Nightclubs and TikTok aren't the most important examples of this, but for people who faced discrimination their entire lives, any victory would make life a little easier.
Exclusivity is a necessity for society.
But if a group is excluding people based on innate physical characteristics, maybe they should rethink that.
Many physical attributes are absolutely relevant for a given context.
What we should do, is getting rid of irrelevant and abhorrent discrimination, such as racial selection.
Society made progress only because people fought against that. They were all accused of fighting against nature, but over time, more people realized those old standards weren't as "natural" as they were once thought to be.
Do you imagine we've reached the pinnacle of human social evolution and tolerance? Perhaps we still have similar lessons to learn, and people of the future will consider our behavior as abhorrent as we consider the 1800s.
The only progress that could push society past that, is genetic engineering. Everyone on equal footing or so different, that sport as we know it ceases to exist.
But that's no reason not to eliminate discrimination when we can.
If you're by some semantic classified as unattractive, you will automatically feel segregated and marginalized. This is not like sexual orientation where non-heterosexual people actually have a desire to express their sexuality but this desire is repressed by a regressive, judgemental society. This is exactly why "Gay Pride" is a thing.
Compare that to being unattractive. Unattractive people, whatever that means, don't want to be part of that group. That's a pure factual reality of the human instinct. People want to feel attractive because they have a natural instinct to intermingle and reproduce.
But even if we opt to oversee this particular deficiency when attempting to justify an "unattractive" protected class, the problem is that "attractive" is extremely subjective and usually dictated by societal norms.
What's attractive today wasn't attractive 100 years ago. What's attractive in Africa is not what's attractive in North America. What's attractive for me (even in this dictated herd mentality) is not necessarily attractive to you. The only common factor that all these perspectives share is that nobody wants to be classified as unattractive.
We have an example of that right here from TikTok.
"I determine you're ugly but you can still come into my nightclub" is not that much better than "I determine you're ugly and you can't come into my nightclub"
The laws prohibit certain behaviors, like excluding people from nightclubs on the basis of skin color. They could easily also prohibit excluding people from nightclubs on other appearance criteria.
Of course no one can control thoughts, and some people will still feel and think hateful things, but that's true for every protected class.
Neither do the elderly, the disabled, etc, but still they are legally protected from descrimination.
Unattractive people don't want to be part of that classification and their belonging to that class is 100% subjective in any direction. Even them leveraging their status to get some sort of benefit.
Also, where's the line? Does that mean that rhinoplasty should be covered by insurance under the same merits of sex reassignment surgery?
If someone's nose is causing as much distress as gender dysphoria, why not?
Sex reassignment surgery isn't easy to get, and presumably coverage for "corrective" cosmetic surgery would also take some evidence. Patients couldn't just make an appointment on a whim.
I definitely agree with you on this one.
But that's where I feel the line gets super blurry. This is not a white or black issue. Gender Dysphoria is an actual documented mental disorder.
Feeling ugly (or in the context of this debate, being classified as ugly), in general, it's not.
Or perhaps a mental disorder in those other people, but that's not likely.
On the other hand, your health insurance could easily create subjective definitions to deny coverage. Because unlike gender dysphoria, beauty is not binary.
With Gender Dysphoria there is only one direction when it comes to re-assignment options, and it is fully documented that this surgery is beneficial for the patient's mental health.
With beauty/ugliness, there are hundreds of possible permutations and no documented precedence to validate that this is a necessary surgery.
Body dysorphic disorder is a real thing (probably spelled incorrectly). There are people out there that feel like their limb isn't theirs - it is alien - and go to great lengths to stop it. Some folks spend lots of time and money hiding "flaws" (like their nose), even when they cannot really afford the costs every month, and avoid dating and going out because of these things. Just because it isn't a specific disorder doesn't mean the people are healthy.
And then there is another category altogether: Folks that have had accidents of different sorts. Sure, facial scars from burns or a disfigured nose might not actually cause a psychological disorder and it might not make things physically difficult, but damn it is hard to argue that fixing these things (when possible) wouldn't improve one's quality of life.
The way these laws work would not necessitate that. People who are old, disabled or queer are not required to carry a card or get a face tattoo. You are simply unable to descriminate on that variable, whatever the value is (old or young, able or unable, etc).
>Does that mean that rhinoplasty should be covered by insurance under the same merits of sex reassignment surgery?
Age is a protected class in Canada/Ontario but they don't cover blood boys for seniors under OHIP either (although I will strongly lobby for it in old age).
You'd be surprised. Being disabled is a spectrum just as being ugly is. It's not just perfectly healthy people vs people missing entire limbs. It's also the person with moderate chronic pain who can do anything they like but not everything they like.
And then there's the whole other subjectiveness that comes from bureaucrats having to classify people into discrete buckets based on how disabled they are. Sure you can't raise your arms above parallel, but does that qualify you for 4C coverage and not just 3D?
Mainly his points: "There's no solidarity with the ugly" and "people would rather be called the worst racial slur for their race then be called ugly"
That sentence is super ambiguous.
Do you mean “Most gay people have a desire to be not gay.”
Or “Most gay people lack any desire with regard to there orientation.”
It's difficult to prove individual cases of discrimination. Evidence can take the form of written commentary about a person's looks, or a documented policy about hiring practices. That is to say, you don't need to prove that somebody's unattractive; only that damage was done on the basis of that perception / judgement.
Dating apps are a good data point to start with.
In addition to that I doubt that refusing to sell a cake to someone because they are ugly would be considered an acceptable thing in a court of law.
Aside from beauty, if you do things to signal you are poor as a luxury sales person, I’m not sure the company is required to keep you on, right or wrong.
This is not a distinction that most people have the mental capacity to make. Whatever the law is, that's obviously what it should be.
Which is not a statement of whether it is moral, or a social benefit. Discrimination against an “unprotected class” can still be worthy of criticism.
For a very long time in Ontario, homosexuals were not protected from discrimination by law. The laws protecting them came about because people would not settle for, “if it’s legal, it must be above reproach.”
That kind of tone is frowned upon here.
Or fashion products, which hire models based on attractiveness.
Or the music industry, which puts forward pop stars that are attractive while keeping ones that don't have sex appeal off the air.
Or the film industry. Or the literally any other industry that tries to survive via popularity and getting eye time. Attractiveness sells. What TikTok is doing is no different than any other industry, it's just that the models aren't getting paid.
https://xkcd.com/2271/
No, that's how you work.
Humans exist within a fitness gradient and we naturally evaluate other humans according to how they fit within it.
I don't like it, but we're bloody animals.
I wonder how much is genetic and how much is learned or conditioned.
Sure, why not?
If you want to do that, then go ahead.
But you should not use whataboutism to shame people into not fighting bad behavior on other platforms.
At the end of the day, this behavior is not normal on most online platforms. And users have the right to shame platforms that do this, and you are the immoral one if you are trying to attack people for doing what they believe is right.
It's not, and that's pretty messed up too when you stop and actually think about it.
> If you disagree, then you are a hypocrite.
Just going to shut out any opposition to your view point like that huh? Great chat.
> So should high end nightclubs be publicly shamed for doing what they do and driven out of business?
Actually yes, discrimination is NOT OK and those supporting it need to be named and shamed.
But even ignoring the authoritarian state angle, surely you'd think it'd be weird and counterproductive for user content from YouTube or Instagram or imgur to have similar policies? Those sites are also not nightclubs or modeling agencies or a Hooters franchise either.
FWIW it's totally shitty for nightclubs to be discriminatory in that way. I get why they do it, but it doesn't make it any less shitty of them, and it sure as hell doesn't let them off the hook for their shittiness in this regard.
Tangentially, this is one of infinitely many reasons that nearly all of humanity hates nightclubs, including the people that feel socially obligated to go to them, and including people still young enough to convince themselves that they must be having fun there because it sure looks like everyone else is, not realizing that everyone else is thinking the exact same thing.
No it's not. China has their own version of TikTok called Douyin. If I recall correctly, TikTok isn't even available in China.
Since TikTok isn't even used in China, who exactly are the users you're describing as "people living in a pathologically authoritarian state"?
The point is:
> but primarily people living in a pathologically authoritarian state that
This is patently false. Unless you're calling the US an authoritarian state.
> but primarily people living in a pathologically authoritarian state that
This is patently false. Unless you're calling the US an authoritarian state.
No, TikTok is a place for a company to sell ads on views of creator content and they, much like those nightclubs, believe having "desireable" creators will get them those views.
Other sites have different strategies (much like the local bar in comparison to that nightclub). Their strategy seems to work for a variety of industries.
I am not supporting it, as being on the other side of the good looking line does tend to make life a pain in the butt around the "pretty" people.
Or maybe there's a case to be made that censoring people for being homosexual or looking different is a form of harassment by censorship?
It's not like these platforms offer any kind of critical service. They come and go every couple of years it seems. TikTok seems pretty crap, just tell people to stop supporting it.
Some people feel socially obligated to go to nightclub, others feel socially obligated to use some social networking app. They're probably both wrong.
Their platform, their choice for what goes on. You want something better? Go build in yourself. I have no problem with platforms self moderating. At the end of the day consumers speak with their actions.
How many TV shows feature dwarfs or people with who are abnormal? Don't blame a platform for the inherit flaws in most of us. It really only serves as a black mirror to the truth.
Oh I don't know...Game of Thrones (Tyrion), Stranger Things (Dustin), Breaking Bad (Walt Jr.) etc.
Yet for some reason, TikTok wants to hide this story. Why do you think that is?
This is what people want. I mean, if they wanted to see ugly people or whatever, then TikTok would show them it. It's not any different than Tinder filtering out the duds.
The person I was responding to was basically saying "let the users decide" but that can't happen if TikTok is lying to the users.
So there isn't much difference between algorithmic and manual sorting yet, because the AI needed for algorithmic curation is not intelligent enough yet.
Can you say the same about Facebook?
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-facebook-wont-let-you...
A platform is not entitled to be free from criticism. And neither are you.
The platform can do what it wants, and the rest of society is free to attack them for it, and cause them to get bad publicity.
And it is silly for you to attack people for giving their opinion on the matter.
You say "it's a place for people to put their content out on the internet", but you don't ask WHY they would do that. And I don't know if you have used TikTok at all, but if you ask anyone who "put their content out on" TikTok, they would agree TikTok is like a giant nightclub.
It's more like a strip club, where the beautiful people are unpaid strippers who don't even know that they are strippers. And even that's a poor metaphor.
And why I think the analogy does have some merit, is because the metric used to decide on who gets restricted is the very similar in both of these cases.
Also, again, the people turned away from the night club door still can’t go in. Took Too users who don’t post can still view content.
However, if this article is correct, they also seem to favour good looking TikTok users, which is not unlike Night Clubs who also like to favour good looking patrons.
Something not trending on Twitter isn't the same as not existing or not showing to one's followers. Likewise, something not becoming a suggested TikTok isn't the same as not allowing the post wholesale.
Spend just a little time on Twitter/Instagram/Tiktok or click on any given Patreon link and you're likely to come across new age digital strippers. If anybody is unpaid and making popular content these days, they're very unaware.
Don’t blame this on young people, IRC was becoming popular again right around when the iPhone started to become necessary for everything.
Emphasis added for clarification.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
For example, there's a massive difference between saying "everyone has a right to healthcare" in a country than saying "the provincial governments of Canada has to provide a public health insurance option to tax paying citizens and temporary visitors".
When I walk into a doctors office as a Canadian citizen or enter the ER I'm still at the whims of the system. All that I know is that the financial costs of the what care I can find will be covered, care which is provided by a limited set of doctors, care the doctors decide to provide me often based on their perceptions of need and a broad definition of 'cosmetic'. If the doctors office is busy and all the ERs are full, or they don't believe what I say or that my symptoms don't require care, there's no one I can go to about my "right to healthcare" or right to spend the health insurance.
Proposing these limited arrangements as if they are positive rights does more harm than good. Once you add enough modifiers to make it accurate, you might as well not say it at all.
I know this matters little during political campaigns and all promises are non-binding so they might as well lie through their teeth as much as possible, up to the point people call bullshit. But it still significantly influences how we debate and discuss important topics, and it's a type of thinking which filters down into a lot of things which have little to do with political campaigns.
I do find this nomenclature helpful when trying to convince people.
The web is still the web, most people still don’t bother using it.
If I actually had interesting things on there it would probably be on the front page for a few related keywords.
Please, please, read the ToS and stop thinking like that! This is not people's own content, it's Facebook's, YouTube's, Reddit's content. If you want to own your content - you should rent a domain name, a server and host it by yourself.
Except typical social network users doesn't want to own their content. They are here for other's attention.
TikTok users aren't aware of filtering yet, so telling them is a social good. Humans may prefer to see beautiful people, but filtering out ugly people means the majority of users will be below average compared to the content they view. They should at least know it's happening.
> and driven out of business?
Has this happened to TikTok?
Why does it matter? Because a nightclub does it, suddenly it's OK for TikTok to do it, too?
If Johnny jumps off a bridge, are you going to leap as well?
Privately-run-and-owned social networks like TikTok tend to attain a critical mass where they're considered a utility when they're really not. So boycotts don't work because it becomes literally where everyone is after a while, and alternatives become difficult because the barrier to entry gets so high.
That's the real problem, and the problem of a centralized Internet. I should be able to broadcast video from my house and participate in a peer-to-peer CDN of my choice.
Tiktok is not a CDN, it's a presentation layer on top of their own CDN or one they rent through cloud providers.
Business that engage in immoral behaviour should be shamed. Doesn't matter if it is casino sites, drug dealers or nightclubs that discriminate against ugly people. Whether that shaming results in them becoming unprofitable is beside the point.
The nightclub lets you know where you stand at the door. I took a read of tik-tok's about page, and it gives me the impression that they're here for everyone. Just a platform to share short videos. The author of one of the featured videos on that page looks like someone who may have been filtered out.
I don't think the analogy is completely off base, but we can judge tik-tok for being deceptive.
Nightclubs that have physical appearance standards have a business model designed around one end of the beauty preference spectrum. By itself, that's not bad; if you want to have a club for only right-handed people, that's fine.
But it's unethical to then pretend that the club is for everyone, when it's really not. That's more like selling someone a car with a top speed of 120mph, but artificially limiting the speed for poorer people, and not telling them. Just because nightclubs walk a fine ethical line doesn't make other companies that also walk that line a great idea.
Many night clubs want users to have "fun" so they pay for a membership. TikTok wants users to stay so they can collect enough data to give it to advertisers or government to target them better.
A single night club won't have more than 100 people at any given time. But tiktok boasts 1.5 billion+ users and millions of them are active at any given time.
Few people going to night clubs won't decide the future of your country but millions on tiktok or other US centric social media might - facebook? instagram?
This too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611404
Other comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22612589
Nightclubs tell you if they think you're not up to their standard. This is far more manipulative and cruel. You could even call it gas-lighting to simply encourage these people to post content!
Most people going to nightclubs are there for fun. In contrast, it's possible to make money on Tiktok and a lot of handicapped people are desperately looking for ways to make money online.
A lot of those people will not be beautiful people. Their disability makes sure of that in many cases.
So the difference is that nightclubs are not telling people "You can make money from the comfort of home" and then shafting people who have few other viable means to make money.
There may be a few sex workers and drug dealers making bank at the nightclub, but they already know they have to fly under the radar and can be thrown out if caught, etc. The nightclub isn't actively telling them they are welcome to hang there and establish an income, then secretly saying "only the sexy people."
I gather that TikTok claimed to be inclusive. Nightclubs almost by definition don't.
Or do you mean another kind of bar?
Pretty similar to how TikTok isn't stopping anybody from posting, they are just selective about what they feature.
Don't casting agents and producers essentially do the same thing for movies and TV?
Now as for how we should treat businesses that treat people better based on their looks is not something I have a strong opinion about, but my two cents is that looks should not be a factor of how people get treated because it is possible that representation of "ugly" people in media could make many diverse looking people "attractive" to younger generations. This would be beneficial because it means that talent would have more priority over looks than before.
A lot of things are like that. One example that comes to mind is that the New York Times, which frequently runs articles criticising tech companies for invading their users' privacy, loads a million trackers every time you access its website. When you're bigger (and more lucrative), different rules apply to you. Maybe that's not a bad thing.
Tell me how it could work any other way? nightclubs are "popular" because of this selection, if anybody could come and go, what would make a place popular?
I don't go to nightclubs and I don't enjoy it, but I can understand why it works that way, it may be unfair but if you break that, the whole concept falls apart. It is valid with any type of community, they simply value different things.
The individuals who they reject on the other hand are living beings, more specifically humans. And that is the point where it starts to become a moral issue because the business interest of an organization is directly linked to the discrimination of a group of humans.
Yes, that is the way that kind of business works, but it should also be valid to consequently judge it as immoral.
PR people really are the worst. It's OK to be rude to them at parties.
I'm re-watching Breaking Bad. A great show about some ugly f*ckers.
This is the story. Why would anyone use a CPC social media platform?
That's explicitly the point.
Yes its evil and manipulative - but everyone should understand CPC is not above such tactics. And neither are pop magazines, holywood.. other people
Its an ugly world out there
I wouldn't equate pop magazines to the people who run concentration camps and silence anyone who talks ill of them.
If you're not gifted with good lucks you are punished in the system.
Now that is some fine spin! Reminds of the Oscar Wilde sketch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uycsfu4574w
TikTok doesn’t care about bullying.
Here it’s humans taking that shortcut, in the future I’d totally imagine AIs resolving to eliminate the source of the problems when dealing with societal issues. And we sure won’t be happy about it.
It's like the contestants on reality TV shows tend to not be ugly as well.
For some reason it _feels_ slimy but I am not sure why. Perhaps it is being confronted with the notion that the world isn't fair.
No wonder they're not interested in seeing people air this dirty laundry.
Not that this is a good thing. It's childish to be surprised and indignant about these companies' policies and behavior like they're your buddy or something.
* TikTok's local moderation guidelines ban pro-LGBT content - Chinese-owned social media app bans such content even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal [1]
* Revealed: how TikTok censors videos that do not please Beijing - Leak spells out how social media app advances China’s foreign policy aims [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-l...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
This is the natural consequence of any platform that wants to be popular and get a ton of media attention.
Is it mortally wrong? of course it is, exactly the same as glamor magazines and Hollywood are.
The interesting observation and funny side to this policy is that there could be a story to be told here where the suppressed "ugly" and "poor" people become the heroes and the TikTok elite and its glamorous fans have become the super-villains.
Another demonstration that centralization is anathema to community. It concentrates power in a few hands, and it creates single-points-of-failure. The internet is not yet routing around that kind of damage.