Current young person here (entering college this fall). I can't think of a single way it's changed "the mindset of our generation", and it seems it's used very heavily by a specific type of person but not by others (as opposed to other social media which is more widely used). How is it changing anything?
"The kids doing suicides" is a common trope dragged out anytime the establishment wants to put something down. Come up with evidence that TikTok is causing more suicidal ideation than people typically experience, and then we might have a conversation. Until then, this is just fearmongering, and a lazy form of it at that.
i personally enjoy seeing young teenagers recording dancing videos on the beach while prior to tiktok they used to just seat down, heads down on their phone, absent, non-existent.
I absolutely love using TikTok, but would give it up in a heartbeat for a Western replacement.
It has absolutely brought more positivity into my life. I am specifically feeding the algorithm with this intent and I get what I asked for. It is a psychological tool.
All I see is girls putting their phone somewhere, dancing in front of it, then getting back into being absorbed by their phones. Can you describe more specifically what is so positive about it? My kids are about to enter the age at which they get a smartphone and these things make me a bit afraid (like, who's watching? Why do they stare at that app for so long? etc). I don't understand the alure, but I want to keep an open mind and not be that old parent that doesn't understand...
You don't need to understand the allure. Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways? What wrong with people smiling, laughing and dancing? I'm an old parent trying to be open minded as well.
Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways?
> I would argue it is one thing to be absorbed by reading in your phone HN or other productive sources. Laughing and dancing on the other hand, after a certain period of time not so much useful.
> Yeah, actually I wish HN would make me laugh and dance, this comment makes tiktok sound pretty good!
LOL. I find HN highly entertaining. Well...not to the point of breaking into a dance...but entertaining. Quite often I just jump straight to the comments.
Really? Almost the entirety of where I see this is people recording and re-uploading content from tik tok onto Twitter. It’s certainly a distinct communication culture. I mean “Instagram dance” was never a thing the way “Tik tok dance” is a thing.
I think the dances came from musical.ly, which part of Tiktok used to be. Then, it's just people doing what other people are doing, one upping each other, trying to get popular, etc. Same social media stuff and Tiktok's recommendation algorithm is really good, so people get into it really quickly.
I guess what I'm saying is just because it's distinct doesn't mean it's alluring. It might be a different form of expression but what is being expressed is that entertaining or different from Instagram. It's just a bit less objectifying than Instagram but still feels lacking.
The parent commenter asked if anyone could describe what is positive about the app. Since they apparently have no first-hand experience with it, and do not understand the allure from what they've heard or seen so far.
You're responding to him or her with "You don't need to understand the allure". And somehow seem offended that he or she doesn't understand what people are laughing about.
>Are you not also absorbed by your phone in other ways?
Honestly, no, and I feel very disconnected from modern culture as a result. I use my phone like a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: to have access to everything we know as humans at my fingertips, in my pockets, at all times.
Otherwise, I don't use it. That said, I have nothing against people using their phone for enjoyment, and there's nothing wrong with people smiling, laughing, and dancing. It's just not easy to relate to the obsession with applications like Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and so on.
I'm a fan of the "Digital Wellbeing" features that ship with newer phones.
I have a social media account which I check approximately biweekly and definitely considered myself someone who wasn't falling into the attention trap in my pocket. I only read HN, a few news sites, send texts, and play chess on my phone.
I was amazed to see just how much time I spent doing these things. Even if in some way how I'm using the phone is more virtuous or less problematic ("this hour-long article about the architecture of the classic XBox gratifies my curiosity, is informative and gives me more context with which to understand my field!"), that time and attention sink still comes at the cost of everything else in life.
Once I started marking 'not interested' on the super basic teenager dance videos, I eventually stopped seeing them. Same with a lot of the memey songs that get tiring to hear after a while. I'll try to make a list of people who keep popping up.
Having used tiktok for a total of 10 hours now, I get programmer humor, car videos and funny animal videos - exactly what I want
That's the whole point - the ability to curate content that you will like is phenomenal, especially given the non-obvious inputs to their model. Like a video? Sure you'll see more of that kind of stuff. You may not think about scrolling up/down to restart the video, watching it multiple times, sharing it, opening/closing the comments (and I'm sure 10,000 other inputs) all feed into it's ability to curate
I get mostly cooking, gardening, life hacks, and occasionally political humor. I'm also on gay TikTok so there's some 'fun' content there.
I've learned lots of cool stuff on TikTok - my favorite tip recently has been a trick for partially juicing lemons while leaving them intact; last week I broke my soda habit as a result of easily accessible homemade la croix.
Since the content is curated strongly by your likes and dislikes, I am afraid your children might actually get some nasty stuff there. There's psychotic horror and soft porn. I don't think I'd trust my child with it unless they're older than 14 or so.
The dancing stuff is pretty mild and I'd say even constructive for children.
The allure, is hard to describe. The content I see is very human, people describing their experiences, doing harmless jokes on each other, or teaching something. How it differs from YouTube is that it is much more strongly tailored to your likes, and due to time constraints, skips the chuff and gets to the meat of things quicker.
It seems to create affinity scores based on which videos you complete watching, like or share. Then they also maintain similar affinity scores for every tag on those videos and the creators of those videos. So as you watch stuff, you feed becomes tuned to your preferences without needing an explicit 'follow' step.
Users have little control of what videos they see explicitly, but if you like 5 videos with the same tag, it will present more videos with that tag.
I was a bit critical of my wife using TikTok until I realized that she replaced the negativity of Facebook with something that, in its current form, is pretty harmless. It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity.
Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country. Hand wringing about TikTok seems more rooted in sinophobia than genuine privacy concerns, from where I’m sitting.
Without the racist framing of "sinophobia," fear of the Chinese state is a legitimate one. They are a totalitarian regime engaged in a variety of human rights abuses and dystopian-fiction-made-reality. From Uyghur concentration camps to "social credit scores," there are a lot of reasons to fear the Chinese state that have nothing to do with racism or xenophobia.
It looks like they may also be brigading this post. Two downvotes pretty quickly on my comment. Maybe I'm out-of-touch with Hacker News norms, but I didn't think I said anything that warrants downvotes.
Edit to add: I don't make this post to complain about downvotes. The point was the potential brigading, since we're talking negatively about the Chinese state.
Yeah, it's been a pattern on recent posts concerning China that any comment describing CCP malevolence gets instantly downvoted, and often responded to with the same extremely weak what-aboutisms and other non-arguments, accusations of Sinophobia and such. So either there's a rather unintelligent group of Hacker News users who just show up to downvote and post bad arguments on every article criticizing China and then disappear, or we're seeing some of China's finest 50 cent warriors in the comment section.
No, but people who post the same logical fallacies again and again (almost like they're getting them off a list somewhere) and never address the actual argument probably are.
It's like pointing out that POC living at higher latitudes likely need Vitamin D supplements because the sunlight isn't intense enough for darker skin to produce enough Vitamin D naturally, because that's how melanin works. Then someone jumps in, down-votes you, calls you racist, and points out that white people need vitamin D supplements too. The rules of logic say those are bad/non-arguments, not me. Once or twice is an unintelligent person. A consistent long-term pattern makes it likely some variety of shill/troll/plant, or Chinese intelligence in the case of China-related articles.
Nah, I think you're being too paranoid. I see plenty of less-China-critical (not even pro-China) comments get downvoted, and China-critical comments upvoted.
Also, CCP shills are a nice myth but they don't operate overseas. The real shills serve a very different purpose: they are hired by local governments to cheat the central government into giving them promotions, by showing the central government comments from "happy citizens".
Oh I'm sure they operate in even greater numbers internally, but I'm equally sure China puts out as much foreign propaganda as they think they can get away with. "Sinophobia" in response to criticism of verified CCP actions in particular seems an attempt to weaponize the current cancel culture in the west.
Hell China did likewise to the Mongol tribes for centuries until Genghis Khan came along. It's not like sowing discord among one's rivals is a new or novel strategy, and while Hacker News might be intelligent enough on average to see through it the bulk of the internet lacks that sort of scrutiny. Suggesting China and America are moral equals might not carry much weight in America, maybe even Western Europe, but Africa? The Middle East? South America? China has certainly tried more radical operations in the past, posting a swarm of "nudge" posts on social media to try and inch world opinion its way seems like an easy call if I were the Chinese propaganda ministry.
I think it is quite ironic that on the one hand you completely dismiss sinophobia as a concept, and on the other hand you cite pre-Ghenis Khan times as the reason for being wary of 21st century China.
Once again withe the non-arguments and strawmen. These exchanges do nothing but prove my point.
Criticizing the CCP's actions in Hong Kong, for example, is not sinophobic. Criticizing their treatment of the Uighurs is not sinophobic, and criticizing their attempts at intelligence collection and propaganda is not sinophobic. Yet all have been called such at some point in Hacker News comments in recent posts.
And my point was that the strategy of sowing discord among one's rivals is thousands of years old and been proven effective. Would you prefer the example of the British in the Middle East? To suggest that the current CCP is unaware of or uninterested in promoting such a strategy is laughable.
> Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country.
I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US. The US isn't intractably opposed to liberal democracy, but the CCP is:
From the OP:
> To that end, this long history looms large in how China thinks about its relationship to the U.S. specifically, and the West generally. China is driven to reverse its “century of humiliation”, and to retake what it sees as its rightful place as a dominant force in the world. What few in the West seem to realize, though, is that the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished, and that Western liberal values are actively hostile to that goal. Tanner Greer wrote in Tablet:
> ...
> This understanding of China’s belief that it is fighting an ideological war explains why the severe curtailing of freedom that happened in Hong Kong this month was inevitable; if the Party’s ideology is ultimately opposed to liberalism anywhere, “one country-two systems” were always empty words in service of China’s rejuvenation, and Marxism’s triumph. To see that reality, though, means taking China seriously, and believing what they say.
> I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US.
I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.
Don't need to be enthused to acknowledge one is better than the other. At the end of the day the NSA/facebook is far less likely to use my information to hurt me than the CCP. The only difference is I live in the US, so the CCP doesn't really care and can't really reach me without committing a potential act of war anyway. If I moved to China and maintained my same social media habits I'd be disappeared rather quickly, and possibly organ harvested.
Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist. And you're giving that info freely, better hope the CCP doesn't decide to use it against you while you're there to make a political statement. They've done and are doing far worse over less.
> At the end of the day the NSA/facebook is far less likely to use my information to hurt me than the CCP.
Again, I do not reside in the US and do not imagine that the NSA is on "my side", so obviously I'm going to take a more jaundiced view of surveillance apps of US origin.
> Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist.
Yes. This is equally true of the US. You are ordered to disclose all social media accounts at the border, and can and will be denied entry to the country if your social media posts contain political statements (or even apolitical statements) that the interviewing officer objects to, whether posted by you or merely sent to you: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s..., https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16810312, etc
> I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.
Could you go into more detail about your thoughts on "[each] country’s ideology" and why you think that makes their social networks (which IMHO are a form of media) roughly equivalently desirable?
IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better. China's government, on the other hand, is pretty unrepentant about the bad things it does, and explicitly rejects and suppresses the mechanisms that could lead positive change in those areas. If the OP is correct and China's government sees itself in an ideological war with the West and its ideas of liberal democracy, then I'd expect that Chinese social networks will be drafted to serve in that war, either now or in the future.
If I dislike beef, I might not be enthusiastic about eating a steak, but I'd still prefer that to some chicken cooked in motor oil.
> IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better
From the outside, I think Americans generally over-estimate the degree to which modern America is actually a liberal democracy. The tolerated range of speech seems to in reality run a perilously narrow gamut from "neo-conservative" to "arch-neo-conservative", with anything left of the former routinely subject to exercises of state force to attack and undermine that dissent in practice (declarations of turning the nebulous self-applied label of "Antifascist" into a "terror organization", COINTELPRO, etc, etc), regardless of what freedoms are claimed to be enshrined in the US constitution.
And this is merely its internal opposition to liberal democracy; again, even a cursory glance at modern Latin American history demonstrates that the US happily prefers right-wing dictators to democratically elected leftists, if the latter is at all detrimental to the US government's interests.
No, but then again I’m equally opposed to much of contemporary US politics and the long history of US meddling in foreign countries affairs to obtain anti-democratic results that happen to favour US goals (broadly, Latin American 20th century history), so again, this “TikTok’s data gathering is an existential threat to freedom but please pay Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google et al no mind” framing is... unconvincing to say the least.
> Ah yes, because the US is well known for its Muslim concentration camps, social credit scores and surveillance panopticon.
Perhaps I simply don’t consider the Hispanic concentration camps, private credit scores that still gate hiring, access to healthcare (via hiring) and renting and apartment, and surveillance panopticon powered by Google, better?
I guess we’ll see how well the detainees in those ICE camps fare in the face of an out of control COVID outbreak.
I wouldn’t care to try to parse any moral superiority between how apologists want to characterize the ICE camps and how Chinese apologists want to characterize the Uighur camps, myself. Neither strikes me as terribly deserving of our defense.
No doubt spyware is bad from either country, but TikTok was caught trying to suppress content from "ugly, poor, or disabled" users. Do you still support the app knowing that?
I merely said I don’t see how it’s worse than the major US social networks. Like say Facebook, which has been caught multiple times allowing employers and housing advertisers to illegally exclude groups like Black people, from seeing job postings and apartment listings.
Again, I don’t know that what TikTok has been shown to be doing is any worse.
Look at Hong Kong where China just yesterday told the political parties that holding any pre-election for Hong Kong's parliament is an aggressive act against China.
Or look at the Uyghur internment camps. Or the one child policy that effectively turned some communitys 80% male.
There is no opposition in China that can speak up against this.
Can you explain the threat model you're using here to assess Facebook vs TikTok? This sounds like just emotional language as I could call most of the modern web spyware and not be too far off the mark
It's less about threat model than willingness to use it.
If the US government were using Facebook to censor and disseminate propaganda, we'd likely eventually hear about it.
In contrast, the Chinese government is certainly using TikTok to censor and quite likely to disseminate propaganda. Critics of that policy will be imprisoned.
Since the copy/paste exploit was addressed (in ios) I'm not sure what useful information "chinese spyware" can gather from this app. As long as it's being used for goofy dance and lip sync videos, I don't see the harm.
Which does an excellent job helping to stimulate thought of just what the power and purpose of these types of apps as well other structures (alphabet) are able to do...
My personal feeling is that Tiktok is better then most other social media for the end users emotional state, at least based on my wife's usage.
From a spying perspective, I tend to agree with you as well.
That said - China doesn't let FB or Twitter in their country, why the hell should the US let them in ours? To me it is akin to letting them buy the NY Times or CNN. They may be benign now, but if tensions were to continue mounting, they could greatly influence the content a significant portion of people in the US are receiving. I see 0 reason to trust them with that power.
Is there any reason to think that positivity will continue to hold? Or is TikTok just getting its grace period before griefers, trolls, and paranoiacs move in?
If the Chinese government is going to aggressively moderate TikTok to keep that out... uh, cool, I guess. I'd be happy to see some popular entertainment that doesn't devolve into a screaming match. But it's a lot of work, and reduces audience (i.e. revenue).
I see the risk being less about spyware, and more about giving CCP the ability to push its agenda at the flick of an algorithm tweak.
A lot of people in comments are talking about how great the feed algorithm is out weeding out teenage dance videos and showing interesting content.
You can easily imagine a scenario where CCP tweaks its algorithms to favor content relating to one party or candidate vs. the other.
The scary part is that I think it wouldn't be obvious to know whether China is exploiting TikTok's American audience via algorithms driving a certain agenda since it can be done very subtly in non-obvious ways.
It's a private company, it's very unlikely for them to outright push government propaganda. They'll probably just censor "political activism" on the platform altogether and someday if government establishes tighter control of the platform they might be forced not to censor some of it, like things that undermine the US government.
Large "private" companies in China are not private as you would think of them in the West. The Chinese government or the CCP will own outright or through holding companies shares in a company. So even at the most benign the government or CCP will have influence in a company's governance. Executives and upper management will always be outwardly enthusiastic about all Chinese government/CCP talking points and decisions.
Due to China's "security" laws security and intelligence agencies have essentially full access to large companies' data. There's no real due process so a "private" company's data is essentially government data. There's also the overt and covert censorship and propaganda imposed by the government.
Company executives serve at the pleasure of the government. Anyone not towing the party line or acting with too much independence will get caught up in "anti-corruption" investigations or just be arrested for crimes they may or may not have actually committed.
Realistically it's better to just assume a priori that a Chinese social media company is pushing propaganda and building dossiers of users. It's certainly safer to assume that.
It takes a lot to produce and push government propaganda. It would require a tech company to essentially turn into a government run news organization if they were to do it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of even having different businesses, rather than all of them being propaganda producing news outlets.
China's already got multiple overt state-run "news" organizations. So it's not like there's some dearth of China-friendly content readily available. Propaganda also isn't necessarily just content produced by some Ministry of Truth. Simply censoring or "discouraging" negative coverage of China/CCP in state influenced media can be/is propaganda.
That's just "official" propaganda. The CCP's various astroturfing brigades are well documented (see "50 cent army" and "internet navy"). They show up in public forums of all stripes.
TikTok doesn't allow discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Falun Gong, Free Tibet, or anything other topics the CCP deems inappropriate. That censorship is propaganda by omission. Content users see being primary algorithmic makes it trivial to add in pro-CCP or just anti-West content into people's feeds.
Not sure if you're aware of the fact of what was going on in Hong Kong and the loss of its autonomous status due to the national security law. Facebook and TikTok are no different to privacy, but TikTok can give all of that data and the CCP can access it. But of course it doesn't matter to you because 'its pretty harmless'.
For Hong Kong citizens, it's much worse. They are being identified and arrested in the hundreds as the Chinese government has access to this data to find anyone insulting or ridiculing them. That's very totalitarian to me.
> But of course it doesn't matter to you because 'its pretty harmless'.
That doesn't seem like a very charitable interpretation of OP's comment.
If a very small fraction of global users may come to harm as a result of (not by) using an app, then that's pretty much the textbook definition of "pretty harmless".
Take any social media app and there is something toxic, mean, snarky about it. Twitter is optimized for snark and shit storms. Facebook has your crazy uncle sharing fake news. Instagram posts are fake and pretentiousness. Reddit has their subreddit drama.
TikTok is just fun. Even wholesome fun.
I tried if I could find one mean tiktok video, but there was not one bullying video. Even if the girl making a dance video was ugly/fat the comments on that were encouraging and positive.
I was wondering awhile ago to what extent the famous saying "the medium is the message" applies here. It's famously easy to misread the intent of text, to see hostility when there is none (and so smiley faces and emojis came into being), it's probably harder to be mean over photos than text (especially a photo of yourself...), and even harder over video.
> give it up in a heartbeat for a Western replacement.
It's important to recognized that it's not a coincidence that TikTok exists and is run by a Chinese company.
In the West that replacement would have been immediately purchased by FB or Twitter and then summarily destroyed. This is literally what happened to the closest Western equivalent: Vine.
The Chinese government has many faults, but unlike the US government, the Chinese government still enforces the idea that Chinese companies should operate in the interest of the nation.
Facebook did try to buy Musical.ly, the company that became TikTok, and would have likely destroyed it just like Twitter did Vine.
If the US government was remotely functional it would put a little effort into challenging the ability of near monopolies to simply destroy any competitor through acquisition. I agree that it's not ideal that the Chinese government is tightly connected with TikTok/ByteDance, but the reason there is no Western TikTok is because our governments (particularly the US) are so deeply aligned with the interests of larger corporations that a viable competitor to these cannot exist.
It may be harder to monetize short video content than short text or longer videos (maybe that drives YouTube revenue nudges for longer content?).
But people like short videos, so there's a tension there. If you're in ads, maybe just buy a few short video companies, get their patents to sue their competitors, and shut them down, so no one gets access to the thing that they like but is less lucrative for you.
But maybe you're right and they would have followed an IG model just fine.
> the Chinese government still enforces the idea that Chinese companies should operate in the interest of the nation.
In most cases, Chinese companies are basically owned and controlled by the state. This has nothing to do with monopoly or trust issues. Acquiring lines of credit in China after you get to a certain size basically means you're owned or partially owned by the CCP.
Besides "FB would have bought it," social media doesn't generally do "replacement." Nuanced differences in product lead to different products, because the "social" aspect is made of culture.
Any replacement for tiktok wouldn't be a replacement. It'd be a different product in the social media space. One way or another, a tiktok ban benefits FB, whether they build a competitor, buy it, or their existing products pick up tiktok's market share.
We are totally ill equipped to deal with modern monopolies. We weren't great at dealing with the old, monopolies. Now though, the laws, norms and political MOs are nearly irrelevant.
One trite example is prices. The default way to "prove" the effect of monopolies historically has been price. Prices don't exist in social media.
A deeper difference is the microeconomics. When Bell was being broken up, one big problem was creating viable component companies. If the courts screwed up and created failing child companies then telecommunications would be broken. This is a hard problem for a court, well outside their comfort zone. With social media the microeconomics is totally different. Even if FB disappeared, consumers would not lack for social media. The market is capable of replacing FB easily, all that's needed is for facebook to move aside. Commercial/profitability considerations are barely an issue.
How can Twitter destroy the idea of Vine? Twitter can destroy Vine.co, but why is there no competitor with the same idea?
The moment they had shut down vine.co, a new site with the same idea could have gone life and absorbed all the users.
Why does this not happen? There are Facebook user groups, reddits and other social networks, even Twitter itself. A replacement for something that popular should be known instantly and take over without friction. Why does 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it' not work here?
>* a new site with the same idea could have gone life and absorbed all the users.*
But that did happen - it was called Musical.ly, which is now known as TikTok (US). I don't think people realize that the US version of TikTok was preceded by an app called Musical.ly, which was also Chinese owned, but failed in China but had massive success in the US.
Next steps in such a war: removal of freedom of speech, and politically motivated and state controlled media. We'll have People States of America in no time . All is fair in love and war, right ?
I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked. There's something so refreshingly playful, authentic, and raw about so much Tiktok content compared to Instagram. Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places. That was fun for a while but it's just not that interesting after a while. I don't need to see more pretty pictures of women doing yoga. I don't need to see more pretty mountain bikes I can't afford. I don't need to see anymore drone shots of Milford Sound in New Zealand.
Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.
I feel the same way about a lot of social media personalities, YouTube ... there's all these youtube-isms that every youtuber eventually adopts. You follow someone, they get popular, then they do some reaction videos, or they decide to evolve into some sort of lifestyle / social media pundit / etc... I really don't care to watch folks react to things or any of that other stuff.
They all encourage a lot of nasty / outrageous content over time as that's what gets eyeballs.
I think much more positive, authentic, curated / focused content would be great. I'm done with filtering twitter, youtube, instagram ... endlessly as content eventually goes sour.
That's a great way to put it. I couldn't quite put my finger on it but that's totally what is happening on IG. A lot of DTC brands have basically saturated my feed. I'm not sure how much longer this can continue without losing engagement. Anecdotally my own interest in IG has been waning the past year almost to the point of deletion.
This happens and has been happening all over the Internet. IG won't be the last victim. As soon as corporate America figures out how to sell their Ranch dressing over a platform, the brands start invading and the whole platform turns vanilla and boring.
It will only get worse as they roll out more and more shopping features...but in fairness they are smart and either anticipating the changing social media market (meaning there may be a critical mass of influencers realizing they treat IG like a job except without compensation) or it’s simply a way to test going after Amazon.
He must be delusional. Tiktok is for dancing videos as far as I can tell. The parent comment and down are taking stances that I would never expect on HN. Something is off, there is nothing ‘refreshing’ about tiktok.
Closest I can get to HN ⋂ dancing is 1:34-1:48 in Virus' "You should ask" (where the video is about the difficulty of source attribution on a LAN, let alone an entire internet)
I think you're underestimating how user-specific the feed is. I recently uninstalled it, but I was getting 5% dancing videos at best (worst?). The vast majority of my feed was animal videos, comedy skits, video games, and anime clips.
Interesting observation. I grew up with shitty (but fun!) phpBB forums and the fancier vBulletin, but wouldn't categorize them as 'social media'. The first of those were probably cu2, MySpace, and eventually Facebook/Twitter/etc.
When I think about it, it seems like a somewhat arbitrary distinction to make. I suppose the main difference is that the forums were self-hosted and I could have different identities for each one. And while I generally reused the same username, the fact that it wasn't just a matter of 'clicking on my profile' to see all my activity was something I really liked.
Maybe to me the term "social media" has come to mean "social media /companies/"? That doesn't quite satisfy, but it really does feel like the primary difference is that on these forums I knew that they were generally not run for profit, and the 'gods' were just individuals who volunteered their time to host or moderate. It felt safer, and more personal.
>Hacker News all look seriously dated in comparison
Yes please make a movie about your next it projekt ;)
I even hate repair-videos on youtube, it's slow and lame, the fix-it manuals are 1000s times better (since i know what a torx is and that most screws open counter-clock-wise)
EDIT: Wow i clicked on #Coding and it is like i taught about it...pure waste of time with Rainbowhairs and talking needle slim guy's with more grease on top than the hole movie 'Grease'
> I even hate repair-videos on youtube, it's slow and lame,
Here are some TikTok tutorials on light painting [0]. I'm not saying that I like them, or that they are good, but they are incredibly pacey compared with the YouTube equivalents
Those are fascinating, and give me a glimpse into a world I didn't even know I found interesting.
One major difference (that some may care about less than I do) is that the TikTok format is great for seeing a variety of content, but does little to help me create. Admittedly, YouTube is filled with lots of filler information (to please their own algorithms) but I could probably figure out what cameras/lights to use, software settings, how to edit, etc... The best TikTok can do is show me what others are capable of.
These tutorials are about how to set up a still a light painting using a DSLR or mirrorless camera in a long exposure mode. TikTok is just being used to record the movement of the light during the long exposure, not to explain the settings (ISO, shutter speed, aperture, etc) of the still camera that takes the final shot.
If there's something that I really really like YouTube for, it would be the videos showing you how to fix or build things. Good woodworking, metalworking, electronics repair videos are hard to find, but I remember seeing a few that were much better than a manual. The manual typically shows one view of a project or workpiece, but good videos show multiple views, close ups, pictures of different configurations I might expect.
You do typically have to wade through a lot of crappy "Hey Guys Like and Subscribe!" garbage with 30 second title sequences to find the good ones though.
I like stuff like Townsends (cooking and build stuff in the old days) but repair stuff big NO for me, but learn howto solder big YES. It really depends.
Yes, they get rid of content from "ugly, poor or disabled users" so you have an even "better" experience. So not only is it Chinese spyware, it is an awful company too.
That's not the answer to the question I was asking. I wanted to know how many are watching this content , not if this this content exists . If nobody is watching, then result is the same
I definitely subscribe to some people who could be labelled that way, because I subscribe to interesting content. Most of my favorite YouTubers don't show their face at all, and a few show neither their face nor their voice. But, I am sure you can also find people who discriminate anyway, otherwise we wouldn't need to have conversations about discrimination.
But, there is a very different ethical and practical divide between a company implementing systematic discrimination and discrimination by individual users. This divide is large enough that most western nations have decided to draw their legislative lines there.
Neither are mine . I'm not subscribed to IG account of poor ugly disabled anyone, though. Should I feel like self-CCP to me ? Feel guilty about myself ?
As one of the replies to your comment suggests, I think this is a problem with photo-based and video-based social media in general. In an all-text environment like HN, each participant is nothing more than their words and the name they choose to post under. Consider that (unless you already looked at my profile), you have now read most of my comment without finding out that I'm legally blind. If I had to post this as a video, it would probably be more apparent.
It feels depressingly long ago when "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog" was both funny and true :-/.
Btw, I checked your profile and I was sad to find that your blog doesn't seem to exist anymore. I'd love to read more about accessibility and the particulars of being a blind developer. I can't imagine what that's like, but I have at times wondered how I would approach it. I imagine many of us web developers could benefit from more awareness when it comes to accessibility in general!
That said, your Twitter appears to still be operational and relevant to the topic.
Here in India, TikTok was massively popular in smaller towns and villages. The content was so different than Instagram.
I really thought it was invaluable (TikTok is banned now). For us city dwelling upper middle class people, it gave a rare glimpse into the lives of people less privileged. And it wasn't maudlin or patronizing as a lot of narratives about the poor tend to be. Rather it was fun and authentic.
I remember when the lockdown happened and a lot of migrant workers were left stranded, the news channels were filled with horror stories and heartbreaking videos of poor families walking hundreds of kilometres to their homes. But on TikTok, there were plenty of videos shot by the same migrant workers where they shared their woes, but would sometimes break into a dance or make fun of their situation.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
There are a bunch of TikTok clones floating around and they've racked up some users. But I'm not sure if these clones would have the tech to serve the kind of recommendations TikTok did. Some, like "Mitron", are basically pre-made scripts bought online and rebadged [0]. They don't have the tech DNA to get recommendations right - which was one big reason for TikTok's success.
Yes. It's called Chingari. Since the ban, downloads have been shooting up. It's now 2M+ or so downloads while being no where near as polished as TikTok UI
Something about Tiktok, whether the algorithm or the sheer volume of content, seems to discourage the sort of look-at-me envy-bait narcissistic posturing that is so common on Instagram. To be popular on Tiktok you actually have to do stuff (even it's fairly banal like dancing or telling stories), not just be (or pretend to be) someone.
I found it funny that the author of this post is trying to defend liberal values like the free flow of information on the internet by...making Apple and Google remove Tiktok from people's phones. He's correct that the primary political risk of Tiktok is the recommendation algorithm being manipulated. However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either.
This would have been a good chance to really defend free flow of information on the internet, open and swappable recommendation algorithms, personal data ownership, and so on, but the conclusion is basically "it's bad because a China-affiliated company does it". Generally, everything that Tiktok does that is wrong is also wrong when Facebook does it. The reality is that Tiktok is (for now) a superior product in many ways to anything from American tech companies. Why is this?
Do you agree that all Chinese companies (even foreign ones operating in China), state owned or not, has to do whatever CCP wants?
If you do, you already have the answer.
If you don't, I suggest you get to know a bit more about China before CCP's alternative facts become the facts.
They are comparable in how they work technically and what they do with your data, but this is less true of "which geopolitical overlord are you supporting". I edited my post from "equally wrong when Facebook does it" to "also wrong when Facebook does it" to clarify this. To "see ads targeting you" Facebook has to steal as much of your personal data as is technically possible, map out all your social relationships, and then sell it to hundreds of companies all over the world. In any case, the path from watching Tiktoks to supporting concentration camps is long and thin. Most people are not thinking about this and are just using Tiktok because they like it better than anything else.
it's a "superior" product because it's new and not yet commercialized. once it is, you'll get the same sort of gaming (influencer culture, ad placement, etc) that you see in every other social media
> Something about Tiktok, whether the algorithm or the sheer volume of content, seems to discourage the sort of look-at-me envy-bait narcissistic posturing that is so common on Instagram.
I haven't used Tiktok, but from what I understand you can only post videos taken using the phone's camera and they can only be edited using whatever filters are available within the app, effectively limiting how manipulated or manufactured the content can be. Sort of like a Snapchat for videos (with the caveat that you can save and post videos at a later time in Tiktok, whereas with Snapchat it's "now or never"). Coupled with not having an associated text component where you can easily post testimonials and links to a site where you're selling a self help book, get rich quick scheme, juice cleanse or gym routine, it should limit how easy it is to use it as a promotion platform.
My theoretical answer would be that we can regulate American companies more effectively and have them be held accountable, like when Zuckerberg had to go before Congress. I doubt you'd be able to get the CEO of a large Chinese company to do that.
In reality we don't regulate them nearly as much as we can, so the end result is that FB and Tiktok both invade your privacy.
As a non-American looking on, it seems to me like the US government has failed spectacularly at any kind of regulation, and to the contrary is often actively trying to undermine privacy laws. Zuckerberg in front of congress achieved exactly zero, except provide footage for loads of memes of Zuckerberg as a lizard.
I prefer the idea of a US based social media company to a Chinese one. But only slightly. I would much rather the company be based somewhere with genuine intent to create consumer safety and privacy focused laws.
Because FB/Insta/Snap aren’t indirectly owned by the Chinese Communist Party. By definition, the communist regime owns all of China including all Chinese companies. TikTok is owned by ByteDance which bends the knee to the CCP. TikTok is not inherently bad, but the CCP is. Conversely, Facebook, in and of itself, is bad without the help of the CCP.
No, it really isn't even a little bit of a leap. Can't tell if you're trolling or severely misinformed.
>Following the shutdown, ByteDance announced that it would give preference to Chinese Communist Party members in its hiring and increase its censors from 6,000 to 10,000 employees.
All Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the country’s National Intelligence Law to turn over any and all data that the government demands, and that power is not limited by China’s borders. Moreover, this requisition of data is not subject to warrants or courts, as is the case with U.S. government requests for data from Facebook or any other entity;
Their privacy policy notes data may be shared as well:
while TikTok claims that it is independent from ByteDance and stores data in the U.S. and Singapore, its privacy policy is clear:
"We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group."
That's the kind of content that survives the crucibles of Chinese censorship, "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics (especially politics) is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. It's why TikTok's content policy is designed to protect the status quo, often misinterpreted as being pro-Beijing when it's broadly pro-establishment. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. That said, I guess it's possible for TikTok to be weaponized to sow division, but why would they need to when the whole of western media sphere is doing so already.
IMO the style has it's place, whole of China has no choice but to live under it, but in the west, a plurality of content management philosophies calibrated for different audiences is good. There's lessons in managing toxicity to learn from TikTok even if it gets banned.
This is a good point, although I suspect most people don't really want to see the toxicity. People are always complaining that they can't make certain things go away on Facebook even though they're constantly telling it "I don't want this". The one time I can remember where someone got "cancelled" on Tiktok, most of the criticism was carried out on other platforms like Twitter and Youtube ("Nurse Holly" if you're curious). I'd try to see how well Tiktok's recommendations can identify "toxic sectarian flame wars", but I don't want to clutter up my feed (which is 90% not in English anyway).
Enough people LOVE drama and toxicity to perpetuate reality TV and online beef culture. Many of my hobbyist communities have been affect at some point in the last few years. I personally enjoy some of the drama (powerlifting/bodybuilding), but I just don't want them to shit where they eat and keep it off the platforms for their OG non-drama content. It's nice to have moderated space away from all that. I have my private communities, but I think TikTok is attempting to bring that feel to a larger scale. It's problematic if that's all there is like Chinese firewall. But when there's many media options, it's a nice spot of respite.
Ah, good to know I “misinterpreted [it] as pro-Beijing” when it’s actually just “broadly pro-establishment” and put in place by the establishment in Beijing. Totally different.
I see plenty conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and quack medicine on TikTok. Way way way more than on other platforms. Less of traditional politics, blm and similar stuff tho.
"I found it funny that the author of this post is trying to defend liberal values like the free flow of information on the internet by...making Apple and Google remove Tiktok from people's phones."
This is what the posted article is about. I cannot write a rebuttal to this that is better than what Ben Thompson wrote, and I won't. The section "A Reluctant Prescription" section is directly about this.
I can rebut this, however:
"However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either."
I find it very hard to believe they don't promote content intended to elicit an emotional response to drive engagement in China the same way they do everywhere else.
I think it has a lot to do with how TikTok manages the balance between consumption and creation. Only a fraction of viewers on YouTube for example create content where a significant portion (55%) on TikTok both create AND Consume.
This was an analysis on TikTok vs YouTube and focuses on how TikTok leverages mimcry to overcome the initial burden of ideation and yields significant content creation for its platform.
I am not a TikTok user but when I first tried TikTok a couple years ago it struck me as extremely well made app geared for creativity.
The traditional social media dominated by US companies is about sharing what you eat what you do where you are who do you sleep with and what you are angry about. People are essentially misbehaving when they post funny videos.
TikTok on the other hand is playful and the encouraged behaviour is to be creative.
When someone misbehaves on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook they would post videos that someone else made and A lot of that content is made on TikTok. The only creative space is in YouTube but it's not because YouTube encourages it but because there are people capable if using it like that.
I am not convinced that the issue with TikTok is a security issue, It's just that SV lost it's edge on culture and technology, and the crusade against TikTok or Huawei is mostly protectionism and this protectionism will eventually lead to Israel, EU, Japan, Korea, UK, Australia to spit domestic and global success stories like China does these days.
If the concerns were about security, there would have been regulations to ensure security(like requiring storing US users data on US soil and so on). USA is not doing that, USA is in war mode.
What even worse? People don't even want to hear it.
I am not the biggest fan of Peter Theil but I think he has a point on the monoculture, group thinking, high rents.
"I'm not sure how I got sucked into Tiktok but I was quickly hooked."
All these apps use behavioral design to get you hooked.
Tiktok is oversocialization on steroids. You have people not only acting out the behavioral scripts embedded and triggered in some meme music or voice you have people mimetically acting out what others are acting out. The psychological manipulation possible though TikTok is immense.
Behavioral Psychology really needs to be a general studies topic, introduced to secondary education.
I remember my local high school's motto when I was growing up was something like, "we're not here to teach, we're here to create good, informed consumers".
Never mind the obvious problems with that statement, but just considering it on face-value: how can people become good, informed consumers without having some kind of exposure to the concepts of how easily information can be collected about and used to manipulate people?
I don't expect most high school students to inculcate the full breadth of the topic, just as so few seem to actually learn and retain anything about history, social studies, or even the freaking alphabet (I've met way too many people who think the English alphabet has 25 letters). But currently, the general populace has no idea the extent to which they and their data can be manipulated. It would be enough if all they learned was "you and your data can be manipulated".
>I remember my local high school's motto when I was growing up was something like, "we're not here to teach, we're here to create good, informed consumers".
I don't get it, was this the actual real motto, or something people said tongue in cheek?
You can phrase it cynically, but that stuff isn't inherently bad. Or at least, it's not worse than anything else people aimlessly browse on the internet. Mostly, it's just fun.
The aimless, constant dopamine hits are incredibly scary. Especially because people who tend towards using it are the ones who need it least. Especially in children.
I guarantee this: children who use TikTok (and YouTube to an extent, etc), will have issues in the future keeping attention on work, and other forms of important and difficult problems and introspection.
Our roommate who used it in our house is a dopamine addict. He never reads, is by far the laziest and sloppiest, he’s also unapologetic about it and unwilling to acknowledge it, sucks at conversation generally because he has nothing to add because all he does is game, YouTube, TikTok and work, and they all feed into each other. And worst - he’s just totally comfortable being the laggard. Everyone else is happier. They contribute more. They clean, they maintain. They do more and have more to talk about because of that.
I fear a generation of children raised on constant dopamine drip. I already see how hard it’s become for me to sit and read or sit and meditate and I try and avoid all that (Twitter is my vice). But I have a friend with a daughter who is addicted to YouTube/TikTok and I fear greatly for a generation raised like that.
Btw IG discovery is mainly based on people you follow and things you like. For example I see more memes and tech stuff on IG than I ever do of yoga pants. If I see something I dont like I mark it as not interested.
I know. I tried that so many times. I think I must have marked 'not interested' on thousands of posts at this point.
For some reason, IG thinks I'm a track athlete (among many other things). Even for stuff I am legitimately into (like mountain biking), my IG explore page mostly serves me up these random accounts called things like 'MTBdaze' or 'bike247' that just seem to repost random pics/memes as a way to grow the follower count.
Oh I see, yeah that doesn't help sadly, for me though the stuff it shows me does not correlate with the people I follow at all. The algorithm must be weird I guess?
Is it manually curated? The article talks about how their algorithms are part of their core success.
TouTiao was about the feed and the algorithm from the beginning. The first time a user opened TouTiao, the news might be rather generic, but every scroll, every linger over a story, every click, was fed into a feedback loop that refined what it was the user saw.
Meanwhile all of that data fed back into TouTiao’s larger machine learning processes, which effectively ran billions of A/B tests a day on content of all types, cross-referenced against all of the user data it could collect. Soon the app was indispensable to its users, able to anticipate the news they cared about with nary a friend recommendation in sight.
I think it's both. In my experience algorithms can do a great job of matching good user generated content to people who will appreciate it, after all the trash has been filtered out. I still haven't seen a viable way to keep good content and remove bad without human reviewers in the loop. Trying to fight bad UGC with algorithms alone appears to be an AI complete problem, because there are humans actively learning and working around your defenses on the other side.
>Instagram (explore/discovery) is generally pretty people with pretty things in pretty places.
TikTok actively pressured the moderators to filter out 'ugly, poor or disabled'[1].
I haven't used TikTok, but I think such apps of mass appeal at this age of intense screen time competition will resort activities like this; there is no magical reason for TikTok to be better than other limited attention social networks.
Even though I never thought of using TikTok, now as a disabled person I feel morally obliged to not use it.
What I mentioned was least of TikTok's initial criticism.
It was known to be a safe haven for much worse type of people(X) because the app was predominantly used by teens in Asian countries where child protection online laws are nearly nonexistent.
Apart from turning a blind eye to it, along with moderation principles which made sure X got what they want, TikTok rose to market leader due to sheer number of Asian population.
TikTok (Musically) was an Asian first app unlike Instagram, high Smartphone/Internet penetration acted as a catalyst.
Only when they got prominence in western market, they started regulating the content for vulgarity.
Instagram has other uses as well. I use it mostly to follow artists, so for me it’s primarily the world’s most interesting (constantly) changing exhibition.
I see maybe one selfie a week. I also know people who use it for home workouts. I’m sure there are a bunch of other, non-shallow, non-bland uses I haven’t heard of.
True. I don't make tiktoks and my friends are on IG. It's basically a private friends video journal for that use. My point was more about content discovery.
this is funny to read as I have five instagram accounts connected,
and the one I have curated the least has TikTok teenage lip sync videos as default.
Its literally Charlie De Malio all over the explore page. And no, this is not based on things I have liked. Its Hype House stuff promoted straight from Bytedance.
That's the kind of content that survives the crucibles of Chinese censorship, "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics (especially politics) is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. It's why TikTok's content policy is designed to protect the status quo, often misinterpreted as being pro-Beijing when it's broadly pro-establishment. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place.
E: IMO the style has it's place, whole of China has no choice but to live under it, but in the west, a plurality of content management philosophies calibrated for different audiences is good. There's lessons in managing toxicity to learn from TikTok even if it gets banned.
Sorry my original comment didn't cover this. Lots and lots of the content I see in my feed is liberal, left, anti-authoritarian. I get nuanced views about the black lives matter movement, feminism, social media, etc. even blatant critiques about what tiktok is doing to young people (especially young women).
Maybe every 5th video in my feed is extremely political. It's not all just la-di-da dance and cat videos.
West got their regionalized treatment and given more latitude in response to media pieces alleging political censorship last year. I surmise controversial content doesn't get promoted much outside the immediate circles. Main point is the DNA of why TikTok feels the way it does is connected to experiences learned cultivating media platforms behind Chinese firewall. Politics and toxicity exist all over Chinese internet as well, they just get filtered / harmonized over time or never reach many eyes in the first place. My hope is that TikTok sticks around at least long enough to monetize and demonstrate that social media doesn't have to primarily drive conflict to reach eyeballs. Douyin (TikTok parent app) is fairly profitable in China, but it's hard to tell if the model works unless its exported and flourishes under different cultural backgrounds.
> Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.
How did you get there? I played with TikTok for a while, but never escaped the "teenagers making videos about other teenagers to pop music" ghetto, and it didn't seem like there was a way for me to tell the algorithm what I wanted without just hoping it surfaced something that I could like.
My TikTok feed is ~70% animal videos and honestly it's the best app for positive content. It starts with way too many young women dancing but you can just mark them as "not interesting" and they will diminish.
Ben is absolutely right and something needs to be done to fight for the values of liberalism, democracy etc we hold dear but I don't see how this will happen. The world seems more divided than ever. Just 2-3 countries unilaterally acting on these issues isn't going to make a difference, how I wish there were strong leaders in some of the nations who knew how to work well for those ideals in the long term together with others.
Also, this is not just about Tiktok as Ben mentioned. When American corporations like NBA start censoring things on their own soil, it is beyond reprehensible.
The current Facebook situation is a bit of a different beast. Most of those advertisers were already cutting their marketing spend because Covid, and are using the current cause to still get attention while reducing direct spend (though I'm sure they'd like Facebook to be a bit heavier on the censorship all the same).
Facebook is likely doing the math now on what makes sense in terms of keeping advertisers happy while resisting temporary market pressure. The answer will probably be a discount on ads, not actually changing content policies, which is what the advertisers are likely gunning for anyways.
Facebook ads are sold as an auction so the discount on ads is already happening. It also tends to produce the type of tempting situation which makes it impossible for brands to resist going back in if they can sneak an advantage in over their competitors.
Everyone forgets that Tiktok bought Musical.ly which was an American product to get the market traction they have. The issue that seems more real than political speech is that US social media / internet companies are denied access to the Chinese market while we allow Chinese owned companies complete access to the US market. Seems like that is unjust.
The scale of information available to an app is potentially huge.
Thus they're automatically involved in some sort of information warfare.
I guess there's two options, either by default the the ecosystem doesn't allow for them to have that information ... or they're in play for these types of things.
I guess the sentiment that TikTok should be sold is gaining ground. It's pretty clear from a regulatory perspective that Facebook won't be allowed to buy it and probably Google neither.
The app also seems to be kind of a wonky fit to Amazons, Microsofts or Apples portfolio (although Amazon does own twitch, so who knows).
I can't make a solid argument for it, but I wouldn't rule out either Netflix or Disney making a bid for TikTok. Both companies are great with video, and I think the current CEO of TikTok is the former COO of Disney. IDK.
If TikTok were to be sold, the new company would still have a EULA clause stating they'll share data with partners. One partner will be ByteDance or a wholly owned subsidiary. So the same information will flow into the CCP panopticon.
The only way that wouldn't happen is if the new TikTok owner incorporated in a jurisdiction that forbid such a relationship. That seems unlikely since ByeDance could pay the spun off TikTok dump trucks full of money for the data.
I recently deleted TikTok from my phone. I didn't have it for too long, and until the recent press I had no idea it was a Chinese app. Honestly, I understand companies will mine my data, but I have an issue with those companies being forced to submit my data to the Chinese government on a whim. And it was really all the same thing. People doing the same skits or dances. Most of which were just chicks doing it in bikinis to get more views and likes.
Are you actually concerned that the Chinese government might get access to your data or is it a matter of principle? What do you think they want to do with it? If they really wanted it could they not acquire it by other means? I ask as I'm genuinely curious. I'm considering install it on my phone to try it out and see how it compares to youtube. I'm not dissatisfied with my youtube feed. Just curious as to how much better TikTok would be based on the descriptions on the article and on this thread.
> Are you actually concerned that the Chinese government might get access to your data or is it a matter of principle?
Both.
> What do you think they want to do with it?
Absolutely no idea. Much like I had no idea what Facebook was doing, or planned to do, with my data back in the 00s. I think we've been down this road enough in the modern era to be distrustful of any entity, especially a government, especially my own government, and especially the Chinese government.
> If they really wanted it could they not acquire it by other means?
If they really wanted to target me as an individual, I am sure they could dig up $THINGS. That doesn't mean I want to do their job for them.
Your line of questioning here, as I've read it, boils down to: "What are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide?"
Possibly, but it could be just be pragmatic - if I lived in the PRC, I would be very, very nervous about sharing some kind of unfiltered feed of my data with state entities. Living outside of the PRC, it's harder to imagine what kind of practical use they'd put that same data to - though that might get more exciting if I traveled to China at some point in the future...
Maybe you're right, but I don't think so. For me, personally, it is kind of personal...
I have visited China multiple times. My wife is Chinese-American. My children are half-Chinese and will, hopefully, be fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese (MIL is Vietnam-born Chinese and a Vietnam War refugee), and English. A lot of our extended family still lives in China, in Hong Kong and the mainland (and even Taiwan). I am critical of China, online and off, and I have been for many, many years.
This isn't even that new to us, specifically. We decided in 2014 that we were not willing to go into the mainland anymore. Most of my wifes paternal family left Hong Kong after the hand-off in 1997 -- the writing was on the wall for anyone willing to pay attention. Given everything that has happened in Hong Kong in the last year or so, I don't think we'll ever visit family there again, either.
More on topic, though... It's bad enough that I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head about what sorts of bullshit the NSA, etc..., (and how they probably share this data freely, if asked, with the FVEY, allied intelligence agencies, etc...) are getting up to with my data, but I've learned how to deal with that without experiencing too much of a chilling effect. I don't have the mental capacity to fight this on yet another front, especially when my own understanding of Chinese state politics is so inadequate. Thankfully, I can easily opt out by simply not installing and/or using TikTok, or any of the other Chinese state-sponsored spyware, on any of our devices.
> Living outside of the PRC, it's harder to imagine what kind of practical use they'd put that same data to
Their reach doesn't end at their borders. The same can be said of every modern government / state on the planet today.
If you want a specific example, the Blitzchung controversy is worth understanding. [0] There's a list of censorship-related issues on Wikipedia, too. [1]
Oh yes, I don't think that sounds overly paranoid to me under those circumstances at all. I am sure I am on some lists here in the US for having taken both Mandarin and Arabic as an undergrad (I could only be more evil if I'd added Russian).
This tiktok "war" is, ultimately, changing the way people politicians think about media tech.
With Twitter or Facebook, it's a lot easier to dismiss the magnitude of their influence. After all, they're not in business to influence politics. They just want to make tech & sell ads and make money. They don't care what becomes news, who wins elections etc. Benign commercial interests, that's all
With tiktok and the chinese government's explicit approach of combining public & commercial interest... That argument falls apart. That and the fact that it is a foreign entity potentially affecting american politics.
Ultimately, the argument will swing back to FB & such... hopefully.
i think if anything tiktok's rise will probably bolster US domestic support for big tech. who wants to be the senator that creates a power vacuum filled by chinese tech?
That's not really a fair comparison though. If FB was pushing US propaganda in China, there would have been no such hearing in the US. That's more equivalent to what TikTok is doing.
This is the sort of thing I meant in my original comment.
"The chinese government use tiktok for propaganda" is an effective call to action. Once you form an opinion on tiktok, the FB equivalents will start to to stand out.
The CCP use tiktok for propaganda. Lobbying firms & individual candidates use FB for campaign. In terms of transparency, manipulativeness, political impact, morals and such... not that different.
Tiktok made sure to suppress HK protests, because they're directly controlled by the ccp. Many US firms (eg NBA) were also influenced by the CCPs desire to suppress support of the HK protest. Tiktok hired and greased many Democratic & Republican "staffers" to lobby for them. They grease pockets. Don't all large companies do that? Tiktok shares your data with the ccp. Facebook sells your data, sometimes to political actors. Meanwhile, the NSA help themselves.
The differences between tiktok and FB may get a ball rolling. ITLT, the similarities will come into play.
I spent a lot of time writing a reply and eventually deleted it. It's not clear from your original post to which I replied that you're being descriptive, not prescriptive, that by pushing the issue of dragging out TikTok's propaganda machine that it opens the door to dragging out Facebook.
It's really hard to tell that you meant, "the public perception of Facebook is..." (that it's not in the business of influencing politics).
That discounts intent: Facebook's intent is for better or for worse to sell a bunch ads and make profits. That Cambridge Analytica was able to exploit Facebook's social graph for political ends is not conducive to the company's mission.
Presumably the GP is implying that TikTok would be working even closer with groups like CA, to the point with partnering with them instead of kicking them off the platform as Facebook did.
First, I think "benign commercial interests" are not. At least not at that scale. Lobbying proves the point. Tech/media is not even the big example. Military industry, banking, mining and healthcare are all far more intertwined with government. Their most important activity is lobbying. That said, tech lobbying still pretty big and the combination of lobbying and controlling a media powerhouse is worse than just lobbying.
More importantly, Facebook (etc), being a massive media channel has lots of power and influence just by being facebook. Again, commercial interests aren't necessarily benign.
FB might tweak the feed to make sure covid-19 rumour mills or deliberate misinformation campaigns don't get out of hand. That might be a good decision (or not), but it isn't a benign decision. It demonstrates that commercial interests, feeds and such are not neutral. They are deliberate, opinionated and that opinion affects reality.
There are two questions that the tiktok case brings up: "how much power?" and "who's power." Zuck isn't as scary as Xi, hence the different response to tiktok. OTOH, Facebook have the same sort of power as tiktok, just a lot more of it.
Tiktok is a potential golden goose for China. They aren't slaughter it just so they can show propaganda for a couple weeks before it inevitably gets shut down. It's the same principle of "don't shit where you eat." If China wants to spread propaganda, they is no shortage of ways to do it on American social media companies.
"With tiktok and the chinese government's explicit approach of combining public & commercial interest..."
You got to be kidding me for blaming the Chinese government for combining public and commercial interest in this context. The amount of hypocrisy is astonishing. The banning of Tiktok, Zoom and Huawei is nothing but a political decision. It's amusing to see someone can blame this on China.
I find it funny how the US is freaking out that they don't own it. Now you know what it feels like when the US owns all the large social media networks and you have to deal with their politics and censorship.
Interesting that only India's decision to ban TikTok made that possible in the US. Shows how polarized the US is. If one side suggested banning TikTok, the other side would immidiately defend it, but India banning it can bring it into the conversation in a way that doesn't force everyone to adopt a view on it reflexively.
There seems to be a concerted effort from both China and the US to create sides. It feels like a new Cold War is looming.
Stratechery is playing on one side. The reality is that US companies are quite willing to censor and manipulate information as well.
Facebook and YouTube censored coronavirus information for the US government. Facebook is fine with right wing manipulation. These propaganda efforts by US companies affect people from other countries.
Both sides are just trying to amass and maintain power. The CCP needs to control information to maintain power. The US is a consortium of entities amassing money and power and likewise tries to destroy institutions preventing that. I bet if you look inside the CCP, you would likewise see multiple groups vying for power.
If you follow Stratechery’s logic, then non US countries should likewise ban Facebook and YouTube.
The more ethical solution would be worldwide standards on censorship.
Why is TikTok allowed to gain market share in Western countries? China banned Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc. while Chinese companies such as Baidu, Sina Weibo, WeChat were able to capture the entire Chinese market share.
It seems that companies not adhering to censorship cannot expand into China, however, Chinese companies adhering to censorship (e.g. TikTok) are able to expand into Western countries. Isn't this anti-competitive?
Good question. If you want to get into the Chinese market, you must comply with its laws and not get in the way of angering the CCP. China is one of Apple's largest markets due to its access to over 1B+ people and it now has its hands tied and anything the CCP wants removed, Apple will do it. [0][1][2]
Like you just said, TikTok already compiles with this security law and censors/bans whatever the CCP requests. By moving outside of China it can either lose access to the Chinese market and get banned by China or still comply with its laws and get banned by the US.
The thing is, TikTok has offices out side of China due to the Musical.ly acquisition (Located in the US) so can still operate there whilst Bytedance being headquartered in Beijing.
A takedown request can be made to the App Store owner. Apple and Google.
> or still comply with its laws and get banned by the US.
How does complying with China's laws in China will get you banned from the US? The US has all the right to establish the laws for products distributed on its own territory, as China does for its own.
Restrictions on foreign-owned companies operating domestically in China applies to many industries -- this is not something unique to TikTok, information companies, or even tech companies. This is something that is often discussed in regards to trade negotiations.
There’s a lot of false equivalence in these comments along with a focus on the app itself.
My worry is about CCP influence and their ability to both spread misinformation and at the same time suppress stories the party doesn’t like.
Easy current examples are the democracy protests in Hong Kong, and the sterilization going on in the Uyghur camps in China.
On Twitter you can talk about both things, on TikTok they will be shut down by the CCP and it’s set up in such a way that users wouldn’t even notice.
On Twitter you can also be critical of the USG.
That’s the risk to me, that the CCP turns down the knobs on speech they dislike and the public is too focused on dance videos to notice.
It’s an even greater risk to people like Joshua Wong, not only would his speech be suppressed on TikTok, but the company would also hand over whatever personal or location data they had on him to the government itself. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Wong)
The CCP should not be stewards of the services we use.
"the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished"
This is BS, the economic system in China is in no way Marxist, nor is it going in that direction. It's worse, lol. This sounds like someone is simply rehashing propaganda he heard somewhere that was intended to either smear Marx or China or both.
It's unfortunate that you were downvoted for this; you're absolutely correct. No one in China gives a fuck about Marxism, and the CCP certainly isn't trying to wage some ideological war to establish some sort of Marxist utopia. To think so is to completely misunderstand the CCP's motivation, which is a dangerous thing when the tensions are escalating and war could be the result.
While China has certainly strayed pretty far from its state-controlled economy in recent years, it also seems pretty clear that Xi is more ideologically "hardcore" than his predecessors.
In the last century the prevailing line the U.S. was that the U.S. would change China through economic engagement, I think what is really going to happen is China is going to change the U.S.
Mainly in the sense that in order to adapt to the competitive threat from China the U.S. has to become more state capitalism and industrial policy guided.
Using strong government to guide industrial policy, fend off or cripple foreign competitors, enact infrastructure. These are the standard tools in China.
As for China, I wonder in the long term if this is not pioneering a completely new mode of the human species. What is the logical end of total surveillance and censorship? Eventually unifying every person into the mind of the state until individualism dissolves and we are all subsumed into a common entity.
Maybe I am speculating too far but if you could have everyone carry an implant from birth wired to a single network then you could achieve the common science fiction trope of an unified collective conscious. Maybe even the leading Party theoreticians haven't even sought about it this far yet.
Americans are losing everything at the moment because of their own shortcomings. Now just get to grips with it and stop constantly demonising other nations, whether it's the Middle East, Russia, China, the EU or whoever else, in order to prevent other countries and internet companies to become successful. America is losing dominance economically, socially and military and it scares them and so we should all expect to be fed more US anti China, anti Russia anti Asia, anti East, anti EU propaganda to keep the power in the house for as long as possible, but whatever bullshit they try to feed us nothing will prevent the inevitable change of power to take place over the next decade.
> What matters more in an ideological war, though, is influence, and that is why I do believe that ByteDance’s continued ownership of TikTok is unacceptable.
What's implied but unsaid here is that somehow the CCP is going to fill TikTok with political propaganda that... a bunch of teens are going to somehow become influenced by? Sorry, but that's just completely far-fetched. Facebook is something to be concerned about, with people sharing political stories, memes, etc. But TikTok? A bunch of funny videos? There's nothing that could be further from ideology.
> Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is that we aren’t China, and isn’t blocking TikTok something that China would do?
Yes, this is precisely why we don't need to do this. We're better than China. Things like freedom of speech, democracy, and the free market set a moral example to the world. Once we start censoring things, we lose that moral leadership. (And sure you can argue all you want about our declining moral leadership and the state of our democracy, but let's not make it even worse, shall we?)
> If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders but within ours, it is in liberalism’s interest to cut off a vector that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want.
Isn't every product trying to be brilliantly engineered to give customers exactly what they want? All this boils down to is, it's a good app, so let's kill it. Again, totally opposite the American values of competition, the free market, and consumers.
Sorry, but there is absolutely zero logic in this analysis.
The plausible deniability is easy. No one will ever find out if it was specially promoted. They could just throw up their hands and say that it all happened all by itself. The algorithm is a mystery and a trade secret!
U.S Teens are making "I Love China" videos on TikTok.
The algorithm could interfere to remove any pro-Trump or anti-China TikToks and noone would be the wiser. There is zero transparency.
The Chinese government can lend these institutions billions forever and undercut rivals and overpay programmers if it buys them political influence.
Speaking of a free market in ideas. 90% of the U.S media is owned by 5 companies. I think a good idea would be to reverse the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which allowed for massive TV and Radio consolidation. Local radio was actually good in the late 80s and early 90s and new music styles were discovered and promoted by disk jockeys on local stations. After 96, the conglomerates bought up all the radio stations and IMHO, popular music more or less froze in place with just the names of the bands rotating.
And all sorts of nonsense happens on Facebook. But TikTok is almost infinitely less political than Facebook.
The Trump rally thing was a prank that was widely publicized on the internet. And the "I love China" videos seem to be a joke too.
You're going to find a little bit of everything on every platform. The idea that TikTok is somehow pushing Chinese ideology remains completely unfounded and baseless. It's pure imagination and conjecture.
If it ever does, it will be obvious and action can be taken then. But until it does, banning something like TikTok is simply blatantly anticompetitive and stooping to China's types of censorship. Again, we're better than that.
Relevant to the topic of political propaganda and in particular conspiracy theories, the leftist blogger Digby wrote a good post [1] critical of TikTok even though she was sympathetic to the punking of the Trump rally in Tulsa. In particular, she cites reporting from the Daily Beast that Pizzagate conspiracy theories are circulating widely on the platform. I'm not endorsing this reporting as fact, but do think it is good food for thought. In any case, the platform seems to be very poorly optimized for critical thinking, which is fine for "laughter and dancing" but less fine in other domains.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadIt has absolutely brought more positivity into my life. I am specifically feeding the algorithm with this intent and I get what I asked for. It is a psychological tool.
> I would argue it is one thing to be absorbed by reading in your phone HN or other productive sources. Laughing and dancing on the other hand, after a certain period of time not so much useful.
"${RELIGIOUS GROUP}: A man who has an uncomfortable feeling that somebody, somewhere is enjoying themselves."
for a different ${RELIGIOUS GROUP}'s opinions on dancing, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591306
LOL. I find HN highly entertaining. Well...not to the point of breaking into a dance...but entertaining. Quite often I just jump straight to the comments.
There is nothing wrong in it, but there isn't much alluring there too. Its available from so many other platforms.
You're responding to him or her with "You don't need to understand the allure". And somehow seem offended that he or she doesn't understand what people are laughing about.
Come on.
Honestly, no, and I feel very disconnected from modern culture as a result. I use my phone like a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: to have access to everything we know as humans at my fingertips, in my pockets, at all times.
Otherwise, I don't use it. That said, I have nothing against people using their phone for enjoyment, and there's nothing wrong with people smiling, laughing, and dancing. It's just not easy to relate to the obsession with applications like Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and so on.
I have a social media account which I check approximately biweekly and definitely considered myself someone who wasn't falling into the attention trap in my pocket. I only read HN, a few news sites, send texts, and play chess on my phone.
I was amazed to see just how much time I spent doing these things. Even if in some way how I'm using the phone is more virtuous or less problematic ("this hour-long article about the architecture of the classic XBox gratifies my curiosity, is informative and gives me more context with which to understand my field!"), that time and attention sink still comes at the cost of everything else in life.
That's the whole point - the ability to curate content that you will like is phenomenal, especially given the non-obvious inputs to their model. Like a video? Sure you'll see more of that kind of stuff. You may not think about scrolling up/down to restart the video, watching it multiple times, sharing it, opening/closing the comments (and I'm sure 10,000 other inputs) all feed into it's ability to curate
I've learned lots of cool stuff on TikTok - my favorite tip recently has been a trick for partially juicing lemons while leaving them intact; last week I broke my soda habit as a result of easily accessible homemade la croix.
The dancing stuff is pretty mild and I'd say even constructive for children.
The allure, is hard to describe. The content I see is very human, people describing their experiences, doing harmless jokes on each other, or teaching something. How it differs from YouTube is that it is much more strongly tailored to your likes, and due to time constraints, skips the chuff and gets to the meat of things quicker.
Users have little control of what videos they see explicitly, but if you like 5 videos with the same tag, it will present more videos with that tag.
... and Chinese spyware in the pockets of children.
Edit to add: I don't make this post to complain about downvotes. The point was the potential brigading, since we're talking negatively about the Chinese state.
It's like pointing out that POC living at higher latitudes likely need Vitamin D supplements because the sunlight isn't intense enough for darker skin to produce enough Vitamin D naturally, because that's how melanin works. Then someone jumps in, down-votes you, calls you racist, and points out that white people need vitamin D supplements too. The rules of logic say those are bad/non-arguments, not me. Once or twice is an unintelligent person. A consistent long-term pattern makes it likely some variety of shill/troll/plant, or Chinese intelligence in the case of China-related articles.
Also, CCP shills are a nice myth but they don't operate overseas. The real shills serve a very different purpose: they are hired by local governments to cheat the central government into giving them promotions, by showing the central government comments from "happy citizens".
Hell China did likewise to the Mongol tribes for centuries until Genghis Khan came along. It's not like sowing discord among one's rivals is a new or novel strategy, and while Hacker News might be intelligent enough on average to see through it the bulk of the internet lacks that sort of scrutiny. Suggesting China and America are moral equals might not carry much weight in America, maybe even Western Europe, but Africa? The Middle East? South America? China has certainly tried more radical operations in the past, posting a swarm of "nudge" posts on social media to try and inch world opinion its way seems like an easy call if I were the Chinese propaganda ministry.
They have motive, means and opportunity.
Criticizing the CCP's actions in Hong Kong, for example, is not sinophobic. Criticizing their treatment of the Uighurs is not sinophobic, and criticizing their attempts at intelligence collection and propaganda is not sinophobic. Yet all have been called such at some point in Hacker News comments in recent posts.
And my point was that the strategy of sowing discord among one's rivals is thousands of years old and been proven effective. Would you prefer the example of the British in the Middle East? To suggest that the current CCP is unaware of or uninterested in promoting such a strategy is laughable.
I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US. The US isn't intractably opposed to liberal democracy, but the CCP is:
From the OP:
> To that end, this long history looms large in how China thinks about its relationship to the U.S. specifically, and the West generally. China is driven to reverse its “century of humiliation”, and to retake what it sees as its rightful place as a dominant force in the world. What few in the West seem to realize, though, is that the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished, and that Western liberal values are actively hostile to that goal. Tanner Greer wrote in Tablet:
> ...
> This understanding of China’s belief that it is fighting an ideological war explains why the severe curtailing of freedom that happened in Hong Kong this month was inevitable; if the Party’s ideology is ultimately opposed to liberalism anywhere, “one country-two systems” were always empty words in service of China’s rejuvenation, and Marxism’s triumph. To see that reality, though, means taking China seriously, and believing what they say.
I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.
Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist. And you're giving that info freely, better hope the CCP doesn't decide to use it against you while you're there to make a political statement. They've done and are doing far worse over less.
Again, I do not reside in the US and do not imagine that the NSA is on "my side", so obviously I'm going to take a more jaundiced view of surveillance apps of US origin.
> Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist.
Yes. This is equally true of the US. You are ordered to disclose all social media accounts at the border, and can and will be denied entry to the country if your social media posts contain political statements (or even apolitical statements) that the interviewing officer objects to, whether posted by you or merely sent to you: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s..., https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16810312, etc
Could you go into more detail about your thoughts on "[each] country’s ideology" and why you think that makes their social networks (which IMHO are a form of media) roughly equivalently desirable?
IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better. China's government, on the other hand, is pretty unrepentant about the bad things it does, and explicitly rejects and suppresses the mechanisms that could lead positive change in those areas. If the OP is correct and China's government sees itself in an ideological war with the West and its ideas of liberal democracy, then I'd expect that Chinese social networks will be drafted to serve in that war, either now or in the future.
If I dislike beef, I might not be enthusiastic about eating a steak, but I'd still prefer that to some chicken cooked in motor oil.
From the outside, I think Americans generally over-estimate the degree to which modern America is actually a liberal democracy. The tolerated range of speech seems to in reality run a perilously narrow gamut from "neo-conservative" to "arch-neo-conservative", with anything left of the former routinely subject to exercises of state force to attack and undermine that dissent in practice (declarations of turning the nebulous self-applied label of "Antifascist" into a "terror organization", COINTELPRO, etc, etc), regardless of what freedoms are claimed to be enshrined in the US constitution.
And this is merely its internal opposition to liberal democracy; again, even a cursory glance at modern Latin American history demonstrates that the US happily prefers right-wing dictators to democratically elected leftists, if the latter is at all detrimental to the US government's interests.
> Hand wringing about TikTok seems more rooted in sinophobia than genuine privacy concerns, from where I’m sitting.
This is a strawman. People dislike the CCP not the Chinese.
Perhaps I simply don’t consider the Hispanic concentration camps, private credit scores that still gate hiring, access to healthcare (via hiring) and renting and apartment, and surveillance panopticon powered by Google, better?
I wouldn’t care to try to parse any moral superiority between how apologists want to characterize the ICE camps and how Chinese apologists want to characterize the Uighur camps, myself. Neither strikes me as terribly deserving of our defense.
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
I merely said I don’t see how it’s worse than the major US social networks. Like say Facebook, which has been caught multiple times allowing employers and housing advertisers to illegally exclude groups like Black people, from seeing job postings and apartment listings.
Again, I don’t know that what TikTok has been shown to be doing is any worse.
Or look at the Uyghur internment camps. Or the one child policy that effectively turned some communitys 80% male.
There is no opposition in China that can speak up against this.
This line of reasoning is getting old. All social media apps are data collection driven platforms
If the US government were using Facebook to censor and disseminate propaganda, we'd likely eventually hear about it.
In contrast, the Chinese government is certainly using TikTok to censor and quite likely to disseminate propaganda. Critics of that policy will be imprisoned.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-202...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...
Which does an excellent job helping to stimulate thought of just what the power and purpose of these types of apps as well other structures (alphabet) are able to do...
From a spying perspective, I tend to agree with you as well.
That said - China doesn't let FB or Twitter in their country, why the hell should the US let them in ours? To me it is akin to letting them buy the NY Times or CNN. They may be benign now, but if tensions were to continue mounting, they could greatly influence the content a significant portion of people in the US are receiving. I see 0 reason to trust them with that power.
If the Chinese government is going to aggressively moderate TikTok to keep that out... uh, cool, I guess. I'd be happy to see some popular entertainment that doesn't devolve into a screaming match. But it's a lot of work, and reduces audience (i.e. revenue).
Bytedance has an isolated version called Douyin.
I believe if FB or Twitter created specific versions that comply with China’s laws, they would be allowed.
A lot of people in comments are talking about how great the feed algorithm is out weeding out teenage dance videos and showing interesting content.
You can easily imagine a scenario where CCP tweaks its algorithms to favor content relating to one party or candidate vs. the other.
The scary part is that I think it wouldn't be obvious to know whether China is exploiting TikTok's American audience via algorithms driving a certain agenda since it can be done very subtly in non-obvious ways.
Due to China's "security" laws security and intelligence agencies have essentially full access to large companies' data. There's no real due process so a "private" company's data is essentially government data. There's also the overt and covert censorship and propaganda imposed by the government.
Company executives serve at the pleasure of the government. Anyone not towing the party line or acting with too much independence will get caught up in "anti-corruption" investigations or just be arrested for crimes they may or may not have actually committed.
Realistically it's better to just assume a priori that a Chinese social media company is pushing propaganda and building dossiers of users. It's certainly safer to assume that.
That's just "official" propaganda. The CCP's various astroturfing brigades are well documented (see "50 cent army" and "internet navy"). They show up in public forums of all stripes.
TikTok doesn't allow discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Falun Gong, Free Tibet, or anything other topics the CCP deems inappropriate. That censorship is propaganda by omission. Content users see being primary algorithmic makes it trivial to add in pro-CCP or just anti-West content into people's feeds.
For Hong Kong citizens, it's much worse. They are being identified and arrested in the hundreds as the Chinese government has access to this data to find anyone insulting or ridiculing them. That's very totalitarian to me.
That doesn't seem like a very charitable interpretation of OP's comment.
If a very small fraction of global users may come to harm as a result of (not by) using an app, then that's pretty much the textbook definition of "pretty harmless".
Take any social media app and there is something toxic, mean, snarky about it. Twitter is optimized for snark and shit storms. Facebook has your crazy uncle sharing fake news. Instagram posts are fake and pretentiousness. Reddit has their subreddit drama.
TikTok is just fun. Even wholesome fun.
I tried if I could find one mean tiktok video, but there was not one bullying video. Even if the girl making a dance video was ugly/fat the comments on that were encouraging and positive.
It's important to recognized that it's not a coincidence that TikTok exists and is run by a Chinese company.
In the West that replacement would have been immediately purchased by FB or Twitter and then summarily destroyed. This is literally what happened to the closest Western equivalent: Vine.
The Chinese government has many faults, but unlike the US government, the Chinese government still enforces the idea that Chinese companies should operate in the interest of the nation.
Facebook did try to buy Musical.ly, the company that became TikTok, and would have likely destroyed it just like Twitter did Vine.
If the US government was remotely functional it would put a little effort into challenging the ability of near monopolies to simply destroy any competitor through acquisition. I agree that it's not ideal that the Chinese government is tightly connected with TikTok/ByteDance, but the reason there is no Western TikTok is because our governments (particularly the US) are so deeply aligned with the interests of larger corporations that a viable competitor to these cannot exist.
But people like short videos, so there's a tension there. If you're in ads, maybe just buy a few short video companies, get their patents to sue their competitors, and shut them down, so no one gets access to the thing that they like but is less lucrative for you.
But maybe you're right and they would have followed an IG model just fine.
In most cases, Chinese companies are basically owned and controlled by the state. This has nothing to do with monopoly or trust issues. Acquiring lines of credit in China after you get to a certain size basically means you're owned or partially owned by the CCP.
Any Bytedance related links were prohibited in WeChat, for example.
Besides "FB would have bought it," social media doesn't generally do "replacement." Nuanced differences in product lead to different products, because the "social" aspect is made of culture.
Any replacement for tiktok wouldn't be a replacement. It'd be a different product in the social media space. One way or another, a tiktok ban benefits FB, whether they build a competitor, buy it, or their existing products pick up tiktok's market share.
We are totally ill equipped to deal with modern monopolies. We weren't great at dealing with the old, monopolies. Now though, the laws, norms and political MOs are nearly irrelevant.
One trite example is prices. The default way to "prove" the effect of monopolies historically has been price. Prices don't exist in social media.
A deeper difference is the microeconomics. When Bell was being broken up, one big problem was creating viable component companies. If the courts screwed up and created failing child companies then telecommunications would be broken. This is a hard problem for a court, well outside their comfort zone. With social media the microeconomics is totally different. Even if FB disappeared, consumers would not lack for social media. The market is capable of replacing FB easily, all that's needed is for facebook to move aside. Commercial/profitability considerations are barely an issue.
The moment they had shut down vine.co, a new site with the same idea could have gone life and absorbed all the users.
Why does this not happen? There are Facebook user groups, reddits and other social networks, even Twitter itself. A replacement for something that popular should be known instantly and take over without friction. Why does 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it' not work here?
But that did happen - it was called Musical.ly, which is now known as TikTok (US). I don't think people realize that the US version of TikTok was preceded by an app called Musical.ly, which was also Chinese owned, but failed in China but had massive success in the US.
Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.
Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.
They all encourage a lot of nasty / outrageous content over time as that's what gets eyeballs.
I think much more positive, authentic, curated / focused content would be great. I'm done with filtering twitter, youtube, instagram ... endlessly as content eventually goes sour.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Hacker News all look seriously dated in comparison.
You are right.
There are big diffferences.
For one: You can joke on TikTok ...
Choke not joke...big difference
Closest I can get to HN ⋂ dancing is 1:34-1:48 in Virus' "You should ask" (where the video is about the difficulty of source attribution on a LAN, let alone an entire internet)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVdoQ2fmIYs
For those us whose Internet citizenship pre-dates Friendster and MySpace, the term "social media" has a particular meaning.
But for many younger "social media natives", the term basically just means "any website or app where you can make posts or comments".
When I think about it, it seems like a somewhat arbitrary distinction to make. I suppose the main difference is that the forums were self-hosted and I could have different identities for each one. And while I generally reused the same username, the fact that it wasn't just a matter of 'clicking on my profile' to see all my activity was something I really liked.
Maybe to me the term "social media" has come to mean "social media /companies/"? That doesn't quite satisfy, but it really does feel like the primary difference is that on these forums I knew that they were generally not run for profit, and the 'gods' were just individuals who volunteered their time to host or moderate. It felt safer, and more personal.
Yes please make a movie about your next it projekt ;)
I even hate repair-videos on youtube, it's slow and lame, the fix-it manuals are 1000s times better (since i know what a torx is and that most screws open counter-clock-wise)
Seriously.
Social media for techies - what will that look like in ten years? Like HN? Or more like TikTok ...
https://www.tiktok.com/tag/coding
https://www.tiktok.com/tag/startup
https://ayende.com/blog/Images/Windows-Live-Writer/Pair-Prog...
EDIT: Wow i clicked on #Coding and it is like i taught about it...pure waste of time with Rainbowhairs and talking needle slim guy's with more grease on top than the hole movie 'Grease'
If you play around with it for a bit, the algorithm will adapt to your taste.
I have a suspicion that HN will outlast TikTok, but it'll take a decade to find out.
Here are some TikTok tutorials on light painting [0]. I'm not saying that I like them, or that they are good, but they are incredibly pacey compared with the YouTube equivalents
[0] https://www.tiktok.com/tag/lightpainting
One major difference (that some may care about less than I do) is that the TikTok format is great for seeing a variety of content, but does little to help me create. Admittedly, YouTube is filled with lots of filler information (to please their own algorithms) but I could probably figure out what cameras/lights to use, software settings, how to edit, etc... The best TikTok can do is show me what others are capable of.
You do typically have to wade through a lot of crappy "Hey Guys Like and Subscribe!" garbage with 30 second title sequences to find the good ones though.
I don't have any evidence, but I believe human evaluation in the whole recommendation is the remedy that makes TikTok excels.
Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
But, there is a very different ethical and practical divide between a company implementing systematic discrimination and discrimination by individual users. This divide is large enough that most western nations have decided to draw their legislative lines there.
There is a word average just you know.
Btw, I checked your profile and I was sad to find that your blog doesn't seem to exist anymore. I'd love to read more about accessibility and the particulars of being a blind developer. I can't imagine what that's like, but I have at times wondered how I would approach it. I imagine many of us web developers could benefit from more awareness when it comes to accessibility in general!
That said, your Twitter appears to still be operational and relevant to the topic.
I really thought it was invaluable (TikTok is banned now). For us city dwelling upper middle class people, it gave a rare glimpse into the lives of people less privileged. And it wasn't maudlin or patronizing as a lot of narratives about the poor tend to be. Rather it was fun and authentic.
I remember when the lockdown happened and a lot of migrant workers were left stranded, the news channels were filled with horror stories and heartbreaking videos of poor families walking hundreds of kilometres to their homes. But on TikTok, there were plenty of videos shot by the same migrant workers where they shared their woes, but would sometimes break into a dance or make fun of their situation.
Has anyone made an Indian TikTok clone, and if so has it got any traction? Seems like an obvious thing to do, if it was that popular.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
[0]: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/mitron-app-tiktok-indian-...
I found it funny that the author of this post is trying to defend liberal values like the free flow of information on the internet by...making Apple and Google remove Tiktok from people's phones. He's correct that the primary political risk of Tiktok is the recommendation algorithm being manipulated. However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either.
This would have been a good chance to really defend free flow of information on the internet, open and swappable recommendation algorithms, personal data ownership, and so on, but the conclusion is basically "it's bad because a China-affiliated company does it". Generally, everything that Tiktok does that is wrong is also wrong when Facebook does it. The reality is that Tiktok is (for now) a superior product in many ways to anything from American tech companies. Why is this?
Using Facebook means you will see ads targeting you.
Using Tiktok means you are helping China silence millions of camped Uyghurs. You are helping China make the world a better place for Totalitarianism.
Totally different levels of evil
I'm genuinely curious if posts relating to China's treatment of Uyghurs are already meeting censors on tik tok.
If you do, you already have the answer. If you don't, I suggest you get to know a bit more about China before CCP's alternative facts become the facts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I haven't used Tiktok, but from what I understand you can only post videos taken using the phone's camera and they can only be edited using whatever filters are available within the app, effectively limiting how manipulated or manufactured the content can be. Sort of like a Snapchat for videos (with the caveat that you can save and post videos at a later time in Tiktok, whereas with Snapchat it's "now or never"). Coupled with not having an associated text component where you can easily post testimonials and links to a site where you're selling a self help book, get rich quick scheme, juice cleanse or gym routine, it should limit how easy it is to use it as a promotion platform.
In reality we don't regulate them nearly as much as we can, so the end result is that FB and Tiktok both invade your privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok
I prefer the idea of a US based social media company to a Chinese one. But only slightly. I would much rather the company be based somewhere with genuine intent to create consumer safety and privacy focused laws.
It’s pretty trivial to do that, and nobody would be the wiser.
Incentive for TikTok is to keep the CCP happy.
Given the geopolitical aims and ambitions of the latter, you can see why they aren't comparable.
The same can't be said of the Chinese Government. That seems like a pretty distinct reason to be more OK with FB/Insta/Snap than TikTok.
>Following the shutdown, ByteDance announced that it would give preference to Chinese Communist Party members in its hiring and increase its censors from 6,000 to 10,000 employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance
All Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the country’s National Intelligence Law to turn over any and all data that the government demands, and that power is not limited by China’s borders. Moreover, this requisition of data is not subject to warrants or courts, as is the case with U.S. government requests for data from Facebook or any other entity;
Their privacy policy notes data may be shared as well:
while TikTok claims that it is independent from ByteDance and stores data in the U.S. and Singapore, its privacy policy is clear:
"We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group."
I replied to the parent comment by accident, but:
That's the kind of content that survives the crucibles of Chinese censorship, "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics (especially politics) is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. It's why TikTok's content policy is designed to protect the status quo, often misinterpreted as being pro-Beijing when it's broadly pro-establishment. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. That said, I guess it's possible for TikTok to be weaponized to sow division, but why would they need to when the whole of western media sphere is doing so already.
IMO the style has it's place, whole of China has no choice but to live under it, but in the west, a plurality of content management philosophies calibrated for different audiences is good. There's lessons in managing toxicity to learn from TikTok even if it gets banned.
This is what the posted article is about. I cannot write a rebuttal to this that is better than what Ben Thompson wrote, and I won't. The section "A Reluctant Prescription" section is directly about this.
I can rebut this, however:
"However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either."
They don't do it in China.
This was an analysis on TikTok vs YouTube and focuses on how TikTok leverages mimcry to overcome the initial burden of ideation and yields significant content creation for its platform.
"On Youtube, 79% of views accrue to only 10% of its creators. While on TikTok 55% of viewers also create videos. " https://4thquadrant.io/freearticles/business-models/tiktok-a...
The traditional social media dominated by US companies is about sharing what you eat what you do where you are who do you sleep with and what you are angry about. People are essentially misbehaving when they post funny videos.
TikTok on the other hand is playful and the encouraged behaviour is to be creative.
When someone misbehaves on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook they would post videos that someone else made and A lot of that content is made on TikTok. The only creative space is in YouTube but it's not because YouTube encourages it but because there are people capable if using it like that.
I am not convinced that the issue with TikTok is a security issue, It's just that SV lost it's edge on culture and technology, and the crusade against TikTok or Huawei is mostly protectionism and this protectionism will eventually lead to Israel, EU, Japan, Korea, UK, Australia to spit domestic and global success stories like China does these days.
If the concerns were about security, there would have been regulations to ensure security(like requiring storing US users data on US soil and so on). USA is not doing that, USA is in war mode.
What even worse? People don't even want to hear it.
I am not the biggest fan of Peter Theil but I think he has a point on the monoculture, group thinking, high rents.
All these apps use behavioral design to get you hooked.
Tiktok is oversocialization on steroids. You have people not only acting out the behavioral scripts embedded and triggered in some meme music or voice you have people mimetically acting out what others are acting out. The psychological manipulation possible though TikTok is immense.
I remember my local high school's motto when I was growing up was something like, "we're not here to teach, we're here to create good, informed consumers".
Never mind the obvious problems with that statement, but just considering it on face-value: how can people become good, informed consumers without having some kind of exposure to the concepts of how easily information can be collected about and used to manipulate people?
I don't expect most high school students to inculcate the full breadth of the topic, just as so few seem to actually learn and retain anything about history, social studies, or even the freaking alphabet (I've met way too many people who think the English alphabet has 25 letters). But currently, the general populace has no idea the extent to which they and their data can be manipulated. It would be enough if all they learned was "you and your data can be manipulated".
Wow, whatever happened to trying to create good, informed citizens?
Glad I didn't go there.
I don't get it, was this the actual real motto, or something people said tongue in cheek?
I guarantee this: children who use TikTok (and YouTube to an extent, etc), will have issues in the future keeping attention on work, and other forms of important and difficult problems and introspection.
Our roommate who used it in our house is a dopamine addict. He never reads, is by far the laziest and sloppiest, he’s also unapologetic about it and unwilling to acknowledge it, sucks at conversation generally because he has nothing to add because all he does is game, YouTube, TikTok and work, and they all feed into each other. And worst - he’s just totally comfortable being the laggard. Everyone else is happier. They contribute more. They clean, they maintain. They do more and have more to talk about because of that.
I fear a generation of children raised on constant dopamine drip. I already see how hard it’s become for me to sit and read or sit and meditate and I try and avoid all that (Twitter is my vice). But I have a friend with a daughter who is addicted to YouTube/TikTok and I fear greatly for a generation raised like that.
For some reason, IG thinks I'm a track athlete (among many other things). Even for stuff I am legitimately into (like mountain biking), my IG explore page mostly serves me up these random accounts called things like 'MTBdaze' or 'bike247' that just seem to repost random pics/memes as a way to grow the follower count.
Isn't that because Tiktock's content is manually curated (for better or worse)?
TouTiao was about the feed and the algorithm from the beginning. The first time a user opened TouTiao, the news might be rather generic, but every scroll, every linger over a story, every click, was fed into a feedback loop that refined what it was the user saw.
Meanwhile all of that data fed back into TouTiao’s larger machine learning processes, which effectively ran billions of A/B tests a day on content of all types, cross-referenced against all of the user data it could collect. Soon the app was indispensable to its users, able to anticipate the news they cared about with nary a friend recommendation in sight.
I guess no way to be 100% sure of the validity of the claims, but here is one article reporting on it: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
TikTok actively pressured the moderators to filter out 'ugly, poor or disabled'[1].
I haven't used TikTok, but I think such apps of mass appeal at this age of intense screen time competition will resort activities like this; there is no magical reason for TikTok to be better than other limited attention social networks.
Even though I never thought of using TikTok, now as a disabled person I feel morally obliged to not use it.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tr...
It was known to be a safe haven for much worse type of people(X) because the app was predominantly used by teens in Asian countries where child protection online laws are nearly nonexistent.
Apart from turning a blind eye to it, along with moderation principles which made sure X got what they want, TikTok rose to market leader due to sheer number of Asian population.
TikTok (Musically) was an Asian first app unlike Instagram, high Smartphone/Internet penetration acted as a catalyst.
Only when they got prominence in western market, they started regulating the content for vulgarity.
I see maybe one selfie a week. I also know people who use it for home workouts. I’m sure there are a bunch of other, non-shallow, non-bland uses I haven’t heard of.
and the one I have curated the least has TikTok teenage lip sync videos as default.
Its literally Charlie De Malio all over the explore page. And no, this is not based on things I have liked. Its Hype House stuff promoted straight from Bytedance.
That's the kind of content that survives the crucibles of Chinese censorship, "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics (especially politics) is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. It's why TikTok's content policy is designed to protect the status quo, often misinterpreted as being pro-Beijing when it's broadly pro-establishment. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place.
E: IMO the style has it's place, whole of China has no choice but to live under it, but in the west, a plurality of content management philosophies calibrated for different audiences is good. There's lessons in managing toxicity to learn from TikTok even if it gets banned.
Maybe every 5th video in my feed is extremely political. It's not all just la-di-da dance and cat videos.
How did you get there? I played with TikTok for a while, but never escaped the "teenagers making videos about other teenagers to pop music" ghetto, and it didn't seem like there was a way for me to tell the algorithm what I wanted without just hoping it surfaced something that I could like.
push like on the stuff you do.
Also, this is not just about Tiktok as Ben mentioned. When American corporations like NBA start censoring things on their own soil, it is beyond reprehensible.
Facebook is likely doing the math now on what makes sense in terms of keeping advertisers happy while resisting temporary market pressure. The answer will probably be a discount on ads, not actually changing content policies, which is what the advertisers are likely gunning for anyways.
Thus they're automatically involved in some sort of information warfare.
I guess there's two options, either by default the the ecosystem doesn't allow for them to have that information ... or they're in play for these types of things.
I don't think there's any other options...
The app also seems to be kind of a wonky fit to Amazons, Microsofts or Apples portfolio (although Amazon does own twitch, so who knows).
I can't make a solid argument for it, but I wouldn't rule out either Netflix or Disney making a bid for TikTok. Both companies are great with video, and I think the current CEO of TikTok is the former COO of Disney. IDK.
The only way that wouldn't happen is if the new TikTok owner incorporated in a jurisdiction that forbid such a relationship. That seems unlikely since ByeDance could pay the spun off TikTok dump trucks full of money for the data.
Both.
> What do you think they want to do with it?
Absolutely no idea. Much like I had no idea what Facebook was doing, or planned to do, with my data back in the 00s. I think we've been down this road enough in the modern era to be distrustful of any entity, especially a government, especially my own government, and especially the Chinese government.
> If they really wanted it could they not acquire it by other means?
If they really wanted to target me as an individual, I am sure they could dig up $THINGS. That doesn't mean I want to do their job for them.
Your line of questioning here, as I've read it, boils down to: "What are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide?"
I have visited China multiple times. My wife is Chinese-American. My children are half-Chinese and will, hopefully, be fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese (MIL is Vietnam-born Chinese and a Vietnam War refugee), and English. A lot of our extended family still lives in China, in Hong Kong and the mainland (and even Taiwan). I am critical of China, online and off, and I have been for many, many years.
This isn't even that new to us, specifically. We decided in 2014 that we were not willing to go into the mainland anymore. Most of my wifes paternal family left Hong Kong after the hand-off in 1997 -- the writing was on the wall for anyone willing to pay attention. Given everything that has happened in Hong Kong in the last year or so, I don't think we'll ever visit family there again, either.
More on topic, though... It's bad enough that I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head about what sorts of bullshit the NSA, etc..., (and how they probably share this data freely, if asked, with the FVEY, allied intelligence agencies, etc...) are getting up to with my data, but I've learned how to deal with that without experiencing too much of a chilling effect. I don't have the mental capacity to fight this on yet another front, especially when my own understanding of Chinese state politics is so inadequate. Thankfully, I can easily opt out by simply not installing and/or using TikTok, or any of the other Chinese state-sponsored spyware, on any of our devices.
> Living outside of the PRC, it's harder to imagine what kind of practical use they'd put that same data to
Their reach doesn't end at their borders. The same can be said of every modern government / state on the planet today.
If you want a specific example, the Blitzchung controversy is worth understanding. [0] There's a list of censorship-related issues on Wikipedia, too. [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_censorship_of_Chinese...
With Twitter or Facebook, it's a lot easier to dismiss the magnitude of their influence. After all, they're not in business to influence politics. They just want to make tech & sell ads and make money. They don't care what becomes news, who wins elections etc. Benign commercial interests, that's all
With tiktok and the chinese government's explicit approach of combining public & commercial interest... That argument falls apart. That and the fact that it is a foreign entity potentially affecting american politics.
Ultimately, the argument will swing back to FB & such... hopefully.
Dude, I personally know people who work in Facebook's own lobbying department. I would be very surprised if Twitter didn't have the same thing.
EDIT: Mark Zuckerberg had to appear before Congress in 2018 specifically to address Facebook disseminating propaganda!
Exactly. Whereas with TikTok the government is pushing the propaganda.
"The chinese government use tiktok for propaganda" is an effective call to action. Once you form an opinion on tiktok, the FB equivalents will start to to stand out.
The CCP use tiktok for propaganda. Lobbying firms & individual candidates use FB for campaign. In terms of transparency, manipulativeness, political impact, morals and such... not that different.
Tiktok made sure to suppress HK protests, because they're directly controlled by the ccp. Many US firms (eg NBA) were also influenced by the CCPs desire to suppress support of the HK protest. Tiktok hired and greased many Democratic & Republican "staffers" to lobby for them. They grease pockets. Don't all large companies do that? Tiktok shares your data with the ccp. Facebook sells your data, sometimes to political actors. Meanwhile, the NSA help themselves.
The differences between tiktok and FB may get a ball rolling. ITLT, the similarities will come into play.
It's really hard to tell that you meant, "the public perception of Facebook is..." (that it's not in the business of influencing politics).
Republican interests channelled through russian oligarch friends made TRUMP possible.
Let's see what happens on the coming elections...
Presumably the GP is implying that TikTok would be working even closer with groups like CA, to the point with partnering with them instead of kicking them off the platform as Facebook did.
First, I think "benign commercial interests" are not. At least not at that scale. Lobbying proves the point. Tech/media is not even the big example. Military industry, banking, mining and healthcare are all far more intertwined with government. Their most important activity is lobbying. That said, tech lobbying still pretty big and the combination of lobbying and controlling a media powerhouse is worse than just lobbying.
More importantly, Facebook (etc), being a massive media channel has lots of power and influence just by being facebook. Again, commercial interests aren't necessarily benign.
FB might tweak the feed to make sure covid-19 rumour mills or deliberate misinformation campaigns don't get out of hand. That might be a good decision (or not), but it isn't a benign decision. It demonstrates that commercial interests, feeds and such are not neutral. They are deliberate, opinionated and that opinion affects reality.
There are two questions that the tiktok case brings up: "how much power?" and "who's power." Zuck isn't as scary as Xi, hence the different response to tiktok. OTOH, Facebook have the same sort of power as tiktok, just a lot more of it.
You got to be kidding me for blaming the Chinese government for combining public and commercial interest in this context. The amount of hypocrisy is astonishing. The banning of Tiktok, Zoom and Huawei is nothing but a political decision. It's amusing to see someone can blame this on China.
It just feels wrong only being surveilled by the NSA.
(by the end of the year Airstrip One will have always been part of Oceania)
TikTok will be banned. SV will do a US based replacement. All will be good.
Stratechery is playing on one side. The reality is that US companies are quite willing to censor and manipulate information as well.
Facebook and YouTube censored coronavirus information for the US government. Facebook is fine with right wing manipulation. These propaganda efforts by US companies affect people from other countries.
Both sides are just trying to amass and maintain power. The CCP needs to control information to maintain power. The US is a consortium of entities amassing money and power and likewise tries to destroy institutions preventing that. I bet if you look inside the CCP, you would likewise see multiple groups vying for power.
If you follow Stratechery’s logic, then non US countries should likewise ban Facebook and YouTube.
The more ethical solution would be worldwide standards on censorship.
It seems that companies not adhering to censorship cannot expand into China, however, Chinese companies adhering to censorship (e.g. TikTok) are able to expand into Western countries. Isn't this anti-competitive?
Like you just said, TikTok already compiles with this security law and censors/bans whatever the CCP requests. By moving outside of China it can either lose access to the Chinese market and get banned by China or still comply with its laws and get banned by the US.
The thing is, TikTok has offices out side of China due to the Musical.ly acquisition (Located in the US) so can still operate there whilst Bytedance being headquartered in Beijing.
A takedown request can be made to the App Store owner. Apple and Google.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/04/new-york-times-apps-removed-i...
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/21/skype-china-app-store/
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/10/protest-app/
How does complying with China's laws in China will get you banned from the US? The US has all the right to establish the laws for products distributed on its own territory, as China does for its own.
The company has an isolated version called Douyin that is only available in China.
Note: TikTok doesn't write Chinese law, so they're not the ones being anti-competitive, even if they benefit from it.
That China bans Google is bad for customers in China. What do we gain if we ban TikTok?
My worry is about CCP influence and their ability to both spread misinformation and at the same time suppress stories the party doesn’t like.
Easy current examples are the democracy protests in Hong Kong, and the sterilization going on in the Uyghur camps in China.
On Twitter you can talk about both things, on TikTok they will be shut down by the CCP and it’s set up in such a way that users wouldn’t even notice.
On Twitter you can also be critical of the USG.
That’s the risk to me, that the CCP turns down the knobs on speech they dislike and the public is too focused on dance videos to notice.
It’s an even greater risk to people like Joshua Wong, not only would his speech be suppressed on TikTok, but the company would also hand over whatever personal or location data they had on him to the government itself. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Wong)
The CCP should not be stewards of the services we use.
Ah, the land of the free!
This is BS, the economic system in China is in no way Marxist, nor is it going in that direction. It's worse, lol. This sounds like someone is simply rehashing propaganda he heard somewhere that was intended to either smear Marx or China or both.
While China has certainly strayed pretty far from its state-controlled economy in recent years, it also seems pretty clear that Xi is more ideologically "hardcore" than his predecessors.
Mainly in the sense that in order to adapt to the competitive threat from China the U.S. has to become more state capitalism and industrial policy guided.
Using strong government to guide industrial policy, fend off or cripple foreign competitors, enact infrastructure. These are the standard tools in China.
As for China, I wonder in the long term if this is not pioneering a completely new mode of the human species. What is the logical end of total surveillance and censorship? Eventually unifying every person into the mind of the state until individualism dissolves and we are all subsumed into a common entity.
Maybe I am speculating too far but if you could have everyone carry an implant from birth wired to a single network then you could achieve the common science fiction trope of an unified collective conscious. Maybe even the leading Party theoreticians haven't even sought about it this far yet.
> What matters more in an ideological war, though, is influence, and that is why I do believe that ByteDance’s continued ownership of TikTok is unacceptable.
What's implied but unsaid here is that somehow the CCP is going to fill TikTok with political propaganda that... a bunch of teens are going to somehow become influenced by? Sorry, but that's just completely far-fetched. Facebook is something to be concerned about, with people sharing political stories, memes, etc. But TikTok? A bunch of funny videos? There's nothing that could be further from ideology.
> Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is that we aren’t China, and isn’t blocking TikTok something that China would do?
Yes, this is precisely why we don't need to do this. We're better than China. Things like freedom of speech, democracy, and the free market set a moral example to the world. Once we start censoring things, we lose that moral leadership. (And sure you can argue all you want about our declining moral leadership and the state of our democracy, but let's not make it even worse, shall we?)
> If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders but within ours, it is in liberalism’s interest to cut off a vector that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want.
Isn't every product trying to be brilliantly engineered to give customers exactly what they want? All this boils down to is, it's a good app, so let's kill it. Again, totally opposite the American values of competition, the free market, and consumers.
Sorry, but there is absolutely zero logic in this analysis.
https://nypost.com/2020/06/21/tiktok-campaigns-ensure-hundre...
The plausible deniability is easy. No one will ever find out if it was specially promoted. They could just throw up their hands and say that it all happened all by itself. The algorithm is a mystery and a trade secret!
U.S Teens are making "I Love China" videos on TikTok.
https://www.recruitmentnewsuk.co.uk/2020/05/28/why-us-teens-...
The algorithm could interfere to remove any pro-Trump or anti-China TikToks and noone would be the wiser. There is zero transparency.
The Chinese government can lend these institutions billions forever and undercut rivals and overpay programmers if it buys them political influence.
Speaking of a free market in ideas. 90% of the U.S media is owned by 5 companies. I think a good idea would be to reverse the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which allowed for massive TV and Radio consolidation. Local radio was actually good in the late 80s and early 90s and new music styles were discovered and promoted by disk jockeys on local stations. After 96, the conglomerates bought up all the radio stations and IMHO, popular music more or less froze in place with just the names of the bands rotating.
The Trump rally thing was a prank that was widely publicized on the internet. And the "I love China" videos seem to be a joke too.
You're going to find a little bit of everything on every platform. The idea that TikTok is somehow pushing Chinese ideology remains completely unfounded and baseless. It's pure imagination and conjecture.
If it ever does, it will be obvious and action can be taken then. But until it does, banning something like TikTok is simply blatantly anticompetitive and stooping to China's types of censorship. Again, we're better than that.
[1]: https://digbysblog.net/2020/06/tiktok-isnt-the-answer-folks/