They still haven't learned their lesson and its algorithm is just as bad as the rest of the other social networks, if not the worst.
Perhaps they should be fined in the millions like the rest of the other social network companies like Facebook, Instagram, etc. Repeat offences should be increased into the billions if possible.
Personally the algorithm works just fine for me. If you interact with what you find is trash / comment / like it will show you more of that content. If you don't want to see it dont' watch it or comment on it. You'll stop seeing it and the items you WANT to see you need to interact with and you will continue to get more of that. If you watch / comment on suicide videos thats exactly what you will get in your feed.
They aren't pushing suicide videos specifically. Like most feed driven social media platforms, a video gets some engagement and it appears in the feeds of some users as a result. If it gets flagged or reported they take it down.
TikTok does actively take down content that violates their guidelines. Children are much more likely to come across nudity or porn on Twitter/Instagram.
Of course. I let "some users" do a bit too much work in my previous comment.
The point was that they're not doing anything that the other platforms aren't doing.
They seem to do a fair bit to identify content that breaks their guidelines. To the point that users often make up alternative terms for sensitive topics e.g. Nazis become Yahtzees/N@zi and suicide becomes unalive. The belief is that TikTok flags videos with these terms and may remove them outright or downrank them in the recommendation algorithm.
There's a lot more outright pornography on Twitter and Instagram than TikTok.
Or more probably it can be a combination of both (and possibly more) explanations. There is no way to know, all we can do is speculate.
But to think that this is just chaos theory is as naive as to think these behaviours are fully planned. That would mean that tiktok has no business strategy nor preferred outcomes to optimize towards.
If this is the case, then the system needs to be far less complex. The algorithm should absolutely be tuned in the direction of steering children toward content suitable for children and away from that which is not. They know this is not currently the case and doing nothing, so yes, they're purposely keeping it harmful.
I don't know how true it is, but allegedly[1] the algorithm of tiktok in china is tuned to promote achievements and education, while in the western world it promotes debauchery and stupidity.
Doesn't take a huge leap to think it could be intentional..
On TikTok you largely just get more of what you've already engaged with. If you're using the platform for porn you're going to get a lot of it. If you like and engage with scientific/political content you'll rarely, if ever, see a video of someone dancing.
edit:
It's anecdotal but having taken a look at TikTok's web feed: https://www.tiktok.com/foryou. The content there was less sexual than the purportedly sanitised Douyin.
You could easily see for yourself by visiting the link in the previous comment.
For what it's worth. Four out of the first five videos I saw on Douyin were sexualised in some way, the first was of a train driver. I scrolled through 20 or 30 of the videos on TikTok's website and didn't find anything close.
I think the parent poster is pointing out that there are more ways of discriminating traffic than just a domain name. Such as geographic location, device IDs, etc. All of which are commonly used.
It's not proof of what is being claimed, but they are variables that would need to be controlled before being confident that Douyin is or is not adjusting content to foreign or domestic users.
I did consider that. Traffic discrimination certainly occurs. However, I don't believe it's presence supports the claim in this case.
The original claim is that Douyin promotes "wholesome" educational content, whereas TikTok is manipulating the west with pornography and other depravities.
Anecdotal observations gathered through the web UI of each app, as an anonymous user, were that Douyin presented "pornographic" content, whereas TikTok did not.
The original claim only stands if we accept that ByteDance is:
* Allowing a vast quantity of sexually explicit content to be posted to Douyin.
* Not showing that content to their users in China but only to western users of Douyin, despite being presented entirely in Chinese.
While also:
* Targeting western users of TikTok with pornography and explicit videos.
* Not showing any of that content in their web UI, despite it quickly becoming the entirety of the Douyin one.
I find it hard to believe that this would be the case. A sanitised Douyin and depraved TikTok, or both being depraved, would have supported the idea. The behaviour that was observed runs entirely counter to the claim.
Frankly, the opinion does not appear to be grounded in reality but comes instead from a place of insecurity regarding our social values. Consider whether any western platform promotes science and engineering over pornography, Twitter and Instagram allow much more explicit content than TikTok, and then ask why TikTok seems to have been singled out.
Think about it a bit more clearly. Douyin in china might be entirely different than the douyin you see when you check it out with a western ip.
By checking douyin.com from my device, my ip and my advertising fingerprint, I cannot have any clue how douyin behaves if I download it from a chinese phone, in china.
I clearly state that possibility in my comment and explain why I think it's unlikely.
The base claim was that ByteDance was pushing sexualised content on TikTok while policing it on Douyin. This makes zero sense given that TikTok's web content was sanitised. Douyin being awash with sexualised content implies an audience for that content in China, further weakening the argument that this is some sort of targeted attack.
The alternative is that Douyin thirst traps are some sort of co-ordinated attack on the west. Despite not being available in the western app or translated in any way.
That's completely untrue. I can't say if the algorithm is the same. In my short experience of using Douyin for the past couple weeks, I get zero education content, but a surprising amount of content about inequality and injustices.
Devil's advocate: you'd need to be in both countries on different device IDs. If you go US -> visit to China, their algorithm "knows" this as opposed to "you are in China and have never been to US before". Just a guess.
> but a surprising amount of content about inequality and injustices
Is it inequality and injustice. where pointing it out. would actually threaten the power of the CCP?
When I started reading Chinese language media I was surprised how much apparent criticism there is -- but if you read carefully, anything approved in the PRC is always criticism of individuals, or maybe corporations, more rarely a local government, doing something that's already supposed to be officially prohibited, or which is not too sensitive, and never criticizes core official policy or high-ranking CCP members.
Which is how you can have anti-corruption, anti-sex scandal, anti-pollution news commentary, or even protests and marches, in China. But should official permission to disagree be withdrawn, the topic can very quickly become taboo. A couple years ago there was ongoing discussion in Chinese media about same-sex marriage and a member of the Yuan even introduced a bill to make same-sex marriage legal in China. Voted down. But an acceptable topic to discuss, not officially taboo. I suspect that has changed recently, with the campaign against the apparent feminization of Chinese men and now explicitly linking LGBT rights with the Western agenda. That shift, as I understand it, comes directly from Xi.
This is possible. But the the evidence in that link is Tucker Carlson. I don't think we can know whether this is actually happening and we're seeing a lot of speculation about what China could or would do given the power they have through moderation of TikTok.
The possibility of China abusing content moderation might be enough to throw out the app altogether. But the only "evidence" we currently have is guessing at what China might do and people in media amplifying that discomfort.
> while in the western world it promotes debauchery and stupidity.
Isn't the narrative "that's what the western world consumers more of/wants" versus "China values achievements and education more than debauchery and stupidity"?
We are talking about kids. They will want what you teach them to want.
With parents working insane hours in the US and outsourcing the socialisation and education of kids to electronics and corporations with perverse incentives, with local communities practically gone in an urban lifestyle, we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked.
This is true. Tiktok is the current problem but there's going to be a lot of stuff like this that the world is going to throw at kids.
It's the parents responsibility to curate the world the their kids are exposed to and build up their defences for all the crap that they're going to finally encounter.
I think it's also the responsibility of societies participants to not seek profit from activities that harm and undermine the society they're a part of. If all we do is play zero sum games and try to get as much money as possible from the people around us for the least effort, you end up with this modern-west mess where we're all shooting each other's feet off to be the tallest instead of... building stools?
https://www.cnet.com/culture/internet/the-way-kids-use-memes... , this article is pretty interesting, it touches on how digital culture permeates young children and how they aren't constantly connected. But they are connected enough to have these disembodied memes on the playground the way my generation heard about Marilyn Manson's missing rib and that superman S we all drew.
I had never heard the "superman" part of that, I always thought it was Stussy. But I knew exactly what you meant! Turns out both were accepted origins, but not necessarily true.
I don't trust narratives about what people are seeing on social media without empirical data. The news media are naturally going to report the worst cases, but we don't know anything about the average case. It doesn't get as many clicks if you report on how many cool science videos kids are watching.
> I don't trust narratives about what people are seeing on social media without empirical data.
I mean, I can speak from my own personal use case (I think I average 30-60 minutes of TikTok screen time a day per week... yeah... I know, not great). I would agree with you. The only reason somebody's feed would show "low grade" content is if they curated it to be that way for themselves.
Now, is it easier to curate a feed of garbage West vs East? Not sure...
I would think that CCP just forces them to penalize certain things (and maybe promote other things) and in the west they merely don't do that (both for engagement and to avoid getting canceled for censoring certain topics).
Compared to other social media it doesn't seem that "debauchery and stupidity" is more prominent there.
This is it. Douyin follows Chinese law, while TikTok doesn't. It has independent editorial control, which ends up very similar to other social media in the same environment.
It's the conspiracy theory I 100% believe in. I don't think the reason to ban TikTok is that it gathers information, I think the reason to ban it is that its ranking algorithm is deliberately destructive. Maybe it's a coincidence that all the dangerous stunts and vandalism "pranks" come from TikTok and not Meta and Twitter, but I don't buy it.
I'm leftist liberal and I have no particular paranoia about China, but I'm not going to pretend that we are besties
Edit: I won't remove the classification of myself as "leftist liberal" because it would make some of the replies to my comment confusing. I will apologize for it because it has derailed the discussion of China and TikTok. In the future I'll be more specific and avoid labels that no two people can agree on.
Suffice to say that I don't believe China deliberately created and released Covid.
I'm not the OP, but I read that qualification as meaning "I'm not some right-wing nutter that's paranoid about Red Danger, and I don't believe everything mainstream media tells me".
The left/right view of the political spectrum doesn’t accurately characterise politics anywhere. Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense. The only generalisation I think reliably separates left/right is the level of government intervention, in both economic and social issues, that they ideologically support. But I don’t think that translates very well into the level of intervention they end up implementing. That also doesn’t really relate very well to the actual core ideas of liberalism or conservatism. But that’s messed up everywhere. It’s only that most of the world generally pays attention to US politics.
> Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense.
There is an interesting case made[1] that while this used to be true, it is actually not the case any more and that things are starting to become rather anti-liberal on both sides of the political spectrum.
I’m not sure I buy that argument. When I was a kid I remember we had the PMRC, panic over violence in video games, and endless debates over a different flavour of “political correctness”. They purveyors of moral panic has a different cast today (on both sides of the political spectrum), but I don’t really buy into this “everything is worse than it used to be” idea. I guess government encroachment on civil liberties tends to only head in one direction, but I’m not sure that’s the topic of the book?
I think the biggest change is that a lot of people just came out of an era where there was a national media narrative that was highly agreed upon and very New England, classically "liberal". Except around sex and drugs of course.
This narrative dominated TV, print and to a lesser extent radio. It really created the notion in people's heads that this narrow band was really what people thought about. What people are reacting to in large part is the newly visible presence of alternative perspectives. They were always there. They were just strategically locked out by people who decided what was "fringe". Basically anything that didn't support institutions was ignored or disparaged.
Waco and Cuba are two prime examples. Waco was written off in the national media because the people in the compound were so "weird". And for years the national media has underwritten the American foreign policy blob's almost neurotic fixation with Cuba.
The argument put forward in the book is that the extreme polarisation is in fact quite new, and that it has lead to a situation where extreme, anti-liberal ideologies, has been given more room to act within their respective communities and been given power to punish non-believers into submission and suppress free speech. Creating a form of vicious spiral.
A quote from the page I was just reading:
> “When Speech First brought a lawsuit against Michigan, alleging that their bias response teams were unconstitutional and “flagrantly violate the First Amendment,” the court agreed, ruling against the school. As of 2022, 456 U.S. colleges⬥ have bias response teams (almost double the 2017 total of 232),49 and very few have been subject to investigations like the one at Michigan.”
The term for this is "neoliberal." Classical liberalism birthed the Gilded Age and the series of economic failures that gave rise to communism and WW2. Neoliberalism encompasses a series of ongoing experiments with micromanaging economic tendencies. It will most likely die an even worse death than classical liberalism.
> Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense.
Wrong. They are neoliberal, not classically liberal.
Classical liberalism (belief in naturalistic free market economics) failed in the 20th century and neoliberalism took its place, characterized by top-down micromanagement of economic ecosystem.
In other words, classical liberalism insists markets will thrive only when left to their own devices. Neoliberalism insists markets will thrive only when managed by competent administrators (see Federal Reserve).
There's a difference between recognizing that China has a political structure I don't like and the "everything China bad" red scare bullshit that is going on.
The US is plenty authoritarian and China becoming a democracy wouldn't actually change any of the things that people are paranoid about. The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers.
Taken as a single political entity on the national stage China is just USA but in italics. It makes total sense that we would be uneasy in the US but that unease is how everyone not in the US feels about us. The unwavering belief that we're the good guys leads us to project our military might much more freely which doesn't exactly make us popular.
It is crazy that TikTok being a Chinese based company is obviously some ploy to undermine the US while in reality the CCP just forced TikTok to change their algorithm to be educational in China where such a thing wouldn't fly in the US because of the first amendment. China's video game ban for under-18s operates on the same principal.
> The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers.
Ludicrous false equivalency.
The USA doesn’t have laws preventing its citizens from criticizing the government, nor are its corporations required by law to participate in policing speech.
This is the reason why criticism of China is so muted.
I agree with you. I think America's system overall has more popular accountability in who holds power but "the foreign policy blob" does a very good job of diffusing that popular accountability in foreign matters.
In contemporary American politics, "liberal" and "authoritarian" are often overlapping categories.
The two-party system makes for all sorts of weird alliances of distinct groups getting lumped together- there's really no reason that one's opinions on gun rights should be related to one's opinions on energy policy, or why one's opinion on abortion should be related to one's opinion on foreign affairs policy, but with two parties all these separate issues get grouped into two camps associated with either "Republican" or "Democrat" and then in turn everything "Republican" can also be called "Conservative" or "Right-Wing" and everything "Democrat" can also be called "Liberal" or "Left-Wing".
Using some academic definition of what "liberal" or "right-wing" or whatever meant in Europe in the 1890s or 1930s doesn't really work in popular English-language media today.
I'm amazed at how people will happily (enough) coalesce into two parties and align their views accordingly. Maybe it's just an exercise in dimensionality reduction.
It's hard to get anything done without a majority coalition. The two party system endures due to quirks of our election design that the two parties themselves are both very happy to keep in place (any change to elections that would make 3rd parties viable would cause the two current parties to lose some power).
"Liberal" is an oxymoron. The social contract is not optional. We agree to be bound by rules because we prefer it to being by force, which is the default. Security is liberty, in the optimization sense.
No it's not, because personal politics aren't pure embodiments of monolithic ideologies. It's a shorthand for a political perspective that incorporates aspects of both liberalism and leftism.
"I'm a completely leftist liberal, therefore I don't have any particular paranoia about China" is a type error. China is an autocracy, with a track record of doing things that warrant paranoia.
I don't really care what you mean by leftist, but you definitely cannot claim to be a liberal and have no "paranoia" about China.
There's a scale I suppose. Paranoia is "China deliberately created and released Covid". My non-paranoid opinion is that China is a large and powerful country which has complete control over its citizens and companies and very much wants the US out of its hair so that it can take over large chunks of Asia with no pushback.
It is not unreasonable to believe in conspiracy theories involving China, because they have a centralized, authoritarian government, which means that true conspiracies occur frequently, and are mandated by the government.
USA has Hollywood, Super Bowl, and the NRA, and yet people clutch pearls when Americans get shown violent debauchery through a specific social media app. Totally unserious. These are parts of our culture that aren't necessarily universal (i.e. that would be reflected on Douyin).
On the last bit... I don't believe they deliberately created and released it, I do believe it was likely a lab leak, and likely negligence. There were a few similar protocol breaches with sensitive materials the prior two years. I also do think that any knowledge to be had was covered up for political reasons. Deny and cover-up, it's what major governments do.
I do think that through malice or neglegence, that tiktok's algorithm is harmful to children.
It may be true on the margin, but Douyin is full of 'Key Opinion Leaders' who at best pay lip service to education and attainment. It's even worse on Kuaishou (Douyin for more rural areas). [0]
I always kind of bristle at the argument that this is somehow impacting what kids want too - PBS exists and spams their content as far and wide as possible, but US kids still end up preferring Cocomelon, Gabby's Doll House, etc.
There's no reason to believe that Chinese youth just take what's given to them when there are literally millions of random livestreams (hard to regulate livestreamed content at that level) going on at any given time.
As usual with China, what's likely going on is that someone is the CCP wants it to be true, so they 'make it true' and US media without local context takes it at face value.
From Wikipedia: "OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news website that frequently publishes misinformation."
To me, it seems much more likely that China is just censoring TikTok like they censor every other platform, while the rest of the world sees a standard recommendation algorithm. "Debauchery and stupidity" is a subjective, sanctimonious phrase that doesn't really mean anything.
Anti-intellectualism is ingrained in the American societal psyche and was seen as a thing to be proud of many times in the past. Hofstadter‘s Anti-intellectualism in American Life is one of the best explanations of this process.
As such, apps like TikTok are just following the target population’s specs.
Whenever I see this comment on HN I always am a bit surprised: Do you not have any friends from/in China?
This conspiracy theory always gets a good chuckle out of me and my Chinese friends whenever it comes up. I have a good chunk of my family living in China and I can assure you, Chinese kids watch just as much if not more junk over there than they do in the US.
This is similar to trying to argue that America kids only play wholesome games on the Xbox or Youtube because they have parent controls.
But to my first point: surely working in tech right now you have a few Chinese coworkers. I recommend you grab lunch with them sometime (and let them choose the place to eat!)
CNN America shows the most ridiculous rage-bait every hour, on the hour. But CNN International (airing in non-American markets) is significantly more toned down because it tries to compete with BBC News, France24 and NHK.
Maybe Tiktok is just trying to give the market what it wants? Idiotic stunts were going viral years before TikTok existed.
I don't think so. CNN America isn't a Chinese product as far as I'm aware. Therefore I think /u/chaud is trying to say that TikTok is just giving the people what they want.
I'm not familiar with opIndia but the article you've cited is unhinged. It cites a DailyMail article which uncritically amplifies anti-trans campaigners, who are basically saying that it's a problem for trans people to publicly share stuff about their transition.
The opIndia article says "The flood of such content on TikTok, an immensely popular social media platform among the youth, is a serious problem that needs to be addressed at the earliest."
There's a lot of dumb stuff on TikTok, but trans people not being suppressed isn't really one of them. And there might be _toxic_ stuff on TikTok, but in the context of an article where youth are pushed to material about suicide, linking to an article calling for the suppression of trans perspectives as if that was part of the same problem is super shady.
As for Douyin having a different algorithm, I'd point out that within China it was still viewed as being harmful enough to kids that they put in a 40m daily time limit, and restricted it to specific hours. I'm guessing it's also not great for kids there.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934
Seriously though, why haven't we banned TikTok yet? There is no legitimate reason to allow them to keep pushing disinfo here. There are already tons of replacements lined up ready to replace it, it would not hurt anyone in the US at all to ban it.
The US government is working on it by giving themselves sweeping new powers to throw you in jail for using apps that are not approved.
This answers your question: the harm banning it does is the laws that will be pushed to make it happen. Meanwhile, as you said, Instagram stands ready to show the same kind of content to teenagers if TikTok goes away. I suspect the actual harm reduction will be minimal.
By that logic everything Made In The USA should be banned everywhere outside the US. Snowden proved that it is by far the worst offender and leaks have shown that Instagram is just as bad as TikTok, and they do it knowingly. All the anti-Tiktok reeks of racism.
How strong of an incentive do we need to ban an app? Should we ban apps made in Brazil, because the BRICS nations are considering making an alternative to the US Dollar? That's pretty adversarial. Or maybe apps made in France or Japan, because some of their companies compete with ours (especially in telecom)? And what about people who get in the way of progress, such as anti-war protesters? Not a slippery slope argument, I just want people to think about where they draw the line. There are no wrong answers,.. just... tradeoffs.
but then the US would have to ban twitter and FB/Insta.
IT would be better to have an enforceable set of licensing. But that wont happen because 1st amendment noises (rightly or wrongly. I'm not sure that corporations should really be treated as humans in this instance, but US case law thinks it should since the 70s.)
Tik Tok is illegal in mainland China, the "local version" called douyin is heavily doctored to promote only positive messages. Ironic that CCP cry anti asian hate on the proposition to ban tik tok
We're talking about children here. Their decision-making skills and understanding of consequences is by nature impaired (compared to the typical adult).
Upvoted because I see your point, although I think you’re being too harsh.
I don’t have kids, but surely you see the design flaw at play here:
I’d want to give my future kid a phone so I may connect with them at will, but at the same time a phone allows others to connect with them (giving them addictive content to serve ads for example)
An iPhone has pretty good parental controls, but when it’s time for the child to connect with their peers, the same place they connect with peers is the same place designed to exploit them, with little to no alternative.
It’s like we’ve transported our 11 year olds into digital pool halls where parent supervision is banned and the pool hall owner keeps serving them drinks
I won’t be giving my future child a phone before 13 but I have no illusions that they’ll be normal peer after not having the same access to such things.
It’s like the McDonald’s play pens all over again, but worse!
> An iPhone has pretty good parental controls, but when it’s time for the child to connect with their peers, the same place they connect with peers is the same place designed to exploit them, with little to no alternative.
try to use it and you will see how bad it actually is, reinstalling an app removes its timeout, any kid almost trivially goes around it, you have to not forget to block the web versions of the apps, there is +1 minute, there is issue with whatsapp links etc
my daughter(12) also just asks for 15 mins extra youtube, then she just looks at my fingerprints on the phone to guess the screentime code, so i have to wipe my fingerprints like i am in a james bond movie (changed the screentime code like 3 times until i figured out what is happening)
i am trying to teach her self control and also to monitor her feed like a hawk and be super critical of what she watches
also once a week we go over all the feeds and try to teach the algorithms to show better things (like/follow some science/code youtubers, block toxic ones, watch few videos etc)
i also pay for everything i can so she doesnt see ads (including having pi-hole and adblockers)
The question is how to keep kids off social media. I am very thankful neighbor mom, who bought her son a smart watch and not a cheap android phone. Good example for other kids. It’s clear, that departments with lots of clever people are doing to lock young kids in the phones. And only parents can protect them.
You can't keep them off it. If you don't provide them access, they can get access on their friend's devices.
The key is education, you have to explain to your kids how these services works, how they are optimized for content engagement to show ads, how they mine your data, and what kinds of things they should look out for and avoid (like misinformation, catfishing, grooming, viral stupidity etc)
We sneaked into local military training compound to look for bullet casings (coz guns and cool) at that age. We'd be far fucking safer if we played online games instead lmao.
We also hitch-hiked to save bus money parents gave us to get some ice cream
I have an ongoing conversation with mine about the things he finds online. We talk about how people try to benefit from appearing "rich" online. We talk about how people have problems in their lives and find things to blame and rant about online. We talk about how people you don't know can try to get things from you or make you think a certain way.
He even started using the term "clickbait" before I even taught it to him. These kids are savy. I think the biggest thing we can do for them is to help them understand how to contextualize what they're engaging with because they don't get to grow up in the "before" and "after" worlds that elder millennials did.
And frankly, I see that my kid is just as saturated in propaganda from his public school as he is from online media. So far, in parallel to his education, school seems to be running one giant ad for the US armed forces.
My parents were pretty clear about what was good/bad. "you can see all sorts of stuff on the internet. But first things first, never use your real name or address. Second, we can totally see what youre looking at."
For me that worked.
For my older sister, she still tried to run off with a bloke she met off a chat room.
You are right in the second part, but the first part is unnecessarily defeatist. You could say the same about alcohol and smoking, "they will anyway try it with friends", yet it still makes sense to keep children away from it or postpone it.
While you cannot keep kids away from it forever, it makes a lot of difference when they are exposed to it and how well-equipped they are to deal with it.
"You can't keep kids from drinking alcohol, they can get it from their friends parents."
This is also a true statement, but happens far less than it does with social media (or other violent or otherwise undesired media).
That's not currently what people want, but I think it could change it the future. But at the same time, there is a particular American quality of stubborness/pride that will probably push back "we have the right to keep hurting ourselves even though we don't really want to, but are being manipulated by algorithmic attention-fixation tricks!"
>"You can't keep kids from drinking alcohol, they can get it from their friends parents."
>This is also a true statement, but happens far less than it does with social media (or other violent or otherwise undesired media).
There is a difference between parent giving kid a lesson about alcohol (which the poster above is proposing), and just starting to drink with your underage kid (which you are comparing to)
I'm not saying a parent would start drinking with their underage kids, I'm saying kids can often get alcohol themselves from their friends parents (either directly or indirectly) even if their own parents tell them they shouldn't drink and don't give them any.
It still happens, but it's a lot less socially acceptable, and it happens a lot less.
Getting access on their friends’ devices at least limits the amount of time they spend sucked into it alone - maybe my mother-in-law had some similar reasons for not allowing a TV in the house, but not particularly fretting over her kids watching TV at friends’ and relatives’ houses.
I am pretty sure, there are enough adults, that have no idea what social networks do. I am pretty sure also, that kids are not really ready for explanation of complex technical functionality. They do not have enough math background and probabilities come way too late in school.
I'm not suggesting doing a complex technical explanation, simply explaining to them at a high level how these products are advertising driven, how they can become addictive, what are the safety risks etc is better than not explaining anything to them.
Tiktok is available on Android and Apple phones. Not sure what the significance of Android is in your post. You can even get tiktok on Apple Watches with a bit of effort.
The real national security issue is if a major power can weaken a rival power to a significant degree without even raising a weapon. That indicates an enormous lack of resilience for a culture that prizes free expression, warts and all.
I don’t think the solution is to keep kids off social media, I think the solution is teaching kids how to use social media safely. Adults could stand to learn a lot about that too.
Tiktok pushes what you interact with the most. If you comment, if you heart, if you watch it and content like it all the way through it assumes its the content that you like and will give you more like it. If you see something you don't like keep scrolling. It learns and stops showing that content.
This argument assumes social media algorithms are passive agents, which only give users what they're looking for. What's missing is the fact that human minds are malleable, reactive, and adaptive through reinforcement. By providing what they think you're looking for, the algorithms subtly shift your psychology, leading you to seek more of what you're already seeing.
This is not a novel insight. It's why advertising works. AI-based Skinner-box algorithms are like traditional advertising techniques on steroids. They inevitably profilerate the kind of content that optimizes for the most engagement, and due to the way our lizard brains work, this happens to be content that generates emotional manipulation and outrage. The consequence? A population-wide mental health catastrophe.
Recently, a group of high school girls jumped to their deaths in Matsudo, Japan, and the video trended on Twitter, and it showed up at the top of relevant searches for 'suicide'. To be honest, I think the priority display of this kind of shocking content is a problem not only for TikTok, but for social media in general.
There's a chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's famous "The Tipping Point" that deals with waves of teenage suicides. He describes that a single suicide acts as a subliminal permission for this behavior to be mimicked. This permission is sent out as a beacon and susceptible agents replicate this behavior.
I forget the details of it, but the point was that this could be extended to other behavior as well, possibly all behavior. The underlying connotation is that humans take on pack roles as pack animals, and are rewarded by connective activities, even suicide, as crazy as it sounds.
Social media is a conduit of behavior modeling. It is best for everyone to realize this.
Gladwell's a good writer, but almost never backs up his positions with empirical evidence. I don't mind too much because I like his writing, but I wouldn't really trust his theories too much because he is a storyteller first.
I recall a story someone told (can't remember if it was a co-worker or a comment on this site) about someone in an office who stood up from their desk at 4:00 on a Friday, said, "I guess I'll take one for the team," and walked out the door. Sounds a bit like that.
No, actually most of the traditional news media (print, TV, radio) declines to report on suicide due to documented risks to increase in suicide rates following news about a suicide:
algorithmic recommendation systems are dangerous, how many times do we have to be shown this — it's like if you replaced all the mirrors in the house with carnival mirrors that make you look fat, of course this is going to cause some people to feel worse about themselves than regular mirrors!
Blaming "algorithms" is really imprecise. Any media site has to use some algorithm to pick what content to present, even if it's a chronological sort algorithm.
Algorithmic recommendation systems in the real world (as opposed to those theoretically possible) have common goals and features, and common problems, whether or not these common issues generalize to every algorithmic recommendation system that might be possible in the abstract.
Maybe true, but it'd be good to figure out what the harms are, if they exist, and their causes instead of handwaving about algorithms. It's the difference between banning all social media and regulating it to remove specific harms.
I blamed content recommendation algorithms specifically. They blindly amplify a lot of problems, and I'm not sure they can be fixed broadly enough to avoid this. We've seen this time and time again at this point. There are so many examples, notably youtube has a problem with accidentally radicalizing terrorists.
It seems we've discovered that there's a good amount of value in looking for content rather than mindlessly consuming what's being fed to us.
It's the old (tongue-in-cheek) problem of telling your family you like cows... only to later dread the fact that every gift they ever give you from then on will be cow related.
This seems like pedantry with no purpose, if my boss asked me to create an algorithm that recommended content I'm certain that they would absolutely not mean a list of chronologically ordered content. Do I really need to specificity that I'm talking about algorithms that recommend content using algorithmically presumed user interests based on aggregated behavior data?
So, recommending content in any of all possible ways is harmful? Or are there some ways that are not harmful (eg filtering out things relating to suicide)?
It's not pedantry without purpose. The logical conclusion to algorithms are bad is the outlawing of all social media and news sites.
then we start getting into who gets to be the proprietary arbiter of ok and not ok content, which frankly is probably even worse - china tweaking an algorithm to depress american productivity isn’t so far fetched when you consider what facebook has knowingly done to its own users
I still don't get how TikTok (and other "feed"-based social media) isn't regulated more strongly.
We don't allow 12 year olds to buy cigarettes because they're harmful and addictive. These apps are no different, they just don't cause obvious physical diseases like lung cancer.
It's clearly designed to entrap users in to addiction, but as a society we're still cool with it and it blows my mind.
We didn't have a federal law in the US for age restriction on tobacco until the 90s. As far as I can tell tobacco wasn't regulated at all until after the cigarette roller was invented (1881) and tobacco was pushed onto society in massive quantities. Even then it took 2 years for a single state to pass age restrictions on cigarettes and it wasn't until 1939 that all states had a law. Some states even removed the law before it was federally unforced in the 90s.
My point is that if an industry has enough money and influence it doesn't actually matter if it's bad for people. Businesses will sell anything to anyone as long as it's profitable. We've known tobacco can cause cancer for almost as long as cigarettes have existed.
> When she opened the TikTok app on his iPad, she found a library of more than 3,000 videos her son had bookmarked, liked, saved or tagged as a favorite. She could see the terms he’d searched for: Batman, basketball, weightlifting, motivational speeches. And she could see what the algorithm had brought him: many videos about depression, hopelessness and death.
The algorithm doesn’t work only on searches. Or even mostly. It is largely based on engagement. Which videos do you actually watch and comment on.
Almost nothing I search for is on my FYP. My FYP is almost all pranks, basketball, dancing in public, and Harry Mack.
I have noticed that if I watch a video all the way through I will get more of those videos pretty quickly. If this kid watched a depression video all the way through it will throw another at him shortly. If he watches that one then it can quickly change the algorithm to begin to favor those. The algorithm has a short memory.
What’s stupid is Facebook is getting very good at blocking this type of content through a mix of classifier systems, user and moderator intervention. TikTok has gotten a pass for it so far.
This still feels like a hit piece, designed to favor e.g. Meta et al against Tiktok.
While I have concerns about the above, I am MUCH more concerned that through this and Twitter's recent changes, we're slowly losing extremely valuable "alternative news sources." and that these are mostly a result of quiet socio-politcal interests, and not for many (or any) genuine concerns for safety (i.e. Facebook and Instagram will happily continue to push the exact same stuff if Tiktok and Twitter go down)
Meta just copies. Reels (videos!) on instagram (a photo app!) is a straight up copy of tiktok with the vast majority of videos on it just copies or resubmissions of videos originating on tiktok.
Although TikTok should do better to demote these kinds of videos, I can't buy the conspiracy theory that this is done intentionally. Anyone who knows a bit about recommendation systems can understand that watching depressing videos will get you more in your feed. Collaborative filtering with i.e watch time as a signal will lead someone who watches them to more.
Proving causation is nearly insurmountable in suicide negligence cases even in fact patterns in which the person who killed themselves was heavily influenced by some person or someone who made the implements convenient to access. With a software application, causation is even more attenuated because the person's decision to kill themselves is almost always considered a superseding cause.
How? Using what laws? If there are no clearly relevant laws, perhaps you expect congress to pass one expediently?
Let's suppose there is no law on the books that explicitly fleshes out liability if you train a model and it does not do as you expect, we'll need to figure out some nearest neighbor matching.
So you will have to shoehorn this novel issue into some preexisting framework of precedent. Maybe something about negligence liability and a common public use item, like a bridge or something. But a bridge isn't as complicated as an ML model and a bridge failure is way more auditable. Bridges don't hallucinate. Also there are unintended consequences to doing this sort of legal massaging, before you know it, campaign finance = speech.
"Hold them accountable" is so broad that verges on meaninglessness. Part of the whole living in a rapidly evolving tech landscape is living with laws that are always a few steps behind the times. Which bleeping sucks, but until we press for a better large scale solution, it is going to keep sucking.
I don't use TikTok but I have used the youtube shorts algorithm and it seems like its almost intentionally shit and trying to stir up people. I try and watch one linked short about something sports related on the home page and scroll feed automatically propagates with super low quality right wing, hustle and Jordan Peterson propaganda content.
We can deflect saying "Anyone who knows a bit about recommendation systems", blame my use of the platform or play these off as a technical problem but imo it seems like Google and the other tech companies know exactly what they are doing in these use cases and are just cynically deploying this content with the culture war filter on because they know it makes the most money. I think when people ascribe political leanings to tech companies that maybe the mean belief of their employee's but as an org it is not the standard opined ultra left havens.
Yeah random acts of censorship for "good of the people", what can go bad /s
by all means put a content warning or maybe a suicide prevention hotline or other help but I'm tired of clowns trying to solve any problem with "bad content" with censorship. Like that didn't misfire enough times in history...
I’m tired of clowns conflating algorithm adjustments with “random acts of censorship”.
If you have a problem with it, you should instead be demanding an open index of all content on these platforms so that you can be assured that all information submitted is available and free from real censorship.
> I'm tired of clowns trying to solve any problem with "bad content" with censorship.
No not "random" but systematic, targeted and effective "censorship"
When a news corp chooses to not run a news story for the third day in a row, is that censorship?
When I am pissed off at a customer services agent, and instead of shouting "GET FUCKED YOU USELESS SHIT" is that censorship?
When I am walking along the road and see a very sexy person, and I _don't_ shout out "HEY THERE SEXY, I'D LIKE TO FUCK/GET FUCKED BY YOU!" is that censorship?
A well ordered society requires rules. Those rules need to be clear, and generated by consensus.
When you negligently and repeatedly show footage to a vulnerable person designed to deliberately illicit harm, that is not what a well ordered and productive society allows.
But then the US is not a well ordered society, so do what you want kid.
> When a news corp chooses to not run a news story for the third day in a row, is that censorship?
It can be. If it were a news story that made a company or a government look bad and the news corp was bribed or pressured to kill the story and stop talking about it, that's absolutely censorship.
> When I am pissed off at a customer services agent, and instead of shouting "GET FUCKED YOU USELESS SHIT" is that censorship? When I am walking along the road and see a very sexy person, and I _don't_ shout out "HEY THERE SEXY, I'D LIKE TO FUCK/GET FUCKED BY YOU!" is that censorship?
That first one's not a full sentence, but if both cases are about self-censorship then you should know that's a very real thing and often it's a good thing. Especially when the decision on what gets censored is based on your own thoughts and feelings more than external factors. Being able to choose for yourself what to say or not say is a freedom, not a problem. Self-censorship isn't always ideal though (Self-censorship as a result of chilling effects for example).
> When you negligently and repeatedly show footage to a vulnerable person designed to deliberately illicit harm, that is not what a well ordered and productive society allows.
When something has already been judged as negligent it's automatically something a well ordered and productive society wouldn't allow. I'm not sure that's the case here though. If they just didn't care enough to make sure their algorithm wasn't doing more harm than good then maybe it would be negligence. If they are intentionally trying to harm people that would be something else.
However the content is being used/misused I'm not sure that I agree that the content was designed to deliberately illicit harm. I'd bet that most of these types of videos are created by suicidal people expressing their own feelings and looking to share them with others who are going through similar trials. I think there should be freedom for people who are struggling with mental health to participate in a community of others and to express themselves in memes and tiny videos.
I also think people should have the freedom to end their own lives if they choose to. Having places online where people can talk and share information about that subject is perfectly reasonable. Although I think there are children for whom suicide might be a legitimate option, even if most others would disagree not everything online needs to be appropriate for children, let alone suicidal children.
The problem with tiktoc isn't that the content exists, it's that it's being heavily promoted to children. This is the same problem with youtube. The algorithms push more narrow and extreme views without considering anything except their profits (unless you're one of the people who think tiktoc is intentionally trying to kill off Americans one suicidal teenager at a time in which case it'd not just be monetary considerations driving their choices). It would be so much better if algorithms were designed to present a more balanced view of things so that even if someone were thinking about suicide and interested in hearing perspectives on the subject they didn't only get the most extreme videos saying it's a great solution.
It would be interesting to hear from those with training and expertise in Psychology and relevant behavioral fields.
For example, someone posted about a group of girls in Japan jumping to their deaths. What makes something like that possible? How does it happen?
Please do not add comments if you don't have the requisite training or experience. Questions would be OK.
This sub-thread could turn into a conversation between people with relevant credentials answering questions. We could all learn something from reading through such a thread.
Please state your credentials if you comment or answer questions.
I'm not aware of any experiments, formal or informal that tries to seek if negative content is promoted more. The article states one experiment with bots saw how quickly the feed would become saturated with majority negative content. But what about the opposite? How quickly does positive content fill the feed if a bot were to engage with inspiring or educational videos? I suspect it'll be slower, though maybe not because of the algorithm itself but because video makers have less incentives to make positive videos, and so there's simply less "good" content to recommend.
Honestly ? That wouldn't matter that much, purely because the negative one will get engaged much more in the first place. Just look on how bad/controversial news sell vs good news.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadPerhaps they should be fined in the millions like the rest of the other social network companies like Facebook, Instagram, etc. Repeat offences should be increased into the billions if possible.
TikTok does actively take down content that violates their guidelines. Children are much more likely to come across nudity or porn on Twitter/Instagram.
The point was that they're not doing anything that the other platforms aren't doing.
They seem to do a fair bit to identify content that breaks their guidelines. To the point that users often make up alternative terms for sensitive topics e.g. Nazis become Yahtzees/N@zi and suicide becomes unalive. The belief is that TikTok flags videos with these terms and may remove them outright or downrank them in the recommendation algorithm.
There's a lot more outright pornography on Twitter and Instagram than TikTok.
all it does is offer you choices of things that people generally react to. Its a window to your desires/hates.
Now, if you are taught that you are allowed to "long press/right click" and say "I don't like this" then your life gets much better.
Does that mean that they shouldn't have a duty of care to their customers? no.
Does that mean that they don't have a responsibility to keep a high standard of safe/good/clean content on their platform? no.
Dang, tiktok is cruising for a bruising
.. where is the disinfo again??
But to think that this is just chaos theory is as naive as to think these behaviours are fully planned. That would mean that tiktok has no business strategy nor preferred outcomes to optimize towards.
Doesn't take a huge leap to think it could be intentional..
[1] https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...
https://douyin.com/
On TikTok you largely just get more of what you've already engaged with. If you're using the platform for porn you're going to get a lot of it. If you like and engage with scientific/political content you'll rarely, if ever, see a video of someone dancing.
edit:
It's anecdotal but having taken a look at TikTok's web feed: https://www.tiktok.com/foryou. The content there was less sexual than the purportedly sanitised Douyin.
For what it's worth. Four out of the first five videos I saw on Douyin were sexualised in some way, the first was of a train driver. I scrolled through 20 or 30 of the videos on TikTok's website and didn't find anything close.
It's not proof of what is being claimed, but they are variables that would need to be controlled before being confident that Douyin is or is not adjusting content to foreign or domestic users.
The original claim is that Douyin promotes "wholesome" educational content, whereas TikTok is manipulating the west with pornography and other depravities.
Anecdotal observations gathered through the web UI of each app, as an anonymous user, were that Douyin presented "pornographic" content, whereas TikTok did not.
The original claim only stands if we accept that ByteDance is:
* Allowing a vast quantity of sexually explicit content to be posted to Douyin.
* Not showing that content to their users in China but only to western users of Douyin, despite being presented entirely in Chinese.
While also:
* Targeting western users of TikTok with pornography and explicit videos.
* Not showing any of that content in their web UI, despite it quickly becoming the entirety of the Douyin one.
I find it hard to believe that this would be the case. A sanitised Douyin and depraved TikTok, or both being depraved, would have supported the idea. The behaviour that was observed runs entirely counter to the claim.
Frankly, the opinion does not appear to be grounded in reality but comes instead from a place of insecurity regarding our social values. Consider whether any western platform promotes science and engineering over pornography, Twitter and Instagram allow much more explicit content than TikTok, and then ask why TikTok seems to have been singled out.
By checking douyin.com from my device, my ip and my advertising fingerprint, I cannot have any clue how douyin behaves if I download it from a chinese phone, in china.
The base claim was that ByteDance was pushing sexualised content on TikTok while policing it on Douyin. This makes zero sense given that TikTok's web content was sanitised. Douyin being awash with sexualised content implies an audience for that content in China, further weakening the argument that this is some sort of targeted attack.
The alternative is that Douyin thirst traps are some sort of co-ordinated attack on the west. Despite not being available in the western app or translated in any way.
Not that OP's claims are proof - but your anecdata does not disprove it.
Is it inequality and injustice. where pointing it out. would actually threaten the power of the CCP?
When I started reading Chinese language media I was surprised how much apparent criticism there is -- but if you read carefully, anything approved in the PRC is always criticism of individuals, or maybe corporations, more rarely a local government, doing something that's already supposed to be officially prohibited, or which is not too sensitive, and never criticizes core official policy or high-ranking CCP members.
Which is how you can have anti-corruption, anti-sex scandal, anti-pollution news commentary, or even protests and marches, in China. But should official permission to disagree be withdrawn, the topic can very quickly become taboo. A couple years ago there was ongoing discussion in Chinese media about same-sex marriage and a member of the Yuan even introduced a bill to make same-sex marriage legal in China. Voted down. But an acceptable topic to discuss, not officially taboo. I suspect that has changed recently, with the campaign against the apparent feminization of Chinese men and now explicitly linking LGBT rights with the Western agenda. That shift, as I understand it, comes directly from Xi.
The possibility of China abusing content moderation might be enough to throw out the app altogether. But the only "evidence" we currently have is guessing at what China might do and people in media amplifying that discomfort.
Isn't the narrative "that's what the western world consumers more of/wants" versus "China values achievements and education more than debauchery and stupidity"?
With parents working insane hours in the US and outsourcing the socialisation and education of kids to electronics and corporations with perverse incentives, with local communities practically gone in an urban lifestyle, we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked.
It's the parents responsibility to curate the world the their kids are exposed to and build up their defences for all the crap that they're going to finally encounter.
Agreed on the first point, disagree on the second. I think it’s a fixable problem. Addicts can recover and further damage can be avoided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S
I mean, I can speak from my own personal use case (I think I average 30-60 minutes of TikTok screen time a day per week... yeah... I know, not great). I would agree with you. The only reason somebody's feed would show "low grade" content is if they curated it to be that way for themselves.
Now, is it easier to curate a feed of garbage West vs East? Not sure...
Compared to other social media it doesn't seem that "debauchery and stupidity" is more prominent there.
I'm leftist liberal and I have no particular paranoia about China, but I'm not going to pretend that we are besties
Edit: I won't remove the classification of myself as "leftist liberal" because it would make some of the replies to my comment confusing. I will apologize for it because it has derailed the discussion of China and TikTok. In the future I'll be more specific and avoid labels that no two people can agree on.
Suffice to say that I don't believe China deliberately created and released Covid.
I'm confused. Do you think the CPP is liberal? It's very authoritarian.
Liberal != Leftist
And neither a leftist nor a liberal has to answer for Communist China. Nor do you gain any special "objectivity" about China by being either one.
There is an interesting case made[1] that while this used to be true, it is actually not the case any more and that things are starting to become rather anti-liberal on both sides of the political spectrum.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...
This narrative dominated TV, print and to a lesser extent radio. It really created the notion in people's heads that this narrow band was really what people thought about. What people are reacting to in large part is the newly visible presence of alternative perspectives. They were always there. They were just strategically locked out by people who decided what was "fringe". Basically anything that didn't support institutions was ignored or disparaged.
Waco and Cuba are two prime examples. Waco was written off in the national media because the people in the compound were so "weird". And for years the national media has underwritten the American foreign policy blob's almost neurotic fixation with Cuba.
A quote from the page I was just reading:
> “When Speech First brought a lawsuit against Michigan, alleging that their bias response teams were unconstitutional and “flagrantly violate the First Amendment,” the court agreed, ruling against the school. As of 2022, 456 U.S. colleges⬥ have bias response teams (almost double the 2017 total of 232),49 and very few have been subject to investigations like the one at Michigan.”
Excerpt From What's Our Problem? Tim Urban https://books.apple.com/se/book/whats-our-problem/id64456422... This material may be protected by copyright.
Wrong. They are neoliberal, not classically liberal.
Classical liberalism (belief in naturalistic free market economics) failed in the 20th century and neoliberalism took its place, characterized by top-down micromanagement of economic ecosystem.
In other words, classical liberalism insists markets will thrive only when left to their own devices. Neoliberalism insists markets will thrive only when managed by competent administrators (see Federal Reserve).
The US is plenty authoritarian and China becoming a democracy wouldn't actually change any of the things that people are paranoid about. The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers.
Taken as a single political entity on the national stage China is just USA but in italics. It makes total sense that we would be uneasy in the US but that unease is how everyone not in the US feels about us. The unwavering belief that we're the good guys leads us to project our military might much more freely which doesn't exactly make us popular.
It is crazy that TikTok being a Chinese based company is obviously some ploy to undermine the US while in reality the CCP just forced TikTok to change their algorithm to be educational in China where such a thing wouldn't fly in the US because of the first amendment. China's video game ban for under-18s operates on the same principal.
Ludicrous false equivalency.
The USA doesn’t have laws preventing its citizens from criticizing the government, nor are its corporations required by law to participate in policing speech.
This is the reason why criticism of China is so muted.
The two-party system makes for all sorts of weird alliances of distinct groups getting lumped together- there's really no reason that one's opinions on gun rights should be related to one's opinions on energy policy, or why one's opinion on abortion should be related to one's opinion on foreign affairs policy, but with two parties all these separate issues get grouped into two camps associated with either "Republican" or "Democrat" and then in turn everything "Republican" can also be called "Conservative" or "Right-Wing" and everything "Democrat" can also be called "Liberal" or "Left-Wing".
Using some academic definition of what "liberal" or "right-wing" or whatever meant in Europe in the 1890s or 1930s doesn't really work in popular English-language media today.
Winner-takes-all popular elections have proven to be naive, but I wouldn't say it's a quirk. It's probably the first election format you'd try.
My point wasn't that you need a coalition as much as that people will change their views to align with their coalition.
That's an oxymoron.
I don't really care what you mean by leftist, but you definitely cannot claim to be a liberal and have no "paranoia" about China.
I do think that through malice or neglegence, that tiktok's algorithm is harmful to children.
It may be true on the margin, but Douyin is full of 'Key Opinion Leaders' who at best pay lip service to education and attainment. It's even worse on Kuaishou (Douyin for more rural areas). [0]
I always kind of bristle at the argument that this is somehow impacting what kids want too - PBS exists and spams their content as far and wide as possible, but US kids still end up preferring Cocomelon, Gabby's Doll House, etc.
There's no reason to believe that Chinese youth just take what's given to them when there are literally millions of random livestreams (hard to regulate livestreamed content at that level) going on at any given time.
As usual with China, what's likely going on is that someone is the CCP wants it to be true, so they 'make it true' and US media without local context takes it at face value.
[0]https://jingdaily.com/2022-top-six-chinese-kols-you-need-to-...
To me, it seems much more likely that China is just censoring TikTok like they censor every other platform, while the rest of the world sees a standard recommendation algorithm. "Debauchery and stupidity" is a subjective, sanctimonious phrase that doesn't really mean anything.
As such, apps like TikTok are just following the target population’s specs.
Ironic hotbed of so much technological innovation (but then $$$ is a strong motivator).
This conspiracy theory always gets a good chuckle out of me and my Chinese friends whenever it comes up. I have a good chunk of my family living in China and I can assure you, Chinese kids watch just as much if not more junk over there than they do in the US.
This is similar to trying to argue that America kids only play wholesome games on the Xbox or Youtube because they have parent controls.
But to my first point: surely working in tech right now you have a few Chinese coworkers. I recommend you grab lunch with them sometime (and let them choose the place to eat!)
https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E
Maybe Tiktok is just trying to give the market what it wants? Idiotic stunts were going viral years before TikTok existed.
The opIndia article says "The flood of such content on TikTok, an immensely popular social media platform among the youth, is a serious problem that needs to be addressed at the earliest."
There's a lot of dumb stuff on TikTok, but trans people not being suppressed isn't really one of them. And there might be _toxic_ stuff on TikTok, but in the context of an article where youth are pushed to material about suicide, linking to an article calling for the suppression of trans perspectives as if that was part of the same problem is super shady.
As for Douyin having a different algorithm, I'd point out that within China it was still viewed as being harmful enough to kids that they put in a 40m daily time limit, and restricted it to specific hours. I'm guessing it's also not great for kids there. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934
This answers your question: the harm banning it does is the laws that will be pushed to make it happen. Meanwhile, as you said, Instagram stands ready to show the same kind of content to teenagers if TikTok goes away. I suspect the actual harm reduction will be minimal.
Who wants to bet e2ee capable apps hit the ban list next? All tech companies are gonna be hit with a "backdoor or ban" ultimatum from the US.
The CCP is an adversarial government with a strong incentive to weaken the US.
Talking about the CCP as if it were just some people with different ideas is not a good faith argument.
IT would be better to have an enforceable set of licensing. But that wont happen because 1st amendment noises (rightly or wrongly. I'm not sure that corporations should really be treated as humans in this instance, but US case law thinks it should since the 70s.)
https://www.douyin.com/
Here are the first five videos that were presented as an anonymous user:
https://www.douyin.com/video/7211500689002876164
https://www.douyin.com/video/7223312448332303668
https://www.douyin.com/video/7216732859879410982
https://www.douyin.com/video/7221862204251966760
https://www.douyin.com/video/7218887726920224000
what do people expect? if it learns what makes you stay on the platform it gives you more of the stuff that makes you stay
you are what you eat.
I don’t have kids, but surely you see the design flaw at play here:
I’d want to give my future kid a phone so I may connect with them at will, but at the same time a phone allows others to connect with them (giving them addictive content to serve ads for example)
An iPhone has pretty good parental controls, but when it’s time for the child to connect with their peers, the same place they connect with peers is the same place designed to exploit them, with little to no alternative.
It’s like we’ve transported our 11 year olds into digital pool halls where parent supervision is banned and the pool hall owner keeps serving them drinks
I won’t be giving my future child a phone before 13 but I have no illusions that they’ll be normal peer after not having the same access to such things.
It’s like the McDonald’s play pens all over again, but worse!
try to use it and you will see how bad it actually is, reinstalling an app removes its timeout, any kid almost trivially goes around it, you have to not forget to block the web versions of the apps, there is +1 minute, there is issue with whatsapp links etc
my daughter(12) also just asks for 15 mins extra youtube, then she just looks at my fingerprints on the phone to guess the screentime code, so i have to wipe my fingerprints like i am in a james bond movie (changed the screentime code like 3 times until i figured out what is happening)
i am trying to teach her self control and also to monitor her feed like a hawk and be super critical of what she watches
also once a week we go over all the feeds and try to teach the algorithms to show better things (like/follow some science/code youtubers, block toxic ones, watch few videos etc)
i also pay for everything i can so she doesnt see ads (including having pi-hole and adblockers)
The key is education, you have to explain to your kids how these services works, how they are optimized for content engagement to show ads, how they mine your data, and what kinds of things they should look out for and avoid (like misinformation, catfishing, grooming, viral stupidity etc)
We also hitch-hiked to save bus money parents gave us to get some ice cream
I have an ongoing conversation with mine about the things he finds online. We talk about how people try to benefit from appearing "rich" online. We talk about how people have problems in their lives and find things to blame and rant about online. We talk about how people you don't know can try to get things from you or make you think a certain way.
He even started using the term "clickbait" before I even taught it to him. These kids are savy. I think the biggest thing we can do for them is to help them understand how to contextualize what they're engaging with because they don't get to grow up in the "before" and "after" worlds that elder millennials did.
And frankly, I see that my kid is just as saturated in propaganda from his public school as he is from online media. So far, in parallel to his education, school seems to be running one giant ad for the US armed forces.
Sit down with them and go through tiktok or insta. Point out dark patterns, bad content.
Answer their questions truthfully. Sometimes the truthful answer is "I don't know".
The field you want is "family dynamics". If things are already off the rails, find a mediator (doesn't have to be an actual legal mediator).
1. Understand their viewpoint and give them the tools to understand yours
2. Find common ground and define the areas of conflict
3. Reassure and reaffirm relationship
4. Repeat
I had the internet for a while when I turned 11.
My parents were pretty clear about what was good/bad. "you can see all sorts of stuff on the internet. But first things first, never use your real name or address. Second, we can totally see what youre looking at."
For me that worked.
For my older sister, she still tried to run off with a bloke she met off a chat room.
so you cant win them all.
While you cannot keep kids away from it forever, it makes a lot of difference when they are exposed to it and how well-equipped they are to deal with it.
This is also a true statement, but happens far less than it does with social media (or other violent or otherwise undesired media).
That's not currently what people want, but I think it could change it the future. But at the same time, there is a particular American quality of stubborness/pride that will probably push back "we have the right to keep hurting ourselves even though we don't really want to, but are being manipulated by algorithmic attention-fixation tricks!"
>This is also a true statement, but happens far less than it does with social media (or other violent or otherwise undesired media).
There is a difference between parent giving kid a lesson about alcohol (which the poster above is proposing), and just starting to drink with your underage kid (which you are comparing to)
It still happens, but it's a lot less socially acceptable, and it happens a lot less.
The real national security issue is if a major power can weaken a rival power to a significant degree without even raising a weapon. That indicates an enormous lack of resilience for a culture that prizes free expression, warts and all.
https://www.techjunkie.com/best-dumb-phones/
Good stuff.
[thisisfine.jpg]
This is not a novel insight. It's why advertising works. AI-based Skinner-box algorithms are like traditional advertising techniques on steroids. They inevitably profilerate the kind of content that optimizes for the most engagement, and due to the way our lizard brains work, this happens to be content that generates emotional manipulation and outrage. The consequence? A population-wide mental health catastrophe.
I forget the details of it, but the point was that this could be extended to other behavior as well, possibly all behavior. The underlying connotation is that humans take on pack roles as pack animals, and are rewarded by connective activities, even suicide, as crazy as it sounds.
Social media is a conduit of behavior modeling. It is best for everyone to realize this.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00031539.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#C...
I recall a story someone told (can't remember if it was a co-worker or a comment on this site) about someone in an office who stood up from their desk at 4:00 on a Friday, said, "I guess I'll take one for the team," and walked out the door. Sounds a bit like that.
https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m575
It seems we've discovered that there's a good amount of value in looking for content rather than mindlessly consuming what's being fed to us.
It's the old (tongue-in-cheek) problem of telling your family you like cows... only to later dread the fact that every gift they ever give you from then on will be cow related.
It's not pedantry without purpose. The logical conclusion to algorithms are bad is the outlawing of all social media and news sites.
We don't allow 12 year olds to buy cigarettes because they're harmful and addictive. These apps are no different, they just don't cause obvious physical diseases like lung cancer.
It's clearly designed to entrap users in to addiction, but as a society we're still cool with it and it blows my mind.
My point is that if an industry has enough money and influence it doesn't actually matter if it's bad for people. Businesses will sell anything to anyone as long as it's profitable. We've known tobacco can cause cancer for almost as long as cigarettes have existed.
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4902755/
Horrific.
Almost nothing I search for is on my FYP. My FYP is almost all pranks, basketball, dancing in public, and Harry Mack.
I have noticed that if I watch a video all the way through I will get more of those videos pretty quickly. If this kid watched a depression video all the way through it will throw another at him shortly. If he watches that one then it can quickly change the algorithm to begin to favor those. The algorithm has a short memory.
(didn't downvote you though, I understand your point)
While I have concerns about the above, I am MUCH more concerned that through this and Twitter's recent changes, we're slowly losing extremely valuable "alternative news sources." and that these are mostly a result of quiet socio-politcal interests, and not for many (or any) genuine concerns for safety (i.e. Facebook and Instagram will happily continue to push the exact same stuff if Tiktok and Twitter go down)
Let's suppose there is no law on the books that explicitly fleshes out liability if you train a model and it does not do as you expect, we'll need to figure out some nearest neighbor matching.
So you will have to shoehorn this novel issue into some preexisting framework of precedent. Maybe something about negligence liability and a common public use item, like a bridge or something. But a bridge isn't as complicated as an ML model and a bridge failure is way more auditable. Bridges don't hallucinate. Also there are unintended consequences to doing this sort of legal massaging, before you know it, campaign finance = speech.
"Hold them accountable" is so broad that verges on meaninglessness. Part of the whole living in a rapidly evolving tech landscape is living with laws that are always a few steps behind the times. Which bleeping sucks, but until we press for a better large scale solution, it is going to keep sucking.
In case of alcohol, sure I can see it but that is not exactly comparable. Enough alcohol will kill you 100% of the time, this aint even close.
that being said some content warning or a bit of push to seek help wouldn't be a bad idea when someone gets stuck in some topic like that
We can deflect saying "Anyone who knows a bit about recommendation systems", blame my use of the platform or play these off as a technical problem but imo it seems like Google and the other tech companies know exactly what they are doing in these use cases and are just cynically deploying this content with the culture war filter on because they know it makes the most money. I think when people ascribe political leanings to tech companies that maybe the mean belief of their employee's but as an org it is not the standard opined ultra left havens.
Negligently letting it be pushed onto people is much worse.
Imagine if facebook were doing the same thing now, there would me massive uproar.
by all means put a content warning or maybe a suicide prevention hotline or other help but I'm tired of clowns trying to solve any problem with "bad content" with censorship. Like that didn't misfire enough times in history...
If you have a problem with it, you should instead be demanding an open index of all content on these platforms so that you can be assured that all information submitted is available and free from real censorship.
No not "random" but systematic, targeted and effective "censorship"
When a news corp chooses to not run a news story for the third day in a row, is that censorship?
When I am pissed off at a customer services agent, and instead of shouting "GET FUCKED YOU USELESS SHIT" is that censorship?
When I am walking along the road and see a very sexy person, and I _don't_ shout out "HEY THERE SEXY, I'D LIKE TO FUCK/GET FUCKED BY YOU!" is that censorship?
A well ordered society requires rules. Those rules need to be clear, and generated by consensus.
When you negligently and repeatedly show footage to a vulnerable person designed to deliberately illicit harm, that is not what a well ordered and productive society allows.
But then the US is not a well ordered society, so do what you want kid.
It can be. If it were a news story that made a company or a government look bad and the news corp was bribed or pressured to kill the story and stop talking about it, that's absolutely censorship.
> When I am pissed off at a customer services agent, and instead of shouting "GET FUCKED YOU USELESS SHIT" is that censorship? When I am walking along the road and see a very sexy person, and I _don't_ shout out "HEY THERE SEXY, I'D LIKE TO FUCK/GET FUCKED BY YOU!" is that censorship?
That first one's not a full sentence, but if both cases are about self-censorship then you should know that's a very real thing and often it's a good thing. Especially when the decision on what gets censored is based on your own thoughts and feelings more than external factors. Being able to choose for yourself what to say or not say is a freedom, not a problem. Self-censorship isn't always ideal though (Self-censorship as a result of chilling effects for example).
> When you negligently and repeatedly show footage to a vulnerable person designed to deliberately illicit harm, that is not what a well ordered and productive society allows.
When something has already been judged as negligent it's automatically something a well ordered and productive society wouldn't allow. I'm not sure that's the case here though. If they just didn't care enough to make sure their algorithm wasn't doing more harm than good then maybe it would be negligence. If they are intentionally trying to harm people that would be something else.
However the content is being used/misused I'm not sure that I agree that the content was designed to deliberately illicit harm. I'd bet that most of these types of videos are created by suicidal people expressing their own feelings and looking to share them with others who are going through similar trials. I think there should be freedom for people who are struggling with mental health to participate in a community of others and to express themselves in memes and tiny videos.
I also think people should have the freedom to end their own lives if they choose to. Having places online where people can talk and share information about that subject is perfectly reasonable. Although I think there are children for whom suicide might be a legitimate option, even if most others would disagree not everything online needs to be appropriate for children, let alone suicidal children.
The problem with tiktoc isn't that the content exists, it's that it's being heavily promoted to children. This is the same problem with youtube. The algorithms push more narrow and extreme views without considering anything except their profits (unless you're one of the people who think tiktoc is intentionally trying to kill off Americans one suicidal teenager at a time in which case it'd not just be monetary considerations driving their choices). It would be so much better if algorithms were designed to present a more balanced view of things so that even if someone were thinking about suicide and interested in hearing perspectives on the subject they didn't only get the most extreme videos saying it's a great solution.
So why even bring it up? It's completely disingenuous imho.
A bit like the production of fentanyl precursor chemicals and their export to Mexico...
And Chinese filters can't be applied to the world wide version because they won't be able to compete with other addictive social media.
They have an algorithm that chooses what videos to show you based on types of videos you view. I'm not sure how that doesn't qualify as intentional.
For example, someone posted about a group of girls in Japan jumping to their deaths. What makes something like that possible? How does it happen?
Please do not add comments if you don't have the requisite training or experience. Questions would be OK.
This sub-thread could turn into a conversation between people with relevant credentials answering questions. We could all learn something from reading through such a thread.
Please state your credentials if you comment or answer questions.
No need for credentials if you post a question.