I'm not against a TikTok ban. It is essentially a slot machine. And it is explicitly designed like one.
My problem with this is that it is this design which should be illegal, not one app or another. Instagram and Facebook feeds aren't any better than TikTok.
I don't disagree that US politicians are corrupt and stupid but as an American citizen I want to be able to access the world's information in order to establish an accurate perspective for myself. Banning media from certain countries is exactly how you develop a delusional worldview and ironically become more susceptible to propaganda.
Exactly this. There is quite a bit of hubris to thinking to that you can consume the media of a propaganda state and be intentional about understanding what is and is not propaganda. It works because it’s subtle. And it works at individual, population, and network levels. So even of you identify and maintain the noble truth, you will have no one in your network to meaningfully corroborate it.
The "beauty" of the plausible deniability in these systems is the hidden reward mechanisms that are in place: you can get a whole country to kick themselves in the groin if the algorithm rewards it and people think they can monetize the attention.
I'm personally quite interested in propaganda and TikTok let's you see both American leftist/rightist propaganda, European leftist/rightist propaganda and pro-Russian/pro-Chinese propaganda. Now there's a lot more on Palestine and Israel obviously. On Reddit it's largely leftist American, although the European right has had a recent resurgence due to refugees.
Weird hobby, I know, but it is actually a great place to look at all the different ways propaganda is done. Everyone is doing it..
Yes, propaganda will always exist. With traditional media (assuming you have cookies and tracking disabled) you are the on that decides what propaganda (which articles) to consume.
With social media like TikTok, they decide what propaganda to feed you.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
It is quite unnecessary to hear you call everyone you disagree with uneducated or similar.
Have you seen the CCP propaganda on Tik Tok though? It’s quite wholesome. Like there’s one where this guy randomly helps poor kids and old people he encounters. It paints Chinese society in a positive light, probably making the standard of living seem better than it is. But in a way it’s not unlike what many Americans wish their kids were watching.
Show the one where the guy gets caught up in an obscure non-state approved religion, falls down on his luck, but the government steps in & sends him to a retreat to get better. Then he enjoys the rest of his life manufacturing goods in a factory as part of his rehabilitation.
Why do you think Tiktok is brainwashing children (why is it always children?) and Facebook, Twitter, etc aren't?
Why do you think Tiktok is the only vector for foreign influence, when it's been documented many, many times that domestic social media sites are rife with foreign misinformation?
What do you think Tiktok will do? Destabilize the US? Our politicians are already doing that. No need to worry about a boogyman from the other side of the globe. It's just a distraction.
On the long term, anthropological warfare is a clever idea... but it's probably a little too optimistic to think you can implement with just one app. The CCP/tiktok hysteria feels overblown to me - public education is what constituents should feel concerned about.
I think it depends, my experience on hacker news has been extremely positive with the exceptions of malicious posters who downvote my cries for help. These are obvious and not depend on the platform but the user's in question. The experience I have with Twitter (X) has been people trying to help me.
There's a difference between malicious users and malicious platforms.
There is a difference between Chinese society and western society. Chinese do not allow kids to play video games for too long because they know effects of games on the youth, they also restrict what can be viewed by children on Chinese version of tik tok for the exactly same reason. They restrict freedom of their kids because they believe it's more productive and better for society. In west we do not do that because freedom is important for us. What you need to understand is that there is no free lunch, freedom has a cost that you need to pay, and we are paying for it.
So while the US pacifies its citizens China tried to make foreign solders to send to the US. TikTok being a tool to "slow down" Americans while enabling foreigners. Seems pretty Sus to me.
Please stop telling people they’re uneducated on the topic in response to one comment. You’ve done it multiple times and it’s unnecessarily aggressive. Ask clarifying questions or provide counterfactuals.
I made a new account last week – totally blank, new device everything. The default FYP so far is all anti-Jewish – not anti-Israel, anti-Jewish – and far left-wing anti-American stuff. it intersperse with really low brow celebrity stuff.
Pretty intense stuff. Lots of “Jews run the world, and hate you” stuff that reporting doesn’t seem to work on. Lots of “America is a nightmare place” aimed at teenagers.
Pretty sure thats the CCP whipping up internal unrest here.
Shit I’ve had youtube try to brainwash me. I clicked on one lecture, that I watched and thought was generally good, if not slightly contrarian. Turns out his later work was hugely influencial in the red pill nonsense. Needless to say, just watching this one lecture led my entire feed to be filled with red pill nonsense.
I have no doubt if I had clicked on similar content on tiktok I would have deluged with similar nonsense.
We have heard about it.... you're just not getting your news from sources that mention it. There are multiple things they allow on American TikTok that they do not allow on Chinese TikTok. They allow these things because they know it helps with social decay in America.
What are you talking about?! Listen to yourself dude, you've completely fallen down a conspiracy rabbit hole. If the US exerted that level of control over private media you would call it a dystopia and a violation of 1A. China also has a policy that limits teenagers to 1hr of online video games a day, surely you wouldn't look at that and jump straight to Activation being a government psyop to stunt education.
TikTok would have to be doing something anything unique in this situation and they aren't. YouTube is the OG radicalization pipeline, Tumblr is more pro-communism than TikTok will ever dream to be, Facebook and IG pioneered doomscrolling before it was cool, and Twitter/Reddit ruined an entire generation of men with the enlightened technoconservatarian nonsense.
I promise you if there is one thing that is absolutely completely certain in America is that we need no help whatsoever in destroying the fabric of our own society and to say otherwise is an affront to American exceptionalism.
Not sure about "corrupting America's youth," but TikTok has been proven to selectively show content to different regions to promote only certain kinds of thought: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917474
This was enough for me to resolve to never use it. And you're right that other social media isn't much better, though I don't think that was being called into question in the first place.
> Not sure about "corrupting America's youth," but TikTok has been proven to selectively show content to different regions to promote only certain kinds of thought
The example cited there seems a lot like it is to conform to local censorship policies, not to manipulate thought around some centralized objective of TikTok or the CCP.
Its a different thing, whether its better or not is a completely unrelated argument.
> Not to mention, being capable of one means they are capable of the other.
Neither one is a particularly deep capability, anyone with an information service with a personalized feed is capable of both, and if they don't conform to local censorship policies they simply will be banned where that occurs.
I agree with you in principle but there's no difference between that and what's allowed in other American platforms. Degenerate content is everywhere in all platforms.
For tiktok to be special in this regard they would have to allow something different that went way beyond what American platforms allow, and that's thus far not happening.
> For tiktok to be special in this regard they would have to allow something different that went way beyond what American platforms allow
I'm not sure that's true. There's a big difference between "Some amount of degenerate content exists on American platforms which are constantly fighting to identify and remove it" and "Adversarial foreign platform intentionally creates/curates degenerate content to push it to American audiences while keeping it from their own users"
Even if you're talking about content that both platforms fully allow, if one platform targets a group and floods their feeds with certain content with an intent to harm that group that is itself a problem. The fact that it is possible to find harmful content on youtube doesn't make it the same as a platform that intentionally and relentlessly shoves harmful content in your face. I can't say how guilty tiktok is of doing that however.
I’m regularly visiting an old-school “scroll images and gifs and post comments” site which moderates a large tree of tags so one can block them and create a highly personalized filter-bubble without an expensive algorithm. Should this be illegal too?
I’m not against TikTok ban because it’s a degenerate format and content. (Main reasons are short videos, no video controls, autorepeat) It’s ADHD plus repetitive voices in your head on top of the usual internet asylum. But what’s the exact criteria for any feed?
- ones you cannot control (manipulation and propaganda)
- addictiveness and personalization (attention grabbing)
- bigcorps only (monetary interest converges to p.1)
One observation I have made about sites with a list of images/videos to view is that it is sometimes easy to succumb to visiting the site only to look at 'mindless' media (memes, sexually suggestive material, etc). At least for me, this seems to be the case no matter the ranking algorithm or user interface (no infinite scroll, etc) used by the site.
I have not found Hacker News to be this way. It is both easier to stop scrolling, and I have to exert at least some mental effort to read the news links and comments.
Not a comfortable disclosure, but it matches your observation. That’s what I expect from a pics and gifs site. Tags allow me to filter out material I find repulsive or boring (specific comic authors, topics, memes, “big …”, onlyfans bs, politics). Serious sites don’t do tag filters, they are either non-profit or all business with ads and tracking. I’d filter 98% of the internet if I could.
I always thought HN is a slot machine. TikTok is HN on steroids. I uninstalled it years ago from all my devices. I stick to the drug that I think I can control.
Do you mind explaining what you mean by "slot machine" in this context? I'm not a TikTok user, but I'm sometimes on Facebook and other "feed" sites, and I don't fully grasp how gambling comes in to play.
The scientific term is Variable Rate Operant Conditioning. It's where you press a button, have some chance of a reward (winning money or seeing a video you like) and can immediately play again. It's the same mechanism.
From rats on up to humans this is known to be an extremely addictive behavioral pattern. Social media like Tik Tok can perfectly balance how much reward to give you to keep you engaged while filing the non-reward results with ads and other messaging they want you thinking about.
Are rewards in nature more valuable if the outcome is not certain? Or is that a trait that stuck to humans because people who try again and again learn better?
I mean even HN employs that pattern (though not necessarily intentionally). Whenever you refresh the page you have a random reward in the form of gain/loss of karma or comment replies.
You're comparing a no-ads[0], slow-moving, text-based feed (that has a maximum number of content pieces on the main pages at any given time) designed around fostering a specific tech-related community to an infinite, doomscrolling, video-based brainwashing machine filled with ads, violence, fear-mongering, propaganda, and softcore pornography designed as a skinner box to maximize engagement and consumption. HN has plenty of problems, but it is not even remotely comparable to TikTok/IG/etc.
Does HN strategically push or withhold desirable content on each refresh in the most addictive way possible specifically to keep people refreshing the page and prevent them stopping?
I think intent matters for a lot here, as does who/what is pulling the levers. If popular content organically rises to the top because people like it that's not really a problem, but if content is artificially pushed to the top or hidden entirely to push an agenda that could be an issue.
What does ‘better’ mean here? Eg TikTok is better at personalising recommendations where facebook tends to give more generic content, so TikTok may better give people what they want but also be more addictive/have a stronger filter-bubble effect.
There's one TikTok for me, and one TikTok for thee. The Chinese version promotes educational videos, and has a strict daily time limit. The "export" version is literally designed to make you retarded. Agree that other apps aren't much better though (especially now that they've redesigned themselves after TikTok's model...)
Why banning it then? Don’t US/EU have power to force educational content and time limits? This “oh, all feeds are bad, we should think of maybe banning them all” will lead nowhere 100% of times. Feels like China absolutely doesn’t even have to do anything bad because the US don’t know what they want.
Why can't we restrict TikTok to the same content only in the west? It's just a matter of regulation, we know it's possible because it's how it's done in China. Now think about it, is it really China here to blame for our regulations?
If calling it what it is helps encourage people to stop doing it to themselves (we are after all emotion-first, rationalization-later!)... then your taking offense on my behalf (for the record, I do have brain damage) will have been an acceptable cost.
I don't see why you'd trust either of them. They're both entirely self-serving and perfectly willing to hurt you in any way they can if they think it might further their own goals
one significant difference is, tiktok forces you directly into the spotlight/reels/tiktoks section immediately upon opening the app. With youtube, you must elect to choose a short even tho they appear on homescreen, with ig reels your sorta coerced into it because most videos are reels and once you hit one, youre in. For snapchat you must elect to open to spotlight page. I think all pf these are less predatory than tiktoks approach, snapchat being the least predatory right now
Do you propose the government shutting down all social media because you don't like them? What is your precise solution if not. Is this the job of the government, to limit speech that you don't like or don't like how it's presented?
The reason TikTok was banned in Nepal was due to the ongoing communal violence between Hindus and Muslims [0][1].
It's gotten pretty bad - the videos I've seen are very similar to those I saw of Gujarat 2002.
It's also election season in India, so there will be massive blowback in Nepal, as several provinces in Nepal are ethnically the same as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar - two major swing states in Indian elections.
The last time a similarly divisive election happened in Bihar, Nepal ended up getting blockaded [2]
This is completely not true. There were small skirmishes between Hindu and Muslims on small city in the western part of Nepal but there is no communal violence as you think there is. Nepal arbitrarily bans things without any due diligence, well because we have inept leaders.
Not to mention corruption. About 15 years ago I got dragged along to a lunch in Kathmandu. My host[0] was meeting with some officials to discuss embezzling from an infrastructure project. It speaks to their impunity that they carried on in public in front of a basically unknown foreigner.
[0] Last I checked he was recently arrested on various corruption offenses.
Fair, but the implications and chances of a communal flair up are high after what happened to the Nepali migrant workers in Israel. I'm sure the Nepali Govt doesn't want a repeat of 2004.
Mix that with the rise of Hindutva, a bad economy, and divisive discourse across the border for the 2024 elections and things can probably get ugly if precautions aren't taken.
Shutting down TikTok is a small price to pay to prevent actual communal violence.
Hinduvta does not exist as a driving political force in Nepal. You are thinking of India. Nepal is secular albeit there is a small faction vying for power based on hindu ideologies but they are a very small portion of nepal politics. Again there is no communal flair that has entered into national discourse like we see in India or some ME countries. Nepal is pretty chill in that regards, surprisingly so given the whole country has multitudes of ethnic groups. There are still caste based incidents in remote areas but not so much in urban cores. Knowing the decisions the nincompoop leaders have done out of whim over the last decade or so I am fairly certain that this decision was also not done with due dilligence.
It's not a driving force in Nepal, but it takes a handful of "Kattar Hindu" idiots (most of whom seem to be Awadhi and Maithili based on the IG Reels and TikTok shorts I've seen) to light a spark in the Terai.
Most of these incidents and flareups are happening in the Terai areas where ethnic communities straddle the India-Nepal border. While the secessionist movement seems to have largely been tamped down, I wouldn't be surprised if many people who were in that milleu ended up becoming more fundamentalist.
And it's extremely worrisome that events and discourse like this is much more common, despite not existing 20 years ago.
Linking the nepal-india issues which led to a blockade by India, with state elections in India is a stretch. It was over disagreements over the then newly framed constituition of Nepal. The people in the plains viewd it unbalanced with regards to provinces and favoring the elites who were the people from the hills. They protested and Indian govt appears to have agreedwith them, probably influenced by them being related to the people in the neighbouring Indian region. This led to the fracas between the nepal govt and indian govt.
With just around 4% muslim population, and no dark history of invasions, destructions and occupation that is associated with islam in India, and also not being subject to present day islamic terrorism, the religous divisions in Nepal is minor relative to India.
The former CM of Bihar Lalu Prasad Yadav of the RJD heavily lobbied for the Madhesh Movement after the 2015 Bihar elections [0]. It doesn't hurt that a number of the Madhesh Movement leaders are Yadav as well. They even used the same flag as former CMs of UP Mulayam Singh Yadav and Akilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party flag, as all these groups across eastern UP, Bihar, and the Nepali Terai were influenced by the Lohia movement at Patna University back in the day.
> religous divisions in Nepal is minor relative to India
Imo a divide exists but it's different.
In the Terai it's the same Hindu-Muslim divide you'd see across the border in Araria Zila or Lakhimpur Kheri Zila as the Terai region is Awadhi and Maithili speaking. For example, Nepalgunj is 3x closer to Lucknow than Kathmandu Valley, Janakpur is 2x closer to Darbhanga than Kathmandu Valley, and Dharan is 3x closer to Darjeeling than Kathmandu Valley.
I've heard of some Hindu-Christian divide occuring around Kirat/Limbu areas like Dharan, but this also seems to be impacted by politics in neighboring Sikkim [1], as the former CM Pawan Kumar Chamling was enabled by support from Gopal Gurung of the MNO, and most "Christianization" appears to be more like Limbu/Kirati ethnonationalism. The related Gorkhaland Movement in Northern WB seems to be tangentially related based on some of the speeches I've perused.
Like every other social issue in India, religion is a facade around ethnic or caste relations. Doesn't matter if it's Sunni-Shia conflicts in Parachinar or Ladakh, Khalistan in the 80s, the Muzzafarnagar Riots in 2016, Tamil Nationalism during the Sri Lankan Civil War, or Manipur as we speak. Indian foreign policy is heavily impacted by state level politics, and this has been noted in Academia [2].
For example, a big reason for the resurgence of support for monarchism in Nepal is because of CM Yogi Adityanath's Gorakhnath Math lobbying for a Dharm Rashtra as the Shah dynasty (like other Pahari dynasties from Nepal to Jammu) was a major devotee of the Nath movement.
If you understand Hindi and Khas Nepali I can link speeches/darahans from the Madhesh Morcha, MNO+Sikkim Democratic Front, and the Gorakhnath Math from that time period specifically using religion as a wrapper around caste or ethnicity.
So they should ban instagram too. I have a feeling tiktok is probably more moderated and enforces stricter content rules than instagram. Of course may be tiktok is just more popular and so has the target on it.
Why do you have that feeling? I volunteer helping to report and disrupt networks of sexual assault and hatred against women on social media. Tik Tok is like the wild west in terms of the availability of CSAM for example, and in how tolerant it is of hate speech. Instagram actually takes reports seriously and doesn't tolerate threats of violence etc.
My observation has been that the comments on high engagement TikTok posts are generally quite pleasant, whereas the comments on high engagement Instagram posts feel like a KKK meeting.
Youtube comments used to be known as a cesspool, but lately I'm mostly avoiding them for their unbearable positivity and uncritical praise of the video. I can see how that's bad on conspiracy or racist videos though.
I wonder if this is because the creators routinely prune negative comments of them. Or perhaps it is because Youtube severely down ranks comments with dislikes.
Fascinating, I'd guess this to be the result of a filter bubble? i.e. it would only show you things you agree with. That might not be optimal though (at least in terms of harvesting human attention at all costs), I always heard that outrage drives engagement better?
I'm familiar with the misogyny problem (Andrew Tate etc), but I thought that CSAM was the one thing that got an immediate effective banhammer everywhere on the Internet. If you've got a real CSAM problem with TikTok it might be addressed by taking it to their CDN?
(even on HN, it's hard to get people to focus on the "is it harmful" question for social media rather than the "run by foreigners vs Americans" aspect)
Yes, TikTok is very very popular for this. The network of these accounts is then leveraged by "fan accounts" who form hubs for abusers to connect with one another and share links to other platforms, particularly Telegram and Mega.
Reddit is also extremely bad for it. They have a system now where a new subreddit is created every day, discoverable via known keywords, and then used as a directory for links to telegram.
The other thing you'll commonly see on both of these platforms is material being stolen from other social media platforms and then re-hosted to reddit or TikTok with sexualised descriptions. Reddit for example will often say it's fine as long they don't explicitly mention that the images are not of the poster.
> Reddit is also extremely bad for it. They have a system now where a new subreddit is created every day, discoverable via known keywords, and then used as a directory for links to telegram.
Why is Reddit in the equation, because the Telegram channels also get banned ? Cause if not, why not just stick to Telegram
Reddit is used as a directory. It has the advantages in discoverability and being able to automate account creation without needing an email address or phone number.
Sure, but .. are there no first Amendment implications at all? What's the minimum US involvement of staff TikTok would require in order to receive first amendment protection?
From what I've read, if you open tiktok app outside of China, most videos will be about ordinary folks celebrating a very liberal or open way of life, being an anarchist, anti-authoritarian or even a dissident is celebrated.
But if you open tiktok from within China, most videos will be about Chinese patriotism and how that way of life is the best. In this case, anarchism or anti-authoritarian videos are NOT celebrated, they will be likely removed or banned from there.
If you go to Douyin's search page https://www.douyin.com/search/ and focus the search bar, it'll show two sets of recommendations. The first is "for you" and, if they don't have a profile on you, likely a reflection of the most popular content. The second is a ranking of "hot topics", where Xi Jinping gets a dedicated top spot above number 1. Obviously that's because he'd only rarely rank near the top organically. But even with that extra promotion, most people will simply ignore it, so it's more of a fig leaf to keep the government content while users keep watching basically the same stuff as anywhere else.
TikTok is not much different than Instagram and Youtube Shorts in the western world.
That it is heavily moderated in China would not surprise me either. But i wouldn't call that an "agenda"
TikTok is full of anti America propaganda. It rarely gets removed. Anything anti China doesn’t last long.
Instagram has hardly any anti China or anti America propaganda. And it’s certainly not recommended to you within minutes of using the app for the first time.
Opened TikTok in Taiwan and almost immediately got anti America propaganda. Blaming America for covid.
First weeks I used TikTok, I got all kind of anti-anything, from the local right to local left, from global KKK to whatever global hippies are called today. Any propaganda to burn whichever evil empires in the creators corner of the world exist. Guess it had some hard time to find my political niche and started with too little information about me.
On Instagram on the other side, I've never seen any serious amount of political messages, but they all want to sell me merch, cat-toys and nerd-toys from any point of the spectrum. Likely be because they have more information about me. And these days, TikTok is pretty much like Instagram, all cats and nerds and the occasional call for blood from those plebs who break their spaghetti.
So I don't think it's that any platform is full of this or that, but it very much depends on what the platforms think what might be interesting for you, and the rest you just don't see until it really floods the platform hard.
That’s funny because this argument has been exposed as complete bullshit in the last month. You should find a better example to try and be dishonest about nowadays. Social media is extremely anti-Israel and now everyone knows it
There’s no ethic cleansing unless you follow the propaganda that Palestine has existed for 1000s of years and Israel stole all the land and has been attacking everyone around it.
Not much to do with Facebook. The people and govt were struggling with Covid and govt. wanted to show some action. India also had some border skirmish with China just before that and also the govt wants to reduce dependency on China in general.
The direct trigger was a violent confrontation on the border that led to the loss of life of 20 Indian soldiers. The govt wanted to be seen as taking action, while dependence on Chinese supply chain meant any action on the trade front would hurt India's own economy. So popular Chinese apps were seen as a softer target and banned. Aliexpress was also targeted with shipped products being held up at customs indefinitely, leading to aliexpress ending shipping to India from China.
IIRC the TikTok (and others) ban had to do with some Chinese incursion inside Indian territory, and the government wanted to appear to be doing something.
That's a incorrect and biased piece of sentence. Over 60 apps were banned initially, some before the skirmishes and some after. Kindly do not spread biased political propaganda.
> I have a feeling tiktok is probably more moderated and enforces stricter content rules than instagram
Respectfully, did you read the article? They had more real problems with TikTok's moderation.
> The Nepali government said that they had reached out to TikTok multiple times but the company declined to address their concerns about the content; Narayan Kaji Shrestha, the home minister, suggested a ban on the entire app since scrubbing offending videos individually would be too tricky, the New York Times reported.
Instagram has been around too long so gets largely ignored when people talk about bad influences from social media. Even though, realistically, any photo/video-based social media is awful for teenagers' self-esteem and mental health. [0]
Instagram's influence on people is of a different kind (which doesn't mean it is not a concern...). TikTok directly fuels violence and low IQ, especially amongst teenagers.
Don't forget it was also the chosen Livestream platform for the CHCH shooter and was where the "J6 Insurrection" was planned (hence the frantic redirection and sacrifice of the scapegoat known as Parler)
It seems to me that the world would be an objectively better place without any of the current generation of social media where you get force-fed content.
Anything with a “feed” of anything other than what you specifically seek out to follow should be constrained at least by persistent warnings like cigarette labels and prevented from being used for advertising (subscription or freemium model).
Advertising should be banned on media that is proven to promote social harm.
MySpace, blogs, newsgroups, IRC were the socially optimal form, even if not the commercially optimal implementation.
Everything else creates ragebait, doomscrolling, self reinforcing insecurity loops, rabbit holing, and other negative social consequences.
If anyone has a counterpoint, I’m actually really interested in other, more positive, models for online social interaction.
If you change /shorts/ in the URL to /watch/, it'll load the same video in the normal YouTube UI. I like that better because it allows for such advanced features as... changing the fucking volume.
(Shorts will keep the volume set as whatever you last changed it to in the normal UI, with no way to change it without going to a different ("normal") video.)
I used a Firefox add-on called "Stylus" and wrote a custom css rule to hide the relevant divs/elements. It's not perfect, but it's okay. https://github.com/openstyles/stylus
However, after the recent ad-blocker targeting by Youtube I pretty much just stopped watching Youtube entirely. I added my regular subscriptions to the NewPipe app on my phone and just watch what they put out.
The add-on I mentioned above is super useful to personalize my experience with other websites. Particularly online-shopping and other marketplaces that have huge amounts of whitespace for no reason. You'd be surprised how much nicer the web experience is after you add a few "margin: 0px;" css styles to strategic areas.
I was wondering the other day what the alternative world would be like where every publicly posted video had to be reviewed by the BBFC censor board and assigned a rating. Like if you want to post your kid's first steps on Facebook, that would be a U rating, while car park fights would be R15.
(and of course how unworkable it would be to have the censor board be several percent of the population so they could keep up with the posting rate)
Maybe that's a good thing, and would cause the balance / dynamic to be different and thus requiring a rework in some form
Perhaps it costs real money to submit each video to these platforms as a means to offset the moderation and rating efforts. Similar to what others have suggested to reduce spam emails.
Off the top of my head, requiring money to post videos to these platforms would immediately reduce the sheer huge volume of spam and automated/auto-generated videos. It would also reduce spam from LCOL regions that weaponize their low-value of time in order to game the system.
Not only that, but it would solve identity and age verification (as it'd require a credit card).
>have the censor board be several percent of the population
Easy to scale up nannying to infinite proportions with AGI. (We don't have that yet, but it may arrive very soon. Well, we have a shitty approximation right now, but AI != AGI.)
On the other hand, that (coupled with the NSA thing) also makes the "my FBI agent" meme come true. One Federal Agent Per Child.
I'm pretty libertarian, but I agree something needs to change. I don't know what sane regulation would look like, but I suspect the politician's answer would be regulatory capture of some kind. I personally don't want some kind of government censor managing my internet connection, but at the same time I think this shit is detrimental to society. I think it's a conversation we should be having.
Maybe some way of making addiction-inducing products less profitable instead of censorship? Or going further, lessening the role of profit in how society is organized?
I'm also heavily leaning towards Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist. My thought on the matter is that whatever solution we come up with to resolve this particular issue is the same one we need to do to resolve the greater societal issues we are seeing, because I think the root cause is the same.
Beyond that, part of the Libertarian line of thought is that we have to "let go" and let things fall where they may because we have no moral claim over it. The area of effect we have as individuals is quite small so it makes sense to focus in that direction rather. So that would mean things like family, neighborhood, community, shared culture/religion, and the institutions that build on those.
I myself try to be involved with and sit on the boards of HoAs, to add some sanity and fairness to it. I've also been helping pay for close family friends to go through college. I'm also planning on doing charity work for the groups I feel closest to in my local context (South Africa).
The root cause is a desire for unconsciousness. The solution is a higher level of consciousness. Take a small dose of LSD (not endorsing this, just making a point) and the entire modern internet becomes unbearable. It becomes physically painful to procrastinate because you are just painfully aware that you are trying to distract yourself, defeating the purpose.
It's like when you reset your tastebuds and the level of sugar and salt in everything becomes physically revolting.
I don't expect a mass enlightenment any time soon though (regardless of legalization/normalization of psychedelics), so we'll need one or two (or three...) "stopgap" solutions before that point. (Just for the next thousand years or so ;)
A somewhat related phenomenon is the desire for someone else to take care of everything. It simplifies the infinite chaos and complexity of life. To some degree this is necessary to maintain sanity, but if this is the "default" approach, except for a small percentage of people who seek power due to genetic hardwiring... well then you end up with what we have now. In this case, the solution is also maturation (though in this case, emotional rather than... whatever you want to call consciousness being aware of itself), and also not expected to "arrive" within the next few centuries.
I wish I had some more practical suggestions, but I at least hope that pointing out the root causes (as I see them) may lead someone else to helpful ideas.
Interesting to watch people confront themselves like this. Everyone's libertarian until they see a real harm that actually upsets them and they can't victim-blame.
Nah man there are a lot of harms that upset me where I still think regulation would cause more harm. Anything related to the latest craze over CSAM and encryption is a good example.
On the other hand, if anyone wants to try making advertisement contracts unenforceable (illegal, essentially), I'll be the first in line.
Social network apps with scrolling feeds are literally online slot machines. People get stuck in the machine zone. It's exactly the same thing, minus the explicit money transaction.
This design should be regulated the same way slot machines are.
I mean that we need something like a forced label on every social platform: a forced 5 second splash screen with a warning. “this app can cause depression, self-esteem issues and is detrimental to your mental health. Here are some resources to know more”
I wish the EU commission had the guts to push for something like this for all dopamine-kick and scroll-based apps
Why are all the comments that point out who runs TikTok downvoted? I want to suggest the same people are active on this platform, which sounds absurd, of course, but also they wouldn't be doing their job if they weren't!
I only visit on mobile. I thought the middle film thing icon was to take your own photos/videos - because that’s what the center icon did on the YouTube app; the last time I had the app installed. Never occurred to me it’s a feed. O_o
Instagram's default feed is an abomination. For me it shows two posts from people I follow, and then an endless stream of ads and "suggested" content.
Thankfully I don't engage with Instagram much, and a few years back I muted/unfollowed a bunch of people, so the algorithmic feed is mostly okay: dogs, cats, climbing. But most of it is recycled regurgitated aggregator accounts
There is no way to set it as default. You have to do it everytime which is extremely annoying. Instagram clearly does not want you to only see posts from the people you follow.
You can switch to "Following" on front page and not get any algo recs but I don't think selection sticks.
Algo recs and reels nearly killed IG for me. It desperately tries to become TikTok but that's not why I signed up for IG (which was photos). Photos still exist, but even if you like every photo and "dislike" every reel for months it will still push 99% reel content in your feed--whatever ML they use has been near totally useless.
I don't know if it was that recent? I abandoned the app two years ago because of the introduction of the algorithmic feed ( and the explore page, but at least you had to click on that )
The context of China destroying Tibet should not be overlooked here. Nepal shares much with Tibet culturally. Perhaps China isn't an immediate threat to their sovereignty, but it's certainly an existential threat.
That'd be a great subject to study then. You've got the whole, open internet as a resource to learn (the irony of that statement will make sense to you later; something to look forward to)
That's the crux of the issue, I'd rather actually talk to the people affected instead of reading biased online information. No one, outside of the U.S. thinks China is the scary boogeyman you guys make it out to be.
No one? Really? Amazing. I’m surprised you’ve taken a tally of the world population sans the US but are unable to find non biased content about China online.
Nepal is a small country bordering on a behemoth (China) that has a fairly authoritarian autocratic government that is asserting itself in multiple territorial disputes with other neighbors. It's wedged between India and China. It is correct for Nepal to have geopolitical concerns about the future. Nepal is the kind of landlocked country (e.g. Poland or Ukraine in Europe) that tends to become the unwitting victims.
I don't really have an opinion on TikTok, but maybe more on the social harmony part. But just an observation as I'm getting older. Restricting your choices in life, can often lead to good outcomes. Like what you eat, drink, who you socialize with, what you watch, who you sleep with, what you read...it's a long list.
Choice is great, but can be overwhelming.
Not that I'm for minimalism. But I'm guessing Nepal has a religious government...Buddhist? And like many other religions, part of it is restricting the behaviour of the adherents. Which like I mentioned before, is not always bad.
If the majority of the country feels this way, why should you push your Western Values on them.
> If the majority of the country feels this way, why should you push your Western Values on them.
While social permissiveness is distinctly a phenomenon of the west, I wouldn’t characterize “western values” by that single phase. For most of the history of the American Republic, it was taken for granted the government could regulate morality as an aspect of the public welfare. Regulation of businesses believed to be morally harmful, such as strip clubs and pornographic magazines, was deemed within the scope of government power into the mid-20th century, until anti-democratic Supreme Court decisions interpreted constitutional provisions in ways that would have shocked the people who wrote them.
While social permissiveness is distinctly a phenomenon of the west
How about Japan or Taiwan? Reminder: Taiwan legalised gay marriage in 2019!
I don't like to use the term "Western" too much. It's more clear to say "modern". Example: Japan is not at all Westernized, nor Taiwan, nor South Korea, but they are definitely modern.
-- Edit --
As a counterpoint, I would say that India (in my limited experience on-the-ground) is way more social conservative than Sri Lanka. I was genuinely surprised by the social permissiveness in Sri Lanka. It was a world apart from India. Thus, I would say Sri Lanka is on-the-cusp of being considered modern (in my eyes).
Everybody in the entire world alive today is in the present. Nobody is more modern than anybody else. An Amish farmer is no less of a modern man than a San Francisco web developer. You are crossing your wires, using temporal language to pass subjective judgment against other ways of life. People who don't live live styles similar to your own aren't living in the past, they are in the present with everybody else.
You're essentially calling everybody else backwards. That's judgemental and subjective, not objective. It's a mentality of cultural imperialism, only one step away from calling for people to be "brought up to speed", e.g. forced into your way of life.
I think we're talking about culturally Western here, not geopolitically Western. I can't see even a (sane) cynic call these 3 countries culturally Western unless you think being a liberal democracy automatically makes you culturally Western. And Japan is one of the countries said to have "Westernized"!
The world is being westernized thanks to the influence of western media and culture. So in that sense, it can seem like “westernization” and “modernity” are the same thing. But the Japanese and Taiwanese also wear western-style business suits, wear jeans, drink coffee, etc. We wouldn’t say that jeans are “modern” rather than being a western influence. Moreover, in other parts of the world you have a resurgent, fundamentalist Islam. In the 1950s, Egyptian women didn’t wear headscarves. Today, most do. That’s also “modern.”
Same-sex marriage also isn’t a good example to gauge whether a culture is socially permissive, because sexual orientation is biologically determined. The scientific fact of that has been critical in acceptance of that in the East: http://olivia.thechiongs.com/2015/03/28/a-purely-practical-v.... It’s more of a social accommodation for a biologically defined group, rather than permissiveness as to individual behavior. That makes it quite distinct from western liberal culture, which I think would say that it doesn’t make a difference whether it’s a choice or not.
Indeed, as the classical and Christian notions of freedom, as opposed to the liberal variety, entails self-discipline, self-denial, and the restraint, disciplining, and purification of the appetites through things like fasting and abstinence.
Would a native Hawaiian, consider themselves free, that they live under Western Laws. They have western freedoms, and democracy, and all the shiny trinkets. But now also lack autonomy, and the real control over their native land. Democracy is kind of useless to a Native Hawaiian, when they'll be outvoted by outsiders every time.
I think plenty of them would just want their land back. And Westerners can shove it.
I think "contemporary western values" is just a feel good saying, a pretty wrapper, on economic expansionist policy ... globalism.
And there are plenty of taboo topics in the West too, and it's enforced as well. Celebrities have handlers, FBI goes around planting informants and extorting dissenters for political gain. People get canceled, fired from jobs for saying dissenting opinions. And its done in the name of "social harmony" and greater good here as well.
"Contemporary western values" is not a statement that means everyone in the west has the same values, nor it is an endorsement. It is referring to the generally predominant mainstream consensus.
I agree. This is a virtually meaningless term. Just look at New York State or Washington State (in US). The largest city (NYC and Seattle) are extremely liberal. However, the country side is much more conservative. Do they share the same "contemporary western values"? Hmmm...
I do believe what they do share is "contemporary Western values". I think both sides would agree with at least some form of the rule of law, freedom of religion, gender equality and support for liberal democracy. Don't you think they would look at most any form of governance pre-1850 and agree it's bad?
I suppose they could console themselves with knowledge that it was never their land. The monarch of the island, and later islands, or local chief had control over it. The very concept of people, or citizens, controlling their land is a concept that was imported.
I'd argue only some alcohol control laws exist for religious reasons. Some of those old puritanical laws are still on the books, but stick around today because they are useful for regulatory capture.
I think in this case (liquor stores being closed exclusively on Sunday morning in Texas), you'd need extraordinary evidence to assume that it's not because of the facade of puritanical ideals.
Perhaps that's not the case in Northern New Jersey (which, crazily, also has similar rules) though.
I was thinking along the lines of alcohol control laws which limit licensing, distribution, sales, etc. Those groups with preferential treatment have become special interest groups in many places that want to perpetuate those limits because it prevents competitors. Somewhere around a quarter of states have mandated some form of monopoly in regards to alcohol, and others have limited licensing schemes that are highly politicized.
If there’s a majority who support this then they should just self-regulate and go on their merry way.
This is always about imposing one’s beliefs on others. “Social harmony” is intentionally vague. Everyone will imagine their own meaning of that and be inclined to think, “yeah that’s something I’m on board with.”
That’s just libertarianism applied to social issues, and has the same problems as libertarianism as applied to economic issues. People need social support to help them understand what decisions are good, and make good decisions.
How many overweight and obese doctors and nurses are there? They’re only slightly healthier than the general population: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/healthcare/why-don-t-doctor.... Smart, educated Americans can’t force themselves to limit their eating. But in say east Asia, extensive social shaming over weight helps people stay slim.
Humans didn’t evolve to be libertarian sovereign individuals. They’re members of communities and their welfare can be increased by allowing community reinforcement of good behaviors and decisions.
> But in say east Asia, extensive social shaming over weight helps people stay slim.
Does it help people stay slim with fewer overall negative effects then if people didn't stay slim? Eating disorders and mental health do come into the equation. There's many ways to keep people slim that doesn't result in a healthier society.
You're generalising that small sample too much. Even their findings suggest healthcare professionals exercise more, and smoke less.
As for "living in a community", I would trust more the kindness and humanity in general, than the same of a select group.
By this I mean, alignment of good behaviour comes naturally from one's experience. And I guess I agree with you to an extent. But, I take the general sentiment of your post as advertising collectivism. Which, from personal experience, has a tendency to be non-inclusive. The worst of it comes in subtle ways. Causing considerable harm to anyone that steers just a little bit from the norm. But, that in no way is a harm to others.
> But, I take the general sentiment of your post as advertising collectivism. Which, from personal experience, has a tendency to be non-inclusive. The worst of it comes in subtle ways. Causing considerable harm to anyone that steers just a little bit from the norm.
Yes, I do think western society has become too individualist, to its detriment. I also agree that collectivist societies can be non-inclusive. But the flip side of that is that it can be better for the people in the middle 80%. I think your average person, especially your average young person, needs more social guidance than contemporary, highly individualist western society is willing to provide. It also makes it difficult to achieve anything that requires solidarity and social coordination.
I dunno… I apply this sentiment to Christian Republicanism and it concerns me greatly. They also have a lot to say about what disrupts social harmony. And of course, it’s what they’ve decided “social harmony” means to them.
From an “evolutionary” standpoint mid-20th century western liberalism seems to be a dead end, as its adherents are literally dying off and being replaced by people from more robust cultures.
You can certainly try to shame people into adopting your rigid ideology, religion, and culture. People have tried time and time again. That doesn’t make it right.
> Restricting your choices in life, can often lead to good outcomes.
The article isn't about somebody restricting their own choices in life, but about the Nepalese government restricting others' choices in life, which is an entirely different thing.
Its a different thing, but not entirely. Having your choices restricted, by a government of all things, is something most Western people especially Americans find obscene. But it can also lead to good outcomes at considerable less effort.
In a sense every government does this. It restricts the ability of its citizens to violently harm each other for example. Or of companies to poison the land. Or even of drivers to not wear seat belts, something which doesn't even harm others. All those are relatively uncontroversial restrictions on personal liberty.
TikTok is full of Asian content that it promotes: there is still so much Chinese, Korean, Japanese, even some Indian content on tiktok even in an average westerner's feed. Some of this is straight taken form Douyin (by content creators in those country who want to earn money on tiktok).
> Some of this is straight taken form Douyin (by content creators in those country who want to earn money on tiktok).
Having helped a Chinese friend taking down a couple of impersonating/infringing TikTok accounts, I believe the overwhelming majority of the content taken straight from Douyin is unauthorized, by people who think the original creators won’t notice and/or won’t do anything about it. It’s not like you can easily earn a meaningful amount from TikTok’s Creator Fund, so better focus on streaming or getting sponsorship deals for the Douyin market which is a lot larger and culturally aligned.
A lot of the cultural movement on TikTok is Korean driven, or multi cultural, like the popularity of that Vietnamese See Tinh in Korea via a TikTok remix. TikTok is incredibly Asian, and gets lots of air from non-PRC Chinese communities (like mainland Douyin content on TikTok with traditional Chinese comments).
India had a military exchange with China and banned TikTok alongside several other Chinese apps in retaliation. Their official justification was "national security concerns". preciousoo is, charitably, just making things up for no reason.
I very much remember reading such an article around the time they banned TT, but maybe said article was fake news, as it's hard to find any mentions of it now.
The content is ~~designed~~curated to destroy the minds of the consumers. There have been quite a few articles showing how content differs between the West and China.
There is a religious angle to it . it comes from christian conversion , spread more rapid after earthquake and in the name of aid . Let's not forget the divisive angles that get exploited in the name of Caste System of Hinduism but Buddhists in far flung places are being converted as well as well as people of older,native cultures .
Tiktok made it easy to peddle a victimhood and prosecution complex to the masses . Deplore the current religion , festivals , cultural aspects etc . Send direct hate against a certain group , caste of people who are supposed to be more privileged and outsider.
As per western values , things are mostly fine . LGBTQ is protected . Nepal ranks better in all Democratic and Human rights aspects . Freedom of press and so on .Leads in women rights and labors . Gay marriage is allowed but has fell short on bureaucratic paperworks related to it .
There's plenty of choice of media in the West. But its like having 50 different flavours of Chips in a supper market. It's mostly the same few political ideas peddled with different wrapper. And what you think free, is actually pretty controlled and contrived.
Is that so? I find a lot of value in certain Fediverse instances. They don't seem contrived, just humane (I know some aren't, I don't intend to go to those).
My comment was about the mainstream media, with actual public reach and influence. I don't even know what Fediverse is and I'm a computer guy. Imagine the general population.
Perhaps ironically (given the somewhat corrupted attribution to Alexandra Kollontai of the flippant remark that "the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as simple as getting a glass of water"), Stalin reeled in some of the sexual excesses that characterized the early Soviet regime, because, as it turns out, sex is indeed dangerous and deserving of honor and respect, and sexual degeneracy is a sure way to propel a society toward self-destruction and chaos.
I think the key is to start with far less restriction then you think you need, and refine your approach over time until you hit upon a happy medium, that allows novel experiences while limiting irrecoverable consequences.
I care about the people in Nepal who don't want their government to restrict their access to the web. The people who want to be restricted in that way can exercise self-control.
It’s like smoking in public places. People who don’t want smoking in their faces can find non-smoker cafes! Once such cafe pops up, some people will complain that it’s messing with human rights to smoke.
I don't know what's going on with Nepal, but I noticed a sudden influx of specifically Nepalese migrant workers in East Europe. It's odd given how small that country is, and also because the area they visit for work is not that great itself. How bad can it be in Nepal then?!?
When they ban tiktok but keep other social medias, tell you that someone wants to keep the audience watching the same narrative, on TV or the internet. You might argue that TikTok has a narrative or not, but sure it isn’t controlled by the same entity that controls other social media.
I was talking to my girlfriend about the concept of banning things deemed harmful last night. The conversation started around whether it's a good idea to ban people doing things that are dangerous to themselves (like smoking and drinking), but obviously it's hard to have that conversation without also considering broader societal consequences.
Something I've noticed in recent years is how out of touch I am about the harms people claim are caused to them by social media. For example, I find Twitter to be an amazing source of real-time information and a place I can discuss practically any topic with experts in that field. I don't post on there but I have TikTok on my phone and I find it quite a fun app to use to pass the time when I have nothing else to do. I think because of my viewing habits I tend to get fairly interesting DIY, tech and political content show up which can sometimes teach me something I didn't know. Sometimes the content is lacking depth, but it's certainly not a negative experience.
The same is true of me and alcohol or smoking. I don't drink or smoke. I actually had my first drink in about 3 years the other day, but it was something I wanted to do to maximise my enjoyment of the situation. Similarly, I have smoked a few times in my life, but it's only ever been a positive experience given the context.
I think what troubles me when I speak to people about these topics is that most people feel they're victims of social media and other potentially harmful things like smoking and alcohol and therefore support bans. Obviously I can't deny these things can and do have negative impacts on individuals and societies, but I'd question whether they are the root cause.
There seems to be a larger issue here around people lacking self-control and self-awareness, therefore wanting the government to impose the self-control they lack on them. And I think this problem is getting worse just observing how teens today use social media.
I'm saying this because I think TikTok could be a positive force in society, but it's not because a large number of people today are incapable of self-control. And this is a problem because if the root issue isn't TikTok but our own self-control then we'll need to demand our government take ever more control over our lives to protect us from ourselves. For example if the government doesn't regulate my use of Twitter or out right ban me using it then I might develop an addiction to it and anxiety. If the government doesn't stop me from smoking then it's possible I might smoke a pack a day for the next decade then go on to develop lung cancer. If the government doesn't ban me from drinking sugary drinks then I might drink a can of Coca-Cola.
I've flippantly joked about it before, but I do think if we can't address this underlying issue of self-control we will have to extend these bans further and further to places which seem absurd today. For example, hard to argue someone watching TikTok every day is more harmful than someone eating at McDonalds every day. Given the harms of fast food I think you could make a far stronger argument against it's legality than TikTok.
I understand I'm expressing an unpopular opinion here. I'm also not saying there's nothing we can do to reduce the likelihood that people will develop harmful behaviours. For example, I wouldn't necessarily be against reasonable restrictions on social media for children. It's really this idea that adults can't choose to do things which could be harmful to themselves that I find hard to understand.
Like many controversial issues regarding government policy, it's an arbitrary line. Different people's brains are susceptible to addiction to different things. I don't enjoy drinking but I still understand some people struggle with alcohol addiction and that it could potentially be a net positive if alcohol were outright banned. It's pretty condescending to simplify people struggling with addiction as simply lacking self control.
>It's really this idea that adults can't choose to do things which could be harmful to themselves that I find hard to understand.
I really think it comes to down to a simple distinction: those that grew up with the old internet as kids and were inoculated to its effects and those that first got the internet through the main line that is the smartphone.
There's always been something like the internet though. When I was growing up there was a lot of concern around video games, for example. Growing up I even knew a few guys who were arguably addicted to video games and did nothing else when they weren't in school but play video games. Video games are also designed to be addictive and can often have harmful content – this is the main reason parents wanted certain video games banned in the 90s.
Again, I'm not against sensible limits on children. I do understand that a child cannot have 100% agency over their own actions. But blanket bans on "harmful" videos games like GTA or apps like TikTok seems silly because it limits the actions of adults under the assumption that the government knows what's best for you and your family.
What the government could do is implement age restrictions and age-based content filters. Mandate that companies provide parents with the tools to restrict usage and fine companies that fail do to this. But otherwise just let people do what they want. Tiktok is a great app enjoyed by millions. I don't know why we have to ruin that because a small percentage of people can't control their usage.
I think growing up with a smartphone in your hand makes you extremely well attuned to presentation and sensing how every little data point will be perceived by others. Maybe you need that to navigate today. But I think that acute awareness also comes with a sense that there are currents dragging and pulling at you, which older generations are less perceptive of, and perhaps less vulnerable to.
We now have a generation who had to form their sense of self in a world where they are surrounded by sophisticated social media algorithms. They didn't get to form a sense of self offline, and only then hit the information superhighway where you pick out the perfect TOOL-song for your MySpace.
They had to swim or sink - and they're really good swimmers now, but perhaps on some level they accurately feel like they were robbed of a choice of sorts.
You'll never know who you would have been without the smartphone.
I've met more than a dozen native Nepalese men and women here in Texas. I've learned lots of names. My closest friend, N, gave me prayer beads to help me keep my path toward healing.
To look at Nepal as an outsider is like dropping a senior citizen lifer from Pittsburgh into McAllen Texas and telling them good luck.
In a lot of regards, if Nepal is considering a different tactic, somewhat like the French do versus the US "break shit & profit & then go to therapy or take pills" approach...well, honestly...
Texas to Bosnia to Nepal is my 2024 tour plan because I'm kinda over this shit a little here.
> Greater time spent on social networking websites led to higher psychological distress, an unmet need for mental health support, poor self-rated mental health, and increased suicidal ideation. In conclusion, greater time spent on online social networking promotes self-harm behavior and suicidal ideation in vulnerable adolescents.
> In September 2021, Bytedance announced it was making several changes to its algorithm and user interface in China, limiting children to just 40 minutes a day, introducing a Youth Mode for under 14s, and preventing the app being accessible to children between 10pm and 6am.
The astute reader will note that China has no such concerns for children outside of China, to the contrary, encouraging them to spend as much time on the app as possible.
We muslims do (for muslims not non-muslims), and also advocate for a ban on such addictive and life-wasting technologies like TikTok in our countries. And guess what, it worked for millenia and still works to a great extent, even when there is no longer a ban in law in many so-called 'muslim' countries. Unlike the American Prohibition which didn't.
In Turkey there is no ban on drinking. They eat halal meat but still drink freely. And do you have any examples of Muslim countries that advocate ban on addictive life wasting tech? It is such a broad term.
I live in Turkey actually! It is probably the most heavily and forcefully secularized Muslim country in the world. (Ataturk killed ~half a million people for his secular reforms, Islamic alphabet got abolished, European dress code literally became law, religious clothing got prohibited, religion schools closed, scholars executed & prosecuted and Islamic prayer call Adhan was banned for straight 18 years).
It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives (including me) I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (they're less religious too).
From here, it’s hilarious to see Westerners thinking prohibition is impossible and preaching against it. Muslims have been very successful in prohibition of all kinds of mind-altering substances since 15 centuries. Compare this with the failed American Prohibition. There are more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, away from the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.
> A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.
Muslims here do advocate for a ban on harmful technologies including but not limited to TikTok. As an example which made its way into law, pornography websites are banned (at ISP level).
I have only been to one Muslim country (where I am from) and the state of general public morals is really bad when compared to UK (where I am for work). Given we don't drink and do most of other drugs (cigarette is considered less harmful and not Haram for example) i often wonder why still our values and morals are so crappy in general. My personal conclusion is that forgiveness is the greatest loophole my religion has. People do whatever and believe it will all be forgiven.
There probably should either be no ban on anything for anyone for any age (only your immediate care takers could stop you) or the bans should be public wide. I don't understand how alcohol/drugs above 18 are not harmful or way less harmful.
Kinda. Note that in most cases even the least religious would not eat pork, which is strictly prohibited. For others, definition of Halal is a bit vague, e.g. Kosher is considered halal by most.
What's the feeling about Khat? I don't know the numbers in general but I was in a specific region and saw that many Muslim men there were quite addicted to it. Is it actually Halal?
""The government has decided to ban TikTok as it was necessary to regulate the use of the social media platform that was disrupting social harmony, goodwill and flow of indecent materials," Saud said."
TikTok "was disrupting ... flow of indecent materials".
I parsed as though there was a semicolon after goodwill - (disrupting …) and (flow of indecent materials) rather than disrupting flow of indecent materials
Meanwhile nearly half of Nepal's population is on Facebook, something I'm sure happened completely organically and there's no chance Facebook influenced this decision at all.
The U.S. government hasn’t loaned Nepal tons of money to build an airport using Chinese companies and labor that will likely never be used and will almost certainly not pay itself off and was significantly overpriced to begin with putting Nepal in severe debt to China and is currently under investigation by the anti-corruption unit of the Nepalese government, as one simple example of why they might be more suspicious of a Chinese company rather than an American one.
After reading the article, all that can eventually be concluded is that China is establishing a tighter control over the hitherto very loose border, and that exactly where the border is remains unclear even to people living close to it.
But the narrative structure of the article - of a leaked government document (!) about Chinese buildings on Nepalese sure of the border (!!) which China denies (!!!) and Nepal sends military to investigate (!!!!) only to find there aren't any (oh) - is an insult to journalism. Maybe I'm naive but I feel BBC used to have higher standards.
> The report also concluded that China had been limiting grazing by Nepalese farmers.
> In the same area, it found China was building a fence around a border pillar, and attempting to construct a canal and a road on the Nepalese side of the border.
Buildings were on Chinese side true, but Chinese roads and canals and fences were on the Nepalese side.
> where the border is remains unclear even to people living close to it.
Limiting grazing by Nepalese farmers... on the Chinese side of the border? Most probably, why else would the article leave that unclear. Also this would be an expected result of border traffic control.
'Attempting' to construct a canal and a road? If this is the explosive payload of the article, why not lean more into the detail?
More than china , india is an existential threat . Historically gone to war with the british east india . Although it had gone to war with Tibet , tibet at the time was backed by China .
Yeah. The tendency of Americans to believe their government does not utilize a great amount of unethical power and control while it needs that and not be noticed or can get away with it is unbelievable.
I get most of my TikTok content via Facebook. I didn’t even really try it before Facebook started putting TikTok videos in my feed. I’m not clear if it’s a Facebook platform that is sucking in TikTok videos or if it’s some kind of agreement with them?
Arguendo, assume Facebook lobbied for it. If only one market player doesn't follow an industry standard on public interest (consensus which prevents industry regulation), of course other players should lobby to get the player out.
I could believe Facebook is a good player in terms of “public interest” or “social harmony” or whatnot if they weren’t credibly accused of enabling a genocide in Myanmar, which is a larger country in roughly the same region as Nepal.
The accusations are only credible if you limit yourself to only looking at stuff on Facebook. If you see posts on Facebook calling for Muslims to be killed and then sometime later you see posts on Facebook of Muslims actually getting killed, you might be forgiven for thinking that the former posts caused the latter posts, and if only Facebook had taken down the former, the latter would never have happened.
But it turns out the posts calling for Muslims to be killed were made by the military's propaganda wing and the killings were perpetrated by the military's armed wing. So the causal chain actually flows through the military, and Facebook was merely a place where you could observe it happen without being there in person.
Blaming Facebook for the genocide seems to be an instance of activists focusing on something they can see and try to influence (Facebook moderation policy) over something they cannot (guys with guns shooting people).
Regardlessly of whether you believe Facebook played a role in amplifying genocidal messages, the fact that Facebook allowed the very clear calls for violence on their platform for years is orders of magnitude more serious than sexually suggestive content (I assume that’s what “indecent material” refers to here) or “kids doing dumb things” which I hear every so often about TikTok.
You didn't have a modem? Even in the 80s there was an animation format called GL (not at all related to OpenGL) for pornographic animations. Which were pretty repetitive and basic but they served the purpose.
Also pay TV channels at the time were full of porn and pretty easy to crack for a horny tech teenager.
And if "your day" was even further back the 60s and 70s were pretty wild with actual in person sex (tbh I wish society hadn't reverted back to prudeness from that but luckily there's plenty of communities that aren't)
“reverting back to prudeness” is a matter of perspective. We’re a species that has domesticated itself for its collective good. Part of making progress towards that was changing our approach to mating from a free-for-all to something strictly regulated by culture. It could be said that we’ve been reverting back to our pre-civilisation free-for-all for the last 60+ years.
I don't really care about our species. More about self discovery without artificial social taboos.
Mating was so regulated by culture (mostly religion though) due to the obvious link to the procreation thing, but these days those are no longer coupled so the taboos aren't necessary.
> Society has accidentally rediscovered that marriage is the only way to have sex that isn't technically rape.
Ehhh no.
Simply asking for an explicit yes is fine here too by law. Of course taking into account that this can be revoked at any time and must be obeyed.
And even within marriage it's not legal to force someone to have sex. At least here in Spain it's much more about spending ones life together, shared ownership and parenthood etc than about sex. Of course you wouldn't marry someone you don't ever want to have sex with but it doesn't mean you are obliged to do so. Marital rape is unfortunately a thing.
On the other hand, open marriages are also a thing. I often engage in sexual practices with married people with the spouse even present (and often active with someone else). It's not rape :). Just harmless and fully consensual fun.
Consent is actually a huge thing in the more promiscuous communities these days. Often people even make contracts (though this is more common in BDSM than in the Swinger community)
I like discovering other communities but not our species as a whole. In fact it makes me pretty depressed reading the news lol. We're not very good at looking after ourselves or the planet.
Prudeness? You have no idea what you're talking about. This accusation of "prudeness" is precisely the kind of insult predatory men hurled at women during the '60s and '70s to try to coerce women into bed. "What are you, a prude? A square?" It is actually libertinism that has bred the widespread sexual dysfunction that we are seeing.
Pornography is utterly deranging, and in such an insidious way, the poor schmuck doesn't even know how damaged and warped he's become, how enslaved. Its production and distribution at the very least should be criminalized, and taboos that shame and stigmatize its consumption should be revived and promoted in the media. Alas, corrupt governments back pornography because of its utility in controlling the populace.
> Prudeness? You have no idea what you're talking about. This accusation of "prudeness" is precisely the kind of insult predatory men hurled at women during the '60s and '70s to try to coerce women into bed. "What are you, a prude? A square?" It is actually libertinism that has bred the widespread sexual dysfunction that we are seeing.
We can have a consent culture and healthy and open sex lives. For example swinger clubs and polyamory are becoming more common again despite explicit consent being totally normal these days. But the other side society of seems to frown more and more on such things.
And I'm not accusing an individual of anything. Just describing society as a whole. In particular people are becoming more and more concerned about what other adults consensually do in the bedroom again. Even though it's none of their business. Like transphobia, homophobia, porn.. 10 years ago people wouldn't pass judgment on those things.
> Alas, corrupt governments back pornography because of its utility in controlling the populace.
So instead of this you advocate... controlling the populace using legal, media and social pressure?:
> Its production and distribution at the very least should be criminalized, and taboos that shame and stigmatize its consumption should be revived and promoted in the media.
I'm sure you know that telling people what to think isn't going to work.
Funny how panoramic/horizontal arms race between film producers and TV producers calmed overnight. I was prepared to ask a snarky question about vertical movies going mainstream but apparently there has been already a relevant festival since 2014.
Why do threads about TikTok _always_ have posts with whataboutism regarding Instagram and other social network apps? It's a pattern I started noticing.
Lmao. I only started using TT again recently. The amount of “thot” content is insane. Only after carefully engaging with interesting topics did its frequency decrease (yes, decrease. Not eliminates).
TT algo tries to sneak in a new thot creator every now and then.
I find that TikTok's algorithm is actually excellent at pigeonholing you depending on what you pay attention to. The only "thot" content I ever see is when TikTok decides to push (geographically localized) live chats on me (which is 50% thirst traps and 50% neo-nazi where I am, apparently). But I have consistently swiped away anything I don't want to see more of as soon as I can.
If anything, the problem for me now is that TikTok is so narrow in what it shows me that I barely ever get anything new (thematically) and when I do TikTok instantly tries to make it its entire focus if I dare engage with it at all.
They're not wrong that it is rooted in misogyny, considering that you don't really use 'whore' or 'ho' with positive connotations. Not to mention that terms like thot are more likely to be found in incel communities these days, which is hardly a glowing endorsement of the term being used with good intentions.
As someone else said, at least 'thirst trap' doesn't lay it squarely at the feet of women, as if men aren't capable of doing the same.
I would ask, why shouldn't it be laid squarely at the feet of these women? This is something that a particular type of woman does to vulnerable men.
These men ought to have our sympathy rather than being labelled as "incels", a term which so easily lets us avoid viewing them as victims. Similarly, these women ought to be held responsible for their actions.
People seem to be more concerned with the perceived misogyny of, at worst, a mildly offensive word than the systematic exploitation of vulnerable members of society.
"A woman considered to be sexually provocative or promiscuous; a slut or whore" (Dictionary.com)
"A girl who is looked at as a hoe or slut." (Urban Dictionary)
"A slut, a woman who is sexually promiscuous." (Wiktionary)
"A promiscuous woman" (Collins)
Nowhere does it say a thot "attracts and extracts money from lonely boys". The behavior of a "thot" is not immoral, she is simply sexually active / promiscuous. Using this term in a derogatory manner is misogynistic, just like "slut". Downvote me all you want.
See I totally get your technique and report on this and thank you. I've done a write up on some free/pay dating apps and the tactics are definitely there. Like this is a community that knows what's up and still kinda skates around it.
No, its not actually banned there. Its just called with different name there and they have different kind of rules. Rules what makes it more harmless for brains. For example concent in Douyin is more educative etc.
The presumption that information warps minds consistently leads to free speech restrictions. My perspective you need to proove harm, then proving Tiktok caused the harm, and showing banning is the only remedy.
I'm not sure even sure Tiktok causes harm, let alone more harm than other social media.
Ive never understood why TikTok is allowed to run their app in the West whilst China blocks all foreign apps within its own borders.
How is this not a simple trade issue?
The West was trying to get China to open its markets, which required opening ours first and reciprocally. Because we can't just force them to buy opium at gunpoint any more.
Of course it's free speech. Manipulative speech is free speech. Dangerous speech is free speech. This has been supported by the US Supreme court, it isn't even controversial. You're the unserious one here, you're acting on emotion and not reason.
I don't even know what "manipulation of opinion by an authoritarian regime" you're referring to, as TikTok is nothing but memes and nonsense, but it's axiomatic around here that free speech means we must allow speech from all sources, and that manipulation of opinion is fair game. That people may be sensitive and easily led astray by falsehood is not an excuse for censorship. They must simply find a way to verify the claims made for themselves. We must simply adapt to this new world order.
And besides, the answer to "bad" speech is more speech, is it not?
I'm simply saying we should apply the same full throated defense of free speech to the psyops of authoritarian regimes as we do neo-nazis and quacks and "journalists" who want to harass trangendered people to suicide. It's only fair, given that social media is already suffused with American government and corporate propaganda anyway. How can we host proper debates without hearing all sides? Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - not actually Voltaire
Your free speech equivalence argument, in this context, is something I'd expect from either a Chinese propagandist or someone who is very young and has minimal life experience. Maybe you are both.
Free speech means non-western nation states are free to run psychological experiments on the populations of western countries, but not the other way around.
At this point TikTok is impossible to ban in the west. Hundreds of millions of people love using it. If an elected official banned it, they'd create space for a political opponent to pick up vast numbers of votes by taking the other side on the issue.
Good question now that I think about it. I guess because it was not a real issue until now because there was no Chinese app popular outside its borders? And the whole app/internet economy is still somewhat new compared to the speed at which international trade law gets written I guess, so there are no established rules. The EU has just started enforcing their opinion on it with some recent laws, and the US started doing something about TikTok under Trump.
The user-base on TikTok (in the US at least) leans extremely left (because they're all young) so the news media has idiotically made this a left vs. right issue.
Yes, any neutral observer can see that it's incredibly foolish to let a company with strong connections to our largest geopolitical rival have control over 1-2 hours of attention (every day) of young people in the US.
We literally have no idea if TikTok is boosting certain political/social values amongst American youth. Even a slight nudge could have a huge effects (because of the scale at which TikTok operates) and it would be impossible to detect.
"I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers."
It's hard for the US to ban TikTok without violating the 1st Amendment.
My solution is: Until China opens up to foreign apps, the FTC should tell Google and Apple that they won't take any antitrust action if Google and Apple replace Tiktok with alternative apps (like Youtube Shorts) in their app stores. Then let Google and Apple do what they want to do already. No need for any heavy-handed government action which could violate the 1st Amendment.
I strongly favor a peaceful relationship with China, but peace is best achieved through reciprocity. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
My conspiracy is that the US is worried about TikTok because it’s actively been pushing younger folk to the left. It has been a huge awakening to folks to learn and hear about topics that their education system has failed them on.
I’ve noticed a general awareness increase of western atrocities of the past century amongst folk.
Note this is just my feelings on this and I don’t have the data to back this up (tldr source: I made it up)
Since we are just sharing how we feel, anecdotally, my observation with my teen and her friends is that TikTok makes people think they are informed while actually misinforming them.
This is very much not limited to social and political issues but can be about physical matters like home repairs, how cars work / how to fix them, etc.
Anecdotally, almost every teen I've ever known has thought they were well informed while actually misinformed. For every one that could fix a car, there'd be five who knew how to change oil and ten who maybe knew how to add more oil. All of them (us) thought they were well informed. I don't think TikTok is behind this.
the amount of misinformation is insanely high on TT. From “news” to even specific trades (ie, construction, cooking, DIY).
I have had to carefully engage with only topics I am interested in else I get flooded with bs vids (ie, thots, “alternative medicine”, far right content, joe rogan, …)
For what it’s worth though, the content moderation is slightly better than other platforms. When I report dangerous videos (literally a person tailgating/road raging), the videos get removed pretty fast.
You can either exert editorial control to push content that fits your rhetorical needs at the cost of engagement (because by definition you're not pushing the most engaging content) or you can push the content that is the most naturally engaging. You can't have both.
And boy do I have bad news about the places you would typically turn to be more informed about current events -- the news -- and how what you see is also designed to promote engagement.
They are still more informed though. One important thing they could be more informed about for example is how slippery and illusory colloquial English language is, and the effects that has on the "reality" one experiences.
No, they are misinformed and may believe entirely incorrect things as a result.
An example of this is Holocaust denial. A carefully selected set of facts in isolation can make someone believe the Holocaust didn't happen; this does not make "the Holocaust never happened" an informed belief.
> No, they are misinformed and may believe entirely incorrect things as a result.
More informed does not necessarily protect one from being misinformed (your "no" implies your statement necessarily disagrees with mine - it does not).
> An example of this is Holocaust denial. A carefully selected set of facts in isolation can make someone believe the Holocaust didn't happen; this does not make "the Holocaust never happened" an informed belief.
Finding a positive example of something is easy, now try demonstrating there are literally zero counter examples, which is the claim you are making.
Also to consider:
- Is "informed" both a binary and non-decomposable?
- Might you be expressing your opinion on the matter, but representing (and perhaps perceiving) that opinion as a fact?
- "One important thing they could be more informed about for example is how slippery and illusory colloquial English language is, and the effects that has on the "reality" one experiences."
Coming across the "10k severe side effects" data point should trigger the critical thinking in one to find out the total amount of vaccines in order to form an opinion. I would say it is still better to learn that fact than not.
You're expecting too much from a generation that grown up being bombarbed by narratives and distractions. Most don't have critical thinking and the required attention span in the first place.
That's what should be fixed then. Teach critical thinking and then you don't have to implement regressive policies like limiting or banning $perceived_bad_thing.
But my example was too simple just to make a point. In the real world you'd be bombarded with hundreds of facts like this, aimed at carefully crafting a certain narrative. Of course mixed with half-truths and lies.
It's not easy to overcome this with critical thinking, and even experts in the field fall into this trap. Expecting someone with no knowledge to be able to is just not realistic.
Is factual knowledge bad, necessarily? Simplistically, it can certainly be bad sometimes/often, but is there ever a time it necessarily isn't also due to to other poorly calibrated variables that have been overlooked, like educational and cultural norms?
Let's be real. It's not TikTok, it's social media. Twitter had a reputation as a cesspool where people yell increasingy extreme political opinions at each other long before TikTok was popular. Gamergate was before TikTok.
TikTok is just the most refined version of the same rotten medium.
It's pretty telling how effective China thinks it is, given their restrictions on Douyin ("internal Chinese TikTok"). iirc kids can only use it for <1 hour / day.
That's absolutely evidence of the opposite. If china thought they could use the app's algorithms to promote national unity, they would do that. They have their own exclusive app.
China thinks its effective at wasting time. Children also aren't allowed to play video games monday through friday, and are limited to 1 hour per day otherwise- a law which existed before douyin limits: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58384457
The country that is obsessive about its children and their productivity, the country famous for kids competing in chess and abacus and piano... that country is just banning douyin because it's a time waster.
I don't think encouraging national unity and encouraging strife and polarization are the same thing at all, and in fact I would bet the latter is easier at scale
Maybe they're restricting Douyin because it's a timewaster, maybe because it much more naturally encourages discord than unity. Maybe both. Probably both, frankly.
Honestly, that’s pretty great. We have limitations on online casinos, because of social harm. How is TikTok and vidya different? They do objectively harm prodouctivity and implement addictive dark patterns, loot boxes, consuming over producing. Sometimes limiting personal freedom actually can be for one’s own good.
Division is everything. It is immeasurably more difficult to control and manipulate a unified mass than it is to manipulate multiple different fragments of said mass. This applies to pretty much everything from flat-pack furniture to society.
From game-theoretic point of view: is China a geopolitical adversary? Yes. Does China control TikTok? Yes. Is TikTok a tool to tweak how citizens of your adversary think? Yes. Is that powerful? Yes.
So the facts our - our adversary is in control of a tool which can influence how we think, which is valuable to them. We don't know for sure that they use the tool but... why wouldn't they?
No. Not in any meaningful way. The data and employees are in the US. Every intelligence agency in the US is watching those buildings and reading their data. The US has no laws against inspecting every single packet sent internationally, the employees are subject to US laws, and tiktok has distanced itself from china.
Tiktok is just the new banana republic, the new gulf war, etc. The US government is aggressively anti-competitive with non-domestic corporate threats to its largest industries. It has always attempted to destroy competition and maximize domestic control of furs, then produce, then oil, and now social media and advertising.
There are at least several credible reports from several Bytedance employees who claim that the CCP has a much stronger influence on TikTok than is publicly stated; as recently as a year ago.
Even if those claims are not true for whatever reason—why is the claim that they want to polarize the west through TikTok hard to believe? We're currently in a zero sum ideological war with them in which they have meddled in at least two of our last elections, they have spyware in internationally exported Huawei equipment, etc.
Their recommendation algorithm is a black box, and if they weren't doing anything heinous they could possibly provide some audit trail for US regulators or US employees to inspect. As far as I know they haven't provided much here to improve public perception or lower their risk of getting shut down.
Just to reflect that back to you - you're responding to some folks (including myself) who are presenting a game-theoretic argument, and your response stems from "I am about to become psychotic."
If your goal is to persuade others to think more like you, "coming from a crazy place" isn't a good way to do that. If you think that people are making an illogical argument, then either present a parallel argument or better yet find the flaw in their logic.
The way you're engaging makes it seem like "logic" is on one side and "psychosis" is on the other side - so someone reading this who could be persuaded one way or the other, has zero reason to go with you.
Not OP but have a similar view. Behavior of TikTok isn't any different from other social media companies like FB and YouTube. The algos everywhere push higher engagement content and that is mostly dumb or polarising in nature. TikTok is in general averse to political content. It is full of misinformation but so is Youtube and Facebook. Short video is in general a worse format for nuanced content but great for engagement and AI. Now FB and Google have copied that.
We should look at harms of social media in collective and not trying to find some political scapegoats ignoring the root cause.
It’s true in the sense that all of these things are powerful and destructive. The naive thing is to ignore the added danger of the powerful and destructive thing being controlled by your adversary.
> Can we please stop pretending China, as a national entity, is doing anything at all with TikTok USA?
You are arguing against a claim that the parent did not make.
It it true that political polarization of rival nations is advantageous. It is also true that filter bubbles do this naturally. There's no need for the CCP to tell TikTok to politically polarize the content they show to people.
> There's no need for the CCP to tell TikTok to politically polarize the content they show to people.
That's exactly what the parent was saying.
> China's benefit to encourage moves in both directions
It's disingenuous to suggest that people are talking about tiktok because they think it's just an inherently divisive app. If people want to ban apps that polarize people, twitter would certainly be higher on the list.
"It is to the US's benefit to encourage the Chinese people to learn about democracy."
This is true. And it is a reason that the CCP has banned western social media. These facts do not require any specific action by US authorities to pressure US-based social media companies to carry it out, because those platforms are full of pro-democracy content already.
> It's disingenuous to suggest that people are talking about tiktok because they think it's just an inherently divisive app.
I didn't. There are many reasons people are talking about TikTok, depending on who it is and what they care about. There's not even a single US government view on the matter.
"US officials have long insisted the Chinese government may be able to view the personal information of TikTok users — but that claim was purely speculative. Until now.
"In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes."
It's absurd to think that a country as adversarial to the USA as China would not take advantage of such a vast chance to poison the mind of America's youth. It's as obvious as night vs day. In this case that is Occam's razor.
Obviously they want social chaos in the USA, pitting right against left is one way of doing that, so maybe just have a self adjusting algo that detects which way they lean and then slowly increase the ratio of right to neutral/left ideas(videos). Slowly push the person in that direction a bit at a time over months. I've been thinking about signup up for a mysudo account and playing with the algos to see how long it takes to become a full on Marxist and also a MAGA extremist.
She is now more of the opinion that anti-Asian hate is primarily perpetuated by African Americans, which seems to be a fringe opinion in left-leaning circles. I don't know if it's true overall: she says it's due to seeing a lot of videos of Asians being harassed by African Americans and almost none of harassment by any other group.
I guess the interesting thing with this one is, while this statistically is __factual__ (at least from my readings of whats going on), we also know statistics do a horrible job in actually showing causation. And an even worse job when it comes to explaining sociological issues because it's always one/few dimensional.
Scientific racism wasn't just absurdist rhetoric. It was, on the surface level, logical (albeit, cherry picked data) to push a specific view point that "felt logical."
So yeah I think you're right about that being an interesting pushed-to-the-right view point. And unfortunately due to it sounding `logical`, it's very hard to convince people to look a bit deeper into it and compare it to historical repeats of that rhetoric.
I will believe your rhetoric if you can give an example where the same thing can be said for leftist thought. Where "logical" thought trumps confounds as you say, but the confounds are what hides the truth.
This is probably indicative that videos featuring someone who is black being racist drives more views and engagement than a white person. So it's the ones the algo shows to her. This is why algos are dangerous.
Although I'm not very interested in the US politics, it looks to me that these 2 are politicians rather than platforms.
Could you find other trees where your propaganda seems more plausible in context, please.
True content can also be propaganda for instance via the glorification of a particular lifestyle and its second order effects (implicitly elevated social capital).
Tiktok and social media in general are polarising by nature. If I am aligned to any side, I'll get more videos of it and rage-inducing engagement magnet videos against other side. So you'll see right side being moving right and left being more left. So a right winger's feed will be full of Fox and Peterson. A central view doesn't get interacted with a lot so will be pushed out.
While Chinese methods may seem draconian. I think they are only what will work. A mandatef OS+app level limit on time spent on social media, particularly for children. Parents are unable to regulate it and self-regulation of addictions is impractical.
One angle of these bans is that TikTok provides rapid person to person sharing of information via rich multimedia, and live streaming of events.
Its harder to control a narrative and spread propaganda when people can see that others around the world are just like them, talk to them directly, and hear their stories.
The idea that China uses TikTok to control other countries I think is backwards. The platform actually enables significant info sharing between normal people, and we’re seeing this for example in the conflict in Gaza.
“Social Harmony” aka our ability to influence popular opinion
Other social media platforms also provide that ability. I suspect the reason has more to do with TikTok's specific algorithm advancing divisive or otherwise controversial content more than other systems.
?? Fines are not the price a government is willing to sell something for. They are a mechanism of enforcement when it's otherwise not realistic or possible to enforce rules. You levy fines when you can't just arrest people or similar, not because you're okay with the behavior.
All you're saying is that we should tax things we don't like, which... duh. We do that- see alcohol, cigarettes, etc. Actual taxes work way better than fines, since they take into account the revenue involved instead of just being an arbitrary number. But an obvious consequence is that you aren't actually banning the thing, and in the case of a digital product like tiktok you're not even discouraging it.
If you levied a recurring fine on tiktok in return for allowing them to do what they want, you're actively encouraging them to collect and sell as much data as they possibly can, to recoup the fixed cost of doing business with you.
Imagine if a regional power with a territorial dispute with your country had opportunity to individually and untraceably curate exactly what your next generation watches for hours each day on their phone.
Nepal can’t necessarily know if that’s happening with but they have to consider that it might be. If that’s a concern in allowing TikTok, fines wouldn’t address the problem very well since money isn’t hard to come by if it buys enough value.
So the US for almost all of the world. YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO, Twitter, Apple, Spotify,...
Every time this happens it's always "but it's bad when this multinational corporation I associate with China does it." Like come on, if you're worried about the Chinese government exerting authority over companies that operate in China TikTok has got to be the bottom barrel of your list.
The CCP has got to be so proud that their relative secrecy has got the rest of the world quaking in their boots about how much power they wield and giving them nigh omnipotence of any person or entity that comes in contact with them.
Personal interests extend far beyond personal desires. We cannot impose Western interpretations of "win" via libertarian interpretations on Nepalese society and culture.
My problem with this is that it is this design which should be illegal, not one app or another. Instagram and Facebook feeds aren't any better than TikTok.