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.
