The TikTok War(stratechery.com) |
The TikTok War(stratechery.com) |
TikTok will be banned. SV will do a US based replacement. All will be good.
That is this onesness that I try to argue. This is this oneness that get China and the strategy missing this part of China the problem.
Obviously I would be baised in the sense that the author just gave up my whole place and my 2m+ liberty loving followers. U people, HK people, TW people ... is just part of China, we can just dump them (or you can just dump us) because we belong to a "ONE". The whole idea of human rights are about individual not about the rights of nation over you or us in Hong Kong. If you let the oneness grow and ignore that one is evil, you die with us because the evil will expand. HK is the front of the ideological fight. Not sure why the author not noted that the play against HK is a play against the promise and contract by the less powerful China to the future. Read Deng speech in UN, you can see there is a promising China. But look at today you know nothing in the one is preventing it. The West look otherwise by letting China grow so powerful it is near a stat that cannot fail. The west has to feed the hand that is going to kill them. Just cut the tie is not enough. A more aggressive way of engaging is needed. Otherwise the world is just another South China Seas.
China has been asserted itself in Internet (speech by Xin please read), UN, WTO, WHO, ... etc. They have number on their side in the past. Now they have money, they have the language (so many good English speakers in the elite and their children), ... There could be millions inside the west and trillion in the bank. It is like Soviet Union evolve and attack USA soil from underneath.
But the analysis is so well that seems ok? That we have to deal with China as one. It is partially yes and partially No. The key problem is what we call one-ness of Chinese thinking. You using that you lost already. What America is great and Europe in a sense has built-in immunity is that there are individual (or even the extreme right has the club concept). You do not analysis a world as a world. A world is nothing but its individual and its links among individual. Now the problem when you think the whole China is a whole you have to fight against then you got yourselves a long term problem.
I said long term is from time to time China would group itself together into one big nasty empire. The best is when it is weak (like in Sung Dynasty) when the culture of unity does not break human backs. But once they are big and as oneness is built into the pyshce they just go ahead to transform all barbarians and uncivilised into one of them. There is no stop. Nothing internal to the Chinese philosophy has many in mind. Everyone has to be saved is what they think, and it is what ultimately you got.
What you need to do is to ensure the individual spirit and liberty mind to survive inside. So the original promise that a great China contribute as part of many, not force its way as one into the world. Just cut into two would not help. HK, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the whole Asian countries are those many.
Not one less! Not just one!
:-) ok back to my debugging of the solitaire of C. gdb tracing of pointer structure is hard, isn't it. From 6502 (by guessing), 370 (XA to ESA extension and control block) to now; still you always deal with dump. Sigh. Back to my cave even though the world is collapsing, that you can hack as an individual and do what you enjoy is more important. And that is why this all about. We should have more or one TikTok.
This is BS, the economic system in China is in no way Marxist, nor is it going in that direction. It's worse, lol. This sounds like someone is simply rehashing propaganda he heard somewhere that was intended to either smear Marx or China or both.
While China has certainly strayed pretty far from its state-controlled economy in recent years, it also seems pretty clear that Xi is more ideologically "hardcore" than his predecessors.
Another dude advocating for the suppression of a foreign government. Been there, done that, seen it all, happened before, will happen again.
To think that a little app that promotes a bunch of videos of kids acting silly, is a national security threat, is ridiculous.
All you need for counter-evidence, is to look at Twitter, Facebook, and all the American news media sites and outlets. They routinely and actively brainwash the population, with the same repeated bombardment of information, even though they claim to be independent reporting agencies.
In fact, all the American news agencies, are increasing the aggressiveness of the rhetoric, and appear to be drumming up the mood for war against China.
You, as Americans, should be very disturbed by this. Because, if the United States engages into a war with China, then it is you, and your children, that will face the brunt of the violence of war. The American elites, and their children, will be safely kept away from any of that violence; and they will be benefiting financially from it all, while you and your children die in the Pacific Ocean.
If you want to ban TikTok, then just ban them. Just say, that you don't want any Chinese media presence on American airwaves. Simple as that. Begin your own censoring of the internet.
Don't bother with making some far-fetched reasoning that some fictitious enemy is out to get you. This is, in fact, what scares Americans the most - the creation of some fictitious bogeyman.
Also, this is not just about Tiktok as Ben mentioned. When American corporations like NBA start censoring things on their own soil, it is beyond reprehensible.
Mainly in the sense that in order to adapt to the competitive threat from China the U.S. has to become more state capitalism and industrial policy guided.
Using strong government to guide industrial policy, fend off or cripple foreign competitors, enact infrastructure. These are the standard tools in China.
As for China, I wonder in the long term if this is not pioneering a completely new mode of the human species. What is the logical end of total surveillance and censorship? Eventually unifying every person into the mind of the state until individualism dissolves and we are all subsumed into a common entity.
Maybe I am speculating too far but if you could have everyone carry an implant from birth wired to a single network then you could achieve the common science fiction trope of an unified collective conscious. Maybe even the leading Party theoreticians haven't even sought about it this far yet.
"while I mourn the end of a free and vibrant Hong Kong that I have had the pleasure of visiting on multiple occasions, I am unmoved by complaints about China’s promised adherence to the Basic Law; that was an agreement imposed on China by a colonial power, and Hong Kong is unquestionably a Chinese city, ultimately subject to Chinese law."
Hong Kong is a unique place, with a unique history, unique government, and more. Yes a Chinese imperial government leased land to British under duress. That imperial government no longer exists, period. The British gave it to a different government under clear terms that were violated. So where does that put Hong Kong? I think you can argue a bunch of different positions, but not that it is unquestionably under authoritarian Chinese communist rule.
This is disregarding the liberal traditional opinion in the West (and Locke, etc ) that people have universal rights period, and that governments that violate those rights are not valid governments.
I think there are stronger philosophical positions to take, including that Hong Kong should be Independent by right, and that China violated it's agreements with the citizens of Hong Kong.
Have my upvote.
> What matters more in an ideological war, though, is influence, and that is why I do believe that ByteDance’s continued ownership of TikTok is unacceptable.
What's implied but unsaid here is that somehow the CCP is going to fill TikTok with political propaganda that... a bunch of teens are going to somehow become influenced by? Sorry, but that's just completely far-fetched. Facebook is something to be concerned about, with people sharing political stories, memes, etc. But TikTok? A bunch of funny videos? There's nothing that could be further from ideology.
> Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is that we aren’t China, and isn’t blocking TikTok something that China would do?
Yes, this is precisely why we don't need to do this. We're better than China. Things like freedom of speech, democracy, and the free market set a moral example to the world. Once we start censoring things, we lose that moral leadership. (And sure you can argue all you want about our declining moral leadership and the state of our democracy, but let's not make it even worse, shall we?)
> If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders but within ours, it is in liberalism’s interest to cut off a vector that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want.
Isn't every product trying to be brilliantly engineered to give customers exactly what they want? All this boils down to is, it's a good app, so let's kill it. Again, totally opposite the American values of competition, the free market, and consumers.
Sorry, but there is absolutely zero logic in this analysis.
A message from Hong Kong.https://nypost.com/2020/06/21/tiktok-campaigns-ensure-hundre...
The plausible deniability is easy. No one will ever find out if it was specially promoted. They could just throw up their hands and say that it all happened all by itself. The algorithm is a mystery and a trade secret!
U.S Teens are making "I Love China" videos on TikTok.
https://www.recruitmentnewsuk.co.uk/2020/05/28/why-us-teens-...
The algorithm could interfere to remove any pro-Trump or anti-China TikToks and noone would be the wiser. There is zero transparency.
The Chinese government can lend these institutions billions forever and undercut rivals and overpay programmers if it buys them political influence.
Speaking of a free market in ideas. 90% of the U.S media is owned by 5 companies. I think a good idea would be to reverse the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which allowed for massive TV and Radio consolidation. Local radio was actually good in the late 80s and early 90s and new music styles were discovered and promoted by disk jockeys on local stations. After 96, the conglomerates bought up all the radio stations and IMHO, popular music more or less froze in place with just the names of the bands rotating.
The Trump rally thing was a prank that was widely publicized on the internet. And the "I love China" videos seem to be a joke too.
You're going to find a little bit of everything on every platform. The idea that TikTok is somehow pushing Chinese ideology remains completely unfounded and baseless. It's pure imagination and conjecture.
If it ever does, it will be obvious and action can be taken then. But until it does, banning something like TikTok is simply blatantly anticompetitive and stooping to China's types of censorship. Again, we're better than that.
Facebook is likely doing the math now on what makes sense in terms of keeping advertisers happy while resisting temporary market pressure. The answer will probably be a discount on ads, not actually changing content policies, which is what the advertisers are likely gunning for anyways.
Tiktok, on the other hand, is playful, diverse, and interesting (at least my feed is). Once you start liking content, the feed completely changes from teenage lip sync videos or other teenager-oriented content into such a nice variety of content. I legitimately laugh my ass off or smile happily at so much of it. Other content teaches me about food, gardening, dancing, DIY, media theory, hiking alone, gender bending, etc. etc. The list goes on. Some of the videos delight me and others inform me.
Instagram, by contrast, just feels so bland now.
I found it funny that the author of this post is trying to defend liberal values like the free flow of information on the internet by...making Apple and Google remove Tiktok from people's phones. He's correct that the primary political risk of Tiktok is the recommendation algorithm being manipulated. However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either.
This would have been a good chance to really defend free flow of information on the internet, open and swappable recommendation algorithms, personal data ownership, and so on, but the conclusion is basically "it's bad because a China-affiliated company does it". Generally, everything that Tiktok does that is wrong is also wrong when Facebook does it. The reality is that Tiktok is (for now) a superior product in many ways to anything from American tech companies. Why is this?
I replied to the parent comment by accident, but:
That's the kind of content that survives the crucibles of Chinese censorship, "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics (especially politics) is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. It's why TikTok's content policy is designed to protect the status quo, often misinterpreted as being pro-Beijing when it's broadly pro-establishment. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. That said, I guess it's possible for TikTok to be weaponized to sow division, but why would they need to when the whole of western media sphere is doing so already.
IMO the style has it's place, whole of China has no choice but to live under it, but in the west, a plurality of content management philosophies calibrated for different audiences is good. There's lessons in managing toxicity to learn from TikTok even if it gets banned.
This is what the posted article is about. I cannot write a rebuttal to this that is better than what Ben Thompson wrote, and I won't. The section "A Reluctant Prescription" section is directly about this.
I can rebut this, however:
"However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either."
They don't do it in China.
This was an analysis on TikTok vs YouTube and focuses on how TikTok leverages mimcry to overcome the initial burden of ideation and yields significant content creation for its platform.
"On Youtube, 79% of views accrue to only 10% of its creators. While on TikTok 55% of viewers also create videos. " https://4thquadrant.io/freearticles/business-models/tiktok-a...
I haven't used Tiktok, but from what I understand you can only post videos taken using the phone's camera and they can only be edited using whatever filters are available within the app, effectively limiting how manipulated or manufactured the content can be. Sort of like a Snapchat for videos (with the caveat that you can save and post videos at a later time in Tiktok, whereas with Snapchat it's "now or never"). Coupled with not having an associated text component where you can easily post testimonials and links to a site where you're selling a self help book, get rich quick scheme, juice cleanse or gym routine, it should limit how easy it is to use it as a promotion platform.
I really thought it was invaluable (TikTok is banned now). For us city dwelling upper middle class people, it gave a rare glimpse into the lives of people less privileged. And it wasn't maudlin or patronizing as a lot of narratives about the poor tend to be. Rather it was fun and authentic.
I remember when the lockdown happened and a lot of migrant workers were left stranded, the news channels were filled with horror stories and heartbreaking videos of poor families walking hundreds of kilometres to their homes. But on TikTok, there were plenty of videos shot by the same migrant workers where they shared their woes, but would sometimes break into a dance or make fun of their situation.
Has anyone made an Indian TikTok clone, and if so has it got any traction? Seems like an obvious thing to do, if it was that popular.
TikTok actively pressured the moderators to filter out 'ugly, poor or disabled'[1].
I haven't used TikTok, but I think such apps of mass appeal at this age of intense screen time competition will resort activities like this; there is no magical reason for TikTok to be better than other limited attention social networks.
Even though I never thought of using TikTok, now as a disabled person I feel morally obliged to not use it.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tr...
All these apps use behavioral design to get you hooked.
Tiktok is oversocialization on steroids. You have people not only acting out the behavioral scripts embedded and triggered in some meme music or voice you have people mimetically acting out what others are acting out. The psychological manipulation possible though TikTok is immense.
I remember my local high school's motto when I was growing up was something like, "we're not here to teach, we're here to create good, informed consumers".
Never mind the obvious problems with that statement, but just considering it on face-value: how can people become good, informed consumers without having some kind of exposure to the concepts of how easily information can be collected about and used to manipulate people?
I don't expect most high school students to inculcate the full breadth of the topic, just as so few seem to actually learn and retain anything about history, social studies, or even the freaking alphabet (I've met way too many people who think the English alphabet has 25 letters). But currently, the general populace has no idea the extent to which they and their data can be manipulated. It would be enough if all they learned was "you and your data can be manipulated".
That's the kind of content that survives the crucibles of Chinese censorship, "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics (especially politics) is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. It's why TikTok's content policy is designed to protect the status quo, often misinterpreted as being pro-Beijing when it's broadly pro-establishment. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place.
E: IMO the style has it's place, whole of China has no choice but to live under it, but in the west, a plurality of content management philosophies calibrated for different audiences is good. There's lessons in managing toxicity to learn from TikTok even if it gets banned.
Maybe every 5th video in my feed is extremely political. It's not all just la-di-da dance and cat videos.
They all encourage a lot of nasty / outrageous content over time as that's what gets eyeballs.
I think much more positive, authentic, curated / focused content would be great. I'm done with filtering twitter, youtube, instagram ... endlessly as content eventually goes sour.
How did you get there? I played with TikTok for a while, but never escaped the "teenagers making videos about other teenagers to pop music" ghetto, and it didn't seem like there was a way for me to tell the algorithm what I wanted without just hoping it surfaced something that I could like.
push like on the stuff you do.
For some reason, IG thinks I'm a track athlete (among many other things). Even for stuff I am legitimately into (like mountain biking), my IG explore page mostly serves me up these random accounts called things like 'MTBdaze' or 'bike247' that just seem to repost random pics/memes as a way to grow the follower count.
The traditional social media dominated by US companies is about sharing what you eat what you do where you are who do you sleep with and what you are angry about. People are essentially misbehaving when they post funny videos.
TikTok on the other hand is playful and the encouraged behaviour is to be creative.
When someone misbehaves on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook they would post videos that someone else made and A lot of that content is made on TikTok. The only creative space is in YouTube but it's not because YouTube encourages it but because there are people capable if using it like that.
I am not convinced that the issue with TikTok is a security issue, It's just that SV lost it's edge on culture and technology, and the crusade against TikTok or Huawei is mostly protectionism and this protectionism will eventually lead to Israel, EU, Japan, Korea, UK, Australia to spit domestic and global success stories like China does these days.
If the concerns were about security, there would have been regulations to ensure security(like requiring storing US users data on US soil and so on). USA is not doing that, USA is in war mode.
What even worse? People don't even want to hear it.
I am not the biggest fan of Peter Theil but I think he has a point on the monoculture, group thinking, high rents.
I see maybe one selfie a week. I also know people who use it for home workouts. I’m sure there are a bunch of other, non-shallow, non-bland uses I haven’t heard of.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Hacker News all look seriously dated in comparison.
Yes please make a movie about your next it projekt ;)
I even hate repair-videos on youtube, it's slow and lame, the fix-it manuals are 1000s times better (since i know what a torx is and that most screws open counter-clock-wise)
and the one I have curated the least has TikTok teenage lip sync videos as default.
Its literally Charlie De Malio all over the explore page. And no, this is not based on things I have liked. Its Hype House stuff promoted straight from Bytedance.
Isn't that because Tiktock's content is manually curated (for better or worse)?
TouTiao was about the feed and the algorithm from the beginning. The first time a user opened TouTiao, the news might be rather generic, but every scroll, every linger over a story, every click, was fed into a feedback loop that refined what it was the user saw.
Meanwhile all of that data fed back into TouTiao’s larger machine learning processes, which effectively ran billions of A/B tests a day on content of all types, cross-referenced against all of the user data it could collect. Soon the app was indispensable to its users, able to anticipate the news they cared about with nary a friend recommendation in sight.
I don't have any evidence, but I believe human evaluation in the whole recommendation is the remedy that makes TikTok excels.
Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
With Twitter or Facebook, it's a lot easier to dismiss the magnitude of their influence. After all, they're not in business to influence politics. They just want to make tech & sell ads and make money. They don't care what becomes news, who wins elections etc. Benign commercial interests, that's all
With tiktok and the chinese government's explicit approach of combining public & commercial interest... That argument falls apart. That and the fact that it is a foreign entity potentially affecting american politics.
Ultimately, the argument will swing back to FB & such... hopefully.
Both.
> What do you think they want to do with it?
Absolutely no idea. Much like I had no idea what Facebook was doing, or planned to do, with my data back in the 00s. I think we've been down this road enough in the modern era to be distrustful of any entity, especially a government, especially my own government, and especially the Chinese government.
> If they really wanted it could they not acquire it by other means?
If they really wanted to target me as an individual, I am sure they could dig up $THINGS. That doesn't mean I want to do their job for them.
Your line of questioning here, as I've read it, boils down to: "What are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide?"
My worry is about CCP influence and their ability to both spread misinformation and at the same time suppress stories the party doesn’t like.
Easy current examples are the democracy protests in Hong Kong, and the sterilization going on in the Uyghur camps in China.
On Twitter you can talk about both things, on TikTok they will be shut down by the CCP and it’s set up in such a way that users wouldn’t even notice.
On Twitter you can also be critical of the USG.
That’s the risk to me, that the CCP turns down the knobs on speech they dislike and the public is too focused on dance videos to notice.
It’s an even greater risk to people like Joshua Wong, not only would his speech be suppressed on TikTok, but the company would also hand over whatever personal or location data they had on him to the government itself. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Wong)
The CCP should not be stewards of the services we use.
It has absolutely brought more positivity into my life. I am specifically feeding the algorithm with this intent and I get what I asked for. It is a psychological tool.
It just feels wrong only being surveilled by the NSA.
(by the end of the year Airstrip One will have always been part of Oceania)
It seems that companies not adhering to censorship cannot expand into China, however, Chinese companies adhering to censorship (e.g. TikTok) are able to expand into Western countries. Isn't this anti-competitive?
The app also seems to be kind of a wonky fit to Amazons, Microsofts or Apples portfolio (although Amazon does own twitch, so who knows).
I can't make a solid argument for it, but I wouldn't rule out either Netflix or Disney making a bid for TikTok. Both companies are great with video, and I think the current CEO of TikTok is the former COO of Disney. IDK.
The only way that wouldn't happen is if the new TikTok owner incorporated in a jurisdiction that forbid such a relationship. That seems unlikely since ByeDance could pay the spun off TikTok dump trucks full of money for the data.
Culturally, China has a very long history. Governmentally, which is what's being talked about here because we're discussing trade, they're less than a century old. We should expect the ruling government of China to behave as they have in the past, not as previous governments have.
Thus they're automatically involved in some sort of information warfare.
I guess there's two options, either by default the the ecosystem doesn't allow for them to have that information ... or they're in play for these types of things.
I don't think there's any other options...
None of those are "internal affairs" to any Western country. Those are international companies that have an interest in not pissing off their cash cow. If they poured money into the Cascadia independence movement then that would America and Canada's internal affairs. But the only party doing that is the State Department and NED.
There's a lot of inaccuracies in this article. He seems to think knowledge in tech translates to knowledge in other things. Pity.
I feel like this claim isn't well substantiated. TikTok claims it was a bug where 2 billion+ views were shown as 0 views. That specific number - the limit on a 32 bit signed integer, makes me think that it was a bug.
Are there any examples of TikTok influencing thinking in a pro-Chinese way via algorithm tuning or direct curation?
https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
Wow.
[1]: https://digbysblog.net/2020/06/tiktok-isnt-the-answer-folks/
Reddit recently banned a ton of subreddits that are simply critical of the idea that men can literally become women (they say it's to stop hate, but they leave up violent porn subs and other subs that hate women). Even subreddits like PCOS - a very serious condition that only females have - ran into trouble because they aren't inclusive enough with their language. Someone got suspended on twitter for saying only females get cervical cancer (this is apparently hate speech), Meghan Murphy got banned from Twitter for using the pronoun 'he' about Yaniv about a profile of his when he was presenting as a man. People get their videos taken down on youtube for "misgendering" people, or demonetized for not having the correct opinion.
American companies are absolutely policing content to their own political agenda.
in the early days they cloned and studied, now they actually took over and Facebook etc barely can even catch up
Stratechery is playing on one side. The reality is that US companies are quite willing to censor and manipulate information as well.
Facebook and YouTube censored coronavirus information for the US government. Facebook is fine with right wing manipulation. These propaganda efforts by US companies affect people from other countries.
Both sides are just trying to amass and maintain power. The CCP needs to control information to maintain power. The US is a consortium of entities amassing money and power and likewise tries to destroy institutions preventing that. I bet if you look inside the CCP, you would likewise see multiple groups vying for power.
If you follow Stratechery’s logic, then non US countries should likewise ban Facebook and YouTube.
The more ethical solution would be worldwide standards on censorship.
Dude, I personally know people who work in Facebook's own lobbying department. I would be very surprised if Twitter didn't have the same thing.
First, I think "benign commercial interests" are not. At least not at that scale. Lobbying proves the point. Tech/media is not even the big example. Military industry, banking, mining and healthcare are all far more intertwined with government. Their most important activity is lobbying. That said, tech lobbying still pretty big and the combination of lobbying and controlling a media powerhouse is worse than just lobbying.
More importantly, Facebook (etc), being a massive media channel has lots of power and influence just by being facebook. Again, commercial interests aren't necessarily benign.
FB might tweak the feed to make sure covid-19 rumour mills or deliberate misinformation campaigns don't get out of hand. That might be a good decision (or not), but it isn't a benign decision. It demonstrates that commercial interests, feeds and such are not neutral. They are deliberate, opinionated and that opinion affects reality.
There are two questions that the tiktok case brings up: "how much power?" and "who's power." Zuck isn't as scary as Xi, hence the different response to tiktok. OTOH, Facebook have the same sort of power as tiktok, just a lot more of it.
You got to be kidding me for blaming the Chinese government for combining public and commercial interest in this context. The amount of hypocrisy is astonishing. The banning of Tiktok, Zoom and Huawei is nothing but a political decision. It's amusing to see someone can blame this on China.
It's important to recognized that it's not a coincidence that TikTok exists and is run by a Chinese company.
In the West that replacement would have been immediately purchased by FB or Twitter and then summarily destroyed. This is literally what happened to the closest Western equivalent: Vine.
The Chinese government has many faults, but unlike the US government, the Chinese government still enforces the idea that Chinese companies should operate in the interest of the nation.
Facebook did try to buy Musical.ly, the company that became TikTok, and would have likely destroyed it just like Twitter did Vine.
If the US government was remotely functional it would put a little effort into challenging the ability of near monopolies to simply destroy any competitor through acquisition. I agree that it's not ideal that the Chinese government is tightly connected with TikTok/ByteDance, but the reason there is no Western TikTok is because our governments (particularly the US) are so deeply aligned with the interests of larger corporations that a viable competitor to these cannot exist.
Besides "FB would have bought it," social media doesn't generally do "replacement." Nuanced differences in product lead to different products, because the "social" aspect is made of culture.
Any replacement for tiktok wouldn't be a replacement. It'd be a different product in the social media space. One way or another, a tiktok ban benefits FB, whether they build a competitor, buy it, or their existing products pick up tiktok's market share.
We are totally ill equipped to deal with modern monopolies. We weren't great at dealing with the old, monopolies. Now though, the laws, norms and political MOs are nearly irrelevant.
One trite example is prices. The default way to "prove" the effect of monopolies historically has been price. Prices don't exist in social media.
A deeper difference is the microeconomics. When Bell was being broken up, one big problem was creating viable component companies. If the courts screwed up and created failing child companies then telecommunications would be broken. This is a hard problem for a court, well outside their comfort zone. With social media the microeconomics is totally different. Even if FB disappeared, consumers would not lack for social media. The market is capable of replacing FB easily, all that's needed is for facebook to move aside. Commercial/profitability considerations are barely an issue.
Any Bytedance related links were prohibited in WeChat, for example.
The moment they had shut down vine.co, a new site with the same idea could have gone life and absorbed all the users.
Why does this not happen? There are Facebook user groups, reddits and other social networks, even Twitter itself. A replacement for something that popular should be known instantly and take over without friction. Why does 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it' not work here?
In most cases, Chinese companies are basically owned and controlled by the state. This has nothing to do with monopoly or trust issues. Acquiring lines of credit in China after you get to a certain size basically means you're owned or partially owned by the CCP.
That's the whole point - the ability to curate content that you will like is phenomenal, especially given the non-obvious inputs to their model. Like a video? Sure you'll see more of that kind of stuff. You may not think about scrolling up/down to restart the video, watching it multiple times, sharing it, opening/closing the comments (and I'm sure 10,000 other inputs) all feed into it's ability to curate
I've learned lots of cool stuff on TikTok - my favorite tip recently has been a trick for partially juicing lemons while leaving them intact; last week I broke my soda habit as a result of easily accessible homemade la croix.
The dancing stuff is pretty mild and I'd say even constructive for children.
The allure, is hard to describe. The content I see is very human, people describing their experiences, doing harmless jokes on each other, or teaching something. How it differs from YouTube is that it is much more strongly tailored to your likes, and due to time constraints, skips the chuff and gets to the meat of things quicker.
Users have little control of what videos they see explicitly, but if you like 5 videos with the same tag, it will present more videos with that tag.
Take any social media app and there is something toxic, mean, snarky about it. Twitter is optimized for snark and shit storms. Facebook has your crazy uncle sharing fake news. Instagram posts are fake and pretentiousness. Reddit has their subreddit drama.
TikTok is just fun. Even wholesome fun.
I tried if I could find one mean tiktok video, but there was not one bullying video. Even if the girl making a dance video was ugly/fat the comments on that were encouraging and positive.
For Hong Kong citizens, it's much worse. They are being identified and arrested in the hundreds as the Chinese government has access to this data to find anyone insulting or ridiculing them. That's very totalitarian to me.
... and Chinese spyware in the pockets of children.
Like you just said, TikTok already compiles with this security law and censors/bans whatever the CCP requests. By moving outside of China it can either lose access to the Chinese market and get banned by China or still comply with its laws and get banned by the US.
The thing is, TikTok has offices out side of China due to the Musical.ly acquisition (Located in the US) so can still operate there whilst Bytedance being headquartered in Beijing.
A takedown request can be made to the App Store owner. Apple and Google.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/04/new-york-times-apps-removed-i...
The company has an isolated version called Douyin that is only available in China.
How does complying with China's laws in China will get you banned from the US? The US has all the right to establish the laws for products distributed on its own territory, as China does for its own.
Note: TikTok doesn't write Chinese law, so they're not the ones being anti-competitive, even if they benefit from it.
That China bans Google is bad for customers in China. What do we gain if we ban TikTok?
The issue is the Chinese government can compel it's citizens to do whatever they want. Having non-Chinese in the management of Bytedance could help but I can't imagine they could have a truly independent board if Bytedance is majority owned by Chinese citizens.
Re: the influence argument your points are stronger, I think. Thompson's article felt a bit like scaremongering there.
I downvoted you because this is not true. Watch YT logged out and you will discover it quickly starts recommending far right videos, recommending more extreme videos as you watch them.
As for "gender critical" and your following paragraph, people aren't being banned for simply misgendering people. It's intentional misgendering from hateful people, often as a final straw after many similar hateful actions.
And yes people are being banned for innocuous misgendering. And for saying only biological women are women. It’s not hate speech to say that.
Declaring things as true don’t make them true. Let’s try reasoning from first principles and acknowledging that principles actually exist. Amorphous relativism is a destructive force in society.
I used selenium to do exactly this. Start at a video, and do a breadth based search based on recommendations. No such preference for far right videos exist. It's frequently get into a hole of certain topics (e.g. first recommendation is on knitting, subsequent recommendations have a higher chance of being about knitting, and so on), but there was no substantial representation of right wing content. And it's not just me with a selenium driver. Other researchers have examined youtube and reached the same conclusion: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf
You already see organizations like the NBA, Disney, etc. self censoring to preserve their market in China so to assume a Chinese based company won’t do the same is a bit of a stretch.
This is a deeply misleading way of understanding this controversy. You can be "simply critical" of the way we define gender or of reddit's policies without being an asshole. "Inclusive" behavior consists, essentially, of just not being an asshole.
If someone tells you they're a woman and you don't agree, that's fine. Let them be them and you be you. Complain if you're actually harmed, or if you think someone needs to be defended. If you start a subreddit dedicated to the notion that trans women aren't "really women" and share a bunch of memes making fun of them, that's crossing the line. That's who got banned.
... Edit ...
Good grief. I started looking up the rest of your evidence (I only knew the trans hate subreddits thing a priori), and it's all equivalently spun. You're are NOT arguing in good faith here:
1. Hammer_Of_Glass was not "banned" from twitter. The account was locked for a few hours, then released when reviewed. It was clearly a mistake.
2. /r/PCOS went through a mod shakeup due to anti-trans comments getting out of hand on a forum that was supposed to be about medical issues and social support for sufferers. The community as a whole seems to be entirely behind the new focus.
3. Meghan Murphy was banned from twitter after a long history of anti-trans activism (including two instances of doxxing otherwise-anonymous trans twitter users), not one tweet and certainly not one pronoun.
4. I don't know what you're talking about with Youtube. The amount of anti-trans hate on that site is staggering.
Making fun of people is crossing the line? This seems like a dangerous slippery slope to say the least. Suppose I make an entire career out of making fun of (say) Irish people. Jokes and stereotypes like "they drink a lot" and "they get into bar fights" and "they're dumb potato farmers" are my bread and butter. Most people would probably agree that this kind of speech should be protected.
However, because trans rights, LGBT, race, etc. has been so profusely politicized, it's become a third rail. Making fun of a trans person and an Irish person are, for whatever reason, not on the same playing field any more. I'm not sure what the solution is, but let's not pretend there's no problem.
You don't understand hate speech. Misgendering a trans person isn't hate unless you do it with the intent to hurt them. Saying that only women get cervical cancer or that that shit that JK spouts about menstruation is literally no issue except for the fact that it's said to purposely be mean and exclusive.
Like FFS, I'm glad we're finally at the point where this bullshit "I'm speaking in coded language and therefore technically not being a hateful pos despite everyone and especially my followers know exactly what I mean" is being called out for what it is an not tolerated anymore.
This is "no true Scotsman" in its full glory, but I'll bite. Even if we agree that "Gender Critical" was hateful, in no way would the sub be "hate speech" as it would need to (by your own definition) target specific people with the intent to hurt them (which was explicitly against the sub's rules).
It was a mistake out of touch with reality. The first thing I found is yes a fair amount of users really did just dislike transgender people. Second, a pattern I consistently saw was trans people making earnest honest sincere posts about real questions and EVERY thread somebody derailed the thread and made it into some culture wars BS. Upon getting their posts removed for derailing threads and starting shit they would proceed to start abusing the mods. Whereas the LGBT users would get upset over the former being tolerated yet were consistently polite, respectful, and their main way of protest was leaving the sub.
As time went on I realised that a lot of sentiment about "SJW bullies" was projection and that many anti-trans users were pathological in their harassment. That people don't really see how bad the problem is because the worst harassment gets removed and hidden from the regular userbase. The LGBT users were a minority largely trying to politely persuade the mods to make the sub better for people they cared about. Whereas the anti-trans users were entitled, attention-seeking, and self-victimizising. Sure there were some users with conservative views which were not like that. These people could be reasoned with if you simply explained the need for anti-harassment rules. Whereas taking a soft line ALWAYS meant people doing nothing wrong getting harassed for the benefit of mostly bad faith users.
From my experience, reddit is actually pretty hands off as long as what you do is contained to your sub, but brigading is a very common occurrence in these more "heated" subreddits, intentional or not.
It was known to be a safe haven for much worse type of people(X) because the app was predominantly used by teens in Asian countries where child protection online laws are nearly nonexistent.
Apart from turning a blind eye to it, along with moderation principles which made sure X got what they want, TikTok rose to market leader due to sheer number of Asian population.
TikTok (Musically) was an Asian first app unlike Instagram, high Smartphone/Internet penetration acted as a catalyst.
Only when they got prominence in western market, they started regulating the content for vulgarity.
I guarantee this: children who use TikTok (and YouTube to an extent, etc), will have issues in the future keeping attention on work, and other forms of important and difficult problems and introspection.
Our roommate who used it in our house is a dopamine addict. He never reads, is by far the laziest and sloppiest, he’s also unapologetic about it and unwilling to acknowledge it, sucks at conversation generally because he has nothing to add because all he does is game, YouTube, TikTok and work, and they all feed into each other. And worst - he’s just totally comfortable being the laggard. Everyone else is happier. They contribute more. They clean, they maintain. They do more and have more to talk about because of that.
I fear a generation of children raised on constant dopamine drip. I already see how hard it’s become for me to sit and read or sit and meditate and I try and avoid all that (Twitter is my vice). But I have a friend with a daughter who is addicted to YouTube/TikTok and I fear greatly for a generation raised like that.
But people like short videos, so there's a tension there. If you're in ads, maybe just buy a few short video companies, get their patents to sue their competitors, and shut them down, so no one gets access to the thing that they like but is less lucrative for you.
But maybe you're right and they would have followed an IG model just fine.
But that did happen - it was called Musical.ly, which is now known as TikTok (US). I don't think people realize that the US version of TikTok was preceded by an app called Musical.ly, which was also Chinese owned, but failed in China but had massive success in the US.
That doesn't seem like a very charitable interpretation of OP's comment.
If a very small fraction of global users may come to harm as a result of (not by) using an app, then that's pretty much the textbook definition of "pretty harmless".
Then, like a lot of subreddits, GC got bigger and the new influx of people weren't uhh... so subtle and more and more of the content became insulting, shaming, and "cringe" directed at specific trans people.
How is this a thing though?
I won't deny that confusion and fear are very real feelings people have when confronted with something that challenges their existing beliefs, regardless of what those are. We have a right to express those feelings; doing so is an important part of grappling with them and growing our understanding of the world.
However, there's a segment of those that seemingly become consumed and blinded by those feelings, then join communities whose express purpose is to stoke them further ("no, we ARE right, those who espouse the challenging ideas are WRONG and they are OUT TO GET US"), and often aren't entirely sincere with their statements that they're really not against the challenging ideas, that they just have ~* concerns *~
Giving them the furthest benefit of the doubt, they're at least confining themselves to communities that largely share their viewpoint, consist of people that don't aren't those bringing the issue to light (how many trans people do you see welcomed and able to express their side in "gender critical" communities? not many? could it be because those communities exist expressly to exclude (from all society, not simply the community itself) and deride them? gee, idunno, hard to say), and are at least populated with some people that are wholly insincere with their "just raising concerns here!" rhetoric and are aiming more to further radicalize whatever subsection of the community is more on the fence.
We would be remiss to also ignore that there's fairly clear historical, if recent evidence that allowing these sorts of communities to persist mostly serves as a means to drive people away from any acceptance of the challenging ideas and further cements them in their existing beliefs. /pol/ isn't exactly as a poster child for such communities about-facing and saying "ah, we were wrong, turns out racism IS bad". There may be outliers, but on the whole, these places are poison, and I commend the services in question for finally taking a "you know, perhaps we /should/ have some level of moderation say and tell these communities 'sorry, but you're not really a fit for the broader community we want to have here'" stance. Are there problems with the specifics of the implementation, and is the process imperfect? Sure, most things are, and it cuts both ways--but strangely, I find fewer people coming out of the woodwork in these sorts of discussions to complain about, say, deplatforming of LGBTQ content on Twitter or Youtube because advertisers are leery about their brands sitting in front of content about gender issues that differs from the norm. That happens too, but doesn't seem to trigger the same "ah! the death of free speech has arrived!" outcry that seems to pop up from the other side--those communities do still complain, but marginalization and bigotry are things they're more accustomed to and live with daily; some are sadly resigned to it.
ACM study: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3351095.3372879
MIT Technology Review summary of the study: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-o...
NYTimes feature: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...
What measure of proof do you require?
I guess no way to be 100% sure of the validity of the claims, but here is one article reporting on it: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
[0]: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/mitron-app-tiktok-indian-...
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
GC wasn't some Socratic circle discussing the intricate nuances of sex and gender and happened to hold the "wrong" opinion. It was a group of bullies who had it out for trans men and women.
I can concede this point without really hurting my argument. Bullies are no fun, and they're mean, and they're hurtful and (usually) wrong. We must still cross the Rubicon, however, until we get to (even your own definition) of "hate speech."
This a reality that is deeply uncomfortable for people who share political views with the bullies, but it is the reality on the ground.
So many people told me I had it wrong and I didn't listen.
It's Popper's classic Paradox of Tolerance: to maintain a tolerant society, we have to be intolerant of intolerance.
I have visited China multiple times. My wife is Chinese-American. My children are half-Chinese and will, hopefully, be fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese (MIL is Vietnam-born Chinese and a Vietnam War refugee), and English. A lot of our extended family still lives in China, in Hong Kong and the mainland (and even Taiwan). I am critical of China, online and off, and I have been for many, many years.
This isn't even that new to us, specifically. We decided in 2014 that we were not willing to go into the mainland anymore. Most of my wifes paternal family left Hong Kong after the hand-off in 1997 -- the writing was on the wall for anyone willing to pay attention. Given everything that has happened in Hong Kong in the last year or so, I don't think we'll ever visit family there again, either.
More on topic, though... It's bad enough that I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head about what sorts of bullshit the NSA, etc..., (and how they probably share this data freely, if asked, with the FVEY, allied intelligence agencies, etc...) are getting up to with my data, but I've learned how to deal with that without experiencing too much of a chilling effect. I don't have the mental capacity to fight this on yet another front, especially when my own understanding of Chinese state politics is so inadequate. Thankfully, I can easily opt out by simply not installing and/or using TikTok, or any of the other Chinese state-sponsored spyware, on any of our devices.
> Living outside of the PRC, it's harder to imagine what kind of practical use they'd put that same data to
Their reach doesn't end at their borders. The same can be said of every modern government / state on the planet today.
If you want a specific example, the Blitzchung controversy is worth understanding. [0] There's a list of censorship-related issues on Wikipedia, too. [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_censorship_of_Chinese...
Wow, whatever happened to trying to create good, informed citizens?
Glad I didn't go there.
I don't get it, was this the actual real motto, or something people said tongue in cheek?
EDIT: Mark Zuckerberg had to appear before Congress in 2018 specifically to address Facebook disseminating propaganda!
Exactly. Whereas with TikTok the government is pushing the propaganda.
"The chinese government use tiktok for propaganda" is an effective call to action. Once you form an opinion on tiktok, the FB equivalents will start to to stand out.
The CCP use tiktok for propaganda. Lobbying firms & individual candidates use FB for campaign. In terms of transparency, manipulativeness, political impact, morals and such... not that different.
Tiktok made sure to suppress HK protests, because they're directly controlled by the ccp. Many US firms (eg NBA) were also influenced by the CCPs desire to suppress support of the HK protest. Tiktok hired and greased many Democratic & Republican "staffers" to lobby for them. They grease pockets. Don't all large companies do that? Tiktok shares your data with the ccp. Facebook sells your data, sometimes to political actors. Meanwhile, the NSA help themselves.
The differences between tiktok and FB may get a ball rolling. ITLT, the similarities will come into play.
Presumably the GP is implying that TikTok would be working even closer with groups like CA, to the point with partnering with them instead of kicking them off the platform as Facebook did.
Republican interests channelled through russian oligarch friends made TRUMP possible.
Let's see what happens on the coming elections...
Honestly, no, and I feel very disconnected from modern culture as a result. I use my phone like a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: to have access to everything we know as humans at my fingertips, in my pockets, at all times.
Otherwise, I don't use it. That said, I have nothing against people using their phone for enjoyment, and there's nothing wrong with people smiling, laughing, and dancing. It's just not easy to relate to the obsession with applications like Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and so on.
I have a social media account which I check approximately biweekly and definitely considered myself someone who wasn't falling into the attention trap in my pocket. I only read HN, a few news sites, send texts, and play chess on my phone.
I was amazed to see just how much time I spent doing these things. Even if in some way how I'm using the phone is more virtuous or less problematic ("this hour-long article about the architecture of the classic XBox gratifies my curiosity, is informative and gives me more context with which to understand my field!"), that time and attention sink still comes at the cost of everything else in life.
You're responding to him or her with "You don't need to understand the allure". And somehow seem offended that he or she doesn't understand what people are laughing about.
Come on.
There is nothing wrong in it, but there isn't much alluring there too. Its available from so many other platforms.
> I would argue it is one thing to be absorbed by reading in your phone HN or other productive sources. Laughing and dancing on the other hand, after a certain period of time not so much useful.
"${RELIGIOUS GROUP}: A man who has an uncomfortable feeling that somebody, somewhere is enjoying themselves."
for a different ${RELIGIOUS GROUP}'s opinions on dancing, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591306
It's really hard to tell that you meant, "the public perception of Facebook is..." (that it's not in the business of influencing politics).
Here are some TikTok tutorials on light painting [0]. I'm not saying that I like them, or that they are good, but they are incredibly pacey compared with the YouTube equivalents
One major difference (that some may care about less than I do) is that the TikTok format is great for seeing a variety of content, but does little to help me create. Admittedly, YouTube is filled with lots of filler information (to please their own algorithms) but I could probably figure out what cameras/lights to use, software settings, how to edit, etc... The best TikTok can do is show me what others are capable of.
You do typically have to wade through a lot of crappy "Hey Guys Like and Subscribe!" garbage with 30 second title sequences to find the good ones though.
Seriously.
Social media for techies - what will that look like in ten years? Like HN? Or more like TikTok ...
I have a suspicion that HN will outlast TikTok, but it'll take a decade to find out.
In reality we don't regulate them nearly as much as we can, so the end result is that FB and Tiktok both invade your privacy.
I prefer the idea of a US based social media company to a Chinese one. But only slightly. I would much rather the company be based somewhere with genuine intent to create consumer safety and privacy focused laws.
It’s pretty trivial to do that, and nobody would be the wiser.
Incentive for TikTok is to keep the CCP happy.
Given the geopolitical aims and ambitions of the latter, you can see why they aren't comparable.
The same can't be said of the Chinese Government. That seems like a pretty distinct reason to be more OK with FB/Insta/Snap than TikTok.
All Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the country’s National Intelligence Law to turn over any and all data that the government demands, and that power is not limited by China’s borders. Moreover, this requisition of data is not subject to warrants or courts, as is the case with U.S. government requests for data from Facebook or any other entity;
Their privacy policy notes data may be shared as well:
while TikTok claims that it is independent from ByteDance and stores data in the U.S. and Singapore, its privacy policy is clear:
"We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group."
>Following the shutdown, ByteDance announced that it would give preference to Chinese Communist Party members in its hiring and increase its censors from 6,000 to 10,000 employees.
Btw, I checked your profile and I was sad to find that your blog doesn't seem to exist anymore. I'd love to read more about accessibility and the particulars of being a blind developer. I can't imagine what that's like, but I have at times wondered how I would approach it. I imagine many of us web developers could benefit from more awareness when it comes to accessibility in general!
That said, your Twitter appears to still be operational and relevant to the topic.
No, you're right, they're not on the same playing field, though saying that they are because one issue is "politicized" is, apologies, somewhat laughable. Do you know many people (and for clarification, this is from an American perspective) who have, in recent history, been assaulted out of the blue, pushed out of their homes or jobs, or bullied to the point of self-harm because they're of Irish ancestry? How long ago was it that being of Irish ancestry meant that your employer could come out and say "sorry, no fucken micks in my shop, gtfo" or that the state could deny you basic rights afforded to most citizens with the full force of the law on their side, and how long ago was that the case for the LGBTQ community?
These things are different playing fields because they're literally different playing fields: the actual broader issues at hand, in the present, are very different. Losing sight of history isn't the goal here--it's stupid and dangerous to ignore history, full stop--but it's doubly stupid to blind oneself to present.
The Holocaust was a pretty big deal, can we joke about Jews yet? Or does comedy have a cooldown period?
To not mince words here, if your comedy career was wholly dependent on making fun of Muslim cultural practices that have existed for millennia before you were born, in America, a country that totally had no relationship with the Middle East or history of anti-Muslim bigotry prior to 9/11, and you further cannot possibly even conceive of continuing it with some other variety of humor, it probably shouldn't resume. Quit that particular hobby and pick up a history book.
And given the prevalence of e.g. anti-trans sentiments, it's also more likely that "memes making fun of them" actually has a side-note of "memes suggesting they are mentally ill", "memes suggesting violence against them is ok", ..., which is not justified against any group.
Is making fun of white straight men OK? Ok good. What about white women? What about white gay women? Black republican gay men? Mexican scientologists? What group takes precedence? Your race? Your religion? Your sexual orientation? Your eye color? Your hair color? It's probably OK to make fun of Christians in the US, but it's not OK to make fun of them in China, right? They're still being persecuted over there, so that makes it not OK. What about content that's shared all over the internet? What about a persecuted Chinese Christian that reads /r/atheism?
Your "group standing" theory is clearly not tractable, as you are now stuck in an N-dimensional sorites paradox[1].
But because you and your Irish buddies feel immune, everyone else needs thicker skin?
I mean, this really should be morally obvious. Laughing with someone (which is how you imagine those Irish drinking jokes) is having fun. Laughing at someone (needless to say there were no welcomed trans users on those banned subreddits) is being an asshole. Reddit banned a bunch of assholes.
You're obviously not arguing in good faith, as I am quite careful with my words and specifically mentioned people. But I do agree that thick skin is a requirement of a free and open society (this is where I'd usually cite J.S. Mill's On Liberty). Finally, I just want to add that your conclusion is off-base: anti-Irish sentiment (known as Hibernophobia) has a long and storied history.
OK, then let's ban the mean Irish jokes too.
LOL. I find HN highly entertaining. Well...not to the point of breaking into a dance...but entertaining. Quite often I just jump straight to the comments.
But, there is a very different ethical and practical divide between a company implementing systematic discrimination and discrimination by individual users. This divide is large enough that most western nations have decided to draw their legislative lines there.
For those us whose Internet citizenship pre-dates Friendster and MySpace, the term "social media" has a particular meaning.
But for many younger "social media natives", the term basically just means "any website or app where you can make posts or comments".
When I think about it, it seems like a somewhat arbitrary distinction to make. I suppose the main difference is that the forums were self-hosted and I could have different identities for each one. And while I generally reused the same username, the fact that it wasn't just a matter of 'clicking on my profile' to see all my activity was something I really liked.
Maybe to me the term "social media" has come to mean "social media /companies/"? That doesn't quite satisfy, but it really does feel like the primary difference is that on these forums I knew that they were generally not run for profit, and the 'gods' were just individuals who volunteered their time to host or moderate. It felt safer, and more personal.
You are right.
There are big diffferences.
For one: You can joke on TikTok ...
Closest I can get to HN ⋂ dancing is 1:34-1:48 in Virus' "You should ask" (where the video is about the difficulty of source attribution on a LAN, let alone an entire internet)
I'm not sure why this matters at all. In fact, it's just another red herring, as you provide no counter-arguments. I think that the case for free speech (my God, especially in comedy) is pretty strong, whether you're a Muslim comic making fun of Muslims or an Asian comic making fun of Muslims.
This isn't a strawman, this is the entire argument: is it okay to make fun of people? I contend that it is.
There's a huge range between the ad hoc and the binary. For example, I think Mill's Harm Principle is a good place to start.
> Doesn't mean it isn't a useful heuristic...
I guess that's my point: I don't think it's a useful heuristic at all. Imo, the great majority of people worried about trans jokes and not Irish jokes are primarily on the political left, which makes it a political issue. But it should be (and in fact is) a moral issue: is X being harmed by Y? If so, we ought to punish Y.
"Weaker" groups are also "weaker" because the harm likely is larger, because of larger existing prejudice being more likely to be strengthened, and having real-life consequences (e.g. on public opinion influencing law-making). The "politicized" is pretty fundamentally connected to that.
I have all sorts of poorly founded ideas on why that might be so, which themselves might be more symptoms than causes, but the bottom line is the same; It's very hard to have a rational discussion between two parties with different points of view these days. I find that one or both will usually have underlying beliefs based on dogma that they refuse to entertain any discussion on, which makes discussing views founded on those beliefs extremely hard to do constructively, if not impossible.
https://ayende.com/blog/Images/Windows-Live-Writer/Pair-Prog...
EDIT: Wow i clicked on #Coding and it is like i taught about it...pure waste of time with Rainbowhairs and talking needle slim guy's with more grease on top than the hole movie 'Grease'
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
I merely said I don’t see how it’s worse than the major US social networks. Like say Facebook, which has been caught multiple times allowing employers and housing advertisers to illegally exclude groups like Black people, from seeing job postings and apartment listings.
Again, I don’t know that what TikTok has been shown to be doing is any worse.
Or look at the Uyghur internment camps. Or the one child policy that effectively turned some communitys 80% male.
There is no opposition in China that can speak up against this.
I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US. The US isn't intractably opposed to liberal democracy, but the CCP is:
From the OP:
> To that end, this long history looms large in how China thinks about its relationship to the U.S. specifically, and the West generally. China is driven to reverse its “century of humiliation”, and to retake what it sees as its rightful place as a dominant force in the world. What few in the West seem to realize, though, is that the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished, and that Western liberal values are actively hostile to that goal. Tanner Greer wrote in Tablet:
> ...
> This understanding of China’s belief that it is fighting an ideological war explains why the severe curtailing of freedom that happened in Hong Kong this month was inevitable; if the Party’s ideology is ultimately opposed to liberalism anywhere, “one country-two systems” were always empty words in service of China’s rejuvenation, and Marxism’s triumph. To see that reality, though, means taking China seriously, and believing what they say.
I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.
If the US government were using Facebook to censor and disseminate propaganda, we'd likely eventually hear about it.
In contrast, the Chinese government is certainly using TikTok to censor and quite likely to disseminate propaganda. Critics of that policy will be imprisoned.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-202...
This line of reasoning is getting old. All social media apps are data collection driven platforms
A lot of people in comments are talking about how great the feed algorithm is out weeding out teenage dance videos and showing interesting content.
You can easily imagine a scenario where CCP tweaks its algorithms to favor content relating to one party or candidate vs. the other.
The scary part is that I think it wouldn't be obvious to know whether China is exploiting TikTok's American audience via algorithms driving a certain agenda since it can be done very subtly in non-obvious ways.
From a spying perspective, I tend to agree with you as well.
That said - China doesn't let FB or Twitter in their country, why the hell should the US let them in ours? To me it is akin to letting them buy the NY Times or CNN. They may be benign now, but if tensions were to continue mounting, they could greatly influence the content a significant portion of people in the US are receiving. I see 0 reason to trust them with that power.
If the Chinese government is going to aggressively moderate TikTok to keep that out... uh, cool, I guess. I'd be happy to see some popular entertainment that doesn't devolve into a screaming match. But it's a lot of work, and reduces audience (i.e. revenue).
Bytedance has an isolated version called Douyin.
I believe if FB or Twitter created specific versions that comply with China’s laws, they would be allowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...
Which does an excellent job helping to stimulate thought of just what the power and purpose of these types of apps as well other structures (alphabet) are able to do...
Could you go into more detail about your thoughts on "[each] country’s ideology" and why you think that makes their social networks (which IMHO are a form of media) roughly equivalently desirable?
IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better. China's government, on the other hand, is pretty unrepentant about the bad things it does, and explicitly rejects and suppresses the mechanisms that could lead positive change in those areas. If the OP is correct and China's government sees itself in an ideological war with the West and its ideas of liberal democracy, then I'd expect that Chinese social networks will be drafted to serve in that war, either now or in the future.
If I dislike beef, I might not be enthusiastic about eating a steak, but I'd still prefer that to some chicken cooked in motor oil.
From the outside, I think Americans generally over-estimate the degree to which modern America is actually a liberal democracy. The tolerated range of speech seems to in reality run a perilously narrow gamut from "neo-conservative" to "arch-neo-conservative", with anything left of the former routinely subject to exercises of state force to attack and undermine that dissent in practice (declarations of turning the nebulous self-applied label of "Antifascist" into a "terror organization", COINTELPRO, etc, etc), regardless of what freedoms are claimed to be enshrined in the US constitution.
And this is merely its internal opposition to liberal democracy; again, even a cursory glance at modern Latin American history demonstrates that the US happily prefers right-wing dictators to democratically elected leftists, if the latter is at all detrimental to the US government's interests.
Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist. And you're giving that info freely, better hope the CCP doesn't decide to use it against you while you're there to make a political statement. They've done and are doing far worse over less.
Again, I do not reside in the US and do not imagine that the NSA is on "my side", so obviously I'm going to take a more jaundiced view of surveillance apps of US origin.
> Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist.
Yes. This is equally true of the US. You are ordered to disclose all social media accounts at the border, and can and will be denied entry to the country if your social media posts contain political statements (or even apolitical statements) that the interviewing officer objects to, whether posted by you or merely sent to you: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s..., https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16810312, etc
Due to China's "security" laws security and intelligence agencies have essentially full access to large companies' data. There's no real due process so a "private" company's data is essentially government data. There's also the overt and covert censorship and propaganda imposed by the government.
Company executives serve at the pleasure of the government. Anyone not towing the party line or acting with too much independence will get caught up in "anti-corruption" investigations or just be arrested for crimes they may or may not have actually committed.
Realistically it's better to just assume a priori that a Chinese social media company is pushing propaganda and building dossiers of users. It's certainly safer to assume that.
That's just "official" propaganda. The CCP's various astroturfing brigades are well documented (see "50 cent army" and "internet navy"). They show up in public forums of all stripes.
TikTok doesn't allow discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Falun Gong, Free Tibet, or anything other topics the CCP deems inappropriate. That censorship is propaganda by omission. Content users see being primary algorithmic makes it trivial to add in pro-CCP or just anti-West content into people's feeds.
