cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12876226
The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.
US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.
I’m not here to be pro-china, and I definitely believe that they’re putting those things in douyin. I’m just not convinced they’re purposefully putting negative things in TikTok purposefully to harm mental health.
This is anecdotal and my personal experience, but I haven’t noticed any pro-ccp things on my personal algorithm. What I do notice is anti-US and anti-capitalist content by Americans. Whether or not they are shills, I can’t say for sure, but it feels like it would border on conspiracy theory thinking to suggest that many of them are.
To clarify the isolation comment, I mean that TikTok is a place where community building and the spreading of ideas or news (not necessarily good or bad ideas/news) spreads rapidly, especially among young people, in a way the people who run traditional media can’t control. Taking away this tool makes us more reliant on forms of media that they do control.
deleted by creator
I agree with you. The difference between the other platforms mentioned and TikTok is that TikTok is where the action is right now, so it’s the target. The unverified hearsay problem is certainly there, but I don’t think it’s inherent to TikTok more than any other platform. No matter the platform, rage and engagement are the most important things so the algorithms will always reward them. Even YouTube’s algorithm has been highly criticized for funneling people down extremist pipelines.
The TikTok algorithm is incredibly efficient at locking people, especially young people, into scrolling forever. That’s bad. However that same criticism has been made against more traditional social media platforms too. Twitter especially has a similar although less effective problem.
Besides vague gesturing at China, I don’t see any problem that TikTok has that isn’t already present in other social media platforms. If we want to go after all of them, I’d 100% be for it, but this legislation is too targeted and creates a dangerous precedent imo.
100% agree on the searchability. It’s totally unusable.
deleted by creator
Thank you for those resources, they are pretty compelling, especially the Twitter thread, which if true, is good evidence that China has used the data to target specific individuals. That’s a problem. And the individual bit is important because I’m unpersuaded by “mass data collection” arguments because a) everyone is doing that and no one seems to care and b) basically the same data is freely purchasable.
The harms associated with the first few links are definitely real, but I would certainly be interested in an apples to apples comparison to other platforms, especially YouTube.
But I think it’s also important to recognize that there is a lot of good that comes from TikTok as well. If I can get personal here, I’ve moved away from family and friends to work a demanding job, and I’ve found some sense of community on TikTok with people who are into the same hobbies as I am, which I’ve had difficulty finding IRL. It has also given voice and community to [certain groups of] marginalized people, and, (for better or for worse) is a major platform by which creators can generate revenue by which a lot of them survive.
Obviously a lot of that COULD and SHOULD be hosted on a different platform without all these issues, but right now they are not, so we need to make sure not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I pointed it out in other comments, but I feel as if the current bill provides too much power to the executive to unilaterally ban foreign outlets from functioning in the US. I’m not a nutty free speech absolutist or anything, but I think anything that has the potential to shut out alternative perspectives like that takes us closer to Chinese style censorship, not farther away.
Ironically, I wonder if a better solution is mandatory integration of positive content algorithms like it seems like douyin has. But then the question is, who picks what’s positive? Is religion positive? Patriotism? Depends who you ask.
All in all, I think social media of all kinds has been basically the worst thing to happen to the world in my lifetime, but I think that that the cat is out of the bag on it and we’re just pretty fucked.
Thank you for the honest and level conversation here, I do appreciate it.
deleted by creator