131–140 of 374 posts
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TikTok should be banned in the US. China banned all of our homegrown social networks, its pretty standard international precedent to ban theirs, given the security risks.
I’d rather have a generally applicable law in place. If we think massive data collection shouldn’t be allowed then ban that.
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>> China is not a good faith operator. Who is? I don't mean to be trite or contrary, but TikTok is coming into an environment where norms are pretty damned shady. Google as you and the article say, also consume user data quite unethically. FB likewise surveil us for their advertising businesses. They both also happen to host and control a good chunk of political and politically adjacent content within that framework.…
Just in cast it makes any difference to you, the Chinese government, who collects all the TikTok data, is a bunch of oppressive mass murderers. Say what you will about Facebook, Google, et al., but they haven't come that far yet.
If the underlying assertion is "ccp is evil," where and why does this relate to TikTok specifically? Why not every other item you are probably consuming?
>> Say what you will about Facebook, Google, et al., but they haven't come that far yet.
They're tech/media companies, not governments. FB & Google are however responsible for the norms under which TikTok can collect data for whatever purposes they want. They're the ones who normalised this sort of shady behaviour. It's a pretty straight line between one and the other.
It's not unclear at all. It's Chinese data harvesting software. They'll do token public appeasement to avoid negative pressure, but every feature in the app is designed to collect biometrics and behavioral data. China is not a good faith operator. Given the data needed to influence public opinion and voting, they will engage in manipulation favorable to their interests. That alone is sufficient to run tiktok at a los…
Everything he rails against was present in both recent US elections but for whatever reason he seems content to focus only on the most recent one.
Maybe he's spineless and holds that line because right-wing hosts are the only ones that will host him to get his message out. Maybe he really does believe that and is being a complete hypocrite. Neither option is respectable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TikTok should be banned in the US. China banned all of our homegrown social networks, its pretty standard international precedent to ban theirs, given the security risks.
I’d rather have a generally applicable law in place. If we think massive data collection shouldn’t be allowed then ban that.
The data collection horse is out of the barn, has legitimate uses, and is an incredibly thorny issue to legislate appropriately. And will be adjusted for the next 20+ years.
What needs to be done now is to say that (1) at a certain user count ("too big to democratically ignore") then (2) production recommendation algorithms must be auditable.
Allow the details of audits to be kept secret from public record, but the DoJ should be able to go to Google, Facebook, Netflix, or TikTok and say "Show me how this works, now."
It's burying your head in the sand to suggest this doesn't have a clear impact on democracy and is currently solely in control of private companies and completely opaque. And it's the opaqueness that's the biggest danger.
Fundamentally, modern media/social is different from everything that came before because of the economic feasibility of microtargeting. Newspapers couldn't afford to track their customers individually & print a unique paper for each of them, which resulted in an auditable public record. All of the companies above can do exactly that, without leaving any public record.
I feel like TikTok is significantly underdiscussed, almost like the tech and business press are assuming it's a flash-in-the-pan more similar to Snapchat than Facebook. It is almost certainly having a major impact on the business of some of the most prominent publicly traded companies in the US, yet there are just a handful of articles discussing their impact on Facebook's disastrous quarterly results.
The users of TikTok are mostly teenagers and young adults, that's why. Nearly everybody in journalism is late 20s or 30+. They just don't get it, though to be fair vine had a similar type of content and that failed.
Those late 20s and up journalists get it, but they recognize (correctly) that like all social networks of this sort the early adopters (kids/young adults) are going to turn into adults with spending power and either change the nature of the platform or move on to something else. In either case, what TikTok is now is largely irrelevant (not to mention trite and shallow).
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TikTok should be banned in the US. China banned all of our homegrown social networks, its pretty standard international precedent to ban theirs, given the security risks.
Right, I actually see this as a very simple trade issue! China doesn't allow US social networks in China, so the US shouldn't allow Chinese social networks in the US. Doing anything else means that Chinese companies have the ability to build international platforms—where both Chinese and US citizens can participate—and US companies do not. Furthermore, those international platforms could potentially be made to enforc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> China is not a good faith operator. Who is? I don't mean to be trite or contrary, but TikTok is coming into an environment where norms are pretty damned shady. Google as you and the article say, also consume user data quite unethically. FB likewise surveil us for their advertising businesses. They both also happen to host and control a good chunk of political and politically adjacent content within that framework.…
I think it would be a mistake for anyone to conclude that because none of these companies is good, they're all equally bad. There is a lesser and greater evil in this case.
Bear in mind that we don't really know much about how our data is being used at any of these, either directly by the company or by security agencies in their home countries. US security also has access to foreign citizens' FB & Google data via prism or its successors.
The whole argument here seems (to me) to be [1] TikTok collects a scary and unjustifiable amount of data about its customers, just like youtube, FB Etc. [2] We don't know exactly what's collected and why [3] TikTok are chinese.
Singling out Tiktok is neither helpful nor honest, IMO.
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As a European, I would be happy to ban TikTok, but also Facebook and all its subsidiaries (Instagram, WhatsApp) and Google and all its subsidiaries. It's not like others are better, but those three are the worst when it comes to spying shaping public opinion only because they are the biggest and most powerful. If I had to choose who will influence the public in my country, let it better be some company (or government…
I understand the point, but I don't see how companies can be "nationalist", or think in "their country's interests". They only care about money and who knows who really control any corporation with the size that a competing social network service would require?
Because there's a rule of law, legal records, required disclosures, all subject to investigation and enforcement by an independent judiciary that creates a public record.
We can bemoan that wealthy people control a majority of assets or that some exceptions slip through the cracks at smaller scale (e.g. offshore shell companies owning assets). But by and large there's no question as to "Who owns Exxon? Or Google? Or Facebook?"
China does not have that.