TikTok’s Poison Pill

“… we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements.”

Like talking and writing directly to a chosen audience of friends instead of acting as an unpaid or low paid content creator / publisher for a social media company?

Any examples of recent apps that might accomplish this goal pf authentic human online engagements? Seems like the difficulty is getting enough users on a platform to facilitate a broad level of interests without a company being tempted to turning their users into neurological lab rats to be milked for ad revenue.

> has shown us that the USA already does stuff like this.

Ya, you're right, China isn't known to collect or do much with population data.

China and the US officially regard each other as adversaries. The CCP outright declares the US to be an enemy. The CCP is also not subject to the rule of law within its own borders, even in theory.

Then you get into the economics of it. The liberal west is generally in favor of free markets, but to what degree do we remain free when dealing with a trading partner who doesn't operate as a liberal democracy? China has banned Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram...because they don't want their citizens giving business to foreign powers which they could be directing to their own growing businesses, and they don't want their citizens giving data to foreign powers.

So please clarify, is the US banning TikTok "sinophobia" but China banning Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc just something else entirely?

I'm not American but I hate TikTok because it seems to be the source of all stupid memes and joke videos people share with me. I can't stand it. Even though I don't use it, it still causes people to dump that crap on me. I wish there was an auto filter to remove everything with a TikTok logo because if it has that it's certain I'm going to hate it :)

This is mainly because they embed their logo into everything that's shared of course. It's like the tramp stamp of stupid memes.

In this case it works out negatively but I guess there's a lot of people loving mindless entertainment so I guess this is why they still mark their stuff this way.

So in my case it has nothing to do with China even though I'm admittedly opposed to their government. But that's a different thing. FWIW I hate Facebook and Twitter too (for other reasons, Facebook because their datamining, Twitter because of the huge amount of nonsense ("Look I just had chicken wings"). But I use Instagram to follow certain artists.

They could not even exist without harvesting data - it is their business model.

Unfortunately, the only option is to just leave.

They could present videos of dogs that look like cats to influence your opinion to be more favorable about dogs.

They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared. Or, they could flood your child’s feed with videos from children their age discussing perceived mental illness self-diagnosis to encourage the youth of a nation to consider themselves mentally ill. They could flood young people of primary child-bearing age with videos of other children discussing their homosexuality in order to lower the reproduction rate within a country. They could flood videos that are critical of key practices or institutions within a country to promote dissent.