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TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

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Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#121

Post by CharlesW »

pessimizer wrote: post #108
Nicksil wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As far as I can tell, TikTok scares like these are 30% standard social media moral panic, 70% jingoism. Everyone knows that they are paying for TikTok with their data and a few hundred million people (myself included) are okay with that calculus and making a rational, informed decision to continue using the product. This is just silly. The overwhelming majority of people have no idea of what any of that means thus h…

No, that's silly. The overwhelming majority of people probably know just as much as you and I do about the uses to which TikTok puts the data they gather. Which is why conversations about TikTok immediately move into attacks on the Chinese government and Chinese people rather than discussing a single material effect that their data gathering or use has or could have on anyone's life. The difficulty with discussing ma…

> The overwhelming majority of people probably know just as much as you and I do about the uses to which TikTok puts the data they gather.

As a very technical person in this industry, do you really think you don't have a better understanding of the data TikTok collects and what it will be used for than Average TikTok User?

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#122

Post by UmbertoNoEco »

suggestion wrote: post #95
boomboomsubban wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jingoism. "Facebook may algorithmically subvert the foundations of society and democracy, but at least it's being done by a state I support."

If it's jingoism to support Western enlightenment values, liberal democracy, and basic human rights, then yeah I guess I'm a jingo.

none of which are exclusive to 'western' countries and even less demonstrated by the actions of the big corporations and governments

zuckerberg pelosi liz truss elon musk et al are not paragons of virtue and they are the people being defended here

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#123

Post by boomboomsubban »

SXX wrote: post #92
boomboomsubban wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jingoism. "Facebook may algorithmically subvert the foundations of society and democracy, but at least it's being done by a state I support."

Not that I support Facebook, but it's impossible to be moral absolutist in today's world. You either support western democracy with all it's imperfections or you are supporting authoritarian / totalitarian states. Everyone who pretend to be "politically neutral" will always be helping later. UPD: Yeah I meant "later" and not "former". Corrected.

>Everyone who pretend to be "politically neutral" will always be helping former.

I'll assume you mean latter, easy mistake to make.

Personally I find the "if you aren't supporting the ridiculous things we're doing you're supporting the enemy" argument ridiculous. I'm capable of thinking both need to seriously change, and think it's a better use of my time to try and change the Western Democracy I am a part of as it's supposed to change if I disagree with it. It's strange how that point of view gets me labeled a (possibly unintentional) traitor.

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#124

Post by CharlesW »

thenerdhead wrote: post #106

I wrote about this topic in a book (link in bio). I found myself addicted to consuming and creating tiktoks for about a year and a half after amassing 25k followers in a few months. There’s many repercussions to being on any social platform for countless hours a day, but for me it was a hard addiction to break. Not only do you get the feeling of a slot machine when the platform allows you to win to keep you incentivi…

> Not only do you get the feeling of a slot machine…

Yes! Even as a viewer, you're (very intentionally, I'm sure) lulled into a Vegas casino-like sleepwalk of infinite scrolling.

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#125

Post by tjr225 »

anonporridge wrote: post #113
initplus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All social media apps have the same goal: soak up as much of your attention as possible to get you to look at ads. But it's a difference of degrees, TikTok is simply so much more successful at soaking up peoples attention than competing platforms. TikTok is seriously affecting peoples quality of life en-masse in a way that social media has never achieved before. Any social media person will tell you how insane the nu…

> TikTok is seriously affecting peoples quality of life en-masse in a way that social media has never achieved before. What evidence do you have that its effect is worse than other platforms? Perhaps its scale is worse, but is the actual effect on the individual that much worse than it is with Instagram?

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#126

Post by pessimizer »

charles_kaw wrote: post #56
angio wrote: post #44

Reminder that Facebook paid a firm to create negative buzz around TikTok [0]. > The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said. > The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, pr…

Just because facebook (a soulless ghoul amalgamation trapped in the vortex of a billionaire p-zombie) took shots at tiktok (also a shit company), doesn't absolve tiktok of real, actual harm. This is whataboutism, although I always do appreciate light being shown on Fb/meta.

> This is whataboutism

This is contemporary liberal anticommunist whataboutism. Whataboutism once described when you point out bad thing X someone else is doing, and they respond by pointing about totally unrelated bad thing Y that you're doing, such as when the USSR responded to the US criticisms of their economic system by pointing out that the US was an apartheid state. It's an ad hominem.

What you're doing is yelling about your neighbor beating his wife when you're also beating your wife, and you're not going to stop beating your wife.

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#127

Post by kareemsabri »

patmcc wrote: post #120
kareemsabri wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I thought I'd test it. I opened Tik Tok for pretty much the first time. I've installed it but not yet used it. It showed me a bunch of girls dancing, as expected. I thought I could swipe up / down to tell them what I like, but I can only swipe up, so I'm not sure how I train it. I searched "Israel Palestine". I got an Irish guy named Freddy Quinne telling me it's like "coming home from work one day, only…

Oh, it's absolutely not easy finding that niche content. You're going to need to swipe past a lot of cleavage to find anything else. To get more of whatever you're currently on, re-watching, liking, commenting all probably work. To get less, either swipe past quickly or long press (I think?) and you can choose "not interested" or something. I think there are other ways to block particular creators and sounds (and may…

It just sounds like a lot of work trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Point taken that the content (maybe) exists on the platform, but if I can't find it what good is it? As essentially a worldwide daily competition for virality, it seems like it'll trend to what is mass entertainment.

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#128

Post by pessimizer »

justapassenger wrote: post #93
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #57

I'm with the rest of the commenters here in being puzzled about why TikTok is being singled out here with respect to the other social media apps. It's like comparing whiskey, vodka, and tequila in terms of health risks. You can't single out one as particularly pernicious when they do about the same thing.

Facebook, IG, Snapchat and other old social apps already had their fair share of dirt thrown at them. TikTok didn’t, and lots of people think that they are just a cool app for teenagers to record their dancing. So it’s more about telling people who already know that alcohol is bad, that White Claw is also bad.

> TikTok didn’t, and lots of people think that they are just a cool app for teenagers to record their dancing.

TikTok was literally attacked by US Presidents of opposing parties in two subsequent terms, and has been credibly threatened with total bans.

So it's more like telling people China bad.

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#129

Post by ficklepickle »

anonporridge wrote: post #111
justapassenger wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook, IG, Snapchat and other old social apps already had their fair share of dirt thrown at them. TikTok didn’t, and lots of people think that they are just a cool app for teenagers to record their dancing. So it’s more about telling people who already know that alcohol is bad, that White Claw is also bad.

Not really. TikTok has had tons of bad press from day one, even if it was just the sense of ick that it's just for kids and skeevy people watching young people dancing. And there's been criticism for years that it's a covert tool China is using to manipulate our youths. We need to think of the children!

They do seem to have a policy of asymmetric warfare, for example turning a blind eye to the export of fentanyl. It's not exactly far fetched. See the book "Unrestricted Warfare" by 2 PLA colonels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare

Re: TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

#130

Post by joshe »

Here's a list of social panics that turned out to be nothing:

  Kids being poisoned by halloween candy (no child was ever poisoned by a stranger on Halloween)
  Kids being latchkey kids
  Violent video games
  Jazz
  Hip hop
  Rap
  Heavy Metal
  Satanists meeting up to cut up animals
  Marijuana
  Dungeons and dragons (really https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-1980s-media-panic-over-dungeons-dragons)
  People gassing Euro trains and removing everyone's kidneys
  The internet
  Email (really)
  Text chat like aol and yahoo messenger
  Sms messages
  The dark web
  Jelly bracelets (really, on Good Morning America https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/the-great-sex-bracelet-scare-and-other-teen-myths/2197833/)
  Most songs sung by black people
  Many songs sung by Italian Americans
  Homosexual men
  Africanized Honey Bees
  Facebook
  Myspace
  Pinball arcades
  Video game arcades
  Pool halls
You will probably die after 70 of old age stuff. If not then a car crash or falling. Your kids might get screwed up but we have no idea why and avoiding all the above won't change the odds at all.
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