Can you point out in the article or describe what you feel is the actual, explicit issue? I read the article, and I didn’t catch any concrete description of why TikTok is dangerous aside from the typically general descriptions, or at a minimum, how TikTok is any different from Facebook or YouTube or Twitter Instagram or whatever else, all of which have essentially black box recommendation algorithms.
The article never hones in on anything specific to TikTok or makes a claim. From what I can tell, the two potential issues are concern of data collection with what that feeds and then a concept of influence.
The former feeds a learning algorithm that shows what people find entertaining, funny, interesting. Could this be weaponized? Potentially. My best guess how is that it simply shows what people in various regions like and dislike, providing food for propaganda and policies. So the app is just a vacuum that feeds some external process that may or may not feedback through the app. No doubt this very thing with Facebook’s data was weaponized in the 2016 U.S. election by Cambridge Analytica and other entities.
The latter possibility is one of influence. However, I do not see how TikTok is unique in this. In a different timeline, Facebook or Twitter or a multitude of other sites could have easily been used to hijack the rally, so that example is weak. If anything, the example is damning since there is a large possibility that Trump’s war on TikTok is one of personal vendetta that has been hypernormalized in the context of actual concerns between the U.S. and China and general concerns of the influence of social media. Further, there is factual evidence of Facebook being weaponized by organized groups to start protests and riots and people being influenced by foreign efforts.
From my stance, the question is why is just TikTok a concern? If it is a legitimate concern, which it probably is at least in theory, then these same concerns apply to other social networks. The other question is where does this all stop?