Comment by afavour

Comment by afavour 3 months ago

> the national security concerns around 17-year old nobodies publishing videos of themselves doing silly dances

C'mon, we can have a more informed conversation than that.

TikTok is an entertainment platform the average young American watches for more than an hour a day. Videos cover just about any topic imaginable. We just had an election. Is it really so impossible to imagine a foreign power adjusting the algorithm to show content favorable to one candidate over another? It's entirely within their power and they have every motive.

coldpie 3 months ago

The trouble I have is that Facebook & X do this, too, and their owners are similarly unaccountable to US law, but we aren't we banning them. If this law were applied equally, I'd be all in favor. Instead it is transparently just a handout to Facebook to remove a business competitor. That sucks, big time.

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afavour 3 months ago

I share that concern. But I also recognize that passing an equivalent law for domestic social media networks would be considerably less likely to pass. Perfect as the enemy of good and all that.

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- coldpie 3 months ago
  
  But this is worse than good: it's giving Facebook & X even more control over the discourse by removing a competitor.
  
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  afavour 3 months ago
  
  I work from the basic principle that a foreign, government-controlled adversary having control over discourse is worse than a domestic company having the same, despite strongly disliking both.
  Just at a base level, Facebook, X, etc are staffed by Americans who have a vested interest in the country remaining functional. The CEOs of those companies are, though it's very unlikely, arrestable. Can't say the same for TikTok.
  
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ryandrake 3 months ago

So why a single product? Young people watch content from way more than a single app. And reportedly (from my kid) they are all just moving over to a different Chinese content-sharing app. If we're worried about "foreign" influence, shouldn't we be blocking all non-US sources of information that young people might watch and be influenced by? It looks pretty ham-fisted to just target one of those sources.

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fumar 3 months ago

How are kids discovering a new Chinese-owned app? Is it through Tik Tok? Could the Tik Tok algo be biased towards China over US based companies?

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- ryandrake 3 months ago
  
  How did they find TikTok originally? Or Snapchat, or all the other silly apps they use? We're all being bombarded with marketing and advertising every day. Maybe this new app is good at marketing and the product itself is as good as TikTok, who knows, I don't use either of them.
  The TikTok ban would have been the perfect opportunity for any number of competing US social media apps to swoop in and offer TT's current users a replacement, but they seem to have all failed to address that market.
  
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