Related to think t the children, I recently read a few comments from women in Romania that told that since around 12-13 years old they got on the Facebook page ads promoting those girls to work as cam girls. Facebook and their ad network should also be analyzed IMO, would make more sense to put all social media under the same standards.
Also dudes working in ad industry, tell us why should we not install ad blockers when you put this kind of ads in front of children? FB knows 100% the user account age so is it stupidity? is it "we don't care", "a innocent bug"?
> These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry
Has WaPo every managed a similar article on Hollywood catalyzing attacks on tech? Or maybe that's the commonplace politics... Still, nice to see mention of press coverage artifice.
None of this detracts from concerns about Tiktok and the CCP though. Just as Microsoft funding anti-Google pieces doesn't detract from Google's near monopoly status in online advertising. Competitors do that all the time, you can't let that be a distraction from what the underlying problems are.
Most of these articles single out TikTok when they apply to all big tech companies. Clearly the call should be for better privacy protection laws that protect all citizens from all present and future tech companies.
> Other platform owners are bad, I don’t need them to be equal to China before doing something about it.
I agree. But by the same token, we don't need to do something about the others before doing something about TikTok. Where would we be today if we accepted the argument that before addressing tobacco companies we must first address alcohol companies, and before addressing alcohol companies, we must first address tobacco companies?
Arguing that X shouldn't be regulated because Y is not yet regulated is never a legitimate argument.
> ... before addressing tobacco companies we must first address alcohol companies
> Arguing that X shouldn't be regulated because Y is not yet regulated is never a legitimate argument.
Either you've got the question wrong, or your position is more disagreeable than you think. It seems to me that the question is whether Chinese X should be regulated when American X is not regulated. It is still technically X vs Y but the justification is far less obvious to me (when compared to justifying that we can regulate tobacco despite a lack of regulation of alcohol).
The problem with "not X until Y" arguments against regulation is you can swap the Y and X around depending on the context of the conversation and use this to disingenuously argue against all regulation while pretending you're only interested in fairness.
As engineers, it often feels like enforcing one policy regardless of the actor is the best solution, but I think it breaks down in practice.
For example, imagine if your email password was given out to two individuals - one is your significant other, and the other is a random dude on the internet. In theory, good password hygiene should be maintained no matter who the individual is. In practice I would be (and should be) vastly more worried about this random dude than my partner.
Trying to figure out a generalized solution for big tech may prove to be too hard, and is frankly a waste of time when there's a credible geopolitical threat on our doorstep.
> Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok
> 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.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
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