> TikTok is an app designed for kids and No Politics policies make the app friendly for kids, which is preferable to the Youtube radicalization treadmill model.
I think this is a false dichotomy. You are mentioning two companies that play this game in bad faith. There is a middle-ground.
> TikTok is a social network that could not be made by an American company, due to its complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship.
This is nonsense. All the social networks have things they will remove and ban your account for, from spam and CP upwards (Instagram and FB being notoriously touchy about sexuality). It seems that TikTok is heavier about politics than most, but censorship is not a boolean.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and (to a lesser extent) YouTube are weapons of psychological warfare that have been optimised to spread political misinformation and outrage.
TikTok, on the other hand, is just hot chicks dancing, stupid memes and Shrugging Black Italian Man. It reminds me a lot of old YouTube in that regard.
>Banning TikTok wouldn’t be a dangerous precedent. Authoritarian countries do that all the time.
Wanting to live in a non-authoritarian country, I think you missed the point you just made, or were just being sarcastic and it went over my head.
There's a theory that this push for a Tik-Tok ban is being funded by Meta, who can't buy it like it bought other competition like Instagram and WhatsApp.
Not OP but have a similar view. Behavior of TikTok isn't any different from other social media companies like FB and YouTube. The algos everywhere push higher engagement content and that is mostly dumb or polarising in nature. TikTok is in general averse to political content. It is full of misinformation but so is Youtube and Facebook. Short video is in general a worse format for nuanced content but great for engagement and AI. Now FB and Google have copied that.
We should look at harms of social media in collective and not trying to find some political scapegoats ignoring the root cause.
> I didn't say that Facebook or Instagram should not ban tiktok. you imagined that I said that.
I'm struggling to even comprehend this sentence. I never said or imagined that you said "Facebook or Instagram should ban TikTok", that doesn't even make sense. I said Apple and Google have no reason to ban TikTok because TikTok does not compete with them. They have nothing to gain except pissing off users, so why would they do it?
I asked "Why should Apple or Google ban TikTok but not Facebook or Instagram". All three are equally guilty of harvesting user data and using it to drive ads and content. You need to explain to me what TikTok is doing that is both different from its competitors, and what makes that illegal.
> What I love about tiktok is how they've managed to ban all political content.
This is... not my experience with TikTok at all. I think what you've just described is your own little filter bubble that Tiktok presents.
My Tiktok is very gay. Not that that is political, but I get a lot of trans rights content, queer issues/advocacy, BLM content, pro-choice content, "landlords are evil" content etc etc and usually its funny and witty and I love it.
> How does the proposed US ban on transactions with TikTok violate users’ rights? Isn’t the application free?
I think Trump is threatening to eliminate the app from the app store. Anyway, the app can't really function with a transaction ban, because it generates revenue from advertisements.
> Also, there are many teenagers who are employed by the US government who are entrusted with state secrets
Members of the military, some federal employees, and the children of some federal employees (e.g. the children of diplomats, for instance) should be banned from using TikTok, out of an over-abundance of caution. My understanding is that this was already the policy (or at least, parts of it were) before Trump decided to destroy TikTok.
Hard to see that you are making a genuine argument here. I mean, the fact that some teenagers are soldiers (for instance) does not begin to justify a blanket ban on the product.
> The timing makes it seem like concerns about TikTok are more about anti-Trump content than actual national security concern.
Before talks of a ban there were discussions about the TikTok app possibly uploading users’ random smartphone gallery content (photos, videos).. That’s technically possible. I don’t know how the government would enforce the app not to have this sort of behaviour.
Is that referring to the content or the company itself? I don't see how it's any more of a cesspool than any other social platform. Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? Every sufficiently large platform is filled with a very wide range of content, from great to awful.
As a company, I do agree they have shady practices, but again, don't most other social media apps such as Facebook and the gang use similar tracking and data collection? Of course that's a low bar to compare to but I don't see why they're being singled out here.
> [...] we gain almost nothing by having tiktok around.
We gain an outlet or creativity that's particularly fun for teens. You might as well say that we gain nothing by banning skateboards, video games, or rock music.
I would agree more with the ban of there was any evidence of nefarious data mining by TikTok. Outside of weird Internet rumors they only seem to collect basic user data and whatever you write in your profile.
>Let’s be very clear here. I am not a fan of TikTok. I had the misfortune of coming across it when it was still called Musically and I had to explain to a little girl that she, unlike her friends, was not allowed to dance for strangers. That ruined an otherwise perfect evening.
I realize this isn’t the main point of the post but I’m very surprised this is pretty much an accepted thing now.
I would have thought the Trump administration or the media would weaponize the potential exploitation of children and turn a complex geopolitical struggle into a moral panic for the public to more easily understand.
> Is there some social signal they aren’t getting from my setup
Honestly from the description you wrote it just does not seem like TikTok is the right platform for you.
What I like about it is the light-heartedness of it, I don't see political content at all and I wouldn't really be interested if I got any as it's a pretty terrible platform for news and hot takes. Instead, I get cooking/funny/cute/surreal meme videos that match the Gen Z humor. It distracts me from gloomy Twitter/Facebook feeds.
It's not an app for serious content, it's a dopamine treadmill.
> Enacting a ban on the most popular app among Gen Z would cause a huge uproar.
Or they just move over to FAANG competitors? I've never used TikTok before since it is an app, but I use YouTube shorts and whatever that Instagram short thing is Facebook is pushing into my feed (with...erm...a lot more addictive algorithms than YouTube). Ok, I'm not Gen Z, but it looks like content providers are already hedging their bets on platforms (they often don't even remove TikTok watermarks), I don't see why consumers wouldn't follow. Its not like YouTube or Facebook is blocked in the USA.
> TikTok is imho one of the closest approximations of a marketplace of ideas
Given they are fairly aggressive at censoring views that run against progressive perspectives, can they really be a true marketplace of ideas? Topics like the lab leak theory or nuanced views on trans issues will net you a ban a lot sooner than on other platforms.
I think this is a false dichotomy. You are mentioning two companies that play this game in bad faith. There is a middle-ground.
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