And youtube. YT shorts is essentially turning into TikTok.
Short of whitelisting and pre-approving content I don't see how we can allow this to go on. This is quite frankly destroying peoples brains.
And youtube. YT shorts is essentially turning into TikTok.
Short of whitelisting and pre-approving content I don't see how we can allow this to go on. This is quite frankly destroying peoples brains.
Any ideas how I can turn off this cancer yt shorts? I'm not using it and yt keeps shoving it up my ass in every update..
Use alternative YT front-end like Piped, Newpipe etc.
I could be wrong, but i thought i saw shorts on newpipe the other day.
I used a Firefox add-on called "Stylus" and wrote a custom css rule to hide the relevant divs/elements. It's not perfect, but it's okay.https://github.com/openstyles/stylus
However, after the recent ad-blocker targeting by Youtube I pretty much just stopped watching Youtube entirely. I added my regular subscriptions to the NewPipe app on my phone and just watch what they put out.
The add-on I mentioned above is super useful to personalize my experience with other websites. Particularly online-shopping and other marketplaces that have huge amounts of whitespace for no reason. You'd be surprised how much nicer the web experience is after you add a few "margin: 0px;" css styles to strategic areas.
On Android you could patch using Revanced, there's a checkbox for shorts in the feed.
Do not use their app, then set ad block rules to block whatever you want.
If you change /shorts/ in the URL to /watch/, it'll load the same video in the normal YouTube UI. I like that better because it allows for such advanced features as... changing the fucking volume.
(Shorts will keep the volume set as whatever you last changed it to in the normal UI, with no way to change it without going to a different ("normal") video.)
I guess you are talking about mobile. There a several ytshorts blocker extensions for desktop browsers.
I'm pretty libertarian, but I agree something needs to change. I don't know what sane regulation would look like, but I suspect the politician's answer would be regulatory capture of some kind. I personally don't want some kind of government censor managing my internet connection, but at the same time I think this shit is detrimental to society. I think it's a conversation we should be having.
I'm also heavily leaning towards Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist. My thought on the matter is that whatever solution we come up with to resolve this particular issue is the same one we need to do to resolve the greater societal issues we are seeing, because I think the root cause is the same.
Beyond that, part of the Libertarian line of thought is that we have to "let go" and let things fall where they may because we have no moral claim over it. The area of effect we have as individuals is quite small so it makes sense to focus in that direction rather. So that would mean things like family, neighborhood, community, shared culture/religion, and the institutions that build on those.
I myself try to be involved with and sit on the boards of HoAs, to add some sanity and fairness to it. I've also been helping pay for close family friends to go through college. I'm also planning on doing charity work for the groups I feel closest to in my local context (South Africa).
The root cause is a desire for unconsciousness. The solution is a higher level of consciousness. Take a small dose of LSD (not endorsing this, just making a point) and the entire modern internet becomes unbearable. It becomes physically painful to procrastinate because you are just painfully aware that you are trying to distract yourself, defeating the purpose.
It's like when you reset your tastebuds and the level of sugar and salt in everything becomes physically revolting.
I don't expect a mass enlightenment any time soon though (regardless of legalization/normalization of psychedelics), so we'll need one or two (or three...) "stopgap" solutions before that point. (Just for the next thousand years or so ;)
A somewhat related phenomenon is the desire for someone else to take care of everything. It simplifies the infinite chaos and complexity of life. To some degree this is necessary to maintain sanity, but if this is the "default" approach, except for a small percentage of people who seek power due to genetic hardwiring... well then you end up with what we have now. In this case, the solution is also maturation (though in this case, emotional rather than... whatever you want to call consciousness being aware of itself), and also not expected to "arrive" within the next few centuries.
I wish I had some more practical suggestions, but I at least hope that pointing out the root causes (as I see them) may lead someone else to helpful ideas.
Interesting to watch people confront themselves like this. Everyone's libertarian until they see a real harm that actually upsets them and they can't victim-blame.
Nah man there are a lot of harms that upset me where I still think regulation would cause more harm. Anything related to the latest craze over CSAM and encryption is a good example.
On the other hand, if anyone wants to try making advertisement contracts unenforceable (illegal, essentially), I'll be the first in line.
Maybe some way of making addiction-inducing products less profitable instead of censorship? Or going further, lessening the role of profit in how society is organized?
I was wondering the other day what the alternative world would be like where every publicly posted video had to be reviewed by the BBFC censor board and assigned a rating. Like if you want to post your kid's first steps on Facebook, that would be a U rating, while car park fights would be R15.
(and of course how unworkable it would be to have the censor board be several percent of the population so they could keep up with the posting rate)
Maybe that's a good thing, and would cause the balance / dynamic to be different and thus requiring a rework in some form
Perhaps it costs real money to submit each video to these platforms as a means to offset the moderation and rating efforts. Similar to what others have suggested to reduce spam emails.
Off the top of my head, requiring money to post videos to these platforms would immediately reduce the sheer huge volume of spam and automated/auto-generated videos. It would also reduce spam from LCOL regions that weaponize their low-value of time in order to game the system.
Not only that, but it would solve identity and age verification (as it'd require a credit card).
have the censor board be several percent of the population
Easy to scale up nannying to infinite proportions with AGI. (We don't have that yet, but it may arrive very soon. Well, we have a shitty approximation right now, but AI != AGI.)
On the other hand, that (coupled with the NSA thing) also makes the "my FBI agent" meme come true. One Federal Agent Per Child.
I was telling my SO today that I think social media should be regulated like cigarettes and booze.
Instagram doesn’t have an algorithmic feed that introduce you to content - not that I know of.
You pretty much only see instagram content when you visit a specific person’s page and that’s all you will ever see.
When was the last time you used Instagram? Or Youtube? They're almost Tiktok clones at this point.
I only visit on mobile. I thought the middle film thing icon was to take your own photos/videos - because that’s what the center icon did on the YouTube app; the last time I had the app installed. Never occurred to me it’s a feed. O_o
Instagram as it exists today is a streamlined dopamine injection engine.
Variable rewards, instantaneous short-form tailored content, fear of missing out. It's carefully built for continuous user engagement.
They'rebadTiktok clones. Which in this case is a good thing - their inferior algorithms make the result less addicting.
Instagram doesn’t have an algorithmic feed that introduce you to content - not that I know of.
That is literally their default mode. They had to introduce a "For You" feed (hidden behind a tap on Instagram logo) to go around EU regulations.
I must have missed it because I don’t follow anyone and just go directly to their pages manually.
Then you're in luck :)
Instagram's default feed is an abomination. For me it shows two posts from people I follow, and then an endless stream of ads and "suggested" content.
Thankfully I don't engage with Instagram much, and a few years back I muted/unfollowed a bunch of people, so the algorithmic feed is mostly okay: dogs, cats, climbing. But most of it is recycled regurgitated aggregator accounts
Insta reels and YouTube shorts are clone of Tiktok with similar feed/algo and content.
Even Facebook has that vertical short video shit now spread among the other content.
Facebook and Instagram "short video shit" is at least partially overlapping. This incidentally creates a quite grating user experience.
They introduced this recently. They do it just like TikTok.
I don't know if it was that recent? I abandoned the app two years ago because of the introduction of the algorithmic feed ( and the explore page, but at least you had to click on that )
Instagram does for reels and you occasionally get related pages popping up in your feed.
I occasionally see a post from someone I follow. 90% of what’s in my feed is either and ad or “suggested for you”.
I basically stopped using Instagram because it only shows you algorithm feed, I see so little content from the people I follow
You can just switch to “following” mode, but it is an annoying extra step.
I often get “For you” on the front app page instead of the accounts I’m following. This sometimes shows suggested pages.
You can switch to "Following" on front page and not get any algo recs but I don't think selection sticks.
Algo recs and reels nearly killed IG for me. It desperately tries to become TikTok but that's not why I signed up for IG (which was photos). Photos still exist, but even if you like every photo and "dislike" every reel for months it will still push 99% reel content in your feed--whatever ML they use has been near totally useless.
Why do you have that feeling? I volunteer helping to report and disrupt networks of sexual assault and hatred against women on social media. Tik Tok is like the wild west in terms of the availability of CSAM for example, and in how tolerant it is of hate speech. Instagram actually takes reports seriously and doesn't tolerate threats of violence etc.
I'm familiar with the misogyny problem (Andrew Tate etc), but I thought that CSAM was the one thing that got an immediate effective banhammer everywhere on the Internet. If you've got a real CSAM problem with TikTok it might be addressed by taking it to their CDN?
(even on HN, it's hard to get people to focus on the "is it harmful" question for social media rather than the "run by foreigners vs Americans" aspect)
Maybe CSAM = 12 year olds posting videos of themselves dancing?
Yes, TikTok is very very popular for this. The network of these accounts is then leveraged by "fan accounts" who form hubs for abusers to connect with one another and share links to other platforms, particularly Telegram and Mega.
Reddit is also extremely bad for it. They have a system now where a new subreddit is created every day, discoverable via known keywords, and then used as a directory for links to telegram.
The other thing you'll commonly see on both of these platforms is material being stolen from other social media platforms and then re-hosted to reddit or TikTok with sexualised descriptions. Reddit for example will often say it's fine as long they don't explicitly mention that the images are not of the poster.
Reddit is also extremely bad for it. They have a system now where a new subreddit is created every day, discoverable via known keywords, and then used as a directory for links to telegram.
Why is Reddit in the equation, because the Telegram channels also get banned ? Cause if not, why not just stick to Telegram
Reddit is used as a directory. It has the advantages in discoverability and being able to automate account creation without needing an email address or phone number.
The 'abuse' in that scenario being the fact that the parents are ignorant or uninvolved enough to let it happen.
is there some unspoken assumption here? Myself and my friends all have videos of our kids dancing at many ages. None of it is considered csam
Run by Americans or run by the intelligence and propaganda arm of a govt that is adversarial to America?
Sure, but .. are there no first Amendment implications at all? What's the minimum US involvement of staff TikTok would require in order to receive first amendment protection?
My observation has been that the comments on high engagement TikTok posts are generally quite pleasant, whereas the comments on high engagement Instagram posts feel like a KKK meeting.
Haha now do YouTube.
Youtube comments used to be known as a cesspool, but lately I'm mostly avoiding them for their unbearable positivity and uncritical praise of the video. I can see how that's bad on conspiracy or racist videos though.
I wonder if this is because the creators routinely prune negative comments of them. Or perhaps it is because Youtube severely down ranks comments with dislikes.
Because YouTube promotes positive comments and every comment section is set to "best comments" now by default (instead of most recent comments)
Fascinating, I'd guess this to be the result of a filter bubble? i.e. it would only show you things you agree with. That might not be optimal though (at least in terms of harvesting human attention at all costs), I always heard that outrage drives engagement better?
This is my experience as well (though it is uninstalled as of ~1 year ago).
You get what you look for on Tiktok.
But tiktok does have an "agenda" of sorts.
From what I've read, if you open tiktok app outside of China, most videos will be about ordinary folks celebrating a very liberal or open way of life, being an anarchist, anti-authoritarian or even a dissident is celebrated.
But if you open tiktok from within China, most videos will be about Chinese patriotism and how that way of life is the best. In this case, anarchism or anti-authoritarian videos are NOT celebrated, they will be likely removed or banned from there.
TikTok is not much different than Instagram and Youtube Shorts in the western world. That it is heavily moderated in China would not surprise me either. But i wouldn't call that an "agenda"
They are much much different.
TikTok is full of anti America propaganda. It rarely gets removed. Anything anti China doesn’t last long.
Instagram has hardly any anti China or anti America propaganda. And it’s certainly not recommended to you within minutes of using the app for the first time.
Opened TikTok in Taiwan and almost immediately got anti America propaganda. Blaming America for covid.
The opposite is absolutely true.
Try and question "America's greatest ally ever" and their policies and see how long you last on these platforms.
When critiquing china, remember that you're essentially looking in the mirror.
That’s funny because this argument has been exposed as complete bullshit in the last month. You should find a better example to try and be dishonest about nowadays. Social media is extremely anti-Israel and now everyone knows it
First weeks I used TikTok, I got all kind of anti-anything, from the local right to local left, from global KKK to whatever global hippies are called today. Any propaganda to burn whichever evil empires in the creators corner of the world exist. Guess it had some hard time to find my political niche and started with too little information about me.
On Instagram on the other side, I've never seen any serious amount of political messages, but they all want to sell me merch, cat-toys and nerd-toys from any point of the spectrum. Likely be because they have more information about me. And these days, TikTok is pretty much like Instagram, all cats and nerds and the occasional call for blood from those plebs who break their spaghetti.
So I don't think it's that any platform is full of this or that, but it very much depends on what the platforms think what might be interesting for you, and the rest you just don't see until it really floods the platform hard.
What else is it then? An instrument in the hands of a dictatorship.
Let's ban schools because they can be used by dictatorships to inoculate their propaganda?
Yea we should ban schools ran by foreign dictators on American soil. Any more obvious questions?
If you go to Douyin's search pagehttps://www.douyin.com/search/and focus the search bar, it'll show two sets of recommendations. The first is "for you" and, if they don't have a profile on you, likely a reflection of the most popular content. The second is a ranking of "hot topics", where Xi Jinping gets a dedicated top spot above number 1. Obviously that's because he'd only rarely rank near the top organically. But even with that extra promotion, most people will simply ignore it, so it's more of a fig leaf to keep the government content while users keep watching basically the same stuff as anywhere else.
Aren't those just moderation policies adapted to local markets?
Tik Tok is very good at targeting to the user. My Tik Tok doesn’t have any liberal stuff on it at all.
probably more moderated
for now. Unpopular opinion, social network should be regulated like casinos.
I would say rather like cigarettes
Adults are not immune.
I mean that we need something like a forced label on every social platform: a forced 5 second splash screen with a warning. “this app can cause depression, self-esteem issues and is detrimental to your mental health. Here are some resources to know more”
I wish the EU commission had the guts to push for something like this for all dopamine-kick and scroll-based apps
Cigarettes are heavily regulated for adults too.
Social network apps with scrolling feeds are literally online slot machines. People get stuck in the machine zone. It's exactly the same thing, minus the explicit money transaction.
This design should be regulated the same way slot machines are.
The Indian ban on TikTok was very curiously timed as well - right after a major investment in Jio (Reliance) from Facebook.
No other apps were banned after that, nor was there any ban on Chinese smartphones. Trade with China has only increased rapidly since then.
Coincidentally, India is perhaps the only large market where Instagram still dominates
IIRC the TikTok (and others) ban had to do with some Chinese incursion inside Indian territory, and the government wanted to appear to be doing something.
That's a incorrect and biased piece of sentence. Over 60 apps were banned initially, some before the skirmishes and some after. Kindly do not spread biased political propaganda.
Not much to do with Facebook. The people and govt were struggling with Covid and govt. wanted to show some action. India also had some border skirmish with China just before that and also the govt wants to reduce dependency on China in general.
Instagram has been around too long so gets largely ignored when people talk about bad influences from social media. Even though, realistically, any photo/video-based social media is awful for teenagers' self-esteem and mental health. [0]
[0]:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...
Instagram's influence on people is of a different kind (which doesn't mean it is not a concern...). TikTok directly fuels violence and low IQ, especially amongst teenagers.
TikTok directly fuels violence and low IQ
That isn't a very High IQ statement. Facebook is believed to be responsible for violence in Myanmar and other countries.
Don't forget it was also the chosen Livestream platform for the CHCH shooter and was where the "J6 Insurrection" was planned (hence the frantic redirection and sacrifice of the scapegoat known as Parler)
It's a Chinese propaganda platform.
Why are all the comments that point out who runs TikTok downvoted? I want to suggest the same people are active on this platform, which sounds absurd, of course, but also they wouldn't be doing theirjobif they weren't!
Why are all the comments that point out who runs TikTok downvoted?
I downvote them for their potentially misinformative nature, which can lead to delusion and disharmony.
Instagram presumably isn't controlled by an expansionist imperial power in Nepal's backyard.
it's not?
Not the expansionist imperial power in their backyard.
Of course may be tiktok is just more popular
Instagram: 2.35B MAUs, tiktok: 1B MAUs (reported by a Chinese company so... probably like half that)
It probably isn't about grand principles, and comes down to wether they have someone to talk to and accommodate their grievances.
If Meta happened to be more reactive and cooperating than ByteDance, they won't be bothered.
So they should ban instagram too.
A great start!
Yeah sure. Love how my pro-Israel comments get immediately deleted.
I have a feeling tiktok is probably more moderated and enforces stricter content rules than instagram
Respectfully, did you read the article? They had more real problems with TikTok's moderation.
The Nepali government said that they had reached out to TikTok multiple times but the company declined to address their concerns about the content; Narayan Kaji Shrestha, the home minister, suggested a ban on the entire app since scrubbing offending videos individually would be too tricky, the New York Times reported.
It seems to me that the world would be an objectively better place without any of the current generation of social media where you get force-fed content.
Anything with a “feed” of anything other than what you specifically seek out to follow should be constrained at least by persistent warnings like cigarette labels and prevented from being used for advertising (subscription or freemium model).
Advertising should be banned on media that is proven to promote social harm.
MySpace, blogs, newsgroups, IRC were the socially optimal form, even if not the commercially optimal implementation.
Everything else creates ragebait, doomscrolling, self reinforcing insecurity loops, rabbit holing, and other negative social consequences.
If anyone has a counterpoint, I’m actually really interested in other, more positive, models for online social interaction.
I don't really have an opinion on TikTok, but maybe more on the social harmony part. But just an observation as I'm getting older. Restricting your choices in life, can often lead to good outcomes. Like what you eat, drink, who you socialize with, what you watch, who you sleep with, what you read...it's a long list. Choice is great, but can be overwhelming. Not that I'm for minimalism. But I'm guessing Nepal has a religious government...Buddhist? And like many other religions, part of it is restricting the behaviour of the adherents. Which like I mentioned before, is not always bad. If the majority of the country feels this way, why should you push your Western Values on them.
If the majority of the country feels this way, why should you push your Western Values on them.
While social permissiveness is distinctly a phenomenon of the west, I wouldn’t characterize “western values” by that single phase. For most of the history of the American Republic, it was taken for granted the government could regulate morality as an aspect of the public welfare. Regulation ofbusinessesbelieved to be morally harmful, such as strip clubs and pornographic magazines, was deemed within the scope of government power into the mid-20th century, until anti-democratic Supreme Court decisions interpreted constitutional provisions in ways that would have shocked the people who wrote them.
I took the parent to be referring tocontemporarywestern values.
Kind of ...
Would a native Hawaiian, consider themselves free, that they live under Western Laws. They have western freedoms, and democracy, and all the shiny trinkets. But now also lack autonomy, and the real control over their native land. Democracy is kind of useless to a Native Hawaiian, when they'll be outvoted by outsiders every time. I think plenty of them would just want their land back. And Westerners can shove it.
I think "contemporary western values" is just a feel good saying, a pretty wrapper, on economic expansionist policy ... globalism.
And there are plenty of taboo topics in the West too, and it's enforced as well. Celebrities have handlers, FBI goes around planting informants and extorting dissenters for political gain. People get canceled, fired from jobs for saying dissenting opinions. And its done in the name of "social harmony" and greater good here as well.
"Contemporary western values" is not a statement that means everyone in the west has the same values, nor it is an endorsement. It is referring to the generally predominant mainstream consensus.
"Contemporary western values"
Don't confuse Western with US. And yes, for all the protestations to the contrary, they are pretty much made out of the same...
Don't confuse 'broad' with 'meaningless'.
I do believe what they do share is "contemporary Western values". I think both sides would agree with at least some form of the rule of law, freedom of religion, gender equality and support for liberal democracy. Don't you think they would look at most any form of governance pre-1850 and agree it's bad?
I suppose they could console themselves with knowledge that it was never their land. The monarch of the island, and later islands, or local chief had control over it. The very concept of people, or citizens, controlling their land is a concept that was imported.
Indeed, as the classical and Christian notions of freedom, as opposed to the liberal variety, entails self-discipline, self-denial, and the restraint, disciplining, and purification of the appetites through things like fasting and abstinence.
And Justice. True justice is missing from the West.
While social permissiveness is distinctly a phenomenon of the west
I don't like to use the term "Western" too much. It's more clear to say "modern". Example: Japan is not at all Westernized, nor Taiwan, nor South Korea, but they are definitely modern.
-- Edit --
As a counterpoint, I would say that India (in my limited experience on-the-ground) is way more social conservative than Sri Lanka. I was genuinely surprised by the social permissiveness in Sri Lanka. It was a world apart from India. Thus, I would say Sri Lanka is on-the-cusp of being considered modern (in my eyes).
A cynic would see Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea as vassal states of the US and as such "Western".
I think we're talking about culturally Western here, not geopolitically Western. I can't see even a (sane) cynic call these 3 countries culturally Western unless you think being a liberal democracy automatically makes you culturally Western. And Japan is one of the countries said to have "Westernized"!
These countries aren’t fully westernized, but it’s impossible to deny they’ve been heavily influenced by the west. For example, traditional diets are being replaced by unhealthy western diets:https://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/health/article/Pacific-C.... Or in another example, Japanese people are increasingly giving “unique” names to children:https://www.tus.ac.jp/en/mediarelations/archive/20220913_823...
Everybody in the entire world alive today is in the present. Nobody is more modern than anybody else. An Amish farmer is no less of a modern man than a San Francisco web developer. You are crossing your wires, using temporal language to pass subjective judgment against other ways of life. People who don't live live styles similar to your own aren't living in the past, they are in the present with everybody else.
You're essentially calling everybody else backwards. That's judgemental and subjective, not objective. It's a mentality of cultural imperialism, only one step away from calling for people to be "brought up to speed", e.g. forced into your way of life.
Ironically your "tolerate everything" point of view is what destroys cultures.
Japan is not at all Westernized, nor Taiwan, nor South Korea, but they are definitely modern.
Free speech and democracy are Western ideals. I think most people would say that these countries are absolutely westernized.
China, and much of the Arab world, is modern, and largely at odds with Western values. Maybe these are better examples for your comment.
The world is being westernized thanks to the influence of western media and culture. So in that sense, it can seem like “westernization” and “modernity” are the same thing. But the Japanese and Taiwanese also wear western-style business suits, wear jeans, drink coffee, etc. We wouldn’t say that jeans are “modern” rather than being a western influence. Moreover, in other parts of the world you have a resurgent, fundamentalist Islam. In the 1950s, Egyptian women didn’t wear headscarves. Today, most do. That’s also “modern.”
Same-sex marriage also isn’t a good example to gauge whether a culture is socially permissive, because sexual orientation is biologically determined. The scientific fact of that has been critical in acceptance of that in the East:http://olivia.thechiongs.com/2015/03/28/a-purely-practical-v.... It’s more of a social accommodation for a biologically defined group, rather than permissiveness as to individual behavior. That makes it quite distinct from western liberal culture, which I think would say that it doesn’t make a difference whether it’s a choice or not.
Regulation of liquor stores for religious puritanical reasons is still a thing today.
I'd argue only some alcohol control laws exist for religious reasons. Some of those old puritanical laws are still on the books, but stick around today because they are useful for regulatory capture.
I think in this case (liquor stores being closed exclusively on Sunday morning in Texas), you'd need extraordinary evidence to assume that it's not because of the facade of puritanical ideals.
Perhaps that's not the case in Northern New Jersey (which, crazily, also has similar rules) though.
It's still happening through the credit card companies and such... What do you think cancel culture is about?
TikTok is a Chinese company, how is that an instance of Western Values being pushed?
India was the first country to ban TikTok iirc. Their situation was bad though
What was particularly bad about India's situation?
I believe children were killing other children /themselves based on TikTok trends (don’t remember full details)
Does "children are killing each other because of what they saw online" sound more like a real thing or more like a moral panic to you?
India had a military exchange with China and banned TikTok alongside several other Chinese apps in retaliation. Their official justification was "national security concerns". preciousoo is, charitably, just making things up for no reason.
I very much remember reading such an article around the time they banned TT, but maybe said article was fake news, as it's hard to find any mentions of it now.
Well National security isn't wrong considering the huge amount of data being siphoned off to the communist party.
This isn't the 1990s. The majority of kids with access to smartphones are online now.
TikTok hosts "Western" content, doesn't it? China has Douyin (same app, different content) afaik.
TikTok is full of Asian content that it promotes: there is still so much Chinese, Korean, Japanese, even some Indian content on tiktok even in an average westerner's feed. Some of this is straight taken form Douyin (by content creators in those country who want to earn money on tiktok).
Some of this is straight taken form Douyin (by content creators in those country who want to earn money on tiktok).
Having helped a Chinese friend taking down a couple of impersonating/infringing TikTok accounts, I believe the overwhelming majority of the content taken straight from Douyin is unauthorized, by people who think the original creators won’t notice and/or won’t do anything about it. It’s not like you can easily earn a meaningful amount from TikTok’s Creator Fund, so better focus on streaming or getting sponsorship deals for the Douyin market which is a lot larger and culturally aligned.
A lot of the cultural movement on TikTok is Korean driven, or multi cultural, like the popularity of that Vietnamese See Tinh in Korea via a TikTok remix. TikTok is incredibly Asian, and gets lots of air from non-PRC Chinese communities (like mainland Douyin content on TikTok with traditional Chinese comments).
Is most of the content Chinese?
The content is ~~designed~~curated to destroy the minds of the consumers. There have been quite a few articles showing how content differs between the West and China.
The western value being a liberal media market, not the contents of the consumed media itself.
If there’s a majority who support this then they should just self-regulate and go on their merry way.
This is always about imposing one’s beliefs on others. “Social harmony” is intentionally vague. Everyone will imagine their own meaning of that and be inclined to think, “yeah that’s something I’m on board with.”
That’s just libertarianism applied to social issues, and has the same problems as libertarianism as applied to economic issues. People need social support to help them understand what decisions are good, and make good decisions.
How many overweight and obese doctors and nurses are there? They’re only slightly healthier than the general population:https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/healthcare/why-don-t-doctor.... Smart, educated Americans can’t force themselves to limit their eating. But in say east Asia, extensive social shaming over weight helps people stay slim.
Humans didn’t evolve to be libertarian sovereign individuals. They’re members of communities and their welfare can be increased by allowing community reinforcement of good behaviors and decisions.
I dunno… I apply this sentiment to Christian Republicanism and it concerns me greatly. They also have a lot to say about what disrupts social harmony. And of course, it’s what they’ve decided “social harmony” means to them.
What you’re calling “Christian republicanism” is just how the entire US was until the liberal social revolution of the mid-20th century.
It’s true. And there will always be resistance to sociocultural evolution and those who want to freeze the status quo.
From an “evolutionary” standpoint mid-20th century western liberalism seems to be a dead end, as its adherents are literally dying off and being replaced by people from more robust cultures.
it’s what they’ve decided “social harmony” means to them".
I think both sides, the secular and the religious are prone to make stuff up, as it suits their needs.
I was watching the Matt Dillahunty Vs Andrew debate. And Andrew gives a very rational counter to the current secular world view.
I will join you in being downvoted. Social shaming is necessary. We need to hold each other accountable or future generations wont stand a chance
Also, shame is a language everyone understands. All ages
You can certainly try to shame people into adopting your rigid ideology, religion, and culture. People have tried time and time again. That doesn’t make it right.
Nuh, dont want to use shame for that. Only for things like stopping 5 year olds from showing their private parts in class. Cant even do that anymore
You're generalising that small sample too much. Even their findings suggest healthcare professionals exercise more, and smoke less.
As for "living in a community", I would trust more the kindness and humanity in general, than the same of a select group.
By this I mean, alignment of good behaviour comes naturally from one's experience. And I guess I agree with you to an extent. But, I take the general sentiment of your post as advertising collectivism. Which, from personal experience, has a tendency to be non-inclusive. The worst of it comes in subtle ways. Causing considerable harm to anyone that steers just a little bit from the norm. But, that in no way is a harm to others.
But, I take the general sentiment of your post as advertising collectivism. Which, from personal experience, has a tendency to be non-inclusive. The worst of it comes in subtle ways. Causing considerable harm to anyone that steers just a little bit from the norm.
Yes, I do think western society has become too individualist, to its detriment. I also agree that collectivist societies can be non-inclusive. But the flip side of that is that it can be better for the people in the middle 80%. I think your average person, especially your average young person, needs more social guidance than contemporary, highly individualist western society is willing to provide. It also makes it difficult to achieve anything that requires solidarity and social coordination.
But in say east Asia, extensive social shaming over weight helps people stay slim.
Does it help people stay slim with fewer overall negative effects then if people didn't stay slim? Eating disorders and mental health do come into the equation. There's many ways to keep people slim that doesn't result in a healthier society.
“Western Values” is one of those words populist rhetoric just loves to conjugate.
Government enforcing “social harmony” by limiting access to entertainment and cultural outlets is just another form of political censorship.
There's plenty of choice of media in the West. But its like having 50 different flavours of Chips in a supper market. It's mostly the same few political ideas peddled with different wrapper. And what you think free, is actually pretty controlled and contrived.
Is that so? I find a lot of value in certain Fediverse instances. They don't seem contrived, just humane (I know some aren't, I don't intend to go to those).
My comment was about the mainstream media, with actual public reach and influence. I don't even know what Fediverse is and I'm a computer guy. Imagine the general population.
I don't know what's going on with Nepal, but I noticed a sudden influx of specifically Nepalese migrant workers in East Europe. It's odd given how small that country is, and also because the area they visit for work is not that great itself. How bad can it be in Nepal then?!?
Nepal is not a rich country. Income per capita is just over $1000 per year.
Wow you discovered, there are poor people in the world. Also, Nepal has a population of 30 million, so not so small.
Restricting your choices in life, can often lead to good outcomes.
The article isn't about somebody restricting their own choices in life, but about the Nepalese government restrictingothers'choices in life, which is an entirely different thing.
Its a different thing, but not entirely. Having your choices restricted, by a government of all things, is something most Western people especially Americans find obscene. But it can also lead to good outcomes at considerable less effort.
In a sense every government does this. It restricts the ability of its citizens to violently harm each other for example. Or of companies to poison the land. Or even of drivers to not wear seat belts, something which doesn't even harm others. All those are relatively uncontroversial restrictions on personal liberty.
Nepal is currently ruled by a coalition of secular communist or socialist parties
Perhaps ironically (given the somewhat corrupted attribution to Alexandra Kollontai of the flippant remark that "the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as simple as getting a glass of water"), Stalin reeled in some of the sexual excesses that characterized the early Soviet regime, because, as it turns out, sex is indeed dangerous and deserving of honor and respect, and sexual degeneracy is a sure way to propel a society toward self-destruction and chaos.
I care about the people in Nepal who don't want their government to restrict their access to the web. The people who want to be restricted in that way can exercise self-control.
It’s like smoking in public places. People who don’t want smoking in their faces can find non-smoker cafes! Once such cafe pops up, some people will complain that it’s messing with human rights to smoke.
But I'm guessing Nepal has a religious government...Buddhist?
Religion in Nepal (2021)
Hinduism (81.19%)
Buddhism (8.21%)
Islam (5.09%)You’re thinking of Bhutan. Nepal has literal Maoists in government.
I think the key is to start with far less restriction then you think you need, and refine your approach over time until you hit upon a happy medium, that allows novel experiences while limiting irrecoverable consequences.
There is a religious angle to it . it comes from christian conversion , spread more rapid after earthquake and in the name of aid . Let's not forget the divisive angles that get exploited in the name of Caste System of Hinduism but Buddhists in far flung places are being converted as well as well as people of older,native cultures .
Tiktok made it easy to peddle a victimhood and prosecution complex to the masses . Deplore the current religion , festivals , cultural aspects etc . Send direct hate against a certain group , caste of people who are supposed to be more privileged and outsider.
As per western values , things are mostly fine . LGBTQ is protected . Nepal ranks better in all Democratic and Human rights aspects . Freedom of press and so on .Leads in women rights and labors . Gay marriage is allowed but has fell short on bureaucratic paperworks related to it .
Their current Prime Minister is from the Communist Party.
It used to be a Hindu monarchy but one of the princes did a murder suicide with the whole royal family around 2002 or so.
Nepal is mostly Hindu. In fact it was the last Hindu kingdom in the world.
My conspiracy is that the US is worried about TikTok because it’s actively been pushing younger folk to the left. It has been a huge awakening to folks to learn and hear about topics that their education system has failed them on.
I’ve noticed a general awareness increase of western atrocities of the past century amongst folk.
Note this is just my feelings on this and I don’t have the data to back this up (tldr source: I made it up)
Personal anecdote but my girlfriend has been pushed to the right due to her TikTok habits. At least what is considered the "right" in the US.
It may be to China's benefit to encourage moves inbothdirections.
Can we please stop pretending China, as a national entity, is doing anything at all with TikTok USA?
It is absurd and not worthy of a board like this. I'm sure many you know people that work at TikTok? This just isn't happening, at all.
The sum total of what China is doing with TikTok is restricting what people in China see, which is what China is worried about.
What justifies the strength of your confidence?
From game-theoretic point of view: is China a geopolitical adversary? Yes. Does China control TikTok? Yes. Is TikTok a tool to tweak how citizens of your adversary think? Yes. Is that powerful? Yes.
So the facts our - our adversary is in control of a tool which can influence how we think, which is valuable to them. We don't know for sure that they use the tool but... why wouldn't they?
Does China control TikTok? Yes.
No. Not in any meaningful way. The data and employees are in the US. Every intelligence agency in the US is watching those buildings and reading their data. The US has no laws against inspecting every single packet sent internationally, the employees are subject to US laws, and tiktok has distanced itself from china.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/tech/tiktok-leaving-hong-kong...
They are not meaningfully different from any other US company. It's not like they don't give data to china:
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-gave-user-data-to-hon...
Tiktok is just the new banana republic, the new gulf war, etc. The US government is aggressively anti-competitive with non-domestic corporate threats to its largest industries. It has always attempted to destroy competition and maximize domestic control of furs, then produce, then oil, and now social media and advertising.
There are at least several credible reports from several Bytedance employees who claim that the CCP has a much stronger influence on TikTok than is publicly stated; as recently as a year ago.
Even if those claims are not true for whatever reason—why is the claim that they want to polarize the west through TikTok hard to believe? We're currently in a zero sum ideological war with them in which they have meddled in at least two of our last elections, they have spyware in internationally exported Huawei equipment, etc.
Their recommendation algorithm is a black box, and if they weren't doing anything heinous they could possibly provide some audit trail for US regulators or US employees to inspect. As far as I know they haven't provided much here to improve public perception or lower their risk of getting shut down.
We're currently in a zero sum ideological war with them in which they have meddled in at least two of our last elections
Oh come on stop with this.
People need to chill.
Without taking sides on the content, your response to him sounds like what one would say after they ran out of actual argument.
Do you even read your own links?
Google answered 44 police requests for user data. That's not the same as the TikTik firehose.
What justifies the strength of your confidence?
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.
Can we please stop pretending China, as a national entity, is doing anything at all with TikTok USA?
You are arguing against a claim that the parent did not make.
It it true that political polarization of rival nations is advantageous. It is also true that filter bubbles do thisnaturally. There'sno needfor the CCP to tell TikTok to politically polarize the content they show to people.
There's no need for the CCP to tell TikTok to politically polarize the content they show to people.
That'sexactlywhat the parent was saying.
China's benefit to encourage moves in both directions
It's disingenuous to suggest that people are talking about tiktok because they think it's just an inherently divisive app. If people want to ban apps that polarize people, twitter would certainly be higher on the list.
We could also say:
"It is to the US's benefit to encourage the Chinese people to learn about democracy."
This is true. And it is a reason that the CCP has banned western social media. These facts do not require any specific action by US authorities to pressure US-based social media companies to carry it out, because those platforms are full of pro-democracy content already.
It's disingenuous to suggest that people are talking about tiktok because they think it's just an inherently divisive app.
I didn't. There are many reasons people are talking about TikTok, depending on who it is and what they care about. There's not even a single US government view on the matter.
Analysis: There is now some public evidence that China viewed TikTok datahttps://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index....
"US officials have long insisted the Chinese government may be able to view the personal information of TikTok users — but that claim was purely speculative. Until now.
"In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes."
It is absurd and not worthy of a board like this. I'm sure many you know people that work at TikTok? This just isn't happening, at all.
Honestly, I feel like you're right.
But at the same time, it'd be a genius strategy to destabilize a country. We'd be getting beat at our own game we pull on other countries.
It's pretty telling how effective China thinks it is, given their restrictions on Douyin ("internal Chinese TikTok"). iirc kids can only use it for <1 hour / day.
That's absolutely evidence of the opposite. If china thought they could use the app's algorithms to promote national unity, they would do that. They have their own exclusive app.
China thinks its effective at wasting time. Children also aren't allowed to play video games monday through friday, and are limited to 1 hour per day otherwise- a law which existed before douyin limits:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58384457
The country that is obsessive about its children and their productivity, the country famous for kids competing in chess and abacus and piano... that country is just banning douyin because it's a time waster.
I think that is kind of orthogonal to the point
I don't think encouraging national unity and encouraging strife and polarization are the same thing at all, and in fact I would bet the latter is easier at scale
Maybe they're restricting Douyin because it's a timewaster, maybe because it much more naturally encourages discord than unity. Maybe both. Probably both, frankly.
They also don't peddle fentanyl within their borders.
Honestly, that’s pretty great. We have limitations on online casinos, because of social harm. How is TikTok and vidya different? They do objectively harm prodouctivity and implement addictive dark patterns, loot boxes, consuming over producing. Sometimes limiting personal freedom actually can be for one’s own good.
Division is everything. It is immeasurably more difficult to control and manipulate a unified mass than it is to manipulate multiple different fragments of said mass. This applies to pretty much everything from flat-pack furniture to society.
It is psy-op 101 to push people to any extreme you can; left, right, up, down, doesn’t matter as long as they’re mad as fuck.
Yes, until civil war.
I dunno if TikTok should be banned, but Nepal motives are truthful.
Let's be real. It's not TikTok, it's social media. Twitter had a reputation as a cesspool where people yell increasingy extreme political opinions at each other long before TikTok was popular. Gamergate was before TikTok.
TikTok is just the most refined version of the same rotten medium.
Interesting, I'm curious but what opinions have changed?
She is now more of the opinion that anti-Asian hate is primarily perpetuated by African Americans, which seems to be a fringe opinion in left-leaning circles. I don't know if it's true overall: she says it's due to seeing a lot of videos of Asians being harassed by African Americans and almost none of harassment by any other group.
I guess the interesting thing with this one is, while this statistically is __factual__ (at least from my readings of whats going on), we also know statistics do a horrible job in actually showing causation. And an even worse job when it comes to explaining sociological issues because it's always one/few dimensional.
Scientific racism wasn't just absurdist rhetoric. It was, on the surface level, logical (albeit, cherry picked data) to push a specific view point that "felt logical."
So yeah I think you're right about that being an interesting pushed-to-the-right view point. And unfortunately due to it sounding `logical`, it's very hard to convince people to look a bit deeper into it and compare it to historical repeats of that rhetoric.
I will believe your rhetoric if you can give an example where the same thing can be said for leftist thought. Where "logical" thought trumps confounds as you say, but the confounds are what hides the truth.
This is probably indicative that videos featuring someone who is black being racist drives more views and engagement than a white person. So it's the ones the algo shows to her. This is why algos are dangerous.
Learning facts cherry-picked by the algorithm to promote engagement is not the same as being informed.
Someone who acquires more factual knowledge via TikTok would be more informed than one who did not, all other things being equal, no?
No.
Consider this simple example of cherry picking data (with made up numbers):
10 000 people every year suffer severe side-effects from vaccines.
If that's all you know it's logical to conclude that vaccines are dangerous.
But what they dont tell you is that vaccines are distributed to hundreds of millions and save the life of millions.
You need the full picture to be more informed.
Coming across the "10k severe side effects" data point should trigger the critical thinking in one to find out the total amount of vaccines in order to form an opinion. I would say it is still better to learn that fact than not.
You're expecting too much from a generation that grown up being bombarbed by narratives and distractions. Most don't have critical thinking and the required attention span in the first place.
That's what should be fixed then. Teach critical thinking and then you don't have to implement regressive policies like limiting or banning $perceived_bad_thing.
Not necessarily. A carefully selected set of facts can tell a very inaccurate story.
They are still moreinformedthough. One important thing they could be more informed about for example is how slippery and illusory colloquial English language is, and the effects that has on the "reality" one experiences.
No, they aremisinformed and may believe entirely incorrect things as a result.
An example of this is Holocaust denial. A carefully selected set of facts in isolation can make someone believe the Holocaust didn't happen; this does not make "the Holocaust never happened" an informed belief.
No information is better than bad information IMHO.
Is factual knowledge bad,necessarily? Simplistically, it can certainly be bad sometimes/often, but is there ever a time it necessarily isn't also due to to other poorly calibrated variables that have been overlooked, like educational and cultural norms?
To be honest, everything we learn is cherry picked by someone.
You can either exert editorial control to push content that fits your rhetorical needs at the cost of engagement (because by definition you're not pushing the most engaging content) or you can push the content that is the most naturally engaging. You can't have both.
And boy do I have bad news about the places you would typically turn to be more informed about current events -- the news -- and how what you see is also designed to promote engagement.
Tiktok is also a vector for propaganda. There is not guarantee that all content there is true.
Sure it is true like other SNSs, like Musk's X, are so too. Some particular people call it the "Free Speech".
Like Rashida Tlaib, or Ilhan Omar to further your example
Although I'm not very interested in the US politics, it looks to me that these 2 are politicians rather than platforms. Could you find other trees where your propaganda seems more plausible in context, please.
True content can also be propaganda for instance via the glorification of a particular lifestyle and its second order effects (implicitly elevated social capital).
For what it’s worth, propagandaness (is that a word?) of content has very little to do with how factual it is.
Since we are just sharing how we feel, anecdotally, my observation with my teen and her friends is that TikTok makes people think they are informed while actually misinforming them.
This is very much not limited to social and political issues but can be about physical matters like home repairs, how cars work / how to fix them, etc.
the amount of misinformation is insanely high on TT. From “news” to even specific trades (ie, construction, cooking, DIY).
I have had to carefully engage with only topics I am interested in else I get flooded with bs vids (ie, thots, “alternative medicine”, far right content, joe rogan, …)
For what it’s worth though, the content moderation is slightly better than other platforms. When I report dangerous videos (literally a person tailgating/road raging), the videos get removed pretty fast.
Not a half bad “status report” system either.
Anecdotally, almost every teen I've ever known has thought they were well informed while actually misinformed. For every one that could fix a car, there'd be five who knew how to change oil and ten who maybe knew how to add more oil. All of them (us) thought they were well informed. I don't think TikTok is behind this.
It has been a huge awakening to folks to learn and hear about topics that their education system has failed them on.
Fully agree - Tiktok university is a great place to graduate from.
If by US you mean republicans, then yea, but they say that about every big tech company.
Tiktok and social media in general are polarising by nature. If I am aligned to any side, I'll get more videos of it and rage-inducing engagement magnet videos against other side. So you'll see right side being moving right and left being more left. So a right winger's feed will be full of Fox and Peterson. A central view doesn't get interacted with a lot so will be pushed out.
I'm not against a TikTok ban. It is essentially a slot machine. And it is explicitly designed like one.
My problem with this is that it is this design which should be illegal, not one app or another. Instagram and Facebook feeds aren't any better than TikTok.
The nice thing about Tiktok is we can totally trust the CCP to show brainwashing content to the children of foreign adversaries.
China banned Instagram et. al. because they're not stupid. They don't want foreign influence on their children.
US politicians are both corrupt and stupid.
Tiktok has been scrutinised so much that if they were showing "brainwashing content" to Western children we would've heard about it already.
We have heard about it.... you're just not getting your news from sources that mention it. There are multiple things they allow on American TikTok that they do not allow on Chinese TikTok. They allow these things because they know it helps with social decay in America.
I agree with you in principle but there's no difference between that and what's allowed in other American platforms. Degenerate content is everywhere in all platforms.
For tiktok to be special in this regard they would have to allow something different that went way beyond what American platforms allow, and that's thus far not happening.
Why do you think Tiktok is brainwashing children (why is it always children?) and Facebook, Twitter, etc aren't?
Why do you think Tiktok is the only vector for foreign influence, when it's been documented many, many times that domestic social media sites are rife with foreign misinformation?
What do you think Tiktok will do? Destabilize the US? Our politicians are already doing that. No need to worry about a boogyman from the other side of the globe. It's just a distraction.
On the long term, anthropological warfare is a clever idea... but it's probably a little too optimistic to think you can implement with just one app. The CCP/tiktok hysteria feels overblown to me - public education is what constituents should feel concerned about.
Have you seen the CCP propaganda on Tik Tok though? It’s quite wholesome. Like there’s one where this guy randomly helps poor kids and old people he encounters. It paints Chinese society in a positive light, probably making the standard of living seem better than it is. But in a way it’s not unlike what many Americans wish their kids were watching.
Show the one where the guy gets caught up in an obscure non-state approved religion, falls down on his luck, but the government steps in & sends him to a retreat to get better. Then he enjoys the rest of his life manufacturing goods in a factory as part of his rehabilitation.
This, china has access to "weights" that push content to people and pushes some content to background.
Do you mind explaining what you mean by "slot machine" in this context? I'm not a TikTok user, but I'm sometimes on Facebook and other "feed" sites, and I don't fully grasp how gambling comes in to play.
The scientific term is Variable Rate Operant Conditioning. It's where you press a button, have some chance of a reward (winning money or seeing a video you like) and can immediately play again. It's the same mechanism.
From rats on up to humans this is known to be an extremely addictive behavioral pattern. Social media like Tik Tok can perfectly balance how much reward to give you to keep you engaged while filing the non-reward results with ads and other messaging they want you thinking about.
I mean even HN employs that pattern (though not necessarily intentionally). Whenever you refresh the page you have a random reward in the form of gain/loss of karma or comment replies.
Should we ban HN?
It's pretty disingenuous to act like the two are similar. I also never weighed in on whether governments should ban such things or not.
it's not about gambling. The dopamine rewards you get from the two are similar.
The dopamine rewards you get from the two are similar.
Look up skinner box
No one said anything about gambling.
What does ‘better’ mean here? Eg TikTok is better at personalising recommendations where facebook tends to give more generic content, so TikTok may better give people what they want but also be more addictive/have a stronger filter-bubble effect.
There's one TikTok for me, and one TikTok for thee. The Chinese version promotes educational videos, and has a strict daily time limit. The "export" version is literally designed to make you retarded. Agree that other apps aren't much better though (especially now that they've redesigned themselves after TikTok's model...)
Why banning it then? Don’t US/EU have power to force educational content and time limits? This “oh, all feeds are bad, we should think of maybe banning them all” will lead nowhere 100% of times. Feels like China absolutely doesn’t even have to do anything bad because the US don’t know what they want.
why banning it then?
Because it’s the most logical thing to do and not doing so is a national security nightmare
The "export" version is literally designed to make you retarded.
Then why does it have so much philosophy content that can reveal the naivete of the many comments like this one reads about "TikTok"?
There is a setting to enable the STEM feed in the export version. Try not to be an ableist.
Better in terms of the grounds Tiktok was banned
I’m regularly visiting an old-school “scroll images and gifs and post comments” site which moderates a large tree of tags so one can block them and create a highly personalized filter-bubble without an expensive algorithm. Should this be illegal too?
I’m not againstTikTokban because it’s a degenerateformat and content. (Main reasons are short videos, no video controls, autorepeat) It’s ADHD plus repetitive voices in your head on top of the usual internet asylum. But what’s the exact criteria for any feed?
- ones you cannot control (manipulation and propaganda)
- addictiveness and personalization (attention grabbing)
- bigcorps only (monetary interest converges to p.1)
?
I’d trust an American publicly traded company over an arm of the CCP any day.
I always thought HN is a slot machine. TikTok is HN on steroids. I uninstalled it years ago from all my devices. I stick to the drug that I think I can control.
Meanwhile nearly half of Nepal's population is on Facebook, something I'm sure happened completely organically and there's no chance Facebook influenced this decision at all.
Facebook is a threat, but not as much as TikTok.
For one, FB data is with the US. While tiktok data is with China.
In the US, there is still some regulatory framework to punish privacy missteps, ask companies to change stuff, etc.
Try doing that in China. Also, China is an existential threat to Nepal.
Facebook is a threat, but not as much as TikTok.
Cambridge Analityca.
Is your point that it happened, there was widespread outrage, penalties and then changes made to prevent it from happening again?
Yes. There were changes. They changed their name.
Yeah. The tendency of Americans to believe their government does not utilize a great amount of unethical power and control while it needs that and not be noticed or can get away with it is unbelievable.
Cambridge Analityca.
I'm not sure you are supporting your case as well as you think your are.
For one, FB data is with the US.
Hope US will remain a democratic country then. And not move into a technofeudalistic autocracy.
Is choosing 1 of 2 parties reaaaally democratic?
More than china , india is an existential threat . Historically gone to war with the british east india . Although it had gone to war with Tibet , tibet at the time was backed by China .
For one, FB data is with the US. While tiktok data is with China.
Not convinced those are necessarily positives.
You had no number 'for two'....
Arguendo, assume Facebook lobbied for it. If only one market player doesn't follow an industry standard on public interest (consensus which prevents industry regulation), of course other players should lobby to get the player out.
I could believe Facebook is a good player in terms of “public interest” or “social harmony” or whatnot if they weren’t credibly accused of enabling a genocide in Myanmar, which is a larger country in roughly the same region as Nepal.
The accusations are only credible if you limit yourself to only looking at stuff on Facebook. If you see posts on Facebook calling for Muslims to be killed and then sometime later you see posts on Facebook of Muslims actually getting killed, you might be forgiven for thinking that the former posts caused the latter posts, and if only Facebook had taken down the former, the latter would never have happened.
But it turns out the posts calling for Muslims to be killed were made by the military's propaganda wing and the killings were perpetrated by the military's armed wing. So the causal chain actually flows through the military, and Facebook was merely a place where you could observe it happen without being there in person.
Blaming Facebook for the genocide seems to be an instance of activists focusing on something they can see and try to influence (Facebook moderation policy) over something they cannot (guys with guns shooting people).
Regardlessly of whether you believe Facebook played a role in amplifying genocidal messages, the fact that Facebook allowed the very clear calls for violence on their platform for years is orders of magnitude more serious than sexually suggestive content (I assume that’s what “indecent material” refers to here) or “kids doing dumb things” which I hear every so often about TikTok.
Is the US encroaching on Nepal's border?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60288007
If China can ban foreign apps for "social harmony", then Nepal can do so too.
After reading the article, all that can eventually be concluded is that China is establishing a tighter control over the hitherto very loose border, and that exactly where the border is remains unclear even to people living close to it.
But the narrative structure of the article - of a leaked government document (!) about Chinese buildings on Nepalese sure of the border (!!) which China denies (!!!) and Nepal sends military to investigate (!!!!) only to find there aren't any (oh) - is an insult to journalism. Maybe I'm naive but I feel BBC used to have higher standards.
As for Nepal banning TikTok, good for them!
Did you read the same article?
The report also concluded that China had been limiting grazing by Nepalese farmers.
In the same area, it found China was building a fence around a border pillar, and attempting to construct a canal and a road on the Nepalese side of the border.
Buildings were on Chinese side true, but Chinese roads and canals and fences were on the Nepalese side.
where the border is remains unclear even to people living close to it.
Thats almost every border in this region.
Limiting grazing by Nepalese farmers... on the Chinese side of the border? Most probably, why else would the article leave that unclear. Also this would be an expected result of border traffic control.
'Attempting' to construct a canal and a road? If this is the explosive payload of the article, why not lean more into the detail?
I get most of my TikTok content via Facebook. I didn’t even really try it before Facebook started putting TikTok videos in my feed. I’m not clear if it’s a Facebook platform that is sucking in TikTok videos or if it’s some kind of agreement with them?
It's FB pages reposting the content
The U.S. government hasn’t loaned Nepal tons of money to build an airport using Chinese companies and labor that will likely never be used and will almost certainly not pay itself off and was significantly overpriced to begin with putting Nepal in severe debt to China and is currently under investigation by the anti-corruption unit of the Nepalese government, as one simple example of why they might be more suspicious of a Chinese company rather than an American one.
On top of the decades of money and labor given by the US government,
The U.S. government hasn’t loaned Nepal tons of money to build an airport using Chinese companies and labor
The US government has done that.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautam_Buddha_Airport
Nepal has banned all pornographic sites in 2018.
All we had back in my day was our imagination anywars
You didn't have a modem? Even in the 80s there was an animation format called GL (not at all related to OpenGL) for pornographic animations. Which were pretty repetitive and basic but they served the purpose.
Also pay TV channels at the time were full of porn and pretty easy to crack for a horny tech teenager.
And if "your day" was even further back the 60s and 70s were pretty wild with actual in person sex (tbh I wish society hadn't reverted back to prudeness from that but luckily there's plenty of communities that aren't)
Ps banning porn is pretty severe IMO.
“reverting back to prudeness” is a matter of perspective. We’re a species that has domesticated itself for its collective good. Part of making progress towards that was changing our approach to mating from a free-for-all to something strictly regulated by culture. It could be said that we’ve been reverting back to our pre-civilisation free-for-all for the last 60+ years.
I don't really care about our species. More about self discovery without artificial social taboos.
Mating was so regulated by culture (mostly religion though) due to the obvious link to the procreation thing, but these days those are no longer coupled so the taboos aren't necessary.
artificial social taboos
Like consent?
The "I do" in the marriage isn't a romantic gesture, it's a legally binding contract for consent to sexual relations.
Society has accidentally rediscovered that marriage is the only way to have sex that isn't technically rape.
Society has accidentally rediscovered that marriage is the only way to have sex that isn't technically rape.
Ehhh no.
Simply asking for an explicit yes is fine here too by law. Of course taking into account that this can be revoked at any time and must be obeyed.
And even within marriage it's not legal to force someone to have sex. At least here in Spain it's much more about spending ones life together, shared ownership and parenthood etc than about sex. Of course you wouldn't marry someone you don't ever want to have sex with but it doesn't mean you are obliged to do so. Marital rape is unfortunately a thing.
On the other hand, open marriages are also a thing. I often engage in sexual practices with married people with the spouse even present (and often active with someone else). It's not rape :). Just harmless and fully consensual fun.
Consent is actually a huge thing in the more promiscuous communities these days. Often people even make contracts (though this is more common in BDSM than in the Swinger community)
I asked her verbally and pretty sure I didn't hear her revoking anything during the fifth stroke
Ehh, good luck with that in a court of law.
I don't really care about our species.
People would be smart to ignore you then.
That's fine, our species is still growing by the billions so enough people are taking care of that.
They don't seem to take care of leaving the planet habitable though, which is IMO a much more urgent problem than any perceived social decline.
It sounds like you need to discover something bigger than yourself.
I like discovering other communities but not our species as a whole. In fact it makes me pretty depressed reading the news lol. We're not very good at looking after ourselves or the planet.
Prudeness? You have no idea what you're talking about. This accusation of "prudeness" is precisely the kind of insult predatory men hurled at women during the '60s and '70s to try to coerce women into bed. "What are you, a prude? A square?" It is actually libertinism that has bred the widespread sexual dysfunction that we are seeing.
Pornography is utterly deranging, and in such an insidious way, the poor schmuck doesn't even know how damaged and warped he's become, how enslaved. Its production and distribution at the very least should be criminalized, and taboos that shame and stigmatize its consumption should be revived and promoted in the media. Alas, corrupt governments back pornography because of its utility in controlling the populace.
Prudeness? You have no idea what you're talking about. This accusation of "prudeness" is precisely the kind of insult predatory men hurled at women during the '60s and '70s to try to coerce women into bed. "What are you, a prude? A square?" It is actually libertinism that has bred the widespread sexual dysfunction that we are seeing.
We can have a consent cultureandhealthy and open sex lives. For example swinger clubs and polyamory are becoming more common again despite explicit consent being totally normal these days. But the other side society of seems to frown more and more on such things.
And I'm not accusing an individual of anything. Just describing society as a whole. In particular people are becoming more and more concerned about what other adults consensually do in the bedroom again. Even though it's none of their business. Like transphobia, homophobia, porn.. 10 years ago people wouldn't pass judgment on those things.
Alas, corrupt governments back pornography because of its utility in controlling the populace.
So instead of this you advocate... controlling the populace using legal, media and social pressure?:
Its production and distribution at the very least should be criminalized, and taboos that shame and stigmatize its consumption should be revived and promoted in the media.
I'm sure you know that telling people what to think isn't going to work.
Maybe not only prudeness, but the rise of STDs like AIDS.
I doubt it. Condoms are a pretty great solution for that.
Relevant comedy skit. NSFW and shared history (but not explicit/porn):
Free speech is just the best thing ever.
Always defend free speech!
(read: all the popular ones at the time)
Recurring fines in the hundreds of millions is much more better than an absolute ban.
The regulators get millions out of repeat offenders until TikTok caves and complies with the demands of the regulators.
Win for regulators, Win for users and Tiktok can still operate as long as it follows the rules.
Imagine if a regional power with a territorial dispute with your country had opportunity to individually and untraceably curate exactly what your next generation watches for hours each day on their phone.
Nepal can’t necessarily know if that’s happening with but they have to consider that it might be. If that’s a concern in allowing TikTok, fines wouldn’t address the problem very well since money isn’t hard to come by if it buys enough value.
So the US for almost all of the world. YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO, Twitter, Apple, Spotify,...
Every time this happens it's always "but it's bad when this multinational corporation I associate with China does it." Like come on, if you're worried about the Chinese government exerting authority over companies that operate in China TikTok has got to be the bottom barrel of your list.
The CCP has got to be so proud that their relative secrecy has got the rest of the world quaking in their boots about how much power they wield and giving them nigh omnipotence of any person or entity that comes in contact with them.
Phew, luckily the US doesn’t have a corporate monoculture controlling most of these media empires and pushing their own set of values. Oh wait… crap
Black Rock ESG?
US coastal elite culture I'm guessing
Look up a map of Asia and you will understand why Nepal is more paranoid about China than the US.
Exactly, it’s just western jingoism to justify more war.
Win for regulators, Win for users
That's assuming that citizens want censorship. Most of the time citizens do not have the same goals as the state's censors.
It's a win for them because they're better off not being users in the first place
That is something for them to decide, not the state.
Personal interests extend far beyond personal desires. We cannot impose Western interpretations of "win" via libertarian interpretations on Nepalese society and culture.
It doesn’t necessarily assume citizens want censorship. They might not want it, but they might be better with it.
Ban the CCP
Tiktok is funded by the CCP. Fines are no issue at that point.
?? Fines are not the price a government is willing to sell something for. They are a mechanism of enforcement when it's otherwise not realistic or possible to enforce rules. You levy fines when you can't just arrest people or similar, not because you're okay with the behavior.
All you're saying is that we should tax things we don't like, which... duh. We do that- see alcohol, cigarettes, etc.Actual taxeswork way better than fines, since they take into account the revenue involved instead of just being an arbitrary number. But an obvious consequence is that you aren't actually banning the thing, and in the case of a digital product like tiktok you're not even discouraging it.
If you levied a recurring fine on tiktok in return for allowing them to do what they want, you're activelyencouragingthem to collect and sell as much data as they possibly can, to recoup the fixed cost of doing business with you.
“flow of indecent materials“
Lmao. I only started using TT again recently. The amount of “thot” content is insane. Only after carefully engaging with interesting topics did its frequency decrease (yes, decrease. Not eliminates).
TT algo tries to sneak in a new thot creator every now and then.
What's thot?
An ancient Egyptian deity, and (unrelatedly) a misogynistic term to describe a woman who has the audacity to be sexually active
No, it's a woman who uses her sexual allure to attract and extract money from lonely boys.
They're not wrong that it is rooted in misogyny, considering that you don't really use 'whore' or 'ho' with positive connotations. Not to mention that terms like thot are more likely to be found in incel communities these days, which is hardly a glowing endorsement of the term being used with good intentions.
As someone else said, at least 'thirst trap' doesn't lay it squarely at the feet of women, as if men aren't capable of doing the same.
I would ask, why shouldn't it be laid squarely at the feet of these women? This is something that a particular type of woman does to vulnerable men.
These men ought to have our sympathy rather than being labelled as "incels", a term which so easily lets us avoid viewing them as victims. Similarly, these women ought to be held responsible for their actions.
People seem to be more concerned with the perceived misogyny of, at worst, a mildly offensive word than the systematic exploitation of vulnerable members of society.
Because male thirst traps also exist. Maybe even worse for women as they are more likely to be victims of online romance scams.
People promoting their onlyfans content with suggestive videos.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thotshould give you some insight.
Thirst trap is a better term imo. Both gender neutral and describes the nature of the content better.
I only got thristtraps in the first week or so, after that I just get memes. Maybe you shouldn't hit like on all of them (;
I find that TikTok's algorithm is actually excellent at pigeonholing you depending on what you pay attention to. The only "thot" content I ever see is when TikTok decides to push (geographically localized) live chats on me (which is 50% thirst traps and 50% neo-nazi where I am, apparently). But I have consistently swiped away anything I don't want to see more of as soon as I can.
If anything, the problem for me now is that TikTok is so narrow in what it shows me that I barely ever get anything new (thematically) and when I do TikTok instantly tries to make it its entire focus if I dare engage with it at all.
See I totally get your technique and report on this and thank you. I've done a write up on some free/pay dating apps and the tactics are definitely there. Like this is a community that knows what's up and still kinda skates around it.
They should ban alcohol too then
We muslims do (for muslims not non-muslims), and also advocate for a ban on such addictive and life-wasting technologies like TikTok in our countries. And guess what, it worked for millenia and still works to a great extent, even when there is no longer a ban in law in many so-called 'muslim' countries. Unlike the American Prohibition which didn't.
In Turkey there is no ban on drinking. They eat halal meat but still drink freely. And do you have any examples of Muslim countries that advocate ban on addictive life wasting tech? It is such a broad term.
Unless you come from a very religious background, many Turks don't care if their meat is halal or not.
Kinda. Note that in most cases even the least religious would not eat pork, which is strictly prohibited. For others, definition of Halal is a bit vague, e.g. Kosher is considered halal by most.
I live in Turkey actually! It is probably the most heavily and forcefully secularized Muslim country in the world. (Ataturk killed ~half a million people for his secular reforms, Islamic alphabet got abolished, European dress code literally became law, religious clothing got prohibited, religion schools closed, scholars executed & prosecuted and Islamic prayer call Adhan was banned for straight 18 years).
It's free to drink here, but drugs are banned. Only a very small minority drinks alcohol in my region, I have no relatives (including me) I know of that ever drank. Drugs/weed/marijuana are horrible things no one ever wants in my entire social circle, I don't think I have ever seen a user of such substances in my entire life IRL. Western and some coastal cities drink more and there's more drug activity too (they're less religious too).
From here, it’s hilarious to see Westerners thinking prohibition is impossible and preaching against it. Muslims have been very successful in prohibition of all kinds of mind-altering substances since 15 centuries. Compare this with the failed American Prohibition. There are more factors at play than what the law says. What do you believe will happen if you drink alcohol in secret, away from the eyes of the State? Muslims believe this will have consequences in afterlife. Atheists don't. Many Christians believe they'll be saved and forgiven by God as long as they are Christian.
A 2012 study suggested that belief in hell decreases crime rates, while belief in heaven increases them, and indicated that these correlations were stronger than other correlates like national wealth or income inequality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlates_of_crime
Muslims here do advocate for a ban on harmful technologies including but not limited to TikTok. As an example which made its way into law, pornography websites are banned (at ISP level).
To close the circle back to Nepal: the Nepali liquor raksi etymologically derives from the Arabic liquor araqhttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B0%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E...which spread far and wide in tandem with the expansion of Islam.
What's the feeling about Khat? I don't know the numbers in general but I was in a specific region and saw that many Muslim men there were quite addicted to it. Is it actually Halal?
Wouldn't this be more akin to banning a specific brand of alcohol that is engineered to get children to drink it as much as possible?
Ye you'd only want domestic alcohol for the children.
Greater time spent on social networking websites led to higher psychological distress, an unmet need for mental health support, poor self-rated mental health, and increased suicidal ideation. In conclusion, greater time spent on online social networking promotes self-harm behavior and suicidal ideation in vulnerable adolescents.
The role of online social networking on deliberate self-harm and suicidality in adolescents-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278213/
In September 2021, Bytedance announced it was making several changes to its algorithm and user interface in China, limiting children to just 40 minutes a day, introducing a Youth Mode for under 14s, and preventing the app being accessible to children between 10pm and 6am.
https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/how-long-can-k...
The astute reader will note that China has no such concerns for children outside of China, to the contrary, encouraging them to spend as much time on the app as possible.
Like banning flavored vapes or Joe Camel?
Alcoholisbanned for minors.
The reason TikTok was banned in Nepal was due to the ongoing communal violence between Hindus and Muslims [0][1].
It's gotten pretty bad - the videos I've seen are very similar to those I saw of Gujarat 2002.
It's also election season in India, so there will be massive blowback in Nepal, as several provinces in Nepal are ethnically the same as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar - two major swing states in Indian elections.
The last time a similarly divisive election happened in Bihar, Nepal ended up getting blockaded [2]
[0] -https://apnews.com/article/nepal-lockdown-nepalgunj-hindu-mu...
[1] -https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/nepal-town-impos...
This is completely not true. There were small skirmishes between Hindu and Muslims on small city in the western part of Nepal but there is no communal violence as you think there is. Nepal arbitrarily bans things without any due diligence, well because we have inept leaders.
well because we have inept leaders.
Not to mention corruption. About 15 years ago I got dragged along to a lunch in Kathmandu. My host[0] was meeting with some officials to discuss embezzling from an infrastructure project. It speaks to their impunity that they carried on in public in front of a basically unknown foreigner.
[0] Last I checked he was recently arrested on various corruption offenses.
To be fair I worked for a startup who turned out to be doing exactly that in the UK.
I am intrigued! Can you say more? Did anyone get caught?
Not really much more. I quit the moment I heard it. Got some threatening letters from a lawyer. The director was deported shortly afterwards.
Then I immediately went and worked for an even bigger turd where I quit by lunch time on the first day.
You seem to have a noose for things. Have you considered working for a anti-corruption agency?
The pay is rubbish :)
I know it's not intentional, but I like the misspelling.
Fair, but the implications and chances of a communal flair up are high after what happened to the Nepali migrant workers in Israel. I'm sure the Nepali Govt doesn't want a repeat of 2004.
Mix that with the rise of Hindutva, a bad economy, and divisive discourse across the border for the 2024 elections and things can probably get ugly if precautions aren't taken.
Shutting down TikTok is a small price to pay to prevent actual communal violence.
Hinduvta does not exist as a driving political force in Nepal. You are thinking of India. Nepal is secular albeit there is a small faction vying for power based on hindu ideologies but they are a very small portion of nepal politics. Again there is no communal flair that has entered into national discourse like we see in India or some ME countries. Nepal is pretty chill in that regards, surprisingly so given the whole country has multitudes of ethnic groups. There are still caste based incidents in remote areas but not so much in urban cores. Knowing the decisions the nincompoop leaders have done out of whim over the last decade or so I am fairly certain that this decision was also not done with due dilligence.
It's not a driving force in Nepal, but it takes a handful of "Kattar Hindu" idiots (most of whom seem to be Awadhi and Maithili based on the IG Reels and TikTok shorts I've seen) to light a spark in the Terai.
Most of these incidents and flareups are happening in the Terai areas where ethnic communities straddle the India-Nepal border. While the secessionist movement seems to have largely been tamped down, I wouldn't be surprised if many people who were in that milleu ended up becoming more fundamentalist.
And it's extremely worrisome that events and discourse like this is much more common, despite not existing 20 years ago.
I didn’t even know Nepal had Muslims.
Ive never understood why TikTok is allowed to run their app in the West whilst China blocks all foreign apps within its own borders. How is this not a simple trade issue?
At this point TikTok is impossible to ban in the west. Hundreds of millions of people love using it. If an elected official banned it, they'd create space for a political opponent to pick up vast numbers of votes by taking the other side on the issue.
People would forget in a month and move to other platforms.
64% of young Americans would rather give up their right to vote than give up TikTok.
Picture how upset kids get when you take away their favourite video game and apply that to a group of people dozens of times larger than the NRA.
That's a lot of votes to risk.
[1]https://reboot-foundation.org/research/the-tiktok-challenge-...
++ I'd be interested to see this study replicated across the entire adult voter base with breakdowns by region etc, but I'm not aware of one.
It's hard for the US to ban TikTok without violating the 1st Amendment.
My solution is: Until China opens up to foreign apps, the FTC should tell Google and Apple that they won't take any antitrust action if Google and Apple replace Tiktok with alternative apps (like Youtube Shorts) in their app stores. Then let Google and Apple do what they want to do already. No need for any heavy-handed government action which could violate the 1st Amendment.
I strongly favor a peaceful relationship with China, but peace is best achieved through reciprocity. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"
Encouraging TikTok to IPO in the west may be another option. Or even in a more neutral location like Singapore.
With corporate headquarters in the West and a diverse group of international shareholders a lot of the national security concerns could be addressed.
In exchange, there could be sanctions / regulatory relief for Huawei, SMIC, ZTE & other Chinese tech.
It wouldn’t matter. The dev office will always exist in China and always be beholden to the CCP.
Love the CCP sympathizers downvoting. Can’t argue with the truth but can downvote.
The West was trying to get China to open its markets, which required opening ours first and reciprocally. Because we can't just force them to buy opium at gunpoint any more.
Tiktok is "allowed" to run their app in the West because we have freedom of speech and expression. At least for now.
Good question now that I think about it. I guess because it was not a real issue until now because there was no Chinese app popular outside its borders? And the whole app/internet economy is still somewhat new compared to the speed at which international trade law gets written I guess, so there are no established rules. The EU has just started enforcing their opinion on it with some recent laws, and the US started doing something about TikTok under Trump.
Free speech means non-western nation states are free to run psychological experiments on the populations of western countries, but not the other way around.
The user-base on TikTok (in the US at least) leans extremely left (because they're all young) so the news media has idiotically made this a left vs. right issue.
Yes, any neutral observer can see that it's incredibly foolish to let a company with strong connections to our largest geopolitical rival have control over 1-2 hours of attention (every day) of young people in the US.
We literally have no idea if TikTok is boosting certain political/social values amongst American youth. Even a slight nudge could have a huge effects (because of the scale at which TikTok operates) and it would be impossible to detect.
The idea that there's some "iron wall" between US and Chinese data has already been proven false. US user data has repeatedly been accessed from china -https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-....
"I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers."
Are they doing anything about YouTube Shorts?
Is anyone actually watching YouTube Shorts?
I mean, not accidentaly clicking one thinking it's a regular video, but deliberately watching them?
I installed an extension blocking them. It's VVS[1] on steroids and annoying.
Funny how panoramic/horizontal arms race between film producers and TV producers calmed overnight. I was prepared to ask a snarky question about vertical movies going mainstream but apparently there has been already a relevant festival since 2014.
Yes. Obviously.
My YT shorts algorithm has turned into softcore porn and its truly disgusting
Why do threads about TikTok _always_ have posts with whataboutism regarding Instagram and other social network apps? It's a pattern I started noticing.
Because Tiktok is also a social network app, and they all have a lot of the same problems, if notallthe same problems?
Why wouldn't you talk about 1 thing being banned but not other things like it?
Because you see, It's totally ok when we do it. But GOD Forbid others engage in the same behaviour.
Of course. But the discussion gets partially derailed against Facebook and Instagram and not about the original article about TikTok.
Seems to be justified whataboutism though... The same content exists on almost any platform, yet only one is banned.
A similarly interesting question: why do so many humans find "Whataboutism" so persuasive, yet worship science for it's attention to detail?
The context of China destroying Tibet should not be overlooked here. Nepal shares much with Tibet culturally. Perhaps China isn't an immediate threat to their sovereignty, but it's certainly an existential threat.
I genuinely don't understand the obsession with China.
That'd be a great subject to study then. You've got the whole, open internet as a resource to learn (the irony of that statement will make sense to you later; something to look forward to)
You should, it’s a country trying to normalize authoritarian governments.
Nepal is a small country bordering on a behemoth (China) that has a fairly authoritarian autocratic government that is asserting itself in multiple territorial disputes with other neighbors. It's wedged between India and China. It is correct for Nepal to have geopolitical concerns about the future. Nepal is the kind of landlocked country (e.g. Poland or Ukraine in Europe) that tends to become the unwitting victims.
One angle of these bans is that TikTok provides rapid person to person sharing of information via rich multimedia, and live streaming of events.
Its harder to control a narrative and spread propaganda when people can see that others around the world are just like them, talk to them directly, and hear their stories.
The idea that China uses TikTok to control other countries I think is backwards. The platform actually enables significant info sharing between normal people, and we’re seeing this for example in the conflict in Gaza.
“Social Harmony” aka our ability to influence popular opinion
Other social media platforms also provide that ability. I suspect the reason has more to do with TikTok's specific algorithm advancing divisive or otherwise controversial content more than other systems.
It advances content by interest/topic as opposed to intentional divisiveness, follows or otherwise. You see more of what you watch.
There isn't another platform today that connects you as rapidly to people with shared interests. IG is trying with feeds
"It advances content by interest/topic as opposed to intentional divisiveness..."
Isn't this presuming some insight into their algorithms that we don't have?
While Chinese methods may seem draconian. I think they are only what will work. A mandatef OS+app level limit on time spent on social media, particularly for children. Parents are unable to regulate it and self-regulation of addictions is impractical.
self-regulation of addictions is impractical
Welcome to the 18th Amendment.
You may want to read what the whole discussion is about.
Prohibiting a widely used and addictive product?
There's a reason why TikTok is banned in its parent country.
No, its not actually banned there. Its just called with different name there and they have different kind of rules. Rules what makes it more harmless for brains. For example concent in Douyin is more educative etc.
The presumption that information warps minds consistently leads to free speech restrictions. My perspective you need to proove harm, then proving Tiktok caused the harm, and showing banning is the only remedy.
I'm not sure even sure Tiktok causes harm, let alone more harm than other social media.
I'd be supportive of this with all social media
Seriously, burn it all. Nothing good has come out of any of it.
Even with HN and Mastodon?
รถราการทำความเข้า
That’s Thai bud. Based on the South Indian Tamil script. It doesn’t have much to do with Nepal.
I was talking to my girlfriend about the concept of banning things deemed harmful last night. The conversation started around whether it's a good idea to ban people doing things that are dangerous to themselves (like smoking and drinking), but obviously it's hard to have that conversation without also considering broader societal consequences.
Something I've noticed in recent years is how out of touch I am about the harms people claim are caused to them by social media. For example, I find Twitter to be an amazing source of real-time information and a place I can discuss practically any topic with experts in that field. I don't post on there but I have TikTok on my phone and I find it quite a fun app to use to pass the time when I have nothing else to do. I think because of my viewing habits I tend to get fairly interesting DIY, tech and political content show up which can sometimes teach me something I didn't know. Sometimes the content is lacking depth, but it's certainly not a negative experience.
The same is true of me and alcohol or smoking. I don't drink or smoke. I actually had my first drink in about 3 years the other day, but it was something I wanted to do to maximise my enjoyment of the situation. Similarly, I have smoked a few times in my life, but it's only ever been a positive experience given the context.
I think what troubles me when I speak to people about these topics is that most people feel they're victims of social media and other potentially harmful things like smoking and alcohol and therefore support bans. Obviously I can't deny these things can and do have negative impacts on individuals and societies, but I'd question whether they are the root cause.
There seems to be a larger issue here around people lacking self-control and self-awareness, therefore wanting the government to impose the self-control they lack on them. And I think this problem is getting worse just observing how teens today use social media.
I'm saying this because I think TikTok could be a positive force in society, but it's not because a large number of people today are incapable of self-control. And this is a problem because if the root issue isn't TikTok but our own self-control then we'll need to demand our government take ever more control over our lives to protect us from ourselves. For example if the government doesn't regulate my use of Twitter or out right ban me using it then I might develop an addiction to it and anxiety. If the government doesn't stop me from smoking then it's possible I might smoke a pack a day for the next decade then go on to develop lung cancer. If the government doesn't ban me from drinking sugary drinks then I might drink a can of Coca-Cola.
I've flippantly joked about it before, but I do think if we can't address this underlying issue of self-control we will have to extend these bans further and further to places which seem absurd today. For example, hard to argue someone watching TikTok every day is more harmful than someone eating at McDonalds every day. Given the harms of fast food I think you could make a far stronger argument against it's legality than TikTok.
I understand I'm expressing an unpopular opinion here. I'm also not saying there's nothing we can do to reduce the likelihood that people will develop harmful behaviours. For example, I wouldn't necessarily be against reasonable restrictions on social media for children. It's really this idea that adults can't choose to do things which could be harmful to themselves that I find hard to understand.
It's really this idea that adults can't choose to do things which could be harmful to themselves that I find hard to understand.
I really think it comes to down to a simple distinction: those that grew up with the old internet as kids and were inoculated to its effects and those that first got the internet through the main line that is the smartphone.
""The government has decided to ban TikTok as it was necessary to regulate the use of the social media platform that was disrupting social harmony, goodwill and flow of indecent materials," Saud said."
TikTok "was disrupting ... flow of indecent materials".
I parsed as though there was a semicolon after goodwill - (disrupting …) and (flow of indecent materials) rather than disrupting flow of indecent materials
When they ban tiktok but keep other social medias, tell you that someone wants to keep the audience watching the same narrative, on TV or the internet. You might argue that TikTok has a narrative or not, but sure it isn’t controlled by the same entity that controls other social media.
I've met more than a dozen native Nepalese men and women here in Texas. I've learned lots of names. My closest friend, N, gave me prayer beads to help me keep my path toward healing.
To look at Nepal as an outsider is like dropping a senior citizen lifer from Pittsburgh into McAllen Texas and telling them good luck.
In a lot of regards, if Nepal is considering a different tactic, somewhat like the French do versus the US "break shit & profit & then go to therapy or take pills" approach...well, honestly...
Texas to Bosnia to Nepal is my 2024 tour plan because I'm kinda over this shit a little here.
So they should ban instagram too. I have a feeling tiktok is probably more moderated and enforces stricter content rules than instagram. Of course may be tiktok is just more popular and so has the target on it.