People don’t like it because:
- It’s the new thing. If alcohol were introduced today it would be banned in every country on earth. People tolerate Facebook, Twitter, Insta because that’s what’s been around. They all do the same thing, but TikTok is new and scary.
- Short form video is scary! It’s a new form of entertainment, and old people don’t like new forms of entertainment. See: every newly introduced form of entertainment in history, books included.
- They are misinformed about what data a mobile application can and cannot do, and the level of security built into both iOS and Android. Rest “assured”, they are collecting as much data as they can – just like every app creator on the planet. What they aren’t doing is capturing mic data while you’re sleeping (that’s not how microphones in phones work), stealing your passwords from your clipboard (OS’s notify users about clipboard paste)
- China bad. This primes people to consider negative press about it with a less skeptical eye, feeding the above points. (Don’t misconstrue me as being pro-China, I’m not, and that’s not what this post is about.)
After they were caught shadowbanning LGBT users “for their own protection”, that should tell you everything you need to know about the CCP-owned app.
So 4, then?
That’s definitely wrong, and definitely worthy of harsh criticism, but not worthy of federal bans, and has nothing to do with the claims of it being “the worst malware in the world”.
Removed by mod
So 4, then?
I’m definitely American, and am unpaid. Dunno how to explain it to you, but millions of Americans use and enjoy the app.
TikTok bans aren’t considered because people dislike TikTok. They are considered because TikTok refuses to comply with local laws regarding sending user data across borders. There are some strict regulations on how this can be done.
And while this plays into your point 4 it’s not a China only problem. Facebook and co had similar issues in the EU. But they have found a way to stay compliant with local laws. TikTok was repeatably caught doing not following the laws. And even in the latest hearing they refused to commit to stop sending data to China.
And that’s also where TikTok being more invasive comes into place. Because once the data is in China there are fewer rules in place what they can do with it. I also have no way of getting that data deleted either. While if the data stays in the EU there are regulations on what they can do with it, how to store it etc.
I am not that knowledgeable about the difference in data law between China and the US so maybe for US citizen the difference is negligible.
Can you share some sources?
Why is it bad for one app to share data to their country when all other apps are sharing data to theirs, not to mention selling data to data brokers who can do literally anything.
Call for legislation of data brokers if you’re interested in calling for anything.
Recently TikTok basically confirmed they are sending US citizens’ data abroad. Yes, it’s “only” from creators but it still goes against their previous statement of not storing any user data in China.
This was in response to evidence surfacing that TikTok is giving China access to user data.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index.html
Yes, the evidence is a little thin. Saying they have been “caught” might have been a bit overzealous on my part. But there was a leaked audio recording where TikTok employees talked about how US user data can be accessed by China before that.
In 2020 TikTok acknowledged that their protocols aren’t protecting the user data sufficiently. This was in response to an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in 2019.
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/our-approach-to-security
So even though “caught” might have been overzealous, there has been plenty of evidence dating back to 2020 or maybe even before that, that supports the claim of TikTok sending user data illegally to China. Either by actually sending it or by giving the engineers from China access to the data.
Why sending Data abroad is an issue has multiple reasons. The first is that each country has its own privacy laws. You can only do certain information with the Data, certain Data can only be stored for a short period of time, others can’t be stored at all. Again, as a European citizen, I have the right to have my data deleted. But that’s pointless if a copy of my data exists in China where the EU has no authority.
Calling for legislation on data brokers isn’t stopping TikTok, these legislations exist already. There are rules and protocols on how and which data can be sent abroad. TikTok isn’t compliant with that.
Then there is the issue of national security. And that’s why China doing this is deemed more dangerous than other western countries because China is a potential hostile nation. You just need to take a look at how social media is a security risk in Ukraine for both the Ukrainians and the Russians. Having a foreign nation access to more extensive data than what is publicly shared is even worse. For example, tracking user Data of key military and government personnel gives them a much easier time on creating a profile. Hence banning TikTok on government phones. If Google or another domestic company does this kind of stuff then the information is at least not in potential hostile hands. And further, the US has the authority and capability to do something against it if the data were used in a hostile manner. They can seize the servers, arrest key personnel, etc. They can’t do that with Chinese nationals living in China.
Thanks for being the only person in the otherwise large thread to give an actual response.
So to make sure I understand correctly, the crux of these arguments are:
- Violation of data privacy laws, admittedly thin, and mostly applicable to areas of high data privacy.
- We might one day be at war with China, at which point there could be bad OPSEC by using TikTok.
I gotta be honest, while you’ve laid it out well, I’m not convinced this is worth the outsized response to it.
TikTok is Chinese spyware. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube is American spyware.
I hate the short video thing. I find many zoomers are into TikTok. The short video length, the subtitles on videos, the filters and the attention span effect it causes does not help. Yeah I get it, social media is bad for everyone in high doses, but zoomers are such a subverted generation and short videos do not help, weather that is TikTok or YouTube shorts.
I am not in favor of banning Tiktok or short video platforms, I wish people will use social media for learning things, exploring ideas and not watching stupid clips of some kid talking about their day. That is what bothers me most about TikTok rise to fame. It is not how it is Chinese based and a privacy nightmare, it is how it changes peoples interaction online and how they use the internet.
Did you feel the same way about Vine?
I’m a millennial and don’t use tiktok, but things change and they’re supposed to. Your argument started off good, but immediately went sideways. Privacy is an actual problem, your beef with gen z is not. You sound like an old man shaking his cane at the sky. We can all cry over how much we miss AIM and Myspace, but they’re gone. This shit won’t last forever either.
Did you feel the same way about Vine?
Yes, however TikTok is more successful in adoption than Vine. Only a few girls I knew were hooked on Vine.
Privacy is an actual problem, your beef with gen z is not. You sound like an old man shaking his cane at the sky. We can all cry over how much we miss AIM and Myspace, but they’re gone. This shit won’t last forever either.
Yeah I get it. I sound like a old cranky man. Every generation has its flaws. If I have beef with zoomers, then I guess I have beef with every generation alive. I just see TikTok is not helping zoomers. Zoomers seem to be the most subverted generation. Zoomers were raised by society to be the best consumer generatiom that ever lived. Corporate America has achieved creating a generation who is bad with money, chasing identity, wanting status and applause without doing the work, bombarded with ads, very depressed and riddle with mental illness, and very lonely. TikTok is just adding gas to the fire.
Of course not all zoomers are like this. However many zoomers I met just simply fall under these things I listed above and I interact with many zoomers in my day to day life.
I am not for censorship, so I do oppose censoring Tiktok. Unfortunately I have no solutions to offer, all I see is a problem.
Have you actually had a conversation with anyone from gen z? Watched any of the content they produce? They’re radically anti-capitalist and are well aware they’re living in a dystopia. Of course they have mental health issues. Look at the world they’re inheriting from us and tell me why they should feel any differently.
But maybe they should just swallow their feelings and beat their girlfriends because that’s what their forefathers did? Feelings are icky.
And they’re bad because they’d rather make money pursuing their passions than grinding for some pedophilic billionaire? Get real. If they were left to their own devices, this world would be closer to a utopia than humanity has ever been before.
Also, they’re funny as fuck, creative, inventive, and wonderfully culturally aware. Love Gen z.
Any issues they have can be attributed to two things:
- Humanity as a whole is dumb and violent.
- We screwed them over. Don’t blame the victim.
Edit: Here, let me provide a nice little example for you. I guess just be glad you’ll die before my children? Positivity! :)
Chill out! This is what I mean by gen z being subverted. So many of then think climate change is man made and just give a fuck about the wrong things. Gen z heart in many ways is in the right place but their intentions are flawed. I do know some based zoomers and they are good friends who yes I talk to very often. The gen z attitude toward their bosses is understandable to a good extent, as long their reasoning for it is being red pilled on how their is a sociopathic mindset in the wealthy elites.
People said the exact same thing about YouTube, and people’s desires for fame. The world still turns.
All to say, like all social platforms, on TikTok there are good and bad, people of all shapes and sizes. Rest assured, people are learning on TikTok, (and YouTube, and Facebook). Yeah there’s misinformation, just like every other corner of the Internet.
People said the exact same thing about YouTube, and people’s desires for fame. The world still turns.
True. The way content was consumed back then was more enriching I guess compared to the short video format now in days.
Rest assured, people are learning on TikTok, (and YouTube, and Facebook).
You can learn lots on YouTube and other simular platforms like LBRY. You can’t learn much on Twitter or Facebook. Tiktok “learning” is short clips oviously like “Did you know” or “Here are 3 thing you can do with your phone” but this is not deep as watching a 20 minute YouTube video on WWII history for example.
Have you used TikTok? How long do you think videos can last? Because they can be up to 10 minutes; plenty of time for quality content. Not to mention, many longer videos are broken into multiple smaller parts (similar to tweet threads).
To your specific point, there are some excellent WWII scholars producing TikTok content on topics such as countering Holocaust denialism.
Beyond that, there are many things people can learn more efficiently outside of long-form content. Recipes are a great example: search engine algorithms have made recipe websites a complete disaster. Literally no one wants to read (or write) about my step grand uncles 3rd cousins summer cabin, but SEO demands bloat. In a short form video, there’s not as much time for algorthmically mandated filler.
No I do not use TikTok but I do know videos can be 10m long. However many TikTok videos do end up outside of TikTok like on YouTube or LBRY and they are usually under 1m.
I am sure there are lots of WWII channels on TikTok, but the tall video format, and the effects are just annoying.
The video format is made for the device format where most people consume it. It’s just as annoying when someone clips a widescreen formatted video on TikTok. The ability to learn from something isn’t affected by the video being horizontal or vertical.
If you look at most videos on the internet. Videos that are tall are not usually educational compared widescreen videos. If a content creator wanted to make a video on WWII, they will likely use video editing tools and whip up a widescreen video. When people want to share how their day is, they do not use a video editor, they open up an app and record themselves.
I find tall videos annoying, even on smartphones.
There’s more widescreen content because it’s an older format. A video creator doesn’t innately prefer one format or another; they use the format of their platform. This argument is no different than saying “if someone wants to educate, they’ll never use videos, they’ll only use books”.
So I guess after this whole thread, the thing we land on is: agreeing to disagree that “vertical videos are annoying”.
You have to start somewhere. Learning something on tiktok is the start of the process, not the end.
You start with a thread and you pull and you pull and you pull and pretty soon you have enough thread to sew yourself an entire wardrobe.
You can’t start at the end or the middle or a third of the way through. You start at the beginning. You can’t research something if you don’t know it exists. You start with an idea, a question, not the answer.
You are looking at this like an adult looking backwards, not a young person looking forwards. You can not learn in reverse.
Tiktok is a feed. You watch a clip under a tag and then swipe to the next one, right? This is not designed to learn. If there is a way to search and interact like YouTube, I sure do not know about it and it is not used often since most people will just scroll though the feed.
On YouTube and LBRY, you search for something and watch it. Yeah you can have a feed too with YouTube and LBRY but this is optional.
Another thing I do not like about TikTok is you cannot browse TikTok in the browser, they force you to install their app, which is one reason I don’t use it.
How can you search for something that you are unaware of?
You gather ideas, ask questions, and then you take them somewhere else.
Again, you are thinking in reverse. An adult with a few decades of experience under their belt. Tiktok, in part, appeals to young people because they inherently have a beginner’s mindset. Everything is new and there’s much to learn.
Are many tiktok users gathering ideas, asking questions and looking into this stuff further? I do not see this at all. I did not see this with Vine users when Vine was around and I do not see this with Instgram users which is simular to Tiktok, being a “scrolling feed platform”.
I do see YouTube users and LBRY users having the most curiosity compared to other platforms.
I get it, many YouTube users watch a few videos they maybe suggested to them by an feed or algorithm, then explore this further. How Tiktok and Instagram are designed, it a feed.
You make a point that it could get an idea planted in your head. However to my understanding the user will need to go to another platform like YouTube to explore an idea further since Tiktok is not designed for this.
Are many tiktok users gathering ideas, asking questions and looking into this stuff further? I do not see this at all.
Yes. You don’t see it because you don’t use it.
You can very much search and follow creators and topics. You can view a feed of just subscribed profiles. I do wish there were ways to make lists of profiles to have more focused feeds at different times, but that’s hardly a scathing indictment.
Upvoted because this is indeed unpopular. I agree though, particularly that people get stuck on #4. We don’t know what China is doing with our data, any more than we know what Cambridge Analytica (now defunct) or the US gov is doing with our data. It could all be “harmless” ad-targeting, it could be more sinister, we don’t know. Until we know what is being done with the data, then Meta or Google collecting my data is just as bad as China collecting my data.
Edit: Some sources related to the matter to help others form conclusions:
https://pirg.org/articles/demystifying-tiktok-data/ they collect essentially the same amount of data, in some cases Facebook collects more.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more-than-any-other-social-media-app-study.html YouTube and Tik Tok share similar amounts of data, YouTube (under google) uses most of it for their own purposes (not sure what those are) while Tik Tok mostly sells it to third parties (who knows who they sell to or what they do with it)
A nation maintaining a database of a different nation’s citizens is pretty scary stuff. We don’t know the reasons.
A nation maintaining a database of its own citizens is also scary, but less so because it can be excused as data collection for marketing purposes. That could also be a lie.
I hate all of those social media applications personally. It’s perfectly reasonable to hate them for different reasons.
OP really can’t grasp why a malicious foreign power having so much data and influence is bad.
Which data? What are they going to do with it?
Usage data that profiles your political leanings and in turn allows them to counter adjust your feeds to make you more sympathetic to said nations views, or even more maliciously, incite artificial political discourse. Profiles made from usage data could also be used to determine individuals who have access to sensitive information which could be made into phishing campaign targets. Or even further, these profiles could be used to monitor and keep tabs on western individuals visiting the country or even monitor Chinese individuals abroad.
I feel like you have to be willfully ignorant to ignore the very real risks that exist here.
Like the incredibly well documented YouTube red-pill pipeline?
If you’re going to China or are one of their citizens traveling abroad, TikTok profiling is probably not the top of your surveillance concerns. If you don’t want impacts from Chinese data collections, don’t go to China 🤷 I sure won’t.
See the comment about willful ignorance.
See the comment about China bad.
Agreed. Also if you put a firewall app on your phone and watch how often various “closed” apps attempt to phone home. Twitter (or X now if I have to call it that) and Hulu make far more frequent requests, even when closed, than TikTok does. Not that every request is necessarily related to data harvesting, but a good amount of data about your location can be gathered just by tying the IP addresses your phone connects to their servers from to your account. The amount of fearmongering over TikTok in comparison to other apps seems absurd to me, and I haven’t even looked at any of the apps from Facebook.
Meanwhile, proving my point, downvotes all over the thread. Which, to be fair, is exactly what I expected when posting this. Not a single challenge to the idea that it’s not capturing what the fear mongering says it is. Just people perpetuating the moral panic.
Bro u dumb af lmao good job
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