The fuck is the point of banning tiktok if the Chinese government already hacked our entire communication network lol
They aren’t banning it because China can see what you put on it, they’re banning it because China can control what you see from it.
deleted by creator
Uh reply to the wrong comment?
Banning TikTok would actually help the Democrats though, so it will probably be reversed
Left vs Right is a distraction.
The fight for a better life is Top vs Bottom.Sure, I’m just saying that Republicans are taking over and they rely on the disinformation machine to have a chance to get elected so banning TikTok goes against their interests.
They already have a massive disinformation machine across every medium.
Yes and TikTok is one of these mediums, why would they get rid of it when it’s one of their main doorways into the mind of young people?
Except there’s no evidence of that.
There’s no evidence that China can control what’s shown on a China-owned app?
In case you’re still unaware, the China govt is the ultimate authority within China, even in private companies. More so after recent crackdowns on their oligarchs and billionaires. The idea that they have no control over tiktok is plain laughable.
TikTok has gone out of their way to show they’ve siloed American operations. There has been no evidence that the Chinese government could or would breach that.
So you’re arguing that TikTok US, despite being fully owned and controlled by China, has full independence and decision making capability? Even regular western companies don’t have that. What the home office says, goes. At most, their American operations are making sure they’re abiding by US law with regards to data and such (and even then I’d highly doubt that, given all the forensic breakdowns about TikTok sending encrypted data to China).
If it sends encrypted data to China it would be the first I’ve heard of it. The worst the news could come up with last time is headcount data. And yes they went on an entire project to silo it. At the end of the day they want the money, and TikTok shop provides it. Other than that they sell the same info Meta does on the open market.
And yes they went on an entire project to silo it
So? It doesn’t matter what internal bureaucratic sleight of hand they pull. The bosses are in the CCP, and when they say ‘jump’, the answer is going to be ‘how high?’. That’s how private companies work.
At the end of the day they want the money
TikTok wants money. The CCP wants other stuff. As long as the CCP isn’t making demands, TikTok will make their money. The moment the CCP says to do something, TikTok will do it.
I really don’t think China is nearly as interested in siphoning data as controlling the algorithm. Getting people to see more pro-Chinese videos, more anti-US videos, and some bias toward candidates they want to see win is completely doable without exfiltrating any data.
Basically, all the stuff people are pissed about Musk doing to Twitter (changing algo to push right wing content) are just as feasible for TikTok to do, with the main difference being China is a state actor, whereas Musk is a private billionaire.
We should be very worried about any social media app that’s very popular and controlled by an org with political motivations.
Except for the extremely obvious disparity between chinese tiktok and american tiktok.
Nothing at all.
So are you saying they run the algorithm in their country? On their internal mirror app? The exact same setup TikTok offered the US?
I don’t see how that’s the evidence you’re looking for.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/china-is-hurting-us-kids-with-tiktok-but-protecting-its-own/
It’s extremely well documented that TikTok offers extremely different experiences within China than it does elsewhere.
I’m just a bystander, China sucks, but referencing a NY Post opinion piece feels a bit like using a Fox News segment as a source. They’re pretty trash.
There’s individual sources for practically every paragraph in that article, so I’m not seeing the issue in this case.
OK, so lets say they moderated it the same way here as they did in China… All good now?
I don’t think it matters at all how tiktok is actually being managed or moderated in the US - Americans simply do not trust anything Chinese.
The cold war never ended.
By moderating, if you mean using the same algorithm for the content feed, it would make a significant difference to a lot of people I believe.
Of course it does, and for two major reasons:
- Chinese law is very different from American law
- China’s domestic propaganda interests are quite different than it’s international propaganda interests
Inversely, they’re banning it because the US cannot control what is posted on it— regardless of whether the central party in China can (they can and they do though so I am not sure why you’re debating it).
Really? Then you can point to the news article that lays out evidence of that actually happening and not just quoting FUD?
What the government wants out of this is to make an example. Then whenever they want something from Meta, Google, Apple, X, etc, they’re going to remind them of TikTok while pointing to the third section of the definition for foreign control. The catch all that says the app can be considered foreign if the government claims the owner has been unduly influenced by a foreign entity.
Meta is already a willing partner of the USSD, they don’t need to ‘make an example’.
to suppress video coming from Gaza and Lebanon? just a guess; but I’d imagine that’s at least a part of it.
That and labor organizing, environmental awareness, and many other things where the absence helps the rich get wealthier .
It’s also just a blatant theft; there is a lot of money to be made here however it goes down , and that money goes to connected arseholes
It also broadcasts propaganda disproportionately highly and harmful ideologies as much as that little list of yours.
On its face the platform itself is neither good nor bad, but the massive theft of identifying information, photos, and personal conversations leading to increasingly common hacking and theft from Chinese sources tips the scales a bit.
Because when US politicians advocate for a single, global market, and a single, global internet, it is with the understanding that US firms and allied parties will dominate the space anyway. When that is no longer the case they get about as nervous as the Chinese got when they went and built the Great Firewall and made a clone of every popular western platform. Now that US/Western dominance is seriously challenged, we are seeing more and more signs of protectionism.
Theater.
Cybersec is hard. There are always more holes. China exports a LOT of stuff with holes. We can do little more than stick our fingers in the dyke. This looks like they’re doing something.
What they’re not going to expect is how much people hate them for taking their entertainment away.
China already doesn’t control US TikTok servers.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
Could I interest you in a bridge?
What are you suggesting? That Congress didn’t force TikTok to hand over control is US servers years ago? You didn’t see it in the news at the time, or you just don’t believe it?
Or do you think China has been censoring on behalf of the state dept?
I think they still get all the data of what goes off the servers, and I think that the Chinese side of the company still has ultimate control over what gets displayed.
The servers being in the US means that the Chinese government doesn’t have to have access to the servers but it doesn’t mean that they still don’t have the equivalent situation silently going on.
I really don’t care if China gets my data. They don’t have any jurisdiction over me. I’m concerned about domestic surveillance.
Because it’s bad if China has the information. It’s fine if “US entity” had the information. The ban is ultimately fake. No one banning the app cares about TikTok, they just hate that China is getting the information they want. What will happen is some US based company, Oracle last time, but someone like that will buy a sufficient enough stake in the company and the ban will not happen. It will be declared “safe” and the data will go to a US controlled entity, but also still secretly to China. (The later will be revealed years later, to the shock of no one.)
They already have a condition of “sell to an American entity or shut it down”
Sign up for https://loops.video/ — the fediverse alternative
“We got rid of the brain cancer. Here, have leukemia instead”
The way I see this is that it’s not TikTok that’s the issue. It’s short form videos.
Short-form vertical video social platforms are here to stay.
We are not going to turn back the clock. I say this as someone who doesn’t use TikTok.
The only semi-realistic (and I use this term very casually) option would be some sort of radical, never-seen-before change in our global societal and socioeconomic models. The dynamics of short form video social media will be the least of our concerns in such a scenario.
The real issue is that these companies are purely for profit and couldn’t give a flying fuck about any negative social implications of their product. Every Le bad thing about any service is just down streamed from this reality of society.
How much more ADHD can I really get at this point ?
My kids have to be forced to watch anything longer than about 10 minutes. Movie night! one and a half hours? that soooo lonnnng.
I doubt there’s many here that are even interested in that format.
or vice versa
Though they’ve announced plans to do so, Loops is not yet federated. It’s presently still a closed site and not part of the Fediverse.
Without the super addictive algorithm, it won’t draw the Tiktokers. It’ll take a serious marketing department to make it even start to compete. TT and Insta have spent an assload of money to make their algo addictive. FB and YT shorts took years of paid content injection at enormous scales to even become interesting.
the issue with loops is there’s no algorithm. so I get 10 random videos that don’t interest me and just one that does, almost.
that’s not going to work long term for engagement. i already get bored on loops after like a minute.
that…sounds super healthy? where’s the downside? lol
healthy? what do you mean by healthy. healthy for whom? the life of the app itself? because it won’t survive without dedicated users.
if there is no algorithm to keep track of what users want to see vs don’t want to see, they’ll stop using the app in favor of apps that cater to their interests.
watching a random video of something I’m not interested in isn’t particularly all that fun.
if an app learns I like anime and video games or specific types of content, then I’m more likely to use the app.
Loops feels like that website that showed you YouTube videos with 0 views.
I am rubbing my nipples in anticipation of the FLOOD of pissed off teenagers who don’t know how to human without sharing their dances now.
…can someone explain the point of overlaying closed captions over the center of the video, but one word at a time fast paced?
I’m on the spectrum. I can process reading way, WAY faster than I can process someone just audibly speaking to me. That shit’s actually helpful. I admit, it doesn’t need to be in the center of the video though.
It also shouldn’t be one word at a time imo
I guess, but as someone who’se functionally deaf, I’ll just always be grateful for subtitles.
Beats 80% of other content.
Actually captions like that can help you read faster. I’ve seen speed reading training things like that.
Ok, but how is it helpful for the general population?
They’re not the target audience.
So who is it for? This is everywhere. It’s in YT shorts, Instagram posts, etc. As a style, it’s getting pretty ubiquitous, and I don’t understand the reason for it. At best it’s annoying because if I look away for a split second, I’ll miss a couple words and it won’t make sense anymore.
Well. A good assumption in life is if something is popular, and you don’t get it, it’s not for you so don’t worry.
People like weird shit.
I personally find that words on screen keeps my attention. But it annoys me if the thing I’m watching isn’t worth my attention. So it’s 50/50.
So you can doom scroll faster… duh!
I don’t understand it either but it’s a product of how people consume the videos in their upright depression rectangles in public places with no volume I’d imagine.
Yeah, removing the headphone jack and jacking up the price for Bluetooth headphones will do that…
Or why the video is of minecraft gameplay that’s entirely unrelated to the voice over and captions?
Because it wouldn’t be a video if it just had audio
I think that’s to keep you occupied to force you to listen to the shitty voiceover that you’d normally skip. Or I guess the opposite?
The one word at a time thing is a way to demand more of your attention. It’s just a side path of the old advertising stick where words would ‘pop’ in weird ways. See this video for an example.
OK boomer.
Ha, eat that China! Now you need to pay millions to American oligarchs for all our user data!
USA!
Until a flood of TikTok users bankrupt them, anyways.
Not entirely sure how you’d make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money and some way to get even more big piles of money on a routine basis :/
Yeah, video hosting is notoriously expensive. It’s why there’s still not a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else but Google could afford to run the platform at a net loss for the amount of time required to build a profitable user base.
If even a tiny percentage of TikTok’s US user base decided to move to Loops, that may be enough traffic to not only completely disable Loops, but would probably impact the rest of the Fediverse at large, too.
Interaction with the fediverse is very limited atm
Edit: and by that I mean non-existent. It’s still very early in development.
The millions of free porn sites would beg to differ…
Free? They are ad-ridden and unlike YouTube, porn videos are removed from the site all the time.
Yet none of them really paywall you for using an adblocker.
Actually come to think of it, porn sites are the only place I allow ads (obv blocking the pop ups and other dark pattern fuckery)… probablys because I learned to ignore them entirely as a teen before ad blockers existed.
Short videos do not need to be long lived (they could be deleted after 3 days) And some peer to peer could work really good for “viral” videos.
Companies or creators can run their own instance can’t they?
AFAIK, it’s still not had the code released, so at the moment there’s just the one site and you can’t host your own.
They can. And if at any point it becomes untenable, you can just archive whatever you host, shut down your instance, and put the videos up for download somewhere.
If a company is going bankrupt as a result of hosting a video service, they’re not going to be able to afford to archive and make it available for download either.
Archive storage is relatively cheap. It’s the bandwidth and compute required to serve video that is expensive
I think this could lead to bigger activity pub instances collecting revenue for allowing company owned instances to federate. aka ad revenue.
Could you explain that idea in more detail? I’m not really sure I understand how that would work in practice.
Private instance for company/creator: Hey, can we federate with your instance?
Large public instance: pay me.
Gotcha.
The idea of a large public instance rubs me the wrong way, since it leads to behavior like that.
Not entirely sure how you’d make the economics of hosting endless video files work without great big piles of money
You’re absolutely right, which is why BitTorrent never managed to take off. Totally unviable, doesn’t work at all, and definitely isn’t the technology underpinning federated video services like PeerTube.
Edit: WTF? Why are you people denying the reality in front of your face? BitTorrent works and distributing video peer-to-peer is a solved problem. I do not understand this defeatist religious insistence that Video Must Cost Money.
At one point BitTorrent/P2P was responsible for something like 30-40% of all global internet traffic.
The thing is the protocol never really developed beyond some useful, but minor evolutionary updates.
You say “never really developed beyond” as if that isn’t a synonym for “finished and working fine.”
Short videos are dumb. Are people really that addicted? I have it and go on it sometimes. And by sometimes I mean like 10 minutes per week. The videos are OK at best, but half of them are ads or live weird shit and the search function for relevant topics are trash.
I stay the f away from it. You haven’t spent enough time to properly train it. As you watch, it tracks time spent on each video, interactions, passive and active choices and slowly builds a dossier on you.
As you keep going, it occasionally throws adjacent stuff in. It starts tossing you stuff that other people with your likes watch. If there is content on there that you’ll appreciate, it will eventually find it. If there is enough, it’ll stream it to you non-stop.
They’ll find people who share your political alignment and say precisely what you want to hear. If you like brunettes with flowy blouses or redheads who are gym rats, you’ll get them. If you like skeptics or preppers, you’ll get them.
My wife gets a lot of her news from it, I find probably 1/3 of it to be suspect and 90% of it biased toward what she wants to hear. Nothing there is telling both sides of any story. (to be clear we have the same political/ethical views, but I’m a touch more skeptical about journalism and random influencers, especially popular influencers)
My wife gets a lot of her news
Wow, that’s scary. I’m guessing a surprising number of people do this as well.
For my wife, it never occurred to her that she could trust tiktok influencers far less than even corporate journalists. They have to ethical requirements on tiktok, no verified sources or corrections or redactions, or any accountability at all.
I had to point that out over multiple videos, although to be fair some of the people on there do put up a front like they are legit to trick people into taking them seriously.
The same nonsense happens on YouTube and Instagram. Just look at the motivations, these “content creators” get paid via ads (so views) and corporate sponsors, so they don’t get rewarded for truth, they get rewarded for saying things their spomsors and viewers like.
I’m not saying they’re intentionally misleading people, but journalism is hard and clickbait and copycat “journalism” is easy, so they’ll tend to do more of the latter.
For all its bullshit, YouTube is the same. I’ve found myself on it more lately precisely because of the reasons you’re saying. It’s amazing how much niche content there is for any taste, even ones you don’t yet realize you have.
Youtube at least realizes when its suggestions are in a rut and gives you that little popup offering to show you stuff slightly outside of your current echo chamber. Just how different it actually is I can’t really prove.
I actually really like short-format videos for recipes so you don’t have to watch somebody chopping onions for ten minutes. Also, Ronaldo highlights set to Brazilian phonk are kinda cool. Other than that, the format seems pretty worthless.
Yes with the attention span of a ground squirrel.
Why do you think they all talk vast with stupid ADHD inducing shit on one side. (Minecraft parkour, GTA V driving or subway surfers)
Because people will scroll away if you don’t jingle keys in front of them
It’s about xpntrolling the narrative. Tiktok is one of the few (if not the only one) popular social media apps that doesn’t censor everything that the US government decides. Just look at how much Palestine stuff goea around there compared to anywhere else.
Most videos on my feed are 3 - 10 minutes, they are ttending less short.
I like tiktok, it’s the only “social media” I use other than Lemmy. I normally hate finding video content, YouTube sucks, and their shorts are even worse. But on Tiktok I get served all sorts of interesting videos, I will stumble upon some cool topic that has been chopped up into five 10 minute videos and then find the video or a similar video on YouTube or something.
It’s an excellent way to discover things fast. You just can’t use it as a good source, need to do external research.
My biggest gripe is as you said, they have really seemed to amp up the ads and stupid live crap.
As someone who never uses this platform, this comment made me chuckle.
Don’t worry musk will buy it…
TikTok has said multiple times they will not sell. They will just exit the US market.
we’ll see, we’ll see
How nice must it be to be able to force your biggest competitor to sell their business off. You either get it on the cheap, or get to make the replacement product.
Imagine if this was what make kids choose Android over iOS.
.apk goes brrrrr
Even with APK, it wouldn’t work if traffic itself is blocked.
VPN time
No. The app will be removed from the store and just stop working once they block traffic
It never had appeal in the first place…
Tell basically all young people that.
You not liking it does not mean it doesn’t have appeal.
I was being facetious
Cool, but the rhetoric on Lemmy around non-federated social media being stupid indicates that many others here aren’t.
easiest way to lose is to never try
This is only great news if you are Mark Zuckerberg and you want a near-monopoly on social media.
You are aware that no western social media is allowed in China, are you not?
so America bans tiktok for the same reason china bans Facebook
Actually tiktok is not just china, its the soviet union too, used by putin’s services…
Free links to American spying devices:
I wish those would be banned too.
I know you’re trying to whataboutism it but they’re all terrible and should go away.
Not meant to be whataboutism, just awareness… ism.
The difference is that those make you stupid and depressed as a side effect of making money. In tiktok it’s the main goal.
Incorrect. Control of US TikTok servers was handed over years ago. The State Department has been actively censoring content on the platform, but I guess they’re having trouble keeping up.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
I honestly cannot tell if this is parody.
Honestly, I don’t see any downsides to this. Tiktok and Instagram are horrible platforms that are actively hurting, and in some cases killing, young teens. Sure, they did it for propaganda reasons, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a net positive.
Source of brain rot
Well this is going to go extremely poorly.
This week on How to Raise an Entire Generation With an Intimate Knowledge of Counter-Surveillance: Ban Their Favourite Social Media!
