11 ms·

TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy

173 points by thm 4y ago

aaron695 4y ago
jerryjerryjerry 4y ago
What can we do with it? Seems hopeless...
- Fargoan 4y ago
  Just delete it
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    Read the reviews...don't even install it.
- throwaway_1928 4y ago
  India has banned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok#2020_ban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok#2020_ban
  - jerryjerryjerry 4y ago
    I like this
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    The US tried but because it was Trump it was bad orange man mentality towards the ban. I wish we could do away with social media in general. It’s horrible.
    - warning26 4y ago
      That so-called "ban" would have just left TikTok under the ownership of Trump's buddy Larry Ellison -- would this really have improved anything? Struck me as entirely performative.
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        He tried to force a sale to remove the link to the CCP. Here in Taiwan I blocked tiktok because just signing up and scrolling displays anti America content. It’s a platform for pushing the CCP propaganda. How many times do I need to see “covid is caused by america” videos?
        skinnymuch 4y ago
        How many times do I need to see Covid is caused by China being nefarious? Or rich people worked hard for their money. Or whatever other uptight rigid status quo bullshit permeates most facets of western life.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Don't use it and if you have children with access to mobile devices take steps to ensure they can't use it.
  - jerryjerryjerry 4y ago
    And then we are probably in a loop to tell our children the same thing, "don't use it" which really depends on how well one can do self-control, but I guess that's one of the hardest parts to many people.
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    It's easy to say don't use it. The difficulty is getting buy-in from kids, when all their friends are in it and using it as a cultural reference.
endisneigh 4y ago
TikTok isn’t great, but fortunately most of us have the freedom to simply not use it. The authors conclusion around potential regulation is, though well intentioned, misguided. Hopefully through more posts like theirs we can have better conversations around addictive technology and teach the younger and more impressionable members of our society how to moderate tech use. Since this is a tech forum - some interesting technological solutions to this could be: 1. Headless app use with updates. Some affordance that you can setup that will open the app, take some actions and give you back the summary. In the case of TikTok you could use this to build your own notification. Maybe only go on if this hypothetical tech tells you something is really, really popular. 2. Reset mode. The OS trains a model on your gestures and you can tell it to tell you if you’ve been making a “brainless action” too many times for too long. In the case of TikTok this would be mindlessly swiping up.
- deepsun 4y ago
  Unlike WeChat in China.
- alphabetting 4y ago
  For me as an american, i'm just uncomfortable with the most popular app among children being under the control of an adversary. When I hear about the Chinese version of tiktok censoring heavily and promoting positive content about community values and STEM while our version promotes twerking and convinces teens they have mental disorders it makes me want it banned. I get that's antithetical to western values of freedom but it seems like a real threat to me.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    I don’t use TikTok but my understanding is that the feed pretty much adjusts to what you promote yourself.
    - sinalalgedonico 4y ago
      this comment assumes we always take actions that optimize our life long-term and that our cognition stays invariant as we consume content, TikTok is hacking our cognition my dude. It's a disgusting system.
hericium 4y ago
> it is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy I mean, it's "social media".
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Which in itself is a neologism intended to convey that the thing in question is somehow social, and a ”medium” to boot.
NoPicklez 4y ago
Animats 4y ago
And ahead of anything Silicon Valley has in compelling engagement. This is the beginning of the end of US social media. The other side is better at it.
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  You are over estimating this space. Fb is already competing here. They have begun an ad share revenue model with people who upload videos.
  - warning26 4y ago
    Meta's pathetic attempts at shoehorning rEeLs into anything and everything can, should, and will fail.
- warning26 4y ago
  Let's hope all of it gets banned, US and foreign alike!
- friendlypeg 4y ago
  Please name one Chinese social media company that is "better" at these social media categories. Group/Newsfeed: Facebook (Baidu Tieba is China only) Longform videos: YouTube (Bilibili is China only) Messenger: WhatsApp, iMessenger (WeChat is mostly China and some SEA countries) Photo: Instagram Microblogging: Twitter (Weibo is China only) VR: Meta/Steam (TikTok has Pico, we will see how it will do internationally) Live stream: Twitch/YouTube (No idea how popular TikTok is in this category)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eloisius 4y ago
I don’t like that it’s compromised by the CCP, but TikTok is in fact fun and enjoyable. People here act like it’s a new phenomenon, rotting children’s brains out. We’ve vegetated in front of TV for generations, and somehow survived. The fact is, people need some mindless downtime to cope with life, and TikTok is at least entertaining. Ban it and then what? Watch the weird viral factory worker videos on Instagram reels?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- npteljes 4y ago
  Somehow surviving is a pretty low bar. We, as a human race, survived every disaster, horror and mistreatment so far. It doesn't mean that they are okay and that we don't need to take action. As to what that action is, I have no idea.
kennethh 4y ago
I think we need to regulate some aspects of the social media apps espesially for the young in the same manner we have rules and regulations for tobacco, gambling and alchol. We see from experience/research that people are less happy after the profilation of social media and if it is harmful to socieicty then there should be more bounderies. I have a 9 year old kid and do not look forward to a world where all the kids are addicted to social media. I think China shows the way on some possible restrictions with focus on protecting young people.
stingraycharles 4y ago
Ok I’m not saying the OP is wrong, but couldn’t almost all of these arguments be made for Facebook / Instagram / Snapchat / etc as well? In general, social media has all these problems with addiction, platforms actively try to exploit that, and harvest data to monetise upon their users. From the article: “With these astounding numbers, TikTok must have something special, right? “Well it has. It uses manipulative user experience (UX) design to keep users glued to it. It is built to trigger compulsive use, especially in more impressionable audiences such as teenagers. It is also harmful to privacy.” Nothing of this list makes TikTok special, the only thing that makes it special is that it’s Chinese, and therefor subjected to more scrutiny (not claiming whether that’s justified or not, that’s another discussion in itself).
- markdown 4y ago
  > not claiming whether that’s justified or not Spoiler: it's justified.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  In short, no. TikTok is the first to have a public feed by default, not based on friends, plus the vertical swiping that forces you to see all the content it suggests. Its design and usage patterns are significantly different from all the others you mentioned.
  - TAForObvReasons 4y ago
    That is not relevant to the general point. The article punchline is > It uses manipulative user experience (UX) design to keep users glued to it. It is built to trigger compulsive use, especially in more impressionable audiences such as teenagers. It is also harmful to privacy. Facebook / Instagram used manipulative user experience design, even if it didn't manifest as a vertical swipe or public feed. While the details may be different, the overall problem was just as true back then as it is now
    - refulgentis 4y ago
      I see you're ensuring we understand Facebook and Instagram also optimize for engagement, I think the novelty here, for me at least, was the differences from Facebook and Instagram are quite significant.
mbgerring 4y ago
All algorithmic media feeds should be banned, and this is especially true of platforms subject to explicit state censorship and control
- sinalalgedonico 4y ago
  Yes but no. It's best to give the knobs for the people to control the algorithm and it's shown for them. Also make the algorithm transparent to the user
- 16amxn16 4y ago
  Banned by who? The state? Wouldn't that be considered state censorship and control?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- charcircuit 4y ago
  There is too much information on the internet. There is always going to be an algorithm on how it should be sorted for your consumption.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And what is the alternative? Purely random from all of the content on platform?
  - mbgerring 4y ago
    Yeah it was called RSS and it was great
lmm 4y ago
Meh, TikTok is fine. If 83% of users are making posts of their own, that very much contradicts the notion that every user is a passive slack-jawed zombie. If TikTok is more interactive than its competitors and encourages a back-and-forth on popular topics, isn't that a good thing? And while there are certainly topics that demand long-form explaination, there are also an awful lot of cases where the current presentation is just gratuitously long (e.g. when I needed to top up my boiler up to pressure, a 3 second video could absolutely have shown me how to do it, but on YouTube everything is padded to 8 minutes instead). Kids these days are thinking faster and demanding you get to the point more quickly: again, isnt' that a good thing rather than a bad one? Parents exploiting their children on social media is a problem, but by no means one unique for TikTok. And as a non-American I have zero sympathy for all the handwringing about how a shady foreign intelligence agency can be slurping up your personal information with no oversight; yeah, welcome to how the NSA has been treating the rest of us for our whole lives, a country that bugs the heads of state of their supposed allies has no leg to stand on here.
efitz 4y ago
There aren’t that many comments on this article yet but most of the comments that are here are pretty shallow and dismissive. Unlike many posts, I read the entire article. I think the author does a reasonable job of describing how TikTok exploits human biology to increase “engagement”. They aren’t unique in this; Casinos have been doing this for decades; Zynga canonicalized this in games and social media has been lurching this way for over a decade. TikTok is difficult to disengage from. For some it’s easier than for others. It would be interesting to see statistics to gauge users’ various level of addictive/compulsive behavior in the app. Here’s a hypothetical question- should there be a limit on how addictive we allow something to become? We limit nicotine content in cigarettes; we ban or highly regulate many drugs. “Under the hood” the drugs we ban are affecting neural pathways; why should it matter if you’re ingesting a substance vs having similar effects via psychological manipulation? I don’t claim to have the right answer and in the USA attempts to limit the app will run up against free speech concerns. But I do think that TikTok is bad for humans and bad for society.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- silisili 4y ago
  > should there be a limit on how addictive we allow something to become? Good question. IMO, yes. Drugs are often considered dangerous not only for what they do to users, but how users behave to get their next fix. If social media can ever get to heroin without the whole death thing, all that's left is the fix problem. A properly addicted person will not be able to hold a job, may have to resort to crime to pay for their data. A stretch, maybe? Or maybe it becomes like porn addictions where people need more extreme content for their fix. I'd say either are realistic and scary outcomes. If I had my way we'd ban smartphones. Yes, the same one I type this comment on. I'd give up this for everyone unplugging, and not being an idiot in public and a danger when driving. Small cost.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    The way the world has enforced drugs as crime has been a massive massive failure. The worst thing we have done is be puritanical, judgemental, and ready to throw the book at drug crimes. Based off that we shouldn’t touch social media or smart phones or anything.
backtoyoujim 4y ago
US American developers steal privacy like _this_, but Chinese developers steal privacy like -this- !
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
imperialdrive 4y ago
30d <- is that the new way to abbreviate days? Never seen that before. TIL
- fsiefken 4y ago
  No? The increment syntax is in org-mode and logseq and I regularly use it to to specify seconds or minutes in audio or video like this: 3m2s. https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/tasks%20%26%20todos https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/tasks%20%26%20todos https://orgmode.org/manual/Repeated-tasks.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Repeated-tasks.html
makeitdouble 4y ago
This is article is so hard to follow. The very aggressive bits are linked to articles supposedly backing their point with more substance, but those are same level think pieces who reference other think pieces who are based on misconceptions, and we never hit any solid ground. For instance: > The videos are in autoplay and shown in an endless scroll. These are features known for triggering addictive behavior and there were legislative plans in the United States to ban them. Following “triggering addictive behavior” goes to thenextweb.com’s rant on autoplay. which posits autoplay is “hijacking your thought process”, with a link to a medium post Which on autoplay, explains that “Another way to hijack people is to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore”, linking that analysis on the age old debunked Brian Wansink‘s bowl of cereal experiment. So many other of these very assertive declarations have 3 to 5 levels of redirection to finally hit some disappointing justification. The general message being vaguely consensual, it’s hard to see what this piece is actually bringing to the table.
- benjaminwootton 4y ago
  Was there ever any serious discussion about regulating addictive social media by banning auto play? That would definetly be an escalation if governments start regulating social media product features, and TikTok definetly wouldn’t be the first!
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    That’s an interesting point. Up until now I feel we didn’t reach anything near that because in the generic case autoplay can be disabled (might be by default ?) in browsers, as it’s an overall obnoxious feature. The case left are specific apps, and for Netflix or other traditional video streaming platforms, proving it’s against the user’s interests would be super tough (even proving it has addictive effects wouldn’t be enough, as the user could be willingly requesting these addictive effects) Social media could be a separate case, as culturally we put it in a different bucket, but then limitations would probably only apply to specific demographics (basically kids younger than 13 or 18 ?) and clear those older on liberty of choice grounds. I think the viewer would need to be directly losing money or being in physical harm to see any kind of regulation on these features.
silisili 4y ago
I can see it, but not with myself. Maybe I'm getting old or just depressed into not feeling dopamine anymore but TikTok has the effect of only annoying me. Constant sound streams, fake voices, etc. It reminds me of Vegas in some ways...loads of people love the flashing lights, I just run away. But I see it with my wife and daughter, it turns them into complete zombies. All this to say, I don't know what it's like to speak effectively as a 'victim.' But as a bystander, I feel something should probably be done...I just don't know what. Anything this addictive cannot be good for society.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- retrac 4y ago
  > It reminds me of Vegas in some ways. You're quite on the nose. An acquaintance is fond of watching TikTok videos. One day when he's visiting my partner, there's just this weird noise in the house. Somewhere between the sound played by the lottery ticket scanners upon winning, an ice cream truck, a fire alarm, and some 80s video game effect sounds. Gosh it's annoying. It goes away. Then comes back. What is that? TikTok! I've noticed that almost exact same sound fairly often since it came to my explicit awareness, in social media video clips, and sometimes advertisements. I suspect it's about the most attention-grabbing sound, for most people.
s1mon 4y ago
TikTok is manipulative, addictive and I do wonder about privacy, but there are a number of factual errors in this post which make me question what axe the writer has to grind. There are plenty of videos over a minute long. Yes, many are quite short, and creators aren’t allowed to post longer ones until they’ve have enough followers. However, recently TikTok upped the max time to 10 minutes. Short videos don’t have a timeline, but longer ones do, so saying “There is no signalization of progress or duration of the experience” is wrong. “the user cannot scroll up fast and jump a few videos” While you can’t literally avoid a fraction of a second of a video playing if you’re trying to skip, you can skip ahead a few videos pretty quickly. There’s also modes where you look at all of a creators video, or search for something and see a bunch. In those cases you can scroll past many smaller videos at once.
Imnimo 4y ago
>TikTok wants you hooked since you log in. The first page after you open the app is the “For You” page, where short videos carefully selected to grab your attention will be displayed. The videos are shown in full portrait mode, occupying almost all the device’s interface. Am I supposed to think this is an unreasonable way for a video app to present its content?
- the_common_man 4y ago
  Yeah, truly some absurd statements in the article . It's like saying the article wanted to hook me in by having a title.
doubleorseven 4y ago
I did a little experiment a while ago, I've watched only videos of girls using their body to promote their videos. I went into their accounts and watched and liked everything where body parts were a huge deal in the video. It took me an hour to have my for you page filled with girls showing off. I let the algorithm go like this for a week and then i changed tactics. Every video starting with a woman, i would swipe away. I didn't even knew what the video was about. I combined it with looking up videos about food, plants and life hacks. After an hour the girls were long gone. For a whole month the algorithm kept showing me only what i was after. Once in every 10 to 15 videos there was an ad or something super viral. Thats it. You control the algorithm. It shows you what you want to watch not the other way around. I also took a tcpdump while the app is closed. Oh boy.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Wow this is the best endorsement for the app. I have been afraid to use Tiktok because I probably won’t like much and I’d get tired of swiping quickly after some time. For the algo to adapt that quickly and remain that way is great. YouTube and IG are dumpster fires in terms of their engagement algo for me.
- npteljes 4y ago
  Please elaborate on the tcpdump angle! What did you discover?
- tmaly 4y ago
  Yes, I would like to hear more about the tcpdump.
throw43235 4y ago
I joined for the first time a few days ago using my gmail account and then selected a few tags like animals, comedy, sports. I only watched about 10 cat videos. Next day I get a notification of a video called "I'm in my 40's, single and I don't have any children". I was shocked. It's impossible for their algorithm to deduce so many facts about me. Which leads me to think that I already have a shadow profile with my gmail address and/or TikTok is somehow working with Google on this.
- reilly3000 4y ago
  Its almost all patterned around dwell time on the videos they feed you. And those tags gave them a really good start TBH. Then they start throwing more Target stuff out and see how you resonate. It’s incredibly clever, but I really don’t think they need 3rd party data to start to infer those things. They don’t even label them like marketers would with traditional categories, it’s graph first and model driven.
- LeonTheremin 4y ago
  TikTok has access to shadow profiles of everyone that includes even their inner speech and body data - all obtained with electromagnetic surveillance using silicon trojans in cell transmitters. And so does Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, all of Big Tech. And so does terrorists recruited on 4chan and KiwiFarms - who use this to create school shooters, sell drugs, change elections, corrupt children, threaten human rights defenders, and stop safe competing companies from challenging Silicon Valley's monopolies. Privacy has long been dead.
Manheim 4y ago
I agree with the author. It is voluntary to use services like TikTok but we should all try try to expose the privacy issues. They should be taken seriuolsy and I believe we need to regulate how TikTok and similar services can harvest and use data. As the author points out this is impossible with TikTok, since it is being run from a dictorial authoritarian regime with no scruples. Everything that is being run from China, Russia or North Korea should worry us, in my opinion. Dismissing problems related to Chinese ownership and surveillance of people is naive. Regarding TikTok as a channel for meaningful content, this is an extraction from an article I posted on LinkedIn this week on the same topic: "The constant stream of clickbait headlines, fast pace video clips, simplified texts and meaningless stories are ... acting as a thick fog that blurs our vision and hides all meaningful information. Social media is good at spreading content, but usually not very meaningful content. Platforms like TikTok are just our time’s linear entertainment TV channels, hyper charged to entertain us a few seconds at a time. Social graph based platforms like Facebook and Twitter are much the same, even though they claim to give us content that fits the interests and activities of the social group we belong to. But regardless of the effect the algorithms the different social media platforms have, they all focus on an attention span of seconds. What they call engagement is often nothing more than a continuous chain of distractions. "
reilly3000 4y ago
Since this forum brings out my inner contrarian, I feel compelled to defend TikTok. I can’t really argue with OP’s assessment of the manipulation built into the UX, but the rest misses the point. The point is the culture on TT is amazing. It’s format and anti-features may have something to do with it, or maybe it’s just the people and the momentum they set. It’s a place where polish isn’t expected, where the most popular content is just silly, unedited, and endearing. You’re more likely to see a person laying in bed with poor lighting than a studio. Their strict comment character count, terrible threading, lack of ability to browse user’s comment history, and no cumulative comment likes count all add up to an ephemeral stream of the tightest and cleverest showing up first. It’s stitch, duet, and video response features turn short form videos into a conversation, and I’ve enjoyed traversing many of such asynchronous dialogs. It’s a powerful authoring platform; it’s inline editing, face tracking filters, and media library make it so easy to make polished content. And it’s (musical.ly’s) original innovation of letting creators reuse each other’s sounds has had majestic results. Users can click on a sound and see dozens to thousands of different takes around the same audio; it’s exhilarating to see real diversity and iteration unfold around the same source material. I disagree that the format is not educational. It has 3-10 min videos which are often richly packed with content and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from historians, reporters, scientists, and enthusiasts. I tend to bounce out to my browser a lot to dig deeper into a subject that I get tipped off about on TikTok. The infamous FYP algorithm is its most popular and controversial feature. It’s a massive neutral net that tracks an insane amount of parameters, many of which you can only get with a video-feed-only platform. It’s been found to be effective at informally clustering people around medical conditions, sexual and political orientations, and more. It’s power of suggestion is terrifying. I’ve noticed a bias towards the more extreme left-wing views, perhaps as an antidote to YouTube’s alt-right pipeline, perhaps in as a subversive pro-CCP thrust. It’s easy to become entranced in a session and not realize that a post or series of them may have been fed with intent to influence a particular subject. I’m still looking for the self-hosted, democratized antidote to TikTok; it’s just that it’s raised the bar so high for platform tools and spawned so many parasocial relationships that it feels insurmountable at times. I would be remiss to not share some content. This video gave me a great chuckle today. Quintessential American TikTok humor, it’s a whole journey: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevmRy/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevmRy/ Here is a creator that does a lot of conversational content. He talks about philosophy, category theory, his apartment decor, and queer aesthetic. This kind of eclecticism is mostly normal, and very different than YouTube’s highly thematic channels. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevgky/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevgky/ Finally, here is one of the news creators I follow. There are many wonderfully talented reporters that bring their own color. This one keeps it really straight: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUdRMLT/?k=1 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUdRMLT/?k=1
makach 4y ago
There are definitively some interesting points in the article, but it seems to miss the point and subjectively focusing on the everything that is bad. Fearmongering is something we need to watch out. The fact that a user use ~75 minutes on the app sounds bad, but in my reality it isn't. kids were watching equally much time on MTV in the 90s if not more. A couple of years back you could say the same things about Facebook. Kids will always spend time on something. It is becomes dangerous when someone claims that it is bad on behalf of someone else. To me, tiktok is a creative platform and as with every thing, you can get addicted. Sure, they data mine my usage in order to retain me as a user - that is what every business is trying to do. I marvel at the knowledge and insight my kids are able to produce on the new technology that is being made available to them. It is our responsibility as parents to make sure that we actively engage in the world our kids are spending their time in order to teach the right and wrong, good and bad etc so that they can be critical thinkers that can navigate the world and the cyber-world in a safe and secure way. Also of course it is not perfect, and there are some issues that needs to be figured out. Maybe Tiktok will be able to sort this out themselves, otherwise they will - as every other piece of technology - be replaced by the next big thing.
_int3_ 4y ago
Well yes sure. But it is not just TikTok. Also Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc... are manipulative, addictive, harmful to privacy... Chinese just figured out the rules of the game and succeeded in making successful application.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Of these, most require phone number and/or real identity. TikTok doesn't. I can watch videos without logging in. It doesn't even ban me for using a VPN. So I reckon it's better for privacy.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  >....manipulative, addictive, harmful to privacy... Only if you use them.
Blahah 4y ago
I really like the proposals at https://attentionsettings.com/ https://attentionsettings.com/ for highlighting and creating agency around interacting with manipulative apps. Last week I installed tiktok for the first time. I lasted one day before deleting my account - the tiktok experience was like being in an interrogation room, or in a social engineering playground. It was very hard to find good content, and I felt I was being coerced into regressing my behaviour to the mean.
friendlypeg 4y ago
It is outrageous that Facebook and Google are banned from operating in China while TikTok is allowed free rein in America.
buraktamturk 4y ago
I really hate China because of their genocide against Uyghurs. But this sentence is pretty unreasonable: "some employees in China, in charge of clearing internal security protocols, can indeed access certain information from United States-based TikTok, such as public videos and comments." I mean no one can prevent anyone to have access to "such as public videos and comments", including the public data in other social media platforms. Other social media platforms are manipulating as well. Including Facebook (Cambridge Analytica) and Twitter (famous journalists accounts blocked in Turkey, for example former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom's tweets can not be seen in Turkey isn't it a manipulation alone? and it has been proven that Turkish Intelligence with Ministry of Internal Affairs using bots to manipulate the social media and Turkish Police regularly posts serious statistics about some hashtags - including the number of tweet belonging to what they call as "terrorists". I mean basically Turkey has more powers on U.S. data than this specific TikTok employee mentioned in the article had).
- buraktamturk 4y ago
  America is a free country. If we are talking about addictions, parents should use built-in or third party software to control their child's screen time, or their online activity - or block specific social media platform altogether. If this kind of addiction is a serious issue, there should be, both public and private, awareness campaigns. Censoring things always backfire, I never saw a case that it worked as intended.
henrikschroder 4y ago
It's addictive because it's fucking hilarious. The amount of glorious micro-comedy I'm getting on the app is off the charts. Last week I had no idea who Emmanuel the emu was. Now I do, and my life is better for it.
- Avamander 4y ago
  The suggestion algorithm is surprisingly fine-grained and stable, that seems to keep people addicted. That's both a positive and a negative, it's also not that easy to end up on the "wrong side of TikTok", with the wrong crowd you don't engage with. Unlike with YouTube and Facebook, I haven't seen close relatives end up in the alt-right/bullshit pipeline. No inane "Elsagate" videos or Fox News.
luizajarovsky 4y ago
Author of the post here: loved to read the discussion and I also learned with your arguments.
helloworld11 4y ago
So.... It's little different from the major American social media sites? Anything to say that's actually new in the world of social network news?
swayvil 4y ago
Is there any mention of the various tik-tok-induced mental diseases going around? Children twitching uncontrollably and such. TikTok is definitely using some high-powered technology to mindfuck their customers/victims. I think that's bad for the health of our society. Heck, advertising is toxic enough.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
- LeonTheremin 4y ago
  Link with example? Seems more like an attack with strong magnetic waves - which is one component used in Havana Syndrome and is used by terrorists with access to microwave weaponry to attack civilians, children included. Real time surveillance of everyone enables oddities like this. Privacy is dead.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - swayvil 4y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=tiktok+twitching&oq=&aqs=chrome.1.69i177j69i59i450l14.-1j0j7&client=ms-android-verizon&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=tiktok+twitching&oq=&aqs=chr...
    - LeonTheremin 4y ago
      All textual discussion, no videos for comparison or inspection. Edit: best one https://YouTube.com/watch?v=ra4-gmQT_50 https://YouTube.com/watch?v=ra4-gmQT_50
pbw 4y ago
Like many TikTok reviewers, she's unknowingly broadcasting to the world her own tastes and preferences in describing "what is on TikTok". TikTok is like the Harry Potter mirror, it shows you exactly what you are looking for. This part is totally wrong, "TikTok is not a suitable place for content that is purely informative or educational". I have seen endless informative and educational videos, thousands of them. She says TikTok videos have to be shocking, irreverent, socially awkward, scary --- she says this because she stopped and watched those videos. That's how it works. Like I describe here[1] there is plenty of good content on TikTok, but you do have to diligently and decisively skip of the bad content to see it. It's baffling that someone doing a PhD in "privacy & data protection" spent 30 days using TikTok without figuring that out. That said, TikTok does contain an infinite amount of junk content, and it's super easy to go down that rabbit hole and never come out. Although... the internet as a whole is the same way: mostly junk, some good stuff you have to work to find. [1] - https://metastable.org/tiktok.html https://metastable.org/tiktok.html

173 points by thm 4y ago

aaron695 4y ago

jerryjerryjerry 4y ago

What can we do with it? Seems hopeless...

Fargoan 4y ago
Just delete it
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Read the reviews...don't even install it.
throwaway_1928 4y ago
India has banned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok#2020_ban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok#2020_ban
- jerryjerryjerry 4y ago
  I like this
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  The US tried but because it was Trump it was bad orange man mentality towards the ban. I wish we could do away with social media in general. It’s horrible.
  - warning26 4y ago
    That so-called "ban" would have just left TikTok under the ownership of Trump's buddy Larry Ellison -- would this really have improved anything? Struck me as entirely performative.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      He tried to force a sale to remove the link to the CCP. Here in Taiwan I blocked tiktok because just signing up and scrolling displays anti America content. It’s a platform for pushing the CCP propaganda. How many times do I need to see “covid is caused by america” videos?
      - skinnymuch 4y ago
        How many times do I need to see Covid is caused by China being nefarious? Or rich people worked hard for their money. Or whatever other uptight rigid status quo bullshit permeates most facets of western life.
tjpnz 4y ago
Don't use it and if you have children with access to mobile devices take steps to ensure they can't use it.
- jerryjerryjerry 4y ago
  And then we are probably in a loop to tell our children the same thing, "don't use it" which really depends on how well one can do self-control, but I guess that's one of the hardest parts to many people.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  It's easy to say don't use it. The difficulty is getting buy-in from kids, when all their friends are in it and using it as a cultural reference.

endisneigh 4y ago

TikTok isn’t great, but fortunately most of us have the freedom to simply not use it. The authors conclusion around potential regulation is, though well intentioned, misguided. Hopefully through more posts like theirs we can have better conversations around addictive technology and teach the younger and more impressionable members of our society how to moderate tech use. Since this is a tech forum - some interesting technological solutions to this could be: 1. Headless app use with updates. Some affordance that you can setup that will open the app, take some actions and give you back the summary. In the case of TikTok you could use this to build your own notification. Maybe only go on if this hypothetical tech tells you something is really, really popular. 2. Reset mode. The OS trains a model on your gestures and you can tell it to tell you if you’ve been making a “brainless action” too many times for too long. In the case of TikTok this would be mindlessly swiping up.

deepsun 4y ago
Unlike WeChat in China.
alphabetting 4y ago
For me as an american, i'm just uncomfortable with the most popular app among children being under the control of an adversary. When I hear about the Chinese version of tiktok censoring heavily and promoting positive content about community values and STEM while our version promotes twerking and convinces teens they have mental disorders it makes me want it banned. I get that's antithetical to western values of freedom but it seems like a real threat to me.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  I don’t use TikTok but my understanding is that the feed pretty much adjusts to what you promote yourself.
  - sinalalgedonico 4y ago
    this comment assumes we always take actions that optimize our life long-term and that our cognition stays invariant as we consume content, TikTok is hacking our cognition my dude. It's a disgusting system.

hericium 4y ago

> it is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy I mean, it's "social media".

eurasiantiger 4y ago
Which in itself is a neologism intended to convey that the thing in question is somehow social, and a ”medium” to boot.

NoPicklez 4y ago

Animats 4y ago

And ahead of anything Silicon Valley has in compelling engagement. This is the beginning of the end of US social media. The other side is better at it.

waynesonfire 4y ago
You are over estimating this space. Fb is already competing here. They have begun an ad share revenue model with people who upload videos.
- warning26 4y ago
  Meta's pathetic attempts at shoehorning rEeLs into anything and everything can, should, and will fail.
warning26 4y ago
Let's hope all of it gets banned, US and foreign alike!
friendlypeg 4y ago
Please name one Chinese social media company that is "better" at these social media categories. Group/Newsfeed: Facebook (Baidu Tieba is China only) Longform videos: YouTube (Bilibili is China only) Messenger: WhatsApp, iMessenger (WeChat is mostly China and some SEA countries) Photo: Instagram Microblogging: Twitter (Weibo is China only) VR: Meta/Steam (TikTok has Pico, we will see how it will do internationally) Live stream: Twitch/YouTube (No idea how popular TikTok is in this category)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

eloisius 4y ago

I don’t like that it’s compromised by the CCP, but TikTok is in fact fun and enjoyable. People here act like it’s a new phenomenon, rotting children’s brains out. We’ve vegetated in front of TV for generations, and somehow survived. The fact is, people need some mindless downtime to cope with life, and TikTok is at least entertaining. Ban it and then what? Watch the weird viral factory worker videos on Instagram reels?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
npteljes 4y ago
Somehow surviving is a pretty low bar. We, as a human race, survived every disaster, horror and mistreatment so far. It doesn't mean that they are okay and that we don't need to take action. As to what that action is, I have no idea.

kennethh 4y ago

I think we need to regulate some aspects of the social media apps espesially for the young in the same manner we have rules and regulations for tobacco, gambling and alchol. We see from experience/research that people are less happy after the profilation of social media and if it is harmful to socieicty then there should be more bounderies. I have a 9 year old kid and do not look forward to a world where all the kids are addicted to social media. I think China shows the way on some possible restrictions with focus on protecting young people.

stingraycharles 4y ago

Ok I’m not saying the OP is wrong, but couldn’t almost all of these arguments be made for Facebook / Instagram / Snapchat / etc as well? In general, social media has all these problems with addiction, platforms actively try to exploit that, and harvest data to monetise upon their users. From the article: “With these astounding numbers, TikTok must have something special, right? “Well it has. It uses manipulative user experience (UX) design to keep users glued to it. It is built to trigger compulsive use, especially in more impressionable audiences such as teenagers. It is also harmful to privacy.” Nothing of this list makes TikTok special, the only thing that makes it special is that it’s Chinese, and therefor subjected to more scrutiny (not claiming whether that’s justified or not, that’s another discussion in itself).

markdown 4y ago
> not claiming whether that’s justified or not Spoiler: it's justified.
ricardobeat 4y ago
In short, no. TikTok is the first to have a public feed by default, not based on friends, plus the vertical swiping that forces you to see all the content it suggests. Its design and usage patterns are significantly different from all the others you mentioned.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
  That is not relevant to the general point. The article punchline is > It uses manipulative user experience (UX) design to keep users glued to it. It is built to trigger compulsive use, especially in more impressionable audiences such as teenagers. It is also harmful to privacy. Facebook / Instagram used manipulative user experience design, even if it didn't manifest as a vertical swipe or public feed. While the details may be different, the overall problem was just as true back then as it is now
  - refulgentis 4y ago
    I see you're ensuring we understand Facebook and Instagram also optimize for engagement, I think the novelty here, for me at least, was the differences from Facebook and Instagram are quite significant.

mbgerring 4y ago

All algorithmic media feeds should be banned, and this is especially true of platforms subject to explicit state censorship and control

sinalalgedonico 4y ago
Yes but no. It's best to give the knobs for the people to control the algorithm and it's shown for them. Also make the algorithm transparent to the user
16amxn16 4y ago
Banned by who? The state? Wouldn't that be considered state censorship and control?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
charcircuit 4y ago
There is too much information on the internet. There is always going to be an algorithm on how it should be sorted for your consumption.
Ekaros 4y ago
And what is the alternative? Purely random from all of the content on platform?
- mbgerring 4y ago
  Yeah it was called RSS and it was great

lmm 4y ago

Meh, TikTok is fine. If 83% of users are making posts of their own, that very much contradicts the notion that every user is a passive slack-jawed zombie. If TikTok is more interactive than its competitors and encourages a back-and-forth on popular topics, isn't that a good thing? And while there are certainly topics that demand long-form explaination, there are also an awful lot of cases where the current presentation is just gratuitously long (e.g. when I needed to top up my boiler up to pressure, a 3 second video could absolutely have shown me how to do it, but on YouTube everything is padded to 8 minutes instead). Kids these days are thinking faster and demanding you get to the point more quickly: again, isnt' that a good thing rather than a bad one? Parents exploiting their children on social media is a problem, but by no means one unique for TikTok. And as a non-American I have zero sympathy for all the handwringing about how a shady foreign intelligence agency can be slurping up your personal information with no oversight; yeah, welcome to how the NSA has been treating the rest of us for our whole lives, a country that bugs the heads of state of their supposed allies has no leg to stand on here.

efitz 4y ago

There aren’t that many comments on this article yet but most of the comments that are here are pretty shallow and dismissive. Unlike many posts, I read the entire article. I think the author does a reasonable job of describing how TikTok exploits human biology to increase “engagement”. They aren’t unique in this; Casinos have been doing this for decades; Zynga canonicalized this in games and social media has been lurching this way for over a decade. TikTok is difficult to disengage from. For some it’s easier than for others. It would be interesting to see statistics to gauge users’ various level of addictive/compulsive behavior in the app. Here’s a hypothetical question- should there be a limit on how addictive we allow something to become? We limit nicotine content in cigarettes; we ban or highly regulate many drugs. “Under the hood” the drugs we ban are affecting neural pathways; why should it matter if you’re ingesting a substance vs having similar effects via psychological manipulation? I don’t claim to have the right answer and in the USA attempts to limit the app will run up against free speech concerns. But I do think that TikTok is bad for humans and bad for society.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
silisili 4y ago
> should there be a limit on how addictive we allow something to become? Good question. IMO, yes. Drugs are often considered dangerous not only for what they do to users, but how users behave to get their next fix. If social media can ever get to heroin without the whole death thing, all that's left is the fix problem. A properly addicted person will not be able to hold a job, may have to resort to crime to pay for their data. A stretch, maybe? Or maybe it becomes like porn addictions where people need more extreme content for their fix. I'd say either are realistic and scary outcomes. If I had my way we'd ban smartphones. Yes, the same one I type this comment on. I'd give up this for everyone unplugging, and not being an idiot in public and a danger when driving. Small cost.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  The way the world has enforced drugs as crime has been a massive massive failure. The worst thing we have done is be puritanical, judgemental, and ready to throw the book at drug crimes. Based off that we shouldn’t touch social media or smart phones or anything.

backtoyoujim 4y ago

US American developers steal privacy like _this_, but Chinese developers steal privacy like -this- !

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

imperialdrive 4y ago

30d <- is that the new way to abbreviate days? Never seen that before. TIL

fsiefken 4y ago
No? The increment syntax is in org-mode and logseq and I regularly use it to to specify seconds or minutes in audio or video like this: 3m2s. https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/tasks%20%26%20todos https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/tasks%20%26%20todos https://orgmode.org/manual/Repeated-tasks.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Repeated-tasks.html

makeitdouble 4y ago

This is article is so hard to follow. The very aggressive bits are linked to articles supposedly backing their point with more substance, but those are same level think pieces who reference other think pieces who are based on misconceptions, and we never hit any solid ground. For instance: > The videos are in autoplay and shown in an endless scroll. These are features known for triggering addictive behavior and there were legislative plans in the United States to ban them. Following “triggering addictive behavior” goes to thenextweb.com’s rant on autoplay. which posits autoplay is “hijacking your thought process”, with a link to a medium post Which on autoplay, explains that “Another way to hijack people is to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore”, linking that analysis on the age old debunked Brian Wansink‘s bowl of cereal experiment. So many other of these very assertive declarations have 3 to 5 levels of redirection to finally hit some disappointing justification. The general message being vaguely consensual, it’s hard to see what this piece is actually bringing to the table.

benjaminwootton 4y ago
Was there ever any serious discussion about regulating addictive social media by banning auto play? That would definetly be an escalation if governments start regulating social media product features, and TikTok definetly wouldn’t be the first!
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  That’s an interesting point. Up until now I feel we didn’t reach anything near that because in the generic case autoplay can be disabled (might be by default ?) in browsers, as it’s an overall obnoxious feature. The case left are specific apps, and for Netflix or other traditional video streaming platforms, proving it’s against the user’s interests would be super tough (even proving it has addictive effects wouldn’t be enough, as the user could be willingly requesting these addictive effects) Social media could be a separate case, as culturally we put it in a different bucket, but then limitations would probably only apply to specific demographics (basically kids younger than 13 or 18 ?) and clear those older on liberty of choice grounds. I think the viewer would need to be directly losing money or being in physical harm to see any kind of regulation on these features.

silisili 4y ago

I can see it, but not with myself. Maybe I'm getting old or just depressed into not feeling dopamine anymore but TikTok has the effect of only annoying me. Constant sound streams, fake voices, etc. It reminds me of Vegas in some ways...loads of people love the flashing lights, I just run away. But I see it with my wife and daughter, it turns them into complete zombies. All this to say, I don't know what it's like to speak effectively as a 'victim.' But as a bystander, I feel something should probably be done...I just don't know what. Anything this addictive cannot be good for society.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
retrac 4y ago
> It reminds me of Vegas in some ways. You're quite on the nose. An acquaintance is fond of watching TikTok videos. One day when he's visiting my partner, there's just this weird noise in the house. Somewhere between the sound played by the lottery ticket scanners upon winning, an ice cream truck, a fire alarm, and some 80s video game effect sounds. Gosh it's annoying. It goes away. Then comes back. What is that? TikTok! I've noticed that almost exact same sound fairly often since it came to my explicit awareness, in social media video clips, and sometimes advertisements. I suspect it's about the most attention-grabbing sound, for most people.

s1mon 4y ago

TikTok is manipulative, addictive and I do wonder about privacy, but there are a number of factual errors in this post which make me question what axe the writer has to grind. There are plenty of videos over a minute long. Yes, many are quite short, and creators aren’t allowed to post longer ones until they’ve have enough followers. However, recently TikTok upped the max time to 10 minutes. Short videos don’t have a timeline, but longer ones do, so saying “There is no signalization of progress or duration of the experience” is wrong. “the user cannot scroll up fast and jump a few videos” While you can’t literally avoid a fraction of a second of a video playing if you’re trying to skip, you can skip ahead a few videos pretty quickly. There’s also modes where you look at all of a creators video, or search for something and see a bunch. In those cases you can scroll past many smaller videos at once.

Imnimo 4y ago

>TikTok wants you hooked since you log in. The first page after you open the app is the “For You” page, where short videos carefully selected to grab your attention will be displayed. The videos are shown in full portrait mode, occupying almost all the device’s interface. Am I supposed to think this is an unreasonable way for a video app to present its content?

the_common_man 4y ago
Yeah, truly some absurd statements in the article . It's like saying the article wanted to hook me in by having a title.

doubleorseven 4y ago

I did a little experiment a while ago, I've watched only videos of girls using their body to promote their videos. I went into their accounts and watched and liked everything where body parts were a huge deal in the video. It took me an hour to have my for you page filled with girls showing off. I let the algorithm go like this for a week and then i changed tactics. Every video starting with a woman, i would swipe away. I didn't even knew what the video was about. I combined it with looking up videos about food, plants and life hacks. After an hour the girls were long gone. For a whole month the algorithm kept showing me only what i was after. Once in every 10 to 15 videos there was an ad or something super viral. Thats it. You control the algorithm. It shows you what you want to watch not the other way around. I also took a tcpdump while the app is closed. Oh boy.

skinnymuch 4y ago
Wow this is the best endorsement for the app. I have been afraid to use Tiktok because I probably won’t like much and I’d get tired of swiping quickly after some time. For the algo to adapt that quickly and remain that way is great. YouTube and IG are dumpster fires in terms of their engagement algo for me.
npteljes 4y ago
Please elaborate on the tcpdump angle! What did you discover?
tmaly 4y ago
Yes, I would like to hear more about the tcpdump.

throw43235 4y ago

I joined for the first time a few days ago using my gmail account and then selected a few tags like animals, comedy, sports. I only watched about 10 cat videos. Next day I get a notification of a video called "I'm in my 40's, single and I don't have any children". I was shocked. It's impossible for their algorithm to deduce so many facts about me. Which leads me to think that I already have a shadow profile with my gmail address and/or TikTok is somehow working with Google on this.

reilly3000 4y ago
Its almost all patterned around dwell time on the videos they feed you. And those tags gave them a really good start TBH. Then they start throwing more Target stuff out and see how you resonate. It’s incredibly clever, but I really don’t think they need 3rd party data to start to infer those things. They don’t even label them like marketers would with traditional categories, it’s graph first and model driven.
LeonTheremin 4y ago
TikTok has access to shadow profiles of everyone that includes even their inner speech and body data - all obtained with electromagnetic surveillance using silicon trojans in cell transmitters. And so does Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, all of Big Tech. And so does terrorists recruited on 4chan and KiwiFarms - who use this to create school shooters, sell drugs, change elections, corrupt children, threaten human rights defenders, and stop safe competing companies from challenging Silicon Valley's monopolies. Privacy has long been dead.

Manheim 4y ago

I agree with the author. It is voluntary to use services like TikTok but we should all try try to expose the privacy issues. They should be taken seriuolsy and I believe we need to regulate how TikTok and similar services can harvest and use data. As the author points out this is impossible with TikTok, since it is being run from a dictorial authoritarian regime with no scruples. Everything that is being run from China, Russia or North Korea should worry us, in my opinion. Dismissing problems related to Chinese ownership and surveillance of people is naive. Regarding TikTok as a channel for meaningful content, this is an extraction from an article I posted on LinkedIn this week on the same topic: "The constant stream of clickbait headlines, fast pace video clips, simplified texts and meaningless stories are ... acting as a thick fog that blurs our vision and hides all meaningful information. Social media is good at spreading content, but usually not very meaningful content. Platforms like TikTok are just our time’s linear entertainment TV channels, hyper charged to entertain us a few seconds at a time. Social graph based platforms like Facebook and Twitter are much the same, even though they claim to give us content that fits the interests and activities of the social group we belong to. But regardless of the effect the algorithms the different social media platforms have, they all focus on an attention span of seconds. What they call engagement is often nothing more than a continuous chain of distractions. "

reilly3000 4y ago

Since this forum brings out my inner contrarian, I feel compelled to defend TikTok. I can’t really argue with OP’s assessment of the manipulation built into the UX, but the rest misses the point. The point is the culture on TT is amazing. It’s format and anti-features may have something to do with it, or maybe it’s just the people and the momentum they set. It’s a place where polish isn’t expected, where the most popular content is just silly, unedited, and endearing. You’re more likely to see a person laying in bed with poor lighting than a studio. Their strict comment character count, terrible threading, lack of ability to browse user’s comment history, and no cumulative comment likes count all add up to an ephemeral stream of the tightest and cleverest showing up first. It’s stitch, duet, and video response features turn short form videos into a conversation, and I’ve enjoyed traversing many of such asynchronous dialogs. It’s a powerful authoring platform; it’s inline editing, face tracking filters, and media library make it so easy to make polished content. And it’s (musical.ly’s) original innovation of letting creators reuse each other’s sounds has had majestic results. Users can click on a sound and see dozens to thousands of different takes around the same audio; it’s exhilarating to see real diversity and iteration unfold around the same source material. I disagree that the format is not educational. It has 3-10 min videos which are often richly packed with content and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from historians, reporters, scientists, and enthusiasts. I tend to bounce out to my browser a lot to dig deeper into a subject that I get tipped off about on TikTok. The infamous FYP algorithm is its most popular and controversial feature. It’s a massive neutral net that tracks an insane amount of parameters, many of which you can only get with a video-feed-only platform. It’s been found to be effective at informally clustering people around medical conditions, sexual and political orientations, and more. It’s power of suggestion is terrifying. I’ve noticed a bias towards the more extreme left-wing views, perhaps as an antidote to YouTube’s alt-right pipeline, perhaps in as a subversive pro-CCP thrust. It’s easy to become entranced in a session and not realize that a post or series of them may have been fed with intent to influence a particular subject. I’m still looking for the self-hosted, democratized antidote to TikTok; it’s just that it’s raised the bar so high for platform tools and spawned so many parasocial relationships that it feels insurmountable at times. I would be remiss to not share some content. This video gave me a great chuckle today. Quintessential American TikTok humor, it’s a whole journey: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevmRy/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevmRy/ Here is a creator that does a lot of conversational content. He talks about philosophy, category theory, his apartment decor, and queer aesthetic. This kind of eclecticism is mostly normal, and very different than YouTube’s highly thematic channels. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevgky/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevgky/ Finally, here is one of the news creators I follow. There are many wonderfully talented reporters that bring their own color. This one keeps it really straight: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUdRMLT/?k=1 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUdRMLT/?k=1

makach 4y ago

There are definitively some interesting points in the article, but it seems to miss the point and subjectively focusing on the everything that is bad. Fearmongering is something we need to watch out. The fact that a user use ~75 minutes on the app sounds bad, but in my reality it isn't. kids were watching equally much time on MTV in the 90s if not more. A couple of years back you could say the same things about Facebook. Kids will always spend time on something. It is becomes dangerous when someone claims that it is bad on behalf of someone else. To me, tiktok is a creative platform and as with every thing, you can get addicted. Sure, they data mine my usage in order to retain me as a user - that is what every business is trying to do. I marvel at the knowledge and insight my kids are able to produce on the new technology that is being made available to them. It is our responsibility as parents to make sure that we actively engage in the world our kids are spending their time in order to teach the right and wrong, good and bad etc so that they can be critical thinkers that can navigate the world and the cyber-world in a safe and secure way. Also of course it is not perfect, and there are some issues that needs to be figured out. Maybe Tiktok will be able to sort this out themselves, otherwise they will - as every other piece of technology - be replaced by the next big thing.

_int3_ 4y ago

Well yes sure. But it is not just TikTok. Also Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc... are manipulative, addictive, harmful to privacy... Chinese just figured out the rules of the game and succeeded in making successful application.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Of these, most require phone number and/or real identity. TikTok doesn't. I can watch videos without logging in. It doesn't even ban me for using a VPN. So I reckon it's better for privacy.
InCityDreams 4y ago
>....manipulative, addictive, harmful to privacy... Only if you use them.

Blahah 4y ago

I really like the proposals at https://attentionsettings.com/ https://attentionsettings.com/ for highlighting and creating agency around interacting with manipulative apps. Last week I installed tiktok for the first time. I lasted one day before deleting my account - the tiktok experience was like being in an interrogation room, or in a social engineering playground. It was very hard to find good content, and I felt I was being coerced into regressing my behaviour to the mean.

friendlypeg 4y ago

It is outrageous that Facebook and Google are banned from operating in China while TikTok is allowed free rein in America.

buraktamturk 4y ago

I really hate China because of their genocide against Uyghurs. But this sentence is pretty unreasonable: "some employees in China, in charge of clearing internal security protocols, can indeed access certain information from United States-based TikTok, such as public videos and comments." I mean no one can prevent anyone to have access to "such as public videos and comments", including the public data in other social media platforms. Other social media platforms are manipulating as well. Including Facebook (Cambridge Analytica) and Twitter (famous journalists accounts blocked in Turkey, for example former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom's tweets can not be seen in Turkey isn't it a manipulation alone? and it has been proven that Turkish Intelligence with Ministry of Internal Affairs using bots to manipulate the social media and Turkish Police regularly posts serious statistics about some hashtags - including the number of tweet belonging to what they call as "terrorists". I mean basically Turkey has more powers on U.S. data than this specific TikTok employee mentioned in the article had).

buraktamturk 4y ago
America is a free country. If we are talking about addictions, parents should use built-in or third party software to control their child's screen time, or their online activity - or block specific social media platform altogether. If this kind of addiction is a serious issue, there should be, both public and private, awareness campaigns. Censoring things always backfire, I never saw a case that it worked as intended.

henrikschroder 4y ago

It's addictive because it's fucking hilarious. The amount of glorious micro-comedy I'm getting on the app is off the charts. Last week I had no idea who Emmanuel the emu was. Now I do, and my life is better for it.

Avamander 4y ago
The suggestion algorithm is surprisingly fine-grained and stable, that seems to keep people addicted. That's both a positive and a negative, it's also not that easy to end up on the "wrong side of TikTok", with the wrong crowd you don't engage with. Unlike with YouTube and Facebook, I haven't seen close relatives end up in the alt-right/bullshit pipeline. No inane "Elsagate" videos or Fox News.

luizajarovsky 4y ago

Author of the post here: loved to read the discussion and I also learned with your arguments.

helloworld11 4y ago

So.... It's little different from the major American social media sites? Anything to say that's actually new in the world of social network news?

swayvil 4y ago

Is there any mention of the various tik-tok-induced mental diseases going around? Children twitching uncontrollably and such. TikTok is definitely using some high-powered technology to mindfuck their customers/victims. I think that's bad for the health of our society. Heck, advertising is toxic enough.

skinnymuch 4y ago
LeonTheremin 4y ago
Link with example? Seems more like an attack with strong magnetic waves - which is one component used in Havana Syndrome and is used by terrorists with access to microwave weaponry to attack civilians, children included. Real time surveillance of everyone enables oddities like this. Privacy is dead.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- swayvil 4y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=tiktok+twitching&oq=&aqs=chrome.1.69i177j69i59i450l14.-1j0j7&client=ms-android-verizon&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=tiktok+twitching&oq=&aqs=chr...
  - LeonTheremin 4y ago
    All textual discussion, no videos for comparison or inspection. Edit: best one https://YouTube.com/watch?v=ra4-gmQT_50 https://YouTube.com/watch?v=ra4-gmQT_50

pbw 4y ago

Like many TikTok reviewers, she's unknowingly broadcasting to the world her own tastes and preferences in describing "what is on TikTok". TikTok is like the Harry Potter mirror, it shows you exactly what you are looking for. This part is totally wrong, "TikTok is not a suitable place for content that is purely informative or educational". I have seen endless informative and educational videos, thousands of them. She says TikTok videos have to be shocking, irreverent, socially awkward, scary --- she says this because she stopped and watched those videos. That's how it works. Like I describe here[1] there is plenty of good content on TikTok, but you do have to diligently and decisively skip of the bad content to see it. It's baffling that someone doing a PhD in "privacy & data protection" spent 30 days using TikTok without figuring that out. That said, TikTok does contain an infinite amount of junk content, and it's super easy to go down that rabbit hole and never come out. Although... the internet as a whole is the same way: mostly junk, some good stuff you have to work to find. [1] - https://metastable.org/tiktok.html https://metastable.org/tiktok.html