4 ms·

Couldn't agree more. Lots of responses about 'I only see funny comedians' or 'Tik Tok is only about dumb entertaining videos', etc. This misses the forest thr

Couldn't agree more. Lots of responses about 'I only see funny comedians' or 'Tik Tok is only about dumb entertaining videos', etc. This misses the forest through the trees. The dumb videos are the mechanism through which a foreign and often hostile world power is able to create a profile on millions of americans and learn everything about them. All this data is fed back into other Chinese government groups and organizations which leverage it to determine how to best spread divisiveness, propaganda, misinformation and more through all the other platforms (FB, Twitter, News, etc). The funny videos is the honey pot trap to collect all the data to create profiles, it may or may not be the primary way the Chinese government then uses that information to influence or nudge people but it informs and empowers all of that. Also, TikTok's algorithm is specific and targeted. Just because your feed is only funny videos doesn't mean everyone else's are too. Even if everyone in your 'group' sees the same funny videos, there are many other groups that have entirely different feeds and many other variants. This has nothing to do with free speech, no one is saying you can't say this but not that on TikTok. This is about the existence and allowance of it in the first place. Plenty of other forums for the speech. I wonder how people would react to this issue if TikTok had come from Iran or North Korea rather than China.

trunnell 4y ago
You're right, this is probably the main problem (rather than the ability to change the content on TikTok.) So you're implying that their future influence operations could be enhanced and better targeted by using profile-level viewing history on TikTok, similar to how Cambridge Analytica used FB profile data to target political advertising?
- bern4444 4y ago
  Exactly, TikTok is for information gathering and profiling so the government can know what swaths of the population to target more effectively for whatever goal they have. What's valuable is all the information they can gather: contacts, age group, political affiliations, interest, geographic location, race, gender, interests. Everything that happens in TikTok is monitored and tracked even the in app web viewer that shows when you click a link. All activity in that is tracked (the page, duration, links you visit etc). These problems of security/privacy obviously exist for other foreign and domestic companies, TikTok is one of the most egregious and more threatening because the US has no recourse against it. At least if it were a US company, they could become subject to US laws requiring better data management, anonymization, require deletions on request etc. Being a foreign owned and operated entity means it is subject to no existing US laws and will never be subject to future US laws.

trunnell 4y ago

You're right, this is probably the main problem (rather than the ability to change the content on TikTok.) So you're implying that their future influence operations could be enhanced and better targeted by using profile-level viewing history on TikTok, similar to how Cambridge Analytica used FB profile data to target political advertising?

bern4444 4y ago
Exactly, TikTok is for information gathering and profiling so the government can know what swaths of the population to target more effectively for whatever goal they have. What's valuable is all the information they can gather: contacts, age group, political affiliations, interest, geographic location, race, gender, interests. Everything that happens in TikTok is monitored and tracked even the in app web viewer that shows when you click a link. All activity in that is tracked (the page, duration, links you visit etc). These problems of security/privacy obviously exist for other foreign and domestic companies, TikTok is one of the most egregious and more threatening because the US has no recourse against it. At least if it were a US company, they could become subject to US laws requiring better data management, anonymization, require deletions on request etc. Being a foreign owned and operated entity means it is subject to no existing US laws and will never be subject to future US laws.