9 ms·

I don't know how true it is, but allegedly[1] the algorithm of tiktok in china is tuned to promote achievements and education, while in the western world it pro

I don't know how true it is, but allegedly[1] the algorithm of tiktok in china is tuned to promote achievements and education, while in the western world it promotes debauchery and stupidity. Doesn't take a huge leap to think it could be intentional.. [1] https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-other-countries-porn-twerking/ https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...

tempsy 4y ago
i think that’s specific to kids
Jochim 4y ago
It's not true you can see for yourself: https://douyin.com/ https://douyin.com/ On TikTok you largely just get more of what you've already engaged with. If you're using the platform for porn you're going to get a lot of it. If you like and engage with scientific/political content you'll rarely, if ever, see a video of someone dancing. edit: It's anecdotal but having taken a look at TikTok's web feed: https://www.tiktok.com/foryou https://www.tiktok.com/foryou. The content there was less sexual than the purportedly sanitised Douyin.
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  Unless I go to china, download the app on a chinese phone and use it, I cannot see for myself.
  - Jochim 4y ago
    You could easily see for yourself by visiting the link in the previous comment. For what it's worth. Four out of the first five videos I saw on Douyin were sexualised in some way, the first was of a train driver. I scrolled through 20 or 30 of the videos on TikTok's website and didn't find anything close.
    - dkn 4y ago
      I think the parent poster is pointing out that there are more ways of discriminating traffic than just a domain name. Such as geographic location, device IDs, etc. All of which are commonly used. It's not proof of what is being claimed, but they are variables that would need to be controlled before being confident that Douyin is or is not adjusting content to foreign or domestic users.
      - Jochim 4y ago
        I did consider that. Traffic discrimination certainly occurs. However, I don't believe it's presence supports the claim in this case. The original claim is that Douyin promotes "wholesome" educational content, whereas TikTok is manipulating the west with pornography and other depravities. Anecdotal observations gathered through the web UI of each app, as an anonymous user, were that Douyin presented "pornographic" content, whereas TikTok did not. The original claim only stands if we accept that ByteDance is: * Allowing a vast quantity of sexually explicit content to be posted to Douyin. * Not showing that content to their users in China but only to western users of Douyin, despite being presented entirely in Chinese. While also: * Targeting western users of TikTok with pornography and explicit videos. * Not showing any of that content in their web UI, despite it quickly becoming the entirety of the Douyin one. I find it hard to believe that this would be the case. A sanitised Douyin and depraved TikTok, or both being depraved, would have supported the idea. The behaviour that was observed runs entirely counter to the claim. Frankly, the opinion does not appear to be grounded in reality but comes instead from a place of insecurity regarding our social values. Consider whether any western platform promotes science and engineering over pornography, Twitter and Instagram allow much more explicit content than TikTok, and then ask why TikTok seems to have been singled out.
        4gotunameagain 4y ago
        Think about it a bit more clearly. Douyin in china might be entirely different than the douyin you see when you check it out with a western ip. By checking douyin.com from my device, my ip and my advertising fingerprint, I cannot have any clue how douyin behaves if I download it from a chinese phone, in china.
analyst74 4y ago
That's completely untrue. I can't say if the algorithm is the same. In my short experience of using Douyin for the past couple weeks, I get zero education content, but a surprising amount of content about inequality and injustices.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Devil's advocate: you'd need to be in both countries on different device IDs. If you go US -> visit to China, their algorithm "knows" this as opposed to "you are in China and have never been to US before". Just a guess.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Ah, yes, your anecdata is proof. Not that OP's claims are proof - but your anecdata does not disprove it.
- retrac 4y ago
  > but a surprising amount of content about inequality and injustices Is it inequality and injustice. where pointing it out. would actually threaten the power of the CCP? When I started reading Chinese language media I was surprised how much apparent criticism there is -- but if you read carefully, anything approved in the PRC is always criticism of individuals, or maybe corporations, more rarely a local government, doing something that's already supposed to be officially prohibited, or which is not too sensitive, and never criticizes core official policy or high-ranking CCP members. Which is how you can have anti-corruption, anti-sex scandal, anti-pollution news commentary, or even protests and marches, in China. But should official permission to disagree be withdrawn, the topic can very quickly become taboo. A couple years ago there was ongoing discussion in Chinese media about same-sex marriage and a member of the Yuan even introduced a bill to make same-sex marriage legal in China. Voted down. But an acceptable topic to discuss, not officially taboo. I suspect that has changed recently, with the campaign against the apparent feminization of Chinese men and now explicitly linking LGBT rights with the Western agenda. That shift, as I understand it, comes directly from Xi.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> while in the western world it promotes debauchery and stupidity. Isn't the narrative "that's what the western world consumers more of/wants" versus "China values achievements and education more than debauchery and stupidity"?
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  We are talking about kids. They will want what you teach them to want. With parents working insane hours in the US and outsourcing the socialisation and education of kids to electronics and corporations with perverse incentives, with local communities practically gone in an urban lifestyle, we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked.
  - noufalibrahim 4y ago
    This is true. Tiktok is the current problem but there's going to be a lot of stuff like this that the world is going to throw at kids. It's the parents responsibility to curate the world the their kids are exposed to and build up their defences for all the crap that they're going to finally encounter.
    - smolder 4y ago
      I think it's also the responsibility of societies participants to not seek profit from activities that harm and undermine the society they're a part of. If all we do is play zero sum games and try to get as much money as possible from the people around us for the least effort, you end up with this modern-west mess where we're all shooting each other's feet off to be the tallest instead of... building stools?
  - BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
    > we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked. Agreed on the first point, disagree on the second. I think it’s a fixable problem. Addicts can recover and further damage can be avoided.
bootwoot 4y ago
This is possible. But the the evidence in that link is Tucker Carlson. I don't think we can know whether this is actually happening and we're seeing a lot of speculation about what China could or would do given the power they have through moderation of TikTok. The possibility of China abusing content moderation might be enough to throw out the app altogether. But the only "evidence" we currently have is guessing at what China might do and people in media amplifying that discomfort.
Hitton 4y ago
I would think that CCP just forces them to penalize certain things (and maybe promote other things) and in the west they merely don't do that (both for engagement and to avoid getting canceled for censoring certain topics). Compared to other social media it doesn't seem that "debauchery and stupidity" is more prominent there.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  This is it. Douyin follows Chinese law, while TikTok doesn't. It has independent editorial control, which ends up very similar to other social media in the same environment.
kranke155 4y ago
I think an American comedian said this and it become a meme repeated by the right wing us media. The comedian has said it’s BS.
- robopsychology 4y ago
  Do you have a source for this?
  - bagels 4y ago
    I probably saw the same claim and admission that the parent poster did: https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E
nineplay 4y ago
It's the conspiracy theory I 100% believe in. I don't think the reason to ban TikTok is that it gathers information, I think the reason to ban it is that its ranking algorithm is deliberately destructive. Maybe it's a coincidence that all the dangerous stunts and vandalism "pranks" come from TikTok and not Meta and Twitter, but I don't buy it. I'm leftist liberal and I have no particular paranoia about China, but I'm not going to pretend that we are besties Edit: I won't remove the classification of myself as "leftist liberal" because it would make some of the replies to my comment confusing. I will apologize for it because it has derailed the discussion of China and TikTok. In the future I'll be more specific and avoid labels that no two people can agree on. Suffice to say that I don't believe China deliberately created and released Covid.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  > I'm a completely leftist liberal I'm confused. Do you think the CPP is liberal? It's very authoritarian.
  - justsocrateasin 4y ago
    How are you under the impression OP that thinks the CPP is liberal??
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      Maybe they're a LLM and got confused by the keyword "conspiracy theory" and the double negative in the statement.
      - vlunkr 4y ago
        Shhh
  - GordonS 4y ago
    I'm not the OP, but I read that qualification as meaning "I'm not some right-wing nutter that's paranoid about Red Danger, and I don't believe everything mainstream media tells me".
RC_ITR 4y ago
>I don't know how true it is It may be true on the margin, but Douyin is full of 'Key Opinion Leaders' who at best pay lip service to education and attainment. It's even worse on Kuaishou (Douyin for more rural areas). [0] I always kind of bristle at the argument that this is somehow impacting what kids want too - PBS exists and spams their content as far and wide as possible, but US kids still end up preferring Cocomelon, Gabby's Doll House, etc. There's no reason to believe that Chinese youth just take what's given to them when there are literally millions of random livestreams (hard to regulate livestreamed content at that level) going on at any given time. As usual with China, what's likely going on is that someone is the CCP wants it to be true, so they 'make it true' and US media without local context takes it at face value. [0]https://jingdaily.com/2022-top-six-chinese-kols-you-need-to-know-liu-genghong-filxiaobai/ https://jingdaily.com/2022-top-six-chinese-kols-you-need-to-...
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
dingusdew 4y ago
[dead]
throw7 4y ago
That was my question. Is the algorithm exactly same across the world, including inside China?
fasterik 4y ago
From Wikipedia: "OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news website that frequently publishes misinformation." To me, it seems much more likely that China is just censoring TikTok like they censor every other platform, while the rest of the world sees a standard recommendation algorithm. "Debauchery and stupidity" is a subjective, sanctimonious phrase that doesn't really mean anything.
paganel 4y ago
Anti-intellectualism is ingrained in the American societal psyche and was seen as a thing to be proud of many times in the past. Hofstadter‘s Anti-intellectualism in American Life is one of the best explanations of this process. As such, apps like TikTok are just following the target population’s specs.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  Sad but true. Ironic hotbed of so much technological innovation (but then $$$ is a strong motivator).
time_to_smile 4y ago
Whenever I see this comment on HN I always am a bit surprised: Do you not have any friends from/in China? This conspiracy theory always gets a good chuckle out of me and my Chinese friends whenever it comes up. I have a good chunk of my family living in China and I can assure you, Chinese kids watch just as much if not more junk over there than they do in the US. This is similar to trying to argue that America kids only play wholesome games on the Xbox or Youtube because they have parent controls. But to my first point: surely working in tech right now you have a few Chinese coworkers. I recommend you grab lunch with them sometime (and let them choose the place to eat!)
bagels 4y ago
This conspiracy theory was invented by a us comedian, Andrew Schulz, if he is to be believed. https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E
rchaud 4y ago
CNN America shows the most ridiculous rage-bait every hour, on the hour. But CNN International (airing in non-American markets) is significantly more toned down because it tries to compete with BBC News, France24 and NHK. Maybe Tiktok is just trying to give the market what it wants? Idiotic stunts were going viral years before TikTok existed.
- whitemary 4y ago
  This is perfectly compatible with parent's theory.
  - my_usernam3 4y ago
    I don't think so. CNN America isn't a Chinese product as far as I'm aware. Therefore I think /u/chaud is trying to say that TikTok is just giving the people what they want.
abeppu 4y ago
I'm not familiar with opIndia but the article you've cited is unhinged. It cites a DailyMail article which uncritically amplifies anti-trans campaigners, who are basically saying that it's a problem for trans people to publicly share stuff about their transition. The opIndia article says "The flood of such content on TikTok, an immensely popular social media platform among the youth, is a serious problem that needs to be addressed at the earliest." There's a lot of dumb stuff on TikTok, but trans people not being suppressed isn't really one of them. And there might be _toxic_ stuff on TikTok, but in the context of an article where youth are pushed to material about suicide, linking to an article calling for the suppression of trans perspectives as if that was part of the same problem is super shady. As for Douyin having a different algorithm, I'd point out that within China it was still viewed as being harmful enough to kids that they put in a 40m daily time limit, and restricted it to specific hours. I'm guessing it's also not great for kids there. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934

tempsy 4y ago

i think that’s specific to kids

Jochim 4y ago

It's not true you can see for yourself: https://douyin.com/ https://douyin.com/ On TikTok you largely just get more of what you've already engaged with. If you're using the platform for porn you're going to get a lot of it. If you like and engage with scientific/political content you'll rarely, if ever, see a video of someone dancing. edit: It's anecdotal but having taken a look at TikTok's web feed: https://www.tiktok.com/foryou https://www.tiktok.com/foryou. The content there was less sexual than the purportedly sanitised Douyin.

4gotunameagain 4y ago
Unless I go to china, download the app on a chinese phone and use it, I cannot see for myself.
- Jochim 4y ago
  You could easily see for yourself by visiting the link in the previous comment. For what it's worth. Four out of the first five videos I saw on Douyin were sexualised in some way, the first was of a train driver. I scrolled through 20 or 30 of the videos on TikTok's website and didn't find anything close.
  - dkn 4y ago
    I think the parent poster is pointing out that there are more ways of discriminating traffic than just a domain name. Such as geographic location, device IDs, etc. All of which are commonly used. It's not proof of what is being claimed, but they are variables that would need to be controlled before being confident that Douyin is or is not adjusting content to foreign or domestic users.
    - Jochim 4y ago
      I did consider that. Traffic discrimination certainly occurs. However, I don't believe it's presence supports the claim in this case. The original claim is that Douyin promotes "wholesome" educational content, whereas TikTok is manipulating the west with pornography and other depravities. Anecdotal observations gathered through the web UI of each app, as an anonymous user, were that Douyin presented "pornographic" content, whereas TikTok did not. The original claim only stands if we accept that ByteDance is: * Allowing a vast quantity of sexually explicit content to be posted to Douyin. * Not showing that content to their users in China but only to western users of Douyin, despite being presented entirely in Chinese. While also: * Targeting western users of TikTok with pornography and explicit videos. * Not showing any of that content in their web UI, despite it quickly becoming the entirety of the Douyin one. I find it hard to believe that this would be the case. A sanitised Douyin and depraved TikTok, or both being depraved, would have supported the idea. The behaviour that was observed runs entirely counter to the claim. Frankly, the opinion does not appear to be grounded in reality but comes instead from a place of insecurity regarding our social values. Consider whether any western platform promotes science and engineering over pornography, Twitter and Instagram allow much more explicit content than TikTok, and then ask why TikTok seems to have been singled out.
      - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
        Think about it a bit more clearly. Douyin in china might be entirely different than the douyin you see when you check it out with a western ip. By checking douyin.com from my device, my ip and my advertising fingerprint, I cannot have any clue how douyin behaves if I download it from a chinese phone, in china.

analyst74 4y ago

That's completely untrue. I can't say if the algorithm is the same. In my short experience of using Douyin for the past couple weeks, I get zero education content, but a surprising amount of content about inequality and injustices.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
Devil's advocate: you'd need to be in both countries on different device IDs. If you go US -> visit to China, their algorithm "knows" this as opposed to "you are in China and have never been to US before". Just a guess.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Ah, yes, your anecdata is proof. Not that OP's claims are proof - but your anecdata does not disprove it.
retrac 4y ago
> but a surprising amount of content about inequality and injustices Is it inequality and injustice. where pointing it out. would actually threaten the power of the CCP? When I started reading Chinese language media I was surprised how much apparent criticism there is -- but if you read carefully, anything approved in the PRC is always criticism of individuals, or maybe corporations, more rarely a local government, doing something that's already supposed to be officially prohibited, or which is not too sensitive, and never criticizes core official policy or high-ranking CCP members. Which is how you can have anti-corruption, anti-sex scandal, anti-pollution news commentary, or even protests and marches, in China. But should official permission to disagree be withdrawn, the topic can very quickly become taboo. A couple years ago there was ongoing discussion in Chinese media about same-sex marriage and a member of the Yuan even introduced a bill to make same-sex marriage legal in China. Voted down. But an acceptable topic to discuss, not officially taboo. I suspect that has changed recently, with the campaign against the apparent feminization of Chinese men and now explicitly linking LGBT rights with the Western agenda. That shift, as I understand it, comes directly from Xi.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> while in the western world it promotes debauchery and stupidity. Isn't the narrative "that's what the western world consumers more of/wants" versus "China values achievements and education more than debauchery and stupidity"?

4gotunameagain 4y ago
We are talking about kids. They will want what you teach them to want. With parents working insane hours in the US and outsourcing the socialisation and education of kids to electronics and corporations with perverse incentives, with local communities practically gone in an urban lifestyle, we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked.
- noufalibrahim 4y ago
  This is true. Tiktok is the current problem but there's going to be a lot of stuff like this that the world is going to throw at kids. It's the parents responsibility to curate the world the their kids are exposed to and build up their defences for all the crap that they're going to finally encounter.
  - smolder 4y ago
    I think it's also the responsibility of societies participants to not seek profit from activities that harm and undermine the society they're a part of. If all we do is play zero sum games and try to get as much money as possible from the people around us for the least effort, you end up with this modern-west mess where we're all shooting each other's feet off to be the tallest instead of... building stools?
- BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
  > we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked. Agreed on the first point, disagree on the second. I think it’s a fixable problem. Addicts can recover and further damage can be avoided.

bootwoot 4y ago

This is possible. But the the evidence in that link is Tucker Carlson. I don't think we can know whether this is actually happening and we're seeing a lot of speculation about what China could or would do given the power they have through moderation of TikTok. The possibility of China abusing content moderation might be enough to throw out the app altogether. But the only "evidence" we currently have is guessing at what China might do and people in media amplifying that discomfort.

Hitton 4y ago

I would think that CCP just forces them to penalize certain things (and maybe promote other things) and in the west they merely don't do that (both for engagement and to avoid getting canceled for censoring certain topics). Compared to other social media it doesn't seem that "debauchery and stupidity" is more prominent there.

dontlaugh 4y ago
This is it. Douyin follows Chinese law, while TikTok doesn't. It has independent editorial control, which ends up very similar to other social media in the same environment.

kranke155 4y ago

I think an American comedian said this and it become a meme repeated by the right wing us media. The comedian has said it’s BS.

robopsychology 4y ago
Do you have a source for this?
- bagels 4y ago
  I probably saw the same claim and admission that the parent poster did: https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E

nineplay 4y ago

It's the conspiracy theory I 100% believe in. I don't think the reason to ban TikTok is that it gathers information, I think the reason to ban it is that its ranking algorithm is deliberately destructive. Maybe it's a coincidence that all the dangerous stunts and vandalism "pranks" come from TikTok and not Meta and Twitter, but I don't buy it. I'm leftist liberal and I have no particular paranoia about China, but I'm not going to pretend that we are besties Edit: I won't remove the classification of myself as "leftist liberal" because it would make some of the replies to my comment confusing. I will apologize for it because it has derailed the discussion of China and TikTok. In the future I'll be more specific and avoid labels that no two people can agree on. Suffice to say that I don't believe China deliberately created and released Covid.

vlunkr 4y ago
> I'm a completely leftist liberal I'm confused. Do you think the CPP is liberal? It's very authoritarian.
- justsocrateasin 4y ago
  How are you under the impression OP that thinks the CPP is liberal??
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    Maybe they're a LLM and got confused by the keyword "conspiracy theory" and the double negative in the statement.
    - vlunkr 4y ago
      Shhh
- GordonS 4y ago
  I'm not the OP, but I read that qualification as meaning "I'm not some right-wing nutter that's paranoid about Red Danger, and I don't believe everything mainstream media tells me".

RC_ITR 4y ago

>I don't know how true it is It may be true on the margin, but Douyin is full of 'Key Opinion Leaders' who at best pay lip service to education and attainment. It's even worse on Kuaishou (Douyin for more rural areas). [0] I always kind of bristle at the argument that this is somehow impacting what kids want too - PBS exists and spams their content as far and wide as possible, but US kids still end up preferring Cocomelon, Gabby's Doll House, etc. There's no reason to believe that Chinese youth just take what's given to them when there are literally millions of random livestreams (hard to regulate livestreamed content at that level) going on at any given time. As usual with China, what's likely going on is that someone is the CCP wants it to be true, so they 'make it true' and US media without local context takes it at face value. [0]https://jingdaily.com/2022-top-six-chinese-kols-you-need-to-know-liu-genghong-filxiaobai/ https://jingdaily.com/2022-top-six-chinese-kols-you-need-to-...

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

dingusdew 4y ago

[dead]

throw7 4y ago

That was my question. Is the algorithm exactly same across the world, including inside China?

fasterik 4y ago

From Wikipedia: "OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news website that frequently publishes misinformation." To me, it seems much more likely that China is just censoring TikTok like they censor every other platform, while the rest of the world sees a standard recommendation algorithm. "Debauchery and stupidity" is a subjective, sanctimonious phrase that doesn't really mean anything.

paganel 4y ago

Anti-intellectualism is ingrained in the American societal psyche and was seen as a thing to be proud of many times in the past. Hofstadter‘s Anti-intellectualism in American Life is one of the best explanations of this process. As such, apps like TikTok are just following the target population’s specs.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago
Sad but true. Ironic hotbed of so much technological innovation (but then $$$ is a strong motivator).

time_to_smile 4y ago

Whenever I see this comment on HN I always am a bit surprised: Do you not have any friends from/in China? This conspiracy theory always gets a good chuckle out of me and my Chinese friends whenever it comes up. I have a good chunk of my family living in China and I can assure you, Chinese kids watch just as much if not more junk over there than they do in the US. This is similar to trying to argue that America kids only play wholesome games on the Xbox or Youtube because they have parent controls. But to my first point: surely working in tech right now you have a few Chinese coworkers. I recommend you grab lunch with them sometime (and let them choose the place to eat!)

bagels 4y ago

This conspiracy theory was invented by a us comedian, Andrew Schulz, if he is to be believed. https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E https://youtu.be/tAV3QkzHC5E

rchaud 4y ago

CNN America shows the most ridiculous rage-bait every hour, on the hour. But CNN International (airing in non-American markets) is significantly more toned down because it tries to compete with BBC News, France24 and NHK. Maybe Tiktok is just trying to give the market what it wants? Idiotic stunts were going viral years before TikTok existed.

whitemary 4y ago
This is perfectly compatible with parent's theory.
- my_usernam3 4y ago
  I don't think so. CNN America isn't a Chinese product as far as I'm aware. Therefore I think /u/chaud is trying to say that TikTok is just giving the people what they want.

abeppu 4y ago

I'm not familiar with opIndia but the article you've cited is unhinged. It cites a DailyMail article which uncritically amplifies anti-trans campaigners, who are basically saying that it's a problem for trans people to publicly share stuff about their transition. The opIndia article says "The flood of such content on TikTok, an immensely popular social media platform among the youth, is a serious problem that needs to be addressed at the earliest." There's a lot of dumb stuff on TikTok, but trans people not being suppressed isn't really one of them. And there might be _toxic_ stuff on TikTok, but in the context of an article where youth are pushed to material about suicide, linking to an article calling for the suppression of trans perspectives as if that was part of the same problem is super shady. As for Douyin having a different algorithm, I'd point out that within China it was still viewed as being harmful enough to kids that they put in a 40m daily time limit, and restricted it to specific hours. I'm guessing it's also not great for kids there. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934