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As much as I am for the free market, TikTok is a scary thing. Probably it would need to be banned even if it was a domestic product.

• krapp 3y ago
  It's just a social media video app. It's no more scary than Youtube shorts, Facebook rolls, Vine back in the day. Sure it's vapid entertainment, but vapid entertainment shouldn't be illegal.
  • gymbeaux 3y ago
    They should all be banned
    • krapp 3y ago
      Not in a free society, they shouldn't. And the US has, at least for the moment, a semblance of a free society.
      • gymbeaux 3y ago
        The “this is a free country” argument is flawed and tired. You must be 21 to legally consume alcohol. You must have a license to drive a car. You can’t drive faster than the speed limit on a road. Meth and cocaine are illegal. Children must attend school. Abortions are illegal (after X weeks). Et al. Study after study has made clear the harm social media brings not only to children, but all who use it. The psychological “gaming” that goes into every little detail of these apps should be enough to make the average person sick. “Bad faith” doesn’t begin to describe the MO of TikTok and others. We’re not even touching the harvesting and selling of people’s data that these platforms heavily rely upon for revenue.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    Youtube shorts came out in response to TikTok. Illegal is one thing, but maybe off of watching Dune, maybe there should be a guiding hand to society so that vapid entertainment isn't promoted and we don't get a society of airheads. though my problem with TikTok is that my feed is serious stuff like trama therapy and I can't use it for long because I hey overwhelmed by things to work on. I realize that's not everyone's experience with TikTok tho
    • danlugo92 3y ago
      > my feed is serious stuff This is also obviously part of the plan in behalf of China to gain ground... FWIW I'm anti-Tiktok and anti-Instagram, they both push agendas that are of no benefit to the common man...
    • krapp 3y ago
      >Maybe there should be a guiding hand to society so that vapid entertainment isn't promoted and we don't get a society of airheads. Vapid entertainment has been around since the beginning of time. Luckily, society doesn't work that way. Vapid entertainment doesn't create vapid people any more than violent videogames create violence. If there is to be a "guiding hand" in society it should be better education rather than censorship. And at one time, for a long time, science fiction was considered degenerate and childish. In a world where vapid entertainment isn't promoted, everything Frank Herbert wrote probably gets burned in a big pile.
      • fragmede 3y ago
        I'm glad we agree that there should be better education. It's up to the platform what it pushes, and while the banal evil implementation of the algorithm is optimized to sell more so we consume more, there's a very real effect on the zeitgeist that TikTok has above that. It's very much able to shape the nation's culture and politics, and that just should not be in the hands of a foreign power. We're already in World War III, and the big weapon in this war is information and ideas. China would love to divide the US and cause a civil war, and control of TikTok's algorithm is a weapon in such a war.
        • krapp 3y ago
          Show me all of the dangerous CCP propaganda on TikTok, because as far as I can tell, China's algorithm is just showing me girls dancing, memes and clips of Fortnite. If I were to accept, for the sake of argument, the premise that China wanted to trigger a civil war in the US through some massive psyop, literally any social media platform other than TikTok would be better suited for the task. Facebook and Twitter are already radicalization machines. No one is getting radicalized by TikTok.