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Support for U.S. TikTok ban continues to decline
- TimCTRL 2y agoWhere on Earth is Eric Schmidt when you need him? /s
- fredgrott 2y agou have not pay attention....look at youtube's monetization moves in terms of reels.... When Amazon stops paying for Twitch losses, they will move to Youtube same with ticktok
- gman83 2y agoWhere I'm at in Europe, the app is rife with anti-American & pro-Chinese & Russian propaganda. I think that even if the Americans ban the app, it's too late, the entire world is now addicted to this app and it'll have negative consequences for the U.S. for many years to come.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoBut it was really too late when nothing was done about Facebook or any of the other US malvertising companies.
- dqv 2y agoLike what? What are some examples of things you've heard from these propaganda videos?
- gman83 2y agoOne example is loads of videos from John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs about how what's happening in Ukraine is really NATO's fault. I don't get why these rather niche academics are all over. Also loads of videos about how democracy in general is just really inefficient and we'd be better of copying China's model. Things like that. I never engage with such videos, actively click things like "don't show me content like this" but it's never ending.
- dqv 2y agoOh. I thought it would be more like the Chinese or Russian version of these US military edits which are widely popular: https://www.tiktok.com/@penerabread/video/7219443593096858922 https://www.tiktok.com/@penerabread/video/721944359309685892... https://www.tiktok.com/@optimusprimegaming/video/7374733967506935046 https://www.tiktok.com/@optimusprimegaming/video/73747339675... https://www.tiktok.com/@._military.edits._/video/7308883732151242027 https://www.tiktok.com/@._military.edits._/video/73088837321... https://www.tiktok.com/@cloakedshadow71/video/7360797286894505258 https://www.tiktok.com/@cloakedshadow71/video/73607972868945... https://www.tiktok.com/@.nightgoons/video/7200591051797597483 https://www.tiktok.com/@.nightgoons/video/720059105179759748... https://www.tiktok.com/@tripdownbritishtown/video/7373237565308161312 https://www.tiktok.com/@tripdownbritishtown/video/7373237565... https://www.tiktok.com/@blake_ola/video/7302581313804995882 https://www.tiktok.com/@blake_ola/video/7302581313804995882 https://www.tiktok.com/@minimalmilitary/photo/7195723559736675630 https://www.tiktok.com/@minimalmilitary/photo/71957235597366... https://www.tiktok.com/@military.ee/video/7361913166873316640 https://www.tiktok.com/@military.ee/video/736191316687331664... https://www.tiktok.com/@military.ee/video/7360805294047366433 https://www.tiktok.com/@military.ee/video/736080529404736643... https://www.tiktok.com/@militaryvids123/video/7189898837425786117 https://www.tiktok.com/@militaryvids123/video/71898988374257... Pretty surprising to have so much content like this and it not be suppressed with TikTok being so anti-US and all.
- boffinAudio 2y ago[flagged]
- WitCanStain 2y agoI think turning a fledgling democracy into a kleptocratic dictatorship and starting an unjust war that has caused 500k casualties is at least on par with the worst the US has done in recent history like Iraq.
- blitzar 2y agoThe United States and its allies have dropped at least 326,000 bombs and missiles on countries in the greater Middle East/ North Africa region since 2001. People 30 and under in the region have barely known a day when the US were not bombing them or their neighbouring countries - that is bound to have a pretty strong effect on how you view a country.
- mopsi 2y ago326 000 is 5 days' worth in terms of Russian invasion of Ukraine at its peak intensity. Those who are 30 and under have seen only a one year when Russia has not been at war - during the economic crisis that followed Asian financial crisis of 1997. But this does not get even remotely as much attention as wars involving the US, because there are no paid shills flooding every imaginable place with stale copypastas about foreign wars, skewing people's sense of proportion.
- vrc 2y agoAnd I don’t think Ukrainians have fond feelings about Russia either.. Both things can be objectively bad for the people being bombed.
- boffinAudio 2y agoThere is an unheard population of Ukrainians who want the war to stop and for there to be peace with their Russian cousins. It is the Western powers who are sacrificing Ukraine in order to put Western weapons systems on Russias borders. Not the Ukrainian people. And, in the context of what was done to Iraq (5% of its population murdered for the purposes of the USA's racist, elitist ruling classes), it is no wonder that this silence is perpetuated.
- raxxorraxor 2y agoI think the popularity of TikTok is already declining and I always question the effectiveness of such propaganda attempts. Investing in education is the best antidote in my opinion, state level blocking of services just opens a few cans of worms. To make TikTok unpopular more quickly, governments should probably mandate that parents make an account too.
- torginus 2y agoDo we know what comes after Tiktok?
- Loughla 2y agoNo, the teens/college kids are still all over tiktok. It's not dying yet
- cma 2y agoA constant AI generated feed, in and out of fully immersive, no swiping, just eye tracking (incl. pupil dilation) and face tracking to guide. Though some in congress who promoted the ban thought it already worked kind like that.
- candiddevmike 2y agoOw! My balls!
- hypeatei 2y ago> mandate that parents make an account too. Guarantee higher monthly active users and the chance they get addicted too. Nice. I don't know why everyone thinks that: 1) parents are infallible 2) the problem is individuals/families and not the thing itself (infinite scroll feeds)
- raxxorraxor 2y agoIt was a joke suggesting that young people tend to think a platform becomes less cool if their parents are on it too. Not that parents can stalk the online life of their kids or other things that actually do make them uncool.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>it's too late, the entire world is now addicted Just like how the world is also addicted to Instagram and Facebook before that?
- j_maffe 2y agoTo be fair the world is still as addicted to IG and FB as before, it's just been normalized at this point and FB is having an aging demographic.
- blitzar 2y agoDon't forget MySpace, people loved that site.
- CalRobert 2y agoIt looks like a clone of it is doing all right https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41422311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41422311
- clbrmbr 2y agoThat’s a problem for Europe but not so much the USA. We should not have a Chinese company controlling our information infrastructure to this degree. It’s divestiture or ban, not just a ban.
- thomassmith65 2y agoYes, it's wise to be aware of how fickle the public's attention can be. TikTok will not be around forever, and likely won't be prominent enough to bother discussing a decade from now. The parent comment also has a point, though, because stale trends generally manage to limp along around 60 years or so. Ideas tend really to win out conclusively once the opposing side has died off. So the "culture" that, at Facebook's height of popularity, Facebook fostered, in fact will live on in a certain generation. And all the nonsense that TikTok seems to foster today will, sadly, affect the world for decades after TikTok turns into a nonentity.
- ziggyzecat 2y agoGerman here: plenty of pro America, anti Chinese and pro Ukraine propaganda in my feeds. Lot's of it full of AI bits, mixed videos with AI and real footage, partially from other wars and or years old mixed into current, potentially staged bits (it's mostly clusters of facial expressions and gestures that make me doubt but also environment, intensity and location of sweat and dirt and positioning of items and vehicles and stuff, in 'artificial(learned actually, semi-professional) relation' to buildings). It's horrible.
- bilbo0s 2y agoMeh. Probably the reality is that the internet is filled with propaganda. Every site. Every forum. Even HN is filled with anti-(put pretty much anything here) propaganda. Try to ignore the noise and tune in more of the signal. That's about all you can do really. I'm not sure banning websites will do much for you, as you two are rightfully pointing out. You ban a website in Brazil? Well, OK. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in Brazil, but the rest of the world keeps getting the anti-Brazil propaganda. You ban a website in China? Well, OK. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in China, but the rest of the world keeps getting plenty of anti-Chinese propaganda. You ban a website in the US? Same thing. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in the US, but the rest of the world keeps getting plenty of anti-US propaganda.
- keiferski 2y agoThe word propaganda itself has been a bit bent out of shape in the last century. It just means to spread information. Information itself is more-or-less inherently biased (as in, not objectively neutral in an omniscient way) and so everything is basically propaganda, although not in the scary obvious way that word usually implies.
- roenxi 2y agoThe problem with banning things is actually a bit more subtle than just that. Propaganda in isolation isn't necessarily a good or a bad thing. If Big Vegetable embarks on a multi-billion dollar campaign to push pro-vegetable propaganda, that is probably a win for the rest of us. But if Big Tobacco does something similar it is more of a loss. So we need a mechanism to decide if a specific type of propaganda is acceptable or not. And, if governments get involved, typically they will start restricting propaganda that is truthful but threatening to their chances of holding power (ie, people pointing out the flawed nature of the powers that be). It is better force people to fight propaganda with counter-propaganda and let individuals make their own mistakes.
- nope1000 2y agoFor me it's videos about working out and climbing. You can train the algorithm pretty well what you don't want to see.
- Garvi 2y agoThat's just a glimpse of reality you're witnessing for the first time. It can be quite disorienting after decades of indoctrination on US social media. I'm just so sick of all the pro-war propaganda we're getting here in the EU from the US.
- slightwinder 2y agoThat's more likely just your algorithm, personalized to whatever TikTok considers the best for engagement-farming from you.
- blitzar 2y agoThe tiktok algorithm famously feeds people what they want and what they most engage with. If all you are seeing anti-American & pro-Chinese & Russian propaganda, it is on you. If all you are seeing is teenage girls doing provocative dances, it is on you.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoMaybe it's just my TikTok feed being in a bubble, but my impression is that there's not nearly as much content being produced for the platform anymore because of the poor monetization strategy. There was a time where it could keep showing you new content regardless of how long you were swiping, but now it has started to show me posts that are often multiple months old. Sometimes I'll watch a handful of videos and the timeline just loops back to showing me stuff it has already shown me previously. Their monetization strategies also just kinda suck in general. You can either make an ad demonstrating some product which you sell on their shop, or you're part of the revenue-share program which doesn't pay out much and which includes a limitation on how frequently you can participate before getting capped. It definitely feels like we're past "peak" TikTok. Honestly... As I was writing this post I started to think more critically about the kind of content I'm being shown and it definitely seems like propaganda when scrutinized more closely. I don't really get any obvious anti-American content, but they sneak in an awful lot of pro-Chinese cooking videos. Edit: thinking more about anti-American propaganda, I do get recommended a decent number of Trump parodies... And as for anti-UK propaganda, it has also shown me lots of videos of people taking down ULEZ camera poles. Admittedly, I hadn't really connected the dots until writing this, but I definitely feel like I was slowly being brainwashed and nudged without realizing. So as of writing this update I'm deleting TikTok and shifting my position against the platform.
- sp0rk 2y agoI witnessed a pretty alarming situation on TikTok surrounding the story about the Dalai Lama asking a young boy to "suck his tongue." Traditional news outlets ran the initial story, and then followed up shortly after to provide important cultural context, as well as the Dalai Lama's apology. My girlfriend's TikTok For You Page, on the other hand, only showed her stuff about the initial story and then she never heard anything else about it. We both walked away from this news story with completely different views of reality. Maybe it's a coincidence or caused by some less nefarious reason, like an algorithmic bias towards newer news, but it seems very suspicious given China's relationship with Tibet.
- alephnerd 2y ago
- sethammons 2y agoI have learned a lot, like, a lot a lot, from tiktok. I devolve to simple fun, but some stuff sticks. I've also learned about political corruption and breaking news. I think that lots of people find similar value in addition to cat videos and dance offs.
- bilsbie 2y agoI don’t know how I feel. It’s probably 90% complete waste of my life, 5% educational, and 5% completely life changing. Overall worth it but kind of like panning for gold I guess. Maybe that’s why it’s addictive.
- bbconn 2y agoCare to share some life changing Tiktok videos?
- spiderfarmer 2y agoWith hundreds of videos watched per month and 5% of them being life changing, your life would change an awful lot.
- sethammons 2y agoI wont quote the 5% number, but I have changed multiple ways of doing things in my (daily!) life from tiktok: how i tie my shoes and a bunch of other knots, how I prepare some of my daily food like eggs and potatoes has changed, how I interact with my phone (unknown shortcuts and features). I literally can't enumerate all the things I have learned and used. Two weeks ago, I had to pull a t-post out of the ground and I used a technique I saw a week or two earlier and it made it so damn easy.
- bilsbie 2y agoIt’s hard to remember here are a few off the top of my head: Pete Holmes God is nothing. Supposed to be comedy but really clicked for me. A couple series where people just strike up conversations with strangers. It started to feel normalized after a while and I started doing it in my own life. Maybe not life changing but a pickleball tip on something I’d been struggling with that finally made it click. (Judging which balls are going out) There are lots of other things but those jump out at me.
- jajko 2y agoWhy isn't the discussion more about general ban of cancerous social medias for people who are not yet mentally developed and fall ridiculously easily into proper addiction for it? It would be wonderful if state/society protected vulnerable, but when thats not the case its each parent's responsibility. The hell will freeze sooner than I will allow any form of this for my kids below maybe 15 years old. Its so sad to see rather small kids glued to screens, parents by their negligence and laziness fucking up their most important people in their lives, for life. Where is the threshold just that they can get a bit more time off from parental duties to slouch on couch, meth or crack? Or course I don't expect miracles from adults who are themselves deep in addictive behaviors themselves, then its just a sad story all the way down the line. Children need tons of time off any screen for proper development, not just early years. Social skills, anxiety, self worth, mental stability and resilience. None of this happens in front of screen, in contrary a lot of harm in not only these areas are very frequent. Very happy to be part of society (Switzerland) where similar values are shared by most peers around us and also whole public education system.
- FollowingTheDao 2y ago[flagged]
- subroutine 2y agoMy problem with TikTok is not that it's a Chinese company per se, but that China won't allow an equivalent US (or EU) company to operate in China. TikTok itself is even banned in China.
- Ferret7446 2y agoCan we stop calling it a ban? It was never about banning TikTok, but forcing it to be divested from foreign adversarial control.