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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Eh this is the one social media that the oligarchs can't censor so I'm fine with it sticking around. I'd rather have options than Elon and Zuck controlling the majority methods for average joes to get information out. Cause it doesn't seem like the fediverse is going mainstream for a while
Yeah, the reason they want to ban TikTok is because it's not an American owned social media platform like every other one in the country, which means that they can't as easily police its content and only China has that kind of power over it (but I think they don't really have much control over the international version? I don't know enough to say).
This is purely about America's ability to put propaganda on the platform.
There is only one reason I'm concerned about but it's a big one - China could at any time tweak the algorithm to influence a whole generation of people addicted to the network. At that level they could really tip the scales in their favor, and create unrest and instability, probably even violence or worse.
All the large platforms can do that. Elon cried about too many bots before he bought Twitter and now it's worse.
Meta has ai profiles. https://www.404media.co/metas-ai-profiles-are-indistinguishable-from-terrible-spam-that-took-over-facebook/
None of these big companies care as long as their profit goes up.
Gotta love the down votes people give for pointing out that it doesn't matter whether it's the US government, a foreign government, or even just the company having an agenda, someone has control over the algorithm and thus what people see.
They seem to want to believe that ignoring the idea that a foreign government can control what we see on social media is somehow inherently better, and that it isn't a legitimate national security threat.
Does that mean it needs to be banned? That's debatable. But it is delusional to insist that it's not a national security issue to have a foreign government in control of the social media nearly 50% of the population interacts with (170m monthly US users in Jan 2024).
You're absolutely right, but I have the exact same concerns about Meta and Facebook, Google and YouTube, and Musk and Twitter - all of whom have been shown to be influencing the algorithms to censor left-wing news and people and favor right-wing groups and push right-wing extremism.
The other platforms are already doing that. So does the news when they report on events using different language (see the cyber truck blowing up vs. the New Orleans attack). The only difference here is that it might be China doing the propagandizing instead of the corporate overlords.
Absolutely a concern but at least Meta and Twitter do have some interest in stability in the USA. China does not necessarily have the same interests.
They may have already done that
22.94%(19.6% more than second place) of voters voted for a person that claimed pepsi had microchips, said that Donald Trump, a dictactor that was responsible for facilitating The Holocaust in Romania and the founder of a fascist party were heroes, called global warming "a global scam", and spread covid 19 missinformation. As far as i know, his only marketing was tiktok. A lot of romanians were surprised by his place in the election
What evidence do you have that oligarchs in any nation cannot influence your TikTok algorithm? Like... we should assume they can by default until proven innocent.
Even if it's just a competing team of oligarchs fighting over who can produce the most amount of animosity and mistrust of the other, they're going to accidentally stumble across some shit that the other one doesn't want you to see and then they'll show it to you.
It turns out we don't have any way of getting clean unbiased sources so the best we can do is just have a lot of different ones with different biases since there is no such thing as clean public media anymore.