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The Trouble With TikTok Is Getting Old (www.theatlantic.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This drama is getting tiresome. It’s just an app, and many Americans—at least those who are old enough to vote—don’t actually care that much about it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that TikTok’s popularity was second only to YouTube among teenagers, but it’s far from the country’s most popular social-media app overall, despite its salience as a conversational stand-in for “internet culture” or “annoying thing that young people like.” “It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic in January, pointing out that only a third of U.S. adults interviewed for another Pew survey said they’d ever used it. (More of these people say they use Pinterest!) Among young adults, she added, Snapchat and Instagram are more popular.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

Tiktok has a fuck ton of problems. Letting in run free is ridiculous. But all of the major social medias need the hammer brought down on them, they should not be solely targeting tiktok.

Letting a hostile foreign power control a social media site is dangerous. Same reason Europe should ban the American ones, we should ban tiktok

"Just an app" is a statement that ignores reality. Similar to the statement "it's just a game". Apps have real world consequences

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

We should only consume domestic media. Good thing the Bible is domestic media. \s

How is there less risk to Americans on a platform like X(itter) instead of TikTok?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It's not the media, it's the recommendation algorithm.

They're all a problem, but we have no way to regulate or monitor the algorithms as it stands.

Tiktok is an even higher risk because the recommendation algorithm is unknown to anyone on US soil. Nobody is going to whistleblow from the inside on TikTok because... they can't; it's all compartmentalized and nobody outside of China has access to the algorithm.

This whataboutism is about as valid as "her emails" because yeah, it's a problem but there are also other problems to consider and reasons to get started fully acknowledging we won't solve the entire problem.

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