There is a passage in the book Life of Pi, where Pi's family is gathered and ready to leave India for Canada. And his mother does something out of the ordinary:
> The day before our departure she pointed at a cigarette wallah and earnestly asked, "Should we get a pack or two?"
> Father replied, "They have tobacco in Canada. And why do you want to buy cigarettes? We don't smoke."
> Yes, they have tobacco in Canada-but do they have Gold Flake cigarettes? Do they have Arun ice cream? Are the bicycles Heroes? Are the televisions Onidas? Are the cars Ambassadors? Are the bookshops Higginbothams'? Such, I suspect, were the questions that swirled in Mother's mind as she contemplated buying cigarettes.
Do I use TikTok? No, I've always advocated against it. Will I use it if it is reinstated? Probably not. But I downloaded it anyway the same way Mrs Gita Patel wanted to buy cigarettes. It wasn’t about need or use. It was about the loss.
I would stand behind a tiktok ban if it was for the right reasons. But this ban is only because it failed to conform to manufactured consent.
> Chinese mobile apps were stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data.
> The compilation of such data, and its mining and profiling by elements hostile to India is a matter of very deep and immediate concern which requires emergency measures
[0] https://apnews.com/article/bd02ecd62ff9da6b1301868f0308e297
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Personal_Data_Protecti...
This, to me, is a weird stance. On what grounds did you advocate against it?
I just had to create a new account tonight after the ban[0] to keep using it. When you first start TikTok you might be presented with a wave of seemingly crap, bizarre or boring videos, but after several minutes of liking and watching the good stuff the algorithm very quickly starts serving you some excellent content.
There is some really, really great, really smart content on TikTok. I have always advocated for TikTok on those grounds.
[0] my accounts are all on USA servers and you can't log into them even through a VPN
It is incredibly addictive inducing drug like state:
> You’ll just be in this pleasurable dopamine state, carried away. It’s almost hypnotic, you’ll keep watching and watching. - Dr. Julie Albright
> You keep scrolling, she says, because sometimes you see something you like, and sometimes you don’t. And that differentiation — very similar to a slot machine in Vegas — is key.
I detest slot machines, so many lives wasted away, and I feel like we already spend too much time on computers to the detriment of both ourselves and society, let alone giving the CCP a hand to manipulate people on top of everything else
> my accounts are all on USA servers
Keep telling yourself that ;)
No idea how you could know this. I have never seen any concrete evidence that there are propaganda videos interlaced into people’s feeds. Everything I have heard is hypothetical. “China could” do this or that. If there were anything more than conjecture it would be huge news.
Casey Newton said on Hard Fork that he started a new account recently as an experiment and didn’t mention anything about China propaganda videos.
The app's design is to get you to mindlessly doomscroll and not really think too hard about what it's showing you. If it shows you something insane occasionally it's no big deal, it's just the algorithm trying something new right?
It's very difficult to show any concrete evidence for how a secretive algorithm controlled by an adversary behaves. In an ideal world the burden should be on the platforms to prove that their algorithms are fair and not biasing towards certain viewpoints, but that might never happen.
I did once see a cat that was named "Chairman Meow" in one video, which might have been very subtle CCP reprogramming now that I think on it.
Usually it is about behavior shifts and/or emotions. E.g. if I’d be watching videos with cute penguins and then seen a politician „adopting” penguins at zoo, that’d be a political propaganda.
Political ads have to be marked clearly but if politician is sympathetic to the platform and platform owner has a stake in keeping good relations then it’s just another penguins video, right?
And it’s omnipresent, so you stop paying attention. It’s not only China who is doing that. That’s why Paris Syndrome exists, car manufacturers don’t allow game makers to show their models in a destroyed form or why actresses don’t like to show their nostrils.
The problem with China (as far as I understand) is lack of the symmetry. They will sell you everything, but refuse to let your merchants in.
And I’d describe message shown to American users as a propaganda.
Do you understand what kind of information can be derived from 150 million smart phones?
(For anyone out of the loop, see https://www.dw.com/en/elon-musk-backs-far-right-afd-in-contr...)
Too bad. Sucks that you got beat at your own game.
And in this case they are known to be exceptionally ruthless and part of Trump's administration.
Meta won't tinker with the algorithm to push propaganda. TikTok will.
TikTok had a huge negative impact on special interest groups that want to continue to allow the holocaust of our days to continue happening and the genocidal state to continue to behave with impunity.
The U.S. is already infiltrated by people working for foreign interests. The thing is, it's not infiltrated by China's or Russia's operatives.
Would you not expect the rules to be different?
If it's only about reciprocity and global hegemony, well then...
United States is classified as a flawed democracy. Partly because sweeping decisions like this one are made by Supreme Court Justices who nobody voted for and who hold their position for life.
Or maybe that's what you meant and you were being sarcastic with the quotation marks around "bastion of democracy"?
As in, due to their official stance, we should not expect reciprocity at all.
But you did pique my curiosity, where did you get that list of "full democracies"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
You could say it is a bastion of liberty but I'm from Europe and women here have reasonable abortion and sexuality rights.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde...
I wouldn't refer to USA as very democratic or China as a center of human rights violation.
If there is no blanket ban, there would have to be many laws, rules, regulations and restrictions prohibiting the software from government buildings, etc.
In addition to the data points: contacts, location, audio, video, etc, malicious actors can learn a lot through deduction. That's before any sort of manipulation.
Historically speaking the biggest threat by far to the lives and livelihood of US citizens is the US government and corporate elite. Giving them more power to control what information the population can access is much more dangerous to the average American than giving the Chinese government some data.