I replied to the parent comment by accident, but:
That's the kind of content that survives the crucibles of Chinese censorship, "Creative and Joyful" opiate for the masses. This is an often overlooked aspect of Chinese social media / content filtering philosophy that has coalesced over time - block out the bad and divisive while elevating mundane joys. It's how the 50c operates, it floods the airwaves with small happy platitudes and avoids debates because engaging and challenging controversial topics (especially politics) is how toxicity is produced. It's counterproductive to even try. It's why TikTok's content policy is designed to protect the status quo, often misinterpreted as being pro-Beijing when it's broadly pro-establishment. The last thing Chinese social media platforms is designed to do is to start revolutions, encourage radicalization or sectarianism among impressionable audiences, things western social media platforms are dealing with now, and why they were blocked in China in the first place. That said, I guess it's possible for TikTok to be weaponized to sow division, but why would they need to when the whole of western media sphere is doing so already.
IMO the style has it's place, whole of China has no choice but to live under it, but in the west, a plurality of content management philosophies calibrated for different audiences is good. There's lessons in managing toxicity to learn from TikTok even if it gets banned.
This is what the posted article is about. I cannot write a rebuttal to this that is better than what Ben Thompson wrote, and I won't. The section "A Reluctant Prescription" section is directly about this.
I can rebut this, however:
"However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either."
They don't do it in China.
In reality we don't regulate them nearly as much as we can, so the end result is that FB and Tiktok both invade your privacy.
I prefer the idea of a US based social media company to a Chinese one. But only slightly. I would much rather the company be based somewhere with genuine intent to create consumer safety and privacy focused laws.
It’s pretty trivial to do that, and nobody would be the wiser.
Incentive for TikTok is to keep the CCP happy.
Given the geopolitical aims and ambitions of the latter, you can see why they aren't comparable.
The same can't be said of the Chinese Government. That seems like a pretty distinct reason to be more OK with FB/Insta/Snap than TikTok.
All Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the country’s National Intelligence Law to turn over any and all data that the government demands, and that power is not limited by China’s borders. Moreover, this requisition of data is not subject to warrants or courts, as is the case with U.S. government requests for data from Facebook or any other entity;
Their privacy policy notes data may be shared as well:
while TikTok claims that it is independent from ByteDance and stores data in the U.S. and Singapore, its privacy policy is clear:
"We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group."
>Following the shutdown, ByteDance announced that it would give preference to Chinese Communist Party members in its hiring and increase its censors from 6,000 to 10,000 employees.
This was an analysis on TikTok vs YouTube and focuses on how TikTok leverages mimcry to overcome the initial burden of ideation and yields significant content creation for its platform.
"On Youtube, 79% of views accrue to only 10% of its creators. While on TikTok 55% of viewers also create videos. " https://4thquadrant.io/freearticles/business-models/tiktok-a...
I haven't used Tiktok, but from what I understand you can only post videos taken using the phone's camera and they can only be edited using whatever filters are available within the app, effectively limiting how manipulated or manufactured the content can be. Sort of like a Snapchat for videos (with the caveat that you can save and post videos at a later time in Tiktok, whereas with Snapchat it's "now or never"). Coupled with not having an associated text component where you can easily post testimonials and links to a site where you're selling a self help book, get rich quick scheme, juice cleanse or gym routine, it should limit how easy it is to use it as a promotion platform.
If you do, you already have the answer. If you don't, I suggest you get to know a bit more about China before CCP's alternative facts become the facts.
I'm genuinely curious if posts relating to China's treatment of Uyghurs are already meeting censors on tik tok.
I found it funny that the author of this post is trying to defend liberal values like the free flow of information on the internet by...making Apple and Google remove Tiktok from people's phones. He's correct that the primary political risk of Tiktok is the recommendation algorithm being manipulated. However, American tech companies manipulate their recommendation algorithms for political reasons (in the loose sense of the word political) all the time and I'm sure not everyone in the world likes that either.
This would have been a good chance to really defend free flow of information on the internet, open and swappable recommendation algorithms, personal data ownership, and so on, but the conclusion is basically "it's bad because a China-affiliated company does it". Generally, everything that Tiktok does that is wrong is also wrong when Facebook does it. The reality is that Tiktok is (for now) a superior product in many ways to anything from American tech companies. Why is this?