Anyway if anyone takes anything at all from this, it's the idea that the whole source of TikTok's success is in making culture (and therefore culture wars) irrelevant. Want to look at videos of disabled, unattractive, poor people all day? Have at. Not being flippant there, although now that I think about it, I bet there are vast differences between some people's publicly-espoused views and their own watching habits, were they ever revealed by TikTok's algorithm.
Edit: Went off on all sorts of tangents, but yes I totally agree with your point. In Trump-era America even success & failure fall into the fact-free zone.
We succeed: Of course! We're awesome! So proud!
We fail: It wasn't fair! Everybody had it out for us!
They succeed: Bunch of cheaters! We took the high road!
They fail: Of course! We're just too awesome for 'em! Better luck next time!
No one believes western companies do it out of the goodness of their heart.
They do it in part because of fear of backlash and in part because their CEO's (especially Twitter's, Youtube's and Reddit's) want to project a philantropist image without actually doing good things.
Who made this argument?
No one explicitly said that but it was implied pretty heavily especially when you look at how people received the news and interpreted it in memes and whatnot. I sent pictures of Wuhan to some family/friends and they were amazed at how big and impressive of a city it is. They thought it was like a small developing village.
It's kind of how we always talk about China though (regarding your initial comment) and I'm not sure if/when it will ever stop.
While I wouldn't phrase it that way, the so-called wet markets where dozens of live animals are sold in unsanitary conditions are a problem. Western nations do have a variety of health/hygiene laws that effectively make such markets illegal. They are seen as a primitive/backwards/dangerous throwback to something rightly done away with long ago.
Take factory farming, for example. Take the mountains of antibiotics we are shoving into factory farmed animals. Take the numerous warnings from experts in biology about how this use of antibiotics is incredibly dangerous, because it has the potential to be a breeding ground for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
Now, consider what we are doing about shutting down, or even mitigating the danger posed by those factory farms. Next to nothing - there's a few fringe environmentalist groups, there's a small vegan movement, there's a few yuppies who make sure to tell everyone that they only source organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat that costs them $40/lb. But the average person doesn't give two damns about it - and the average politician in agricultural-heavy ridings is entirely in the pocket of those industries. [1]
Disclaimer: I don't buy organic, hand-raised, cruelty-free meat, that would cost me $40/lb. I'm part of this problem. There's a lot of utility in cheap meat. Meat is delicious. But alternatives do exist.
[1] See the popularity of ag-gag laws - intended to suppress information, so that the public only gets one side of this story.
In Southeast Europe where I live cities are clean af. The thing that bothers me personally is absurd amount of pets on the streets in my country. When I go for a walk I see like 30 dogs.
Of course it's a huge country and it's not too hard to find an open-air market with meat hanging on hooks or public lavatories that you wouldn't want to enter without a hazmat suit, but people emptying their night soil out the window into the street below is not really a thing anymore.
Not every country on the planet is so egoistic like Americans, where self discipline for greater good means communism /s
I think there is. The world has already reached a point where we live in information bubble, surrounded by things we want to see and that agree with us. People are depressed and feel inadequate.
Formerly reputable news sources have realized that people don't want to be informed, they want to be outraged, or feel smug and correct, or see pictures of cats, and so real news is relegated to a lesser status.
I would much rather websites present me with the truth, even if I don't like it as much, than live my life seeing only attractive people and reading only good news, but ending up woefully depressed and un-informed, with feelings of inadequacy and no understanding of what in the world is broken.
I think news agencies have a responsibility to society to present news accurately, even if people find the news less pleasent to read than pictures of cats.
Similarly, I think social media companies have a duty to present a semi-accurate view of society where possible. I would rather have a realistic view of what people look like than have a series of recommendation algorithms and feedback loops result in me seeing only "conventionally attractive" people.
Of course, we've kinda already screwed ourselves here with hollywood/tv/movies. Perhaps it's too late to step back.
Is it too much to also believe that a company subject to a radically different regulatory regime, and different cultural norms, might field a product that would not be considered acceptable elsewhere?
For example: How does TikTok handle children under 13yo? That is a real headache for western social media firms. Does China enforce similar rules? Would not having to obey such rules not represent an advantage for a product aimed at young people? The lawsuits and imposed fines suggest TikTok is substantially advantaged.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53418077
"The company was fined 186m won (£123,000) by the Korea Communications Commission (KCC). The KCC, the country's media watchdog, said TikTok collected data of children under 14 years old without the consent of legal guardians."
The Slate article you linked talks about Facebook doing a similar thing, and facing a similar backlash.
Is it really that hard to believe that a country of over a billion people, with a mature domestic tech industry and startup scene, would eventually produce something that would compete successfully in the west?