TikTok's package is com.zhiliaoapp.musically. Obviously when I saw this I googled what zhiliao meant. Turns out, it's chinese for to cure (an illness), medical treatment, or therapy [0]. Keep in mind, this isn't exactly hidden - it's part of the store URL: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zhiliaoapp.musically. I can think of a couple very generous non-worrying interpretations of why it'd be called therapy (I don't know, maybe therapy from boredom or something?), but "to cure an illess" and "medical treatment" seems very straightfoward. Even though I can really only guess what they're "curing" (capitalism? western ideals? I don't know), I don't really want to use an app that can so heavily, yet silently influence my mood and thoughts when the developers have clearly and openly planned on using it for this purpose since the very beginning (since they haven't even changed the name to TikTok, I would guess this was the original package name)

I really didn't think that was a very crazy take, but I've told some of my friends and family members about this and the response (across the board) was "well that's crazy, and if I knew about this before I'd probably never would have downloaded it, but I really like tiktok so I don't care"

Am I going insane? Are people honestly ok with being openly manipulated like that? Isn't it worrying that they're so addicted they can't give it up when given facts that they admit would have caused them to not use it in the first place?

I really feel like this is going to be a huge issue in 5-10 years but nobody will notice it happening.

[0] https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.php?define=zhi+liao, this is consistent with google translate.