It's not just the data, it's bidirectional. The concern is that by adjusting the algorithm they can influence the population (e.g. to make math and science perceived as uncool). Not sure how seriously to take that but in principle it seems like a large vulnerability that is challenging to close off without actions like what we're seeing.

> Not sure how seriously to take that

I can help with that: not seriously at all. Calling someone a nerd has been a thing for the better part of a century. How long has TikTok been around?

It's a fair bit more complicated than that. They could choose to show all of the "you're a nerd!" videos to youths in other nations and all of the "look at what I did using science and engineering!" videos to youths in their own nation. It might be considered that such a move would put them in a more competitive position years to decades down the line.

Please tell me where I can purchase information about the sexual preferences of Republican politicians and leading religious figures. I... have... reasons.

I’m sure you could run some targeted ads on pornhub and figure it out.

Please provide me a dataset I can buy that has video feeds, so I can do facial recognition, as well as deep behavioural insights.

There are webcam feeds all over the earth, most can be found by just scanning ip addresses. There are even websites dedicated to finding them. You’d probably have a better dataset than TikTok simply because it is more realistic. The best part: it is free.

No you said a comparable dataset to TikTok was commercially available.

Few random webcams which would be illegal to take video from is not substantive and does not provide any insight into their interests, likes etc.

The whole issue with TikTok is that the Chinese government is able to personally identify people who disagree with them.

I’m not in the business of selling datasets. But it also sounds like you don’t know what problem you’re actually trying to solve yet. That’s a problem I can help you with.