Learning facts cherry-picked by the algorithm to promote engagement is not the same as being informed.

To be honest, everything we learn is cherry picked by someone.

You can either exert editorial control to push content that fits your rhetorical needs at the cost of engagement (because by definition you're not pushing the most engaging content) or you can push the content that is the most naturally engaging. You can't have both.

And boy do I have bad news about the places you would typically turn to be more informed about current events -- the news -- and how what you see is also designed to promote engagement.

Someone who acquires more factual knowledge via TikTok would be more informed than one who did not, all other things being equal, no?

Not necessarily. A carefully selected set of facts can tell a very inaccurate story.

They are still more informed though. One important thing they could be more informed about for example is how slippery and illusory colloquial English language is, and the effects that has on the "reality" one experiences.

No, they are misinformed and may believe entirely incorrect things as a result.

This is a good example as I’m sure many holocaust deniers see themselves as more informed than non-holocaust deniers

>> They are still more informed though.

> No, they are misinformed and may believe entirely incorrect things as a result.

More informed does not necessarily protect one from being misinformed (your "no" implies your statement necessarily disagrees with mine - it does not).

> An example of this is Holocaust denial. A carefully selected set of facts in isolation can make someone believe the Holocaust didn't happen; this does not make "the Holocaust never happened" an informed belief.

Finding a positive example of something is easy, now try demonstrating there are literally zero counter examples, which is the claim you are making.

Also to consider:

- Is "informed" both a binary and non-decomposable?

- Might you be expressing your opinion on the matter, but representing (and perhaps perceiving) that opinion as a fact?

- "One important thing they could be more informed about for example is how slippery and illusory colloquial English language is, and the effects that has on the "reality" one experiences."

No.

Consider this simple example of cherry picking data (with made up numbers):

10 000 people every year suffer severe side-effects from vaccines.

If that's all you know it's logical to conclude that vaccines are dangerous.

But what they dont tell you is that vaccines are distributed to hundreds of millions and save the life of millions.

You need the full picture to be more informed.

Coming across the "10k severe side effects" data point should trigger the critical thinking in one to find out the total amount of vaccines in order to form an opinion. I would say it is still better to learn that fact than not.

You're expecting too much from a generation that grown up being bombarbed by narratives and distractions. Most don't have critical thinking and the required attention span in the first place.

That's what should be fixed then. Teach critical thinking and then you don't have to implement regressive policies like limiting or banning $perceived_bad_thing.

Nobody in a position of power is interested in teaching that to the masses. We are lucky if we can teach our own kids to think on their own.

If it only was a single data point, sure.

But my example was too simple just to make a point. In the real world you'd be bombarded with hundreds of facts like this, aimed at carefully crafting a certain narrative. Of course mixed with half-truths and lies.

It's not easy to overcome this with critical thinking, and even experts in the field fall into this trap. Expecting someone with no knowledge to be able to is just not realistic.

No information is better than bad information IMHO.

Is factual knowledge bad, necessarily? Simplistically, it can certainly be bad sometimes/often, but is there ever a time it necessarily isn't also due to to other poorly calibrated variables that have been overlooked, like educational and cultural norms?

Personal anecdote but my girlfriend has been pushed to the right due to her TikTok habits. At least what is considered the "right" in the US.

It may be to China's benefit to encourage moves in both directions.

Division is everything. It is immeasurably more difficult to control and manipulate a unified mass than it is to manipulate multiple different fragments of said mass. This applies to pretty much everything from flat-pack furniture to society.

It's pretty telling how effective China thinks it is, given their restrictions on Douyin ("internal Chinese TikTok"). iirc kids can only use it for <1 hour / day.

That's absolutely evidence of the opposite. If china thought they could use the app's algorithms to promote national unity, they would do that. They have their own exclusive app.

China thinks its effective at wasting time. Children also aren't allowed to play video games monday through friday, and are limited to 1 hour per day otherwise- a law which existed before douyin limits: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58384457

The country that is obsessive about its children and their productivity, the country famous for kids competing in chess and abacus and piano... that country is just banning douyin because it's a time waster.

I think that is kind of orthogonal to the point

I don't think encouraging national unity and encouraging strife and polarization are the same thing at all, and in fact I would bet the latter is easier at scale

Maybe they're restricting Douyin because it's a timewaster, maybe because it much more naturally encourages discord than unity. Maybe both. Probably both, frankly.

They also don't peddle fentanyl within their borders.

Honestly, that’s pretty great. We have limitations on online casinos, because of social harm. How is TikTok and vidya different? They do objectively harm prodouctivity and implement addictive dark patterns, loot boxes, consuming over producing. Sometimes limiting personal freedom actually can be for one’s own good.

It is psy-op 101 to push people to any extreme you can; left, right, up, down, doesn’t matter as long as they’re mad as fuck.

Yes, until civil war.

I dunno if TikTok should be banned, but Nepal motives are truthful.

Can we please stop pretending China, as a national entity, is doing anything at all with TikTok USA?

It is absurd and not worthy of a board like this. I'm sure many you know people that work at TikTok? This just isn't happening, at all.

The sum total of what China is doing with TikTok is restricting what people in China see, which is what China is worried about.

What justifies the strength of your confidence?

From game-theoretic point of view: is China a geopolitical adversary? Yes. Does China control TikTok? Yes. Is TikTok a tool to tweak how citizens of your adversary think? Yes. Is that powerful? Yes.

So the facts our - our adversary is in control of a tool which can influence how we think, which is valuable to them. We don't know for sure that they use the tool but... why wouldn't they?

> Does China control TikTok? Yes.

No. Not in any meaningful way. The data and employees are in the US. Every intelligence agency in the US is watching those buildings and reading their data. The US has no laws against inspecting every single packet sent internationally, the employees are subject to US laws, and tiktok has distanced itself from china.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/tech/tiktok-leaving-hong-kong...

They are not meaningfully different from any other US company. It's not like they don't give data to china:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-gave-user-data-to-hon...

Tiktok is just the new banana republic, the new gulf war, etc. The US government is aggressively anti-competitive with non-domestic corporate threats to its largest industries. It has always attempted to destroy competition and maximize domestic control of furs, then produce, then oil, and now social media and advertising.

Do you even read your own links?

Google answered 44 police requests for user data. That's not the same as the TikTik firehose.

There are at least several credible reports from several Bytedance employees who claim that the CCP has a much stronger influence on TikTok than is publicly stated; as recently as a year ago.

Even if those claims are not true for whatever reason—why is the claim that they want to polarize the west through TikTok hard to believe? We're currently in a zero sum ideological war with them in which they have meddled in at least two of our last elections, they have spyware in internationally exported Huawei equipment, etc.

Their recommendation algorithm is a black box, and if they weren't doing anything heinous they could possibly provide some audit trail for US regulators or US employees to inspect. As far as I know they haven't provided much here to improve public perception or lower their risk of getting shut down.

> We're currently in a zero sum ideological war with them in which they have meddled in at least two of our last elections

Oh come on stop with this.

People need to chill.

Without taking sides on the content, your response to him sounds like what one would say after they ran out of actual argument.

No, it is the response of someone about to become psychotic from all the war mongering that got into fashion lately.

Just to reflect that back to you - you're responding to some folks (including myself) who are presenting a game-theoretic argument, and your response stems from "I am about to become psychotic."

If your goal is to persuade others to think more like you, "coming from a crazy place" isn't a good way to do that. If you think that people are making an illogical argument, then either present a parallel argument or better yet find the flaw in their logic.

The way you're engaging makes it seem like "logic" is on one side and "psychosis" is on the other side - so someone reading this who could be persuaded one way or the other, has zero reason to go with you.

I am referring to myself, as the one about to get psychotic. Sorry if I was unclear. Otherwise I agree with your points.

> What justifies the strength of your confidence?

Not OP but have a similar view. Behavior of TikTok isn't any different from other social media companies like FB and YouTube. The algos everywhere push higher engagement content and that is mostly dumb or polarising in nature. TikTok is in general averse to political content. It is full of misinformation but so is Youtube and Facebook. Short video is in general a worse format for nuanced content but great for engagement and AI. Now FB and Google have copied that.

We should look at harms of social media in collective and not trying to find some political scapegoats ignoring the root cause.

I find your view true and naive at the same time.

It’s true in the sense that all of these things are powerful and destructive. The naive thing is to ignore the added danger of the powerful and destructive thing being controlled by your adversary.

Analysis: There is now some public evidence that China viewed TikTok data https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index....

"US officials have long insisted the Chinese government may be able to view the personal information of TikTok users — but that claim was purely speculative. Until now.

"In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes."

> Can we please stop pretending China, as a national entity, is doing anything at all with TikTok USA?

You are arguing against a claim that the parent did not make.

It it true that political polarization of rival nations is advantageous. It is also true that filter bubbles do this naturally. There's no need for the CCP to tell TikTok to politically polarize the content they show to people.

> There's no need for the CCP to tell TikTok to politically polarize the content they show to people.

That's exactly what the parent was saying.

> China's benefit to encourage moves in both directions

It's disingenuous to suggest that people are talking about tiktok because they think it's just an inherently divisive app. If people want to ban apps that polarize people, twitter would certainly be higher on the list.

We could also say:

"It is to the US's benefit to encourage the Chinese people to learn about democracy."

This is true. And it is a reason that the CCP has banned western social media. These facts do not require any specific action by US authorities to pressure US-based social media companies to carry it out, because those platforms are full of pro-democracy content already.

> It's disingenuous to suggest that people are talking about tiktok because they think it's just an inherently divisive app.

I didn't. There are many reasons people are talking about TikTok, depending on who it is and what they care about. There's not even a single US government view on the matter.

You can't be this stupid

> It is absurd and not worthy of a board like this. I'm sure many you know people that work at TikTok? This just isn't happening, at all.

Honestly, I feel like you're right.

But at the same time, it'd be a genius strategy to destabilize a country. We'd be getting beat at our own game we pull on other countries.

It's absurd to think that a country as adversarial to the USA as China would not take advantage of such a vast chance to poison the mind of America's youth. It's as obvious as night vs day. In this case that is Occam's razor.

Let's be real. It's not TikTok, it's social media. Twitter had a reputation as a cesspool where people yell increasingy extreme political opinions at each other long before TikTok was popular. Gamergate was before TikTok.

TikTok is just the most refined version of the same rotten medium.

Obviously they want social chaos in the USA, pitting right against left is one way of doing that, so maybe just have a self adjusting algo that detects which way they lean and then slowly increase the ratio of right to neutral/left ideas(videos). Slowly push the person in that direction a bit at a time over months. I've been thinking about signup up for a mysudo account and playing with the algos to see how long it takes to become a full on Marxist and also a MAGA extremist.

Interesting, I'm curious but what opinions have changed?

She is now more of the opinion that anti-Asian hate is primarily perpetuated by African Americans, which seems to be a fringe opinion in left-leaning circles. I don't know if it's true overall: she says it's due to seeing a lot of videos of Asians being harassed by African Americans and almost none of harassment by any other group.

I guess the interesting thing with this one is, while this statistically is __factual__ (at least from my readings of whats going on), we also know statistics do a horrible job in actually showing causation. And an even worse job when it comes to explaining sociological issues because it's always one/few dimensional.

Scientific racism wasn't just absurdist rhetoric. It was, on the surface level, logical (albeit, cherry picked data) to push a specific view point that "felt logical."

So yeah I think you're right about that being an interesting pushed-to-the-right view point. And unfortunately due to it sounding `logical`, it's very hard to convince people to look a bit deeper into it and compare it to historical repeats of that rhetoric.

I will believe your rhetoric if you can give an example where the same thing can be said for leftist thought. Where "logical" thought trumps confounds as you say, but the confounds are what hides the truth.

This is probably indicative that videos featuring someone who is black being racist drives more views and engagement than a white person. So it's the ones the algo shows to her. This is why algos are dangerous.

Tiktok is also a vector for propaganda. There is not guarantee that all content there is true.

True content can also be propaganda for instance via the glorification of a particular lifestyle and its second order effects (implicitly elevated social capital).

Sure it is true like other SNSs, like Musk's X, are so too. Some particular people call it the "Free Speech".

Like Rashida Tlaib, or Ilhan Omar to further your example

Although I'm not very interested in the US politics, it looks to me that these 2 are politicians rather than platforms. Could you find other trees where your propaganda seems more plausible in context, please.

Sure you are, that's why you're whinging about X for free speech reasons.

Will you be honest?

For what it’s worth, propagandaness (is that a word?) of content has very little to do with how factual it is.

If by US you mean republicans, then yea, but they say that about every big tech company.

> It has been a huge awakening to folks to learn and hear about topics that their education system has failed them on.

Fully agree - Tiktok university is a great place to graduate from.

Since we are just sharing how we feel, anecdotally, my observation with my teen and her friends is that TikTok makes people think they are informed while actually misinforming them.

This is very much not limited to social and political issues but can be about physical matters like home repairs, how cars work / how to fix them, etc.

Anecdotally, almost every teen I've ever known has thought they were well informed while actually misinformed. For every one that could fix a car, there'd be five who knew how to change oil and ten who maybe knew how to add more oil. All of them (us) thought they were well informed. I don't think TikTok is behind this.

the amount of misinformation is insanely high on TT. From “news” to even specific trades (ie, construction, cooking, DIY).

I have had to carefully engage with only topics I am interested in else I get flooded with bs vids (ie, thots, “alternative medicine”, far right content, joe rogan, …)

For what it’s worth though, the content moderation is slightly better than other platforms. When I report dangerous videos (literally a person tailgating/road raging), the videos get removed pretty fast.

Not a half bad “status report” system either.

Tiktok and social media in general are polarising by nature. If I am aligned to any side, I'll get more videos of it and rage-inducing engagement magnet videos against other side. So you'll see right side being moving right and left being more left. So a right winger's feed will be full of Fox and Peterson. A central view doesn't get interacted with a lot so will be pushed out.