> being controlled by the Chinese government is clearly problematic
I read it a lot, but it's actually highly dubious that that is the main issue or a problem at all.
The problem is how western kids react to TikTok content and why they do it that way.
TikTok is also present in many other parts of the World and it's not causing the same harm everywhere, it must mean something.
The title should actually be "TikTok is harming American children at an industrial scale" and the focus should be on why Americans are more susceptible to TikTok[1], whose content, BTW, is mostly created by fellow Americans and not directly by the Chinese government.
[1] the why is also somewhat explained in the article, even though I do not believe those are root causes, they're just symptoms
“It’s better to have young people as an early adopter, especially the teenagers in the U.S. Why? They [sic] got a lot of time.”
“Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience . . . . If you look at China, the teenage culture doesn’t exist — the teens are super busy in school studying for tests, so they don’t have the time and luxury to play social media apps.”
The latter being honestly quite worrying for a country that prides itself to be "the best place in the World", kids should not waste so much time on what is basically a reel of (highly discutibile) ads disguised by entertainment.
Chinese seem to understand it and have created a healthier environments for their kids, maybe we could learn a thing or two...?
It should be noted that in every major US corporation there's been a meeting where executives said or proposed something very similar. It's capitalism 101, first: profit, then, maybe, if you're forced to, ask for forgiveness .
EDIT: as a non American, it looks to me like the old guns don't kill people, people do except coming from a country where there are virtually no guns around, and very few people kill other people and usually the gun is not the weapon of choice, maybe the problem is actually the people living in the USA plus giving them guns.
> I read it a lot, but it's actually highly dubious that that is the main issue or a problem at all.
Nobody here said it was the main issue. But it is clearly problematic, and easy Google searches brings up tons of well-researched journalism as to why.
Algorithmic-driven feeds are brilliant from a psychological control perspective, because you don't need to outright censor stuff. You should need to downrake stuff you don't like so it shows up less often, and uprank stuff that shares your viewpoint. It's a very effective yet extremely subtle way to mold public opinion.
Still the problem is not that the Chinese government owns it, but that the people in US cannot stop using it and give it to kids to use unsupervised, despite being owned by the Chinese government.
We don't know whether parents in China would give it to kids to use unsupervised because the Chinese version of TikTok is heavily regulated by Beijing and is very different from the American version.
TikTok in China is mostly the same app, under a different name of course.
What is different?
The Chinese society, which does not exists in a vacuum and is not directed by evil entities coming from another planet to rule the Chinese people under their thumb, they are Chinese people too.
In China kids are only allowed a limited screen time per day, because that's what parents want, that's what studies showed them, that it's not safe for children, and that's their beacon: for parents, the ruling class and the society at large. They chose safety over instant gratification.
OTOH when US government tried to ban TikTok people protested vehemently. It was mostly so called "influencers" who turbo charged their armies of minions against a decision that could harm them, but was good for everybody else.
So Americans should ask themselves why they prefer TikTok over the safety of their children, Chinese people don't, because they don't do it.
It doesn't matter if it's controlled by the Chinese government or an oligarch. The damage is the same. Remove TikTok today and it's another form of social media tomorrow. Algorithms trained to increase addictions are the problem.
Moot point given the state of the US government (or Hungarian, Turkish, Israeli, etc). What makes China's hold over TikTok supposedly more nefarious than say Musk's hold over Xitter?
Regardless of whether one would necessarily argue China's ownership of Tiktok is worse than Musk's ownership of Twitter, is you're in the US, China is a foreign adversary. Any country would be nuts to have one of their biggest media distribution channels (especially the way Tiktok's algorithm works) be owned by their largest rival.
Not only am I not in the US, I also don't subscribe to this way of thinking of "foreign adversaries". From what I can tell, China and the US both have significant problems, but China's dealings with my country have been mostly fair of late, while the US has been a big petulant bully.
I feel like this is a site full of educated people, for whom a citation for this claim is about as necessary as one for the claim "the President is the leader of the executive branch of the US government"
Honestly, I question the motivations of any techie trying to argue that a Chinese state-controlled propaganda machine consumed en masse by children is anything but especially problematic.
Well, no, I just want to understand why people are calling the chinese government evil. It seems like they must be doing something different from other world governments to be called evil, so I'm curious about what those things are and how much they differ from other governments.
It's simple. They're "Communist." Anti-capitalist. Anti-Christian. The United States, which sees itself as the righteous inheritor of Western civilization, founded as the New Jerusalem by God himself, which single-handedly won World War 2, has considered itself the existential enemy of communism since the Cold War, and stoking fears of the "Red Menace" has always been effective on the American populace, particularly the parts with really sensitive hearing.
We tried to do the same trick with Islam post 9/11 and it was somewhat effective but it didn't have quite the same resonance. Which is weird because there's a long history of Black Marxist activism in the US, and of Black Muslim activism in the US, and you'd think if anything could convince Americans to hate and fear something, it's that thing's utility to Black liberation. But for some reason Islamophobia just seems to have been folded into the same generic antiwoke xenophobic white supremacist milieu as everything else, while people still jump on tables and go "eek!" at the thought of commie mind control.
