The subtle influence of TikTok on people is quite astonishing. I believe that there should also be antitrust laws in the field of communication. Otherwise, platforms like TikTok can gradually change people's thoughts, making their ideas more uniform. The government should not control people's thoughts, nor should any giant company control people's thoughts.
>platforms like TikTok can gradually change people's thoughts, making their ideas more uniform
Its nothing special to TikTok, the only difference of TikTok is that for the USA its a first(as a foreign owned social media company). The rest of the world was under the influence of Meta and Google for decades. It was reported that Facebook did experiments like making people sad by curating the feed.
Anyway, TikTok is working great for me. I see no political or culture war content, I enjoy comedians, travellers, scientists, culture, culture commentators, songs, hot women and cats. Its like the good old days of the internet, its fantastic. Also, unlike the traditional social media, it doesn't induce FOMO. I don'y check TikTok all the day, I don't feel the urge to be on top of my feed but once I'm in I can spend hours. Much more healthier than Instagram or Twitter IMHO. Also, I see all the cringe inducing TikTok stuff when on Twitter. That stuff never appears on my TikTok feed.
I wonder if EU will find anything. maybe sharing of private data illegally?
I recall during the last election cycle I would always see divisive posts from friends on facebook. Facebook has me marked as liberal. I would always see rather inflammatory posts from conservative friends.
What bothered me was that those same friends would post dozens of times a day about non political things, posts that would get a lot of comments and likes. I never saw those posts unless I went directly to their page. Facebook only put their posts on my feed which would be inflammatory.
I don't mind political content even from fringe ideologies. I'm actually curious why people think what they think, why people do what they do. I know the arguments of "my side" and I want to know the "other side".
That's why I still use Twitter but my problem with the traditional social media is that it constantly induces anger in me.
Lately, I also begin seeing too much bullying, the red pill alpha male stuff that constantly argues someone is bad/immoral/weak if doing this unimportant or mundane thing and we are all doomed and this one weird trick can fix it(usually crypto, some BS attitude towards someone etc). It feels like high school. Just unbearable.
I made myself a few list of people from different view so I can be aware of their agenda and argumentation but can't stand the "for you" tab.
If Twitter was a real life those people in the "for you" tab wouldn't have survived a day among the society, IRL you can't just go around and spell BS constantly. There's a serious hustler overload in the traditional social media, a functioning society doesn't have space for that many flamboyant people.
Its exhausting. One Dan Bilzerian may be an entertainment, add a Kardashian too maybe but a society of %0.1 Kardashians is too much. That's not a society. Maybe we don't have a real social media anymore due to the engagement wars.
My kids are self-confessed TikTok addicts. They are aware that now when they watch YouTube, they get 5 minutes in and wonder when the heck it's going to end.
Even they recognize the adverse effect on attention spans.
It doesn't help that YouTube was pushing creators towards longer and longer videos, resulting in lots of fluff and padding to convert a simple idea into an unnecessarily long entity for the sake of algorithm rankings.
While lack of attention span is a valid problem, YT has also created the problem of attentions not being rewarded.
I'm happy for you for having good kids but in my experience becoming truly self happens much later in life and I think your kids are simply thinking in your mental models, which I guess makes you a good parent. Not necessarily right about TikTok though.
Except there is rising antisetism in Germany (source of the report) and according to media reports there is rising antisemitism in the US which is the source of your phrase.
Germany got a bit off-rails during the last months. Any critique towards Israel’s actions it is called antisemitism.
As an example, this event organised by jewish people to talk about peace have been marked as antisemite by the government and lead to funding cancellation of a cultural center.
1.) The study is about antisemitism in Germany. There are Hamas supporters who plan terror attacks against synagogues and churches.
2.) Just somebody claimed to be canceled is not objectely canceled.
3.) this institution invitated people who have a positive and supportive view on 7 October massacre, source https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/neukollner-kulturzentrum-...
4.) It's about governmental funding. They still operate but why should my tax money put into this institution who have a positive attitude to massacres.
Can you read German or does your knowledge is based on English sources on this topic?
Antisemitism might be rising due to many things, like an ongoing event where huge number of civilians, including children are killed. That kind of stuff can make people angry and emotional and direct it towards a group of people instead of politicians. It's beyond me why anyone would attribute it to social media company.
If there was no TikTok/Twitter etc, people would have heard of it from politicians and NGOs and some people with other motives would have used it.
Can you eloberate why the Gazian Israelian war is linked to planned terror attacks with bombs on Synogogs in Berlin? Also this link can be seen on Tik Tok so they become more antisemetic.
I have no idea if it is linked or if so why would it be linked on that particular incident. What I see on Twitter though, is that people get angry and seek answers when people they feel connected to are wronged and there are always people providing answers like "because Jews are like that".
I wouldn't say that this is necessarily Twitters fault and I don't think these comments should be blocked. People gravitate towards easy answers to their problems and blocking doesn't help because there's private groups and real life communities where that kind of stuff is discussed.
I think, people concerned of social media are also seeking easy answers like those concerned with the mass killings of Palestinians. They all have valid concerns but their desire of easy solutions is misguided. It's so easy to say its the "evil jews" and its so easy to say that social media companies are radicalising people. Only if they can do this thing they will fix it, they think.
There's no easy solution to Gaza-Israel conflict, there's no easy solution to people communicating BS with each other.
There were also reports about rising extremism because of Youtube, it was discussed many times here. Also, do I have to remind of the state of Twitter? Wasn't Facebook involved in an actual genocide[0]? Maybe its just the society evolving and engagement based algorithms accelerating it?
As I said, I don't see political content on TikTok but that's probably due to my engagement patters. People who are into these things, they likely see as much as they like.
I do agree that social media can be a danger to the society though.
IMHO, the solution to this shouldn't be suppression of speech or tune algorithms to favor any politics. After all, the world is never simple as the good vs the evil, even though every party tries really hard to depict themselves as the good ones.
I think we would be better off with enforcing transparency. I would love if EU made TikTok open its algorithm and enforce review on the data that the algo runs on.
I glad your engagement pattern doesn't lead you to antisemitic content
According to the DSA researcher will get access to Tik tok. We might have more data in the future.
> Wasn't Facebook involved in an actual genocide[0]? Maybe its just the society evolving and engagement based algorithms accelerating it?
The algorithms seem to feed people what they like, so people with fringe ideas think they have a lot of support. Matched together with mob mentality, threaten and "downvote" dissenters, which makes the "downvoted" people believe they are fringe, I can easily see how Facebook at least increases the risk of genocide mobs, or any other obscene herd mentality action.
Like, people that are considered maniacs by their peers, can more easily find each other and organize, fundamentally. And the algorithm does it for them.
Maybe its just that we as species are not able to act intelligently as large groups? Maybe we have tools to deal with bad actors in small groups but those tools don't exist in the artificial large networks? Maybe those networks are structured in such a way that we can't act in any other way and participate? Maybe being flamboyant hustler is the only succeeding strategy?
I don't know but I' definitely not happy with the current state.
I think it is more about not having moderates around to distinguish radicals and like make them chill. The "filter bubble" is working way faster than changing friends.
A radical group seem to self-radicalize in isolation, putting "moderate radicals" away, making the cycle self-enforcing.
The exact same thing can be said about Instagram and the US. The fact consumers are summoned once in a while to chose in-between two sockpuppets of the establishment (corporations + deep state) is of little relevance, especially to foreigners like me living under its imperialism.
It matters quite a lot that it's bound by effectively no treaties or oversight by the population. Instagram also sucks, but there's at least a theoretical path to reining it in.
Unfortunately I live in the Netherlands. A country in which the government itself carries out criminality against it's citizens (They call it interventions), where prosecutors lie regularly in court, are found out and it's no big deal. A country where the attorney general writes in a letter that if a prosecutor lies in court it's not perjury and he cannot be prosecuted for it. A Country where the head of a court was publically outed as being responsible for the jailing of 9 innocent people on fabricated evidence, one of whom consequently commited suicide and there are no consequences. (See de Villamoord).
I would be great to live in a democracy. However, I don't think that picking on Tiktok is going to make it so.
Instead of investigating tiktok, why doesn't the EU investigate why obstruction of justice by the government is not punishable. Why does it not investigate why they (The Dutch government) introduced a new law in 2020 that everyone in government that has secrets to keep may lie in court under oath and not be punished by perjury. Which undermines the very concept of a democratic state of law.
I'm much less addicted to TikTok than I'm addicted to HN, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. I will use TikTok every few days, usually before sleep because I don't feel like something is happening and I'm missing out.
On the other hand, I constantly feel the urge to check what's going on in the rest.
Other people may have a different experience but its up to them to write about it. I can't speak for them and I'm not obligated to repeat the mainstream narrative. TikTok is working amazingly well for me.
Governments should invest more into education to train kids to actively seek and sense their cognitive biases. I think this is the only serious solution, punishing or baning platforms just addresses symptoms.
To tackle filter bubbles, you need digital competence, which is also an educational problem.
yeah, one has to actually be rewarded appropriately for their effort to learn such habits, but capitalism considers it more important to reward owners of capital for doing nothing at all, so we do that instead.
giving parents time off to spend with their kids would be a lot more effective. the schools can't even teach basic material to poor kids because their home lives are so lacking.
I have noticed that a lot of people I follow on instagram who use tiktok all adopt the exact same opinion of $CONTROVERSIAL_TOPIC at roughly the same time.
Until "recently" it was only crackpots and dictators that even though about controlling social media, by definition -- you were one if you raised concerns. At least how I read the political climate.
I guess it is good that awareness is raised, but I feel it is for the wrong reasons. There can be no major distinction between e.g. Facebook and TikTok.
