• werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    9
    ·
    2 months ago

    Tiktok helped my life for the better 😀… LOL. Sure but it is also a Chinese company that can do things to turn your life and the life of everyone around you into living hell if the government do wishes to.

    I think what I would want my relationship with the Chinese country to be like is just simple transactions… I give you this money and I buy that thing. Done, end of transaction. I would like that for all phone tech companies actually. None of this shit about updates because they sold me a shit phone. None of the here’s 8 features, then an update leaves you with 3 features only.

    • TenderfootGungi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      2 months ago

      Twitter/x is owned by an unhinged South African billionaire and Middle East oil Barrons. We can discuss the theoretical abuse of TikTok, but X is damaging our democracy today.

    • WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Meanwhile everyone has already forget when Cambridge Analytics used Meta and Facebook to influence voters into giving us Trump with the help of Russian propaganda. The hypocrisy is so blatant They just want only US oligarchs making money and they want to be able to censor things young people are seeing nowadays from around the world. Every other excuse is a screen.

      • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 months ago

        This is possible. But at home we don’t watch TV and I just blocked YouTube altogether from my kids. That website is rancid. I wouldn’t let my kids on TikTok either if I was me. And I am me.

        However you are absolutely right. How else will you move people who don’t know any better to actually vote for you? And what sector of the population doesn’t know all the shit you have done in the past 30 years than people who haven’t lived 30 years and haven’t paid attention in history class, not care much about it? Teenagers! That population lives on TikTok. So you are absolutely right. Because if TikTok was a porn site nobody would give a fuck except Texas.

        • WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          That’s the thing. I definitely think short form content, and spawning even before that, the news bite culture, has been bad for attention spans, and I wouldn’t mind some sort of regulation on that with respect to kids probably. If I ever get a kid, they’ll be mad at me for being one of the last of their friends to get a smart phone lol.

          But the fact that it’s only Tik Tok and not the just as algorithm-laden YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, and Snapchat stories kind of proves it’s not for the good reasons people keep bringing up, of mental health or privacy. So they have to concoct the red scare, “China can manipulate our youth” angle. Even though we already had foreign companies and states influencing Americans, especially our older people, on other good, homegrown social media companies, like Meta and Twitter. So it won’t make a difference on that front, so it’s for less good reasons, like protecting American social media monopolies and censorship of news, the exact stuff we criticize China for. Then they’re going to pat themselves on the back about solving the problem. That’s the part that bothers me, i suppose. The lies and hypocrisy.