[bstar77]

I was a bit critical of my wife using TikTok until I realized that she replaced the negativity of Facebook with something that, in its current form, is pretty harmless. It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity.

[ralfd]

This.

Take any social media app and there is something toxic, mean, snarky about it. Twitter is optimized for snark and shit storms. Facebook has your crazy uncle sharing fake news. Instagram posts are fake and pretentiousness. Reddit has their subreddit drama.

TikTok is just fun. Even wholesome fun.

I tried if I could find one mean tiktok video, but there was not one bullying video. Even if the girl making a dance video was ugly/fat the comments on that were encouraging and positive.

[chillacy]

I was wondering awhile ago to what extent the famous saying "the medium is the message" applies here. It's famously easy to misread the intent of text, to see hostility when there is none (and so smiley faces and emojis came into being), it's probably harder to be mean over photos than text (especially a photo of yourself...), and even harder over video.

[rvz]

Not sure if you're aware of the fact of what was going on in Hong Kong and the loss of its autonomous status due to the national security law. Facebook and TikTok are no different to privacy, but TikTok can give all of that data and the CCP can access it. But of course it doesn't matter to you because 'its pretty harmless'.

For Hong Kong citizens, it's much worse. They are being identified and arrested in the hundreds as the Chinese government has access to this data to find anyone insulting or ridiculing them. That's very totalitarian to me.

[stronglikedan]

> But of course it doesn't matter to you because 'its pretty harmless'.

That doesn't seem like a very charitable interpretation of OP's comment.

If a very small fraction of global users may come to harm as a result of (not by) using an app, then that's pretty much the textbook definition of "pretty harmless".

[mschuster91]

> It's replaced rants and frustration with laughter and positivity.

... and Chinese spyware in the pockets of children.

[msbarnett]

Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country. Hand wringing about TikTok seems more rooted in sinophobia than genuine privacy concerns, from where I’m sitting.

[xapata]

Do you agree with the censorship and propaganda policies of mainland China? If not, Sinophobia is not paranoia.

[msbarnett]

No, but then again I’m equally opposed to much of contemporary US politics and the long history of US meddling in foreign countries affairs to obtain anti-democratic results that happen to favour US goals (broadly, Latin American 20th century history), so again, this “TikTok’s data gathering is an existential threat to freedom but please pay Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google et al no mind” framing is... unconvincing to say the least.

[addison-lee]

No doubt spyware is bad from either country, but TikTok was caught trying to suppress content from "ugly, poor, or disabled" users. Do you still support the app knowing that?

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

[msbarnett]

I didn’t say I supported it at all.

I merely said I don’t see how it’s worse than the major US social networks. Like say Facebook, which has been caught multiple times allowing employers and housing advertisers to illegally exclude groups like Black people, from seeing job postings and apartment listings.

Again, I don’t know that what TikTok has been shown to be doing is any worse.

[addison-lee]

Sorry, didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

[foepys]

Look at Hong Kong where China just yesterday told the political parties that holding any pre-election for Hong Kong's parliament is an aggressive act against China.

Or look at the Uyghur internment camps. Or the one child policy that effectively turned some communitys 80% male.

There is no opposition in China that can speak up against this.

[ardy42]

> Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country.

I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US. The US isn't intractably opposed to liberal democracy, but the CCP is:

From the OP:

> To that end, this long history looms large in how China thinks about its relationship to the U.S. specifically, and the West generally. China is driven to reverse its “century of humiliation”, and to retake what it sees as its rightful place as a dominant force in the world. What few in the West seem to realize, though, is that the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished, and that Western liberal values are actively hostile to that goal. Tanner Greer wrote in Tablet:

> ...

> This understanding of China’s belief that it is fighting an ideological war explains why the severe curtailing of freedom that happened in Hong Kong this month was inevitable; if the Party’s ideology is ultimately opposed to liberalism anywhere, “one country-two systems” were always empty words in service of China’s rejuvenation, and Marxism’s triumph. To see that reality, though, means taking China seriously, and believing what they say.

[msbarnett]

> I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US.

I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.

[ardy42]

> I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.

Could you go into more detail about your thoughts on "[each] country’s ideology" and why you think that makes their social networks (which IMHO are a form of media) roughly equivalently desirable?

IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better. China's government, on the other hand, is pretty unrepentant about the bad things it does, and explicitly rejects and suppresses the mechanisms that could lead positive change in those areas. If the OP is correct and China's government sees itself in an ideological war with the West and its ideas of liberal democracy, then I'd expect that Chinese social networks will be drafted to serve in that war, either now or in the future.

If I dislike beef, I might not be enthusiastic about eating a steak, but I'd still prefer that to some chicken cooked in motor oil.

[msbarnett]

> IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better

From the outside, I think Americans generally over-estimate the degree to which modern America is actually a liberal democracy. The tolerated range of speech seems to in reality run a perilously narrow gamut from "neo-conservative" to "arch-neo-conservative", with anything left of the former routinely subject to exercises of state force to attack and undermine that dissent in practice (declarations of turning the nebulous self-applied label of "Antifascist" into a "terror organization", COINTELPRO, etc, etc), regardless of what freedoms are claimed to be enshrined in the US constitution.

And this is merely its internal opposition to liberal democracy; again, even a cursory glance at modern Latin American history demonstrates that the US happily prefers right-wing dictators to democratically elected leftists, if the latter is at all detrimental to the US government's interests.

[scottLobster]

Don't need to be enthused to acknowledge one is better than the other. At the end of the day the NSA/facebook is far less likely to use my information to hurt me than the CCP. The only difference is I live in the US, so the CCP doesn't really care and can't really reach me without committing a potential act of war anyway. If I moved to China and maintained my same social media habits I'd be disappeared rather quickly, and possibly organ harvested.

Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist. And you're giving that info freely, better hope the CCP doesn't decide to use it against you while you're there to make a political statement. They've done and are doing far worse over less.

[msbarnett]

> At the end of the day the NSA/facebook is far less likely to use my information to hurt me than the CCP.

Again, I do not reside in the US and do not imagine that the NSA is on "my side", so obviously I'm going to take a more jaundiced view of surveillance apps of US origin.

> Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist.

Yes. This is equally true of the US. You are ordered to disclose all social media accounts at the border, and can and will be denied entry to the country if your social media posts contain political statements (or even apolitical statements) that the interviewing officer objects to, whether posted by you or merely sent to you: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s..., https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16810312, etc

[alextheparrot]

Can you explain the threat model you're using here to assess Facebook vs TikTok? This sounds like just emotional language as I could call most of the modern web spyware and not be too far off the mark

[xapata]

It's less about threat model than willingness to use it.

If the US government were using Facebook to censor and disseminate propaganda, we'd likely eventually hear about it.

In contrast, the Chinese government is certainly using TikTok to censor and quite likely to disseminate propaganda. Critics of that policy will be imprisoned.

[Altimos]

This article calls into question how closely you feel a sitting executive's campaign is to its government, but we have heard about it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-202...

[ideals]

Ya only Uncle Sam is allowed to spy on our kids.

This line of reasoning is getting old. All social media apps are data collection driven platforms

[bstar77]

Since the copy/paste exploit was addressed (in ios) I'm not sure what useful information "chinese spyware" can gather from this app. As long as it's being used for goofy dance and lip sync videos, I don't see the harm.

[cj]

I see the risk being less about spyware, and more about giving CCP the ability to push its agenda at the flick of an algorithm tweak.

A lot of people in comments are talking about how great the feed algorithm is out weeding out teenage dance videos and showing interesting content.

You can easily imagine a scenario where CCP tweaks its algorithms to favor content relating to one party or candidate vs. the other.

The scary part is that I think it wouldn't be obvious to know whether China is exploiting TikTok's American audience via algorithms driving a certain agenda since it can be done very subtly in non-obvious ways.

[zzzcpan]

It's a private company, it's very unlikely for them to outright push government propaganda. They'll probably just censor "political activism" on the platform altogether and someday if government establishes tighter control of the platform they might be forced not to censor some of it, like things that undermine the US government.

[giantrobot]

Large "private" companies in China are not private as you would think of them in the West. The Chinese government or the CCP will own outright or through holding companies shares in a company. So even at the most benign the government or CCP will have influence in a company's governance. Executives and upper management will always be outwardly enthusiastic about all Chinese government/CCP talking points and decisions.

Due to China's "security" laws security and intelligence agencies have essentially full access to large companies' data. There's no real due process so a "private" company's data is essentially government data. There's also the overt and covert censorship and propaganda imposed by the government.

Company executives serve at the pleasure of the government. Anyone not towing the party line or acting with too much independence will get caught up in "anti-corruption" investigations or just be arrested for crimes they may or may not have actually committed.

Realistically it's better to just assume a priori that a Chinese social media company is pushing propaganda and building dossiers of users. It's certainly safer to assume that.

[zzzcpan]

It takes a lot to produce and push government propaganda. It would require a tech company to essentially turn into a government run news organization if they were to do it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of even having different businesses, rather than all of them being propaganda producing news outlets.

[monkpit]

Couldn’t you say the same thing about any social media algorithm? That’s the “scary part”. Not the fact that it is Chinese.

[godtoldmetodoit]

My personal feeling is that Tiktok is better then most other social media for the end users emotional state, at least based on my wife's usage.

From a spying perspective, I tend to agree with you as well.

That said - China doesn't let FB or Twitter in their country, why the hell should the US let them in ours? To me it is akin to letting them buy the NY Times or CNN. They may be benign now, but if tensions were to continue mounting, they could greatly influence the content a significant portion of people in the US are receiving. I see 0 reason to trust them with that power.

[jfengel]

Is there any reason to think that positivity will continue to hold? Or is TikTok just getting its grace period before griefers, trolls, and paranoiacs move in?

If the Chinese government is going to aggressively moderate TikTok to keep that out... uh, cool, I guess. I'd be happy to see some popular entertainment that doesn't devolve into a screaming match. But it's a lot of work, and reduces audience (i.e. revenue).

[throw57654]

TikTok is also banned in China.

Bytedance has an isolated version called Douyin.

I believe if FB or Twitter created specific versions that comply with China’s laws, they would be allowed.

[jsterSC]

I highly recommend anyone that has this initial reaction to what these companies are benefiting from their surveillance models check out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...

Which does an excellent job helping to stimulate thought of just what the power and purpose of these types of apps as well other structures (alphabet) are able to do...