[newbYhrly]

I was referring to users choice of TikTok, not the “content of” TikTok.

Why should the US government decide which apps free people download? Free people ostensibly have no obligation to government security concerns.

Assange, Snowden, Swartz. Migrant children in cages.

Along with the list in my original post, and recent history I was alive for that includes numerous other examples; US citizens and its politicians are bullies who ignore their own bullying.

Not saying “China good.” I’m saying “US bad.”

[andrei_says_]

How is “someone else bad” an argument to not “make thing less bad”?

Isn’t this the very definition of whataboutism?

What would be a constructive approach to improving the situation?

[newbYhrly]

Because they aren’t coupled in a meaningful way.

Whataboutism is minimizing bad thing by highlighting other bad thing. “Look bad thing parity!”

Shooting someone because your friend shot someone else does not make what you did ok.

A constructive approach would be to build schools, hospitals, and other local social solutions to community vision rather than allowing outside agents to gambling for themselves with the outputs of our agency.

We flip out over the potential for waste in too many hospitals while binning laptops and phones every couple years to save Apple.

There will be literal waste to any human endeavor. What character do we want it to have? Empowering a party drug addicted rocket man filling us full of high minded bullshit about a future no one can predict or helping people exist how humans tend to exist; building communal ties that don’t expropriate wealth and agency for some distant power hording edgelord.

[andrei_says_]

Thank you for clarifying, this distinction is useful to me.

Do you see the possibility for a constructive approach which could address the situation with TikTok?

And, by extension, the toxic destructive influence of social media addiction, especially for youth?

[newbYhrly]

Who is to say it is destructive and toxic? Elders who lack emotional context and for whom it quickly makes anxious?

The same was said by elders when DND and comic books came about. The same was said about the internet itself. About secularism and relinquishing maintenance of past spoken traditions of all flavors.

For an increasingly secular society to say “hey wait I meant we bin religion but not my profiteering!” is the height of hypocrisy.

The only past traditions of value are disabusing people their meatbag is more sacrosanct than another, and fighting like hell to improve equality of condition for all meatbags even if that costs some their figurative value whether measured in conviction to scripture or fiat currency.

That’s my two cents anyway. Relativity means reality is relative, and thus so too are individual motives given an individuals time spent close to specific information.