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by tuxpenguine
1177 days ago
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I think this is exactly the manifestation of social media's influence on a person's view on America. I came from another country and lived in America now. If we watch the news from social media, you will inevitably get the sense that the country is in decline: guns out of control, sky-rocketing house and medical expense, non-functioning government etc. In reality, you take for granted the freedom that you enjoy here, protected by the US military, constitution and rule of law. People in many other countries would go to great lengths to just have what you have. I agree that gun control is a serious issue, but this TikTok thing can easily cause many more suicides among teenagers if we don't ban it, the scale of harm is much higher than school shootings. That's my 2 cents. |
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Not that it isn't at least a little reasonable to be wary of adversaries having access to a data collection platform, but the problem also gets meaningfully less substantial in general if you put meaningful limits on these companies' capacity to grow and eat each other in the name of building empires of surveillance capitalism.
Meta in particular is pushing hard on that angle while hand-waving away the fact that Facebook has a history of treating society as a large-scale experiment. It's manipulated users' mental health on purpose, meddled in elections by selling users' data directly to campaigners, and furthered incitements of everything from genocides abroad to the attack on the Capitol. They're feeding into attacks that single out TikTok specifically, as part of a broader pattern that Facebook and Zuckerberg personally have exhibited of trying to buy or clone nearly anything that represents competition. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp. They tried to buy Snapchat. They've lifted the primary functionality of several large competitors, ranging from disappearing messages to basically all of Reels.
Instead of just taking the blunt-instrument approach of banning social media platforms from within the borders of specific foreign countries, we arguably should be having an entirely different conversation about banning the business practices that make TikTok a problem.