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by Spivak 949 days ago
What are you talking about?! Listen to yourself dude, you've completely fallen down a conspiracy rabbit hole. If the US exerted that level of control over private media you would call it a dystopia and a violation of 1A. China also has a policy that limits teenagers to 1hr of online video games a day, surely you wouldn't look at that and jump straight to Activation being a government psyop to stunt education.

TikTok would have to be doing something anything unique in this situation and they aren't. YouTube is the OG radicalization pipeline, Tumblr is more pro-communism than TikTok will ever dream to be, Facebook and IG pioneered doomscrolling before it was cool, and Twitter/Reddit ruined an entire generation of men with the enlightened technoconservatarian nonsense.

I promise you if there is one thing that is absolutely completely certain in America is that we need no help whatsoever in destroying the fabric of our own society and to say otherwise is an affront to American exceptionalism.

1 comments

Not sure about "corrupting America's youth," but TikTok has been proven to selectively show content to different regions to promote only certain kinds of thought: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917474

This was enough for me to resolve to never use it. And you're right that other social media isn't much better, though I don't think that was being called into question in the first place.

> Not sure about "corrupting America's youth," but TikTok has been proven to selectively show content to different regions to promote only certain kinds of thought

The example cited there seems a lot like it is to conform to local censorship policies, not to manipulate thought around some centralized objective of TikTok or the CCP.

As if that's any better? Not to mention, being capable of one means they are capable of the other.
> As if that's any better?

Its a different thing, whether its better or not is a completely unrelated argument.

> Not to mention, being capable of one means they are capable of the other.

Neither one is a particularly deep capability, anyone with an information service with a personalized feed is capable of both, and if they don't conform to local censorship policies they simply will be banned where that occurs.