Insta/FB/X/TikTok are all massive geo-political risks for a large number of countries. They have been called many times as tools for social engineering against governments.
The attacker in the 2015 OPM hack acquired biometric data on every federal government employee. Cross referencing against biometrics collected at ports-of-entry unmasked covert US operations, undermined US interested and put the lives of Americans abroad at risk. This information is valuable to every adversary equipped to use it.
The scandal of Tiktok is that rather than breaching OPM, a foreign entity has simply requested this information directly from future federal employees. Beyond mere facial biometrics, tiktok knows the childhood street address of ~every future spy -- and everyone near and dear to them. Tiktok can generate a psychological profile on ~every future diplomat and international businessman. And the biometrics they can access includes things like sleeping habits, gait, vocal chord structure, vocabulary, and accent -- much more than the OPM hackers got.
I find it bemusing that people continue to pretend that some TikTok videos can just completely brain-warp people, when domestic politicians paired alongside US intelligence agencies, countless astroturfed social media accounts, and a completely dysfunctional and collaborative media system can't make people think what they want them to.
I'm not saying this is true, but as a thought experiment, imagine you are an agent of the Chinese government assigned the task of weakening the west relative to China over the course of a decade or two given TikTok as a tool. What would that look like?
It can't look like obvious propaganda; people wouldn't use it. It doesn't have to convince people of any one thing to work anyway. Just shortening the average attention span would be enough to weaken a society a little. How about increasing polarization? People produce plenty of polarizing content on their own; just favor that a little more than an algorithm merely trying to be addictive does. Antisocial and self-destructive behaviors should also get a subtle algorithmic boost. Aggrandizing the platform itself is harmful as well - if someone chooses to be an influencer instead of a scientist, damage is done.
If those all sound like things most social media does, that's the point. It's like popularizing a junk food that's just a little higher in sugar, fat, and salt than the rest. Harmful elements of social media are harder to measure than that though.
FB/IG will delete or downgrade content that's extremely embarrassing to the US government; TikTok will do the same for the Chinese government. It's amusing when a subject (e.g. US government funding for a Chinese virus lab doing bat coronavirus research right before the Covid pandemic) hits both triggers - but X does allow that content to some degree so perhaps X really is a bit more pro-free-speech than either FB/IG or TikTok.
FB/IG/Threads openly downrank any political content for good reasons nowadays. There was a thread from one of the execs that I saw a few months ago. I actually like that. Not everything has to be "rage bait of the day sprinkled with geopolitical drama". And whenever I have that itch to scratch, I can just doom-scroll through Twitter.
TikTok is a bit different though, I think they were able to capture the audience and put them in correct bubbles, so if you want to just watch your funny memes, you won't see anything else. But looking at my friend's feeds, they see the opposite - extremely polarizing political content from all the possible sides of the spectrum. It looks like IG Reels has started to eat their lunch, but time will show.
If your algorithm can convince large numbers kids to snort cinnamon and eat tide pods for dinner, bending their perceptions enough for them to vote or not vote for something would be a piece of cake.
That’s just the worst reasoning I’ve ever heard. Your if.. then statement just doesn’t logically follow.
Honestly this whole thing reeks of the satanic panic type moral scares of the 80’s or the anti communist rhetoric of the 60’s repackaged in new form. Moral panic over something or other is an American tradition; right now it’s tiktok but god knows why.
Set yourself a reminder to come back to this comment in 10 years once the fervor has died down and you will read your own comments with bafflement.
"Using what it called "behavioral microtargeting" the company indicated that it could predict "needs" of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then could be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments and companies, providing "a better and more actionable view of their key audiences."
It is probably possible to manipulate people to further your political goals in an automated fashion using these technologies. In fact you can manipulate insane numbers of people in all kinds of ways with them.
This runs into a simple logical problem. The powers that be would love nothing more than to be able to do exactly what you're describing. And they have effectively endless resources at their disposal alongside dysfunctional intelligence agencies, a completely dysfunctional and obsequious media, and social media sites that have no doubt all signed up for PRISM and its likely even more insidious successors. Yet society is absolutely, in no way whatsoever, becoming more compliant.
There is no good side in this debate.