The bigger deal (bigger than the tracking that people usually focus on) might be how the algorithm is specifically tuned to reward dumb content in the US, compared to rewarding STEM and other educational content in China.
I'm not sure if this claim is true or not, but the person in your first reference is Andrew Schulz. He's a comedian who has already come out to say that he made all that up, and the media just ran with it [0].
So he made it up thinking it was fake - but now it has been independently shown to be likely true. In which case he made up a conspiracy theory then demonstrated to be accurate when he thought it was a joke.
One note on that sourcing: I would not generally find Deseret News (i.e. Mormon cultural-industrial-habits-porn outlet) a credible source in this context.
I also design productivity systems as part of my job, and found that watching TikTok in the laziest way possible can be an outstanding part of such a system.
We are long past the Horatio Alger bootstrapping days where we condemn procrastination and laziness out of hand. And yet Chinese government culture continues to try to speak with that always-on productivity-porn voice--fine, let them do it, see how it works out. They love to wax poetic about theoretical human machinery without giving attention to a reasonable duty cycle concept.
And keep in mind that they are simultaneously blocking a lot of that E-word they hate: Expression.
We now have much more deep, nuanced experience with productivity that exists and outperforms outside of that context.
IMO TikTok is better feared (if that's the lens) for the more rational, non-propagandistic reasons.
A combination of factors. History, ownership, culture & region, other personal experiences with contributors.
Those of us who were raised with this publication held over our heads grew up, checked it out, and do not hold it lightly in our considerations...in the right context it may be fine at face value but this is not one of those.
(Look up the name too. It has "old school industry/productivity concept" in its blood, even just as a general point of interest)
You want to spread fault, fine but at least make a quality argument. Keep in mind that some of us may be more resilient to casual gaslighting than you are used to, and for good reason.
The claim isn't fake. But the idea that this is some TikTok plot to poison America is ridiculous and sinophobic. Douyin is happy show low brow garbage to Chinese netizens, just like chinese gaming companies were happy to let teens play video games 24/7. The difference is the Chinese government won't let them.
America could easily do what China did here: enforce regulations on what kind of content social media companies can show minors. Just banning TikTok won't prevent Instagram from running the same playbook on Reels, it's not like Instagram has been the standard for teen mental health in the past 10 years. Douyin isn't educational in China due to the goodness of their hearts, it came from regulation.
The issue is, good luck trying to enforce any sort of corporate regulation in the US.
If you are concerned about the content that American's consume, there is no reason to single out TikTok. Instagram has been shoving the same garbage into the feeds of teenagers for nearly a decade and Reels is nearly exact clone of TikTok. There is little "educational" content on Instagram Reels. The solution would be regulate all the social media companies, like how China does.
If the problem is solely TikTok, then it most likely stems from the fact you don't like TikTok is owned by the Chinese (and you are more likely to believe nefarious claims that Xi Jinping personally told the TikTok CEO to make America dumber) which is sinophobic. You don't like TikTok just because it's a chinese company serving you the same garbage as an American one.
I believe there are valid reasons to ban TikTok, especially on state-owned devices, given the amount of data they exfiltrate, but "they are poisoning the American youth" is not a good one.
If you want TikTok banned in the US because they don't have proper data hygiene and you believe that data could be used by the CCP in the future that is fair.
If you want TikTok banned in the US because you believe that they promote dumb content as part of some strategic Chinese plot and you conveniently ignore Meta and Google, I'm going to assume that your reasoning comes from irrational fear of the Chinese. It doesn't make sense to distrust the Chinese when they are doing the same thing as Americans (unless you don't like them just because they are Chinese).
Trying to single out the government from the people is a convenient way to justify an anti-China stance. Have you even considered the fact that even if the majority of Chinese may not like their own government, that doesn't mean they support yours?
It's perfectly fine to separate the government from the people. That is why it is fine to hate the Chinese, Israeli, Iranian, Russian, and Saudi Arabian regimes.
You can but I don’t think it’s possible to without at least some blame by association. Even if I didn’t support the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan, I am still culpable as an American, and as a benefiter of American government policies (in general).
Yes, in Democracies people are culpable for the actions of their government. But I think the obligations of the Americans, Israelis, Russians, Chinese, etc is limited to consent to paying reparations to people their state has committed atrocities against. For example by paying a special tax which goes to the wronged people.
At the end of the day calling everything anti China and racist is just a way of deflecting and trying to justify what the government is doing.
No one is here defending their own government. Most people in most countries will freely admit when their governments do stuff that’s wrong.
But only CCP shills are here defending the CCP and trying to justify genocide, cross border arrests, mass censorship, etc etc.
For the record. Do I support my government being the NZ government. Nope. They are trying to pass some laws to prevent the next government from being able to roll anything back. Cement the things they implement even if the citizens disagree.
It's funny how in order to criticize another government we must first criticize our own. It should go without saying that nobody fully supports everything their government does. It's obvious and doesn't really need to be stated.
Yes so you don’t fully support the NZ government, but you are still a subject of and supporter of (through taxes or even maybe just plain apathy even) of the New Zealand government. And so in this way you can’t say the Chinese people are completely separate from their government, because at the end of the day they are paying taxes and letting their government do these things you object to.
So what? He doesn’t call everyone racist who criticizes the actions of the NZ government. It seems to only be CCP shills that struggle with this concept.
Nobody in the US gets confused when someone from Europe complains about US government military actions and calls them racist. Perhaps you too can learn that criticisms of the CCP have nothing to do with the Chinese citizens?
> So what? He doesn’t call everyone racist who criticizes the actions of the NZ government. It seems to only be CCP shills that struggle with this concept.
You’ve subtly insinuated that anyone pointing out some criticism of China must be calling everyone racist.
Has it occurred to you that some are indeed racist? In fact it is not OP pointing out the poster is racist, but they explained why such random allegations can be construed as racist. It is in fact his detractors who are attacking his motivation at a personal level (calling him a CCP shill) and trying to discredit his valid viewpoint without offering any reasoning.
There’s no evidence—nor is it even a good hypothesis—that somehow Tiktok is actively trying to subvert American society by feeding it garbage content. Such a conclusion is only reachable if you have an inherent bias that the motives in China towards the West are always evil. As others pointed out America produces and consumes garbage content well before TikTok… as well as companies like Meta literally copying tiktok features in shoveling garbage content… so twisting this narrative to antagonize and reframe China as the bad actor—at least in this specific case—is one rooted in inherent bias and laziness. Have you considered that the difference is simply because the Chinese government, with their well known heavy handed authoritarianism, simply not allowing TikTok to do that within China? Is western society so flawless that it is unwilling to accept its own failures that it must accuse others of active subterfuge instead?
I won’t argue with you about this anymore at a fundamental level because the issue at hand is that you are among many blindly discrediting and disregarding opposition. So I’ll ask you this for your own contemplation: is it even possible to say something or make an argument that just coincidentally isn’t anti CCP that doesn’t get us labeled as a CCP shill? If you’re going to answer avoid personal attacks and avoid “CCP shill” because that is not using any “facts” and is just a blind attempt to discredit the arguments being made. No one called anyone a racist. Some arguments and ideas were labeled sinophobic but no one made the accusation that a person must be sinophobic and therefore their ideas must be as well. But you are doing exactly that, but instead calling us CCP shills…
When people are criticizing the actions of the Chinese government and someone labels them as racist or sinophobic, the accuser is not necessarily a CCP shill but they are repeating CCP propaganda.
The CCP uses pretty strong disinformation campaigns against any criticism of them with whataboutism and false equivalences of the Chinese people with the government to claim it is “racist”.
A flood of commenters crying “Sinophobia” every time there is an article about Muslim concentration camps, zero covid failures, etc gets quite old.
Even now, your comment is prattling on trying to equivocate the comments with racism despite it being very clearly about the CCP’s policies on TikTok.
It’s not even compatible. I can criticise my government safely. You cannot say anything negative about the CCP without repercussions.
So it’s probably better you stop trying to defend and justify the CCP. It just makes you look like a supporter of an authoritarian regime that commits genocide to its own people.
Philip you’ve already showed your hand and revealed your biases by assuming things about my background… sorry but wholly unrelated as I am a US citizen and I can in fact freely criticize the CCP and I often do. But here in this thread we were talking about something specific. Since it’s not even possible to say something that doesn’t criticize the CCP that doesn’t get you labeled as “a supporter of the regime” there’s no point arguing with you. As you pointed out, you can disagree with your own government (assuming the CCP were my own government) but it doesn’t mean your government only does bad things. Rather than worrying about if I can criticize my own government, or anything about me or what I look like I am doing, why not focus on my arguments like a civilized democratic freedom of speech supporting society? Free discourse only works if you listen.
It's not like they can (short of an armed rebellion) demand to have another political party or government.
It's like saying a thug is robbing me at gunpoint so I give him my wallet. You only observe that I give my wallet therefore giving that guy my wallet was good for me and fail to observe the gun.
I agree with both of your points. This reminds me while visiting the holocaust museum. The guide explained similar conspiracy popular believe that Jews have a great secret plan to poison European society. I assumed this kind of thinking is commons in Xenophobic situations either subconsciously or un subconsciously.
People criticize Israel all the time. Criticizing the state (Israel) is unrelated to criticizing the people (Jewish). Similiarly for China, criticizing the state is not the same as criticizing the Chinese. And adding on, there's multiple types of Chinese people. There's Chinese in America, Chinese in Taiwan and Chinese in many other countries. No one fears "the Chinese" that's just CCP government brainwashing to try to trick innocent people such as yourself that any criticism of the party is xenophobia/sinophobia.
The Russian government has been actively doing it during the war in Ukraine, trying to accuse all of Europe and the US for having "Russophobia". Turns out autocrats rhyme with each other.
How can you tell whether they hate the govt or xonophobe? Some
racists use the same excuse to justify their behavior.
There is some CCP scheme to use TikTok to turn American society lazyand teach some Stems sounds very conspiracy to me.
Paranoia and conspiracy thinking are the symptoms of xenophobia.
In my home country, Youtube recommendations are mostly related to porn and I have to use VPN to access good-quality content on Netflix.
Should I assume the US want to turn my countrymen stupid and horny.
Or should I use my critical thinking youtube recomend things that are popular in my Country.
> How can you tell whether they hate the govt or xonophobe? Some racists use the same excuse to justify their behavior.
Most xenophobes tend to be pretty clear what their opinions are and rarely deny them. Also occam's razor applies. Why assume that they're xenophobic when they repeatedly deny being xenophobic and say that they don't like the chinese government (which is the more rational opinion to take)? Ask such people what they think about Chinese people and it'll become rather clear whether their viewpoints come from xenophobia or not.
> In my home country, Youtube recommendations are mostly related to porn and I have to use VPN to access good-quality content on Netflix. Should I assume the US want to turn my countrymen stupid and horny. Or should I use my critical thinking youtube recomend things that are popular in my Country.
That sounds like a "you problem". Youtube in general does not have much porn. If you're being recommended it somehow then you or someone who shares an ip address with you has been actively searching it and it has narrowed it's suggestions to suit your "interests".
Also this tiktok issue is a reverse situation. Tiktok shows one thing to China and something else to every other country. It's not just the US.
Based on my personal experience with racism. There are different type of racism. Some are extreme, some are conscious and some are unconscious. Some are in denial.
Other social media, western news, etc also show different things from country to Based on my personal experience with racism. There are different type of racism: some are extreme, some are conscious, some are unconscious, and some are in denial. Just
YouTube recommends different things from one country to another. It is the same for news and other entertainment site. For some content I have to use VPN. I think it is either due to legal issue or recommendation algorithm not brainwashing.
I was recommended porn-related stuff maybe it is because of my usage pattern or my geo locations , and maybe it is the same things with Tiktok, American like to see stupid things.
Are you Chinese? Racism against various groups of people tends to vary drastically. You can't take one sort and apply it to another.
> I was recommended porn-related stuff maybe it is because of my usage pattern or my geo locations , and maybe it is the same things with Tiktok, American like to see stupid things.
You accuse of people of racist conspiracies, but then you act racist right here.
There is a difference between people who criticize Israel based on real, factual issues (e.g., the occupation of the West Bank), and people who spin conspiracy theories about vast Israeli conspiracies to poison the minds of Americans. The former criticisms are legitimate. The latter criticisms are almost certainly antisemitism.
This TikTok conspiracy theory (it's an operation designed by the Chinese government to dumb down American youth) is exactly like the sorts of antisemitic conspiracy theories one hears about Israel. It is not like the legitimate criticisms of Israel's actions in the West Bank.
I live in Taiwan. I sometimes look at Facebook reels and Instagram.
I never come across anti China or anti US content.
I tried tiktok for a day and was bombarded with anti US content. Videos blaming the US for covid. Videos saying that covid started in the US, created by the US, etc. Videos that the US is using Taiwan to start a war with China.
I deleted tiktok and have it blocked.
You can defend China all you want. But it doesn’t change the fact that the CCP is using it to spread propaganda.
I just tried it using a VM and a VPN and I cannot reproduce your claim. Searching for "covid" and "corona", for example, literally shows me the current videos about China's crackdown on recent protests from Vice, FlashNews Australia and Sky News (as well as citizen videos from those events) as the top result. Nothing that would paint China in a positive light in any way.
I tried in… October 2021 just after I moved to Taiwan. Friend sent me some video of food fuckup (someone cooking turkey in oil annd setting everything on fire) and so I signed up. Scrolling through i had random videos of one (Chinese) person saying covid originated at fort detrick and blaming China was a US coverup. Another video (Chinese) person saying it originated in deer in the US. Another (Chinese) person saying it started in the US in august 2019 and they took it to China to try kill the Chinese.
I deleted tiktok about an hour after signing up so obviously my claim isn’t based on any significant data. And I also don’t claim to say this is prevalent.
But I never searched anything. I’m not from the US. And while on YouTube I do watch some content in relation to what’s happening in the US, China, Ukraine, Iran. It’s not a playlist. 98% of what I watch is movie trailers and tech videos.
Even on Instagram and Facebook 99% of what I watch is food related.
So I don’t expect my experience to be taken as absolute fact that China is spreading a propaganda through tiktok. But it’s my experience and based on the propaganda on YouTube (videos of YouTubers being escorted around the exact same areas in Xinjiang as “proof” there’s no genocide) I think it’s likely that there is some propaganda to paint the US in bad light.
Anecdotal evidence. Maybe it's what you were recommended based on your watch history or other data points. YouTube recommends me anti-China content all the time.
YouTube has a lot of anti China and anti US content. But you can block channels and subjects and clean it up. But the difference is anti. US content tends to be fake propaganda. Like claiming covid started in the US and was designed to kill people in China? That’s blatant propaganda. That’s anti US. Talking about the US spending money on gain of function research in Wuhan? That’s just reporting on facts. But I don’t consider that anti US.
Anti China content is just facts. If a video comes out saying there’s protesting in China due to zero covid. That’s not fake news. It’s not propaganda. It’s just something happening and CCP bots will scream “anti China anti China”
You can’t do that on tiktok.
I specifically called out Facebook and Instagram. It’s not flooded to death with propaganda.
> The solution would be regulate all the social media companies, like how China does.
Twitter and Facebook are both banned in China, isn’t it? Is that because the CCP is afraid of western ideals if freedom? Or is it protectionism? Put differently, is it because of ideological or because if commercial reasons or perhaps both?
Because, to follow your thinking, why does the CCP not simply regulate them using the same rules as is uses for homegrown companies like TikTok?
> why does the CCP not simply regulate them using the same rules as is uses for homegrown companies like TikTok?
They do, which is why TikTok is blocked. Only Douyin, a separate content silo with shared codebase, is allowed to operate. Products by American companies like Facebook or Google Search that are now blocked used to censor the content they made available in China, but then stopped.
Other products by American companies, like Microsoft's Bing and Google Ads, continue to censor and continue to operate.
People on the English-speaking internet often seem to think that American companies' difficulties operating in China stem from them being specially and unfairly singled out, but the thing is that Chinese companies operating in China have to fight the same obstacles. And the majority of companies trying to make it big in China are Chinese, so they bear the brunt of the burden.
When a company building a platform for user-generated content gets more users and more content, that would usually be something for them to celebrate, but in China it also means they need to spend more resources censoring content to remove everything that might displease the government.
E.g. HelloTalk, a language-exchange app made by a Chinese company, restricted their Chinese users' accounts in 2020, most likely because some were using the app to talk about censored topics: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/glf14q/wh...
Other Chinese companies abandon the Chinese market completely and focus on the rest of the world while blocking Chinese users from accessing their product so they don't have to fear getting shut down by the government over lacking censorship.
For some reason, everyone wants to hold TikTok to a higher standard than our own social media companies. Facebook, Instagram, et al have been running by the same playbook as TikTok for over a decade, but somehow the impact this has on adolescents only became a concern when the company doing it is Chinese.
If you want to lessen the impact of this crap on your kids, then you need to pass regulations that prevent all social media companies from doing it. Just banning the foreign ones does nothing but artificially prop up Facebook.
Exactlty. Everyone's freaking out over TikTok while conveniently ignoring the fact that our own social media companies have been doing the exact same shit for over a decade now.
This is why I reject any talk of regulating TikTok that doesn't apply equally to all social media.
> The claim isn't fake. But the idea that this is some TikTok plot to poison America is ridiculous and sinophobic.
Oh please, all countries do it. The US uses Twitter and other social media to instigate civil unrest all over the world. Literal revolutions and genocides have been instigated over US-run social media platforms.
I don't know of a superpower that doesn't use the internet as a vector to sow discord and propagate misinformation.
I think you are generalizing my claim. My claim is specifically that the claim that the Chinese is using TikTok as some American programming vector is sinophobic. The CCP could be tracking the location of government officials through tiktok; that is a legitimate concern. If you want TikTok banned in the US because you believe that they promote dumb content as part of some strategic Chinese plot and you conveniently ignore Meta and Google, I'm going to assume that your reasoning comes from irrational fear of the Chinese. It doesn't make sense to distrust the Chinese when they are doing the same thing as Americans (unless you don't like them just because they are Chinese).
If you want to ban TikTok for another reason (such as their incredibly poor data hygiene, such as tracking every action you do within their app browser), then that is fair and you can reasonably argue that point from the grounds of privacy and national defense.
My reasoning in calling it sinophobia is because if you actually care about "dumb content" the proper solution is REGULATION for ALL the social media companies. Singling out TikTok makes no sense at all.
>It doesn't make sense to distrust the Chinese when they are doing the same thing as Americans (unless you don't like them just because they are Chinese)
If the Chinese and the Americans behaved identically in all other respects, this would be excellent logic. As they do not, it is spurious logic. I don't think you really believe that the Chinese style of governance and Chinese culture are the same as the American style of governance and American culture.
Put another way, there's an Australian law that can literally compel Australian coders to become secret agents and implant government backdoors into products they work on at their government's whim [0, 1]. It is not, and would not be, "aussiephobia" to not want to hire a person for whom this is a possibility, or to avoid products that Australian forced-backdoors are likely to be present in. Individual Australians are unlikely to support this, and shouldn't be individually blamed, but does that change the reality of the law?
>My reasoning in calling it sinophobia is because if you actually care about "dumb content" the proper solution is REGULATION for ALL the social media companies. Singling out TikTok makes no sense at all
I've heard it said that politics is the "art of the possible". From a fairness perspective, I'd love to see Western social media get a little regulated. From a harm-reduction perspective, sanctioning the Other social media is, at best, the first step to regulating everything else, and at worst, the only thing we're ever going to get.
> The CCP could be tracking the location of government officials through tiktok; that is a legitimate concern
Are you claiming that TikTok is able to track users and bypass mobile phones opt in requirements for location data ? Yes I know they can do course tracking based on IP address.
Please don't resort to conflating criticism of China (however speculative) with Sinophobia. It lowers the tone of the discussion and imputes a motive onto your peers which isn't warranted. If you have a problem with the facts of the discussion then address them directly.
If you want TikTok banned in the US because they don't have proper data hygiene and you believe that data could be used by the CCP in the future that is fair.
If you want TikTok banned in the US because you believe that they promote dumb content as part of some strategic Chinese plot and you conveniently ignore Meta and Google, I'm going to assume that your reasoning comes from irrational fear of the Chinese. It doesn't make sense to distrust the Chinese when they are doing the same thing as Americans (unless you don't like them just because they are Chinese).
>imputes a motive onto your peers
If my peers don't realize they are are repeating sinophobic talking points, they should be made aware of them. My concern is chiefly that sinophobia is simply a vector that allows American social media giants to get rid of competition without being forced to clean up their own backyards. If your concern is "algorithmic dumb content", then just banning tiktok is the wrong solution. Secondly, the reason why China has different content on TikTok is through government regulation, and we could do the same thing here! It's not a Chinese conspiracy that keeps Americans from regulating corporations.
The CCP is not a race. Working against companies under the control or influence of the CCP is no more "Sinophobic" than working against companies under the control or influence of the Nazi government was "Germanophobic".
To think everything a company does is from CCP just because there are ties to the CCP is sinophobic.
That chinese users get STEM content is because of the enforcement by the CCP, that US users get stupid content is because of their freedom of choice. People loved stupid stuff on FB and YT way before TikTok.
You realize the CCP forces companies to accept CCP members into their board and leadership, right? It’s even affecting foreign companies operating in China. It’s not “sinophobia”, it’s just facts.
> CCP forces companies to accept CCP members into their board and leadership
Except they don't?
1993 company law stipulates party committees are formed in any org with 3 or more CCP members... Trivial conditions to meet when party membership is like 1/8 of workforce and committees have been limited to dumb shit like organizing staff picnics not influence operations. Many chinese high up enough in company leadership/board will naturally be CCP members as you'll find democrats/republicans in a US board who has political affliation for upward mobility. And with respect to Chinese leadership / board members, they're not wasting their time doing party committee duties. Committee chores gets pawned off to nobodies, who more often then not don't do shit outside of keeners advocating for benefits and better working conditions, which was why these committees were conceived in the first place. Recent Euro chamber of commerce surveys concluded there's no push to strengthen party influence in foreign companies.
"Party committees" is a non issue and hasn't been for 30 years, thinking otherwise, because bloomberg, known for pushing anti-PRC hitpiece is more or less eating "sinophobia" bait. Misattributing said reporting to insinuate CCP is forcing members onto board and leadership even more so. It's just facts.
It's jingoistic and sinophobic since the purpose of the "work against" is to strengthen your own team's position. By and large, Chinese human rights activists do not think banning TikTok strengthens human rights in China.
I think for the most part, people are annoyed about TikTok doing good things in its home country and yet doing 'bad' things in foreign countries.
Yes, it's true the good things it does at home are mandated by the government.
Yes, it's true that in foreign countries those same mandates would be difficult and in some cases (maybe the US?) unconstitutional.
However, that's a logical argument which doesn't speak to the heart of the disagreement: TikTok could do good in foreign nations, but it explicitly chooses not to. It'd be easy for them to copy and paste their policies from China into other countries, but they work very hard to fill the feed with entertainment because it makes more money.
You’re right. It’s very racist and bad to not support the government enslaving, neutering, force aborting, and imprisoning Muslims, supporting a government currently invading your allies, one that said it wants to make a new world order without you, take taiwan by force if needed, heavily censors content, etc…
It can’t be any of that! No! It must be sinophobia!
> Chinese human rights activists do not think banning TikTok strengthens human rights in China.
While I agree with you. On the face, it doesn't seem logical that banning TikTok in a foreign country would make things better in China. Even if TikTok were a pure propaganda arm ala Voice of America, it still doesn't have much to do with the treatment of people at home (where by the way it has 'good' policies to foster the development of the youth).
He did address the facts of the discussion... The fact is jumping to some ridiculous conclusion that there must be some conspiracy to feed dumb content to Americans is Sinophobic because there is no evidence to suggest such a ridiculous thing, when the obvious answer, as pointed out by grandparent, is much more reasonable of an explanation.
Sounds more like the west gets the standard social media version. Just like YouTube and FB algorithms do serve you more of the same no matter how stupid it is.
The Chinese get the version with government enforcement of science and patriotism.
So in China the algorithm is partially regulated, but in the rest of the world the algorithm (asia, europe, africa, americas) is just showing people what they want? Instead of what they government thinks is best for them?
As US confrontation with China has become more open, the evidentiary standard for any stories about China has headed toward North Korea levels, where we constantly read about people being executed in baroque ways before a couple months before they make new public appearances, apparently risen from the dead.
Oh come on. China has basically been getting a pass from Western media for their concentration camps for Muslims. Probably because nobody on the west wants to look "racist"
This made me laugh, it’s so true! Growing up I absolutely loved the History Channel, once they became the ancient aliens and Pawn Stars channel, I was so sad.
Kind of like MTV’s evolution away from music-themed programming. Maybe History Channel can follow their lead with “H2” where they still play history videos.
PBS Digital Studios [1] also funds several high-quality YouTube-style creators. Some of my favorites are "It's Okay to Be Smart" and "PBS Spacetime". Crash Course, a staple of high-school review material has also partnered with PBS.
I found that European TV is a lot drier and more educational than US TV, but I don't know if that's because of interest, regulation, a smaller market (in each language), or ?
This may be a cliche, but I seriously don't understand why anyone still watches cable TV - it's been unbearable for many years and it's expensive. I sort of understand that some people enjoy sports broadcasts that are only available on cable, but the rest is just unbearable and incomprehensible to me.
If you had said “I haven’t watched TV in 20 years. Do people still watch TV?”, that would have been cliche.
But I agree with you. My wife and I are doing thr digital nomad thing traveling across the US staying in hotels. The first thing I do when I arrive is plug in my Roku stick.
Worse. In the next hour, the History Channel has a show about UFOs, the Travel Channel about ghosts, National Geographic about drugs, TLC (formerly The Learning Channel) has a dating show, and about 10 channels have shows about murders.
That's nothing to do with the US and more to do with non-sports cable viewership drying up. All the good educational content moved to YouTube and streaming for the larger viewerbase.
I think this is a serious issue but underestimated. People in the US believe that the top science and engineering roles should be filled by immigrants which I don't think is sustainable or even a healthy view of education. I am basing this on the huge foreign population of our top schools and the push for H1-B visas. It can be a self fulfilling prophecy if people remove themselves from the running for STEM in earlier childhood.
This survey showed a growing number of people who want to be social media stars[1] as fewer want to pursue STEM. I can't picture a healthy society that makes this decision. You can't shun important roles of society collectively and then hope everything works out.
The linked study is for children aged 8-12. How does a 12 year old "remove themselves from the running for STEM"? A six grader taking average math/science classes and getting average grades is on track for qualifying for a science/engineering/math undergraduate program. There's even opportunities later in life for those struggling in school to join STEM.
When I was 12 all my friends wanted to be rock stars or professional skateboarders. I seriously doubt the causation between what children want to be in the age group of 8-12 and what they grow up to become.
I agree that this feels a bit like a moral panic and wanting to be a YouTuber doesn't seem that different from wanting to be an actor, singer, or pro sports player, all dreams many more children have nursed in the past than have pursued in adulthood.
People often try to get into top tier high schools to help them in their STEM careers starting at ages 8-12. At elite universities, most students have already seen calculus by the time they get there. A student doing average at age 12 probably won't see calculus by then.
I think in reality, preparation for STEM takes years. It helps to have an education that fosters interest at a young age as well. I am specifically questioning the priorities of the US's view of education. As I said, we rely heavily on H1-B and have very large foreign populations in STEM degrees. Social media may not be the cause. What matters is that there clearly isn't early interest. Early interest translates to having more graduates. As I posted elsewhere, there is a clear difference in what degrees foreign students pursue in the US (more STEM) versus what US students pursue. This seems like a difference in values that I think we should examine.
Sure, children going to the most competitive universities will probably have began prep work before the age of 8. I would guess that "Did my parents go to an elite university?" has far more predicting power for who will enter an elite university than "What was my dream job at age 10." Elite schools are designed to be attended by only a small fraction of the population, hence the term elite. For the rest of the population, going to a state university, community college, or even a technology trade school can lead to meaningful employment.
I don't think you can move the extremes without moving the mean. We are already seeing the effects. First and second generation immigrants from foreign countries (like China) outperform Americans. This cycle could become self fulfilling. People expect immigrants to achieve at the extremes and prioritize other things in their lives. As you said, let's suppose having parents who go to these schools predict who will enter. At this point, recent immigrant families would outperform and others under perform and this can continue as cultural values are passed on. Is this is a sustainable situation? No, I think it bifurcates it and creates permanent classes.
On the other hand, more focus on STEM education broadly would translate to higher enrollments and self reliance. This also assumes that out performing immigrant families assimilate. Non-assimilation would exacerbate the bifurcation.
Ya I wrote the reasoning following that. Look at these statistics[1]. It shows the ever growing number of foreign people earning both undergraduate and graduate STEM degrees in the US.
foreign students accounted for 54% of master’s degrees
and 44% of doctorate degrees issued in STEM fields in the
United States in SY2016-2017.
We rely on tens of thousands of H1-B visas per year to fill STEM roles which has been debated for years. We have accepted we have to import people to sustain our economy. I am questioning the merits and sustainability of these views and whether Americans have a unhealthy view of education. We certainly hold these visa holders to higher standards than ourselves. Why?
The report leaves out a crucial detail; the total number of STEM degrees increased significantly. Doing some backwards math, the total number of STEM degrees increased by 108% (x2.08) between 1988 to 2016. The US population only increased ~35% in the same period. Even if we assume the increase in the college age population was a bit higher (accounting for birth rate decline), the overall trend is growth in STEM degrees by both native and foreign students.
Given how much population and economic growth the main sources of foreign exchange students had during the same period, what we see is expected unless we actively tried to limit foreign exchange students. Native students aren't being replaced, they are still there.
We don't depend on visas to 'sustain' our economy. We use immigration to keep the massive comparative advantage we have had for the last ~80 years (since WW2). It's classic brain drain and the US has been on the winning side for most of recent history.
Top graduate programs in STEM fields recruit internationally, because they're looking for the absolute best students, and Americans are only a small percentage of the world population.
The US is extremely lucky to have a large percentage of the top research universities in the world, so every year, it Hoovers a fairly large fraction of the best students worldwide, who naturally want to go to the best programs and work with the best scientists.
This is a positive feedback loop. The US has the best research universities, so it gets the best students. The best students come to the US, where they do research and maybe stay on as professors, so the US has the best research.
If the US were to consciously try to "Americanize" its STEM programs, that would fundamentally undermine the very thing that makes research in the US so strong - its ability to constantly draw in the top talent worldwide.
Yes, I am glad you brought this up. I think there are trade offs. There is a benefit to Americans that they accept the best globally. On the other hand, professors and elite STEM grads do form a high status caste who occupy the most powerful government and corporate positions and professorships that make decisions that affect Americans.
Some of my favorite people I know are foreign stem grads. But I have also met some who have nothing but contempt for uneducated americans. To tie this to my original post I do wonder if this is not only a security risk but a cultural risk which creates a mostly foreign immigrant group with high caste status in the US that is hereditary/permanent based on university admissions policies. There is lowered expectations for non immigrants.
The most provable issue is the security issue though not the cultural issue. A thought experiment: would France or Japan or China accept that their most elite people are heavily foreign? Probably not. One can imagine why this might be an issue. Professors with dual citizenship can leave at any moment and during a war that could devastate us. What real loyalty do they have?
My remedy is to nationalize an effort to focus less on tiktok dances, followers, and selling foot pics and more on education. It's what other countries are doing and I am afraid if the US doesn't react it is heading towards decay.
> Professors with dual citizenship can leave at any moment and during a war that could devastate us.
Look at the list of people who developed the atom and hydrogen bombs for the United States. They were overwhelmingly foreign-born.
Imagine you moved to another country at age 22, studied there, got married there, raised kids there, and built your career there over the course of 20-30 years. You would not simply "leave at any moment."
Maybe, but as far as I know, none were Soviet citizens who came on work visas. Even if it were possible to emigrate from there, I don't know that they would have been allowed to be professors or grad students either. This was during the Cold War. In some ways we are kind of in a cold war with China right now where a huge % of high skilled workers come. We're practically in a hot war with Russia and I don't need to repeat what has been said about them. I am not trying to single any country out but I don't think we can say we have no enemies abroad right now. Surely this is something to think about before creating a caste of foreign high skilled workers and academics?
> none were Soviet citizens who came on work visas
Many of them were from countries that were at war with the United States, like Germany and Italy.
George Gamow, one of the most important American physicists ever, was born in Russia, educated in the USSR and began his career there, before defecting to the US. He didn't work on the Manhattan Project, but he did consult on other military projects during WWII. There are lots of other examples of Soviet-American physicists, including one of the inventors of quark theory (George Zweig) and the one of the people who formulated perhaps the most famous paradox in quantum mechanics (Boris Podolsky).
> Surely this is something to think about before creating a caste of foreign high skilled workers and academics?
Casting suspicion on students and scientists in the United States because they come from "enemy" countries is not a healthy thing for society to do. I also object to your use of the word "caste." Castes are hereditary groups with defined roles in society. What we're talking about here are simply smart people who did well in school, and managed to get into top universities.
Although a defector is not a temporary student or H1-B, yes it is complicated but you are saying there is no cause for concern even though clearly Soviet citizens would not have been allowed in such high numbers into important roles and I suspect people would rightly question the numbers if nearly half of all STEM graduate students were Russian right now.
I call it a caste deliberately for those reasons. It is hereditary I believe whether through socioeconomic status or genetics or culture or legacy status. It's already becoming apparent. There may or may not be social consequences. I fear there will be.
H1-B visas didn't even exist in the 1940s. I don't know what the immigration system was like back then, except that it was fairly racist (this is before the reforms in the 1960s).
Most of the foreign-born STEM graduates I've come across in the US are not from a hereditary caste. I'd even say most of them are from the first generation in their families to obtain such a high level of education.
Legacy is something very different. It pertains mostly to undergraduate admissions at elite universities, and almost by definition, foreign-born students are not the main beneficiaries.
Part of the foreign STEM graduate degree phenomenon — not all of it — is that foreign students bring in more money to universities. This is one reason why universities were worried about the sky falling during the pandemic, because they wouldn't be able to fill their seats due to the foreign student flow being cutoff, and even if they did refill the seats with domestic students, it wouldn't be at the same net 'profit" level in many cases, as they usually end up paying more in net tuition per credit.
People who hold this view are mostly employers as far as I'm aware, unless we're conflating having a generally sympathetic view to skilled immigrants with not wanting Americans to learn engineering.
It's not so much people in the US who believe that top science and engineering roles should be filled by immigrants, but rather employers who want cheap labor and can control the immigration laws indirectly via lobbying and campaign contributions. US work visa laws give preference to foreign students who earn advanced degrees in US universities. Those students are thus more willing to tolerate low wages and poor treatment in PhD programs because it still beats returning to their home countries.
I don't blame the foreign students for this, but it's important to understand what's really driving the current situation.
Which BigTech employers are getting “cheap labor”? Cry me a river about a returning intern with no experience “only” being able to make $160K right out of college and a mid level developer “only” making in the mid $200 in a couple of years.
Yes I work in BigTech and I’m one of only a very few native English speakers on my team and probably in my wider department. I never look at my coworkers and think if it weren’t for them I would be making even more than 3x to 4x the median income in the US.
Even on the corp dev side, after 3 or four years and one job hop, you can make twice the median income in any major city in the US.
" I never look at my coworkers and think if it weren’t for them I would be making even more than 3x to 4x the median income in the US."
You should think that, though: their presence is helping reduce wages, including yours. The fact that labor in tech is relatively well paid compared to other fields is entirely irrelevant.
Yes because I’m such a selfish human being I’m going to bemoan the fact that my coworkers who are also able to have a good life that ability because even with my unvested RSUs that are at half their all time highs, I’m still going to make over three times the national median household income.
For context: I’m not bragging, I’m not officially a software engineer by title and I only fell into BigTech three years ago at 45 by doing a slight pivot from software engineering. I’m still paid less than an equivalent mid level software dev at my own company.
Not that I’m complaining I work remotely from - all over the US.
I don't get why they can't just hire more citizens; can't most people agree that would be good? If you don't want the money, fine, but it just seems unreasonable that we force Americans to compete against people who are the top 0.001% of some other country with a billion people. Who benefits from that? The tech company does, that one person who may or may not even like Americans does. That person's former country could lose since their best leave or maybe they pressure them to steal tech who knows?
I don't think immigration is a cost free win for America in 100% of the cases. I am worried we are creating a caste of elite immigrants and their progeny who occupy the country's most elite positions and we're prioritizing foreign education to the detriment of US citizens. We have no reason to make things more competitive here if we can just import people from another country. It's bizarre to do this on a lot of different levels.
I think we should do what China is doing with their own citizens and try to make Americans more competitive and then we could talk about skilled immigration.
Do Japanese people who work at an all Japanese company feel they were diversity hires because their company did not hire Indians, Americans, and Chinese people who had nicer credentials?
Are you saying you are unable to compete in an open market? All of the Big Tech companies make a lot if their money internationally. Why shouldn’t they recruit worldwide?
And holding up China and Japan as exemplars of economic development is not the winning argument you think it is…
>Are you saying you are unable to compete in an open market?
yes. ~350M vs ~7B (1.2B China, 1.1B India) means more elites in the bigger population. I am talking only about immigrant visas, not foreign offices. I have no problem with foreign offices hiring people from that country. I do take issue with continuous importation of elite-skilled people. This is doubly so if our education system relies on importing the best people rather than home growing them or trying to remain competitive. There is evidence Americans are declining in STEM right? we should try to reverse that.
I am less concerned about the short term economy as I am with turning the US into a global free for all for the best that US citizens can't possibly compete with presently. It could turn into a death cycle for current Americans. Surely that isn't sustainable or healthy. No doubt, dropping H1-B numbers would lower GDP but we should build it back more sustainably.
How is it in any way better to have a foreign office where none of the employees salary gets spent in the US than having immigration? Either way you are competing with foreign workers in aggregate.
And until this year, any CS grad that spent time practicing interviewing and could “grind LeetCode” for six months could get a job in tech. College teaches nothing that helps CS grads be employable at most companies.
Other countries graduate more prepared students because they don’t believe in the bullshit that college is meant to make you a “better citizen of the world” and they prepare their graduates with useful skills
My theory is that it could open up more space in the top graduate schools and undergrad for Americans who didn't make the cut otherwise. Maybe we can improve on this. We could work on making standard education a little harder too to fill the gap we would need. It's going to be hard competing globally though. We may need to bring people in but I believe the numbers we have are very high right now. I would like to see the mean of america become more educated and richer and more skilled as opposed to just the extremes.
I look at it differently: tech companies get away with paying our immigrant peers less because they can, and we should work toward addressing that so that all of us benefit.
From looking at my companies internal “anonymous” #pay-equity Slack channel. I don’t see that as being the case.
The Slack channel is anonymous via a Slack workflow that posts on your behalf. As part of the workflow, it allows you to self identify your ethnicity and location.
Yes you’re right. We need to unionize. How are we going to feed our families and have and live the American dream only making $160K+ straight out of college up to $350k+ and the tech company I work for is considered the “frugal FAANG”.
If you stymie immigration, what’s to stop companies from just expanding their overseas offices?
Those graphs are weird as fuck. Look at the actual percentages in China vs the other places: 37% want to be a professional athlete, which is more than youtuber in the UK/US.
This makes absolutely no sense to me and even as an American, often times reads like anti-China propaganda. If the algorithms are showing STEM content on the Chinese version of TikTok, it's likely the result of two reasons:
1. Chinese children prefer STEM content and the algorithm is providing that to them.
2. It's enforced by the Chinese government or someone who believes this kind of content will benefit the Chinese future.
In the case of #1, this is a cultural issue and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
In the case of #2, which I believe is what most folks who say this are suggesting, I can't imagine why children would then proceed to download the app, use it for hours a day, only to learn science and math. Sure, some may enjoy it (as some in the US would as well), but a vast majority of that market is going to reject this and delete it from their phone. In fact, we have this in the US -- we have educational TV shows, you can visit a library on your free time, etc, but kids don't do it-- because they're kids.
Chinese children don’t use TikTok “for hours a day.” Another key difference between their app and ours. They are limited to 40 minutes a day and cannot use it at all between 10pm and 6am.
This isn't a choice being made by TikTok, this is due to regulations/laws in China. If the US passed laws requiring TikTok to do the same in the US, they would obviously comply.
> If the US passed laws requiring TikTok to do the same in the US, they would obviously comply.
Except for the part where that law would end up being declared unconstitutional, and rightly so. Then again, if TikTok has no US ownership, perhaps it would pass constitutional muster. 1A doesn't specifically mention US citizens or US-owned corporations, though, just that that government shall pass no laws abridging the freedom of speech, so maybe not.
There are plenty of laws forcing companies to engage in certain kinds of behavior. The latest I've seen is the beer manufacturing / distribution / sales breakup as a result of the post-prohibition policies. Manufacturers can't distribute, distributors can't sell to consumers and so-on.
I think people might not tolerate such govt interference, but assuming it's law I don't think it'll be unconstitutional.
The Constitutional bar is pretty high for requiring anyone to engage in forced speech, even if it's purely commercial. Laws requiring broadcasters to transmit a certain amount of public interest or educational programming were generally upheld by the courts because spectrum is a limited public resource, and radio waves reach into everyone's home whether they want it or not. But cable TV and streaming video services have effectively unlimited capacity, so those old rules never applied to them.
Alcohol is a separate issue entirely. The 21st Amendment gives states broad authority to control distribution.
Right, and I think it depends on what the intent is. If TikTok's default would be to just promote "dumb" content everywhere (because that's what increases engagement and sells ads or whatever), but the Chinese government is like "no, you're making our citizens dumber; you have to promote 'smart' content in the China market", then that's totally fine. I mean, I don't agree with the level of interference the Chinese government has empowered itself with, but that's their business.
If the Chinese government were forcing TikTok to promote "dumb" content to citizens of adversary countries, then that would be a bit more nefarious.
>If TikTok's default would be to just promote "dumb" content everywhere (because that's what increases engagement and sells ads or whatever), but the Chinese government is like "no, you're making our citizens dumber; you have to promote 'smart' content in the China market", then that's totally fine.
But that is what happened. The CCP went on a huge clampdown on the newer internet companies around that time that Jack Ma was abducted and passed numerous laws censoring and limiting what people could do online, such as how long teenagers could play video games.
In China, all companies with more than 50 employees are legally obligated to have dedicated Chinese Communist Party representatives overseeing, according to Harvard Business Publishing (https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/R1403J-HCB-ENG). Social media companies? They probably have tons of mandatory representatives guiding the system. ByteDance also had a "nominal" 1% ownership taken by the Chinese government, which then got 1 of 3 board seats supposedly from that investment (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese...).
So you have a company which is absolutely at the size where dedicated CCP representatives are mandatory, with a board seat possessed by a representative of a state-owned enterprise. How much separation is there, really? Add to that, TikTok has been censoring the Uighur genocide, Tiananmen Square riots, Falun Gong, so forth despite not operating in China, as well documented (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...) and (https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/xinjiang-china-...). If you censor things in non-Chinese nations to please the Chinese government, plus the earlier facts, you're controlled.
Finally... putting that together, it is safe to say TikTok is under substantial control of the CCP. What does every Chinese student, and almost every Communist Party leader, learn in their schools (for being a communist leader has mandatory education in many things, including lessons taken from the fall of the USSR, to avoid such a fate)?
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." - Sun Tzu
Your point would be stronger if YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and every streaming service in the country was showing the same kind of content. TikTok getting bashed for serving American consumers American content is one of the silliest trends on Hacker News.
I'm sorry but I cannot take this politician seriously. Hawley has a storied history of talking mad smack and writing bombastic, strongly worded letters at California tech companies which never really go anywhere.
To me at least, it comes off as red meat for the base.
I'm dead serious. Go on Facebook, Twitter, even Fox News, how many images can you find without revealing clothing, suggestive poses, suggestive dances, etc.? Not far.
For them, it's a financial motive. For TikTok, because it is so bottom of the barrel, I think it has both financial and strategic motive.
TikTok is a private company that wants to make money. If it could make more money by showing Chinese audiences more trashy content, it absolutely would. And in fact, it does show a great deal of mindless content in China.
However, as is well known, China has recently been trying to regulate children's use of the internet (e.g., time limits on internet gaming). If companies were already willingly doing what the Communist Party wants, the Chinese government wouldn't have to pass these new regulations in the first place. And guess what happens when the government passes these sorts of regulations? Companies immediately start looking for ways to skirt them.
> legally obligated to have dedicated Chinese Communist Party representatives overseeing
No, at least legally, these committees have no oversight role in private companies. Companies with over 50 employees are required to allow a Party committee to organize and meet, but it doesn't have a role in management.
There are far too many grand statements nowadays about how China works, coming from sources that don't actually seem to be very familiar with the country. There is a very strong tendency in the West now to view everything about China through a paranoid lens. The truth is usually much more boring.
In this case, the truth is that Douyin (TikTok in China) has plenty of trashy content, but that there's more government regulation than before.
I recommend going to China and seeing for yourself.
What you read from afar and what you see on the ground are very different. Imagine if all you heard about the US were constant stories about gun violence, drone strikes and homelessness. You'd have a very distorted view of life in America. That's basically the situation with China, if your only point of reference is what you read in the English-language media.
I don't know what the subject we were discussing (whether TikTok is part of a plot to dumb down Americans) has to do with Xinjiang.
> every single message you have posted is defending China
I just comment on what interests me at the moment, and because of the rising level of paranoia about China (paranoia which I think is dangerous), I've been commenting more on these sorts of issues - which I happen to know a bit about.
Shill accusations go against HN rules, by the way.
I should have visited China back when it was opening up and relations were relatively friendly. But now that we have entered a new Cold War it's too late, I missed my chance.
About 150 million tourists (or shall we call them "idiots"?) travel to China without incident every year.
I don't know what, specially, is happening in the 200 cases described by the Politico article you linked to. Politico mentions one accusation of drug trafficking and another of spying.
Opindia citing Tucker Carlson, Stephen Crowder, and using "alleged" videos of non gender normative people as examples of bad content is pretty revolting.
I'll also say that Instagram is just as much trash as TikTok, but it's our trash instead of china's.
Infinite-scroll short form trash content is this generation's trash TV, yet more addictive.
And you won’t believe me when I say this, but in US-China diplomatic terms, an official saying a technology “allows them…if they want to” to perform influence operations means they already are.
As further corroboration, Andrew Schultz revealed earlier this week on the PBD podcast that sources at the State Dept confirmed these influencing operations were happening in the US via TikTok
Oh, I have little doubt personally that TikTok is a malignant tumor, I just don't cite other tumors (Carlson and Crowder) for anything, even the sky being blue.
I am quite critical of TikTok, of people who have it installed on their phones, and as someone who unfortunately has Instagram for certain reasons, I see the same mechanisms of hypertracking and attempts to push addictive mind-melting entertainment and softcore porn to people.
I am unaware of legitimate critique's of Chris Wray as head of the FBI, but that's besides the point, I suppose. At least we have a comedian on a business writers' podcast to tell us about it.
I would be personally happy if TikTok disappeared but this seems a bit silly? Is it not equivalent to pointing out that a production making documentaries for both PBS and Netflix would make their PBS content more educational but less sensational than Netflix?
And if you'd like both educational and sensational, I highly recommend watching PBS Spacetime with Dr. Matt O'Dowd on YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime
Sounds like a hen/egg problem: It could well be that educational content just performs better in a market where education is valued both by society as well as kids, as compared to a market where most kids want to become an "influencer".
That western notice-me-culture has been obvious long before TikTok was a thing - consider reality TV, early YouTube, and the fact that several serial killers apparently murdered for the media attention.
Our own culture treats education as something that's not really that important. We promote sports stars with little to no educational background to ivy league universities. Hardly a teenage movie does not take a dump on 'math class'. Our kids are being told to dream and find their passions, but no-one considers them a failure if they get a D in the sciences. The student who excels is not praised societally, but shunned as a 'nerd'. Where 'hustle culture' exists, it is not seen as a way of achievement, but as a way to greater wealth, and almost always unpleasant.
Why then are we surprised that educational content does not perform well in the West?
As for the second link's part about TikTok promoting sexual confusion: Was it TikTok which started that discussion, or was it celebrities who made alternative sex/gender assignments cool (much like they made smoking cool in the 1950s), supported by pro-sex/gender-divergent activists? Imagine the backlash should TikTok decide to ban these topics from their platform.
sounds like china has the right idea. it takes me (in america) constantly weeding the garden of my youtube (also american) to minimize the dumb shit it shows me. so does america want stupid americans? is that not the biggest deal?
I don't think America (as a collective) "wants stupid Americans", I think people are generally of the mind that "intelligence is good". Unfortunately, I think what that means is largely subjective in many cases, and tends to be aligned with their own interests/preferences.
My suspicion, which is mostly just me thinking out loud and is based on no real evidence, is that folks are (a) largely desensitized to stimulation due to aggressive "marketing" (in the loosest sense of the word - whether ads, click/viewbait, or other quasi-exploitative attention-grabbing things); and/or (b) have observed that, culturally, a lot of "dumb shit" is mainstream enough (in terms of critical mass within their social microcosm) to warrant conformity, and thus may be a preference that is adopted for identity or inclusivity purposes. Similarly, it may be seen as a pathway to some form of success or recognition (see: IG/YT influencers, tiktok fads, etc).
I'm sure other, much smarter folks have actual evidence or have performed studies (and I would be interested in learning more), but based on my personal experience, the above seems to hold true, generally speaking.
The FCC has the authority to ban swearing and nudity on public television. States can ban nudity, profanity, and (in my state) adult video-store ads from highway signage. States can control what teachers instruct students with (who wants a flat-earth teacher?) I don't see why a law, which generically states that recommendation algorithms operated by a publicly-owned company must bias towards intellectually stimulating content, would necessarily be a violation of the First Amendment without undermining earlier accepted laws.
FCC rules are in place because those things you mention are a part of the commons. Publicly-viewable by anyone, and also exclusionary: someone broadcasting on particular airwaves or putting up advertisements takes up physical space that no one else can use.
That's... not the same as a service on the internet, at all.
You're also talking about a completely different regulation regime. The FCC rules prohibit certain (fairly narrow?) things, largely "obscenity". A regulation that requires a company to actively promote certain things is... not even remotely the same.
I have seen and heard way too many dumb things by people in suits in the finest language, so I do not think focusing on this is helping much.
"recommendation algorithms operated by a publicly-owned company must bias towards intellectually stimulating content"
How would you even define "intellectually stimulating content" in juristical clear terms?
If I would want to increase the general level of science education (I strongly do), I would increase funding to schools and enable them to have fun experiments with the students of all sorts.
I love science, ever have and my teachers did the best they could, but even to me school was booring as hell.
> I don't see why a law, which generically states that recommendation algorithms operated by a publicly-owned company must bias towards intellectually stimulating content, would necessarily be a violation of the First Amendment without undermining earlier accepted laws.
This is an extremely misleading line of reasoning.
Publicly traded companies are not 'public' in the same sense as publicly owned airwaves, public (that is, government) employees, and public property. They don't cede any constitutional rights simply by offering equity for sale in the capital markets.
No, but the broader idea of sensationalist journalism wouldn't have been a foreign concept.
At any rate, there is a process for amending the Constitution, so if you want the First Amendment to change such that the federal government has a clear mandate to do this sort of thing, feel free to campaign for that. But just repeated violation by the state is not that process.
I'd say it depends on the politicians themselves. I'd say populists don't mind the people's stupidity and misery at all, because they turn that into an advantage for themselves, by very publicly providing, or even just promising, a short term relief for them. In this way, systemic issues like the welfare trap or wage slavery give them opportunity to inflate their popularity by organizing handouts, or by redirecting the people's misery to outgroups, such as non-heterosexuals, people of color, immigrants or other marginalized groups like people with addictions.
I think you are too focused on one side of the bubble. The most popular desired career in the US is Youtuber/influencer and before that it was actor. This is just how American culture always was.
(I get the irony of pushing a gossip blog to prove the point)
As others have mentioned, before the rise of Youtube, the learning based channels on TV weren't doing so well in terms of popularity.
On a positive note though, our late stage capitalism era(plus half the millenial generation failing) has beaten any idea of "follow your dreams" out of young peoples souls. As a result, Gen-Z (and I suspect Gan Alpha) seem to be very pragmatic when they come of age and realize that the only real viable career is to hide in a closet/cube and be a coder or (surprisingly) enter the trades. Great for the US economy, terrible for the generation's self-esteem. (Gen-Z has one of the highest suicide rate of any generation in American history).
How much dumb content does it take for one to believe such bullshit?
Of course, the system are rewarding dumb content all over the world, because dumb people are the majority all over this planet.
The primary source of your "further reading" article is Tucker Carlson. Not saying the claim is incorrect, but are there any trustworthy sources supporting it?
If you want to verify it yourself, go to China, open Douyin. Plus, the story makes internal sense - for example, pornography and the kind of soft-core porn, heavily revealing clothing, and so forth that appears on TikTok is actually illegal in China. Post it, you'd get it censored and removed.
It's a cultural war. I'm personally convinced they are also trolling many different ways on platforms such as 4chan and reddit. When the Ukraine war started I noticed so many sleeper accounts suddenly wanting to defend Russia's side...
that's because Americans want that content, and that precedes TikTok by a few decades. Literally every American media channel reflects that.
I've seen China blamed for a lot of things, some legitimate, but they didn't force Americans to pick the Kardashians over engineering degrees. American public discourse is becoming that Eric Andre show meme except it's "why did China make me do this"
Oh, please, as a Chinese I can say with 100% certainty that this is false. The Chinese state media and parents lament in the same way how douyin (tiktok’s version in China) dumb down the next generation of children.
When I just went to douyin.com, the first douyin was entitled "the role I play in your life is too vague." That douyin showed a beautiful women eating yogurt as her jacket was perpetually fallen off her bare shoulder. The second douyin was a rap video that showed a women modeling various clothes in different environments.
There are government regulations in China that censor and disallow twerking content, but I didn't see any stem videos, either.
Tuned towards dumb content or just content people want to watch like on every other platform? Are we getting made at TikTok for giving what their users want?
There are VPNs tunneling back to China, search for 翻墙回国 (+ DeepL) and you can find a lot of providers. Those are quite popular for Chinese speaking people outside of China to get access to geoblocked contents (video, music, etc.).
But usually the biggest problem is how to get a Chinese phone number. In China, most apps require you to register with a phone number (+SMS verification), which is your de facto personal identity number.
Back to the topic, I can confirm this for you. Douyin is also serving shit to Chinese children and the Chinese government do "regulate" them. And of course, between STEM content and shit, most Chinese children I have met (well, genius do exist), prefer shit.
Why does it matter what content is shown in China? Many countries have content requirements the US does not. Isn’t the important part what is shown in the US and if it’s manipulated or just responding to user demand like every other platform?
I am aware of these claims. The document to which you linked says, “If enforced as intended…”
It is not clear to me how universally these regulations are enforced.
My skepticism requires that I go there? This is a different definition of skepticism than I was previously aware of. During the Cold War, I was skeptical of many of the claims about the evil Soviets. I did not have the opportunity then to visit. Was I not a proper skeptic?
A true skeptic might not even believe a Russia exists without visiting. A proper skeptic would need to be skeptic of both sides and all information coming out. A common skeptic would watch the news and only be skeptical about your side.
Universally? There is only one tiktok. But in general the ministry of culture and security handle that. They literally employ millions of people to assist in watching what anyone says online. You online entity is connected to your national card. Go check it out for yourself you won't believe it until you see it.
Let me know if you need any help navigating a search engine but you should be able to put similiar keywords and get a variety of information from any number of sources.
Of course I have read the often repeated claims written in English by those who have no personal experience with China.
One of the sibling comments guided me to https://www.douyin.com where ten minutes of browsing was enough to disprove the claim "the algorithm is specifically tuned to reward dumb content in the US, compared to rewarding STEM and other educational content in China".
>"the algorithm is specifically tuned to reward dumb content in the US, compared to rewarding STEM and other educational content in China"
No idea if it is true but I think the US and Canada do not need foreign "help" in this department. Dumbification of the average Joes and Janes is a wet dream of every politician and big corps and thanks to advanced tech it is becoming more and more.
It's really hard to prove that this is a result of deliberate algorithms and not simply that Chinese culture promotes things like science and technology whereas the US promotes more dumb things. For example, someone like Logan Paul would have never gained popularity in China but he's one of the biggest creators in the US.
> might be how the algorithm is specifically tuned to reward dumb content in the US, compared to rewarding STEM and other educational content in China.
The China distortion field
Anything normally would be laughed at would be considered dead true when comes to China...
You're criticizing dumb content then show a 1 minute video as explainer, please don't take this the wrong way, but there are very few 1 minute videos that are not dumb.
And idiocy begets idiocy, but this is a problem with US-style social/entertainment media already. Though Chinese and US players do it for different reasons...
When they deployed wfh, they used mfa. They banned Google authenticator out of the view Google can't be trusted. But told people to search the app store for any other mfa app. They one my wife found makes you wait for an ad run before it displays the code. It sometimes crashes and is generally terrible.
The point being banning certain apps seems far more political than well thought out.
Yes that was the official policy. I was in such disbelief I made her show me the official guide she was given. Of course im sure they had no contracts anywhere, it looked like someone simply said "google will sell your data" and someone senior bought it and banned one app.
Duo Mobile on iOS lets you save and restore your TOTP tokens across iPhone backups with a symmetric passphrase. It provides some peace of mind in the event you would lose your phone.
Exactly. Most state governments have competent enough IT that they use a corporate AppStore to deploy software to phones.
This is just a way to get the governor’s name out there as a VP candidate. Taking an anti-China stance sounds tough and decisive. She was pretty good getting her name out during COVID.
They’re probably hidden in Chinese TikTok, but I’ve seen a lot of Shanghai protests on TikTok since like mid November. You’re definitely right though, I recall I had to search for it myself before algo started showing it to me automatically. Could be because of TikTok’s default behaviour of hiding violence-adjacent behaviour, which I find quite awful as it hides the current events.
Anecdata: I have seen what appears to be a couple on my Tiktok, but not a large number. Edit: Seems searching "China lockdown 2022" brings some up I think.
The actual amount of protests in China were laughably small in comparison to how the state depart... I mean 'free press' in the US portrayed it. Yes, there were reasonable protests against zero-Covid measures, no there was no revolution in progress.
They were not laughably small in comparison to other protests in China, which as I'm sure you know are extremely rare ever since the Tienanmen Square massacre in 1989.
there was also a labor protest at a foxconn factory last week, but it seems to have failed to capture the liberal imagination in the same way as these “white paper” protests, gee I wonder why
"The government’s response, though, does not, of course, address the larger yearning for an end to autocracy."
"Those brave protesters have changed China’s national policy, and their broader yearning for rights can no more be extinguished than a virus; someday the Chinese Communist leadership will have to respond to that very human aspiration."
It is hard to know really. Nobody is incentivised to report the true scale of the protests.
If the scale of the protests were laughably small and of no concern to the CCP, it could just be a coincidence that China announced their scientists have determined Omicron has ‘reduced pathogenicity’ [1], as a pretext to relaxing restrictions.
This is not your usual "'free press'" fare and it is noteworthy for the both the designation of China under Xi as "totalitarian" and also its optimistic prediction of a new wave of democratization globally.
What excited the press (...and those whom you imply) was probably that anything happened in Xi's China, and that it happened in multiple places, and that CPC was not entirely successful in suppressing it even while having near total control.
So what is extraordinary about these protests -- something apparently very new in China -- is that they are directed at the cult of personality directly. I just did a google search to see if there ever were demonstrations in China against Mao during his reign. Xi's political game is role-playing some sort of Maoist / Stalinist state with him as maximum leader. He even publicly dismisses former grandees in front of foreign press. How did these Chinese dare to directly call for his removal in protests?
> Yes, there were reasonable protests against zero-Covid measures, no there was no revolution in progress.
"Finally, to borrow an image from Liu Cixin's novel The Three Body Problem, we should be psychologically prepared for Xi's totalitarian rule to enter a dark forest. Xi will rule China for at least another five years. But we should not be too pessimistic. No matter how long Xi stays in power, as I argued above, it is unlikely that another Xi Jinping will emerge after Xi steps down. The good news is that the hassle of fighting the pandemic with the zero-tolerance policy has awakened even more people. When social discontent reaches a tipping point and everyone believes in regime change, then change will come soon."
Someone in any organization is allowed to install apps or have them installed. More relevantly though this also bans use of the website on the devices too.
I have a fairly large position in Meta because I'm sure that the US government is going to ban TikTok. I think once it spikes from that announcement, it will at least make it back up to over $200, for the time being.
But even if you got in sub $200, a tiktok ban would be a very generous layer of icing on the cake. Same with the metaverse. The core business is still attractive and it’s a good stock.
One possible reason is because if Meta did have a product that was appealing, they’re ready for 100M new users overnight. Not just infrastructure but regulatory, compliance, etc. on a global scale.
Any new contender would have to build out very quickly.
Unless I'm missing something, there is no penalty for using TikTok on an SD device, and there's no initiative for SD tech support to institute a ban. So basically, it's a pointless PR move for Noem.
If it wasn't just a PR move, it would be whitelist based instead of banning a single app.
There are likely thousands of apps on every major app store with apps whose sole purpose is to fish out data from users and sold to different criminal or governmental entities.
If they had found the app doing some things, the ban would be nationwide. This is just one state's government trying to fan some fears about the chinaman.
That being said: I don't see why any government device should have access to any social media.
The argument to ban TikTok doesn't need to be complicated. Simply block Chinese media apps the same way China blocks all external media apps within its own borders.
In the context of any other kind of trade relationship would it be acceptable for China to get unfettered access to foreign markets whilst blocking all access to its own?
TikTok is such an obvious threat on so many levels, it’s very hard to understand why we don’t talk about this more.
I don't feel like its controversial to say that social media algorithms can be designed to manipulate people, or that this capability is especially dangerous in the hands of a hostile state. It seems to me like TikTok is ripe for weaponization in any future conflict between China and any other country.
To be fair, most organizations should have a list of allowed and forbidden apps and require a third-party security assessment before any cloud, SaaS, or network-enabled/social app is allowed on organization-owned device.
While the US is urging a ban on TikTok, I'm curious why the world at whole is not waking up and banning US-owned and operated social media - obviously it's an even bigger risk.
You've never worked for a gov office have you? Getting any kind of new policies or tools added or updated when it comes to infra and IT can take years, if not decades. I would not be surprised if the one I volunteered at 10 years ago when I got my start is still on Lotus Notes.
I had the weirdest interview of my life with Tik Tok.
Tik Tok, like anything run by the Chinese or other totalitarian regimes, is not very respectful of autonomy or freedom of expression, but I still want to know what went down at my old NGO after I was forced out -- I had thought the CEO worked for the Russians or something, she was so effective at destroying the organization like one of the sabotage guides I used to read in middle school on textfiles dot com, but one day I pop over to LinkedIn and she ended up working for Wal Mart, and the general counsel ended up at Tik Tok as people on Signal would do literally anything but connect me with a decent job but tell me the weirdest shit like "The Mayor of Albany beats his wife"
(Apparently one of my friends may have given their phone to some now dead FBI agent around the time I renewed my passport and loudly declared presidents last 8 years max and switched from learning javascript and CSS to learning Python and Metasploit.)
Anyways, Tik Tok sucks, Facebook sucks, all social media sucks. Delete your accounts and learn the value of verbal conversations in a room with NPR cranked to 11 on an analog radio you built yourself in a 3rd floor walkup with the door bolted and barricaded.
(Or maybe the above is disinformation... reader beware, you're in for a scare!)
China has rules that apply to all social media apps operating there, including rules on data storage, data sharing, and moderation. Those applications are not willing to follow those rules, and so aren't allowed in China. TikTok is willing to follow those rules, so is allowed.
My spouse used TikTok for a while on the app. I can’t remember if they logged in or not (I never used it), but the videos it recommended where kinda shocking. It would recommend reviews of a fridge we had bought, but hadn’t explicitly searched for on TikTok, or anywhere else that I recall. There were also some other coincidental videos that would pop up that just seemed eerie. I assume there’s some data broker TikTok uses (AAID or IDFA tokens perhaps for fingerprinting). Needless to say, we stopped using it and I don’t open shared links anymore.
One minute video that explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hus9fWz0RRk
Further reading: https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...