I suspect this view is held by American adults who aren't from a young enough generation to use TikTok. While Facebook and Instagram might be 'evil', they're considered 'our American evil'. This smacks of jingoism and ageism. It's simpler to ban what you don't personally use.
> While Facebook and Instagram might be 'evil', they're considered 'our American evil'.
Yes, the business operations of Facebook and Instagram are fundamentally accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters, in a way TikTok is not. That accountability is imperfect, indirect, and weaker than it should be, but it is a different situation than TikTok.
Despite a lot of hullaballoo, I think it would be exceedingly difficult for any one person to purposefully (!) tweak the Facebook algorithm to benefit a preferred political viewpoint. Someone—an engineer, a shareholder, etc—would notice and blow the whistle.
By contrast, there is no doubt in my mind that the CCP can make ByteDance e.g. downrank messages in support of Hong Kong. ByteDance is a private company in an authoritarian nation whose government explicitly has this legal power! I don't think it's jingoism to believe the CCP should not have control over a major American media platform.
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Yes, Facebook's and Instagram's business operations are fundamentally accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters, in a way TikTok is not.
No, they are accountable in the same way. You pass laws that restrict corporate behaviour, and then you fine/ban applications that don't follow them.
What you don't do is write a 'TikTok sucks so it's banned' law, while permitting the same problematic behavior from other vendors.
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The major problem with TikTok[1] is that it disrupts an American oligopoly on public mindshare, and the US is afraid of it for the same reason that CCP is afraid of Facebook, or the CCCP[2] was afraid of jazz music and Hollywood.
[1] The other major problem with TikTok is that Facebook and Twitter and another major tech company are scared of it, and instead of competing, are very interested in lobbying until it goes away.
> I also think voters continue to wield significant power.
I disagree. Have you seen this famous study?
"Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people?
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all."
"The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
> Facebook's and Instagram's business operations are fundamentally accountable to American lawmakers, and thus voters, in a way TikTok is not
Also, and perhaps more relevantly here, American lawmakers are accountable to and American voters are thereby subject to Meta's owners in the way they are not to TikTok’s.
Would it be easier for the US govt to "throw the smackdown on" FB or Tiktok? Nobody is even talking about banning FB, despite the known bad shit we know about it. Half of US adults would ban TikTok goes to show how much more accountable TikTok is than FB. Zuckerberg/FB has spent millions buying political favor. There is no way the Chinese ownership of TikTok has anywhere the kind of political access and influence of Zuck/FB.
In "the Twitter Files" we learned that American social media companies actually manipulate public opinion on sensitive political topics (censoring content based on hypothetical "Russian involvement"). And they haven't been held to account.
Meanwhile, there is no actual evidence of TikTok doing this in the West. I'm sure Chinese Douyin complies with government censorship for their domestic product, but there is no evidence that the American-managed product has done this. If it is happening and we just haven't found the evidence, the effect isn't there: Americans hate China more than ever.
I understand you wish to believe the opposite, because it would make us feel fuzzy inside about how great America is and evil the chicoms are, but there simply isn't evidence to support your comment.
It is honestly mind blowing that americans still believe that big social media companies and our glorious three letter agencies aren’t in cahoots, and that we only ever influence other countries.
The problem is that "The Twitter Files" is yet another propaganda op, framing the centralization problem in terms of the de jure government so that you continue ignoring the longstanding elephant in the room of centralized corporate control. In your terms - most power structures are roughly in cahoots, and directing focus towards a mere few seats at the table is a distraction. The vast majority of censorship is done for banal business reasons, including executives scratching each others' backs, regardless of whether one thinks it's justifiable based on the outcome or not.
Given users of these sorts of apps have been demonstrated to have an addiction to them in many cases, are users of TikTok more or less reliable judges?
No, you're comparing apples and oranges. In the poll, the reason they support banning TikTok is due to security concerns about China. The person I responded to was implying that the respondents' opinions are irrelevant because they do not (he assumes) use the platform themselves, and my point is that using the platform does not make your opinion on this issue more or less valid. Nobody is using addiction as a metric for banning anything in this case.
"Security concerns about China..." as more than half of the products you buy are from China. Your phone, router, bluetooth earbuds, chips in your car, the smart assistance that has an always on microphone, your smart TV that observes everything you watch and listens with a mic...
But this free app that some people use definitely needs to be banned because "China". Selective jingoism.
"Sometimes kids are complete idiots"... so definitely ban their social network but keep yours full of phony influencers and extreme politics - because the adults are never complete idiots...
It’s not “their” social network. It’s the CCP’s. They have never lacked for a social network. They will simply migrate to YouTube, Instagram, whatever. They will not hurt one bit for expressive capability. No one is being censored.
This is like banning a specific blend of woodpulp for making paper. There are other papers.
TikTok has no age gate. If adults "aren't young enough" to use TikTok it's because TikTok's content is irredeemable low quality trash and the average adult isn't as stupid as the average teen. Youtube doesn't seem to have this problem. Adults, even elderly people, can find content they like on youtube; youtube has both vapid trash and long form thoughtful content. TikTok's content is just awful cringe to a unique degree.
This reminds me of the last time this came up in some committee and senior politicians were complaining how the app is just full of dancing teenage boys. It’s not. As a longtime user of both, I’d say the content is comparable, except on TikTok you can’t drag out a video to 10 minutes to make a bit more money. Also, all ads are skippable.
A good video isn't drawn out to 10 minutes. Youtube has videos that are an hour+ because that's how much time the content demands. MIT's OpenCourseWare hosts lecture videos on youtube. What does TikTok have that compares? Nothing.
I know, I’m just saying that the platforms encourage different types of content and for YouTube it’s drawing out what could be a 3 minute video into 10 minutes because it’s better for the creator and the platform. TikTok doesn’t have long form content, but what it does have is someone saying “hey, check out this YouTube lecture, this is why you should watch it” which has helped me find interesting things on YouTube that I would have never clicked on.
