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Comment by libraryatnight | Hacker News Reader

Tangent: I don't trust TikTok. I notice "they" use bots on other media platforms to post gifs/images with their logo (Imgur was getting this a lot) to drive people to their platform.

Couple that with that we now know how Russia (and ostensibly others) are using social media platforms for manipulation, and it just seems rather suspicious.

I'm probably just being tinfoil hat paranoid, but I feel like memes are basically vehicles for propaganda and we should be cautious with where we spend our time.

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>Couple that with that we now know how Russia (and ostensibly others) are using social media platforms for manipulation, and it just seems rather suspicious.

TikTok's parent company is a Chinese tech company headquartered in Beijing, so I would be astonished if it wasn't a stalking horse for some kind of PRC surveillance.

This whole time I've been worried about Belt & Road, South China Sea militarization, and tech IP theft - who knew that the secret to China's world domination would be through the lip syncing aspirations of our pre-teens!

Any thoughts to their motivation for doing this, seems like a waste of time, or maybe a thought experiment on their part.

Why leave data on the table

They are spamming their app to make money. There's no political conspiracy.

That's totally possible and maybe even probable lol :)

> "they" use bots on other media platforms to post gifs/images with their logo

Are you sure these are bots? They might just be regular users that download these videos through the app. No matter what, when you download a video on TikTok, it downloads you a watermarked version.

I can't speak for every post, but there are plenty that are bots. At first I thought the same, because I noticed people leaving notes on these posts like "Don't upvote, bot" (not that it ever mattered) but I wasn't sure - so whenever I saw tiktok I started checking account histories and nearly every time it was an account with no activity other than maybe one or two failed tiktok posts, then one successful front page post. There'd also be posts that took already successful FP content, and reposted it with the tiktok branding.

Not very scientific, but it was enough at the time for me to sort of take note.

I was going to say this. TikTok makes it trivially easy to download content by default. I've probably got a couple hundred videos in my photo library now.

If you share video through their platform, it will have their logo. I do, because if I want to share video with music and so effects, TikTok is the easiest one to use, and then I share the video on other platforms as well, with the logo of course.

If you don’t trust tik tok then please use their platform as the paranoia will make you prudently cautious.

There really isn’t much reason to treat any social media company as trustworthy, or the networks themselves as inherently safe and healthy. Both Syria and Christchurch provide ample evidence for the dangers they can transmit.

> Couple that with that we now know how Russia (and ostensibly others) are using social media platforms for manipulation, and it just seems rather suspicious.

PR and propaganda is essentially the same thing. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that private actors are engaging in the same kind of social media manipulation as state actors. Every ad you see, every business social media account and every mention of the benefits of a product or a service in a blog should be considered first as a deliberate attempt at exploiting your concern and manipulate you into wasting money or time.

So no, don't take off your tinfoil hat, but make that it shields you from the EM radiation evenly :)

I mean isn't every form of social media a platform for influencing(another word for manipulating) people?

of course that every government will try to abuse it, so will corporations, it is very convenient and profitable for them.

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