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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

TikTok, for it's many faults, is at least not ragebait farming. It is distracting junk. Facebook feels more malicious in my mind.

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Except TikTok’s also is controlled or controllable by a foreign government whereas we know all Facebook is after is more profit. One of these seems more malicious and abusable than the other.

Motives aside, I see way more concerning content on Facebook than TikTok

Yeah TikTok has yet to convince anyone I know that there is a globalist plot to replace white people with Jews and blacks for um, reasons? One of these is more malicious and has already been more abused than the other.

Right because anti-semitism and replacement theory didn't exist until Facebook..

And uh, does the genocide of the Uigher population somehow not count as an evil? I mean I know they are Muslims and not Jews but seems like we should be concerned about them being forced into camps and sterilized...

Of course the lunatic cult existed before, but none of my relatives were at risk of getting suckered into the John Birch Society orbit before about 2010. And it seems like the PRC has been repressing Uighurs in Xinjiang since well before TikTok, and I doubt the leadership circles in China are swapping dance videos about the subject.

This is not to say TikTok is some wonderful, innocent thing. But the harm done by it compared to Facebook is just not remotely comparable, at least not yet, and that may be partially due to the nature of what the platform pushes and to whom.

Foreign government to who? US doesn't constitute majority of users on any platform.

Let’s not pretend stupid while writing comments in US company’s new page.

Yeah, the CCP's finger on ByteDance isn't awesome and it's possible it feels less evil merely by chance (it hasn't been worth it to weaponize, nobody has thought that far ahead, etc).

I do wonder if ByteDance does really just want to chase profit here though, and letting TikTok be weaponized by the party would hurt that.

TikTok has tons of ragebait farming material. The fact that you're not seeing what you don't likely highlights the effectiveness of their algorithm.

Not yet. If Facebook can produce so many conspiracy theorists and so much radicalization, what will TikTok be capable of?

That's what I fear. I usually join social networks too late but I joined TikTok just in time to have a good time before it all turns to shit. It's already happening, my bubble is being slowly invaded by conspiracy/political/gamed videos even though I try to avoid them as hard as I can. I dread to see what new user experience looks like these days.

Conspiracy theories about conspiracy theorists. I like it.

Early Facebook was wholesome as well, relatively speaking. It's the cycle of addiction. The early days of addiction are always nostalgic. It's only later that an addiction starts to produce anger as much as it produces relief. I see no safeguards preventing Tiktok from going down the same path, if not worse.

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