And those are all owned by one American corporation.
China, Iran and North Korea all ban Facebook under similar reasoning.
That said, we encourage you to block them all (don't forget Twitter!) in your country.
The attention aspect is what will eventually cause the most harm. Attention feeds databases. The future of AGI is dependent on its utility to make decisions for us. The primary users of AGI as a personal decision maker will be those who are feeding the most information to these systems.
I've heard that bandied about, but banning an app over that seems... inefficient at the least. What exactly is it this app is capturing and how?
And why not fix this by limiting the permissions of the app?
Isn't this exactly what every single advertiser does? Isn't this what amazon does?
Can anybody describe a single credible threatening scenario, even hypothetically?
Or they can do the same but in a way more subtle way over months or years, they control the algorithm after all.
Or they can influence how people feel about Taiwan, Ukraine, military, religion or a million other topics - they have the audience. They do this already elsewhere too - see comparison between what tiktok shows you in Russia and what it shows you in Ukraine.
And yes Amazon Facebook and Google can do the same - but they are American corporations so the American government obviously isn't going to act against them..
Definitely bears thinking about as a hypothetical, but a ban would seem rather preemptive.
1. TikTok is foreign owned and the line between the CCP and Chinese businesses is blurred.
2. TikTok collects a lot of data from its[US] users.
3. ????
4. Bad stuff happens.
If you ask "well why aren't we concerned about Facebook doing the same to citizens of some other country(or even Americans)" - we are, but this is specifically about American government.
I'm not aware of any concrete threats from China currently, but seeing as a conflict is brewing slowly(over Taiwan) I understand why the American government wants to limit this specific activity.
It seems evidently clear that we exist an a mental ocean of teaming memetic competition. I wouldn't expect less of businesses, media, the US government, other governments, even here when discussing ideas with other people, I'm keenly aware of the fact that nearly all exchanges are an attempt to convince or be convinced of some idea. Am I skeptical, cynical, or hardened, or did people genuinely believe the marketplace of ideas represented a path toward an objective truth?
Yes I think the American government was somewhat surprised by the fact that another country can run such an effective media machine within their own country and it took a really long time to react to this. It's as if they woke up one day to discover that most Americans watch Al Jazeera as their main news source instead of a domestic channel that can be controlled or influenced more easily.
I suppose I'm having a hard time grasping at how letting the cat out of the bag could be contained to just China, but maybe I'm missing something. It feels like it's a perfectly logical conclusion to say, "The ability to control the narrative ideas stops at existential threats to the US government and it's economic hegemony." Doesn't that sort of seem like a totalitarian stance? Maybe that's more acceptable to people than I thought?
TikTok, for its many flaws and problems, is also a place where new culture really does happen. Just dismissing the entire thing as brain-rotting media makes everybody come across as the same "out of touch older generation" that was demanding that Mortal Kombat be made illegal.
Concerns about harm caused by TikTok need to be expressed in specific rather than in broad terms - or else what possible reason to we have to believe that this moral outrage is appropriate?
And is the culture generated on these platforms a good culture? Intellectually shallow, void of original thought, mob mentality. I'll pass.
Anyway, my concern is where it's leading us. From attention theft to decision theft.
I don't know what good culture is, but there is definitely interesting things happening on TikTok. Because the stitch feature makes mashups and remixing so easy there is a lot of interesting new kinds of content being made that we haven't seen on other platforms in the past. There's a lot of junk on TikTok, but "intellectually shallow, void of original thought, mob mentality" are absolutely complaints lobbed at TV but we also get shows like Breaking Bad or The Wire.
Why are you so sure they don't?
https://www.psychreg.org/political-speeches-simple-language/
> The research also showed that the reading level of the speeches changed significantly over the years. The analysis measured the Coleman-Liau readability index, which estimates the reading level of a certain text and associates it with the appropriate school grade. The analysis showed that the reading level of congressional speeches made by both Republican and Democratic legislators increased consistently from the eighth-grade reading level in the 19th century, to the 10th-grade level in the 1970s. But since 1976 the reading level of political speeches has been declining consistently, and as of the 21st century, it is below the ninth-grade reading level. The same trend was also observed with the vocabulary used by congressional members in speeches, which had been increasing consistently until the early 1970s, and then started to decline, and it is still declining, Shamir said.
> According to the study, the decline in reading level and vocabulary of the speeches can be related to the increasing presence of media – including live radio and TV coverage – in Congress beginning in the 1970s. Members of Congress started to gradually adjust their speech styles, addressing the public through the media rather than addressing their fellow legislators.
Anecdotally; television news today is much worse than television news in the 90s. And television news has always been low quality compared to newspaper reporting. Furthermore the rise of television news has a fair share of the blame for the decline of the newspaper industry.
I agree with social media eroding free will and being generally harmful to society no matter what country the social media comes from. Nothing would please me more than to see the dissolution of Facebook. But that doesn't refute the national security implications of communist Chinese social media particularly. Both of these are problems.