All for the sake of "security & safety", I‘d assume.
The impact the Chinese government can have on an individual American is minor compared to the US govt and the same goes for the American and Chinese govts on the average Chinese person.
Nothing a tin-foil hat can't prevent
As if the public needed any manipulation. You can just read what actual public figures, journalists, and such have been openly saying for the last 15-20 years...
When a long-time political player, wife of a President, and presidential candidate calls a big chunk of the population "deplorables", when opposing candidates call for the jailing or even shooting of their opponent, or when the current President is saying what he says and doing what he does, you need more to get "chaos" and "distrust of the neighbor"?
I don't really have respect for this idea; we do this to ourselves far more effectively than people who frankly have a pretty hamfisted cultural understanding- just as we have of china or russia.
IMO influence over real concrete choices is much more alarming. Someone with household-level information has an insane amount of advantage in an election. You can target politcal messaging street by street to play up the worst aspects of your opposed candidate and the least repulsive aspects of your own candidate.
But if you're in china, the most you can do is try to push towards whatever of the two candidates is least bad for you. And spoiler, zero american politicians are pro-china.
The real challenge to this is that most Chinese apps aren't in English.
Because TikTok in the US is run by an American company now, right?
It was only a problem when TikTok was owned by a Chinese company, right?
Then, it was little more than a propaganda and surveillance platform for a hostile foreign government but now it's a propaganda and surveillance platform for a government that can actually harm you. But getting black-bagged by ICE or whatever other band of Christofascist moral police the next decade brings is a price worth paying to avoid the risk of indoctrinating the youth into Communism, right?
Right?
The theoretical difference is that the people can push their govt to restrict what data the American version of TikTok collects and what it does.
Unfortunately it’s looking likely this difference will remain theoretical.
Because even if it was true that TikTok was a "CCP weapon of war" - which I have yet to see actual evidence of - that's still less of a threat than the USG and existing Western social media platforms, all of which are definitely full of foreign and domestic psychological operations.
And when that same lot (it's mostly the same people) gets Section 230 repealed and has the US internet regulated by the FCC and all online speech within the Western world gets censored and monitored for wrongthink UK style, I'll mock them again from behind my nine illegal proxies.
It's like saying "don't do drugs" (thinking of heroin, meth, coke and that sort) and someone else says "caffeine is a drug too".
It's sort've cliche at this point but we got the worst of both Orwell and Huxley in that our super-invasive surveillance apparatus is also a super-addictive apparatus designed to hit all our evolutionary buttons like a slot machine.
But yeah, the solution is to not let them collect data about you.
Most of what keeps people on it isn't heroin-like dependence but convenience and habit.
My mother used it to communicate with her COPD support group and chat with in-laws in Australia. I use it to follow up on work groups and authors and developers I'm interested in. Most people's usage of social media is banal and mundane, little different than watching television in the 1990s. They use social media because it provides value for them, not because they're addicted to dopamine.
So, why on earth are they displaying stuff that you say is disturbing? There is no profit in that and TikTok is all about profit, ideally from abroad, ie market share.
I'm sure that the American population is incapable of being dumbed down any further.
Log a bug.
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