from Powderhorn@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org on 04 Apr 2025 20:35
https://beehaw.org/post/19263808
This drama is getting tiresome. It’s just an app, and many Americans—at least those who are old enough to vote—don’t actually care that much about it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that TikTok’s popularity was second only to YouTube among teenagers, but it’s far from the country’s most popular social-media app overall, despite its salience as a conversational stand-in for “internet culture” or “annoying thing that young people like.” “It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic in January, pointing out that only a third of U.S. adults interviewed for another Pew survey said they’d ever used it. (More of these people say they use Pinterest!) Among young adults, she added, Snapchat and Instagram are more popular.
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Hearing a kid literally say ’ can we watch tiktoks for bedtime tonight’ was an eye opener…literal brain rot
In short…you do not want your kid consuming fast paced trash. Yt shorts are just as pathetic. It does nothing positive, and destroys their brain and accustoms them to very short attention spans and instant gratification that isn’t possible in real life.
They are all bad and should be treated as such
While you do get my upvote consider this:
Encyclopedia Brittanica could have been said to be for people who didn’t have the attention span to read broadsheets and history books.
Obviously Brittanica was information while TikTok is lolcats and requires no reading skills but am curious to hear other not-so-obvious reasons why it is not a fair comparison.
Encyclopedia Brittanica wasn’t designed to be addicting and offer misinformation for one.
Fair call.
Oh, only a third of all Americans. Practically nobody. Way down there in the less-than-five-billion user club with nodebb and mbin. Why even go there?
This article is very confused. America definitely isn’t banning TikTok because it’s unpopular or unimportant. American billionaires are stealing TikTok because it is more profitable than their apps.
Tiktok has a fuck ton of problems. Letting in run free is ridiculous. But all of the major social medias need the hammer brought down on them, they should not be solely targeting tiktok.
Letting a hostile foreign power control a social media site is dangerous. Same reason Europe should ban the American ones, we should ban tiktok
“Just an app” is a statement that ignores reality. Similar to the statement “it’s just a game”. Apps have real world consequences
Could you please elaborate on the “it’s just a game” part?
“it’s just a game” is a common phrase used to justify cheating, and insult people who call it out. I’m pointing to the usage of “it’s just an app” here as similar to that, meaning it’s used to downplay how much actual impact an app can have, and to insult those who call it out, by making it out to be a lesser thing than it actually is.
Interesting.
We should only consume domestic media. Good thing the Bible is domestic media. \s
How is there less risk to Americans on a platform like X(itter) instead of TikTok?
… that’s not what I said at all. I specifically said, “hostile foreign power” for a reason.
See my statement on how all should be regulated. But the difference is that country can enforce the regulations.
I don’t believe any media should be banned. But algorithms should be subject to regulation and worry, in my opinion.
If there are recommendation systems, maybe an open API for requests is required. Thereby a user can choose an algorithm. I would go as far as open sourcing it all.
I agree that the current form puts too much power in the hands of a few.
It’s not the media, it’s the recommendation algorithm.
They’re all a problem, but we have no way to regulate or monitor the algorithms as it stands.
Tiktok is an even higher risk because the recommendation algorithm is unknown to anyone on US soil. Nobody is going to whistleblow from the inside on TikTok because… they can’t; it’s all compartmentalized and nobody outside of China has access to the algorithm.
This whataboutism is about as valid as “her emails” because yeah, it’s a problem but there are also other problems to consider and reasons to get started fully acknowledging we won’t solve the entire problem.
I suppose the issue is the private ownership of the algorithm. Lemmy is a way to distribute ownership even though I think each instance is privately owned. It might be worthwhile to create a platform abstracting the data from the algorithm allowing the end user a choice of recommendation algorithm.
There is no money in it. Enclosure of the recommendation algorithm is profitable.
Bluesky is another instance of effectively what you’re talking about, an open algorithm platform. In theory Skylight (ATProtocol short form video app) is as well.
the more this goes on the more i believe this whole scandal is just a marketing campaign to try and stretch along a dying platform
TikTok is no more in a death spiral than Facebook. This is about complete domestic control of major social media platforms. It’s unclear that ByteDance would sell rather than shut down completely in the U.S.
The content isn’t the problem. Or, well, most of the content, anyway. The problem is who controls its recommendation algorithm and collects the data. Personally, I don’t know if it warrants a ban; but I certainly will never download the app.
The attempts to ban TikTok were always an obvious move to hide the genocide in Palestine.
But now that Trump has fully endorsed genocide and can directly kidnap people who resist, the ban on TikTok doesn’t really matter as much.