Comment by logicchains
3 months ago
For most of US history people's access to information was controlled by a few powerful news/media corporations and the Supreme Court did nothing to stop that. It's no surprise that when we finally get a decentralised information transmission system not beholden to the elites, the Supreme Court doesn't want to lend it a hand.
Wait, since when is TikTok decentralised?
The information is decentralized (a hundred million different sources...), just not the infrastructure.
The way that it is distributed is centralized and controlled by a single party. You can generate content all day, but unless the algorithm pick you up and make you popular, your content may as well not exists.
The consumer doesn't choose what gets fed to them. Neither does the producer. Tiktok chooses who gets to see what. It's absolutely centralised, with crowd sourced content.
Social media algorithms are nuclear bombs for the mind. And they are beholden to whoever holds the detonator. It just happens that a lot of people are happy with China holding it.
When the mind-reading algorithm provides each user with their own reality to live in, then we are talking about editorializing. And allowing a communist, anti-Western government direct control over that power does not seem reasonable.
inb4 "better than my own government" - great, we agree that social media algorithms are a net negative to all society.
Communications is great. Video is great. Social media algorithms controlled by rage-inducing profit seekers and governments is not great.
> rage-inducing profit seekers
That pretty accurately describes Twitter and Facebook these days. TikTok, not so much, which you would know if you had used the platform. (Or, you have used the platform, and you prefer rage-inducing crap, so it continues serving that to you)
The proponents of the ban keep mentioning some kind of nefarious "communist" propaganda, and some kind of nefarious privacy data access, but I've yet to see someone show concrete examples of what that would look like.
My TikTok feed contains a ton of funny cat videos, Europeans shitting on clueless American tourists, OF models hawking themselves, the ubiquitous dance videos, people making caricature cringe videos, and a bunch of viral meme videos. And a lady drinking Costco peach juice.
Where's the propaganda? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
Where's the rage-inducing bait? Not in my feed, that's for sure.
What privacy data can the nefarious CCP access about me? That I like cat videos and memes?
I don't know... The baseball error videos TikTok keeps sending me are making me want to seize the means of production.
It means your psyche has not yet been targeted by explicit reprogramming.