Comment by spicyusername

I'm always surprised how hard it is for people here to understand.

I guess the magic of TikTok was not immediately apparent to lay people or those who did not use it regularly.

In my opinion, no social media site, since maybe Stumble Upon, has been as effective as TikTok at bringing different kinds of people together and facilitating the sharing of culture: art, music, philosophy, history, jokes, ideas, etc, etc.

It was a platform used by regular people, consumed by regular people, and really allowed culture to freely flow. It made it easy for the most amazing, interesting, thought provoking, funny things to come into my awareness. It really greased the wheels of communication and made it trivial to participate in the greater social environment that is "right now".

I understand the general concern that technology enables the efficient propagation of propaganda, but there's something very incoherent in policy making about singularly banning TikTok and letting all other outlets contributing to this problem continue to exist as-is.

Let's be honest, both Fox News and Facebook have done significantly more real damage along this exact same dimension for decades and both will continue, as-is, unabated.

There's also the unfortunate fact that the real solution to preventing foreign propaganda isn't a simple Band-Aid, like this, and is going to involve the grueling decades-long process of improving our education system.