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TikTok argues in federal appeals court that US ban would have ‘staggering’ impact on free speech
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- Title
- TikTok to begin appeal against being sold or banned in US
- Word count
- 490 words
Oh get bent TikTok, you poisoned my dad with your algorithmic garbage and it's going to have huge ramifications on our population for decades to come.
What happened to your dad?
He's old, he doesn't know how to report videos and slap down garbage and do things that change his algorithm to serve less garbage. He can barely understand how to swipe.
I'm okay with the copious amounts of tight yoga pants working out young ladies videos.
I'm even slightly okay with the ones selling idiotic nonsense using fear and disgust. I'm so glad he can't figure out how to subscribe or click through to purchase and he doesn't use his credit card.
But I feel so grossed out and saddened by how many of the videos in his feed consist of "don't trust your kids" and "your friends don't really care about you" and "they're all after your money" and "your government / they / everyone is trying to hurt you" ones. There are just so, so many.
I send memes, I send horse gifs, I send fun videos all day but honestly I can't compete with the mountain of new content they generate. I just can't....I feel so defeated and I just know this is how I'm going to slowly lose him.
If its any consolation, this story rhymes with my own, except it was Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
I'm sorry it's happening to you too. Early intervention is likely your best bet, although may have to be indirect 'I hated how much of my day I was losing to the algorithm, so now just use this curated RSS feed then go work on a hobby'
Can you elaborate on what you tried, and how did it work out? This is so sad...
This was many moons ago, I was but a child pleading to turn off the garbage and put on anything else because it was so incredibly boring. I didn't get to see the mindrot until I had my own moral awakening years later and turned back to face my past. I no longer speak with my parents for (mostly) unrelated reasons and as such....the fight is beyond me now.
As far as one "algorithm avoidance method:" I've got a cronjob that downloads Youtube videos for me, so I can share some content with my kids without subjecting them to the rest of Youtube's terribleness.
I was the sole caregiver for both my parents as they aged. My Dad was a lifelong democrat, and solidly liberal, but even after a career in politics and diplomacy(!), he had no defense against the propaganda and spam that pervades the internet.
Part of this was the aging process- even without dementia, people tend to become susceptible to manipulation as we get older. But a large part of it was that he didn't understand how the new medium worked, and just how many levers there are behind the scenes. Just like I eventually had to pull the coil wire to his car (the engine would then crank, but never start), I had to add filtering behind the scenes to help limit some of the things he was exposed to. At the time, I felt a little guilty about it, but seeing your parent lose themselves to despair or anger, well... You have to do Something.
I'm really sorry for what you had to go through. It's so hard.....
I'm debating if I just somehow delete his garbage apps (yes plural) and somehow block them from being installed.....but at the same time "all the cool kids use these apps and send each other memes"....he has few enough friends as it is....
Any suggestions for things I can do behind the scenes? WeChat and TikTok and REDnote in particular. I briefly looked on WeChat, I couldn't even see controls to filter content. (My plan was to crank [interested topics] way up and turn all other feeds off if possible, or filter out everything political or wellness related)
It really is hard, isn't it. We can do but our best.
I do have several suggestions along this line, and I am happy to share. It's late for me right now, but I will type up my thoughts and post back here within the next day or so.
Hmmm I have a suggestion (never tried it though): Block them on a DNS level. Maybe have those DNS filters stop for some time, then activate again for some time, making it appear so those apps have garbage reliability.
Maybe dynamic, it stops until x number of requests then back to filtering. This should at least break the impulsive use of those apps, since there's never a guarantee opening them would lead to that sweet dopamine boost. Hopefully he'll try to find entertainment elsewhere.
We really should have a media literacy class in school. Something that teaches people to identify common cheap manipulation tactics used to extract money and attention from people in the digital age. For older people it would be harder, but we can harden the next generations against this shit.
Except the manipulators would heavily lobby against these sorts of classes. The American political apparatus is heavily captured due to the relatively low cost of buying congressmen.
My guess is the alt right pipeline got him. It's insane how quickly you get recommendations from conservative and then ever more right wing content creators, across all platforms.
I have to actively fight YouTube not to serve me garbage. It's not just China.
This is a super important point, and one I feel is being lost in the conversation over TikTok. What TikTok does is bad, but YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and especially Twitter are all guilty of doing the same thing, and it's not somehow better because the algorithm is maintained by Americans.
The algorithms have problems, but this is false equivalency. The issue that got China in hot water was influencing US politics by gaming the algorithm such that it favors certain content and kill topics sensitive to the CCP like Taiwan and Uygur labor camps.
Even if you don't accept the premise that Tiktok is gaming its algorithm, it is a logical argument distinct from the alt-right rabbit hole on US social media. I highly doubt the US is secretly encouraging YouTube to promote alt-right content.
I see no difference between "gaming" the algorithm and the kind of deliberate indifference that's being practiced by most large social media companies there days. In a self-interested way, it's worse, because I actually live here.
In either case, the beneficiaries are the ruling classes of their respective countries. In the US, our ruling classes likely want to keep the wheels from coming off of capitalism for as long as possible, and a far-right government is far more amenable to that end than the neoliberal compromise alternative.
I'm not sure if you've talked to any engineers at Google, but I promise most of the engineers responsible for the YouTube algorithm are further left than the US median. There's no evidence of any grand conspiracy at Google to game their algorithms for the far-right. If anything they've tried, and failed, to cut down on divisive content.
There is no shadowy cabal of American neoliberals that control the algorithms. (The one exception is Twitter...which is why more people should leave and stop supporting fascists.)
Why would I ask an engineer? Management is who allocates resources, and I bet they don't see the negative externalities of the algorithm as a problem, as long as the metrics look nice.
Managers rarely make direct code changes, and frequently they don't even generate reports. Often that's the job of a data engineer or business analyst of some kind. The negative externalities are likely hard to measure with the internal tools they have.
Facebook on the other hand has explicit data on what garbage gets shared the most, and they've done fuck all to fix their problems.
I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make by trying to correct me on who has what responsibility at a given social media company.
To me, the important part is the end result, regardless if the cause is internal company myopia, knowing the data but refusing to address it, or explicitly putting a thumb on the scale.
Somehow, capital always ends up conspiring to protect capital, either expressly or unknowingly through a system of incentives or indifference.
To come back to the original point, we were discussing whether Tiktok's algorithm is any different than YouTube. I'd argue it's significantly different, and there are national security reasons to prevent a foreign government from meddling via influencing algorithms.
Arguments about capital are secondary to the national security discussion. US lawmakers were swayed by Tiktok's "call your Congress member" campaign rather than any secret back channel lobbying from US capital.
It's not just China, sure. But it's especially China, that's the problem. They're
nearly half17.75% of the world's population, still dealing with poverty, and wild wild involution (competition internally without ability to break into a wider international market, without many avenues for investments, and much of the population without the ability to get work overseas), which basically incentivises a lot of content creation in hopes of going viral. -..-Not sure if hyperbole, but for accuracy's sake it's more like 17.75 percent.
Oh whoops I was way off, my bad, and thank you kindly for the correction, it cheers me greatly to know they're only less than 20%. (Not that it's an excuse for my error, but I grew up watching their propaganda about how basically there's them and then there's miniscule populations scattered barbarian cultures.)
We need to have some sort of legal workings about the algorithms and how they work. This type of descent is so easy on all of the platforms, and it's insane that it's been allowed to fester this long.
I don’t know enough of the details to refute my own idea here, but I really think that should have been covered by those “safe harbour” laws. Note that this is all my own opinion.
If the feed was just chronological, without any algorithmic choices being made, and the end user has control via subscribing/following/blocking, then you’re just hosting content on the producer’s behalf. Likewise if you give the user a handful of various sorting options (eg when online shopping allows you to sort by price or alphabetically or by reviews etc) that are predictable and explicitly in the control of the user, then safe harbour still applies.
But I think as soon as the platform has its own algorithms dictating what the platform “recommends” then that should immediately step outside of the safe harbour laws, and the business itself should be held responsible for the content it recommends.
And if a platform tries to hide behind “oh but we couldn’t have known that the black box algorithm we built would recommend this hateful sludge and cause these societal harms” then the response should be “gosh what a foolish and irresponsible platform to publish code to the user-facing side that gets your business in trouble!”
A massively inexperienced mechanic who cuts your brake cable isn’t protected from their liability because “they didn’t know it would cause that issue” — that’s just admitting gross negligence
Not GP, but in my parents case it was Facebook instead of TikTok. My mom especially went from a progressive at heart sort of person to spouting far right propaganda. To the degree that's she's lost friends and can be really hard to talk to. Her voting preferences have changed too.
The power of algorithms serving far right manipulation to the vulnerable is immense. Simply dialing down the weight of signals showing controversy in the ranking algo would make a huge difference, but it would also cost platforms engagement which means they'll never do it. Governments will have to force them to.
Who is particularly vulnerable to this? I feel like any time I see this I reject it (along with non-political rage bait). So it's not magic or universally appealing.
As people age, they often become more trusting, and less appropriately suspicious. It can also be an early sign of dementia. It's one of the reasons that scams tend to focus on the elderly- as a group, they are the most susceptible.
In chocobean's case it seems like their parent has become less trusting.
I probably should have clarified a little better. I'm specifically referring to taking things said or experienced as true, with less evaluation of context than we learned to apply earlier in life. So if a $talking_head says something outlandish on TV, it's taken as Truth. If someone calls and says they're their grandson, and have been in an accident, and need $10k in Apple Gift cards sent immediately, well, that happens too. So susceptibility to even blatant propaganda is much higher than you'd think.
What came to mind when reading your comments is that it seems like they are more trusting of a medium they don't really understand, but they still retain an ability to feel skeptical except these mediums they don't understand leverage that to make them feel skeptical about things in their life that will help keep them isolated.
Basically it presents generally false or exaggerated ideas about mediums they do understand, such as their children having selfish motivations or immigrants are bad for XYZ bullshit reasons, and they just don't understand or recognize that content being served to them is underhanded.
Exactly what @Baeocystin said. Dad has become less trusting in general about the world and the kindness of human beings, whilst becoming more susceptible and easily deceived about nonsense. It's a double whammy for sure
I've seen it from the generation above my parents, to their great sadness and disbelief..... Eg, a great grandparent tier elder was convinced my parents' gift of a new air conditioning unit (1980s amount of money) was somehow a scam ; another elder was convinced the obviously fake gold nuggets they bought from weirdos were real and "became fake" when switched by his loving son somehow; another elder started dating a scammer and turned against their children; another elder kept rotating which child was scamming all of their money and go crying to the other children..... It's really really sad even in the days before [redacted] TikTok.
My sibling and I have a pact that we will always believe each other no matter what dad says the other has done. -..-
Even though I hate seeing my dad like this and I'm currently more able to discern garbage from content, and I work with tech, even I can't confidently say that when I'm old and out of the tech loop, I wont fall prey to poisoned garbage that's designed specifically to target my fears and anxieties. Maybe it'll be some sort of eco-doo-dad or some sort of copeium to deal with climate collapse sadness, or scams that involve rescuing or resurrecting long extinct cute animals, or some kind of shiny mineral club...I don't know....I have passions like fears and obsessions and sadness about dying cute critters, I will be easy to manipulate when my brain starts to be unable to discern toxic garbage.
When I grow older I'll turn off that faucet of toxic garbage. I've developed some hard headed beliefs overy less than 30 years of life:
It's a gut instinct at this point. The mere sight of a Facebook reel nauseates me. Everything emitted from the screen of my pocket misery machine is garbage until proven otherwise.
I'm hoping that of all that hard headed obstinate beliefs one carries in their elder years, it'll be those ideas.
But that's the thing. You and I are experts at using today's tech, but invariably we will slow down our ability to intake new tech, and eventually there'll be some kind of new thing that feels comfortable and we feel confident about that has dark patterns we won't be able to recognize, or requires some kind of new ability to filter properly.
And along with our diminished capacities, we will also have the Eye Of Sauron turned upon us, to firehose garbage specifically targeted to make us feel great and confident and young and capable and included, when the world otherwise no longer feels like our osyter. "It'll happen to you~~~~" says Grandpa Simpson.
For example, maybe decades later, Valve will suddenly turn evil after many decades of us understanding them and trusting them. Maybe our homes will become so digitized we can't escape hostile new tech. Maybe regulatory capture will become so bad we must engage with hostile new tech to navigate retirement payouts, taxes and healthcare.
Your first statement is correct: turn it all off. My partner and I are going to a Home where we sit down and play classic 30-40s games on a closed emulation box, and we'll get my kid to send it updates / new content they approve, and I'll just ask them to do any of the weird neural-implant / space walk necessary tasks. Basically reverse our current roles where I curate a safe offline internet environment for them.
Edit: relevant 2005 Penny-Arcade comic
Older people, and to a lesser degree anyone who isn't in a good place in their life and susceptible to the emotional appeal of blame and anger.
Older people because they grew up in a world where you could (compared to now) trust the media. They got their news from journalists, people who took ethics and cared about their reputation. It wasn't perfect but the bullshit level was much lower than the social media baseline. I think subconsciously, for many of them, if it looks and sounds like news they're more likely to believe it than someone who grew up experiencing internet BS. A lot of them don't have good filters for the internet.
I generally fit into this category too, but I know I'm not immune to manipulative psychology. Perhaps it's an unhealthy relationship with food to blame, but a lot of the time that I see food on TV, in a YouTube video, etc. I end up craving it. Brands have leveraged this for decades.
I also have to step back at times when I'm considering buying into something being sold to me (though it's usually in person). An example is the tactic of "we will charge you $X to fix this thing on your house that is broken and you have a fairly critical need for, but if you buy a replacement in 90 days from us we'll give you $X as a credit towards it." Memberships can be tempting when you would save money if you do the thing 2x a month, because you are already paying to do it once.
I would be willing to bet there's at least a handful of people here with a "Discord Nitro" subscription, even though the only argument going for it is that it may make Discord more fun for you, with perhaps the best feature being using custom emoji across multiple servers. I've been tempted to get it but can't justify it personally.
Just because we view people spewing nonsense on certain topics with a "that's so stupid, who would believe this?" mindset, others have different personal histories and genetic dispositions that could make it very different for them.
I think there's a big difference between buying a product and buying an ideology. But you have a point. I've certainly been bamboozled before.
I genuinely think it could evolve from there depending on the product. Many products have a cult of personality around them. Apple is an example people point at a lot, but there's a ton of others, like Stanley tumblers.
Disclaimer: the following does not align with my thoughts or values, but I've seen similar propaganda take place. This also isn't a factual example.
So let's say you start monitoring forums, TikTok, whatever other source to try to get your hands on the latest color of tumbler. Someone in a forum makes a comment about how unemployed <minority> are always in line first for them. You watch a TikTok video where someone of that minority shoves their way to the shelf to get their hands on it first. You initially questioned the forum post, but now you've "witnessed" it (even if the video represents a one in a million interaction). You make your way to the store, and while you're not currently competing for a tumbler, you happen to see one in the cart of a <minority> shopper in line in front of you. You're now making a connection where one likely doesn't even exist.
This is the illusory truth effect, which has an interesting Wikipedia article.
It can even be falsely triggered - Donald Trump would repeatedly say in speeches "People are saying <thing>. I'm not saying it, but people are saying it." For many (if not all) of those things, he was the one saying it, but he was able to trick people into believing others were saying it, so it must be real.
As you said yeah it isn't just tiktok, it's also many social media which use algorithms. For instance, Instagram reels.
Algorithmic content leads to radicalization as people are given a constant stream of posts with comment sections that span endlessly. I think people also misconstrue tiktok to be a good thing because it shows people awareness on political topics which would otherwise be unpopular in the US, but you don't need tiktok for that. People are mad about alot of things already.
I can't shake the feeling that both US political parties are going to market the hell out of themselves on TikTok in order to confirm to the youth that they are the young and the happening, only to immediately cut the knees out from under it no matter who gets power. Granted, it's a social media platform that is from #theotherside, who can collect all the data and operate as an propaganda engine for the state apparatus, but I don't know how much water that carries when our guys do the exact same things.
The use of Tiktok by candidates and politicians in office alike suggests to me that they don't think it's inherently and free speech violation worthily levels of unsafe.
I agree with the criticisms of social media as a whole, but I don't think any of it is unique to Tiktok. And if politicians would like to do a broad internet privacy protection bill and in the process Tiktok chose to stop doing business here because of it, I wouldn't be mad at the politicians.