Has anyone actually looked at their network traffic whilst TikTok is running? I’ve already isolated my partners phone because it’s so bad.
I am against blocking shit online but since it’s being done against my will at least it’s that shit hole.
I’ve worked in mobile development before. We hide the traffic by batching it, sending it through i.e. Google Play Services (so it looks like Google traffic), or simply sending it all to a relay server so it doesn’t look diverse. In any case, all your apps are doing this, and the ones that want to hide it, can.
What is the traffic? How did you look at it?
first they came for the tiktok but only the person closest to me in the world used it so fuck it
Tik Tok likely isn’t going anywhere, they’ll sell to someone able to keep it up and running. The Tik Tok allowed in China isn’t the same one, so they don’t have to worry about data being pulled from their citizens.
TikTok is a weaponized social media platform.
Why do you think that? That’s an aggressive claim. I don’t use it, but thats because it isn’t my idea of fun, obviously many like it. Data collection happens everywhere, are you referring to kids eating tide pods or something?
Shit site, but not a legal precedent we want to be setting.
The biggest problem is them doing illegal shit like scanning all your photos instead of just what you pick
Fuck tik tok though. CCP propaganda
Yup, I only want to see American social media! Because it has no propaganda!
It’s less about that and more about stopping an extremely powerful attack vector currently active in your own country.
Literally the biggest reason why the western world is in such a giant political crisis is the weaponization of social media.
100%
Social media 15 years ago: cat pics and friends.
Social media today: shit you didn’t subscribe to, but shows up anyway to push wedge issues in to things you enjoy.
had youtube open in a new private window on a vpn connection the other day after clicking a link to a video about the new raspberry pi compute module
was scrolling down thru one of the top comment threads and noticed, sandwiched between relevant tech videos on the right? some talking head, designed to enrage (as opposed to inform) fox news video about nothing related.
I think Im just done with youtube for the forseeable future. if your profit model requires inducing engagement like that, your product isnt good enough to stand on its own, and/or you’re ok with being shitty to make more money. either way, I want nothing to do with you at that point.
Yeah, kinda miss that era. Luckily Lemmy emulates kinda well, just wish that there were more proper old school forums for nich but large communities like NCD or Rimworld.
This week on How to Raise an Entire Generation With an Intimate Knowledge of Counter-Surveillance: Ban Their Favourite Social Media!
This week on the Effectiveness of Foreign Influence Campaigns on Impressionable Youths: Young people refuse to even consider that TikTok might be bad.
Next week on effectiveness of foreign influence campaigns: muricans don’t spy on me. Except when they do it’s for my own good and protection. Except if it’s not for my own good it’s important to sell my data so they keep running. Except when they accept state agents to buy ad in bulk to influence elections
That is true for all social media. Everything is being used for disinformation campaigns, that is not why TikTok is being banned.
Yeah but the others are US companies. They can be regulated. Which they don’t want and they will at least make an effort to get rid of at least the obvious disinformation.
With TikTok, there is no middle ground. Can’t keep them in line with the threat of regulation as they’re a foreign company. Operating in the country that has superseded Russia as the biggest source of disinformation. The only leverage they have is the threat to ban it outright.
Besides, Zuckerberg and Musk live in the US. They don’t want things to get too bad. Though they’re so disconnected from reality they may inadvertently make things bad. But they at least have an incentive to not have the US go to shit.
With TikTok, US cities could burn to the ground and they’ll still be fine. And we see TikTok making people particularly unhinged already.
This week on I Don’t Care Dad Maybe I Want To Be a CCCP Agent.
Lo lolololo lololo lolo lolo
I’m sorry, which part of your comment do you suppose relates to me?
The fuck is the point of banning tiktok if the Chinese government already hacked our entire communication network lol
They aren’t banning it because China can see what you put on it, they’re banning it because China can control what you see from it.
Except there’s no evidence of that.
There’s no evidence that China can control what’s shown on a China-owned app?
In case you’re still unaware, the China govt is the ultimate authority within China, even in private companies. More so after recent crackdowns on their oligarchs and billionaires. The idea that they have no control over tiktok is plain laughable.
TikTok has gone out of their way to show they’ve siloed American operations. There has been no evidence that the Chinese government could or would breach that.
So you’re arguing that TikTok US, despite being fully owned and controlled by China, has full independence and decision making capability? Even regular western companies don’t have that. What the home office says, goes. At most, their American operations are making sure they’re abiding by US law with regards to data and such (and even then I’d highly doubt that, given all the forensic breakdowns about TikTok sending encrypted data to China).
If it sends encrypted data to China it would be the first I’ve heard of it. The worst the news could come up with last time is headcount data. And yes they went on an entire project to silo it. At the end of the day they want the money, and TikTok shop provides it. Other than that they sell the same info Meta does on the open market.
If it sends encrypted data to China it would be the first I’ve heard of it.
No shit. Do you think they would tell everyone? Do you think it would be easy to prove?
I really don’t think China is nearly as interested in siphoning data as controlling the algorithm. Getting people to see more pro-Chinese videos, more anti-US videos, and some bias toward candidates they want to see win is completely doable without exfiltrating any data.
Basically, all the stuff people are pissed about Musk doing to Twitter (changing algo to push right wing content) are just as feasible for TikTok to do, with the main difference being China is a state actor, whereas Musk is a private billionaire.
We should be very worried about any social media app that’s very popular and controlled by an org with political motivations.
Except for the extremely obvious disparity between chinese tiktok and american tiktok.
Nothing at all.
So are you saying they run the algorithm in their country? On their internal mirror app? The exact same setup TikTok offered the US?
I don’t see how that’s the evidence you’re looking for.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/china-is-hurting-us-kids-with-tiktok-but-protecting-its-own/
It’s extremely well documented that TikTok offers extremely different experiences within China than it does elsewhere.
I’m just a bystander, China sucks, but referencing a NY Post opinion piece feels a bit like using a Fox News segment as a source. They’re pretty trash.
OK, so lets say they moderated it the same way here as they did in China… All good now?
I don’t think it matters at all how tiktok is actually being managed or moderated in the US - Americans simply do not trust anything Chinese.
The cold war never ended.
By moderating, if you mean using the same algorithm for the content feed, it would make a significant difference to a lot of people I believe.
Inversely, they’re banning it because the US cannot control what is posted on it— regardless of whether the central party in China can (they can and they do though so I am not sure why you’re debating it).
Really? Then you can point to the news article that lays out evidence of that actually happening and not just quoting FUD?
What the government wants out of this is to make an example. Then whenever they want something from Meta, Google, Apple, X, etc, they’re going to remind them of TikTok while pointing to the third section of the definition for foreign control. The catch all that says the app can be considered foreign if the government claims the owner has been unduly influenced by a foreign entity.
Meta is already a willing partner of the USSD, they don’t need to ‘make an example’.
Banning TikTok would actually help the Democrats though, so it will probably be reversed
Left vs Right is a distraction.
The fight for a better life is Top vs Bottom.Sure, I’m just saying that Republicans are taking over and they rely on the disinformation machine to have a chance to get elected so banning TikTok goes against their interests.
They already have a massive disinformation machine across every medium.
Theater.
Cybersec is hard. There are always more holes. China exports a LOT of stuff with holes. We can do little more than stick our fingers in the dyke. This looks like they’re doing something.
What they’re not going to expect is how much people hate them for taking their entertainment away.
China already doesn’t control US TikTok servers.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
Could I interest you in a bridge?
What are you suggesting? That Congress didn’t force TikTok to hand over control is US servers years ago? You didn’t see it in the news at the time, or you just don’t believe it?
Or do you think China has been censoring on behalf of the state dept?
I think they still get all the data of what goes off the servers, and I think that the Chinese side of the company still has ultimate control over what gets displayed.
The servers being in the US means that the Chinese government doesn’t have to have access to the servers but it doesn’t mean that they still don’t have the equivalent situation silently going on.
I really don’t care if China gets my data. They don’t have any jurisdiction over me. I’m concerned about domestic surveillance.
Because it’s bad if China has the information. It’s fine if “US entity” had the information. The ban is ultimately fake. No one banning the app cares about TikTok, they just hate that China is getting the information they want. What will happen is some US based company, Oracle last time, but someone like that will buy a sufficient enough stake in the company and the ban will not happen. It will be declared “safe” and the data will go to a US controlled entity, but also still secretly to China. (The later will be revealed years later, to the shock of no one.)
to suppress video coming from Gaza and Lebanon? just a guess; but I’d imagine that’s at least a part of it.
Because when US politicians advocate for a single, global market, and a single, global internet, it is with the understanding that US firms and allied parties will dominate the space anyway. When that is no longer the case they get about as nervous as the Chinese got when they went and built the Great Firewall and made a clone of every popular western platform. Now that US/Western dominance is seriously challenged, we are seeing more and more signs of protectionism.
That and labor organizing, environmental awareness, and many other things where the absence helps the rich get wealthier .
It’s also just a blatant theft; there is a lot of money to be made here however it goes down , and that money goes to connected arseholes
It also broadcasts propaganda disproportionately highly and harmful ideologies as much as that little list of yours.
On its face the platform itself is neither good nor bad, but the massive theft of identifying information, photos, and personal conversations leading to increasingly common hacking and theft from Chinese sources tips the scales a bit.
ITT: Braindeads defending government censorship of the internet as if Zuckerberg won’t immediately replace the void with his own platform or by buying out TikTok in a bid.
Banning one platform would not magically get rid of short attention span and brainrot you fools. Every social media company already copied or utilizes the same techniques as TikTok, which is already a massive platform because they don’t spam ban or regulate content as hard as Facebook and YouTube do.
It is insulting that a Chinese run social media platform provides more freedom of speech online than its US competitors.
They’re banning it to remove competition, congress does not care about its effects on privacy or health, otherwise they’d have done something about Faceebook, Insta, Twiiter, and YouTube decades ago. They pulled their usual committee shenanigans to pretend to care by calling in CEOs to testify, and then promptly accepting a shitload of lobbying money.
Absolutely none of this law was ever about privacy or mental health. No one ever claimed it was. The law is banning tiktok because it is based in China. That is the reason given by the law itself. The possibility that meta or Google or some other American company will buy or replace tiktok and operate the same way is not an unintended outcome. It is literally the whole point of the law to get bytedance to sell tiktok to an American company.
Hence them saying it’s braindead to say otherwise.
What would be interesting to see is if other countries ban Facebook because it’s a “national security risk” lol.
From China’s perspective, Facebook probably IS a “national security risk”, which is why it is already banned over there.
For American to do business and sell products in China, they almost always have to go through a Chinese company. I’m sure that’s part capitalism and part accountability theater, but it’s just a fact. So why is it such an outrage for America to ask TikTok to do the same?
Throw in that Tik Tok is banned in China, so it won’t be a national security risk for them to sell it, just profit and then have to invest that money into other forms
Google is even banned in China. Most Western social media and tech platforms are banned there, and have been for decades.
You mean like how the entire western internet is banned in China?
Competitor lobbying doesn’t even enter into it, I’d guess.
The US State Department won’t tolerate Americans being exposed to media that doesn’t adhere to its view of the world. What large groups of Americans think - and vitally, the bounds of what they are permitted to think - is a national security ‘issue’ in the eyes of the state. No such problem exists with Facebook, cable news, the establishment newspapers, etc. As Chomsky teaches, propaganda is equally about what isn’t in the news.
Agree on this except I have doubts that this statement is true
It is insulting that a Chinese run social media platform provides more freedom of speech online than its US competitors.
Yeah tiktok is the reason we have words like unalive, I wouldnt call it freedom of speech just incompetent moderation.
Words like “unalive” are a form of doublespeak just to get around the restrictions, it’s silly.
I have to admit, it’s a bit bizarre seeing so many comments holding up TikTok as if it’s a free speech bastion away from western-run social media companies.
Isn’t this the one where people started saying “g*y” because there’s only one sexuality and Taiwan doesn’t exist?
You think the communist party of China will allow western billionaires to buy one of their asymmetrical psyops weapon systems? Ha!
Banning one platform would not magically get rid of short attention span and brainrot you fools.
Ah yes, the old “Taking this action won’t solve all of the problems therefore we should do nothing” argument.
Sign up for https://loops.video/ — the fediverse alternative
“We got rid of the brain cancer. Here, have leukemia instead”
The way I see this is that it’s not TikTok that’s the issue. It’s short form videos.
Short-form vertical video social platforms are here to stay.
We are not going to turn back the clock. I say this as someone who doesn’t use TikTok.
The only semi-realistic (and I use this term very casually) option would be some sort of radical, never-seen-before change in our global societal and socioeconomic models. The dynamics of short form video social media will be the least of our concerns in such a scenario.
The real issue is that these companies are purely for profit and couldn’t give a flying fuck about any negative social implications of their product. Every Le bad thing about any service is just down streamed from this reality of society.
How much more ADHD can I really get at this point ?
My kids have to be forced to watch anything longer than about 10 minutes. Movie night! one and a half hours? that soooo lonnnng.
Though they’ve announced plans to do so, Loops is not yet federated. It’s presently still a closed site and not part of the Fediverse.
the issue with loops is there’s no algorithm. so I get 10 random videos that don’t interest me and just one that does, almost.
that’s not going to work long term for engagement. i already get bored on loops after like a minute.
that…sounds super healthy? where’s the downside? lol
healthy? what do you mean by healthy. healthy for whom? the life of the app itself? because it won’t survive without dedicated users.
if there is no algorithm to keep track of what users want to see vs don’t want to see, they’ll stop using the app in favor of apps that cater to their interests.
watching a random video of something I’m not interested in isn’t particularly all that fun.
if an app learns I like anime and video games or specific types of content, then I’m more likely to use the app.
Loops feels like that website that showed you YouTube videos with 0 views.
This is only great news if you are Mark Zuckerberg and you want a near-monopoly on social media.
TikTok could have sold to an American company (read: a company that we can hold legally accountable for bad things that their product does) and made billions of dollars in the process. They chose not to, for some reason, and thus knowingly opted to face a ban in the United States. Those were the options and they knew it.
As I understand it American companies doing business in China almost always have to go through a Chinese company in order to operate legally and make products available to the Chinese market. Platforms like Facebook are already banned in China and must be accessed through a VPN because they don’t play ball with the Chinese regime, so why should it not be reciprocal?
Until TikTok is being managed and operated by a company that can be held legally accountable here in America, they are nothing but a security threat and a backdoor for the Chinese government into every cell phone of every person who is dumb enough to install that shit. Is that what the people want to hear? Probably not, but it’s the truth.
I wouldn’t install TikTok on my phone any sooner than I’d install RedStarOS on my PC, because the implications of using a proprietary, closed source application with ties to the Chinese regime should be fucking obvious to anyone with bare minimum technical knowledge. Likewise, I wouldn’t blame a Chinese person for being skeptical of Microsoft Windows or X.com for their close relationship with the American government. To think otherwise is just not smart.
You are aware that no western social media is allowed in China, are you not?
Are you implying we should firewall free internet like china?
No. I’m implying that in general, international trade works by shared openness or shared closeness. If one country or economic region puts an import tax on something, the reciprocal thing is likely to be taxed by the opposite partner.
I was responding to someone saying “oh this just creates a monopoly for Zucks” when in fact the Chinese social companies have a monopoly in China (an ENORMOUS market) because our products are blocked over there.
So what we are doing is in line with the norm in international trade.
Is anyone else besides China doing this? Cannot really call it international norm if 1 country is doing this.
I don’t think I’ve explained my point very well, or you’ve misunderstood what I’ve said.
My point is all international relationship is tit for tat. Since China chose to block western social media, it’s not unreasonable for the west to block Chinese social media.
Fighting tryanny with tryanny isn’t the answer.
It’s been the answer in international trade for the last 1000 years.
already banned, but thanks
Ha, eat that China! Now you need to pay millions to American oligarchs for all our user data!
USA!
Trump said he’ll unban it, if he does that’ll be the one brightside of the new admin
I don’t see it as a bright side, but I also think it should be unbanned. Don’t get me wrong, I think TikTok is cancer and nobody should use it, but I also don’t think the government should decide what propaganda I get to consume.
The government should absolutely do a public campaign against it and keep a close eye on it, but don’t ban it.
In the meantime, we should look into passing laws to solve the underlying problems, which would impact Meta and other big social media orgs as well. Or maybe fund independent social media alternatives that are FOSS.
But don’t ban speech. Banning TikTok feels a little too close to banning books…
Your instance is the same kind of malignant cancer as TikTok.
^ Imagine being this mad about TikTok. This is another reason why libs lost the election.
Ugh wah wah wah
The security and privacy of hundreds of millions of people being penetrated to the benefit of a massive hostile dictatorship!
I’m so angwy! How dare an actual militaristic attack on the USA be allowed?! RRRrrgh!
ugh liberals are insufferable.
A bit of a self-report to note the opponents to the platform hold a stance of personal liberties and freedoms, which you oppose as a user of said platform.
I didn’t say you were wrong, I said you’re insufferable.
Don’t worry musk will buy it…
How nice must it be to be able to force your biggest competitor to sell their business off. You either get it on the cheap, or get to make the replacement product.
Well this is going to go extremely poorly.
Just wait 'til truth.social and xitter run the country. Wouldn’t be surprised if TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, MySpace, WeChat, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Discord and Tumblr all get banned.
The ban will not stand up and, because he had no core principles and is an opportunistic scoundrel, when this fails inevitably, trump will folly shift position and reframe/embrace the failure as deliberate action he took to “give tiktok back to the young people”. He’ll then do his double jerk off dance on the white house account and cement another couple decades of loyalty from the underinformed gen zers who will make up the bulk mass of humanity that officially drives us into full “ouch my balls” idiocracy
Imagine if this was what make kids choose Android over iOS.
.apk goes brrrrr
Even with APK, it wouldn’t work if traffic itself is blocked.
VPN time
No. The app will be removed from the store and just stop working once they block traffic
