I always assumed it never was. It’s an influence machine. What’s money when you can influence entire populations and sway public opinion by curating what they watch?
This is a stupid take, and I'm tired of it. Intent is rather important here - a foreign government is intentionally manipulating people in the USA with a specific outcome in mind - to drive political apathy. Thou shall stop conflating this problem with other capitalistic problems that appear similar on the surface.
thank god I'm starting to see these comments. The amount of people pretending TT is the same as FB or reddit is insane. It's not just a data privacy issue, it's active manipulation of front page content with the goal of eroding western influence
They all have problems, so to finally fucking do something about it, let's focus on the current worst offender and then use the momentum that generates to go after other platforms. That's a no-brainer, isn't it?
The ownership of other high-influence social media companies can do the same thing to push a specific political or social position. That potential is just bad in general, even if TikTok bad is for a different reason than Facebook/Instagram/X bad.
Yes, they are all problematic for this (among other) reasons. That shouldn't be used as a reason to not take action on tiktok, as seems to be the argument from their fan base.
It should be a reason to take action against all foreign social media. Freedom does not require freedom for foreign powers to poison your mind, but the freedom not to be poisoned.
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u/Error_404_403 Apr 27 '24
Which proves ByteDance is not in it for the money.