Good riddance, vertical videos are cancer, short form obliterates attention spans, and their algorithm is engineered specifically to addict people, especially kids.
Now to ban all the rest of them. Let’s start with Facebook. Twitter is already killing itself but could stand to be “helped” off the cliff.
These bans are bad. All it takes is for the US to think the fediverse is a threat and this goes too. You clearly don’t like the platform and that’s okay, but don’t root for government censorship on the internet.
Yeah, I’m all for Australia style banning to kids, however that gets implemented, but this is slippery slope and all that. But hey, maybe not, maybe it’s the only time they do it.
Wouldn’t that be nice, if the powers that be didn’t grab for more power lol
The only reason this is bannable is that it is owned by china essentially; based on national security grounds. As long as the fediverse is never sold to an enemy nation, there’s nothing to worry about.
The US has control of US tiktok servers. This is bannable because politicians want the power to control social media.
Not true. That’s why the banning has a clause allowing for the sale of the US portion to a US (or other allied) company.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/17/tech/tiktok-user-data-oracle/index.html Definitely, definitely correct. A company that’s owned by a foreign nation shouldn’t be a problem. And if you think that this doesn’t set a precedent for banning anything politicians don’t like, then I feel sorry for your naivety.
There’s no national security basis to ban social media from the US or a friendly country. It would be protected by the first amendment otherwise. They have actual evidence that China was using TikTok as electronic warfare, which is the only reason they can ban it.
I’m baffled by your blind faith in politicians. There’s been clear foreign influence on just about every major social media platform.
Sounds very much like you’re telling me that if I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear.
As a video editor, let me tell you how much I hate that not only do people watch shitty vertical videos all the time, but I’ve had to learn how to edit the fucking things.
I hate vertical video on a professional level.
That’s not just a TikTok thing though.
vertical videos are cancer
I generally agree with you, but I have to laugh at the fact that this is the first point you make about the danger of TikTok.
their algorithm is engineered specifically to addict people, especially kids
I’ve always wondered if 100 years from now people will look at kids using social media in a similar way to how we look at kids using tobacco products today.
Why would America ban Facebook for being a “national security threat” to America lmao? Nothing about this had to do with protecting kids or the dangers of social media. Don’t act like it did.
I think even people who use facebook know its a bad thing.
Depends what you use it for.
I joined Facebook when it first came out, when it was still only for Uni students, used it for many years and stopped probably about 8-10 years ago now. Fuck, how long has it been around for?
Anyway, I’ve recently rediscovered Facebook as I bought an old muscle car and I’ve been enjoying the groups and marketplace for parts.
Anyway, just a thought from an old Facebook user.
Agreed. Much of my family is on it, and most of them live in other countries. My brother, who is ASD, prefers to communicate with it rather than text or phone, and I live at least an hour’s drive from any friends. I use it to talk to them and I have joined a handful of groups, most of which I don’t post in, I just lurk.
I also tell them I don’t want to see any ads of any type of thing except the narrow number of things I don’t give a shit about if I see an ad for. Lots of telling them “I don’t want to see ads of this type” for a while, but it’s not anywhere near as bad now.
I did discover recently that if you go to “feeds” rather than just look at the main scroll, you see a lot less bullshit.
Is facebook marketplace competing with Craigslist or is Craigslist dead?
At least where I’m at, Craigslist is absolutely dead. Marketplace actually has consistent new listings.
Sorta rough facebook is the avenue for that nowadays. Sorta like if public libraries were located inside walmarts or something.
Yeaaaaah I hate it.
I just use it to find shitty $50 flat screen televisions when the next one dies. Works a treat.
My mom literally broke the living room TV, and I brought one home that afternoon from some dude in a parking lot.
The future has its ups.
I get it, but also can you imagine a foreign country banning Amazon because “it means the US can see what you’re up to and it gets to choose what deals to push at you” etc?
I mean… Facebook for god’s sake…
Being protectionist makes sense sometimes but it screws you over when other countries start banning your apps in favour of home grown alternatives…
The US should ban Amazon
The US should have humane worker rights.
Uh, there are several countries that ban Amazon. And amusingly, the EU Parliament has also banned their employees from entering the building.
I wasn’t aware, thanks
The People’s Republic of China has banned Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc). Brazil has banned Twitter and the European Union is considering it.
Brazil banned Twitter because Musk thought he could just ignore their laws.
The was hilarious 😄
Well, TikTok refused to abide by the law saying they had to be sold to a US company, which is why they’re being banned, so it’s technically the same situation, if for different reasons.
Not really, Brazil’s demand was to stop spreading seditious material and to engage with their court system.
The American law is to bar them from the market. Reducing that to “follow the law” is a bit disingenuous.
China has banned practically all US social media sites, not just Meta-owned properties. A bunch of other sites are blocked too.
China generally wants major internet services to have servers in China itself, similar to how the EU wants citizens’ data to remain in the EU. In order to operate servers located in China, you need to get a license from the Chinese government (ICP license). Large sites that don’t do this tend to get banned by the Great Firewall.
Ah well that makes sense then
It really doesn’t. Banning Tiktok is banning certain types of speech. Same goes for Twitter/X and Meta. It’s like banning a book because it was heavily influenced by an adversary country.
Brazilians and Europeans should be very angry about doing anything that resembles banning speech.
I didn’t mean it makes sense as in I agree. I meant, ‘oh, a lot of this is going on and it fits in’
I cannot decide what to support here. On one hand, Tiktok is a blight and a cancer upon the whole world. But on the other hand, I’m kind of a libertarian, anyone should be able to do what they like.
stupid rule that helped cost Harris the election. Fuck every moron that voted for it.
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.
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.
Sign up for https://loops.video — the fediverse alternative
I doubt there’s many here that are even interested in that format.
or vice versa
Loops feels like that website that showed you YouTube videos with 0 views.
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.
Without the super addictive algorithm, it won’t draw the Tiktokers. It’ll take a serious marketing department to make it even start to compete. TT and Insta have spent an assload of money to make their algo addictive. FB and YT shorts took years of paid content injection at enormous scales to even become interesting.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
I am rubbing my nipples in anticipation of the FLOOD of pissed off teenagers who don’t know how to human without sharing their dances now.
…can someone explain the point of overlaying closed captions over the center of the video, but one word at a time fast paced?
I don’t understand it either but it’s a product of how people consume the videos in their upright depression rectangles in public places with no volume I’d imagine.
Yeah, removing the headphone jack and jacking up the price for Bluetooth headphones will do that…
Actually captions like that can help you read faster. I’ve seen speed reading training things like that.
Ok, but how is it helpful for the general population?
So you can doom scroll faster… duh!
They’re not the target audience.
So who is it for? This is everywhere. It’s in YT shorts, Instagram posts, etc. As a style, it’s getting pretty ubiquitous, and I don’t understand the reason for it. At best it’s annoying because if I look away for a split second, I’ll miss a couple words and it won’t make sense anymore.
Well. A good assumption in life is if something is popular, and you don’t get it, it’s not for you so don’t worry.
People like weird shit.
I personally find that words on screen keeps my attention. But it annoys me if the thing I’m watching isn’t worth my attention. So it’s 50/50.
OK boomer.
The one word at a time thing is a way to demand more of your attention. It’s just a side path of the old advertising stick where words would ‘pop’ in weird ways. See this video for an example.
Or why the video is of minecraft gameplay that’s entirely unrelated to the voice over and captions?
I think that’s to keep you occupied to force you to listen to the shitty voiceover that you’d normally skip. Or I guess the opposite?
Because it wouldn’t be a video if it just had audio
I’m on the spectrum. I can process reading way, WAY faster than I can process someone just audibly speaking to me. That shit’s actually helpful. I admit, it doesn’t need to be in the center of the video though.
It also shouldn’t be one word at a time imo
I guess, but as someone who’se functionally deaf, I’ll just always be grateful for subtitles.
Beats 80% of other content.
Now the horses are completely out of the stables, we close the door before the cows get any ideas
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.
Short videos are dumb. Are people really that addicted? I have it and go on it sometimes. And by sometimes I mean like 10 minutes per week. The videos are OK at best, but half of them are ads or live weird shit and the search function for relevant topics are trash.
I actually really like short-format videos for recipes so you don’t have to watch somebody chopping onions for ten minutes. Also, Ronaldo highlights set to Brazilian phonk are kinda cool. Other than that, the format seems pretty worthless.
I was on tiktok and even created for it for a bit, but it did get exhausting quickly after getting flooded with a painful amount of ads. I do like short form content though, I’ve been enjoying Loops!
I’m guilty of using tiktok half the people on here have never used it. But you’re exactly right a few years ago it was actually not too bad, but these days every other video is an advert for some AliExpress level shit.
Ive tried to use it, my wife is on it a lot. I can get through a few videos before the constant changing bothers me and I physically feel a need to get away from it. Its to quick, too short, too shallow. My brain is wired nearly the opposite.
I stay the f away from it. You haven’t spent enough time to properly train it. As you watch, it tracks time spent on each video, interactions, passive and active choices and slowly builds a dossier on you.
As you keep going, it occasionally throws adjacent stuff in. It starts tossing you stuff that other people with your likes watch. If there is content on there that you’ll appreciate, it will eventually find it. If there is enough, it’ll stream it to you non-stop.
They’ll find people who share your political alignment and say precisely what you want to hear. If you like brunettes with flowy blouses or redheads who are gym rats, you’ll get them. If you like skeptics or preppers, you’ll get them.
My wife gets a lot of her news from it, I find probably 1/3 of it to be suspect and 90% of it biased toward what she wants to hear. Nothing there is telling both sides of any story. (to be clear we have the same political/ethical views, but I’m a touch more skeptical about journalism and random influencers, especially popular influencers)
For all its bullshit, YouTube is the same. I’ve found myself on it more lately precisely because of the reasons you’re saying. It’s amazing how much niche content there is for any taste, even ones you don’t yet realize you have.
Youtube at least realizes when its suggestions are in a rut and gives you that little popup offering to show you stuff slightly outside of your current echo chamber. Just how different it actually is I can’t really prove.
My wife gets a lot of her news
Wow, that’s scary. I’m guessing a surprising number of people do this as well.
For my wife, it never occurred to her that she could trust tiktok influencers far less than even corporate journalists. They have to ethical requirements on tiktok, no verified sources or corrections or redactions, or any accountability at all.
I had to point that out over multiple videos, although to be fair some of the people on there do put up a front like they are legit to trick people into taking them seriously.
The same nonsense happens on YouTube and Instagram. Just look at the motivations, these “content creators” get paid via ads (so views) and corporate sponsors, so they don’t get rewarded for truth, they get rewarded for saying things their spomsors and viewers like.
I’m not saying they’re intentionally misleading people, but journalism is hard and clickbait and copycat “journalism” is easy, so they’ll tend to do more of the latter.
I think its the mentality in america of, “whatever I need to do to get ‘mine’ is good”.
Theres a reason people ask “was it worth it” about nearly everything here. I dont know how to convince people theyd be happier if greed didnt drive their values.
Why is it shocking that people hear about topics through social media? Seriously? Why? I heard about the UHC shooter through TikTok. And it’s not necessarily just memes, there are “real” news accounts on TikTok. The same way I hear about new on Lemmy because people post links to stories. Like the literal platform and thread we are currently discussing.
It’s not shocking that they hear about news through social media, it’s shocking that people trust it anywhere near as much as traditional journalism.
There’s no incentive for someone on social media to fact check or tell any more of the story than will get them views.
Did you fact check this article?
Not personally, but it’s from a media org I trust, and they generally do a good job citing sources.
If the BBC got caught lying, it would be big news. If a random influencer got caught lying, people would shrug and say, “that tracks.”
So how is it different if someone sees a news story from BBC’s TikTok account? https://www.tiktok.com/@bbcnews
Framing this as people being pouty because their favorite social media is being banned is a shit tier take. This is a problem of censorship and government overreach.
As someone who never uses this platform, this comment made me chuckle.
It’s about xpntrolling the narrative. Tiktok is one of the few (if not the only one) popular social media apps that doesn’t censor everything that the US government decides. Just look at how much Palestine stuff goea around there compared to anywhere else.
Most videos on my feed are 3 - 10 minutes, they are ttending less short.
I like tiktok, it’s the only “social media” I use other than Lemmy. I normally hate finding video content, YouTube sucks, and their shorts are even worse. But on Tiktok I get served all sorts of interesting videos, I will stumble upon some cool topic that has been chopped up into five 10 minute videos and then find the video or a similar video on YouTube or something.
It’s an excellent way to discover things fast. You just can’t use it as a good source, need to do external research.
My biggest gripe is as you said, they have really seemed to amp up the ads and stupid live crap.
Yes with the attention span of a ground squirrel.
Why do you think they all talk vast with stupid ADHD inducing shit on one side. (Minecraft parkour, GTA V driving or subway surfers)
Because people will scroll away if you don’t jingle keys in front of them
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
already banned, but thanks
Actually tiktok is not just china, its the soviet union too, used by putin’s services…
I honestly cannot tell if this is parody.
Incorrect. Control of US TikTok servers was handed over years ago. The State Department has been actively censoring content on the platform, but I guess they’re having trouble keeping up.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
Yeah, handed over formally 😉
Free links to American spying devices:
The difference is that those make you stupid and depressed as a side effect of making money. In tiktok it’s the main goal.
I wish those would be banned too.
I know you’re trying to whataboutism it but they’re all terrible and should go away.
Not meant to be whataboutism, just awareness… ism.
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.
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.
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?
Google is even banned in China. Most Western social media and tech platforms are banned there, and have been for decades.
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
Because the end result of this line of thinking is every country having siloed social media and not being able to communicate.
You mean like how the entire western internet is banned in China?
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!
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.
In other news you can’t shit in the street anymore either.
That implies that social media is going to be banned; it isn’t. The only thing this ban does is punish Tiktok for allowing content that revealed Israel’s genocide.
The thing about freedom of speech is that we are only allowed speech that doesn’t threaten the interests of the oligarchs. If any speech creates a real movement that threatens the oligarchy then the government takes swift action against it (hence outlawing socialism during the red scare)
