Yes, and TikTok pr team and lawyers doing a great job to obfuscate this point
Judge for yourselves if you want this thing on your phone.
Guy
Meanwhile in Europe . . .
Guy
Honestly im less worried about stuff like that than the stuff that is less detectable, such as turning people against their own society and government and creating the seeds of social unrest.
Yes tweaking algorithms can subtly foreground say negative perceptions of one’s community, how say the US is broken, how pop culture from other places say China is awesome, and so on.
Guy
I think the pro China stuff is detectable and less of an issue.
The main goal of UF efforts like this is to sew the seeds of chaos.
I would have banned TikTok years ago.
Meanwhile in Taiwan . . .
Guy
This journalist at Time looks at the numbers of posts of controversial topics on TikTok versus IG and comes to a clear conclusion: from a US perspective, TikTok must be sold or banned.
Guy
Funny that Trump said he doesn’t want it banned now.
You know what’s wild though. TikTok doesn’t seem to censor as much as Facebook and instagram in my experience. And this is coming from someone who is highly critical of TikTok.
I don’t use tictoc or reddit and many other social media apps. No FB on my phone.
Im sure, but when Google, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook censor, manipulate searches and topics, shadowban and outright ban its good censorship.
When Tic Toc does it, its bad censorship and manipulation.
If people took a stand against all this manipulation and lack of transparency I would call that a righteous principled position.
When Tik Tok is the only one someone is concerned about, well the concern is not for censorship and manipulation so much as who gets to do the censorship and manipulation.
YouTube is notorious for demonetizing anti China content as well.
Its not like some haven’t been trying to raise this issue for decades.
The left however were quite happy however since the big tech firms lean their way and they were the ones doing the censoring and manipulation. So they did nothing to address the issue.
Oh but now its a huge issue since they aren’t the ones manipulating everything?
ChinaUncensored labels its video about China differently on YouTube to try and override that autocensorship.
Tik Tok is in different ways directly answerable to the Chinese Communist Party.
If this key point is irrelevant to you, then you may have a nice career ahead of you making shiny happy videos for that party. 
Guy
The U.S version of TikTok (read: not douyin) doesn’t censor really much at all, yeah. Hmmm I wonder why.
Meanwhile, I have read Douyin (TikTok in China) is largely not a smoldering pile of trash.
In before “but what about Youtube, facebook, etc”
Yeah, these places are often content cesspools as well, regrettably. Every country though, reserves the right to be in control of what kind of muck their citizens get exposed to – pretty natural.
It’s all digital opium or w/e. Messed up that governments are ok with exporting it, and/or exposing their own people to it, as long as their own pockets are being lined and they have the dominant influence.
Honestly the quiet part out loud is that China’s Western TikTok pumping out Grade A, uncensored garbage could be construed as some sort of revenge for the Opium Wars.
I think most people here agree this is a major concern. But who do the social media platforms answer to like Facebook, YouTube, instagram. They seem to have their own agendas and its largely ignored.
Ban tiktok! Short-attention spam videos are a reflection of social degradation.
Always the predictable personal attack follows, I dont make videos for TikTok or use it, this knee jerk reaction I assume is similar to “Are you a Russian” or “Are you an Antivaxxer” or whatever you are told needs to be controlled by the authoritarians in charge.
The question at hand, which is on a topic I guess you haven’t thought about until 5 minutes ago, unlike myself who has been following these kinds of developments for decades is should TikTok be banned?
EFF offer a well thought out response that coveres “unintended” consequences for all companies and what the correct approach that should be considered.