this is meaningfully concerning.

TikTok is a great platform for entertainment, and a terrible one for news. 

its capacity to cause harmful social contagions is unparalleled.

vids have 3 secs to capture attention (10 words) with zero way to fact check content (unlike community notes), and the algo boosts controversy.

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Greg it's clear the CCP has already brainwashed you and has you in their clutches. Deprogram

I like baking and building apps on web3 protocols. DevRel @ ENS Labs. gregskril.com

i believe you that it doesn't affect you personally bc you consume music content.

ayk Twitter + TikTok have algos so the people who are making and seeing the Bin Laden video are likely consuming this type of content constantly.

to me, this is as scary as incels hanging out on siloed 4chan proliferating misogyny.

Could it be that you interact less with political content and so the algo doesn't show you much? Insta reels started showing a lot more doggo content to me as I got a dog and the algo figured it out

also how old are you? 

for those of us old enough to remember 9/11, the fact that we are debating whether Bin Laden is "right" and if he really is a "terrorist" is cause for major concern and a passionate reaction.

ily and i'm worried that you aren't concerned about the secondary and tertiary order effects of this :(

I see more political content on Twitter than TikTok bit a long shot

I watch TikTok more than most on this app and never saw the Bin Laden thing - only saw it on Twitter

People are overreacting IMO

10 seconds of propaganda is still 0 seconds of real news

can you dive deeper into why it's concerning? I think of it like 10 second videos or 0 seconds of news

did you listen to the Pirate Wires pod episode with Palmer Lucky where he says we should ban if not purely for trade reasons? that's the most compelling argument i've heard to date.

🥑🍋 Farmer / LAMP stack dev / Husband / 🌈 Dad / Web1 dude loving a web3 world / Collector of things digital & physical / 
CdeP ‘94 

good question, I’ll have to think about it.

one difference is that older Americans have lived 30+ years longer than the 18-29yos; they have a much greater lifetime news consumption, which makes Fox potentially less impactful or influential their POV compared to the younger people using TikTok*. 

*theory, not fact.

Is this be better or worse than the majority of older Americans that get their news from Fox?

benevolent dictator shows kids STEM videos every 3 TikTok’s and shuts the app off between 10pm and 6am 😝

the really concerning fact is that the algo is made to show you that kind on content while in china it's the opposite, a scientific and educational content.

agree that conspiracies and misinformation will always exist.

the speed at which it spreads is critically important. a newsletter can’t be seen by 1M <30yo across the US in 3 hours, but a TikTok can. 

TikTok has more high-speed influence over young culture than any platform, spreading like a contagion or wildfire.

Important to keep perspective imo. My dad's stepmom never used the internet, but nevertheless knew all kinds of conspiracies (e.g. Clintons orchestrated the death of JFK Jr). I think she got them from some right-wing newsletters popular in SoCal in the 90s. And that's nothing compared to stuff like Weather Underground

building pics or it didn't happen - degen.poidh.xyz - fully onchain bounties with collectible NFTs - come chill /poidh

an optimistic take that I appreciate — yet it comes down to execution. what TikTok features give you hope that it amplifies truth and fights misinformation?

no community notes, stories proliferate in siloes, comments aren't threaded so no way to follow a debate, search function delivers 20% misinformation.

on the flip side, this could be an unparalleled tool for spreading the truth quickly if needed

there's a lot of lies on TikTok but it's incorrect to assume 100% of the news content is lies

I'm ok with misinformation being spread if the tool is still useful for spreading truth when the occasion arrises

There's definitely something strange going on over there

Who had *the proliferation of a new political philosophy blending Osama Bin Laden and Karl Marx* on their 2023 bingo card?

I guess I'm not better since I get 95% of news about situation in my country from Instagram stories by a famous Polish memelord

the Osama Bin Laden meme is so completely wild and concerning.

The Bin Laden letter really highlights this.

Hearing many calling for a Tik Tok ban. This is a very slippery slope. I don't know how this can be in done in the USA without raising significant first amendment issues.

I swear I read the description in the second chart as a survey of 8,842 qDAUs at first

Implications for 2024 election disinformation may be beyond what we are imagining today.

Tiktok speedran enshittification on overdrive