160

I'm not here to claim that Tiktok is completely harmless, or that it's even a good site. I'm sure they absolutely do collect as much personal information as they can, and I'm sure they give it to the Chinese government whenever they ask. But I don't understand how Meta and Facebook are meant to be any better? There's always a lot of hoo-haa going on with politicians promising to ban tiktok, and (at least back on Reddit) everybody's vowing they will never use tiktok because it's such a privacy invasive site. Yet I never see anybody going up against Facebook, at least the average person, but they collect just as much personal info and I'm sure hand it over whenever any government agency in the US asks them to

It kind of feels to me like this is some sort of country thing. China is bad, so they shouldn't have your personal info. But the US is the last bastion of free speech and privacy, so their companies would NEVER dare to invade your privacy, and their government would never abuse their power to get people's personal info

I'm aware Lemmy probably isn't the best place to ask since most people here seem to be deep into open source software and often privacy focused (so I suppose wouldn't use either) but this also feels like the only place on the internet I might actually get an answer that isn't just "TIKTOK BAD". If you refuse to use tiktok but are ok with Facebook - why?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] habitualTartare@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Coming from someone who uses neither currently but has used Facebook before, I think it's more to do with the fact that people are used to Facebook, Google and other companies collecting data. Facebook does a ton of lobbying to tell you just how much they value privacy.

Facebooks data policies are supposed to follow US law. As you already mentioned, I won't go any further on that. With a foreign country that isn't exactly super friendly with the US, they could use this same data against citizens. You have no real GDPR, or US privacy laws to protect you if China decides to target a diplomats family or whatever.

For most people, it's probably not going to affect you either way, but because data is something we really don't understand the full value of. As an Example, ethnic groups could be targeted and tiktok can be used as a data source.

With the whole Facebook being used to potentially manipulate elections, Tiktok could be as well and the US/other countries have even less they can do to stop it.

But a lot of the hate that you're seeing on the news is playing into China bad and not really casting light that they are okay with US companies collecting the same data. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/17/brexit-voter-manipulation-eu-referendum-social-media

https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-censor-china-critical-content-uighur-uighurs-2020-11?op=1

this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
160 points (80.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35832 readers
196 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS