The problem is not TikTok, it’s people who are easily influenced and distracted by sensationalist content. I will tell you that TikTok is nothing but vocal and instrumental entertainment with some stand-up comedy and British sit-com style clips, but that’s because I don’t follow or wander off into political discourse or “news” areas.
It varies from region to region. The problem with TikTok is that, the western version seems to have very different content / moderation than other parts of the world.
I’m in south east asia, the amount of homophobic content that’s tied up with anti-semitism (accusing jewish people of pushing LBGTQ+ propaganda) is nauseating. I’ve reported so many of those posts, plus the typical ‘here are media companies, and Israeli flags on them’ or ‘the Austrian painter was right / didn’t finish their job’ posts, but they always come back as ‘No Violations’.
It’s frustrating, because the US / European versions are very progressive, but for the other parts of the world, it’s being pushed towards far right extremism.
You do realize you’re getting fed that content because you interact with it, right? I get the odd run of uninteresting content, too; I don’t interact with it because it’s not what I want to watch.
I disagree. Platforms like Tiktok take advantage of very specific psychological tricks to lure people’s attention in and keep it where they want it. It’s not the audience’s fault when they don’t notice a magician perform a sleight of hand during a trick. It’s not a victims fault when a thief does the same for ill. I do believe regulation might need to get involved if these platforms are doing harm. The same happened in the gaming space with lootboxes when regulators realized they were essentially marketing gambling to minors. It’s not the minors fault in that case either.
Every for-profit platform does this. Every product package on the shelf does this. It works because someone always finds a way around the prohibition, and we are shirking it responsibility of teaching others-everyone- how to identify it. Magic tricks don’t become uninteresting by making them illegal, they become uninteresting by telling everyone how they work.
The top result is already out. Obviously the John Oliver fans got their wish and Pūteketeke won. Thousands of them had to be disqualified for cheating, though.
We are all waiting now to see who is in second. Fingers crossed for the Fairy Tern, New Zealand’s most endangered bird!
The not so uplifting part is that most of their parents are either dead or were not at the hospital, and I really hope some of those babies would be able to reunite with their parents even though I doubt it.
very much not looking forward to the next year of climate disasters–as i recall, we’re not even close to peak El Niño and probably won’t be for another six to eight months.
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