Support for U.S. TikTok ban continues to decline

Where I'm at in Europe, the app is rife with anti-American & pro-Chinese & Russian propaganda. I think that even if the Americans ban the app, it's too late, the entire world is now addicted to this app and it'll have negative consequences for the U.S. for many years to come.

I have learned a lot, like, a lot a lot, from tiktok. I devolve to simple fun, but some stuff sticks. I've also learned about political corruption and breaking news. I think that lots of people find similar value in addition to cat videos and dance offs.

My problem with TikTok is not that it's a Chinese company per se, but that China won't allow an equivalent US (or EU) company to operate in China. TikTok itself is even banned in China.

Why isn't the discussion more about general ban of cancerous social medias for people who are not yet mentally developed and fall ridiculously easily into proper addiction for it? It would be wonderful if state/society protected vulnerable, but when thats not the case its each parent's responsibility.

The hell will freeze sooner than I will allow any form of this for my kids below maybe 15 years old. Its so sad to see rather small kids glued to screens, parents by their negligence and laziness fucking up their most important people in their lives, for life.

Where is the threshold just that they can get a bit more time off from parental duties to slouch on couch, meth or crack? Or course I don't expect miracles from adults who are themselves deep in addictive behaviors themselves, then its just a sad story all the way down the line.

Children need tons of time off any screen for proper development, not just early years. Social skills, anxiety, self worth, mental stability and resilience. None of this happens in front of screen, in contrary a lot of harm in not only these areas are very frequent. Very happy to be part of society (Switzerland) where similar values are shared by most peers around us and also whole public education system.

Maybe it's just my TikTok feed being in a bubble, but my impression is that there's not nearly as much content being produced for the platform anymore because of the poor monetization strategy. There was a time where it could keep showing you new content regardless of how long you were swiping, but now it has started to show me posts that are often multiple months old. Sometimes I'll watch a handful of videos and the timeline just loops back to showing me stuff it has already shown me previously.

Their monetization strategies also just kinda suck in general. You can either make an ad demonstrating some product which you sell on their shop, or you're part of the revenue-share program which doesn't pay out much and which includes a limitation on how frequently you can participate before getting capped.

It definitely feels like we're past "peak" TikTok.

Honestly... As I was writing this post I started to think more critically about the kind of content I'm being shown and it definitely seems like propaganda when scrutinized more closely. I don't really get any obvious anti-American content, but they sneak in an awful lot of pro-Chinese cooking videos.

Edit: thinking more about anti-American propaganda, I do get recommended a decent number of Trump parodies... And as for anti-UK propaganda, it has also shown me lots of videos of people taking down ULEZ camera poles. Admittedly, I hadn't really connected the dots until writing this, but I definitely feel like I was slowly being brainwashed and nudged without realizing. So as of writing this update I'm deleting TikTok and shifting my position against the platform.

Can we stop calling it a ban? It was never about banning TikTok, but forcing it to be divested from foreign adversarial control.

Where on Earth is Eric Schmidt when you need him? /s