THE threat remains potent and the evidence keeps piling up. The US Surgeon General's investigations into health damage, both physical and mental, caused by social control media is relevant. Then there's also the CBS 60-Minutes segment from last autumn, even though it is not viewable outside the US. It's the "opium TikTok" vs "spinach TikTok" segment.
"We're hoping that the media will be predisposed to criticise Bytedance's TikTok. We can only hope."Even though the pertinent facts are widely and openly available, the media thinks it can gain audiences by sucking up to Bytedance's masters. Sometimes it gets paid to do this! To give an example, a tabloid that kept promoting TikTok almost every day (even several times per day in recent months) decided to publish an article entitled "Dangerous TikTok trends claim 4 lives in 6 months in Alabama: officials". This was published this past Saturday. As someone explained today, Bytedance's TikTok is at its heart a weapon. But with the multiple, daily mass shootings there, people have become inured to not just threats and danger but to actual damage even.
Sadly, the criticism we saw about 3 months ago is almost never/nowhere to be found anymore.
The spamfarm CNET (yes, CNET is SEO-optimised word spew, not journalism) has just published some spam for TikTok. Someone has told me all the mainstream media is pushing Bytedance's TikTok as if they were hired to advertise for it and advocate for its universal usage.
"The White House is not benign either; we should reject them all."We're seeing the same from Gizmodo in recent days [2-3], whereas some talk about banning the darn thing [4], some neglect to say [5] that the court challenge is in fact sponsored by Bytedance's TikTok (some reports correctly say that it's Bytedance's TikTok making the case [6], not "5 Content Creators"), some demonstrate the real harm of TikTok [7], and the real harms are highlighted again [8-9], albeit at the same time they promote TikTok as a gateway (or gatekeeper) for recipes.
Our assessment of this has been consistent; all social control media is bad and one that's controlled by the dictators in Beijing is even worse because it's the reflection of the regime (China is objectively more repressive than Europe and North America). The White House is not benign either; we should reject them all. ⬆
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