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I don’t believe I saw anything in this article about Trump wanting to shut down TikTok and the screaming that ensued. Now it’s probably too late. All the little numb nuts out there who can’t wait to share their latest tattoo or death defying act or whatever will be up in arms.

Meanwhile the Chinese use TikTok to advance knowledge and education. We use TikTok to highlight decadence and stupidity.

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I've worked in IT for 30 yrs. Twenty of those years have been in the federal space.

I saw in the mid 90's what we were capable of doing with the internet, large scale data collection and storage and smart applications, and it scared the heck out of me then. Today's tech is just orders of magnitude more powerful and the thought and analysis that goes into it is just so much more sophisticated.

Video game companies use human behavioral specialists to analyze how get people's attention and make a game or app "sticky". They hire great economists to figure out how to structure in game incentives that lead people to pay more.

Social media figured out long ago how to get people emotionally committed through little hits of dopamine from "likes" (social approval) and conflict.

The system today is set up to manipulate you all the time. I can route you to places with information that I want you to see with people similar enough to you that you will desire their approval. I can feed you a string of such things that over time lead you to a place I want you to go, to accept an opinion that at the start you would not have approved of but have come to see as obviously correct and your own. Hitler used this technique with the German people to get them from indifference to Jews to agreeing with their being wiped out from Europe. He did not just come out and propose the final solution, he took time and moved in incremental steps, ramping up the rhetoric and proposals slowly, built a social narrative that pulled the larger society in its wake.

Then, if that does not work, I can use the same methods to shame you or dox you. If the carrot of social approval online does not get you where I want you to go or you pose a threat to that, then I can use the stick. I can set mobs on you online. I can publish or allow to be published information about you in the real world.

With today's tech, I can track you 24 hrs a day. I know when you go to the doctor and where just from tracking the location of your phone. I can tell when you get paid by your shopping habits and I can tell you have hemorrhoids by the fact that you were at CVS and used your discount card or credit card to purchase hemorrhoid cream.

In fact, there is so much information coming in about you all the time, location, purchasing, call data, Google searches, EzPass, signals from your car, ....there is just SO MUCH, that a properly organized corporation or government agency with enough money can not only track you all day, every day, but can know you better than you know yourself. With that, they can and DO manipulate you all the time.

Sure, Tik Tok is tied to the CCP and yes that is a major problem, but do not for one minute think that the same tech and data are not being used by either your own government or Wall Street. Pick your poison.

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Gen Z is so mis-educated they will probably never become aware of what they are doing to themselves and to their country. They are totally misinformed about their government's founding principles and do not understand that they have been indoctrinated into socialism.

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Once again, DJT was right and even ahead of the curve, both on TikTok and Huawei. His efforts were thwarted by his American political opponents, not on the merits, but because they hate him. Somehow now, under a Democrat president, the concerns become legitimate. But the latest proposed method of dealing with those concerns are less burdensome to China because Biden has taken their cash in the past via the Hunter connection. All Chinese companies should be banned from doing business in the U.S. Our feckless president is incapable of acting responsibly on China because he is compromised. We need our new Republican Congress to investigate all this right to the bottom of it.

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“...Fears of Chinese manipulation of American elections has, curiously, not deterred  candidates in those elections from using the app. More politicians than ever—one-third of Democratic contenders and 12 percent of Republican—are deploying TikTok to reach Gen Z voters...”

Lol gee, I wonder why a third of Democrats and a tenth of Republicans aren’t deterred by TikTok’s threat to national security? Could it be because they’re all owned by the CCP? Peter Schweizer’s “Red-Handed” is a must read for anyone interested in just compromised our political class really is.

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Lenin was said to have written “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.” Whether or not he really did, America is being just as greedy and short-sighted in this digital age of TikTok and the rise of the Chinese authoritarian surveillance state.

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Frankly, I think _all_ apps are problematic. Companies are global, no? True, TikTok may be more under the control of the Chinese government than Apple is, say, under the control of the U.S. government, but in the end, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp—they're all little data plantations waiting for the right bots to harvest them.

Thing is that privacy is just not important to TikTok's main user base—GenZ and the more experimental Millennials. They essentially grew up without it. And they don't value it.

And shutting the barn door after the horses have escaped probably won't do much at this point.

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"A previous order under the Trump administration would have required ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American..."

And that's the closest we come to an acknowledgement that Trump was years ahead on this, and "progressives" stopped him from protecting the country from Chinese influence, just like they stopped him from shutting down the borders to the Chinese coronavirus.

Meanwhile, there's loads of evidence that the Chinese have previously bribed our current president's family. Explicit acknowledgement from Deborah Birx that the Chinese wrote our COVID policies. They feed propaganda and mental illness to our kids, encouraging everything they outlaw back in China. This isn't coincidence, it's strategy. Weaken your enemy before you go to war, and don't begin until you have won.

Hopefully progressives start catching up to conservatives on this and other issues of national security, but given the midterms, I think America's Democrats are already prepared in their hearts to strip our rights and vote our sovereignty away. They began years ago and vote for more of the same, and there's growing relationship and similarity between the CCP and the Democratic Party. "Social justice" is fundamentally Marxism and it's now being explicitly written into everything from kindergarten curriculums to Congressional legislation.

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I am a cybersecurity professional working at a well-known multinational firm -- we have been warning about TT for these reasons (and others) since 2017. This should be shared far and wide. Seriously, get off TikTok, and get your kids off, too

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Typically speaking, Gen z (I have a daughter in college) doesn’t want more info than a 30 second, confirmation bias political clip anyway... and some politicians have capitalized on this; I believe more, a lot more to come.

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Trump was right again.

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Has anyone commenting on this thread actually USED TikTok... as in you actually have the app on your phone and scrolled and liked things? I generally feel that these comment sections lean toward readers that may be 50+ (correct me if I'm wrong) but as someone who turns 30 next year, yes I've used TikTok and the majority of my friends do as well.

After about 2 months of heavily using it a year ago, I had to delete it because it was easily the MOST addicting social media app I have ever experienced. One day something in me kind of shifted and I knew I needed to get rid of it.

The algorithm is unparalleled... It kind of made me feel like my IQ levels were being lowered on a daily basis and my brain didn't know how to do other daily life tasks. The biggest risk is that at surface level TikTok appears innocent. It's just "people dancing"... but as someone who has used the app it didn't take very long for them to feed me exactly what I wanted to see and to get me hooked. There's so much subliminal messaging underneath the layers of comedy and dancing.

Haven't other social media companies had ties to China before? I'd like to see a comparison to illustrate exactly why TikTok is more dangerous than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Is it only in the way our data is stored and harvested or is it more than that?

Is banning the app entirely the way to go? I know I personally wouldn't mind it, and I sure as heck would get my kids off of it ASAP if I were you. But get rid of all the other social media giants while you're at it too.

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Something the article fails to address is the content of TikTok that gets the most views and goes viral. It’s mostly anti-West. Young people think that western values are uniquely terrible (cis-hetero-patriarchy, anyone?) and are ignorant about atrocities ongoing in other countries. Not my original thought - something I learned from Douglas Murray.

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founding
Nov 16, 2022·edited Nov 16, 2022

In 1981, Michael Crichton’s movie, Looker, was released. 41 years ago. The premise is that a company, Looker Labs, had developed technology to tailor what people saw on television to their individual brain activity. James Coburn plays a cameo, but critical part as John Reston, CEO of Looker Labs. He is addressing a meeting of his Board of Directors. Here’s his speech—and bear in mind that this is over 40 years ago:

John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power.

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I’d call this prescience.

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founding

“Exhibit A: the Senate race in Pennsylvania, in which both Democrat John Fetterman and his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, deployed TikTok, with Oz railing against the cost of vegetables in one video, and Fetterman slamming Oz for saying “crudité” in a highly effective response”

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Imagine running an ad about the price of groceries when your opponent is a lumbering, impaired, skinhead, ogre who CHASED A BLACK GUY DOWN THE STREET WITH A SHOTGUN.

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Nov 16, 2022·edited Nov 16, 2022

"....a win for centrist Democrats."

Now that's funny. Name one "centrist Democrat" (and don't say Joe Manchin).

Sorry but if you vote for the garbage pushed by Pelosi, Schumer and the Squad, you are no "centrist." Because no matter how "moderate" they claim to be, their entire party has been captured by leftist cant and they all vote in lockstep.

Just like the leftist apparatchiks they are.

So no surprise they'd embrace tik-tok. After all, the head of their party took Chinese Communist cash. Who else would be "the Big Guy?"

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