I feel like I'm going crazy. Hasn't TikTok been proven malicious in it's excessive user tracking and data theft? Why does everyone I know still use it? Outside of privacy concerns, doesn't the blackbox algorithm make anyone worry? We're building automated echochambers for an entire population. We're giving a Chinese company the ability to control the content consumption, and therefore beliefs and knowledge, of entire countries. The ever growing popularity of tiktok is, to me, extremely concerning.
- algo is a black box, and uncalibrated youtube makes my eyes bleed;
- own by the biggest spy on the planet, google, known for manipulating information, monopolistic behavior, participation in the worst gov programs (e.g: PRISM);
- impose American censorship rules to the entire world, and makes creators do inane cuts to fit some terrible metrics
Besides, the typical Tik Tok customer doesn't give a damn about those things. They didn't on facebook, insta, whatsapp, or whatever. They don't even know it's an issue, "have nothing to hide", don't care about privacy, power centralization, citizen spying and so on.
I see where you're coming from, but Youtube isn't nearly as opaque as Tiktok. You can actually search for videos on youtube, typically content is longer and has a higher production quality which reduces probability of doom-scrolling. As someone else mentioned, TikTok is intentionally designed to be addictive and gamified, much more so that youtube or facebook.
And, objectively speaking, the US government is far preferable to the CCP. The US has it's issues and has made mistakes in the past, the CCP is still putting Muslims in concentration camps and exercises regular authoritarian controll over it's citizens. Militarily, the US is allied with most EU powers (including France) and generally has good intentions for it's allies. China, on the other hand, finds itself on the outside of most alliances, and considering that even their own people are treated poorly, I can only imagine that their intentions for others are not positive.
American tech companies take your data and sell it to advertisers, I don't like it, but they do. The US government only accesses it if they have a reason to do so and subpoena the specific information needed. The Chinese government? I have no doubt that they're collecting data for much more nefarious purposes. Intelligence indicates that they've been improving their military forces massively in the last several decades. It wouldn't be hard for them to subtly start slipping in propaganda into the tiktok feeds of countries they intend to invade, and then they'll have local-national support.
I think it's easy to look at this and say objectively that it's worse. If Youtube or Facebook were owned by France or Germany I would hold the same belief that tiktok is worse. It's not fear of some mysterious "other", but fear of a proven enemy to freedom and human rights, China.
> The US government only accesses it if they have a reason to do so and subpoena the specific information needed
As Snowden revelations have shown, this is not the case.
> It wouldn't be hard for them to subtly start slipping in propaganda into the tiktok feeds of countries they intend to invade
Last time I checked, the USA were the number one warmonger in the world, sometimes by lying about WMD and going against the vote of the UN.
I'm not defending China, I do think Tiktok is a dictatorship honeypot, but the USA is only good to the USA. A cancer is worst than diabetes, but I still don't think diabetes is a good thing.
And google is only good to google.
I'm in the good graces of neither, being in Europe, and consider both as services that will try to get as much of me as possible when I use them. And the minute our interest are not aligned with theirs, they will bite us.
Fun fact, if you are not a US citizen, you have no 4th amendment rights against seizure of your data. No judge or legal process necessary beyond a blanket executive order.
> Militarily, the US is allied with most EU powers (including France)
Wouldn’t this be an argument for preferring TikTok over YouTube?
There is literally nothing China can do to me as long as I stay firmly in the West. On the other hand, I could very well be sold out by Google to the US government, which could easily have me extradited from the EU.
I mean if you want to foster anti-america content all you really need to do is leave TikTok alone. It’s my generation’s version of Tumblr only on a bigger scale. You don’t really need manipulation when the user-base skews young, activist, and unironically anti-capitalist.
Which I think is awesome personally but I get how some people will see all of that as huge red flags.
I mean the trope of colleges turning people into leftist hippie communists is older than my parents.
But K-12 in the US tries to hammer so much “so misleading it might as well be false” pro-America propaganda during exactly the age that kids are generally rebelling against anything authority tells them that’s it’s not all that surprising that during a major economic downturn that’s only benefiting those with capital that people would start to have a distaste for the system that produced this mess.
There’s something wild about being so liberal that people assume you’re conservative. I’m very much vaccinated and also upset that our government left the out most vulnerable people with $1400 and a thumbs up, fucked over out healthcare workers, pushed people back to work rather than give any meaningful assistance and put everyone at risk, did basically nothing to control housing costs all while the stock market posted record returns for already wealthy capital holders.
I just think it’s weird to attribute the things you are complaining about to ‘capitalism’, and that if you are going to make such broad statements, then it’s weird to claim there are no benefits to those ‘without capital’ when there plainly are.
I happen to also be critical of most of the things you are criticizing. Blaming ‘capitalism’ doesn’t seem to offer anything. The word has become interchangeable with ‘the bogeyman’.
In a lot of ways I don’t think that’s a totally unfair assessment. But “fuck capitalism” has become somewhat of a rallying phrase for people who are upset at a number of economic problems and their non-solutions that are largely underpinned by the mostly individualistic but fundamentally capitalist way of thinking that is both wildly held in the US in general but specifically held among those in power who are personally unaffected by the systems they create.
> underpinned by the mostly individualistic but fundamentally capitalist way of thinking that is both wildly held in the US in general but specifically held among those in power who are personally unaffected by the systems they create
I largely disagree with the first half of this, and agree with the second half. I think ‘individualism’ is a chimera and not a cause.
I do agree that Americans are generally more suspicious of the state than people in most other countries, but that’s to be expected given both the founding and history of the country, and the experiences of minorities.
On the other hand, the disconnectedness of those in power and the lack of solutions is definitely evident.
My dislike of ‘anti-capitalism’ is that is just a complaint, but without any solutions.
> There is literally nothing China can do to me as long as I stay firmly in the West.
There are numerous Uyghurs in the West who would disagree with your assessment given the harassments they have had to endure. This will only become worse as China continues to become more powerful.
Explaining these to the average person makes you seem like a conspiracy nut case.
No of some of the same people will go on about the illuminati controlling everything. But you talk specific companies or policies and you get an eye roll.
Just a single point, but as a non american, I can say that I do not feel "the same way" exactly. Its close, in that I think, the discussion in the EU on Huaweis network equipment in telco nets, is a little bit overheated and I'd like to see the same requirements to be enacted on, for example, CISCO, whos security track record is ... not that good?
But I still think that 'chinese company owning a majority of internet video traffic' is WAY more scary than 'US company owning a majority of internet traffic'. Maybe thats just bias, maybe not.
But yes, I think there should be more relevant non-US big IT players to add more variety. But for a lot of reasons, the EU, and especially germany, just does not cut it in regard of IT expertise anymore. I am not saying this from a perspective of "disappointed patriotism" or something like that. Its more about having more choice would make thinks more interessting.
But on the other hand: more choice makes thinks like movie streaming less attractive. I do not want to have to sign with Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO, Apple TV AND Maxdome.
I guess we still cannot have the cake, and eat it, too.
I agree with you, China is a nation run by a single dictator that is imprisoning and torturing millions of people without trials or even letting anyone else know.
The USA has its problems, but they are all extremely publicized compared to the secret nightmare going on in China.
I have noticed that there are armies of Chinese and Russian shill accounts on HN now that brigade with "whataboutisms" whenever criticism of Putin or Jinping's dictatorships arise.
As a non american I don't feel the same way. Amazon, Google, etc just want to make money. TikTok is (like all companies in China) an extension of the Chinese state, a state that is currently engaging in genocide.
Amazon and Google are extensions of the USG when dealing with foreign nationals. You can assume that 100% of the relevant data is accessible to US agencies.
How is that different than Facebook? We have known for Facebook shady data policies for 10 years, and that has never prevented people from using it, why do you think suddenly people would care more when it comes to TikTok?
Facebook wants your data to sell higher priced targeted ads.
Tiktok gives your data to China. I don't know what they are doing with it but they are not using it for better targetted ads. I guess when they request permission for my phone contacts, clipboard content, private photos at least I know they aren't using it for ads.
People in many parts of the world will have the exact opposite impression. So far, Chinese domination looks like new roads, while US domination looks like coups and war. Of course, this reflects the current relative advantages of both and I have no illusions about the risks of being dominated by any imperialistic power.
Which just blows my mind. At a total US development aid of $34 billion in 2019, China is the only country that even comes close. The US's giving in the last fifty years (including massive sums to China) has been unparalleled in recorded history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...
> US blows away all other countries in humanitarian aid too
The problem is that they often do blow stuff away, quite literally. People aren't going to sing your praise for the new well you've dug after you've bombed their wedding and killed all their friends and family.
Such a cynical position. I predict there will be domestic calls in the near future to significantly curtail the US's extraordinary benevolence -- nobody seems to appreciate it anyway. And that will benefit nobody other than maybe China, which has its own history with killing innocents.
If you reduced the development aid but also stopped bombing people, regime changes and all that good stuff that brings instability to a region, I'm sure everyone would be fine with that.
If you want to do some good, take some refugees. Like, a significant number, not a homeopathic amount.
> I think the majority of countries have dropped or shot bombs at somepoint in the last 100 years.
195 countries in the world... Only have to find ~100 countries that have bombed another country in the last century. Only thing I can see that is going to save that assumption is going to be ww2.
> The US was killing more central asians than China every year of the last 20 years straight. Hopefully no longer true going forward.
That's absolutely a fallacious comparison.
1. We don't have accurate data from China on the number imprisoned and killed by them, so no one can make absolutely comparisons like you did.
2. The Chinese do this to people living peacefully inside their borders. If the US started rounding up and killing ethnic minorities WW2 concentration camp style then you could make this comparison. The US was engaged in active conflict with a group that itself was detrimental to human (specifically, women's) rights and that engaged us first.
I dont agree with a lot of what happened in the middle east, but you can't in good fairh stretch that as a comparison to fit your own narrative.
There's those qualifications and spin I was asking for.
China is bringing economic development, secular institutions and women's rights, in a heavy handed way, whether the residents want it or not, with minimal regard for costs to those residents. It's the exact same thing as we've been doing, minus a fig leaf of democracy.
In neither case is the word genocide or ethnic cleansing appropriate, body counts don't support it. But it's especially rich to level the accusation 5 seconds after our 20 year war ended.
Note the word "war". They killed us as well. Again, this is not comprable to the situation in China with the Uighur Muslims. Unless you're one of those running these camps, you don't have an accurate body count, so you don't know what word is or is not appropriate. Based on the perceived scale of the operation, genocide seems very much correct, but I have no more information than you.
I don't understand how you can sit here and compare a war in the middle east to literal concentration camps. Stop performing mental gymnastics to fit your own narrative.
Because dead is dead. If you can't read, who cares what the declaration of war said.
It's counterinsurgency in both cases, attempting to modernize a tribal Muslim society in hopes of improving security from terror attacks.
You are aware there were terror attacks in Urumqi?
There are differences between their style and ours, the re-education camps vs the drone bombs. Maybe there's an argument about freedoms vs deaths. But Americans clearly do not actually give a shit about Muslim lives, it's just a political talking point. 300k dead in Yemen with our weapons doesn't even make the news, Afghanistan barely cracked the news for a decade, etc etc.
How many Americans were baying at the moon to invade Iraq and now they're the world's greatest humanitarians about Xinjiang?
>2. The Chinese do this to people living peacefully inside their borders. If the US started rounding up and killing ethnic minorities WW2 concentration camp style then you could make this comparison. The US was engaged in active conflict with a group that itself was detrimental to human (specifically, women's) rights and that engaged us first.
This kind of whitewashing is what allows us as Americans to ignore the mass scale death we inflict while pointing fingers at other kettles. You don't even have the cause of events correct - we invaded afghanistan first, America were the aggressors. Do you think we invaded Afghanistan to preserve women's rights? Do you know that American soldiers were told to turn a blind eye to the afghan national army raping little boys? You mention that we don't have accurate numbers about china's tyranny, but under Trump, we repealed the rule that the USG had to report drone strike casualties. I'm not surprised other countries don't see a functional difference between the US and China, after all only one of those countries has a solid track record of overturning democratically conducted elections because they didn't like the outcome.
As a European: this is extremely funny. America has been doing this for years. Apparently only when it's not America doing these things it becomes a problem?
America being an ally only really makes them more dangerous to me as an individual. If I were in trouble with the US government there is a high likelihood my own government would extradite me. There's very little chance of that with the Chinese government, and the chances are they wouldn't be interested in the first place*
* Not that the US would be interested in me personally either. But they do take an interest in citizens from other countries.
Well, you could certainly see why the situation changes when the service is controlled by an adversarial government. At least the US services are only clandestinely influenced by the US government. TikTok is practically a Trojan horse
Kinda. Many Americans run around with a notion of some kind of noble entrepreneur who provides the bounty of endless choice in consumer goods, even if it's a corporation. The fact that many different brands come from the same factory tends to be overlooked. Americans are also unique in their tolerance for constant advertising where other cultures would consider it gauche and intrusive.
TikTok is imo goddamn scary. It is explicitly set up to hook people with gamification techniques, showering likes on new users so they come back for more. Only the subject matter is often politics, activism and intertribal warfare.
The US want to take all my money and put me in jail. I like my freedom.
China want to blackmail me to do their bidding. I dont actually have much shame, so probably wont work so good.
There are days where I think the lesser of two evils when it comes to invading my privacy might be the regime whos jurisdiction I am not, and likely never will be present in.
The US government is monitoring traffic at all major points including undersea cables. The US reasons are complex ranging from terrorism to cyberwar faire to unknown reasons.
One reason China does it to monitor and control their own people. Speaking out against China in the west will often put family in China at risk and any business interests. Monitoring journalist, tracking western movement, cyberwar faire, are all reasons.
Being a US company specifically doesn't make it better, but being a Chinese company absolutely makes it worse.
I wouldn't be nearly as worried if Tiktok were owned by Italy or Germany or France. But China, with it'a ongoing genocide of Muslims and totalitarian oppression, yeah that is worse than Netflix selling your data to advertisers.
TikTok algorithm is like a tamgotchi with short memory. The echo chamber is actual much less than on other systems, or at least this is my actual understanding.
I've been working on AI and ML for 20+y now, I'm always interested is testing the systems out there from the user side.
Overall, I've been surprised by TikTok, as I did find it very enjoyable actually, and easily 'trainable'.
Why does YouTube not change their algorithim. It is clearly sub tier to tik tok, they have the data and skill set to provide new and entertaining videos but the recommended feed has been so stale and stagnant for a few years, constantly pushing videos you’ve seen or ones you clearly don’t want to watch. How much of tik tok’s success do you think is their algorithim for recommending content. I heard from numerous people how addicting it is and how every video is different. Do you think the short videos give more instant gratification which has a
Large effect? I use YouTube shorts and for the most part it is really entertaining
Yea, It may be as simple as the length. There's a vastly higher frequency of samples when every video is twenty seconds long.
It's also clearly designed around a different experience, a constant consume-or-scroll feed as popularized by Instagram. YouTube shorts also has this, but regular YouTube clearly doesn't, given that there's just enough latency between video skips that it feels like the algorithm is "making mistakes" at a much lower number of skips.
Exactly right. More data beats better algorithms every time. Because YouTube is (foolishly IMO) trying to turn itself into television, they've pursued 10+ minute videos even when there's only ~30 seconds of content. Tiktok's success is well deserved.
YouTube's algorithm used to be better, they neutered it at some point after all the articles about "YouTube Radicalization" dropped. Feels like it's heavily moderated or throttled on what can bubble up now, which probably results in less novel content and novel content is where TikTok excels.
I wonder about the 'other' viewers on youtube, the matching to 'you might also like' content is terrible. At best I get a lot of the same channel, or videos containing the same title, or worse still the celebrity garbage that is popular in the country at the time.
The algo also doesnt seem to get the hint - it suggests a video over and over again, an no matter how many times I dont ever watch a video on X channel or on Y subject, it keeps on trying.
While I am complaining, Netflix algo is getting worse too. Stop reccomending the movie I watched earlier in the week, I watched it. I clicked thumbs down on it. I dont want to waste another 90 minutes on it.
The depressing reality is that your average person on the street couldn't care less. I've tried bringing it up to friends and family in the least evangelical way I can, and the most common response is that they simply don't care about their privacy; to them the content on the platform is worth dealing with an app that's accused of malicious practices and "so what if some company in China gets my data, I'm not planning on going to China". Talking about things that are well known in the tech industry to people without that background has a nasty habit of making you look like a conspiracy theorist to Johnny Random.
The obvious answer is that most people just want to watch funny and entertaining videos, and don't care about some externalities which don't even seem real to them.
I think the reason people use it is the reason why people still use dating apps. Choice is infinite. Every time you swipe, is a new person, a new video, a new hit of dopamine. An insatiable appetite for something new. It is also power. With the dating apps it’s the power to dismiss someone with a swipe, no need to waste time looking at their profile. In TikTok there are no YouTube ads, and you can swipe quickly past videos that don’t spike interest (dopamine).
It would be an issue if Youtube's doing it for their own benefit, but they are just honoring Nintendo's request to not show that content to minors, so Youtube isn't at fault here.
As a person who is hopelessly addicted to refreshing feeds I can say that TikTok is the first app in 10 years that replaced reddit - my previous digital drug of choice. Their algo is just to good. People without rich and fulfilling lives don't stand a chance.
Nope, you're not going crazy. But the thing is every other social media company does the same thing. So railing against tiktok was ineffective because everyone already accepts this. And I was one of the people early on (even before the merger) talking about it.
Even the "china controls it" part isn't persuasive because, I mean, what isn't china influencing these days? And TBH I don't give a shit if it's Chinese or American powers collecting my information, I don't want either of them doing it. And consider that these American corporations influence other nations in the same way China may influence America and they accept it -- of course Americans would accept it too.
My word to people who hate TikTok's privacy invading tech and practices is to lobby to pass a sweeping privacy law or shut up, basically. But that would mean wrecking a huge part of the parasitic tech industry so it's not going to happen.
Domestic companies like Facebook and Google are already doing all the censorship, manipulation, and tracking I'd expect from the Chinese. Why should I care at this point?
What do you call a nation that spends 800B on the military while their infrastructure rots, routinely sponsors coups all over their hemisphere and maintains an aggressive forward military posture all over the planet?
A democracy is a form of government where citizens pick who is in charge.
You can have pacifist government against war. You can have the opposite.
Norway is a democracy but doesn't have an aggressive miliary posture. The US has the largest army and probably spends 800b on their military.
Authoritarian government manage by suppressing their own people. This requires an aggressive military presence locally. All of the conditions above could be true as well for these types of governments.
There's polling numbers on all this. You can check popular approval of imperial wars in the US (it is low), or you can check Chinese approval of their government (it is high).
Ah yes, the extremely reputable self-reporting from Chinese citizens, who absolutely have no fear for their safety should they say the wrong thing. Of course the Chinese love the CCP, they all say so!
Go talk to some Chinese people, then, do your own research.
Just don't call them brainwashed while uncritically swallowing a story about how we're all free and they're all oppressed, no matter what they say about it.
Hmm maybe once China decides to get rid of it's Muslim concentration camps I'll take a visit and ask around. Until then, it's pretty clear to me which government is objectively worse.
Approval of their government compared to what? What is the alternative? Chaos?
In a democracy you have many parties and points of view which would naturally lead to lower popularity as it spreads over many ideas. Each takes turns and this system renews ideas.
Sorry, I thought you were trying to understand why Chinese people might be happy with their government after you add it all up. If it's just cold war arguments and demonization, I can't help you with that.
Consider, even if you're that hardcore about it, 'know your enemy' has some value. They understand us but we don't understand them, and sometimes it's willful on our part. We'd rather tell ourselves a story.
What do you think the word democracy means? None of that is incompatible with being a democracy.
That's not a defense of those actions, but there's an incredibly bizarre trend these days to act as if words don't have any actual meaning beyond their mood affiliation. Just pick a word from a vaguely-related grab bag ("living wage", "misinformation", "democratic", white supremacy ") and hurl it blindly at the conversation and you get all the retweets you want.
If you admit that, the issue becomes actual reality, not authoritarianism per se, and the comparison between the US and China becomes very uncomfortable when democracy is no longer a crutch.
"Good" is such a subjective term. Even the worst totalitarian governments are good for some percentage of the population. Even the best democratic ones have people who are struggling against the system and would regard it as evil.
I live in New Zealand and there are people driving around thinking we are a communist country and feeling oppressed by government. They express as much through the signs and stickers all over their vehicles.
I wish that good and evil existed in a measurable way but I fear that we live in a world of grey and everyone sees the shades differently from their different perspectives.
We'll see how you feel when China takes over the world and your kids are only allowed to play video games 8pm-9pm on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday... unless you're Muslim in which case all of you can work in a labor camp with no rights or technology.
I stepped back from a group chat because the fellows in it swore by “Mental Health TikTok,” where therapists give mental health advice. This is concerning to me.
Beyond that, the data collection and the way it mixes young-but-of-age mildly sexual content with underage guys imitating them makes me stay far away. I enjoyed the handsome men in various states of undress but couldn’t find a way to make the app not veer into underage content, no matter how many times I told it what I liked. Disturbing.
> I stepped back from a group chat because the fellows in it swore by “Mental Health TikTok,” where therapists give mental health advice. This is concerning to me
What's concerning about this? I don't mean this rhetorically: I'm genuinely curious, as I've heard people say similar things recently.
It seems to me that, like metabolic health, there's a pretty large body of basic mental health advice that's safe and salutary, and that doesn't displace heavy-duty mental Healthcare for those who need it (in the same way that healthy recipe tips don't displace insulin shots).
It was apparent in the group chat I was in that these guys were replacing heavy-duty mental healthcare with tips provided by unverified sources on TikTok. A chat where we went to vent about our frustrations turned into peer-to-peer mental health diagnosis informed by these TikTok doctors, telephoned through these regular, non-doctor participants.
It struck me as the kind of thing that leads people to, for example, ingeste chloroquine phosphate [0] on the advice of a celebrity.
> It was apparent in the group chat I was in that these guys were replacing heavy-duty mental healthcare with tips provided by unverified sources on TikTok
You've mixed together two-way (discussion) and one-way (advice) mental health communication. Your point only applies to discussion, and the tiktok example only involves advice.
Concretely, what privacy concern do you see in watching a video with mental health tips? Do you think this privacy concern similarly extends to reading a Wikipedia article on (eg) CBT techniques?
Or am I misunderstanding, and "Mental health tiktok" involves users describing their mental health issues in videos that they post, and a back-and-forth with those who are claiming to "treat" them?
I'd trust Wikimedia's privacy policy a hell of a lot more than I'd trust TikTok's.
Also, the English Wikipedia article on cognitive behavioural therapy cites Cochrane reviews, psych textbooks and a whole volley of journal articles from prestigious journals like the Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association etc. describing clinical trial results, plus guidance from the UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence.
Presumably, the TikTok version makes up for this by having a better dance routine.
> I'd trust Wikimedia's privacy policy a hell of a lot more than I'd trust TikTok's
Yes, of course. I wasn't clear, but I was referring to going through a search engine, not going directly to Wikipedia.
> Presumably, the TikTok version makes up for this by having a better dance routine.
I'm afraid you've completely misunderstood what this subthread is about. The _quality_ of medical information and the privacy concerns involved in finding it (whether through Google or via tiktok's algorithm) are completely different topics. To be honest, I can't imagine how anyone could read these comments and come away thinking any comparison was being made (let alone equivalence being drawn) between quality vs privacy concerns.
I was being snarky about the quality of the information, but the privacy issue is the important one.
If the key variable is the search engine, then, yes, you probably don't want to be feeding details of your possible mental health problems into Google. Maybe DuckDuckGo would be preferable. Once you've put your symptoms or diagnosis into a search engine, where you end up is going to likely not be the main issue. If you type, say, "autism spectrum disorder" into Google, Google will make certain assumptions about you regardless of whether you end up clicking on a Wikipedia link, an NHS.uk link, some academic paper on bioRxiv, or a TikTok video with someone describing their autism diagnosis.
That's an extremely expansive definition of "two-way", to the point of meaninglessness. If you were to bite this bullet, you'd also preclude the type of extremely basic work to get informed that any patient should be doing when engaging with the healthcare system (including for physical health). Basic research about your health problems doesn't even preclude putting full faith in your doctor and his recommendations; they're helpful in the general case for even understanding conversations with him. And this type of web search provides infinitely more "two-way" loss of privacy than signal from tiktok recommendations.
This is worth elaborating on, since I know HN tends to have a bizarre fantasy conception of the medical system where patients arent supposed to understand anything that's happening. I have to wonder if the HNers contributing to this conception have ever engaged with the medical system, or if they have, I have to pity those that they're responsible for.
There are plenty of doctors in my family, and I've been responsible for managing both chronic and severe acute health issues for family members. Every single one of the doctors I've been in contact with would be shocked by the notion that patients shouldn't be informing thenselves at a basic level. This goes quadruply for basic preventive measures like nutrition, exercise, or basic mental health practices: there's a reason that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
I don’t think you want mental health information going where it could be used against you.
Eg,
> Cheng believes the website that doxed him by publishing his personal information online was started by pro-Beijing supporters in Hong Kong.
> “I feel fear,” he admitted. His family, too, was scared and told him not to walk home alone anymore. But part of Cheng remains defiant as he considers the doxing website a component of a larger campaign to incite fear in protesters as mass demonstrations continue into their third month.
The parent comment clarified in response to my original question that they were referring to "heavy duty" mental health advice, of serious issues.
The premise of my pushing back against privacy concerns was mental health advice of the basic, fundamental kind: mindfulness, productive thought patterns, healthy work habits, sleep hygiene, etc etc etc.
Even taking for granted that tiktok's access to this information is scarier than eg Google's, the signal they can glean from this type of usage is little more than "I get anxious sometimes", not things like "I have bipolar disorder". I don't think it's controversial at all to say that getting advice for serious mental disorders via social network isn't a good idea for multiple reasons (again, this is why I clarified with the OP of the story what sort of mental health advice they were seeking).
To make it clear by analogy: one maintains their physical health through a million 24/7 day-to-day decisions, and nobody would blink twice at getting information about eg yoga or healthy recipes from YouTube or other non-medical sources. OTOH, trying to treat your pneumonia or MS via YouTube or tiktok would be an obvious disaster. Similarly, there are a million and one day-to-day actions one takes to maintain their mental health, eg mindfulness or other basic CBT techniques. Researching these independently is not just harmless, it's what people _should_ be doing, regardless of whether they're also seeking treatment (and the privacy concerns are similarly minimal). Again in stark contrast, serious mental health issues shouldn't be treated via casual research.
Pretty clear from several comments in this thread that Non-US citizens have a hard time distinguishing the risk-levels of a US-centric vs a China-centric world. Particularly insulting to see the French comments. Ever wondered what Europe would be looking like today if it was China and USSR that ended up defeating the Nazis?
