TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/tiktok-disabled-users-videos-suppressed.html
TikTok has been accused of secretly gathering "vast quantities" of user data and sending it to servers in China. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50640110
TikTok is paying the FTC a fine of $5.7 million for collecting the data of kids under 13. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/28/18244996/tiktok-children-privacy-data-ftc-settlement
TikTok censors all reference to the Hong Kong protests. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks-beijing-roots-fuel-censorship-suspicion-it-builds-huge-us-audience/?noredirect=on
TikTok has had children as young as 8 targeted by sexual predators and Police are urging parents to check the app privacy settings. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms-android-google&source=android-browser&q=cache:https:%2F%2Fwww.scotsman.com%2Flifestyle-2-15039%2Ftiktok-privacy-settings-everything-parents-need-to-know-about-the-video-app-1-4872619
TikTok's privacy page admits to collecting as much data as possible, from meta data, GPS location, and pulls all contact information on someone's Facebook and instagram (if connected) and phone, while allowing themselves to use this data for whatever they want.
https://www.tiktok.com/legal/privacy-policy?lang=en
TikTok has been labeled a "threat to national security" by the USA government.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rU0zzHKHxC8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6jOJe9U9Wj8 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/technology/tiktok-national-security-review.html
TikTok is ban from US Navy mobile devices, as it's been declared a cybersecurity threat.
TikTok had vulnerabilities as recent as last month, which allowed attackers to gain control of users accounts to upload videos or view private videos, while a separate flaw allowed attackers to retrieve personal information from TikTok user accounts through the company’s website.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/technology/tiktok-security-flaws.html
Censorship on TikTok goes back a long way, and I think as the app continues to grow, China will use this, the most popular social media app globally, to influence us for the worse, because they realize social media in the modern day has the most power of all. I sound like I have a tinfoil hat on, but still. I’m super anti-CCP, where they don’t even acknowledge that Tiananmen Square even happened.
Oh, and to make matters worse? See what happened May 17th, where a Chinese Democrat was forcibly removed from a vote for protesting the CCP: https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3084822/hong-kong-lawmakers-thrown-out-key-legislative-council
If anything, the constant protests, arrests, and tortures of Hong Kong protestors for wanting independence from China should tell you why an app directly related to China is probably one of the last things I’d support. I mean, have you seenthose videos of protestors getting beaten down and sprayed with tear gas just for being in the streets? Crazy. https://www.google.com/amp/s/hongkongfp.com/2020/05/14/hong-kong-police-tortured-detainees-says-rights-group-as-un-experts-voice-concern-over-leading-activists-arrests/
It’s like, what if during the early 1940s, the Nazi Party made, like, Instagram? I mean, not that I’m comparing China to the Nazi Party (though, fascism, arrests, and censorship and torture of your constituents…is kind of…similar), but why do people not even care where the app comes from or what it endorses through its ties? It’s the modern guise of entertainment and ‘social media.’ Joseph Stalin could have created Honey Nut Cheerios under a different name and people would eat the Cheerios all the same – it’s almost as if where it comes from has become irrelevant if the product sells. A sad social commentary on our future direction, everyone is prone to manipulation, myself included.
Its almost as if Tiktok is China’s attempt at pushing their propaganda out to the world while also having massive privacy issues. China has realized that to control the global population you have to control social media and what people see. So for the last year they have been pouring a ton of money into getting their social media app to be accepted and widely used- through a campaign of paid content creation/submission, and vote manipulation. Once they have widescale buy in, their backdoor monitoring and data collection will have free reign.
That's everything from a macro perspective, I guess. From an app standpoint, I heavily disagree with it. This doesn't even begin to touch on the content perspective, though. Its focus is on lack of originality and instead following trends -- lip syncing, dancing, and some sort of sexual hints, all rolled into one. Its effects and danger on the current and future generations is indubitable, and its bred a generation of middle schoolers twerking and stripping at the ages of 12 because their content algorithms favor the culture due to pedophiles and creeps actively being able to access these videos, hence many other lawsuits concerning safety of minors. It's toxic and disgusting, to say the least, and its bred a mindset of oversexualization of anything and everything, where everything is an innuendo and everything from clothing to a face or a foot is a sex symbol. Social media has been the catalyst for this, and TikTok is at the forefront. Nothing is safe nowadays, and I'm sick of it.