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The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
For decades, one could not get a security clearance if one were homosexual. On the one hand this was a "natural" disgust reaction by those who hand out security clearances, but there was also a logic to it that went: I myself might not be homophobic, I might have all the goodwill in the world to homosexuals, but most people hate and despise homosexuality, so a homosexual simply has far too much blackmail material lying around waiting to get got by the damn Reds. You can't trust someone who has secrets that could be revealed to his family and embarrass him. It's too much to expect him to successfully keep this secret forever.
We've since moved past this, homosexuals are perfectly capable of getting security clearances, because exposing his homosexuality isn't going to qualify as blackmail in America in the Year of our Lord 2023. Who are you going to tell, his husband and the other guests at their wedding? We didn't make it ok to have Homos in security clearances by figuring out a way to reliably avoid their perversion getting detected by enemies, we simply decided that we didn't care about the perversion. Expose their sordid personal lives all you want, we knew they were sodomites when we hired them. We didn't prevent their exposure, we transcended the need to avoid exposure. We didn't end liberalism, we expanded it.
Now, as the proverb goes whose attribution I can't recall, there is almost no one alive whose sex life, if fully exposed to public ridicule, would not inspire revulsion and horror. And of course the modern sexual menu is like the Cheesecake Factory in its variety and artificiality. So we don't worry we'll be revealed as fags or fairies or sodomites or Saphists, but we worry about all kinds of other things. Are you some kind of fetishist? Furry? Pervert? BDSM? Like toys? Noncon? Wincest? Power relations? Raceplay? Like 'em a little on the young side? Messaging hot young hung bottoms on Insta? Just having a good old fashioned affair? All that and more is in your browser history for many people.
So TikTok offers a threat of blackmail. TikTok reflects back your own desires, it shows you what you like to see, what you look at. Some of that is various strategies to trick you into watching a video, but much of it is thirst traps. When I first downloaded the app to try it, it showed me some MILF bikini reveals, and while I'm not a regular porn user it's not like I'm not a fan of great tits. But, especially early on, watch a couple of them, pretty soon your feed is flooded with them. Keep watching them, and really who wouldn't keep watching them?, and pretty soon your TikTok app is just a softcore porn button. I didn't really like that, but to get rid of it I had to make a concerted effort to swipe past instantly every time I saw an attractive woman who might be about to take her dress off. If I were a little more interested, like a normal person, in seeing random breasts on a daily basis, I guess I wouldn't have done it. I'm happy to report that now I get nothing but Roman History, pictures of books, and Tedposting Indomitable Human Spirit Memes, along with a smattering of cutesy "I love you so much" poetry and Psycho Girl memes that have cross pollinated from my wife sharing things to me.
If I were a little more desperate, like so many in this alienated and anodyne age, I might be one of those simps who sends messages to thirst traps, who watches lives and sends "gifts" to get her to say your username, I'm sure there are even men who hire sex workers over TikTok though I have no first hand knowledge of it (certainly that happens on Reddit). Listening to Lex Friedman have Aella on his podcast, and feeling him gravitate towards her, I really appreciated the mindset of the simp for the first time. Aella's personality is tailor made to appeal to my autistic demographic in a way most professional thirst traps don't, and I could watch Lex's guard drop and sense his salivation over her. I thought to myself, especially in the altered state I was in at the time, there but for the grace of God go I, if I didn't get lucky and have the relationship I have with my wife, I could see how that kind of parasocial relationship could tempt a man.
And that's not even getting into the weird and socially frowned upon politics or CW issues one might find on TikTok. One could equally be exposed as a racist, a misogynist, a virulent hater of Christians/Jews/Muslims/Hindus/Blacks/Atheists/Baseball/America/France/Books/TV-Watchers/Weightlifters/Gays. And you don't see it because you set out to see it, you see a racist joke and you laugh at it because you find it funny, maybe you watch the video again, pretty soon you are flooded with racist joke videos, your whole feed is nothing but CoonTown, without ever making the conscious decision to set it up that way. TikTok caters to our basest desires, whether they be sexual or cultural, and our Id is not what we want exposed to the world.
The nightmare scenario isn't hard to picture: a politician rises who is a huge China Hawk, and then he is exposed by his TikTok, or threatened to be exposed, and his power is undermined. He was messaging Twink 18 year olds and buying them gifts during Lives, he was favoriting trashy negro jokes or Black nationalist rhetoric or antisemitism or whatever. ((Honestly, I'm surprised I haven't found out the sex toy habits or viewing history of politicians that publicly go after Amazon yet...)
But the solution isn't to abandon liberalism and ban TikTok, the solution as with homosexuality is to transcend our petty concern with the unimportant moral foibles that we all have but no one admits to. To quote Dan Savage who has written on the topic:
His theory a decade ago was that we would hit a similar point with sexting and leaked nudes, we will reach a point where everyone has them and so no one cares when they are revealed because we did it too. I would guess that a supermajority of sexually active people under the age of 35 have sent noods at some point in their lives, and better than that number have sent otherwise explicit texts waiting to be leaked. But we haven't seen acceptance of it.
The way we beat TikTok and every other spy ring foreign and domestic isn't by abandoning Liberalism, but by expanding it, by accepting and addressing that what our Id enjoys in a six second video doesn't say anything important about our moral worth. We're all doing it, why not just accept it. Fuck you, CCP, show everyone that I love MILFs with great asses or Twinks with great asses or racist toilet humor, it doesn't mean anything about how I do my job. I think we should have taken the same attitude to the damn balloon! The Joint Chiefs should have given a press conference where they said: China, Mr. Xi, Generals of the Red Army, if you have questions come ask us! We'll take you on a tour of all our military facilities, so you can see just how powerful the United States Armed Forces are, how thoroughly capable we are of crushing any threat on any notice. If the Chinese want aerial photography they can just take it from a sat photo anyway, why piss ourselves about a fucking balloon?
TLDR: Don't end the first amendment to fight blackmail, end a culture that shames normal people for liking things that normal people like.
I have a tiktok account following a handful of models I find attractive, but it doesn't seem to do anything with that info? I check in maybe once a month, scrolling without interacting, at first on purpose to see what it would show, but it never deviated from feeding me random content in english except adding random content in french, spanish, russian, etc, so now I have even less reason to interact.
I have been thoroughly unimpressed with its continued spaghetti against the wall approach so I imagine people must actively cooperate to get addicted to their feed.
Weird. I definitely scroll through and get some shit that it just kinda throws in there, but it also definitely follows my likes and time watched. If I watch a single video of SCP narrated cartoons twice, I'll get a dozen of them in the next 20 videos. Ditto "Keep Your Rifle By Your Side" memes.
Addiction I don't really see, though it's easy to get sucked into scrolling when I'm very stoned at the end of a long day, so maybe a lot of other people are closer to that mental state normally.
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