You can still be convicted of something even if other people are doing the same thing and getting away with it.

So it doesn't matter whether this practice is unique to TikTok. "What about all my competitors doing the same thing" isn't a viable defense in court.

The complaint [1] is very specific to TikTok and alleges specific violations of the Consumer Fraud Act on their part. While other companies may produce similar results, it would be the burden of the state to establish all elements of the crime.

[1] https://www.nj.gov/oag/newsreleases24/2024-1008_Complaint-Fi...

They're just the best at it.

I'm curious how this will affect YouTube Shorts which is an obvious copy of TikTok.

> How is this unique to TikTok?

It's not [1]. Instagram was sued last year by a similar cohort [2].

TikTok isn't being singled out in this. It's almost suspicious how many people are peddling this false whataboutism. (And if two people are beating up your kid, why is the priority in what order you stop them?)

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/people-of-the-...

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/1/people-of-th...

> How is this unique to TikTok?

FTA:"Chinese-owned TikTok"

> This smells very election-yearish.

Is there a term for the phenomenon whereby when a conversation is being had by a group of people, and all participants know that the conversation is non-genuine (the talking points of the various parties are knowingly untruthful), but it hasn't yet been explicitly acknowledged that everyone is telling fibs?

I think it's funny that almost everything in the world runs in this general state, but we hardly ever talk about it. And then we whine about how everything is such a mess.

Is there anyone other than me out there that wonders about why we do things this way? No known laws of physics force us to do it, and yet we do almost only this (it is mainly a question of the degree to which "we" do it in any given situation, and there are many very obvious patterns of domains/topics where we tend to do it more so than in others). Might there be some other forces in our midst that we are overlooking?

> Should this lawsuit succeed, would that open up American companies to the same claims?

No. They are spying the kids for your own good. Remember, everybody can be a terrorist. /s

> dislike the "singled-out" aspect of it. If we're leaving Insta alone

We're not. Instagram was sued last year [1].

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67908468/people-of-the-...

If this case succeeds it would establish strong precedent for going after the rest. If you want a world where this sort of attention hacking is illegal than this is an excellent start.

I think the concern is TikTok's Chinese ownership.

I don't really like the data collection of Instagram or YouTube either, but at least those are owned by US companies, and as such aren't centralized in a country we have an semi-adversarial relationship with.

TikTok has no real political allies in the US so it is vulnerable to a pile on attack that American tech giants (that commit the same sins) are not. This would make it easier to win a case against them and set a precedent that could be used to sue the American giants.

It probably won't play out that way though since the whole political push isn't really about harming kids or addictive behaviors of social media, it's just about destroying an outside interloper that isn't part of the existing propaganda apparatus and competes with American tech giants.

Instagram is far too popular among voters. TikTok benefits from a bad reputation among parents, which will make the lawsuit popular.

Interesting political distribution, mirrors the congressional vote.

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-us-ban-sale-china-congress...

It seems wrong to be able to force people to sell a company because they're foreign

> strongly expect that they will disappear from the main US App stores on 19th January 2025

Eh, they'll still be on TikTok.com. Keep in mind, too, that the app store monopolies are being dismantled.

> The fact that they're the only major foreign owned social media company in the whole pool

Kind of out a big question mark over ‘free and fair competition’ thing.

How confident are you in that "very unbiased" rating

> not open for investment

60% of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors such as the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group

More like switching from one extreme of propaganda to another.

Like what were you doing during the late 2000s and the early 2010s? All of these "controversial" topics, the skeletons in the closet and self-critique have been open and available for viewing from the beginning.

The only difference is that how they are viewed, in the past as lessons to inform the future, today as ammunition to attack, or to distract from one's own misdeeds.

I disagree with the unbiased part of the comment. IMO all social medias, whether it's Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok - they are all heavily censored and their algorithm is tipped in a direction that optimizes attention, click throughs, and in general, is not good for you.

Notice how on TikTok, even accounts you follow sometimes will show up with the + sign, begging you to click Follow eventhough you are already following them. This isn't a bug, rather, it's dark UX tricks to keep you trained on clicking the follow button.

On Meta (be it Facebook or Instagram), you only need to be sympathetic to what people in Gaza are experiencing to begin to see the censorship. It's blatantly obvious.

Coming back to TikTok, similar to Meta, they have crafted an incredible algorithm that will keep you glued to your phone. We have no idea if they have adjusted the levers to increase dissent in young people in the West. Just because they are saying they haven't, or we have not been able to prove that they haven't, doesn't mean they won't. I can tell you with a guarantee that if Instagram or YouTube were allowed to operate in China, they would certainly use these levers to increase dissent against the CCP. We already have an example of what these companies are doing to censor certain content and boost others in places like India and Pakistan.

In general, all of these social media companies are this generations cigarette companies. We need heavy regulation from congress. We need to take tech's lobbyist money and not do their bidding.

We need to shutdown lunatics like Andreessen Horowitz and more.

Here, have your 5 yuan, comrade.

Please please please encourage them to read books by giving them rewards and make them do activities that require concentration also send them to a mathcamp or a cscamp and make sure they get the education they need the US education system is getting worse every year with students who can barely read and can't do algebra coming to college.

> I guess TikTok is like everything bad about YouTube but with less attention span

YouTube has "Shorts", attempting to duplicate the TikTok experience.

My kid is allowed to watch 2 hours of youtube a week, but it's always supervised by me or my partner. He chooses what he wants to watch and gravitates towards science experiments, cartoons and some shows for kids. He stumbled a few times into dead ends such as mindless content (other kids or adults influencers playing Minecraft for example) but we guided him out of it. He now knows how to stay away from all that. As parents we do a lot more to keep him engaged with reading, outdoor play and other activities. Technology is an inescapable part of the future but we try to mitigate its bad effects and let him take the good parts. Seems to be working wonderfully. The goal is for him to realize what is good and what's bad without parental policing. Apart from Youtube there's Duolingo music and math that he does a few days a week. It's wonderful to see him resist the pull, turn off the device and go to some other activity by himself.

the real killer feature of tiktok is how easy, how much it encourages (or at least used to?) remixing anything and contributing your own content back.

it's like youtube combined with instagram upload fitlers or something like that

> These days YT is getting even worse. It's full of AI slop including pop science channels full of completely false AI-generated information. It's absolutely cursed.

How would you know if you don't watch YouTube? Or I hope you don't, to be morally consistent with your own positions.

> I guess TikTok is like everything bad about YouTube but with less attention span and controlled by the CCP.

I feel like YouTube has more content with actual effort put into it, and if you took the top N videos on each platform on any given day, the ones on YouTube would be substantially better.

Can I prove that? Nope. Does it even matter if the algorithm is just feeding you trash anyway? Perhaps not.

But at least YouTube *can* be used in a way that's not absolute mind rot. If that's even possible with TikTok, it's gotta be done by a substantially smaller chunk of the user base.

>We had to ban YouTube, and doing so was possibly the single best boundary we've set as parents

Sounds horrible. My young teens have been on youtube for like 6+ years. They can watch hour long videos no problem. So what if they are trash sometimes? They are into it, paying attention and it's their entertainment. But then they also end up watching and learning so many different things they aren't going to see anywhere else. Or randomly come across chess videos then start watching those etc.

My kids have more screen time than 99% of kids I know, yet they are super well behaved, have many interests, do well in school, etc. I couldn't ask for better kids.

>If we hadn't we'd probably have never spoken to our kids again.

Sounds like a You problem. Not a YouTube problem.

Hello, fellow luddite! We have also managed to keep our kids, somehow, off any Meta product, TikTok, and mostly, YT. Even as they roll into and through highschool.

There are occasional moments when the fact that "everyone" else is on them, are challenging.

But it's been worth it.

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I'm stuck on how precedent works differntly in civil law (the rest of the world) and common law (only USA and UK)