I’m not here to claim that Tiktok is completely harmless, or that it’s even a good site. I’m sure they absolutely do collect as much personal information as they can, and I’m sure they give it to the Chinese government whenever they ask. But I don’t understand how Meta and Facebook are meant to be any better? There’s always a lot of hoo-haa going on with politicians promising to ban tiktok, and (at least back on Reddit) everybody’s vowing they will never use tiktok because it’s such a privacy invasive site. Yet I never see anybody going up against Facebook, at least the average person, but they collect just as much personal info and I’m sure hand it over whenever any government agency in the US asks them to

It kind of feels to me like this is some sort of country thing. China is bad, so they shouldn’t have your personal info. But the US is the last bastion of free speech and privacy, so their companies would NEVER dare to invade your privacy, and their government would never abuse their power to get people’s personal info

I’m aware Lemmy probably isn’t the best place to ask since most people here seem to be deep into open source software and often privacy focused (so I suppose wouldn’t use either) but this also feels like the only place on the internet I might actually get an answer that isn’t just “TIKTOK BAD”. If you refuse to use tiktok but are ok with Facebook - why?

  • @Snapz
    6•8 months ago

    First, Facebook isn’t “fine” by any measure - That’s what you call a false premise. Tiktok sees more scrutiny generally, initially because of rightful skepticism of a platform beamed into children’s brains, with partial ownership by the authoritarian government of it’s parent country.

    That initial well-founded distrust, along with things like this early on, “TikTok memo directed censorship of users deemed ugly, overweight, or disabled, and banned users for livestreams that criticized governments” were then perpetuated by the lazy, ignorant blind racism from the American far right because they were tools to hate then by people like trump.

    P.s. Here’s that article