The Biden Executive Order Is Changing the Face of Social Media

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The longer social media goes on in general, tat makes the government less coherent. Tiktok still has dials on what people see and how many likes and followers you get. It doesn't handle that part of what we want to draw attention to this issue. Time spent on reels is overall, has more than doubled year over year in the us. And 80 % of the growth since march coming from facebook. This is because companies like facebook and youtube have to continue to copy this race to the bottom of the brain stem and match tick tak in the form of maximum dopamin satisfying thing.

Imagine it's the Cold War. Imagine that the Soviet Union puts itself in a position to influence the television programming of the entire Western world — more than a billion viewers.

While this might sound like science fiction, it’s representative of the world we're living in, with TikTok being influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.

TikTok, the flagship app of the Chinese company Bytedance, recently surpassed Google and Facebook as the most popular site on the internet in 2021, and is expected to reach more than 1.8 billion users by the end of 2022. The Chinese government doesn't control TikTok, but has influence over it. What are the implications of this influence, given that China is the main geopolitical rival of the United States?

This week on Your Undivided Attention, we bring you a bonus episode about TikTok. Co-hosts Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin explore the nature of the TikTok threat, and how we might address it.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Pew Research Center's "Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022"

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/

Pew's recent study on how TikTok has established itself as one of the top online platforms for U.S. teens

Axios' "Washington turns up the heat on TikTok"

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/07/congress-tiktok-china-privacy-data?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Article on recent Congressional responses to the threat of TikTok

Felix Krause on TikTok's keystroke tracking

https://twitter.com/KrauseFx/status/1560372509639311366

A revelation that TikTok has code to observe keypad input and all taps

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

A Fresh Take on Tech in China with Rui Ma and Duncan Clark

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/44-a-fresh-take-on-tech-in-china

A Conversation with Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/42-a-conversation-with-facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen

From Russia with Likes (Part 1). Guest: Renée DiResta