So I don’t think any social media is great. It notice it seem to induce strange and negative behaviour in people around me, whether that’s the dead-eyed late-night Facebook scrolling of my husband or my friend’s use of her not-necessarily- consenting young child to advertise questionable products on Instagram.
As a person with ADHD and mental illness, I make a concerted effort to stay away. I do not use Facebook, Instagram or TikTok (giving up Facebook was hard but so worth it and I’ve not been back in about 10 years). I wouldn’t say my use of Mumsnet is necessarily healthy though. Also Reddit. Personally my issue is very much information addiction, and I’ve still got the whole internet to feed that habit. So I’m still f*ed.
But back to TikTok. The concerns I’m aware of are:
Addictive algorithm
Directing people to dangerous content like self harm
Data gathering based on engagement with content - knows your interests and preferences
Can be enabled for granular GPS data including altitude that would show eg what floor of a building you are on
Can be enabled to access contacts
Pixels follow you round the internet to see what you do
Can read your direct messages on the platform (unlike e.g. WhatsApp)
Can gather keystroke data to read other things you type including outside the app
Relationship to parent company ByteDance and Chinese law mean the Chinese government could access the data, though we don’t know that they have
So I know a lot of these concerns aren’t really unique to TikTok. For example on the nefarious-use-of-data side of things, from macro to micro level, for example we have seen the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook and more recently the way that Chinese spies are targeting individuals to obtain state secrets on LinkedIn.
Still there is clearly a lot of alarm about the platform. Do policy makers know more? Are all the issues listed clearly bad enough to warrant the concern? Do you have any personal negative experiences with TikTok?