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?

  • andrew_bidlaw
    91·
    10 months ago
    1. Facebook is old and shown itself more and more shitty over time. TikTok happened to be this way from the start, as it’s how users could allow it to be when it launched.
    2. TikTok is viral, no one cares about Facebook outside of Facebook.
    3. Rational and irrational dislike of distant China. Local issues aren’t reacted on as much as they are routine.
    4. Both harm to the kids as it’s popular with them most and cross-generational confusion between zoomers and older people.
    5. TikTok is not a classic social network with friends, groups, chats, blogs but more of a content platform with it’s own distinct format of content, genres, them not being to everyone’s taste.

    I don’t use neither. Not for security first, but rather because I can’t find there something interesting for myself. Not my things.