Oh also shout out for the amazing MPV and yt-dlp lol. Fuck em all. Get yer' ships ready lads.

Yeah I think that would be cool. I think we should all be spied on. I think we should all submit everything we've ever done to every authority. Every time I'm taking a shit, I record a small video and save it to my publically active telegram channel that's full of dead al-qaeda members and federal agents posing as them. So dictates the holy doctrine.

If you want to have a lot of fun, you can let the chinese government and the US government spy on you at the same time!

I dunno, it's moreso the fact that people don't bring up how every other web service is spyware whenever they get brought up. You get a fair number of those complaints, and more on lemmy, where everyone is a linux focused privacy psycho, sure, but I think the disproportionate level of shit flung at tiktok isn't really organic, and people aren't judging the app on the actual merit of the thing. If you wanted to, you could pretty easily fling shit at tiktok on the basis that you can't really control what it is you're watching at all, and so it can very easily take advantage of people who have no self control. You could judge it on the basis that they implement policies to curate their content pretty heavily to be more attractive (eliminate the uglies). You could judge it on the basis that the platform basically has no active moderation to police speech and will allow very obviously white supremacist and conspiratorial content to flourish. All of those are pretty true criticisms.

But instead, people don't know what the fuck they're talking about, and they just want to fearmonger about chinese invasion some more. What I'm saying is that the claims spiral into shit like all the kids being brainwashed, on the basis that china has it's own tiktok, doyun or whatever, you know, when that doesn't make any fucking sense and those two ideas aren't really logically connected. China has it's own everything, for the most part, they exist behind a curtain. Obviously, if they have their own tiktok, which no duh they will, it's gonna be controlled by the chinese government, and then the chinese government is gonna spin that so their censorship is for the good of the people and for the good of the kids. But then instead, people will accept that claim at face value, and use it to turn around and say that the chinese are brainwashing our kids, when ironically they've just bought chinese propaganda. That's the type of shit I'm talking about. There's no like, measurement, or self-awareness, of what actually there is to hate about china, people just end up kind of talking shit based on the points that they've been fed by propagandists who benefit from their ignorance. People would just as easily hate tiktok if it was censored by the chinese on the basis that "this content isn't beneficial to society, this content is" type shit, and people actually do already criticize tiktok for that because they're full of shit and can't make up their mind and believe the app to basically just be controlled by some foreign red menace government.

Do you see where I'm coming from? People that aren't willing to actually understand the shit they're talking about, they just hear a surface level narrative and then decide to parrot that unflinchingly, and then, duh, of course that narrative is gonna be a tool to, in this instance, try to take a bite out of a foreign company in order to get them more tapped into US intelligence, and allow US intelligence more access to their data, while at the same time providing US business interests with a neat and shiny new toy.