Amazing how that platform continues to exist
There’s a lot of really engaging shot-form content on the platform; most people assume it’s just a firehose of what you see when you log in anonymously.
and people actually get their news from there
It’s a poor substitute for a healthy set of reading, but it’s also a way people put things happening “now” online. Not unlike choosing your broadcast or print media, the results can be really interesting or really misleading (or both; okay, often both)
It’s also, like other social media, easily and continuously manipulated to social engineer your worldview. Please try to avoid getting your news from social media, especially tik tok, but also Facebook, reddit, Instagram, Lemmy, Twitter or mastodon, etc.
ALL media is easily and continually manipulated to social engineer your world view. If you can name an outlet which is free of sociopolitical bias on sociopolitical topics I’m all ears. Every act of commentary is exposing a position, whether it be left, right, corporate, status quo, centrist, or any other area of ideology. Not recognizing that every source has a bias is dangerous.
While true, it’s a false equivalence. Getting news from multiple news sources is less controllable of you than getting your news from ‘multiple sources’ filtered through social media algorithms targeting you.
Further, you can often browse news in a private fashion. You can be fingerprinted, sure, but it’s easier to mitigate with multiple news sources than fingerprinting in social media, especially when you get to accounts on both. And lets be realistic, someone getting their news from tik tok is being tracked hard in ways they would have no way of predicting from multiple data sources and with phone information that they don’t realize they are providing.
Someone watching CNN or fox news or abcnews or what have you is not even close to being manipulated in the same way, even if they are being provided a biased data set.
Social media news is the worst of both worlds.
