I get your point, but I mean I see a ton of fat and ugly people on tiktok anyway, they even get huge followings because theyre funny and cool (though sometimes it's just because people can't look away lol). So maybe you should reconsider how you view people, unless you only want content you can drool over.
I'm on the younger side, it's very addictive. People love to come up with wild theories for why the app blew up, but I think it's just pure algorithmically curated fun.
This doesn't make any sense, I use tiktok and there's plenty of content I wouldn't expect china or america to endorse. There are lots of videos dedicated to communism, capitalism, uyghur muslims, BLM, etc. It's actually fairly open and this type of content gets noticeably boosted by the algorithm if you express interest in it, and gets a ton of likes too. There is also plenty of happy cat videos as well if that's your thing.
Also, ugly people get a lot of attention. I would expect china's social credit system to discredit those who are less attractive, but on tiktok you see less than conventionally attractive creators get a big following. They don't even need to be freak shows, it's just an app that's full of regular people openly talking about regular things. Very much the opposite of what I have heard about the way media works in china.
Allowable overton window differs between region to region - TikTok international is a business and will respond to local pressures, i.e. west shifted to laxer content restrictions due to MSM reporting of possible censorship last year. But behind the scenes the algorithm is biased towards mainstream content and limits dissemination of fringe / radical views, a must if you want to reach mass eyeballs in China. This is mostly in reference to actual ideology and not the dumb article about censoring ugly/poor, that's branding decision for advertisers. It follows same pattern on Chinese net, dissenting opinions are allowed to exist, either for limited time or exposed to limited eyes, unless gained too much traction in which case it will be removed, or endorsed for political purposes. Social credit has not been expanded to extent west think it does. Nor is Chinese internet as manicured west thinks. It's every bit as much of a shitshow as western internet except janitors come in to sweep up very frequently. If you experience it live, there's shit flinging all over the place. But TikTok itself very much feels like Douyin, lots of regular ppl doing regular things, very little drama or divisive topics because the janitors are proactively working in the background to shape platform sentiment versus west which is more reactive. I'm not saying it's analogous to Chinese net as a whole, but what is allowed to be mainstream and dictate the rhythms of society.
> Social credit has not been expanded to extent west think it does.
OT but this is the first time I see China's "social credit system" not being described as a myth on HN. People usually just repeat the myth pushed by mainstream media. Can you suggest something to read on this?
Otherwise the system is still very new and in progressive. If it's anything like BRI, it could be a massive uncoordinated internal shitshow of competing jurisdictions and incentives that doesn't pull together into anything cohesive for a long time.
TikTok has been publicly criticized for their censorship and filtering countless times, so I wouldn't doubt that they toned it down a bit in the non-Chinese versions while they're actively getting negative coverage.
If news media is for profit, news media will naturally use the most engaging headline to beat out competition. There is no solution to this problem unless news is regulated or not for profit. You won't 'shame' an entire industry into changing something they've been doing for centuries.
