According to a recent report, the Chinese government provides their children with a more limited, useful version of the wildly popular app TikTok than the “opium version” provided to youngsters in the United States.
According to TikTok’s Chinese parent firm, ByteDance, the form of TikTok supplied to Chinese consumers presents children with a dramatically different encounter, according to Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technologies, on “60 Minutes” Saturday. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, limits children under the age of 14 to 40 minutes per day and delivers patriotic and instructional content.
“They do not even ship that TikTok version to the rest of the globe,” Harris explained. “It’s almost as if they realize that technology is influencing children’s growth, and they manufacture their home version of TikTok a spinach version, while shipping the opium version to the United States and the rest of the globe.”
Meanwhile, youngsters in the United States and other areas of the Western world, according to Harris, are using the app for “hours at a time.” To demonstrate how TikTok is impacting American children, Harris observed that the number-one dream profession for preteens in the United States is social media influencer, whereas youngsters in the same age group in China dream of becoming astronauts.
“If you let those two societies play out over the next few generations, I could tell you what your world would look like,” he went on.
TikTok gives parents options to control their children’s screen time and what they can view on the app, but it is the parent’s responsibility to employ those tools.
Because of emerging national security concerns, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has urged Apple and Alphabet CEOs to prohibit TikTok due to the platform’s excessive harvesting of user data. In 2020, previous President Donald Trump issued an executive order requesting that ByteDance relinquish control of TikTok and threatened to restrict its use in the U. S. The injunction was later overturned by a federal judge.
“TikTok, like many worldwide corporations, has engineering teams all throughout the world. To secure user data, we use access controls such as encryption and security monitoring, and the access approval procedure is reviewed by our US-based security team. TikTok has continued to maintain that our engineers in regions other than the United States, including China, can be permitted as-needed access to U.S. user data under those rigorous limitations.” TikTok announced this in a statement in June.
