"it turns out it’s much better to have an AI feeding you stuff"

I re-installed TikTok on my phone a few minutes ago (to the delight of the kids) because you never know. And while we are waiting for the whole banning TikTok saga to conclude (or more likely to peter out?) here is a perspective on how TikTok became what it is shaped by the constraints of operating in an authoritarian environment that i found quite interesting. From last week’s Stratechery interview with Paul Mozur on Technology in China:

The algorithm side is important and, and we just wouldn’t know and I think one thing that’s really important — I don’t know how much people agree with me on this, but I think it’s true — I think TikTok comes from censorship. I think the way you get a social network with a social feed that’s basically disconnected from friends and populated by an AI, that comes from a Chinese system basically because WeChat was created to make things not super viral, to be safe and not fall afoul of the Chinese government. So that created a space where there wasn’t a super viral really buzzy social media sort of territory or product, and that’s what ByteDance stepped in and created with a Toutiao and then with Douyin, and so to do it and make it in a way that wasn’t gonna freak out the government. Well, instead of having people, make it something you can control, and what better to do than a bunch of a series of algorithms that make things go viral and decide what goes viral, and can be cut off instantly for human review when you need to do it, and that’s the heart of where TikTok‘s recommendation engine and the design of how it’s a content delivery mechanism comes from. And it turns out it’s much better to have an AI feeding you stuff than your friends, because the AI will find way cooler stuff and be way more addictive and so lo and behold, it’s sort of unleashed on the world. Ultimately it does come from a sense of state control, but whether TikTok is actually being used in that way right now we have some smoke, there’s certainly indications, like a lot of videos about Xinjiang on TikTok seem to be very pro Xinjiang […]