this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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TikTok is a Time Bomb (gurwinder.substack.com)
submitted 10 months ago by boem to c/technology
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The ultimate weapon of mass distraction

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[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You ever read 1984? You remember the bit about newspeak? Well go have a conversation with a zoomer sometime and pay attention to the word choice they use for controversial subjects like suicide and murder (self/other unalive), depression (big sad), pornography (corn), neurodivergence (neurospicy), etc.

I'm not saying TikTok is solely to blame, but content recommendation algorithms are definitely warping the language people use. Almost all of these genZ slang terms originated as weasel words to talk about these touchy subjects without getting deplatformed by an algorithm designed to keep things advertiser-friendly

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

It's true that it's affecting language, but if anything it shows that trying to force newspeak doesn't really work. People get creative.

In monocultures like most of China, it can work locally, such as in suppression of knowledge of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but outside their direct control they can't stop the signal.