No Stupid Questions

Facebook is NOT FINE

China. Also, no one is saying FB is fine, but since it’s American then gov pretty much shrugs. It was FB after all feeding the NSA yeah?

This is the first time I’ve ever seen the phrase “Facebook is fine” ever written out.

Who said Facebook is fine ? Threads was illegal in the EU due to privacy concern.

Facebook is most definitely not fine. However, as far as I know Facebook hasn't pushed known RCE (remote code execution) exploits into their product updates, which TikTok has. Politicians don't care about this but literally everyone else should.

"Facebook is fine" Ima stop you right there, lol

They're both bad but tik tok is on steroids. There are a bunch of security researchers out there that have uncovered the crap ton of shit tik tok collects. It's basically a spyware app that also comes with a social media app. From the ground up it was meant to collect personal information and every little bit about your device. I block it on my network because any tik tok device also scans the entire network and I don't want that to happen.

People in the know understand how shitty Facebook is, but at the very least, they're a private company. ByteDance is Chinese, and there's very little separation between Chinese companies and the Chinese government.

So, for all intents and purposes, it comes down to a company spying on you vs. a foreign government spying on you. They're both invading your privacy, but for different nefarious reasons.

I've literally never read any kind of online privacy guide that has said anything like "Facebook is fine". Not sure where you're getting that opinion from.

Neither of them are fine, but only one is owned by an oppressive regime.

They are both malware and I wish we could snap them out of existence thanos style.

Facebook isn't fine. But TikTok is worse because it's not fully controlled within our borders.

Facebook is certainly not fine, it's just talked about less, especially among the younger generations. Teens and twenty-something's haven't been drawn to Facebook for quite some time, while TikTok is currently the place to be if you're in that age range. You don't need to convince a Zoomer to avoid Facebook, because Facebook is where their grandma does social media, but TikTok is currently dominating their attention.

Haven’t seen this mentioned, but Meta hired marketing consultants to present to the government how dangerous TikTok was just so their Facebook/IG reels or whatever they are called can take their place. This spawned a ton of news articles and opinion pieces about the government talking about this new dangerous TikTok thing and how bad it is. Also, it was very clear that an anti TikTok campaign was happening on Reddit like a year ago, so the marketing didn’t stop with presenting things to the government.

And I’m not saying it isn’t a breach of privacy. I also use Google maps too, so I’m not too terribly concerned with it. But it does just seem like a marketing smear campaign centralized around the facade of xenophobia and “think of the children”

I think the issue with this question is the fact that you asked it on a decentralized platform. If you asked this same thing on a centralized social media platform, you’ll definitely get far more pro-Facebook and anti-TikTok comments and less “uh…both are bad CHECK PLEASE”

What if I told you both were bad?

Real quick --> these discussions tend to spiral off into bad faith arguments and whataboutism, I'm going to try and avoid that

I think there are a few things that come to mind for me, and I apologize for this being very disorganized

• Both are bad and privacy invading, I avoid both as much as possible
  • facebook where I am (and likely through north america) is more embedded in how we communicate. Both individually, and with companies/institutions. This isn't a good thing, but it's what has happened.
  • I don't post much or at all on either, and I use the web browser when possible. Unfortunately, I'm forced to use facebook stuff more than I am forced to use tiktok (which I don't think happens at all)
  • Because TikTok is newer, it's also easier to restrict it. I think if Facebook tried to enter today, we'd push it away much harder
• Is one actually worse? Maybe, but I'll defer to people that know more. I think on the app level, TikTok collected more data (and types of data) than the apps for Facebook products.

For me, it's less about who is getting the data than what data is collected. Especially because once the data is collected, it won't necessarily stay with the one entity. I wouldn't be surprised if both Facebook and TikTok benefit from the data that the other one collects, making that point somewhat moot

Facebook collects far more than we think it does. I don't understand why they aren't getting hit hard with HIPAA violations yet.

It's not fine - it's been around longer and the user base is rusted onto it.

I left Facebook in 2018 after discovering the level of behavioural tracking, and the discovery that Facebook had both captured and sold this information to advertisers. I found this out at a marketing technology showcase after chatting with a FB engineer.

Tiktok is Chinese and Facebook is American... That's why they are saying tiktok is bad... Facebook is probably worse by a considerable degree.

Are you referring to privacy or security? In my opinion, they're both absolute dumpster dogshit for privacy AND security. But facebook (meta) is a US company whereas tik tok is a Chinese company. So tik tok is seen as a security risk because China is an adversary to the west. An adversary is more likely to spy through their product than a friendly nation. So tik tok is seen as a security threat by many in the west. That's basically all there is to it.

Facebook is definitely not “fine” when it comes to privacy. It’s less worse than TikTok because it’s an American-based company, so in theory there’s a more accountability compared to TikTok (owned and operated by China).

TikTok is owned primarily by western investors and it's board is majority American. Usually I would be here to give the contrarian opinion that the government that is most likely to harm you is your own and that the majority of people would be better off with a non-cooperating country having your data. However, TikTok is just as likely to hand over user data to the US as Facebook is. It's the worst of both worlds.

It isn't fine for us. It might be fine for US politicians because Facebook is a US company subject to US laws.

to boil it down; "only our government gets to spy on us"

1. Facebook is old and shown itself more and more shitty over time. TikTok happened to be this way from the start, as it's how users could allow it to be when it launched.
2. TikTok is viral, no one cares about Facebook outside of Facebook.
3. Rational and irrational dislike of distant China. Local issues aren't reacted on as much as they are routine.
4. Both harm to the kids as it's popular with them most and cross-generational confusion between zoomers and older people.
5. TikTok is not a classic social network with friends, groups, chats, blogs but more of a content platform with it's own distinct format of content, genres, them not being to everyone's taste.

I don't use neither. Not for security first, but rather because I can't find there something interesting for myself. Not my things.

One other reason that I'm surprised not to have seen anyone has already brought up is the degree of government involvement. There's the perception (whether it's true or not) that a business run in China is necessarily on the lookout for the government's best interests and possibly directly interfered with by the government. The same perception says that's not true in America, where the only time the government is involved is through direct known legislation & regulation, or via espionage operations done against the company's will. There's an absence of fear that, for example, the company will be manipulating its algorithm for the government's gain. (Instead, it's purely manipulated for the company's shareholders' gain, which is oh so much better, right? Right?)

American Exceptionalism

That is it.

That is literally it.

It's not, I don't use either of them.

Tiktok is considered worse because it's involvement with a foreign government.

I'm in my late 30s and nobody I know thinks Facebook is fine, including the few people I know that still use Facebook.

First, Facebook isn't "fine" by any measure - That's what you call a false premise. Tiktok sees more scrutiny generally, initially because of rightful skepticism of a platform beamed into children's brains, with partial ownership by the authoritarian government of it's parent country.

That initial well-founded distrust, along with things like this early on, "TikTok memo directed censorship of users deemed ugly, overweight, or disabled, and banned users for livestreams that criticized governments" were then perpetuated by the lazy, ignorant blind racism from the American far right because they were tools to hate then by people like trump.

P.s. Here's that article

China is the enemy, therefore when they do it it's bad.