Forcing a Chinese company to sell TikTok won’t solve the biggest problem with #TikTok: the fact that so people get their “#news” from platforms that are designed to hijack attention for commercial gain, not to deliver reliable information.
If China wants information on Americans, they can buy it from companies since there are no effective #privacy laws.
And American-owned Facebook and X have shown themselves to be as bad or worse as TikTok at spreading #misinformation.
@TheConversationUS Federal politicians will not, and *cannot* fix “the biggest problem with #TikTok “ (that it is a primary source of ‘#news ‘ for millions of #Americans ).
That’s because the ‘problem’ is lack of #CriticalThinking skills. So only fixing our failing #Education system can do that!
State politicians need to support, instead of degrade #PublicEducation. And #HigherEducation ‘leaders’ need to make #teacher preparation programs more competitive and of higher quality.
@ChemicalEyeGuy no, I don’t think it’s the lack of critical thinking skills at the core here.
A more direct problem is that people noticed that well known news outlets were reporting things that they knew to be false, to the point where people lost faith in those outlets.
Platforms like TikTok rose to fill the vacuum.
We need journalism to improve, to regain the trust of the people through valuable and accurate reporting.
There is no substitute for this. Without reliable journalism everything else is up for grabs, and we need to forcefully tell journalists to their faces that they put themselves in this position, and they can fix it.
@TheConversationUS
@volkris Public mistrust in media is a genuine problem. But I still believe that critical thinking skills are essential to discriminate between "reliable journalism" and #FakeNews. 🤷♂️