They could present videos of dogs that look like cats to influence your opinion to be more favorable about dogs.
They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared. Or, they could flood your child’s feed with videos from children their age discussing perceived mental illness self-diagnosis to encourage the youth of a nation to consider themselves mentally ill. They could flood young people of primary child-bearing age with videos of other children discussing their homosexuality in order to lower the reproduction rate within a country. They could flood videos that are critical of key practices or institutions within a country to promote dissent.
> They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared.
This is what every US social media company has been trying to do forever, except they didn't focus on schoolkids, they focused on everyone. It's called "maximizing engagement".
I’m, aren’t parents supposed to be keeping track of their own kids, not some company?
The stuff you said in the last half there is insane to me, so I’ll assume you’re either trolling or perhaps we have a very different view of certain things.
It's better to look at the world from a perspective of possible/impossible rather than sane/insane as there exist people inside governments who are paid to do insane-yet-possible things.
I don't believe the theories around the Chinese government controlling children's minds through TikTok are likely to be true. It's probably just a dumb app. But there's nothing impossible about it.
The claim that you can *control* people's minds via TikTok is a pretty big claim. You can influence behaviour, but what the OP is suggesting is highly outlandish and almost certainly impossible (particularly the homophobic fear that TikTok can turn kids gay).
Remember that the advertising industry has been trying to control people's minds via all kinds of media for over a century, but is still only moderately successful at it.
Historically, the Soviet intelligence services used to think that they were very good at spreading Communist propaganda within Western countries. In many ways they were. And yet, not many Westerners became Communists. Just look at this guy explain how successfully the Soviets are subverting US public opinion only a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
The DoD did exactly this with a campaign on Facebook back in the 2010s (moreso to understand the capability of the platform rather than out of malice). There is nothing insane about what that poster listed.
If the Snowden leaks haven't shown you that the schizos are starting to become more right about many things, then I don't know what else to say. You're being willfully ignorant I guess.
> They could flood young people of primary child-bearing age with videos of other children discussing their homosexuality in order to lower the reproduction rate within a country
Are you suggesting that ones sexuality can be changed by being exposed to other sexualities?
They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared. Or, they could flood your child’s feed with videos from children their age discussing perceived mental illness self-diagnosis to encourage the youth of a nation to consider themselves mentally ill. They could flood young people of primary child-bearing age with videos of other children discussing their homosexuality in order to lower the reproduction rate within a country. They could flood videos that are critical of key practices or institutions within a country to promote dissent.