If you have recently caught yourself binge-watching short viral dances, funny memes, or lip-syncing videos on your phone, chances are that you were using TikTok. TikTok has been surpassing Facebook, YouTube and Instagram to become the world's most downloaded mobile application in 2019 with over a billion downloads. As this number continues to skyrocket, privacy and safety concerns about the smartphone app are also increasing.
According to James Moor’s article, Why we need better ethics for emerging technologies, “in these days of the easily accessible and powerful web, the solicitation of children by child molesters has increased.” TikTok has “been called a ‘hunting ground’ for child predators, who are able to communicate with children via TikTok’s internal messaging system.” In addition, the company had also recently paid the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) a $5.7 million settlement, after allegedly collecting data of children using the app.
TikTok is a direct impact of Moor’s model, which states that “as technological revolutions increase their social impact, ethical problems increase.” The app has always been known to cater towards a younger audience, so it was surprising to see they had not implemented kid-friendly settings. Unfortunately, the lack of safety on the app could be because TikTok was more focused on their profits instead. Although TikTok was not proactive in making their platform safe for its entire community, they are currently making large efforts to change that. They have created a system so that children under 13 can only watch kid-friendly content and not share it.
Instead of waiting for more people to be involved and for their technological revolution to progress, big companies like TikTok should make proactive decisions. I agree with Moor that “ethics is an ongoing and dynamic enterprise” and there are not policies set in place for some technologies. Therefore, as soon as an ethical situation arises, these companies should put new policies in place to avoid the consequences.
It is really sad how the lucrative system of social media app development works these days. Sadly I believe since these companies are mainly motivated by profit they will go where the money is. If they can make profit out of a situation then they will take it. It is not until there's a group uproar about the problems that they will actually step up and amend their mistakes. Happens with legislation as well where there is no policies being made until some unfortunate event happens and it becomes too late. We are really bad at trying to predict problems I guess.
ReplyDeleteThe quality of the article was very good. I liked your choice of language and imagery. Made it seem really informative and easy to follow.Although I feel in the case of Tik-Tok it really didn't bring anything revolutionary with technology since snap chat and vine were similar concepts to this one so I feel that it doesn't directly relate with Moor's Law for that reason, it has only just attracted a young audience and thus has had it's problems with it. But you did in general a very good job writing this blog.
I thought this article was very interesting, especially because I don’t really know that much about TikTok. I had no idea this type of stuff was happening, and it’s concerning because I know that my little sister loves this app! I thought you did a great job tying in what Moor said as part of your post in a way that was relevant to the story and made me consider things more deeply. I definitely think tech companies all need to try to be a little more proactive with their decision-making, especially because policy generally lags behind them.
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