Why Tiktok is selling Spinach in China and Opium in the West. Kind of.
Tiktok is the Western version of a Chinese service called Douyin (that’s why the Tiktok logo sports a d!). UI & UX of those two services are pretty similar, but what is different is the content: Douyin has lots of really cool and often interesting, educational content (mixed with a bit of propaganda, of course), while Tiktok is full of trivial stuff — twerking teens and hustling influencers.
In last week’s episode of 60minutes Tristan Harris (an American technology ethicist) explained that kids in China tend to get educated by Douyin, while our kids here in the West get hooked by Tiktok and then sold off as ad reach. According to him, Bytedance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin, is selling the same service in China as the “spinach version”, while we in the West get the “Opium version“ — wow, that sounds really bad, doesn't it?
Of course, everything he says is absolutely correct — and tragic! But TikTok is not a Chinese conspiracy to sell digital opium to our kids. (Btw, I wonder whether Tristan Harris gets the irony of the “Opium…
