What’s in the stars for 2020?
The horoscope for the new decade has a rare cosmic lineup.
let me guess.
Mercury’s going into retrograde, Jupiter switched to Capricorn, and the Earth is going
to crash directly into the sun.
That’s the vibe I’ve been picking up ever since the new decade started.
But I think I know how to fix it.
TikTok, WWIII and the Hype House is already ruining my 2020 and here’s why.
Barely a week into the new year, and WWIII TikTok compilations are now
a thing.
If that’s not enough to prove that this decade is going to be awful, I really don’t
know what is.
I feel like the world is a sitcom, and we’re on season 12.
Like the first few seasons were cute at the time, even though looking back, they’re
a little problematic.
But at this point, the show’s just been on for too long.
It’s not making as much money, none of the actors want to be here anymore, and we’re
headed to an inevitable and abrupt cancellation.
But not because of WWIII.
There’s a political subtext behind the WWIII meme which I will not be getting into in this
video, because scientifically speaking, “Ew, politics, no thank you”.
But as an objective fact, nobody is going to be drafted into WWIII.
And as for the war itself?
World War III is not gonna happen.
But of course that wasn’t enough to stop Twitter.
Tweets started popping up left and right, and before we knew it, WWIII was trending
on Twitter with over 1 million tweets.
But then one of those tweets turned out to be a meme.
And another.
Within less than 24 hours, World War had become a meme.
Some of them were even funny.
Even I posted World War 3 tweets, like this one.
Wait, that’s just my username.
I guess you should follow me on Twitter if you want to see them.
And like all good Twitter discourse, it eventually trickled up to TikTok.
Everyone joined in, and the WWIII hashtag on TikTok quickly racked up over 400 million
views.
So basically that’s the story of how for a brief second, everyone thought we were going
to be drafted into the third world war, and then once we realized that wasn’t the case,
we just memed it into oblivion on TikTok.
This all happened within the first week of the year by the way.
That’s how we set the stage for the new decade.
But like I said, I know exactly how to fix this situation.
But first there’s an even deeper level of irony to all of this that nobody has talked
about so far.
Legally speaking, TikTok wouldn’t even be allowed in WWIII.
It’s been banned by the United States military as a security risk.
See the real cringe on Tik Tok isn’t the people on the app.
Then again, I may be biased because I’m on the app, but we don’t talk about that.
No, the real cringe is Tik Tok itself.
Because TikTok is owned by a Chinese compnay called ByteDance.
And ByteDance is bad at everything.
For example: security.
Last year, the United States conducted a security review, and their conclusion was that government
personnel should remove the app from their phones because it was a “cyber-security
threat”.
They didn’t go into detail about what exactly was wrong with the app, but this year we got
the information.
Check Point Research conducted their own, independent review of the app in December,
and they published the whole thing this January, including screenshots.
Apparently, anybody who knew how could mess around with some of the code on TikTok’s
website, and get access to any user’s real name and date of birth.
In addition to that, hackers could send a text message directly from Tik Tok’s verification
number, leading to fake links which would then give the hackers control over people's
accounts, whether that’s viewing and deleting videos, making accounts accept unwanted followers,
or worst of all: making private videos public.
Now generally I would say if you click on a shady link and wind up getting your account
hacked, that’s pretty much natural selection.
Like come on.
You know that email was worded a little to strangely to be official.
But the thing is, these aren’t email links, these are text messages coming directly from
the same number you used to set up your Tik Tok account.
You can’t blame anybody for not realizing it’s unofficial.
When you take that into consideration along with the fact that the majority of Tik Tok’s
users are kids, suddenly things are starting to seem a bit more sinister.
You think you're just lip-syncing to Ariana Grande, but some guy in a basement somewhere
has your real name, date of birth, and private videos.
It’s trash.
Now to their credit, ByteDance allegedly fixed all of these Tik Tok security issues in December.
But that was literally last month and Tik Tok has been around for a couple of years.
If the security bugs weren’t scary enough, ByteDance is also extremely unethical, as
they were actively hiding videos from disabled creators.
According to the German tech blog Netzpolitik.org, they got their hands on leaked documents where
ByteDance instructed their moderators to look at TikToks to see if the users had disabilities
such as autism or Down’s Syndrome, and to flag those viewer’s accounts and hide them
from view.
This was apparently done to “limit cyberbullying”.
But for some reason, the moderators were also instructed to hide accounts from users that
were overweight or LQBGT.
Where do I start.
You know what, I’m not going to start.
I’m just going to say there’s a word for this, and it rhymes with discrimination.
And is discrimination.
How are you going to limit cyberbullying by bullying people before the cyberbullies can
get to them?
It‘s almost like it has nothing to do with preventing bullying, and you’re just bullying.
Also, in what world is it okay to look at someone and just guess whether or not they’re
LGTQB, autistic or overweight so you can figure out if you should treat them differently?
TikTok is lierally trash.
But once again, ByteDance has apparently stopped doing this, and said that they realized it
was “not the right approach”.
I’m so glad they came to the conclusion that discrimination is wrong.
Can we get a round of applause for their bravery?
The last thing that’s creepy is that ByteDance was developing a feature that lets users ceate
their own deepfakes, scanning your face and digitally placing it on someone else’s body.
Now, this is the same type of feature that’s found in any app that allows you to do a faceswap,
but my question is, do I really want a Chinese company notorious for security issues scanning
my face and storing that information in their data.
What makes it creepier is that this feature isn’t even in the app.
It’s just in the app’s code.
The only reason we knew TikTok could scan your face at all was because this code was
found by an Israeli research company called Watchful.ai.
And do you know what ByteDance said once they got called out for having deepfake code built-in?
They had no intention of using it, and that they would be removing the code to “avoid
confusion”.
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that we live in a dystopian society.
The app has over 1.5 billion downloads worldwide, making it one of the most widely used social
platforms, and yet it’s a hotbed for privacy breaches and unethical behavior.
This is literally the plot of any sci-fi movie where the computers turn on us.
We’re not on Season 12 of a sitcom.
We’re on movie 6 of the Terminator.
Technology is scary but also we’re tired of this and nobody wanted it.
So what’s up on our new decade checklist?
Rumors of war?
Check.
Scary companies watching us?
Ccheck.
You know, is it just me or it this beginning to look a lot like . . . the previous decade?
All we need now is a group of problematic influencers to make some giant mistake and-
oh look, there they are.
The hype house.
Now, the hype house is the final thing I want to talk about in this video, and it’s just
a little footnote, because if you want to watch a deep dive of their content, you should
just check out Casey Aonso’s video on them after this, but there’s still one little
point I want to make about them.
Basically, the Hype House is a group of “TikTok influencers”.
Okay the term “TikTok influencers” physically hurt me to say.
It physically hurt me to edit.
It physically hurt me to write.
Anyway these TikTok influencers, there’s about 20 of them, they all moved into a mansion
together called the Hype House, where apparently all they do is make TikToks all day which
in turn makes them enough money to keep living in a mansion.
Now that’s not the issue.
Well let’s be honest, that’s definitely the issue.
But that’s not why I’m bringing them up.
My real issue is with the members.
Daisy Keech, 20 years old.
Tony Lopez, 20 years old.
Addison Rae, 19 years old.
Ondreas Lopez, 22 years old.
Charli D’Amelio.
15 years —oh no, she’s literally a child, why . . . would you do-- why would you ever
do this.
Please stop.
New wave, new freaking wave.
Either this girl’s parents let her move into a house with a bunch of adults so she
could make more TikTok money, or her parents moved into the house with her, meaning they’re
paying to live there . . . using their 15-year-old daughter’s TikTok money.
I derive no enjoyment from my continued existence on this planet.
In conclusion.
There’s something disturbing about seeing a bunch of teenagers celebrate themselves
on an app designed to silence them.
There’s something weird about making United States military jokes on an app banned by
the United States military.
And it’s not even slightly weird that we have adults moving in with teenagers into
mansions that they afforded from making 15-second videos on a Chinese video app.
But you know what?
I think it’s time for us to finally admit that it’s not the kids that are weird.
It’s TikTok.
So now at this point you may be wondering what my grand solution is.
How can I solve WWIII, get rid of the Hype House, and make TikTok worthless by taking
away its most popular users.
Simple.
I think we should draft the Hype House into WWIII.
See, it’s that easy.
Complex problem, simple solution.
That’s what I do here on my channel.
I fix entire decades.
I literally deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
Anyway, all that being said, follow me on TikTok, my TIkTok username is @Dangelno.
There’s a link down below and I too would love to make TikTok mansion money.
TikTok if you’re watching this, please sponsor me, this video is just a light-hearted joke
haha.
Except for the articles and objective facts.
我爱中国.
Anyway, looks like I’ve gotten ten minutes of content out of this, so leave a like, tell
me what you think, and subscribe if you haven’t already.
Thank you for watching and a big thank you to my 276,000 subscribers. Okay bye.
*desperately tries to pronounce Chinese*
Maybe?
I tried.