You’re overestimating the number of people that care about it. A good chunk of people really don’t care about privacy, data security and potential exposure to propaganda, no matter how much we (engineers who actually care about it) tell them to.
Lots of people do care about the propaganda thing. Like, most normie voters I know definitely don't give a crap about the data privacy stuff, but they haven't forgotten about the cold war and are not bought into this "maybe it's fine if the Chinese government can control what all the kids are seeing" narrative.
But it's a big problem that the framing has often been about the data privacy thing.
A lot of normie voters care but they are at least one if not two generations removed from the median TikTok user. Generational divides can be pretty stark and it's clear that future generations increasingly don't care as much about internet privacy. In fact, being a public figure on the internet is a good thing these days since you can make a career out of it.
Again, I don't think it is ever again going to be mainstream to care about the privacy thing.
But I think older people do care now about the potential for hostile foreign propaganda affecting our politics, and I think the younger folks who (reasonably!) care more now about losing their favorite entertainment app will grow up and understand the propaganda problem when they're older. That is, I don't think it's a generational thing, I think it's an age thing. And politics is driven by people over the age of 30.
Yes, but you don't have to be alive to understand the problem. I agree with you that the cold war is very old news to the TikTok demographic, but it isn't to people who were born in the 80s and before, and that is who drives politics. By the time the current young people grow up more, they will have their own direct experiences with geopolitical struggle. It remains to be seen where that will lead.
