Hacker News Reader

Comment by neflabs | Hacker News Reader

This isn't about political ads, it's about silencing any politics on the platform.

There are over 80 million US downloads of TikTok as of October 2018, with an active user count of 40 million [1]. This means China's authoritarian regime is influencing the political discussion of 40m+ US citizens.

You say this ban is good, I disagree. In the US, a lack of informed political discussion is one major factor keeping young voters away from the polls. It also prevents global free speech from reaching 400 million Chinese users.

1. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/

View on HN

This isn't about political ads, it's about silencing any politics on the platform.

That's not true at all, at least not on the surface. Do you have any proof of anyone being banned as a user for posting political content?

From the article: “Any paid ads that come into the community need to fit the standards for our platform, and the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience,” says Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s VP of Global Business Solutions, who recently joined the company from Facebook.

“To that end, we will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group or issue at the federal, state or local level — including election-related ads, advocacy ads or issue ads,” he says.

But isn't TikTok specifically talking about paid ads in this article?

Our parent wrote that paid political advertising is favoring those with the greatest amount of money to spend and therefore (as far as I understood) reducing the quality of political conversation. (Which sounds plausible to me, since money is a factor largely unrelated to quality.)

You seem to imply that paid political advertising is increasing the quality of the discourse. Is that right? If yes, I'd love to know why!

> a lack of informed political discussion

Was TikTok was an appropriate place for informed political discussion?

The forum is the right place for political discussion, regardless of what the forum is. As for the political discussion being "informed", that is subjective.

What are you using the definite article to mean there?

> In the US, a lack of informed political discussion is one major factor keeping young voters away from the polls.

I agree.

But the purpose of political advertising is to misinform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com