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Comment by rahuldottech | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone really surprised? This had to happen. And it won't stop happening.

1. Develop platform targeting the youth

2. Gain huge market share

3. Censor and curate to influence young minds worldwide

Many of us this saw this coming long ago. Unfortunately, no legislation appears to exist anywhere in the world which could possibly stop such social media companies which are controlled by foreign agencies with agendas from being launched in their countries in the first place.

China has a TERRIBLE track record of censoring information, of not respecting user privacy, and of KILLING people for speaking out.

Letting infrastructure, apps, operating systems or social networks controlled by them (eg. Android forks, WeChat, TikTok) into your countries is a terrible idea.

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Thankfully it happens no where else.

4chan/diy was banned in my country for a long time "voluntarily" by telcos. There's plenty of garbage human beings on that site most certainly yes, but there's just as many on talkback radio late at night who advocate incredibly horrible things too, really horrible things, I worked in an industry documenting them.

Some people in society seem to get a free pass and others who are the mass media badguy of the day don't. To pretend it doesn't come down to advertising dollars is disingenuous.

Intrigued by hearing that “many of us saw this coming”. Is there a frontier of folks in opposition to censorship of targeted platforms?

>Unfortunately, no legislation appears to exist anywhere in the world...

I think you'll find a couple of countries, including China and Russia, have very effective methods to prevent foreign influence on their own citizens, all while they run very effective campaigns against the naive internet citizens of Western countries.

IMHO this is highly asymmetric warfare.

I’m surprised everyone is somehow missing the fact the video is still up on TikTok and has not actually been removed.

How does that matter? The user was kicked off. Punished for speaking out. How is that okay?

I mean, people get banned from Twitter for similar stuff. Or at least similar in the minds of the people banning them.

so TikTok will be the first politic-free platform? Just fun and entertainment? I would love it.

Sometime you have a platform, sometime you don't have one, get over it.

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