Hacker News Reader

Comment by filleduchaos | Hacker News Reader

As something of an outsider (being from West Africa), the extent of the panic over TikTok is more than a little amusing to me. I understand how it might be different for an American citizen, but to me much of it frankly sounds like one third party trying to paint another as the devil incarnate over much the same practices. Plus unlike many American data farms masquerading as services, TikTok does actually provide me with a measurably positive experience as a content consumer; a feed that contains fresh, relatively non-gamified content that I actually want to see.

I just treat the platform like I treat the likes of Facebook. Accessed only through the web in a sandbox, etc.

View on HN

This is clearly over more than TikTok, it's just the most convenient target.

I can see both sides. The US doesn't want Chinese tech because China won't allow US tech. That's really what it boils down to. And I can't really blame the US for it because China has locked out US tech companies for decades.

Exactly. And it would be nice if people were just upfront about that instead of making it out to be a one-sided moral quandary.

I don't have a dog in the two countries' tech tussle and so I'm bemused at the expectation that I should take a side (it's also interesting that many people that I've spoken to don't recognise that using US tech is picking a side).

>> The US doesn't want Chinese tech because China won't allow US tech. That's really what it boils down to. And I can't really blame the US for it because China has locked out US tech companies for decades.

> Exactly. And it would be nice if people were just upfront about that instead of making it out to be a one-sided moral quandary.

Eh, not so exactly. You're talking as if "people" were hiding their true movies, but the reality we're not talking about a monolithic entity and different people have different motives. Some people think the way the GP describes, others think differently. What is true is that many of those different lines of thinking are starting to converge on the same kinds of responses.

Why do people keep saying China doesn't allow US tech? Apple, Microsoft, Google, Tesla all make a lot of monies in China.

Good point. Apple maps worked very well in China.

The american government isn't using the data to openly oppress entire groups of people though.

Didn't the US have that entire thing with PRISM/the NSA?

Ah, I forget, it's the US so its own surveillance programs are obviously above board and only used for good. The leader of the free world or some such.

>> The american government isn't using the data to openly oppress entire groups of people though.

> Didn't the US have that entire thing with PRISM/the NSA?

You can possess a gun, you can use that gun to kill someone in self defense, or you can use the gun to kill some innocent person. All those things are very different in important ways, even though they involve guns. It's true that US has surveillance and propaganda capabilities, but just noting that doesn't show equivalence to China in the areas that really matter.

I consider things like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Middle East or the treatment of children in US border camps to be "areas that really matter". For some very strange reason, most Americans I have spoken to find it unreasonable to treat companies like, say, Github or Microsoft with the same level of vitriol that is currently being leveled at TikTok for being affiliated however tenuously with the CCP.

My career would pretty much be a non-starter if I refused to use such companies' services for just as solid (if not more solid) ideological reasons as the ones that are apparently driving y'all to approve of bans/other boycotts of TikTok. As a pretty much neutral third party I've come to the quite logical conclusion that the outrage is largely hypocritical theatre and is thus not really much of my concern.

(It is worth nothing that there are Americans who for instance pressure Github to drop their ICE contract. As far as I can see they're a minority without the influence to make a difference.)

> For some very strange reason, most Americans I have spoken to find it unreasonable to treat companies like, say, Github or Microsoft with the same level of vitriol that is currently being leveled at TikTok for being affiliated however tenuously with the CCP.

It's because this is the CCP: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...:

> Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society.

> These seven perils were enumerated in a memo, referred to as Document No. 9, that bears the unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader. The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past.

Add to that practices like the Xinjiang cultural destruction/forced labor camps, the dystopian nightmare of what's happening in Hong Kong, and a domestic surveillance apparatus that makes the people who complain about Stingrays look like whiny babies, which all show that it's not just talk.

The US and Western companies like Microsoft definitely have issues, but they don't hold a candle to the CCP's.

And I wouldn't count TikTok/ByteDance's affiliation with the CCP as "tenuous." How much power to say "no" do you think they have?

America's involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan are "not just talk". Drone strikes are not just talk. Its treatment of undocumented immigrant children at its borders is not just talk. Pointing as many fingers as you can at China does not erase America's own atrocities - what, exactly, does the civilian death toll from America's manufactured conflicts struggle to hold a candle to? How, exactly, is the violent approach that the US has taken to the protests currently going on within its borders so much less of a dystopian nightmare than in Hong Kong?

> And I wouldn't count TikTok/ByteDance's affiliation with the CCP as "tenuous."

Github clearly, demonstrably, directly supports ICE's operations with its contract services.

Microsoft clearly, demonstrably, directly supports the US military's operations with its contract services.

What clear, demonstrable, direct support does TikTok give the CCP that I can point to as a reason why I disdain it, the way I can point to Github's ICE contract or Microsoft's JEDI contract? I would actually be quite interested in evidence of such a thing.

Why am I expected to swallow my revulsion for the American war machine and use Github's or Microsoft's services, but not do the same for TikTok?

> How much power to say "no" to them do you think they have?

This...is not the gotcha that you might think it is. Even if they're implicated in harm, ByteDance at least has the dubious excuse of being compelled to do so by the state. Github, Microsoft and co voluntarily choose to (and even compete to!) be a part of the American state's apparatus of violence because of money of all things - that really, really does not translate into me having more respect and/or trust for them than for ByteDance.

> America's involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan are "not just talk".

Huh? I didn't say that. I thought it was pretty clear when I said "talk" I was referring to Document Number 9.

> How, exactly, is the violent approach that the US has taken to the protests currently going on within its borders so much less of a dystopian nightmare than in Hong Kong?

Because the dystopian part is the sense that the curtain is coming down there and it's all over, not anything to do with the quantity of bullets or tear gas. What's going on in the US feels more like a step on the long, dirty road of making progress. It was good that the police acted against protesters the way they did, because that behavior wasn't new, and it reinforced the protester's points and lead to a tipping point in public opinion.

> What clear, demonstrable, direct support does TikTok give the CCP that I can point to as a reason why I disdain it, the way I can point to Github's ICE contract or Microsoft's JEDI contract? I would actually be quite interested in evidence of such a thing....

> This...is not the gotcha that you might think it is. Even if they're implicated in harm, ByteDance at least has the dubious excuse of being compelled to do so by the state.

ByteDance's willingness or unwillingness is not my actual concern, and I honestly don't really care about that. What I do care about is the fact that they're under the control of an organization where Document Number 9 reflects official policy goals, and TikTok's popularity gives that organization potential capabilities here that it shouldn't have.

This thread will 100% devolve into a binary USA v. China worldview clusterf*ck. im going to try to use less emotion but that might be impossible. -- these are disingenuous comparisons - or maybe truly I simply can't comprehend such a fundamentally different worldview but I hope not

Chinese tech companies at best have competing allegiance and at worst are indistinguishable from CCP in goals

Trying to compare the violations of privacy the US has unfortunately perpetrated against us, the citizens to the actions and goals of CCP/Xi is dishonest

both in the goals of the espionage both states carry out and in terms of the fundamentally inseparable CCP control of corporations to achieve state (and a single increasingly dictatorial leaders' [1]) goals.

Douyin and other Chinese tech companies actively:

- facilitate an ongoing genocide [2] - carry out state sponsored corporate espionage and forced tech transfers for the direct benefit of CCP via an inseparable government/corporate relationship [3] - suppress and spy on their citizens with the goal of elevating Xi and the CCP, silencing dissent, and controlling over 1 billion people in a way that is fundamentally incongruous with 'western values' and not remotely comparable to the goals of US Government surveillance however misguided [4, 5]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/xi-jinping-chi... [2] http://archive.is/wdZ36 [3] https://www.csis.org/programs/technology-policy-program/surv... [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-tech-giants-have-a-secon... [5] http://archive.is/SUyhH

I think I explain my stance pretty clearly in this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23991554

I do understand how it might be a "disingenuous comparison" to you as an American citizen who primarily thinks of your government according to its internal policies (and even those raise quite a lot of eyebrows). But as a third party that's spent all of my life witnessing (for instance) the death toll of US foreign policy, my fundamentally different world view is that the mouth preaches while the hands feed poison. Why should I take up arms for one brand of poison over the other?

Are you suggesting american government is currently doing this? Source for your claims if so please.

Isn't that exactly opposite of what they suggested?

Facebook ran an experiment several years ago where they injected either positive or negative posts into people’s timeline to see if they could alter their emotions similar to if they were with happy or sad people in person.

That's both mischaracterization and irrelevant.

Seeing posts on Facebook is going to change your behavior on Facebook, whether Facebook studies the relationship or not. Paying attention to that effect isn't sinister.

Is it not? They had to apologise and it got them into quite a bit of heat with an ethics department... Interested to know how it's irrelevant or a mischaracterisation!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...

Edit: original paper https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

nobody is openly opressing anybody

the keyword is "openly"...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com