Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitcurious | Hacker News Reader

One way of interpreting is that this is a private company which pissed off the president.

Another way is that this is a company beholden to our geopolitical adversary that intentionally interfered in our domestic politics.

View on HN

It's either unregulated social networks are a threat to free and fair elections or they are not.

If you have the former position, which seems to be embraced by the majority of HN users, you can't accept to have Tik Tok, a chinese controlled social network, taking over everyone under 30 in the US.

How would this not be a major threat? As opposed to bot farms on FB/Twitter controlled by foreign actors?

> How would this not be a major threat? As opposed to bot farms on FB/Twitter controlled by foreign actors?

Bot farms are symmetrical - you can use them to support Democrats or Republicans.

TikTok is asymmetrical - it can be used by the owner to support one side or the other, but users of the platform have no influence on this.

FB and Twitter aren't owned by someone?

Also, if bot farms can sway elections I would either want them to be pliable to more than just Democrats and Republicans.

Facebook and Twitter are both owned by someone, but the primary driver of what content you see is your social graph, not their magical algorithms. (though this is decreasing with both)

With TikTok, the primary determinant of what you see in your feed is what they choose to show you - and it could be from anyone in the world, with any degree of separation from you.

I think we all know that geopolitical adversaries interfere on USA domestic politics mainly using USA owned social network, in particular Facebook and Twitter.

> Another way is that this is a company beholden to our geopolitical adversary that intentionally interfered in our domestic politics.

Does "that" in this sentence refer to the geopolitical adversary (China), or the company beholden to them (Tik Tok)?

(Linguistically it could be either, but I'm wondering if I missed a story about Tik Tok interfering in domestic politics)

The “that” I intended is TikTok, a reference to this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/07/07/tiktok-...

TikTok tends to be apolitical and heavily moderated, so having this go viral was unusual.

"Intentionally interfered in out domestic policies"

Which ones, pray tell?

Yep, what so sad is things have become so transparently partisan. If it were Telegram or Yandex interfering on behalf of Putin, there would be endless hours of call outs about the abuse and need for sanctions, but because it’s China (who have economic sway on a lot of corps and pols), it’s unfashionable to call them out and castigate them (by most media and pols).

> it’s unfashionable to call them out and castigate them

This is an exaggeration. Anti-China sentiment has been surprisingly uncontroversial and bipartisan. It’s actually one of the only things the American left/right can agree on right now.

Really the problem is reducing countries, China or America, to a single entity with a single will as if this was the middle ages and each was being run by a monarch.

The problem is that China has done some specific extremely bad things - Uighurs, Hong Kong; as well as some normal things (competing against US companies) and some things that may be normal but are opaque (how many social networks are beholden to US intelligence services? how many apps snoop the clipboard?). Conflating them all into "China bad" makes it harder to make specific demands that can be widely supported.

Putting kids in cages isn't as bad as the Uighurs? Separating families at the border isn't similar? C'mon... we are just as shitty in the US as other countries any more.

Unfortunately the treatment of the Uighurs is even worse.

> geopolitical adversary that intentionally interfered with our domestic politics

Pot, meet kettle.

As far as the united states intelligence agencies are concerned, so did russia in the 2016 elections. We seem to be cozening up to them with no issue.

I don't think you're making a fair comparison.

Russia bought ads on Facebook, a US owned platform.

China has actual state actors in leadership at Tiktok's parent company Bytedance, a Chinese owned company.

In Tiktok's case there is unlimited potential for the Chinese government to influence the platform.

Didn’t Russia do a lot more than buy ads? I thought they ran a huge fake account network and intentionally radicalized US citizens.

Seems pretty serious to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com