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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

They would need to explain how TicTok brainwashes americans to vote(or not vote) but Facebook and Twitter categorically does not do the same thing. If "brainwashing" on social media exists then all should be made illegal not only the a small subset.

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As a US citizen, I would absolutely like domestic social media companies to be held similarly accountable.

Twitter and Facebook are US companies, while ByteDance (the company behind TikTok) is not. This makes them pretty different legislation-wise. Not saying that the brainwashing part doesn't apply to all three.

Hmm, what does it mean to keep a social media giant hostage right up to the elections?

Adults watch TikTok for voting suggestions? The American society is getting weirder every day.

Adults believe in every picture with a caption or video with text and sad music in it, as long as it doesn't have any clear association with a government. After all, it's not propaganda if the source is private, and the message is ostensibly made for teh lulz, right?

Sounds like we should abolish states, then.

I can't even tell what's sarcasm and what isn't, anymore.

> They would need to explain how TicTok brainwashes americans to vote(or not vote) but Facebook and Twitter categorically does not do the same thing.

FB and Twitter didn't have people on them embarrass Trump by tanking one of his rallies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...

It reminds me about the China and the Winnie the Pooh ban.

FB and Twitter no doubt brainwash people into all kinds of silliness - we've seen that quite vividly in the past 3 months. But there's not a whole lot you can do about them legally under US law. There is a whole lot you can do with TikTok and other foreign companies that represent a national security threat.

That is the point, make a new law. I mean FB way where I can target with ads extremely precise groups make it possible to systematically slit a nation in all the political regions, split the population in relevant groups, and preciously target them non stop with fake or misleading stuff.

This could be fixed in many , many ways - like not allowing political ads, or not allowing targeted political ads, or labeling clearly what is paid political propaganda or the exteme solution , limited electoral budget (why should the guy with more money is more equal then the rest?? it is are torical question I know constitution in US allows this )

It's not about fake news it's about data access.

The data is pretty clear in a lot of cases on contentious issues. It's the interpretation that is being driven/manipulated and weaponized for some agenda.

E.g. people have had all the data for car accidents for decades, and yet we don't have a large, concerted movement to ban or "reinvent" cars/roads/driving/driver's licenses even though it could save tens of thousands of lives. Likewise, we've had police and crime statistics for decades as well but only recently had a "big movement" mobilize around addressing some of it. Additionally, we have all the data to "call in to question" some of the hard narratives of said movement, yet people are doubling-down on it. At some point we have to agree that it's not about data anymore. It's about mind-share, and feelings/emotions and other intangible things that are causing shifts that we should all be worried about.

With that in mind, it's absolutely clear to me that we should be taking a close look and scrutinize the platforms that can cause such societal shifts. TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Google Search, etc. They can all explicitly or at the very-least subtly manipulate and drive societal movements/impressions on issues. At least let's agree that they promote certain types of viral topics/movements that have criteria that make them more "virable".

thats not the concern of the US government in the case of tiktok though

It's about both, really. Data is darn near useless by itself. But from data you can easily infer things like age, gender, political affiliation, income and education level and so on, which can then be _easily_ used to swing an election.

I am not taking about the data I am taking about access to the data and the devices. This is G5 controversy all over again. It's a trojan horse which can be used by the CCP. There is no ability to take them to court for misuse, no opposition media.

There already exists a law: if there's a threat to national security (which there is), the executive branch has relatively broad discretion. You can't really "make a law" in the time remaining until election, not with Pelosi turning everything into a political showdown, and _especially_ not if China prefers Biden (which, according to Nancy Pelosi it does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arS5qzS95cE).

Here's one way you could interfere with US elections without showing political ads BTW: show "vote" reminders only to people who you infer from data to be democrats. At a first approximation, to people in urban centers in swing states. Not an "ad" per se, but you can still swing the election quite easily - in swing states elections are close by definition. As far as I'm aware there exists no law prohibiting such interference.

This is how FB and Twitter are going to do it if the DNC doesn't like the final polls.

Then this trail would hopefully surface the evidence about this National Security issue and we are not left without a retraction like in the case where China was accused of planting chips in PC motherboards.

Thats not really why they are worried about TikTok, it comes back to the issue of the CCP and and that China defacto owns TikTok which means that information can be harvested. This is G5 controversy all over. The brainwashing part is just noise. The real concern is real given Chinas history.

I mean FB has a lot of information about users, have you seen how you are tagged in the ads ? Any private person can target any subgroup and we know that FB transferred this data to different companies in the past, the probability that some government somewhere that wanted the FB data does not have it yet (maybe a bit outdated) is Zero.

Let's assume you block all applications that are suspected of relations with CCP (no proof, no trial) this won't stop CCP just buying this data from shady american (or foreign) companies so it would be smart to fix the root of the problem(data collection and brainwashing)

That's not the point.

In the US we have rule of law, we have rights. There is no rule of law in china only rule of the party. FB and Twitter er scrutinized, this would never happen in China.

That's the very very very big difference here.

When tiktok removes Hong Kong related protests videos this is bigger than the ccp having a facebook group or buying advertising profiles.

If they took those down, that would certainly be a problem, yes: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/%E5%85%89%E5%BE%A9%E9%A6%99%E6%B8...

Yeah, but like the CCP don't really care about TikTok/ByteDance.

Or at least they didn't, until this happened.

They would care about Tencent or Alibaba, but ByteDance isn't big or important enough for the party to care.

Oh they care. A lot. They care about anything that gives them access to western data so that's just wrong. They care quite a lot about TikTok as it provides a potential backdoor (given that the CCP defacto owns bytedance)

That's the problem.

The sources I'm familiar with (mostly the FT) claim otherwise.

See for example: https://www.ft.com/content/0c42dc7c-b927-477a-90b7-a202bbe4b...

Or also this: https://www.ft.com/content/61988d2d-4c95-4a35-8273-d6980af04...

That article is mostly an opinion piece not really about the nuts and bolts of US intelligence concerns.

I love FT and I subscribe to the paper but I see more anti-trump sentiment than an actual argument there.

Like, when a President who disagrees publicly with his own intelligence agencies claims that something is the result of intelligence, I am very sceptical.

I'm very sceptical of US intelligence justifications in general (and have been since 2003) but even more so under the current administration.

"I love FT and I subscribe to the paper but I see more anti-trump sentiment than an actual argument there. "

I really don't see any anti-Trump sentiment there, can you clarify what you mean?

> They would need to explain how TicTok brainwashes americans to vote(or not vote) but Facebook and Twitter categorically does not do the same thing.

The easiest answer is: because ByteDance said so.

ByteDance has a internal board staffed by the CCP, and their CEO Zhang Yiming has even:

> promised that the firm would in the future “Further deepen cooperation with authoritative [official party] media, elevating distribution of authoritative media content, ensuring that authoritative [official party] media voices are broadcast to strength.” [0]

> If "brainwashing" on social media exists then all should be made illegal not only the a small subset.

The US, like almost every other country, regulates international commerce differently than domestic commerce. The US intentionally makes it harder to regulate domestic matters in order to protect the rights of the people the government is tasked with protecting. They even go so far as having separate agencies responsible for domestic matters vs foreign matters.

[0]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/16/bytedance-cant-outrun-b...

And what prevents some political party you don't like just use money to buy data from FB directly , or if getting the data is harder this days use the ad targeting and get same result that you don't like(make some people stay at home and not vote for your favorite and mobilize the guys in the group you don't like)

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