Swap China with USA and Tiktok with Google and see how insane it is. I hope China doesn't back down to US aggression. This is like a child throwing a tantrum. It needs to be put in its place by a grown-up.
Abducting protestors off the street in unmarked vans is very reminiscent of what’s happening in Hong Kong. Many people actively support the riots in Hong Kong, but demonize them when they happen here. The NSA spies on everyone, but we care more about when China does it. We have roughly a Social Credit system in the form of your Credit Report and algorithms that determine if you’ll jump bail.[0] Heck, we have a President who has suggested he won’t leave office if he loses in November and a very large chunk of the population supports it (I’ve seen some die-hard Republicans say he should run for a third term in 2024 if he wins 2020). The list goes on and on.
Basically, we may be better than China in some ways, but to say we’re overall better is debatable. I would even go as far as saying it’s disingenuous. We can’t be better if we don’t recognize our own shortcomings.
Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of arguably the worst congressional vote in this century.
On that day in 2000, the Senate approved Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with the People’s Republic of China by a vote of 83-15. President Bill Clinton signed the legislation into law, declaring: “China will open its markets to American products from wheat to cars to consulting services, and our companies will be far more able to sell goods without moving factories or investments there.”
Republican Rep. Bill Archer of Texas, the lead sponsor of the bill, remarked, “The American people support this agreement because they know it’s good for jobs in America and good for human rights and the development of democracy in China.”
quote.end
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/sep/11/normalizing...
Call me cycnical but review above quotes, multiply by N over 3 decades, and we have a general sense of the type of smoke blown in our face by the representatives of Big Money and Big Business (and possibly some Globalist ideologues) that were elected by "us" to represent "us".
Two possibilities, based on a working memory of what was said and when, regarding China and more broadly "free trade" and Globalism, here and abroad:
option 1: "The West" (which c.f. above regarding "our" representatives) assumed that Chinese greed will exceed Chinese ideological zeal/control, and CCP would ultimately lose its grip over the Chinese nation.
option 2: No such thoughts "clouded" "our" decision makers' decisions. The idea was always and in essence contrary to option 1 - how to evolve from sole Superpower order to a global elite order. China was deemed as large enough, significant enough, and strategic enough to be used as the instrument to evolve post WWII order to a global governance model, as the platform to dethrone USA from its superpower perch. Recently, it appears a sub-set of the US capitalist class has rediscovered a love of homeland or something like that, while another sub-set (with the better sort of propanda organs) is vehemently opposing them. I think the former didn't get the original memo. Sucks not to be in the uber-in circle.
Both sides really do have mass surveillance, China's being a bit further along and a bit more omniscient.
I don't think TikTok, a collection of six-second clips of teens messing around represents a real, material, meaningful threat to freedom and democracy. Even if they collected all the footage and ran it all through their national security apparatus. The signal to noise ratio on this content is incomprehensibly low.
This is grandstanding and showmanship on the part of two strongmen leaders, one totalitarian overlord and one wannabe, and really, I don't think there's a clear right side and wrong side here.
I guess this is where we agree to disagree. I do think a foreign power with direct and absolute editorial control over the #1 content delivery network of an entire generation of our population is cause for concern.
I'm not discounting your skepticism that there is grandstanding involved, but from your comment I see a dramatic difference between a wanna-be totalitarian in a free democracy and an unequivocal one in a single party state. Let's not let perfect be the enemy of better; while domestic surveillance is unacceptable it is most definitely better than the current situation.
I don't love the NSA, or Trump, or the US military-industrial complex, but parroting this "both sides" garbage just makes you sound like a useful idiot for the CCP.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...
I don't encounter too much political propaganda on TikTok (lots of BLM stuff though), but the potency of the platform is obvious, and the userbase is overwhelmingly young people who may be more impressionable, idealistic, etc.
Just one example of propaganda: https://www.tiktok.com/@jperkinsauthor
Of course, this exists on other sites as well, but bundling ideas/memes into 30 second bite-sized morsels with video seems like a fantastic design for quick propogation throughout a network of human minds.