Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that China is an enemy of democracy. Whether you hate or love the US, I’m sure you’d rather live in a free world.

View on HN

John Adams and George Washington believed a two-party system was also an enemy of democracy. It's not really so black and white. Free vs. non-free.

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.

Or we could ve underestimating how much influence these social media apps exert especially on the younger crowd(where Tiktok currently reigns) and our IC is looking to limit this soft power from others. It's easier to control the 'world narrative' when you own the channels.

>> 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

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.

That's fair.

Please stop with this false equivalence nonsense. In 2020, the USA (for all its many faults) is not running concentration camps to imprison and "re-educate" millions of citizens for having the wrong religion or ethnicity. It's not trying to carry out a slow-motion genocide.

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 didn't say they were equivalent, I'm limiting the scope of my commentary to TikTok alone, and not the broader environment. It is my opinion that TikTok in isolation does not pose a national security threat or a threat to democracy, and therefore, this is likely to be grandstanding.

Sure, US is a free world where people are free to loot, burn down buildings, spread qanon conspiracies; and subvert other governments, make false baseless accusations against other countries because they refuse to be the puppets of the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com