Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

>Does anyone seriously believe TikTok is a threat to national security?

Everyone who believes Facebook was used to influence the 2016 election should believe TikTok poses a similar threat. I'd agree that the threat is overblown, but many serious people, in good faith, seriously believe it.

View on HN

Current US intelligence officials [1] are among those serious people who seriously believe that social media is being used to influence American elections.

[1]: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/china-election-interference...

If you read any account of the history of the KGB and GRU (obviously the west does it too), so-called Active Measures are their bread and butter. It would be bizarre if they weren't trying to influence countries via social media

I believe that social media is being used to try to influence American elections, whether it actually being influenced is unclear, and I believe overblown. I've been party to enough multi million dollar brand campaigns to know the results are hard to measure, often less than believed, and generally a waste.

I would say the possible threat is more than FB is assumed to have been responsible for, whether it is true or not is a different story.

While FB's perceived threat was(is?) targeting of users on behavioral models, for misinformation campaigns. Tiktok's goes beyond this, with a state actor pushing its propaganda with active blessing of the platform itself and curbing dissent against itself. Considering how we have seen companies self censor for CCP, I wouldn't say the curbing dissent thing is far fetched.

On a similar note, I used to consider SCMP reporting of high standard different from Xinhua/CGTN and free from interference as it was based in HK. But lately I have seen them publish stories to push CCP agenda without proper fact checking.

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't we already see censoring of any references to the Tiananmen Square massacre on Tik Tok back in July?

I am not sure if it was this July but yeah, there was news of them censoring content around Tianamen, Tibet and other topics sensitive to CCP

I don't think it's overblown. We've seen what can be done flooding social media networks with propaganda-troll accounts and memes. With TikTok China owns the platform, and TikTok knows what you like (see any number of threads with HNers shouting the praises of how addicting tiktok is). And, we already see China's influence in media. Games and movies censored or tailored to not offend China, so we know they're mindful about even subtle messages. I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned about TikTok as a propaganda machine.

But then this is evidence that whether it’s an American company or Chinese company has little import on its ability to subvert elections.

It's not evidence of anything because it's possible Facebook's ability to subvert elections could have been even more damaging if it were controlled directly by a foreign power.

You think the threat of hyper-targeted propaganda is overblown? Can you elaborate on that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com