US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party
npr.org
npr.org
It’s also failed to actually do anything about Tik Tok for months despite having committed some blatantly illegal acts that have reduced the government to little more than a PRC style ruling party. I guess actually solving the stated Tik Tok problem would prevent the daily headlines that are distracting from those same record deficits.
There's way more going on behind the scenes here than is apparent. Trump could within the hour, literally within the hour, ban TikTok and nobody could really do much until/unless Congress decided to do something about it. Unfortunately, in America we've given the president too much power under the guise of national security. For that I blame Congress, of course, because whenever their team is in power they conveniently forget about restricting presidential authority.
With that being said, I do want to see Chinese social media companies banned from the US until/unless US companies can operate in China freely. There just isn't really a reason to let them operate here.
My partner uses it and shows me a lot of these things. "All buildings matter" trended on 9/11, and yesterday there was a large group of young, voting-aged adults joining a pact to not vote.
I'm disheartened by a lot of the stuff I'm seeing on TikTok. Then again, I have the same reaction to Twitter.
If China can tweak the knobs and radicalize our youth, then this is extremely dangerous. I think it's impossible to say whether or not this is just emergent network behavior or if it's selectively being curated. If the administration had evidence, though, I think they'd be talking about it.
Edit: the repeated downvotes for saying anything about China don't give me confidence. Why not offer a rebuttal instead? I haven't said anything controversial.
Edit 2: Flagged too, huh? Is having an open and frank discussion dangerous? I'm an earnest contributor acting in good faith. This isn't the right way to go about things.
A lot of white people also recognize what a fucked system we've created for people. Centuries of injustice. The reactionary identity politics is extremely harmful.
As a PoC I'm happy to have non PoC allies in this fight. I welcome them. And will make this fight our fight.
Their moderation guidelines banned contents “endangering national security” or deemed “uglification or distortion of local or other countries’ history” [4].
It’s just another CCP mouthpiece.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/tiktok-says-it-doesnt-censor...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
[4] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-once-again-come...
What makes this "the key difference"? I think you can safely say the same about Chinese tech companies. VPN usage is higher among tech-literate people for obvious reasons, and while having access to uncensored information doesn't necessarily instill love for the US, wanting "bad things to happen to the United States" is a pretty extreme level of nationalism.
I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese tech employees in China had a more positive attitude with respect to the US than Chinese tech employees in the US, due to "the grass is greener on the other side"-type effects.
Maybe we should focus more on decreasing that baseline so we can actually figure out if foreign companies are doing bad things to the US out of malice or indifference?
Why would Tiktok need to maliciously harm the US when just their simple act of seeking profit is already doing enough work to harm the US without the need for any malintent? It's like wondering if the open sewer dumping into your town's water supply might also have gluten in it when you're gluten free.
I see my kids look at TikTok all the time. I don't really see how you could spread propaganda through 5 second dances and jokes. Especially since peers are doing that.
I would think the Party influence on Hollywood and other entertainment such as Computer Games would be way more disturbing. Injecting propaganda into a real story seems way more effective. Especially when you fully control the medium.
Dances may have been tiktoks start but the shift to shortform videos on a specific topic in rapid succession meets the criteria of propaganda. Particularly if they are humorous or provide a dopamine response.
China much like twitter and facebook and youtube has complete control over what their supposedly "unbias" algorithms direct users to. It is trivial to push propaganda between dances and jokes. Swaying public opinion has never been easier than in the social media age.
It's mostly teenager dancing stuff, yes. If you start liking political content you'll get political content too. I've found there's a lot of pro-China, both soft-power "look how pretty the countryside is" stuff and straight up Uyghur denial. There's also a decent amount of anti-China activism on there as well, though.
2. They can get information on kids now to be used against them in the future as blackmail (and similar) when those same kids become politicians. Say what you want about the Chinese but they are great at long-term 5, 10, 20 year plans.
E.g. several people at my work (engineers with degrees) seem to absolutely trust everything they hear on "comedy" talk shows. And not only trust, but eager watch all new episodes and discuss between themselves at work. Those cannot be propaganda because it's just a joke, dude?
An interesting thing about their interview process is that they often required a night time slot for at least one round.
This was because many teams had their direct manager or VP in mainland PRC, which has a 15 time hour difference.
Why is this tolerated if the U.S. Gov has major concerns about the PRC’s having access to TikTok’s data?
I'm anticipating a future where foreign platforms like TikTok are just webapps and can't be banned without implementing great firewall. What will countries do then.
The trouble is it is a) a networked world and hence this is not just radio it sent and b) it is one sided as any innovation can be profited by non-Chinese in Chinese man unless the ultimate winner is China.
Big trouble and how it struggled or lost to China is details. Not sure it can win. I will pray it can. Just so one sided how can it win. WHO, UN, WTO, IP ... in fact it is not the wake up call from Hong Kong. But it might be too late.
> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...
DouYin is the Chinese App, which is hosted in China, and TikTok is hosted in Singapore and Canada I believe.
I don't know if the incorrect translation was on purpose or not, thought correcting it can only be fair.
1. Bytedance employs 130 Party members.
2. The party members had a rally with Communist salutes and pledges and such.
3. Bytedance's CEO once apologized over an app that the authorities shut down because, as far as I can tell, the memes were too dank.
The first two are normal for big Chinese companies, though I suppose one could say that just means all Chinese companies are propaganda outlets. The third one...yes, if authorities go after a company in any country you will generally see leadership either challenge the decision or apologize, this isn't even unique to authoritarian countries. In other words this sounds like generic natsec scare tactics where you could insert the name of any Chinese corporation rather than anything interesting.
Is that one accepted because it benefits the president? What kind of leader of free nation would accept something like that?
What’s the math of your time economy look like?
You’re a servant of their economy. Any challenges to that, it’s slower police responses, more austerity, and strongman bashing figurative genitals on TV all day to prove his grit
Why don’t we do anything about it? Because we’re entitled to our stuff!
Technology is just your salon.
The level headed man is the scourge of modern times.
My iPhone is the same as Buffets. I can be distracted the same. I can’t get the same healthcare to stay alive.
That’s the reality of your nation.
You can consider it the equivalent of national honor society in high school in the US and various honor societies in college, but with membership dues you must pay. Membership is symbolic and people must attend mandatory propaganda classes which they don't take seriously. Why would they do this? Because this is the way to get into many leadership roles in government.
So CCP membership is driven by capitalist motives.
I personally am friends with quite a few CCP members. I assure you they are critical of the government and have no insight into what the leadership is doing.
CCP membership in itself means little. Really depends on how high up an individual is within the party.
Most things that we see as controversial or dangerous when it comes to the CCP aren't even apparent to most CCP members.
Joining the CCP isn't generally a decision to turn a blind eye for personal gain. It is difficult to comprehend just how much China controls the flow of information to its citizens (and the ordinary CCP members).
We must distinguish between CCP leadership and the ordinary members. The average CCP member is no evil person and is unaware of any evil acts being committed.
Now you might wonder why people don't investigate rumors they hear from Western media (even if the sources are banned): - Western media tends to attack Chinese culture and pride, attack ordinary Chinese - The Chinese government refuted the news and any contradicting sources are blocked. - Approval of how the country is run is generally high. Han Chinese and other groups are doing as well as never before. (And they truly don't know that there are people who are not being treated well.)
And you have constant bombings of civilians in the Middle East.
And you have sanctions on Venezuela and Iran which lead to many many civilian deaths.
And THAT is a dangerous claim that mixes Chinese people and the ruling government/party.
Byte Dance has around 30k employees in total (world wide) according to https://craft.co/bytedance so by random sampling we would expect 350 employees to be CPC members.
So if they have 130, that would be less than you would expect from complete random sampling all over the world.
Of course that's a naive approach in many ways.
TikTok has repeated said American user data is safe because it's stored in the US, and it would never give data to the PRC government. This arrangement could (depending on the specifics) be a circumvention around both of those promises.
Maybe it’s not nefarious, but certainly not good optics.
Its tiktok job to show and prove that the suspicion is not the case.
Because it is in their economic interest for people to believe that and they are in a large trade dispute with the origin country.
So without any proof this is essentially trade war propaganda.
In terms of TikTok what kind of secret thing they could possibly hold in addition what they are already saying?
It's not like to get that information they used a new spy satellite that trump shared image from agree assassination of Soleimani allowing to identify it, or disclosing that Israeli intelligence knew about planned operation by Islamic State and many other disclosures [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_disclosures_o...
From my point of view the US administration lost a lot of credibility during the last months & years => they might be right, but at this point stating something like this without presenting proof is not enough anymore.
For those that aren't familiar. TikTok is pretty ubiquitous in the under 21 crowd while being practically unused by older people. It's sort of like when young people fled to Twitter and Instagram to get away from their parents on Facebook. It's basically the next Twitter for that age group.
TikTok (the community, not the company) is also quite critical of Trump. For instance, the buying up of rally tickets a few months ago so he would show up to an empty political event was organized on TikTok and we know that it pissed Trump off [1].
That level of age and political specificity in their audience makes it easy to target them for their ideas.
This type of laser focused ban on specific conpanies (rather than, say, disallowing data to be stored in China or banning Chinese owned companies from operating) reveals the nakedly political motivation behind this action. "China is bad" is just the excuse here. It's really about banning a popular meetingplace for a political demographic opposed to Trump.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Cooper
See: "Satirical videos"
The major impact exactly as he promoted light in the lungs and disinfectants in the body as the treatment:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/14/trump-lip-sy...
For him it's all about his ratings. The reality show continues.
Wait. "China is bad" is not necessarily an excuse, it might be an end in itself. Populism needs enemies and threats to find and maintain support. By demonizing China (as it did previously with immigrants, BLM protesters, Iran, etc.) Trump effectively injects fear in the political discourse and creates the need for a savior with a strong attitude. Which is himself, of course.
Readers of HN are heavily leaning to the left and naturally very far from Trump's voters demographic, reflecting California's and the US's tech workers predominant political sympathies; but I see that the fear and distrust of China has taken solid roots and I wouldn't be too surprised if some of them ended up voting republican, driven by the fear that a democratic president could be less resolute against China. Such is the power of creating enemies.
Its not that there isnt something to it but i would agree that his handling of the situation is poor and ineffective. For instance, rather than risking thier intel on TikTok specifically, they could try spreading awareness about the Belt and Road Initiative for instance which went from 60 something pledged countries in 2018 to ~138 pledged cpuntries in 2019. Simple, immediate, effective. No need for divisive identity politics.