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Comment by _23sd | Hacker News Reader

The evidence that TikTok is a mouthpiece for China, according to NPR's account of the Commerce Department memo (I still need to read it myself):

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.

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Saying that TikTok employs 130 CCP members doesn't mean much. How many Republicans and Democrats do a typical American company employ?Maybe they don't talk about politics at work in China either?

Being a CPC member is a bit more involved than being registered Democrat or Republican. And the article specifically points to them having a chapter at Bytedance. Again, this is normal in China, but it’s not really comparable to anything here.

Last I heard Republicans and Democrats weren't involved in the systematic genocide of an ethnic minority.

America supports Israel financially, politically, and with military support. Israel is genociding Palestinians right now.

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.

Not anymore

That’s silly, of course you can point to things American governments have done that the average voter wouldn’t feel personally responsible for. Many Democrats would accuse the current administration of trying to carry out a genocide against Latin American immigrants, and both Obama and Trump are guilty of countless crimes against humanity overseas.

If you're referring to ICE I would still take my chances being incarcerated in one of their detention facilities over a Uighur concentration camp. Much more likely to get out alive and not sterilized.

That wasn’t the comparison I was making, it was about whether a rank and file Republican non-politician would feel personally responsible for ICE’s actions if they are ever found to be criminal.

An apt comparison would be the West‘s war on terror. In terms of civilians killed I highly doubt that they are anywhere near our numbers.

What? How is this in any way comparable? Being a registered Democrat doesn’t make you an agent of the government...

Although heavily redacted, part of their claim is that US user data is stored on servers leased by a PRC state owned enterprise located in Virginia (China Telecom?).

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.

I think the evidence is that any Chinese company is under the umbrella of the omnipotent CCP who do as they please. Placing 100 million (and growing) US persons' location, likes, dislikes, contacts, and sms messages in the hands of the CCP on a silver platter is why this is happening.

isn't like 10% of chinese population party members? How many employees has Bytedance in total?

That’s true and if you are willing to extrapolate by connecting family relationship, you are basically implying most of the Chinese people can’t be trusted.

And THAT is a dangerous claim that mixes Chinese people and the ruling government/party.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party) the CPC has 91,914,000 members in 2020. Which is around 6.5% of the population of the PRC or around 1.2% of the world population (assuming around 7.8 bil people).

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.

bytedance has 70k employees right now

Expanding on (1): It is important to explain to HN readers the reality of CCP membership.

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.

This squares with my experience as an exchange student in China. Once I went on a hiking trip organized by the Communist Youth League (as a non-member, obviously) and when I told some friends about it, they were surprised because their only interaction with the CYL was paying 2 cents a month in membership dues. They didn't even know there was supposed to be anything more to it... (The reason they gave for being members in the first place was that all students with good grades were encouraged to join.)

That’s the truth, I don’t know why you are downvoted. Point is at the moment it’s infeasible to use the CCP membership to infer if a person or organization works for CCP. It’s a deadly dangerous door to open because the next step is to inspect the direct family affiliation to CCP. Given the proliferation of CCP members, it’ll be affecting over half billion people and effectively you are telling most Chineses in America that they are suspects. It’s not too different from terminating the diplomatic relationship and worse, effectively you are saying Chinese people ~= CCP by the connection to members

In the US people either under estimate the size of the CCP or act as though it is an egalitarian group of people where everyone has access to all information and is briefed on strategy. The CCP doesn't vote on its strategy among all of its members.

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.)

Thanks for the clarification. It seems like a lot of the boom in Chinese industries is because of them adopting capitalistic policies (although maybe not publicly).

Let's assume TikTok is the mouth piece of Chinese propaganda. Why aren't we doing anything about another mouthpiece that we already got confirmation that it is being used by both our and foreign intelligence.

Is that one accepted because it benefits the president? What kind of leader of free nation would accept something like that?

Just because they talk about it being a free country doesn’t mean much

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.

Is this a free form poem?

"Walking round the land of the free, yelling 'free for who?'"

What other mouthpiece/personal data sink is on 100 million American devices? You start with the 800lb gorilla not the 10 spider monkeys who are there for support and logistics.

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