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wanda

Isn't this what all firms do to each other, all the time?

Like, isn't this just normal business these days? Isn't this sort of thing a natural eventuality in a capitalist world?

Capitalism crowns the person who wins, regardless of how they won.

And besides, all press is good press because it's all exposure. Why wouldn't you do this sort of thing?

It's only wrong to get caught.

And even then, you can pay for a lawyer to prove that you were either:

- not doing anything wrong,

- not legitimately caught,

- or simply giving your opinion.

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Positive PR, where you pay someone to go around convincing reporters how great you are, is normal business and I'm not sure it could ever be otherwise. Negative campaigns that function solely to tear down your opponents, as the article says (and my experience matches), are relatively uncommon outside of politics.

I disagree, the PC vs Mac is arguably not positive PR towards the PC industry but was very popular back when it aired. Even now Samsung sometimes poke fun at Apple mistakes. I would argue micro aggressive advertising is negative PR just with lipstick on it.

There’s a pretty large difference though. PC vs Mac were explicitly adverts, you knew Apple made them. This article describes the firm placing op-eds from “concerned parents” that they drafted themselves with no indication of their or Meta’s involvement. Whole different level.

There's a pretty big difference between comparing the cool Justin Long and nerdy John Hodgman (I would argue those character roles are backwards from what they should be) and a massively cynical scare theater campaign about how a Chinese company is stealing your children's data, negatively impacting their mental health, and causing destruction of property from a company that makes money using your children's data and negatively impacting everyone's mental health.

I mean, to some extent, those ads were popular/notorious precisely _because_ they were such an unusual tactic.

Also, that was open advertising, not a covert disinformation campaign; it's a bit different.

Tell me you've never run a business without telling me you've never run a business.

> Negative campaigns that function solely to tear down your opponents, as the article says (and my experience matches), are relatively uncommon outside of politics.

If you have competitors, they will try to trash your name, I promise you. It doesn't matter what scale you're operating at.

Trash talk is universal.

The 'yellow peril' aspect of it was certainly disgusting.

Sure, but what are the repercussions?

If you know how to ride a media wave, you literally can't lose in today's media landscape (mixed metaphor, I know).

What "yellow peril"?

The focus on Asia, specifically China, as a uniquely threatening force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril .

Is China not a uniquely threatening force? They have the second largest GDP, the second-most expensive military with the most personnel, considerable influence over other important Asian countries, and a major role in manufacturing the world's products, and they continue to rapidly expand across all of those facets. They are very much in opposition to Liberal values (free speech, democracy, privacy), and they are somewhat aligned with other US adversaries (Russia, North Korea).

In 1910, I'd absolutely attribute focus on China to racism. Today, if I were to rank the biggest threats to US for the coming decades, I would put China in distant first place. But I'm no geopolitics expert, am I missing something?

All of Chinese economic activity is subservient to the state, including companies like ByteDance. The information they gather goes back to the state. This is not “yellow peril”, this is “Sino peril” if you must call it something scary sounding. It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with national security and ideology.

If we can put aside our own ideology and national bias, the business model and tactics of ByteDance, Facebook or any other company in the ad-tech supported social media realm operates more-or-less with the same objectives and does the same things.

Ideology is just the trash can we are all eating from.

It's not necessarily wise to put aside national bias. There are well informed, intelligent, honorable people who believe that Chinese hegemony would be a bad thing. In that lens, it would be perfectly consistent to want to prevent Western citizens from being influenced by the Chinese company/govt, while being OK with the same power in the hands of Western governments.

IE, you would need to also assert that Western companies having these data is no better than Chinese companies, an opinion which is hotly debated and not at all settled.

There are well informed, intelligent, honorable people who believe that American hegemony has been bad thing.

Yep, totally agree! They usually aren’t the ones making the case that for Us citizens, it’s better to have data in the Us companies hands rather than Chinese.

I may have missed your overall point though - would you mind being explicit about it?

Yes, but no well informed, intelligent, honorable people who believe Chinese hegemony would be a good thing.

Capitalism has nothing to do with power disseminating information in an attempt to retain power. You are actually lucky for capitalism as it's two companies offering social media services playing PR games and not a totalitarian government operating under the guise of fascism/socialism/marxism pushing domestic propaganda demonizing people who think like you.

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