Comment by trunnell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trunnell | Hacker News Reader

Duh.

No reasonable adult (in any country) would go on the record to propose that a hostile foreign government should run any part of their internal communication infrastructure. It's well documented that all companies in China are beholden to the political whims of the Chinese Communist Party; when national security is at issue, Chinese companies and the Chinese government are one entity, sadly.

I'm squinting skeptically at all the comments here that are confused about this, especially the ones with extra helpings of carefully chosen rhetoric (whatabout-ism, free speech, free markets, etc). There are no "free speech" issues here, ByteDance is a foreign company, not a US person. This is a national security issue.

If you think it's cool to allow TikTok in Western countries, please explain why it would have been fine to allow the Nazis to run the Royal Mail, the US Postal Service, and one third of the broadcasting services in the 1930s. Would that have been a "free speech" or "free market" issue?

The Chinese government has a long way to go to earn the trust of other countries.

See this list of common Chinese propaganda themes to check if they may have already influenced you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_China#Common_CCP...

Comparing tiktok to the post office circa 1940 is… an odd choice.

Tiktok is more like a foreign power owning playboy and mad magazine. People making dumb videos for a laugh isn’t critical communications infrastructure it’s entertainment. Banning ZTE and Huawei makes sense… but if your culture and infrastructure is so sensitive that Chinese ownership of dumb entertainment is a threat… you’ve really already lost.

If tiktok as foreign spyware is a problem, ban the mechanisms of surveillance, everyone does it and it’s not only a problem when China is in control of the data.

People underestimate the power of TikTok to influence opinion.

Strangely, TikTok makes up a large part of the "information diet" for a lot of people. It's tough to find a great analog from 1930, but I think the postal service analogy is in the ballpark.

no, it's not. "information diet" is not the point. the postal service was the mechinism by which information traveled. a person's information diet is what they choose to pay attention to, communications infrastructure is how information moves.

My TikTok feed is mostly stand up comics and absurd sketches from American 20-somethings. I think characterizing TT as “internal communication infrastructure” is a massive stretch.

That said, I could see the argument that what TT chooses to censor or uprank is a kind of soft power that could influence American attitudes over time. But I’m not sure this is any more significant than say, Chinese influence on what Disney chooses to include or not include in their films.

Right - it's complicated and nuanced. Some Disney censorship is probably benign, right? This is the argument made by the crowd urging inaction.

Consider the recent example of John Cena, an actor in the "Fast and Furious" franchise, apologizing to China for calling Taiwan a country. Is that apology good, bad, or irrelevant? Probably irrelevant by itself, I'd say.

But what about China's ability to coerce John Cena into making that apology? This is more akin to the problem you might see on TikTok. Influential people that others look up to parroting Chinese propaganda, wittingly or unwittingly.

It doesn't require much imagination to see the problem. If China secretly coerced 10 famous actors to say, "the US should leave Taiwan to China," and those videos had >100 million views in the US, that could be a very successful influence operation. TikTok could be a means of distribution for that kind of thing.

I think it doesn’t have to be coercive or even conscious. Basically there’s a million content creators out there saying different things. On their own volition, some will say stuff the Chinese government likes, some will say stuff the Chinese government doesn’t like. The former get upranked, the latter get downranked. The outcome is it seems like “everyone” believes the former.

Couldn't agree more.

Lots of responses about 'I only see funny comedians' or 'Tik Tok is only about dumb entertaining videos', etc.

This misses the forest through the trees. The dumb videos are the mechanism through which a foreign and often hostile world power is able to create a profile on millions of americans and learn everything about them.

All this data is fed back into other Chinese government groups and organizations which leverage it to determine how to best spread divisiveness, propaganda, misinformation and more through all the other platforms (FB, Twitter, News, etc).

The funny videos is the honey pot trap to collect all the data to create profiles, it may or may not be the primary way the Chinese government then uses that information to influence or nudge people but it informs and empowers all of that.

Also, TikTok's algorithm is specific and targeted. Just because your feed is only funny videos doesn't mean everyone else's are too. Even if everyone in your 'group' sees the same funny videos, there are many other groups that have entirely different feeds and many other variants.

This has nothing to do with free speech, no one is saying you can't say this but not that on TikTok. This is about the existence and allowance of it in the first place. Plenty of other forums for the speech.

I wonder how people would react to this issue if TikTok had come from Iran or North Korea rather than China.

You're right, this is probably the main problem (rather than the ability to change the content on TikTok.)

So you're implying that their future influence operations could be enhanced and better targeted by using profile-level viewing history on TikTok, similar to how Cambridge Analytica used FB profile data to target political advertising?

Exactly, TikTok is for information gathering and profiling so the government can know what swaths of the population to target more effectively for whatever goal they have.

What's valuable is all the information they can gather: contacts, age group, political affiliations, interest, geographic location, race, gender, interests.

Everything that happens in TikTok is monitored and tracked even the in app web viewer that shows when you click a link. All activity in that is tracked (the page, duration, links you visit etc).

These problems of security/privacy obviously exist for other foreign and domestic companies, TikTok is one of the most egregious and more threatening because the US has no recourse against it. At least if it were a US company, they could become subject to US laws requiring better data management, anonymization, require deletions on request etc.

Being a foreign owned and operated entity means it is subject to no existing US laws and will never be subject to future US laws.

How do you ban TikTok if they broke no law? If they’re kicked off all the app stores, they’ll just live on the web. If they’re not allowed to do business in the US, they’ll serve content for free, if their aim is indeed data gathering.

> No reasonable adult (in any country) would go on the record to propose that a hostile foreign government should run their internal communication infrastructure.

frankly, calling tiktok internal communications infrastructure is idiotic.

I can't wait until China invades Taiwan and their is a statistically significant shift of gen-z support for Chinese imperialism, or more likely, support of american isolationism.

> or more likely, support of american isolationism.

we can only hope.

Only hope that China is the world police?

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