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Comment by weego | Hacker News Reader

The US is a surveillance pseudo-democracy.

The problem here being this time they can't insert themselves into the surveillance pipeline.

They're not better or worse (unless you're fine with your own Govt surveilling you but not another state), just not the status quo.

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This is absurd, frankly.

"The US government collects taxes on US citizens, why not let China collect taxes on US citizens? Its the same."

"The US government throws US citizens in jail, why not let Chine throw US citizens in jail? Its the same."

Yeah, it would be great if the Federal government turned down their surveillance. That doesn't make it okay for China to run psy-ops against us.

https://www.newsy.com/stories/american-athlete-shares-experi...

(and obviously if you're a US national in China you'll pay Chinese and US taxes, because of the weird extraterritorial taxation of the US)

Yes; you are pedantically correct, and missing the point entirely.

But you don't have a point, you just said "x thing is absurd" then proceeded to write a bunch of strawmen arguments which are not applicable

I see a lot of US psyops and I'm an American. That is even more disturbing IMO. I'd expect it from a foreign nation but not my own country. Also, why can't we just make education about foreign influence part of our curriculum and national discussion. Why do we have to ban things like speech to protect people? That is borderline just becoming China-like in itself.

Critical thinking would be a good start... but TikTok also targets a very young and immature audience that is already protected from many other things by rules.

In public elementary school here in the US they literally taught me indoctrination everyday by doing cult like rituals and allegiance to a cloth and history that whitewashed the crimes. How are young people in America supposed to be taught to think freely when they are shunned for thinking outside of the American way?

There's a golden mean between insufficient patriotism to defend your kin domain from an outsider whose victory would be genuinely worse than the current status quo, and insufficient self-criticism to prevent your kin domain from becoming worse than the current status quo through inertia. Navigating that kind of dichotomy can be learned through practice, I think the challenge in the US in particular is that the two political parties so associate the other one with one of the unhealthy extremes that the center has trouble holding.

Have you seen what happens in China *today*?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/30/chinese-communist-party...

Back to topic:

Applying critical thinking, you can be patriotic and a critical thinker.

You can love a country and still be a critical thinker. Just like you can love a person but be aware of their flaws.

> That doesn't make it okay for China to run psy-ops against us

Downloading and using TikTok is a personal choice and you’ve allowed it by doing so as an individual. I don’t think we should ban individual apps from other countries. If we want that, we need some larger more thoughtful policy. But to do so effectively, we essentially need to put up a firewall and ban the sharing of domestically collected data as well (amongst other things, like enforcing these bans.)

PSY-ops as mentioned sounds negative but I’d argue it’s what TikTok and social media consumers enjoy the most.

> Downloading and using TikTok is a personal choice and you’ve allowed it by doing so as an individual.

Not if it interferes with security of the country.

The same personal choice argument is what folks use to justify other choices that are bad (refusing well test vaccines, not paying taxes, etc.)

I view it more like a vice (smoking, gambling, etc) and as mentioned we need an actual thoughtful policy if we think it’s a security issue.

Banning one app at a time is not the way.

Almost vices are regulated.

> Banning one app at a time is not the way.

True, let us ban *all* apps from countries that (1) ban US apps and (2) seek to influence US citizens.

> True, let us ban all apps from countries that (1) ban US apps and (2) seek to influence US citizens.

My view is the "app" is just a client for information sharing. It would be like putting up a firewall or banning traffic from certain TLD's. Seems ironic that the solution is to mimic the problem.

Isn't the logic reversed in this case? Spying on US citizens is fine as long as you aren't the US government. Hence 5 eyes and so on.

Should other countries ban facebook, instagram, twitter, youtube, google, etc?

There is a very relevant difference between a country which affords you civil rights surveiling you, and a country that you are not a civilian of surveiling you.

Its not just about being "fine" with one surveiling you and not the other.

So many argument threads on HN (and other discussion platforms) could be avoided if people understood that level and degree of issues matter.

It seems to always start from blanket statements or false dichotomies where "if your country does X why are you not ok with C country doing X?" and completely ignoring the nuances in between.

And in this case it's even C country going Y.

They are better though? People don't routinely go disappearing (at least on the same scale) and there are free and (mostly) fair elections. It isn't perfect but it isn't the same beast.

The US is not better or worse than an autocracy?

Their post is exactly the kind of non-blatant thing that would be used to undermine US interests on TikTok.

Any thread criticizing China on HN is full of logical fallacy, whataboutism, and other similar bad faith arguments that gum up the discussion.

Contrarianism runs rampant on HN and is easily weaponized by bad actors.

Surveillance isn't the primary issue. INFLUENCE OPERATIONS is. China's ability to direct content to achieve their strategic goals, and to do so at a very granular level, is too great a risk. Its not the only property with this capability (cough, 4chan/pol/, cough), but its by far the largest.

Aren't influence operations free speech?

(thread locked after 1,397,957 comments)

Yes. So is yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre. Nothing is without limits, and with out limits we are nothing.

>So is yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre.

A course of action so blatantly legal that a Supreme Court Justice used it as an example for what is clearly allowed, dislikeable though it may be.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...

There is no right for foreign governments to have free speech in the US. If they are outside of the US they do not get US rights.

> China's

Tiktok is not China, Tiktok is owned by a private company

All the arguments that you are using can be successful leveraged against any Inqtel funded private company (of which there are plenty), so I'd recommend you to speak in a measured way

In China, private companies large enough cannot operate without a fair amount of control and involvement of some layer of the CCP. https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/china-business...

Absolutely not. China is an authoritarian state with no rule of law other than what the CCP says goes. There are no meaningful firewalls between corporate operations and the Chinese government.

Seriously. The only problem the FBI’s owners have with TikTok is that they can’t police the content

They're very clearly "better". What an insane assertion.

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