South Dakota first to ban TikTok on state-owned devices
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
One minute video that explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hus9fWz0RRk
Further reading: https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-passes-sweeping-re...
It is not clear to me how universally these regulations are enforced.
My skepticism requires that I go there? This is a different definition of skepticism than I was previously aware of. During the Cold War, I was skeptical of many of the claims about the evil Soviets. I did not have the opportunity then to visit. Was I not a proper skeptic?
Universally? There is only one tiktok. But in general the ministry of culture and security handle that. They literally employ millions of people to assist in watching what anyone says online. You online entity is connected to your national card. Go check it out for yourself you won't believe it until you see it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-24396957
Let me know if you need any help navigating a search engine but you should be able to put similiar keywords and get a variety of information from any number of sources.
One of the sibling comments guided me to https://www.douyin.com where ten minutes of browsing was enough to disprove the claim "the algorithm is specifically tuned to reward dumb content in the US, compared to rewarding STEM and other educational content in China".
The more stupid things you look for, the more stupid things you see. Its the same in the us as it is in china.
But usually the biggest problem is how to get a Chinese phone number. In China, most apps require you to register with a phone number (+SMS verification), which is your de facto personal identity number.
Back to the topic, I can confirm this for you. Douyin is also serving shit to Chinese children and the Chinese government do "regulate" them. And of course, between STEM content and shit, most Chinese children I have met (well, genius do exist), prefer shit.
Perhaps a distinction without a difference
The first could be viewed as a attack vs. the latter is a mere choice of the states involved.
If the Chinese government were forcing TikTok to promote "dumb" content to citizens of adversary countries, then that would be a bit more nefarious.
But that is what happened. The CCP went on a huge clampdown on the newer internet companies around that time that Jack Ma was abducted and passed numerous laws censoring and limiting what people could do online, such as how long teenagers could play video games.
In China, all companies with more than 50 employees are legally obligated to have dedicated Chinese Communist Party representatives overseeing, according to Harvard Business Publishing (https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/R1403J-HCB-ENG). Social media companies? They probably have tons of mandatory representatives guiding the system. ByteDance also had a "nominal" 1% ownership taken by the Chinese government, which then got 1 of 3 board seats supposedly from that investment (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese...).
So you have a company which is absolutely at the size where dedicated CCP representatives are mandatory, with a board seat possessed by a representative of a state-owned enterprise. How much separation is there, really? Add to that, TikTok has been censoring the Uighur genocide, Tiananmen Square riots, Falun Gong, so forth despite not operating in China, as well documented (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...) and (https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/xinjiang-china-...). If you censor things in non-Chinese nations to please the Chinese government, plus the earlier facts, you're controlled.
Finally... putting that together, it is safe to say TikTok is under substantial control of the CCP. What does every Chinese student, and almost every Communist Party leader, learn in their schools (for being a communist leader has mandatory education in many things, including lessons taken from the fall of the USSR, to avoid such a fate)?
"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." - Sun Tzu
I think a narrow set of outlooks is bad for the general population.
If you think TikTok deliberately prioritizes dumbed down content then why does Facebook or Fox news also do it?
I'm dead serious. Go on Facebook, Twitter, even Fox News, how many images can you find without revealing clothing, suggestive poses, suggestive dances, etc.? Not far.
For them, it's a financial motive. For TikTok, because it is so bottom of the barrel, I think it has both financial and strategic motive.
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-demands-google-...
To me at least, it comes off as red meat for the base.
TikTok is a private company that wants to make money. If it could make more money by showing Chinese audiences more trashy content, it absolutely would. And in fact, it does show a great deal of mindless content in China.
However, as is well known, China has recently been trying to regulate children's use of the internet (e.g., time limits on internet gaming). If companies were already willingly doing what the Communist Party wants, the Chinese government wouldn't have to pass these new regulations in the first place. And guess what happens when the government passes these sorts of regulations? Companies immediately start looking for ways to skirt them.
> legally obligated to have dedicated Chinese Communist Party representatives overseeing
No, at least legally, these committees have no oversight role in private companies. Companies with over 50 employees are required to allow a Party committee to organize and meet, but it doesn't have a role in management.
There are far too many grand statements nowadays about how China works, coming from sources that don't actually seem to be very familiar with the country. There is a very strong tendency in the West now to view everything about China through a paranoid lens. The truth is usually much more boring.
In this case, the truth is that Douyin (TikTok in China) has plenty of trashy content, but that there's more government regulation than before.
The more I read about China the more paranoid I get. I don't think they haven't earned it.
What you read from afar and what you see on the ground are very different. Imagine if all you heard about the US were constant stories about gun violence, drone strikes and homelessness. You'd have a very distorted view of life in America. That's basically the situation with China, if your only point of reference is what you read in the English-language media.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/19/families-biden-admi...
I should have visited China back when it was opening up and relations were relatively friendly. But now that we have entered a new Cold War it's too late, I missed my chance.
I don't know what, specially, is happening in the 200 cases described by the Politico article you linked to. Politico mentions one accusation of drug trafficking and another of spying.
Except for the part where that law would end up being declared unconstitutional, and rightly so. Then again, if TikTok has no US ownership, perhaps it would pass constitutional muster. 1A doesn't specifically mention US citizens or US-owned corporations, though, just that that government shall pass no laws abridging the freedom of speech, so maybe not.
There are plenty of laws forcing companies to engage in certain kinds of behavior. The latest I've seen is the beer manufacturing / distribution / sales breakup as a result of the post-prohibition policies. Manufacturers can't distribute, distributors can't sell to consumers and so-on.
I think people might not tolerate such govt interference, but assuming it's law I don't think it'll be unconstitutional.
Alcohol is a separate issue entirely. The 21st Amendment gives states broad authority to control distribution.
You can't really prove that. They have their own influencer culture that looks just as vapid as ours.
Interest in drier, more educational content is less for every human society I know of.
Is the European programming you're impressed with publicly funded by any chance?
But I agree with you. My wife and I are doing thr digital nomad thing traveling across the US staying in hotels. The first thing I do when I arrive is plug in my Roku stick.
Having a publicly funded TV network goes a long way to producing good content.
Similar thing happened to G4 tech TV.
By the late 00s/early 10s it was all Pawn Stars and American Pickers.
"recommendation algorithms operated by a publicly-owned company must bias towards intellectually stimulating content"
How would you even define "intellectually stimulating content" in juristical clear terms?
If I would want to increase the general level of science education (I strongly do), I would increase funding to schools and enable them to have fun experiments with the students of all sorts.
I love science, ever have and my teachers did the best they could, but even to me school was booring as hell.
This is an extremely misleading line of reasoning.
Publicly traded companies are not 'public' in the same sense as publicly owned airwaves, public (that is, government) employees, and public property. They don't cede any constitutional rights simply by offering equity for sale in the capital markets.
At any rate, there is a process for amending the Constitution, so if you want the First Amendment to change such that the federal government has a clear mandate to do this sort of thing, feel free to campaign for that. But just repeated violation by the state is not that process.
That's... not the same as a service on the internet, at all.
You're also talking about a completely different regulation regime. The FCC rules prohibit certain (fairly narrow?) things, largely "obscenity". A regulation that requires a company to actively promote certain things is... not even remotely the same.
My suspicion, which is mostly just me thinking out loud and is based on no real evidence, is that folks are (a) largely desensitized to stimulation due to aggressive "marketing" (in the loosest sense of the word - whether ads, click/viewbait, or other quasi-exploitative attention-grabbing things); and/or (b) have observed that, culturally, a lot of "dumb shit" is mainstream enough (in terms of critical mass within their social microcosm) to warrant conformity, and thus may be a preference that is adopted for identity or inclusivity purposes. Similarly, it may be seen as a pathway to some form of success or recognition (see: IG/YT influencers, tiktok fads, etc).
I'm sure other, much smarter folks have actual evidence or have performed studies (and I would be interested in learning more), but based on my personal experience, the above seems to hold true, generally speaking.
I'd say it depends on the politicians themselves. I'd say populists don't mind the people's stupidity and misery at all, because they turn that into an advantage for themselves, by very publicly providing, or even just promising, a short term relief for them. In this way, systemic issues like the welfare trap or wage slavery give them opportunity to inflate their popularity by organizing handouts, or by redirecting the people's misery to outgroups, such as non-heterosexuals, people of color, immigrants or other marginalized groups like people with addictions.
This survey showed a growing number of people who want to be social media stars[1] as fewer want to pursue STEM. I can't picture a healthy society that makes this decision. You can't shun important roles of society collectively and then hope everything works out.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-youtube-star-a...
When I was 12 all my friends wanted to be rock stars or professional skateboarders. I seriously doubt the causation between what children want to be in the age group of 8-12 and what they grow up to become.
I think in reality, preparation for STEM takes years. It helps to have an education that fosters interest at a young age as well. I am specifically questioning the priorities of the US's view of education. As I said, we rely heavily on H1-B and have very large foreign populations in STEM degrees. Social media may not be the cause. What matters is that there clearly isn't early interest. Early interest translates to having more graduates. As I posted elsewhere, there is a clear difference in what degrees foreign students pursue in the US (more STEM) versus what US students pursue. This seems like a difference in values that I think we should examine.
On the other hand, more focus on STEM education broadly would translate to higher enrollments and self reliance. This also assumes that out performing immigrant families assimilate. Non-assimilation would exacerbate the bifurcation.
Huh? Anecdotally, I have never heard this sentiment before.
foreign students accounted for 54% of master’s degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees issued in STEM fields in the United States in SY2016-2017.
We rely on tens of thousands of H1-B visas per year to fill STEM roles which has been debated for years. We have accepted we have to import people to sustain our economy. I am questioning the merits and sustainability of these views and whether Americans have a unhealthy view of education. We certainly hold these visa holders to higher standards than ourselves. Why?
The US is extremely lucky to have a large percentage of the top research universities in the world, so every year, it Hoovers a fairly large fraction of the best students worldwide, who naturally want to go to the best programs and work with the best scientists.
This is a positive feedback loop. The US has the best research universities, so it gets the best students. The best students come to the US, where they do research and maybe stay on as professors, so the US has the best research.
If the US were to consciously try to "Americanize" its STEM programs, that would fundamentally undermine the very thing that makes research in the US so strong - its ability to constantly draw in the top talent worldwide.
Some of my favorite people I know are foreign stem grads. But I have also met some who have nothing but contempt for uneducated americans. To tie this to my original post I do wonder if this is not only a security risk but a cultural risk which creates a mostly foreign immigrant group with high caste status in the US that is hereditary/permanent based on university admissions policies. There is lowered expectations for non immigrants.
The most provable issue is the security issue though not the cultural issue. A thought experiment: would France or Japan or China accept that their most elite people are heavily foreign? Probably not. One can imagine why this might be an issue. Professors with dual citizenship can leave at any moment and during a war that could devastate us. What real loyalty do they have?
My remedy is to nationalize an effort to focus less on tiktok dances, followers, and selling foot pics and more on education. It's what other countries are doing and I am afraid if the US doesn't react it is heading towards decay.
Look at the list of people who developed the atom and hydrogen bombs for the United States. They were overwhelmingly foreign-born.
Imagine you moved to another country at age 22, studied there, got married there, raised kids there, and built your career there over the course of 20-30 years. You would not simply "leave at any moment."
Many of them were from countries that were at war with the United States, like Germany and Italy.
George Gamow, one of the most important American physicists ever, was born in Russia, educated in the USSR and began his career there, before defecting to the US. He didn't work on the Manhattan Project, but he did consult on other military projects during WWII. There are lots of other examples of Soviet-American physicists, including one of the inventors of quark theory (George Zweig) and the one of the people who formulated perhaps the most famous paradox in quantum mechanics (Boris Podolsky).
> Surely this is something to think about before creating a caste of foreign high skilled workers and academics?
Casting suspicion on students and scientists in the United States because they come from "enemy" countries is not a healthy thing for society to do. I also object to your use of the word "caste." Castes are hereditary groups with defined roles in society. What we're talking about here are simply smart people who did well in school, and managed to get into top universities.
I call it a caste deliberately for those reasons. It is hereditary I believe whether through socioeconomic status or genetics or culture or legacy status. It's already becoming apparent. There may or may not be social consequences. I fear there will be.
Most of the foreign-born STEM graduates I've come across in the US are not from a hereditary caste. I'd even say most of them are from the first generation in their families to obtain such a high level of education.
Legacy is something very different. It pertains mostly to undergraduate admissions at elite universities, and almost by definition, foreign-born students are not the main beneficiaries.
Given how much population and economic growth the main sources of foreign exchange students had during the same period, what we see is expected unless we actively tried to limit foreign exchange students. Native students aren't being replaced, they are still there.
We don't depend on visas to 'sustain' our economy. We use immigration to keep the massive comparative advantage we have had for the last ~80 years (since WW2). It's classic brain drain and the US has been on the winning side for most of recent history.
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1025193562/the-u-s-attracts-f...
I don't blame the foreign students for this, but it's important to understand what's really driving the current situation.
Yes I work in BigTech and I’m one of only a very few native English speakers on my team and probably in my wider department. I never look at my coworkers and think if it weren’t for them I would be making even more than 3x to 4x the median income in the US.
Even on the corp dev side, after 3 or four years and one job hop, you can make twice the median income in any major city in the US.
You should think that, though: their presence is helping reduce wages, including yours. The fact that labor in tech is relatively well paid compared to other fields is entirely irrelevant.
For context: I’m not bragging, I’m not officially a software engineer by title and I only fell into BigTech three years ago at 45 by doing a slight pivot from software engineering. I’m still paid less than an equivalent mid level software dev at my own company.
Not that I’m complaining I work remotely from - all over the US.
The Slack channel is anonymous via a Slack workflow that posts on your behalf. As part of the workflow, it allows you to self identify your ethnicity and location.
If you stymie immigration, what’s to stop companies from just expanding their overseas offices?
I don't think immigration is a cost free win for America in 100% of the cases. I am worried we are creating a caste of elite immigrants and their progeny who occupy the country's most elite positions and we're prioritizing foreign education to the detriment of US citizens. We have no reason to make things more competitive here if we can just import people from another country. It's bizarre to do this on a lot of different levels.
I think we should do what China is doing with their own citizens and try to make Americans more competitive and then we could talk about skilled immigration.
As an American citizen you wouldn’t want to be considered a “diversity hire” would you?
And holding up China and Japan as exemplars of economic development is not the winning argument you think it is…
yes. ~350M vs ~7B (1.2B China, 1.1B India) means more elites in the bigger population. I am talking only about immigrant visas, not foreign offices. I have no problem with foreign offices hiring people from that country. I do take issue with continuous importation of elite-skilled people. This is doubly so if our education system relies on importing the best people rather than home growing them or trying to remain competitive. There is evidence Americans are declining in STEM right? we should try to reverse that.
I am less concerned about the short term economy as I am with turning the US into a global free for all for the best that US citizens can't possibly compete with presently. It could turn into a death cycle for current Americans. Surely that isn't sustainable or healthy. No doubt, dropping H1-B numbers would lower GDP but we should build it back more sustainably.
And until this year, any CS grad that spent time practicing interviewing and could “grind LeetCode” for six months could get a job in tech. College teaches nothing that helps CS grads be employable at most companies.
Other countries graduate more prepared students because they don’t believe in the bullshit that college is meant to make you a “better citizen of the world” and they prepare their graduates with useful skills
My theory is that it could open up more space in the top graduate schools and undergrad for Americans who didn't make the cut otherwise. Maybe we can improve on this. We could work on making standard education a little harder too to fill the gap we would need. It's going to be hard competing globally though. We may need to bring people in but I believe the numbers we have are very high right now. I would like to see the mean of america become more educated and richer and more skilled as opposed to just the extremes.
BTW, click on the time on the post to reply when the reply link isn’t available.
If you want to verify it yourself, go to China, open Douyin. Plus, the story makes internal sense - for example, pornography and the kind of soft-core porn, heavily revealing clothing, and so forth that appears on TikTok is actually illegal in China. Post it, you'd get it censored and removed.
Your opinion on reputation is just that.
Politifact "fact check", or really anything that calls itself s fact check, isn't a reliable proxy for forming opinion from primary sources.
I'll also say that Instagram is just as much trash as TikTok, but it's our trash instead of china's.
Infinite-scroll short form trash content is this generation's trash TV, yet more addictive.
And you won’t believe me when I say this, but in US-China diplomatic terms, an official saying a technology “allows them…if they want to” to perform influence operations means they already are.
As further corroboration, Andrew Schultz revealed earlier this week on the PBD podcast that sources at the State Dept confirmed these influencing operations were happening in the US via TikTok
I am quite critical of TikTok, of people who have it installed on their phones, and as someone who unfortunately has Instagram for certain reasons, I see the same mechanisms of hypertracking and attempts to push addictive mind-melting entertainment and softcore porn to people.
I am unaware of legitimate critique's of Chris Wray as head of the FBI, but that's besides the point, I suppose. At least we have a comedian on a business writers' podcast to tell us about it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/11/30/tik...
I've seen China blamed for a lot of things, some legitimate, but they didn't force Americans to pick the Kardashians over engineering degrees. American public discourse is becoming that Eric Andre show meme except it's "why did China make me do this"
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-passes-sweeping-re...
https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...
CBS 60 Minutes Interview with an IT expert just 3 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0xzuh-6rY
America could easily do what China did here: enforce regulations on what kind of content social media companies can show minors. Just banning TikTok won't prevent Instagram from running the same playbook on Reels, it's not like Instagram has been the standard for teen mental health in the past 10 years. Douyin isn't educational in China due to the goodness of their hearts, it came from regulation.
The issue is, good luck trying to enforce any sort of corporate regulation in the US.
How?
If the problem is solely TikTok, then it most likely stems from the fact you don't like TikTok is owned by the Chinese (and you are more likely to believe nefarious claims that Xi Jinping personally told the TikTok CEO to make America dumber) which is sinophobic. You don't like TikTok just because it's a chinese company serving you the same garbage as an American one.
I believe there are valid reasons to ban TikTok, especially on state-owned devices, given the amount of data they exfiltrate, but "they are poisoning the American youth" is not a good one.
It's not sinophobic to distrust the Chinese government. Are the Chinese protestors sinophobes?
If you want TikTok banned in the US because you believe that they promote dumb content as part of some strategic Chinese plot and you conveniently ignore Meta and Google, I'm going to assume that your reasoning comes from irrational fear of the Chinese. It doesn't make sense to distrust the Chinese when they are doing the same thing as Americans (unless you don't like them just because they are Chinese).
The fact that TikTok has ties to the CCP is simply another data point supporting the need for such regulations.
People here don’t hate Chinese people. They hate the CCP.
No one is here defending their own government. Most people in most countries will freely admit when their governments do stuff that’s wrong.
But only CCP shills are here defending the CCP and trying to justify genocide, cross border arrests, mass censorship, etc etc.
For the record. Do I support my government being the NZ government. Nope. They are trying to pass some laws to prevent the next government from being able to roll anything back. Cement the things they implement even if the citizens disagree.
Nobody in the US gets confused when someone from Europe complains about US government military actions and calls them racist. Perhaps you too can learn that criticisms of the CCP have nothing to do with the Chinese citizens?
You’ve subtly insinuated that anyone pointing out some criticism of China must be calling everyone racist.
Has it occurred to you that some are indeed racist? In fact it is not OP pointing out the poster is racist, but they explained why such random allegations can be construed as racist. It is in fact his detractors who are attacking his motivation at a personal level (calling him a CCP shill) and trying to discredit his valid viewpoint without offering any reasoning.
There’s no evidence—nor is it even a good hypothesis—that somehow Tiktok is actively trying to subvert American society by feeding it garbage content. Such a conclusion is only reachable if you have an inherent bias that the motives in China towards the West are always evil. As others pointed out America produces and consumes garbage content well before TikTok… as well as companies like Meta literally copying tiktok features in shoveling garbage content… so twisting this narrative to antagonize and reframe China as the bad actor—at least in this specific case—is one rooted in inherent bias and laziness. Have you considered that the difference is simply because the Chinese government, with their well known heavy handed authoritarianism, simply not allowing TikTok to do that within China? Is western society so flawless that it is unwilling to accept its own failures that it must accuse others of active subterfuge instead?
I won’t argue with you about this anymore at a fundamental level because the issue at hand is that you are among many blindly discrediting and disregarding opposition. So I’ll ask you this for your own contemplation: is it even possible to say something or make an argument that just coincidentally isn’t anti CCP that doesn’t get us labeled as a CCP shill? If you’re going to answer avoid personal attacks and avoid “CCP shill” because that is not using any “facts” and is just a blind attempt to discredit the arguments being made. No one called anyone a racist. Some arguments and ideas were labeled sinophobic but no one made the accusation that a person must be sinophobic and therefore their ideas must be as well. But you are doing exactly that, but instead calling us CCP shills…
The CCP uses pretty strong disinformation campaigns against any criticism of them with whataboutism and false equivalences of the Chinese people with the government to claim it is “racist”.
A flood of commenters crying “Sinophobia” every time there is an article about Muslim concentration camps, zero covid failures, etc gets quite old.
Even now, your comment is prattling on trying to equivocate the comments with racism despite it being very clearly about the CCP’s policies on TikTok.
So it’s probably better you stop trying to defend and justify the CCP. It just makes you look like a supporter of an authoritarian regime that commits genocide to its own people.
You cannot criticize the CCP while living in China and you know this.
There are probably ways to "hate the CCP" without hating Chinese people, but it's difficult to see how.
There is absolutely no basis to this claim unless there's an alternative party to compare to
What do you mean by they don't know?
What are they going to do even if they did know?
It's not like they can (short of an armed rebellion) demand to have another political party or government.
It's like saying a thug is robbing me at gunpoint so I give him my wallet. You only observe that I give my wallet therefore giving that guy my wallet was good for me and fail to observe the gun.
The Russian government has been actively doing it during the war in Ukraine, trying to accuse all of Europe and the US for having "Russophobia". Turns out autocrats rhyme with each other.
There is some CCP scheme to use TikTok to turn American society lazyand teach some Stems sounds very conspiracy to me. Paranoia and conspiracy thinking are the symptoms of xenophobia.
In my home country, Youtube recommendations are mostly related to porn and I have to use VPN to access good-quality content on Netflix. Should I assume the US want to turn my countrymen stupid and horny. Or should I use my critical thinking youtube recomend things that are popular in my Country.
Most xenophobes tend to be pretty clear what their opinions are and rarely deny them. Also occam's razor applies. Why assume that they're xenophobic when they repeatedly deny being xenophobic and say that they don't like the chinese government (which is the more rational opinion to take)? Ask such people what they think about Chinese people and it'll become rather clear whether their viewpoints come from xenophobia or not.
> In my home country, Youtube recommendations are mostly related to porn and I have to use VPN to access good-quality content on Netflix. Should I assume the US want to turn my countrymen stupid and horny. Or should I use my critical thinking youtube recomend things that are popular in my Country.
That sounds like a "you problem". Youtube in general does not have much porn. If you're being recommended it somehow then you or someone who shares an ip address with you has been actively searching it and it has narrowed it's suggestions to suit your "interests".
Also this tiktok issue is a reverse situation. Tiktok shows one thing to China and something else to every other country. It's not just the US.
YouTube recommends different things from one country to another. It is the same for news and other entertainment site. For some content I have to use VPN. I think it is either due to legal issue or recommendation algorithm not brainwashing.
I was recommended porn-related stuff maybe it is because of my usage pattern or my geo locations , and maybe it is the same things with Tiktok, American like to see stupid things.
> I was recommended porn-related stuff maybe it is because of my usage pattern or my geo locations , and maybe it is the same things with Tiktok, American like to see stupid things.
You accuse of people of racist conspiracies, but then you act racist right here.
This TikTok conspiracy theory (it's an operation designed by the Chinese government to dumb down American youth) is exactly like the sorts of antisemitic conspiracy theories one hears about Israel. It is not like the legitimate criticisms of Israel's actions in the West Bank.
Where do you get get these ideas when people repeatedly tell you that it's not the case?
Isn’t this the same for quite nearly anything a Westerner would’ve heard of that comes from China?
Genuine question. I thought that was a sort of common knowledge type thing.
I never come across anti China or anti US content.
I tried tiktok for a day and was bombarded with anti US content. Videos blaming the US for covid. Videos saying that covid started in the US, created by the US, etc. Videos that the US is using Taiwan to start a war with China.
I deleted tiktok and have it blocked.
You can defend China all you want. But it doesn’t change the fact that the CCP is using it to spread propaganda.
Anti China content is just facts. If a video comes out saying there’s protesting in China due to zero covid. That’s not fake news. It’s not propaganda. It’s just something happening and CCP bots will scream “anti China anti China”
You can’t do that on tiktok.
I specifically called out Facebook and Instagram. It’s not flooded to death with propaganda.
And you are surprised, you don't find Sinophobia.
I deleted tiktok about an hour after signing up so obviously my claim isn’t based on any significant data. And I also don’t claim to say this is prevalent.
But I never searched anything. I’m not from the US. And while on YouTube I do watch some content in relation to what’s happening in the US, China, Ukraine, Iran. It’s not a playlist. 98% of what I watch is movie trailers and tech videos.
Even on Instagram and Facebook 99% of what I watch is food related.
So I don’t expect my experience to be taken as absolute fact that China is spreading a propaganda through tiktok. But it’s my experience and based on the propaganda on YouTube (videos of YouTubers being escorted around the exact same areas in Xinjiang as “proof” there’s no genocide) I think it’s likely that there is some propaganda to paint the US in bad light.
Twitter and Facebook are both banned in China, isn’t it? Is that because the CCP is afraid of western ideals if freedom? Or is it protectionism? Put differently, is it because of ideological or because if commercial reasons or perhaps both?
Because, to follow your thinking, why does the CCP not simply regulate them using the same rules as is uses for homegrown companies like TikTok?
They do, which is why TikTok is blocked. Only Douyin, a separate content silo with shared codebase, is allowed to operate. Products by American companies like Facebook or Google Search that are now blocked used to censor the content they made available in China, but then stopped.
Other products by American companies, like Microsoft's Bing and Google Ads, continue to censor and continue to operate.
People on the English-speaking internet often seem to think that American companies' difficulties operating in China stem from them being specially and unfairly singled out, but the thing is that Chinese companies operating in China have to fight the same obstacles. And the majority of companies trying to make it big in China are Chinese, so they bear the brunt of the burden.
When a company building a platform for user-generated content gets more users and more content, that would usually be something for them to celebrate, but in China it also means they need to spend more resources censoring content to remove everything that might displease the government.
E.g. HelloTalk, a language-exchange app made by a Chinese company, restricted their Chinese users' accounts in 2020, most likely because some were using the app to talk about censored topics: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/glf14q/wh...
Other Chinese companies abandon the Chinese market completely and focus on the rest of the world while blocking Chinese users from accessing their product so they don't have to fear getting shut down by the government over lacking censorship.
If you want to lessen the impact of this crap on your kids, then you need to pass regulations that prevent all social media companies from doing it. Just banning the foreign ones does nothing but artificially prop up Facebook.
If you want TikTok banned in the US because they don't have proper data hygiene and you believe that data could be used by the CCP in the future that is fair.
If you want TikTok banned in the US because you believe that they promote dumb content as part of some strategic Chinese plot and you conveniently ignore Meta and Google, I'm going to assume that your reasoning comes from irrational fear of the Chinese. It doesn't make sense to distrust the Chinese when they are doing the same thing as Americans (unless you don't like them just because they are Chinese).
>imputes a motive onto your peers
If my peers don't realize they are are repeating sinophobic talking points, they should be made aware of them. My concern is chiefly that sinophobia is simply a vector that allows American social media giants to get rid of competition without being forced to clean up their own backyards. If your concern is "algorithmic dumb content", then just banning tiktok is the wrong solution. Secondly, the reason why China has different content on TikTok is through government regulation, and we could do the same thing here! It's not a Chinese conspiracy that keeps Americans from regulating corporations.
Try replacing red with black or jewish and look how it sounds.
That chinese users get STEM content is because of the enforcement by the CCP, that US users get stupid content is because of their freedom of choice. People loved stupid stuff on FB and YT way before TikTok.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-21/hsbc-form...
Except they don't?
1993 company law stipulates party committees are formed in any org with 3 or more CCP members... Trivial conditions to meet when party membership is like 1/8 of workforce and committees have been limited to dumb shit like organizing staff picnics not influence operations. Many chinese high up enough in company leadership/board will naturally be CCP members as you'll find democrats/republicans in a US board who has political affliation for upward mobility. And with respect to Chinese leadership / board members, they're not wasting their time doing party committee duties. Committee chores gets pawned off to nobodies, who more often then not don't do shit outside of keeners advocating for benefits and better working conditions, which was why these committees were conceived in the first place. Recent Euro chamber of commerce surveys concluded there's no push to strengthen party influence in foreign companies.
"Party committees" is a non issue and hasn't been for 30 years, thinking otherwise, because bloomberg, known for pushing anti-PRC hitpiece is more or less eating "sinophobia" bait. Misattributing said reporting to insinuate CCP is forcing members onto board and leadership even more so. It's just facts.
It can’t be any of that! No! It must be sinophobia!
> Chinese human rights activists do not think banning TikTok strengthens human rights in China.
Source?
While I agree with you. On the face, it doesn't seem logical that banning TikTok in a foreign country would make things better in China. Even if TikTok were a pure propaganda arm ala Voice of America, it still doesn't have much to do with the treatment of people at home (where by the way it has 'good' policies to foster the development of the youth).
Yes, it's true the good things it does at home are mandated by the government.
Yes, it's true that in foreign countries those same mandates would be difficult and in some cases (maybe the US?) unconstitutional.
However, that's a logical argument which doesn't speak to the heart of the disagreement: TikTok could do good in foreign nations, but it explicitly chooses not to. It'd be easy for them to copy and paste their policies from China into other countries, but they work very hard to fill the feed with entertainment because it makes more money.
Oh please, all countries do it. The US uses Twitter and other social media to instigate civil unrest all over the world. Literal revolutions and genocides have been instigated over US-run social media platforms.
I don't know of a superpower that doesn't use the internet as a vector to sow discord and propagate misinformation.
If you want to ban TikTok for another reason (such as their incredibly poor data hygiene, such as tracking every action you do within their app browser), then that is fair and you can reasonably argue that point from the grounds of privacy and national defense.
My reasoning in calling it sinophobia is because if you actually care about "dumb content" the proper solution is REGULATION for ALL the social media companies. Singling out TikTok makes no sense at all.
If the Chinese and the Americans behaved identically in all other respects, this would be excellent logic. As they do not, it is spurious logic. I don't think you really believe that the Chinese style of governance and Chinese culture are the same as the American style of governance and American culture.
Put another way, there's an Australian law that can literally compel Australian coders to become secret agents and implant government backdoors into products they work on at their government's whim [0, 1]. It is not, and would not be, "aussiephobia" to not want to hire a person for whom this is a possibility, or to avoid products that Australian forced-backdoors are likely to be present in. Individual Australians are unlikely to support this, and shouldn't be individually blamed, but does that change the reality of the law?
>My reasoning in calling it sinophobia is because if you actually care about "dumb content" the proper solution is REGULATION for ALL the social media companies. Singling out TikTok makes no sense at all
I've heard it said that politics is the "art of the possible". From a fairness perspective, I'd love to see Western social media get a little regulated. From a harm-reduction perspective, sanctioning the Other social media is, at best, the first step to regulating everything else, and at worst, the only thing we're ever going to get.
[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/new_australia...
Are you claiming that TikTok is able to track users and bypass mobile phones opt in requirements for location data ? Yes I know they can do course tracking based on IP address.
This is why I reject any talk of regulating TikTok that doesn't apply equally to all social media.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3136168/tiktok-ow...
It’s all the same crap being served.
I also design productivity systems as part of my job, and found that watching TikTok in the laziest way possible can be an outstanding part of such a system.
We are long past the Horatio Alger bootstrapping days where we condemn procrastination and laziness out of hand. And yet Chinese government culture continues to try to speak with that always-on productivity-porn voice--fine, let them do it, see how it works out. They love to wax poetic about theoretical human machinery without giving attention to a reasonable duty cycle concept.
And keep in mind that they are simultaneously blocking a lot of that E-word they hate: Expression.
We now have much more deep, nuanced experience with productivity that exists and outperforms outside of that context.
IMO TikTok is better feared (if that's the lens) for the more rational, non-propagandistic reasons.
Those of us who were raised with this publication held over our heads grew up, checked it out, and do not hold it lightly in our considerations...in the right context it may be fine at face value but this is not one of those.
(Look up the name too. It has "old school industry/productivity concept" in its blood, even just as a general point of interest)
That’s not a dig, it was just completely obvious.
Deseret News isn't the source, their article just paraphrases from other sources (60 Minutes, Wall Street Journal, BBC).
The Chinese get the version with government enforcement of science and patriotism.
Freedom vs. Dictatorship.
The fact the western governments had their own balancing acts to maintain and didn’t do much still never stopped the media from being honest about it.
1. Chinese children prefer STEM content and the algorithm is providing that to them.
2. It's enforced by the Chinese government or someone who believes this kind of content will benefit the Chinese future.
In the case of #1, this is a cultural issue and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
In the case of #2, which I believe is what most folks who say this are suggesting, I can't imagine why children would then proceed to download the app, use it for hours a day, only to learn science and math. Sure, some may enjoy it (as some in the US would as well), but a vast majority of that market is going to reject this and delete it from their phone. In fact, we have this in the US -- we have educational TV shows, you can visit a library on your free time, etc, but kids don't do it-- because they're kids.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/tiktoks-china-equivalent-limits...
No idea if it is true but I think the US and Canada do not need foreign "help" in this department. Dumbification of the average Joes and Janes is a wet dream of every politician and big corps and thanks to advanced tech it is becoming more and more.
That western notice-me-culture has been obvious long before TikTok was a thing - consider reality TV, early YouTube, and the fact that several serial killers apparently murdered for the media attention.
Our own culture treats education as something that's not really that important. We promote sports stars with little to no educational background to ivy league universities. Hardly a teenage movie does not take a dump on 'math class'. Our kids are being told to dream and find their passions, but no-one considers them a failure if they get a D in the sciences. The student who excels is not praised societally, but shunned as a 'nerd'. Where 'hustle culture' exists, it is not seen as a way of achievement, but as a way to greater wealth, and almost always unpleasant.
Why then are we surprised that educational content does not perform well in the West?
As for the second link's part about TikTok promoting sexual confusion: Was it TikTok which started that discussion, or was it celebrities who made alternative sex/gender assignments cool (much like they made smoking cool in the 1950s), supported by pro-sex/gender-divergent activists? Imagine the backlash should TikTok decide to ban these topics from their platform.
The China distortion field
Anything normally would be laughed at would be considered dead true when comes to China...
Use your f*king mind...
Tiktok is called douyin in China.
When I just went to douyin.com, the first douyin was entitled "the role I play in your life is too vague." That douyin showed a beautiful women eating yogurt as her jacket was perpetually fallen off her bare shoulder. The second douyin was a rap video that showed a women modeling various clothes in different environments.
There are government regulations in China that censor and disallow twerking content, but I didn't see any stem videos, either.
When they deployed wfh, they used mfa. They banned Google authenticator out of the view Google can't be trusted. But told people to search the app store for any other mfa app. They one my wife found makes you wait for an ad run before it displays the code. It sometimes crashes and is generally terrible.
The point being banning certain apps seems far more political than well thought out.
TOTP is a standard (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6238), so I don't see how that wouldn't work.
TOTP is a standard, so anyone can implement it.
This is just a way to get the governor’s name out there as a VP candidate. Taking an anti-China stance sounds tough and decisive. She was pretty good getting her name out during COVID.
The recent protests in China have been suppressed by the CCP.
No doubt there are close to zero protest videos on TikTok.
There are protest videos on YouTube - though anecdotally YouTube management is attempting to suppress them because Google is tightly bound to China.
The question is, does it matter if protest videos are shown or hidden on social media? Can the videos shown on social media influence world affairs?
https://www.readingthechinadream.com/deng-yuwen-on-xi-jinpin...
This is not your usual "'free press'" fare and it is noteworthy for the both the designation of China under Xi as "totalitarian" and also its optimistic prediction of a new wave of democratization globally.
What excited the press (...and those whom you imply) was probably that anything happened in Xi's China, and that it happened in multiple places, and that CPC was not entirely successful in suppressing it even while having near total control.
So what is extraordinary about these protests -- something apparently very new in China -- is that they are directed at the cult of personality directly. I just did a google search to see if there ever were demonstrations in China against Mao during his reign. Xi's political game is role-playing some sort of Maoist / Stalinist state with him as maximum leader. He even publicly dismisses former grandees in front of foreign press. How did these Chinese dare to directly call for his removal in protests?
> Yes, there were reasonable protests against zero-Covid measures, no there was no revolution in progress.
"Finally, to borrow an image from Liu Cixin's novel The Three Body Problem, we should be psychologically prepared for Xi's totalitarian rule to enter a dark forest. Xi will rule China for at least another five years. But we should not be too pessimistic. No matter how long Xi stays in power, as I argued above, it is unlikely that another Xi Jinping will emerge after Xi steps down. The good news is that the hassle of fighting the pandemic with the zero-tolerance policy has awakened even more people. When social discontent reaches a tipping point and everyone believes in regime change, then change will come soon."
If the scale of the protests were laughably small and of no concern to the CCP, it could just be a coincidence that China announced their scientists have determined Omicron has ‘reduced pathogenicity’ [1], as a pretext to relaxing restrictions.
> no there was no revolution in progress.
Who said there was?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/foxconns-zhengzhou-plant-...
Fresh off the presses, courtesy of the paper of record:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/xi-loosens-up-it-...
Some tidbits:
"The government’s response, though, does not, of course, address the larger yearning for an end to autocracy."
"Those brave protesters have changed China’s national policy, and their broader yearning for rights can no more be extinguished than a virus; someday the Chinese Communist leadership will have to respond to that very human aspiration."
Howso? Google, YouTube, and Docs are banned over there. Their biggest stake is really just Android.
Any new contender would have to build out very quickly.
There are likely thousands of apps on every major app store with apps whose sole purpose is to fish out data from users and sold to different criminal or governmental entities.
That being said: I don't see why any government device should have access to any social media.
In the context of any other kind of trade relationship would it be acceptable for China to get unfettered access to foreign markets whilst blocking all access to its own?
I don't feel like its controversial to say that social media algorithms can be designed to manipulate people, or that this capability is especially dangerous in the hands of a hostile state. It seems to me like TikTok is ripe for weaponization in any future conflict between China and any other country.
Whataboutism would be saying it’s ok to abuse users on behalf of totalitarians not equally criticizing anyone who does so.
(At least with Twitter they had to bribe a Saudi lol)
Tik Tok, like anything run by the Chinese or other totalitarian regimes, is not very respectful of autonomy or freedom of expression, but I still want to know what went down at my old NGO after I was forced out -- I had thought the CEO worked for the Russians or something, she was so effective at destroying the organization like one of the sabotage guides I used to read in middle school on textfiles dot com, but one day I pop over to LinkedIn and she ended up working for Wal Mart, and the general counsel ended up at Tik Tok as people on Signal would do literally anything but connect me with a decent job but tell me the weirdest shit like "The Mayor of Albany beats his wife"
(Apparently one of my friends may have given their phone to some now dead FBI agent around the time I renewed my passport and loudly declared presidents last 8 years max and switched from learning javascript and CSS to learning Python and Metasploit.)
Anyways, Tik Tok sucks, Facebook sucks, all social media sucks. Delete your accounts and learn the value of verbal conversations in a room with NPR cranked to 11 on an analog radio you built yourself in a 3rd floor walkup with the door bolted and barricaded.
(Or maybe the above is disinformation... reader beware, you're in for a scare!)
China has rules that apply to all social media apps operating there, including rules on data storage, data sharing, and moderation. Those applications are not willing to follow those rules, and so aren't allowed in China. TikTok is willing to follow those rules, so is allowed.