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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

State run apps that are designed to "nudge" and manipulate population at a large scale, should be classified as weapons and banned.

This is not a regular app, but part of information warfare China is engaged in with the West.

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The US is known for involvement in the policies of other nations and even organising coups etc. With documented access of the American government into the American tech giants, I don't have reason to believe that Instagram is any different than TikTok. What makes you think that CIA didn't infiltrate Meta or made a deal to manipulate political situation in its friends and foes? What makes you believe that they won't work with Musk to achieve their goals?

The TikTok situation is new for the USA but it's nothing new for the rest of the world.

Yes, and the CCP has banned Instagram and Facebook because they understand that those are ultimately tools for subtly shaping mass opinion, regardless of whether it's clear that they're used for that purpose. Why would the US not do the same with TikTok?

> Why would the US not do the same with TikTok?

Millions (?) of Americans have freely chosen to receive and interact with the app, wouldn't their freedom of speech allow them to enjoy the content they choose?

Freedom of speech doesn't mean consuming content. Indeed there appears to be no such right in the constitution. The only protections would be for the publisher of the content, so I suppose Bytedance could challenge this law on free speech grounds.

Millions (?) of Americans have freely chosen to use cocaine, wouldn't their freedom of doing what they want with their bodies allow them to enjoy the drug they choose?

Yes but unironically.

But they're not choosing the content. Algorithm -> Tiktok -> China -> Communist party is.

Who specifically is in charge of the algorithm at Twitter? Keep in mind the recent foreign interest financing and editorial changes. How are we certain they have our best American Interests™ at heart?

I'm not trying to play the whatabout card, I'm trying to understand how we would legally articulate what TikTok has done to justify banning by congressional decree. The senate bill [1] doesn't appear to have any measurements or values or clarifications, it's just a few paltry pages that never specify what line TikTok crossed. The only argument I'm hearing is China=Bad.

And who knows, maybe China is nefariously manipulating the TikTok algorithm, but for the US government to step in and say "these ideas are too dangerous, you can not access them," seems like the cure is as bad as the disease. It's using blatant authoritarianism to try to stop the spread of potential authoritarianism.

[1] https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/1ebac814-15...

I don't think that's quite true. The CCP banned communication platforms it couldn't censor before there were algorithmic feeds.

Facebook and Instagram were banned because they wouldn't obey China's censorship and surveillance laws, not because they were western tools of influence or whatever.

If other countries feel that way, they should probably ban Instagram.

In my opinion, the difference is that insta (Meta) controls US government more than the government controls insta. I don't believe that's the case with tik tok and the CCP.

If Meta controlled the US Government, TikTok would have been banned years ago!

>The US is known for involvement in the policies of other nations and even organising coups etc

If they don't like that they should be free to ban social media being used in that way.

[flagged]

"Yes, the US was / is doing bad things, so other countries should be allowed to do bad things too!"

Strawman argument.

What doesn't make it a regular app? It's similar looking to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others to me?

With that logic the EU should ban Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/Twitter

Legislation how data is acquired/stored/used will solve every problems, banning the people you don't like only solve one specific problem and makes you look like a fool

The US built a monopoly on online social media and communications, this move is another evidence that it wants to remain the sole big eye

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies...

Hope the third world countries understand this and ban Twitter and Meta apps.

My question for you: why stop at state-run ones?

This is true! But also much worse; agents from the CCP appears to have infiltrated Google and META and have injected primitive versions of TikTok into both the YouTube app and the Instagram app. No one is safe and the communist conspiracy reaches the highest level!

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