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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

The Internet has been colonized by spies who work for corporations and governments, but it's been going on for well over a decade, as this article notes:

> "By the time ByteDance was founded in Beijing in 2012, Google had been reading our emails over our shoulders, Amazon had been watching us shop, and Twitter and Facebook had been mediating our messages to friends and foes for years. Indeed, Zhang Yiming, the millennial software engineer who set up ByteDance, modeled himself and aspects of his new company on Silicon Valley. Zhang, who briefly worked for Microsoft before going out on his own, was once fond of quoting Steve Jobs and Jack Welch."

It would be highly surprising if the ByteDance-Beijing relationship was all that different from the Google/Verizon-Washington relationship (2013):

https://www.corpwatch.org/article/verizon-and-google-helped-...

> "Technology companies willingly provided information to U.S. government agencies to help the Obama administration snoop on reporters from the Associated Press (AP) and Fox news in order to ostensibly crack down on leaks that pose a "threat" to national security."

View on HN

> relationship was all that different

It's not the relationships of the parties in control that worries me. It's the arrests and abductions of the people that concerns me.

Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.

The CCP is a completely different beast, it has no issues jailing people for speaking the wrong things, forcing it's citizens into reeducation camps, welding them locked into buildings and much worse.

>>posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.

I would not be so confident about that, at least until the US and other western countries wise up to the CCP's tactics, which may be starting. E.g., CCP is running overseas "police stations" to intimidate and harrass people oversead, and the US FBI finally just arrested two people doing so in New York City.

>>TikTok spied on me. Why?

Short answer, is that it, along with every other Chinese company, has no choice other than to bend to the will of the CCP. Plus, they have no ethical boundaries (other than crossing the CCP) in seeking absolute market position, and this journalist had done something to threaten that dominant position.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1170571626/fbi-arrests-2-on-c...

> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.

Let me think of groups of people in the US and if they have been treated like this - C language programmers...we'll there is Julian Assange.

> no issues jailing people for speaking the wrong things, forcing it's citizens into reeducation camps, welding them locked into buildings

China has more than four times the US population, yet the US incarcerates more people than China does. In that context it does not sound like much of a knock "China locks up less than a quarter of the people the US does!" Well - yes.

> the US incarcerates more people than China does

Yes, but mostly because of race, not politics. (Not that that's any better, but the underlying dynamic really is different.)

Right the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a good primer for this concept.

https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEw...

Same with this wiki page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St....

Where is the harvesting of organs chapter?

Didn’t we discuss medical experiments on people the other day? In the Us? Feeding women and babies radioactive substances?

> the underlying dynamic really is different

Is it? I believe every state, or its establishment, acts forcefully to protect against what they consider potential existential threats.

Given that the Western states and their establishment are atleast 2 centuries ahead of the curve of anyone else in terms of modern state apparatus, ideological basis (...), it is natural that we will observe distinct patterns of oppression and red lines. Most of the emerging powers are acutely sensitive to ideological challenges, challenges to the legitimacy of the establishment, precisely because they are the newly arrived and insecure in their position.

Someone mentioned Julian Assange. Why did US and UK come down so hard on this guy? Because he represents an existential threat: he represents dissident factions in their intelligence communities (5 eyes) and that layer of the system is central to their maintenance of power and they will -not- tolerate any challenges in that area.

So the equations defining the dynamic are identical. We just need to plug in the appropriate values for the equation's variables.

> Is it?

Yes.

> I believe every state, or its establishment, acts forcefully to protect against what they consider potential existential threats.

Of course. But just because they all have this one feature in common does not mean that they do not have additional features that distinguish them.

You are completely dodging the other poster's central point.

The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution.

Those are different problems and they need to be addressed. The war on drugs must end, policing culture and policies must be corrected, the US prison system must be corrected. Other options for dealing more effectively with various social and mental health problems must be instituted.

And none of that is the same as what China is doing to their people, nor does it absolve China of the wrongs it has committed. And it doesn't take the edge off of it either. Going to China can still get you locked up for reasons you don't understand because you said the wrong thing one time and forgot you even said it.

That actually is a more risky situation for most people than making sure they are not buying or carrying around the wrong plants. That is what comments such as the one you are responding to are actually worried about. It's not a raw numbers game for the individual, it's a question of "how easy is it for me or people I know to go to jail for what should be trivial actions?"

> The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution.

You completely ignored OP's example of Julian Assange, I guess?

There's a wide gap of a difference between "publishing something that is simply critical of the government" and "publishing classified / state communications", including massive information dumps of unredacted diplomatic cables.

Put it this way, if you can name a country that would not react in the exact same manner to the actions that the US did to Assange's actions, please let me know. I certainly can't think of any.

Wikileaks became very close to Russia in the end, anyways, not exactly a bastion of freedom and IMHO destroying any credibility Assange had. If Assange was on the "other side" and the classified stuff was from Russia, he'd probably have been "Novichoked" for what he did.

That's just the casus belli for the arrest - the real motivation changes over time. Drug laws have been used to target and disrupt various groups from Latinos and African Americans to hippies and anti-war protestors. First it was about racism and Hearst's economic interests, then about policing wrong think, then it was about the tough on crime wave, and now it's largely about protecting several lucrative industries.

I can go with the general feeling here, but to use that to put the US's behavior on par with China's, specifically with regard to each country's own citizens, that is definitely a point that would need some data to back it up. Data that is likely hard to get on both the US and China.

It seems that line of argument would get much deeper into how, how fairly, and on which groups, the various countries have tended to apply their laws.

For now I can fully grant that selective enforcement has and still does happen in the US. The legal system here definitely does leave that possibility open and prosecutors are elected officials, some of whom have provably gone after certain groups or individuals, hunting for a reason to put them in jail.

US politicians have literally said that their drug laws were motivated to attack ethnic and cultural/political groups.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Agreed, Nixon was a moron, basically everything his administration did was truly awful. The war on drugs must end, the people put in jail for having or consuming the wrong plants must be released, and the US government should make amends with those people. Anyone still alive who provably participated in that should go to jail for the rest of their lives, ideally occupying the same cells as the people they unjustly locked away.

The process of repairing the damage that was done should include large payouts for unjustly taking away years of those people's lives, if nothing else. I'm not exactly holding my breath on these points, but if we take seriously the idea that the world should become more fair and just over time, we're going to have to square with the wrongs that were committed in the name of unjust laws.

In the post you are responding to, what you see is me acknowledging that, in order to answer the specific questions: "Is the US just as bad as China on this?" or "Is what China does to it's citizens in order to suppress wrong-think being unfairly criticized in light of what the US does to it's citizens in order to suppress drug use and generally be racist about it?"; one would require good data on just how many citizens are sent to jail for what should be trivial acts of speaking their mind or consuming weird plants, and that data is unlikely to be available or good data if it exists since both countries have rather large incentives to make sure it doesn't.

Please also note that I fully granted Akiselev's point that selective enforcement happens in the US even now. There should be genuine outrage over this until it is changed. However, I understand why people can't even keep up with the sheer scale of the bullshit modern governments get up to.

Chinas drug laws are way harsher than US ones. Do their citizens not partake in drug use? It is actually a pretty interesting question, did the war on drugs work in China? They have harsh drug laws but do not have mass incarceration of drug users.

"Nowadays, the penalties for being caught with cannabis are severe. Offenders run the risk of receiving the death penalty for being in possession of just five kilograms or more. Additionally, strict sentences are imposed; anything from five years imprisonment to a life sentence."

Good questions, for another time perhaps.

I don't agree with the death penalty or cannabis prohibition, but 'just five kilograms' is about a 27 year supply for someone who smokes a couple of joints every day. It's not an amount you could have casually, you're definitely in it as a business.

>how easy is it for me or people I know to go to jail for what should be trivial actions?

Yes and PRC wrong think 99% of time gets you an invite to the police station to "drink tea" and sign a paperwork not to do it again. Maybe occasionally a write self criticism letter. Consequences are about as trivial as it gets. It generally takes enormous repeat and public offenses that gains popular traction to get administratively punished let alone end up in jail for the simple reason that PRC doesn't have mass networks of for profit prison that incentive internment. It takes extraordinary bad luck (i.e. % of become a trending author in particularly sensitive times) and to get punished / arrested for wrong think on the same level as Americans carrying the wrong plant, which is statistically a much riskier situation due to how US racial prosecution and internment system is incentivized. Ask PRC citizen how many people they know has been formally punished, even mildly, for wrong think vs Americans who know someone jailed for drug offense and the numbers will be revealing. In both raw numbers and ease of getting fucked over "trivial" offenses, PRC wrong think is much less riskier than US drugs. Which is not to say PRC wrong think wouldn't stack up poorly compared to other "liberal" countries, rather US internment is just that messed up.

>wrong think 99% of time gets you an invite to the police station to "drink tea" and sign a paperwork not to do it again. Maybe occasionally a write self criticism letter.

That is good to know. And genuinely new information for me. Thank you for contributing it.

And the details you offer do help calibrate something of an answer to the question you are responding to. Thank you also for being a great participant in that conversation!

> Ask PRC citizen how many people they know has been formally punished, even mildly, for wrong think vs Americans who know someone jailed for drug offense and the numbers will be revealing.

We should definitely like to have real data on that for both countries. It seems difficult to find though. In the mean time I take your seemingly first hand experience as insightful. Thanks again!

>"we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution."

I personally do not see much difference. Holding person in prison for profit is a result of corporations buying government. It is as political as it gets. Those people in my view are just as bad scam of the Earth their political counterparts in China.

With you on that point for sure. It is just as important for the US to end it's for-profit prison system as it is for China to stop punishing people for thinking the wrong thing.

They are dodging the point because whataboutism is an effective tactic on HN.

That's fine. The corrective for it is to name the bad conversational behavior where you see it, don't get too bothered about it, and demonstrate the kind of conversations you wish to have instead.

It's not terribly taxing to just say, "that's not the kind of conversation we want to have here" and go on to continue engaging with any specific points being made. And that's doable even when you suspect the post you are responding to might just be trolling. If there is an identifiable point, engage with that if you will, gently and patiently correct or ignore the rest. Kind of similar to being patient with a rowdy kid. Trolls don't get much out of it if they can't get your goat.

The sub-thread below still managed to take on a few people who just wanted to virtue signal with argumentative sniping but others showed up with good points and information, that part was good to see.

> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.

regretfully, being poor and in certain parts of the USA is sufficient to get sucked up by the system. no ideology necessary, just getting caught and loaning money for bail is enough to get swallowed by this beast.

i suppose the CCP pays for these systems directly? whereas the American way has a distributed system of crony 'entrepreneurs' (shoddy lawyers, loan sharks, court bureaucrats and so on) all keeping this system of private jails and other 'services' and industries built around people 'breaking the law'

Black activists accused of sowing discord

https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2023/05/04/black-activists-ac...

> Just because you advocate programs that are not aligned with or approved by the U.S. government, siding with anti-racist, anti-colonial forces should not make you a target of U.S. cointelpro actions, raids on the homes of citizens, and humiliating arrests.

> indicted on April 18 for allegedly working on behalf of the Russian government and Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a “malign influence campaign” designed to “sow discord” and “advance Russian propaganda.”

Interesting slant, given developments like this[0].

[0] https://catholicherald.co.uk/fbi-spied-on-american-catholics...

Your example is about what exactly? Yes Russia intervenes and China does too, you expect it to not be acted upon?

By the way in China as of this month saying something that is against national interest is punishable under espionage law. If they want they can jail you for using VPN to access something outside of great firewall.

I have very little to fear, on a personal level, from the CCP. They may or may not be collecting data on me, and I find that distasteful and somewhat scary, but they are not a direct threat to my personal liberty, safety or civil rights.

The NSA, CIA and the US intelligence-industrial complex, however, is a direct and credible threat to me. Perhaps not today, and hopefully not tomorrow, but as history has shown us, governments change, sometimes wildly so, in a short period of time while still holding the trappings and lip-service of their predecessors. If you dismiss the concerns about warrantless data collection, tracking, active suppression of free discourse and political targeting of people who ideologically threaten those in power (no matter the political background), well, you just haven't been paying attention.

If you run a business, visit or know someone from China you will be targeted. If you try to publish an article against China and have a high profile your secrets will come out.

But if you are nobody why worry about the NSA, FBI, etc they have better people to target

You don't have to be a citizen of the nation that does the spying for the data they collect on you to be harmful. Following your logic, nobody outside of the US or China has reasons to be concerned, which is not the case.

Governments—particularly those of the world's greatest superpowers—have influence outside of their borders, and can make your life hell, no matter where you currently live. They can restrict your freedom to travel, censor your public speech, and target you electronically in many ways. This can happen if you fall on their radar for whatever reason, including by mistake. Good luck getting off that list, and getting your life back after that.

If I'm rating which government I'm more afraid of, it would be the one that has a totalitarian control over its citizens, and no regard for human life. Otherwise, they're all equally harmful to my wellbeing.

People were cancelled for much less in US

The Black Panthers and victims of Mcarthism wiuld disagree. The current whistleblowers like Snowden also would disagree.

And assange.

For these exact reasons, I'm more comfortable with Xi Jinping's cronies spying on my every movement than my own government. The Chinese only do that stuff to their own citizens and I'm a zero-value target to them. US authorities may feel like being petty one day.

Seriously. What happened to that whole philosophy that the founding fathers had about being wary of our own government and the tendency of governments to overreach to control its citizenry.

That entire sentiment seem to have disappeared especially in the last few years in favor of China-Russia-terrorism-whatever new bs hysteria.

The red scare wasn't in the last few years.

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

China absolutely does not limit their abductions to their own citizens. If you're in China, you're fair game.

I have no plans to visit China, thankfully.

You should do some more research about who China is willing to imprison for political purposes.

It is absolutely not limited to Chinese citizens.

That's too simplistic of a line of thinking.

They've:

"fabricate evidence that the hosts of and participants in the meetings to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre were supporting terrorist organizations, inciting violence or distributing child pornography" [0]

You mention only being concerned about US authorities, but have somehow failed to realize they can fabricate evidence and send it to US authorities in an attempt to reach you from across the pond.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/china-based-executive-us-tele...

However, China has 1.4 billion people, they will do whatever to collect resources, including information and user stats which powers the recommendation system behind TikTok, which is ruining your next generation.

Have I mentioned that China and Russia are deep allied and are probably sharing intelligence? I don't think the US government is worse than Russia's.

Were they apprehended via corporate spying? I wasn't aware of that.

We're talking about millions of people (hundreds of millions over the last ~70 years) that have been sought out by the CCP for arrest and murder because of their non-violent views and ideals.

The problem is you’re judging based on different standards and ideals, but the violations are fundamentally the same. So China can imprison citizens, the US decided to make it harder to imprison citizens. We do arbitrary drone strikes on people we don’t like, on foreign sovereign territory. We have Guantanamo. The fact that we arbitrarily draw a line at “our own citizens” is frankly meaningless in the grand scale and not really a meaningful distinction in terms of human rights.

A best explanation by EFF here(https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/government-hasnt-justi...) is that it is not only for TikTok. A transparant system of regulating and even auditing what telemetry services can acquire is fundamentally and universally beneficial for whatever country the service is based in.

But it is not surprising that those laws are never passed so far. Google in their software realm is too strong to be combated as compared to their hardware realm with right to repair. The big names in hardware are replacable as they all buy stock solution (like fingerprint sensor), and those sensor manufacturers don't care about right to repair. But Instagram or Snapchat or WhatsApp or Tiktok or whatever are not that replacable and thus more addictive and better for the company. Google or Meta is definitely not giving up on these places, and considering their influence, the future ain't bright.

hundreds of millions people have been arrested and murdered because of "your reality", do you take into the consideration for the infrastructure to arrest and murder hundreds of millions people?

Macarthy was disgraced by 1954, and almost universally reviled for the lives he ruined with his slander. I think you can point to him as an example of what happens when demagogues go unopposed (even for a time) in the American system, but not as the normal or desired product of our political system.

And yet “In God We Trust” and the pledge of allegiance were adopted during that era.

While I don't think the US is on the same scale as the CCP, I also think you're being a little naive. Expressing the wrong ideas or misjudging the time/place to do so can absolutely land you behind bars.

> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years.

Which parallel world are you living in ? I would like to migrate there to this utopian USA.

The implicit claim that, "actually the US and China are the same regarding human rights, balance of power, authoritarianism, etc." is by far the weakest argument in this domain.

Nobody cares what you think (except for parents and loved ones), they might care why you think it. Sneering at a claim isn't an argument.

It's not about what I think, it's just simply untrue.

I cared. In fairness even less care what you qualify as a counter-point

The only thing I pointed out was that the two 'Great Powers' have a curiously similar obsession with spying on domestic civilian populations. You added the other issues for some reason.

It is true that authoritarian control freaks are my least favorite people, regardless of what government they're affiliated with - but I don't doubt that the American version, given free rein, would rush to introduce the methods used in China to control the population.

Well, as a counterpoint to "America is the same" I would direct your attention to this handy map of how long the current national leader has been in power for each country - there are some pretty clear distinctions (https://preview.redd.it/gzqeeslcyez91.png?width=1024&auto=we...)

If China was politically and culturally organized like a western democracy this would be a worthwhile analysis.

China does continuity not plurality, because its government scopes out centuries, not decades.

And the Chinese understand this - they are broadly happier with their government than Americans are with theirs. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...

How relevant is it that Xi Jinping has gained an additional mandate, if he's basically continuing a long-term policy which started in the early 80s with Deng Xiaoping, who was also the head of the party that's been in power since 1949?

It's not, because dialectically the article furthers the framing of TikTok and China as uniquely perverse which is wrong (cf. the abundance of examples posted elsewhere in this thread) and plays into American imperialist/hegemonic anxieties

The difference is the US is a country with checks and balances of power.

In China when the CCP says jump however, there’s no recourse

> checks and balances of power

Only in theory, when it comes to National Security Letters.

If you can't prove the government spied on you specifically, you can't take them to court to get a check or balance.

It's important to note that NSLs are an exception rather than a rule, and one over which a freely elected body (Congress) has oversight.

I'm not sure the same claim can be made about China.

An exception used around 10,000 times per year as of 2005.

And congress hasn't done anything to reign them in.

And I'll freely admit that China is going to be worse, with less oversight. But not only is the comparison a fallacy, it's cold comfort for the rest of the world (not to mention many non-naturalized American citizens).

Were they all Americans? How many warrants were served for comparison?

You should look that up.

The NSA doesn't need an NSL to spy on non-Americans.

Is it really oversight when our elected leaders are afraid of the people they are supposed to oversee?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW7EHai-cRM

In the Feds, you have 14 days to appeal your sentence. That is not fair access to a check. That time includes transfer from the court to a Federal Detention Center (lots of holding cell time with no access to a law library), transfer from a Federal Detention Center to your final place of incarceration via diesel therapy, etc. The USA used to allow unlimited time for appeals but that was clogging up the courts, so a happy balance between 0 and unlimited time to exercise your rights to access to the courts was agreed to, which the American Federal justice system determined to be 14 days (fun fact, they actually originally tried for a shorter appeal period than 14 days).

Edit: Sorry, 14 days for the defendant to appeal. The Feds team gets longer (because they have less resources than a locked up person I guess, some animals have more rights than others in American courts)

https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-2-4000-time-appeal-or-petition...

I think that kind of argument is really muddying the waters. Google/Amazon/Facebook[1] have absolutely not been "reading our emails over our shoulders" in any kind of human sense. And all those companies have extensive policies and enforcement structures designed deliberately to prevent the kind of abuse detailed here with TikTok.

And it's been decades, and they've really been quite good about it. There are abstract arguments about whether that kind of data centralization is a good or bad thing, and I think that's fine.

But that's extremely different from "this company actively spied on its enemies". And I think we need to treat with that distinction and not muddy it. Because if your point becomes "Facebook and Google and Amazon are bad too" it becomes isomorphic to "oh well, nothing can be done", because in practice society is OK with the existing giants.

We shouldn't be OK with active spying!

[1] Twitter is more of an open question right now, certainly the promiscuous release of the "Twitter Files" nonsense didn't tend to exhibit an institutional inclination toward privacy.

Is this an attempt at being edgy? The relationships between the companies and their host governments is not the point, its the differences between those governments that matters. Just one example of the difference is the Chinese government has camps for ethnic groups it doesn't like.

What if I told you there is a higher percent of our African American population incarcerated than the percent China's Uighur population that is incarcerated?

Google can push back, US companies can do that, and do do that. That system isn't perfect but I'd rather go with apps from more free countries than those that are not free.

ByteDance has no choice.

It's unclear to what extent such corporate pushback against the USG is genuine conflict as opposed to theater/PR cover. I don't think it's a safe assumption either way. The incentives to pretend industry has more independence than it does are there, and methods of such deception have been seen before.

I think it is unlikely we have a conspiracy so vast, across a ton of companies that they put up fake legal fights, have fake warrant canary notices ... and nobody ever leaks out that they're all fake.

It doesn't require a vast conspiracy, certainly not something more vast than the kind of conspiracy that Snowden alerted everyone to.

I would guess the truth is somewhere in the middle... That there is genuine pushback but also theatrics to project independence.

>It doesn't require a vast conspiracy

It would if we account for the fact that we haven't seen any reports of fake legal fights / warrant canaries and etc.

>I would guess the truth is somewhere in the middle

I don't understand this phrase, wouldn't that just mean the bigger lie / conspiracy wins every argument? How do you weigh such things reliably?

There doesn't need to be any conspiracy. If it's good for PR reasons to show they are fighting, companies will do it anyway without the need to coordinate.

So they are able to push back?

It would be highly surprising if the ByteDance-Beijing relationship was all that different from the Google/Verizon-Washington relationship (2013):

No, no it wouldn't.

The hope of a free internet sits rotting in a prison somewhere in Britain.

I find it hard to interpret such whataboutism as sincere.

If you care about these perceived abuses by US tech companies, why wouldn't you applaud the outcry against TikTok? At the very least, it moves the needle in the right direction. It increases the awareness of industry practices and helps flesh out some constraints. Even if you're of the mindset that there's no practical difference between the US government and an authoritarian communist dictatorship that murdered millions of its compatriots for having the wrong political views, why defend their right to do the things you hate?

It's because the pot is calling the kettle black and then getting annoyed when it is called out on it. It's not that complicated, and it doesn't call into question the legitimacy of the criticism. It just says: "you've had shit under your own shoe this whole time and only now that I got some under mine are you complaining about the smell"

you're literally describing logical fallacies: tu quoque and whataboutism

in fact, "the pot calling the kettle black" is a textbook example of a tu quoque logical fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_calling_the_kettle_black

"Whataboutism" is not a logical fallacy, in fact it is the opposite.

"We need to do X because A is bad because it does Y"

"But we also do Y, shouldn't we also do X for us?"

Logic says yes. "Whataboutism" was invented to kill basic logical inference, in the context of the bipolar Cold War era. Using that term to kill discussion and browbeat is anti-intellectualism, pure and simple.

whataboutism is simply another word for tu quoque, which, as previously indicated, is a logical fallacy

indeed, the whataboutism itself is intended to kill discussion of the initial topic (in your example, A doing Y, not simply Y), hence why it's a logical fallacy, too

There's a world of difference between saying "you're a hypocrite, stop talking" and adding (uncomfortable) context to a discussion.

you are absolutely, 100% right here, and whataboutism is the first one, not the second one

in this case, the goal was to stop people from talking about China's actions and instead deflect to someone else's actions

that might explain why Whataboutism, invented by russian propagandists, is explicitly described as a subtype of the tu quoque logical fallacy:

"From a logical and argumentative point of view it is considered a variant of the tu-quoque pattern (Latin 'you too', term for a counter-accusation), which is a subtype of the ad-hominem argument."[0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

> the goal was to stop people from talking about China's actions

You made this up. Nowhere in this thread is it implied.

this is false.

as an example, look at whether, after the whataboutism, we're discussing the original topic (Tiktok & its actions) or something/someone else.

see? whataboutism deflection succeeded.

it should be clear now why whataboutism is indeed, as shown above, explicitly defined as a logical fallacy, despite the made-up claim that it isn't one.

I think people find it insincere because pointing out that both parties in question have a problem doesn't change anything about the situation or the problems.

It is most often used as an attempt at a defense by calling out other guilty parties. Yes, we should like to live in a world where anyone calling out a problem or injustice only does so from a place of unimpeachable moral authority. But we do not live in such a world so we are still left with the need to address problems where and when we can get the social and political will to do so. Using finger pointing as a defense has the effect of making the problem seem insurmountable and therefore sapping the will to fix it.

The more genuine admission might be to simply say, "I admit I have shit on my shoe, and it does stink; however, if you are to hold me to account for that, then I demand you also be held to account".

With that approach people have a much harder time seeing the complaint as merely a self-defense by way of finger pointing and it's much more likely to be taken seriously.

This is where many people in the US are probably at on, say, the Trump indictment. Can't really say it shouldn't happen, he has almost certainly broken a long list of laws for his whole career. But that also shouldn't be the end of it, more like "Great start getting a corrupt and lawless politician in jail! Who's next on that list? When does their indictment begin?".

You can always count on HN for whataboutism

It's good to have a broad overview of the subject, don't you think? Wouldn't you want to know whether or not the TikTok outrage is genuine, or perhaps engineered by other social media corporations worried about loss of market share? Maybe this is all about economics and 'national security concerns' are just the vehicle for expressing that concern (as market manipulation is a harder sell?).

P.S. Have you noticed that both Twitter and Youtube have adopted TikTok-type formats, in terms of Twitter video feeds and Youtube Shorts?

Except it’s not a broad overview of the subject, it’s little factoids that equate bad behavior with other bad behavior, except there are many substantial difference which are neglected in the conversation.

It is a relevant question to wonder what prompted the concerns and bills… is it national security of is it economics? That’s not what’s being questioned, and even then there’s no good basis to know so it’s hard to go anywhere other than conspiracy theory.

I actually fully buy that both are plausible and likely, but I have no basis for the economics other than Meta’s lobbying. But the whataboutism always shifts away the conversation from the moment at hand by dismissing it all as something that meta/google do. We can at face value look at the risks of TikTok doing it and understand that they’re maybe legitimate national security concerns. By broadening, we end up just ignoring this completely.

I have noticed the copy cats. The concern from congress has been what can the CCP know via TikTok; not what can TikTok know as an independent entity. I personally do see the control of information and the knowledge of attention being a national security risk, which is unfortunate as I think they have the better product.

What you call whataboutism is what many would call precedent, which is an essential concept in legal discussions. Crying whataboutism to shield your side only gets you so far.

> The Internet has been colonized by spies

That's definitely not you or your deflecting and derailing comment which rocketed to the top or the whatabout comrades who make it impossible to discuss this topic here.

This piece smells like ccp propaganda. @dang

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