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Comment by grugagag | Hacker News Reader

Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP. I’ve heard of bans of Tiktok use by politicians and army bases and such. Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data… Not a Tiktok user myself, if anyone could illuminate me on this it’s be great. For example does tiktok have direct messages from users to users that could be spied on? My naive assumption is that Tiktok is a meme sharing platform and timesink

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> Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP

Let's pretend I hire two people: The first is a private detective, the other is an entertainer.

The private detective is able to follow you around and watch everything you do. They know when you eat, when you sleep, and even when you poop. They know who you talk to and for how long. They know everything that interests you and bores you, down to the microsecond (knowing what makes you pause). The PI gets to know you pretty well and honestly, probably better than many close friends.

The entertainer is your main source of entertainment. They offer a wide variety of things and they're highly addictive and prevent you from being bored. Since they are a major part of your day, they are a major influence of the information that you consume. Be this in comedy, politics, academic information, or whatever. That all depends on what interests you that day.

Now I've hired these two people and am able to direct them. The PI are my eyes and ears, the entertainer are my hands. If I want to make the most profit off of you I can make deals with McDonalds and get the entertainer to influence you that way (maybe do comedy bits about burgers) and the PI can track how interested and influential the entertainer is. Allowing us to refine our techniques on a personal level. On the other hand, if I am interested in politics I can do the same. I know what makes you afraid. I know what makes you sad. I know what makes you angry. I know what makes you feel good.

Now we're just looking at you, a single person here. But I have a billion PIs and entertainers. I know all your friends, family members, and even your crushes. I know how close all these bonds are because I'm doing to them what I am doing to you. Consider this and then tell me that I don't have influence over you. I am a significant part of your environment. You may have free will, but you are also a product of your environment.

> My naive assumption is that Tiktok is a meme sharing platform and timesink

And that's why I have influence over you. The less important you think it is, the more influence I have since your guard is down. Same way comedians crack people up.

But to do most of what you discussed, you don't need any "private" data. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit does and uses your browsing and posting data in the exact same way.

Imagine that a state actor would seek to flip a foreign National to their cause. You can do so with either a carrot or a stick or both. The carrot can be fancy dinners, free vacations, or access to what they want. The carrot can be threat of exposure of deep secrets, etc. Now imagine that there is an app that has the AMAZING ability to figure out EXACTLY what you like and don’t like. You haven’t used TikTok yourself so you don’t know it firsthand but this app is uncanny in its ability to feed you stuff that only you would find fascinating that you didn’t even know about yourself. In the wrong hands it can give incredible amounts of information on an individual’s interests at a level of detail that was previously impossible

And the 66% of US teens on TikTok are 66% of the next generation of US senators, presidents, cabinet members, military chiefs, etc. Imagine the competitive advantage of having a deep psychological profile for each of these personas of your geopolitical adversary.

And remember that political games do not have to be won in a generation, simply knowing the direction your opponent is going and bending them towards your preference is sufficient to be worthwhile.

Simply over subscribe the generations on antiwork and the cons (as opposed to pros) of (Democracy, America, Freedom, Modern thought, etc. whatever are the targets) and you can bend a generational trend.

Humans aren't particularly good at seeing evidence and realizing they're only seeing part of the whole picture.

>And the 66% of US teens on TikTok are 100% of the next generation of US senators,

FTFY

That's the threat.

Is American turnover in Congress actually that fast enough for this to happen? We have more people over 40 than younger people and the influx of youth is being floated by an immigration policy that favors middle- and upper-class, basically the brain drain, of the rest of the world (read: people interested in business-friendly policy, etc), and older people, say, everyone 40 - 60, will have even greater life expectancy, so those who are in power may be in power when current teens are adults, just as Nancy Pelosi has been a Congresswoman my entire life and a good chunk of my mother's.

I think it's about knowing what people are interested in and having an algorithm that can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things.

Eugene Wei's article [0] helped me see how TikTok uses more of an interest graph, whereas many of the other platforms use more social graphs. By this, I think he means that TikTok cares much more about knowing what people are interested in than knowing to whom they're connected.

> But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?

I think the fear is that the algorithm can be tweaked to nudge people towards things that the platform, or in this case, the CCP, want them to want.

For example, if I see you watching videos about the book 1984, and I want you to be less interested in things that promote fear of a totalitarian government, and I also know that you feel really afraid of your home getting robbed, I can have the algorithm show you more videos about homes getting robbed so that you boost your feelings of fear of neighbors and therefore you may even want to have a stronger government to protect you from your neighbors.

[0]: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things.

You mean like mainstream media has done for decades?

Sure, but it’s much more effective when the messaging is targeted to an individual (or, small cohort of similar individuals) based on their interests (known, at a granular level, because of what they watch for how long etc)

Mass media isn’t individualized in the same way

Is mainstream media designing a user-specific content feed that is adjusted to your specific preferences? Your argument sounds similar to the one used against arguments of an encroaching police state: sure it has been done before but not at this scale or with this level of sophistication.

Yes, now just imagine if mainstream media could create millions of TV channels specifically designed for each human being instead of broadcasting one channel to millions of human beings?

The memes you share are a representative of you...

Lets say you're sharing a bunch of memes about being a private in the army. What is the likelihood you are actually a private in the army? Can tiktok use that to propagandize you in any way? For example, by sending you a lot of what I would consider far right propaganda that the US military is weak because it believes in 'wokeness', could this cause you to be less effective in the military?

Also it's a place with many subjects for psychological experiments. What propaganda is best to fool someone like you? Or someone like person A, person B? And if "Program P" works best to convert people to whatever, hey hey, you still have the captive audience, just apply that program

Probably Cambridge Analytica has the best information on how such programming works. Or, Google/YouTube with their "What goes viral" algorithms.

Yes, there is a private/direct messaging feature in TikTok that should of course be considered accessible to ByteDance, and by extension the Chinese government.

However, that is not the only valuable information.

The user behavioral profiles (which users have viewed what videos when, what do they engage with, what do they re-share to others) are valuable, particularly if you can de-anonymize them against account registration data. Also, the social graph of a big service like TT is a goldmine.

Both types of information are useful whether you're doing traditional espionage, targeted influence operations, or mass-influence/propaganda.

For traditional espionage, knowing what sort of content someone watches could give you direct insight into non-public aspects of their life that could be leveraged. (I.e. mental or physical illness, sexual interests, relationship problems, fringe political leanings, etc. etc.) There's a fair amount of not-exactly-porn but porn-adjacent stuff (and lots of health/wellness/lifestyle content) on TT that could give you leverage or at least ideas on how to approach someone if you wanted to convince them to pass information to you, provide access to something, etc.

The real value is in targeted influence ops, though. Find someone you want to influence, or a small subset of the population you want to influence, and drill down to figure out who their 'thought leaders' / opinion-setters are within their social circle. Figure out what kind of media engages them. Go after them indirectly via their friends/colleagues/family. TT is demographically limited right now, so you're probably not changing many Senators' votes directly, but you might be able to get their kids, their kids' friends, their junior staffers, etc. thinking a particular way. Done the right way, the actual influence target might never even need to be messaged-to directly. They'd get the full social-media 'Inception' treatment and probably think they came up with their opinion organically or by being in touch with the culture.

And then of course for mass-messaging/propaganda, you use the information in aggregate just like any big advertising company does, but for political ends, and without having to engage an actual advertising company that's going to create a tangible trail.

in my rudimentary understanding, the knowledge would be useful more in an aggregate nature. finding effective ways to target include/exclude propaganda and gathering real-time data around memes/info sharing topics that relate to whatever information campaigns they are currently running. lies seem to spread faster than the truth, and very few places are as actively in use as tiktok.

The ccp pays visits to relatives who still reside in China - and sometimes those abroad - for behaviors of people who’ve emigrated out of China. Tiktok gives them easy insight on whose relatives need a visit.

Second, it’s easy to find secrets on important people or politicians through their online habits - it’s pretty easy to see how that can be used for influence.

The fact that many Westerners are still unsure about this and not aware that they're in the middle of an unconventional war¹ is fascinating. Xi does not care about memes of course. The app itself is the backdoor, Bytedance (which has the Communist Party right inside the company, like other Mainland corporations) controls what the users see. And what they're shown is completely different from Douyin, there is a reason Chinese residents aren't even permitted to download TikTok - the foreign propaganda version. No one will be able to tell you their strategy for certain but it's not hard to guess when you look at the content that gets boosted. It's like Twitter on steroids, it's designed to cause division and radicalize the users. The data harvesting is an added bonus and with more data they can be better manipulated.

Btw on a meta level this doesn't matter when the CCP has completely walled 1.4 billion people in. Every single American social media app is banned, the vast majority of foreign news sites is censored. It should not even be a question what the app is about, the regime is as obvious an enemy to free society as it gets and before they open up as was promised in the past in exchange for economic investment, no Chinese internet company should be permitted operating anywhere.

While the Chinese internet is so tightly controlled and the US & co are attacked in Chinese state media on a daily basis, foreign countries let them move in this Trojan horse. There's a book called Unrestricted Warfare where the authors describe just this sort of weakness of the US to political/information warfare 20 years ago. It turns out they were spot on.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_warfares

> Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data…

Speculation about how adversaries might advantageously use data is meaningless unless coupled with policy that allows access to such data only with binding agreements about how that data can be used.

As a general principle, I believe adversaries should not have blanket access to data of US citizens.

My belief, however, is meaningless when US powers-that-be to date show little interest in regulating data policy with respect to any business, foreign or domestic.

Location data is the least interesting thing they're harvesting. Modern targeting models are able to understand the most intimate personality traits of their users, and manipulate users based on those traits. They're capable of weaponizong user's unique levels of skepticism, political leaning, depression, or dysmorphia, weaponizing them against entire cultures and society

It's a massive platform for propaganda and mass data collection entirely without the ability for us to regulate it in an effective way without entry cutting it out of China's control

Spread outrage, controversy and doubt.

Have a neutral mutually beneficial idea? Let’s contextualize it as a divisive political issue that is championed by the political leader you hate the most.

It's often more about what they can show you than what they can see, but what they fun see about you helps them decide how to nudge your beliefs

I will just tweak algorithm to show you more videos supporting a particular ideology which favors my motives. The rest your brain will do it yourself!

Most simple is to control algorithms pushing whatever agenda China wants America youth focused on.

It is a kompromat generator to blackmail the next Teixeira.

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