It is absurd and not worthy of a board like this. I'm sure many you know people that work at TikTok? This just isn't happening, at all.
The sum total of what China is doing with TikTok is restricting what people in China see, which is what China is worried about.
From game-theoretic point of view: is China a geopolitical adversary? Yes. Does China control TikTok? Yes. Is TikTok a tool to tweak how citizens of your adversary think? Yes. Is that powerful? Yes.
So the facts our - our adversary is in control of a tool which can influence how we think, which is valuable to them. We don't know for sure that they use the tool but... why wouldn't they?
No. Not in any meaningful way. The data and employees are in the US. Every intelligence agency in the US is watching those buildings and reading their data. The US has no laws against inspecting every single packet sent internationally, the employees are subject to US laws, and tiktok has distanced itself from china.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/tech/tiktok-leaving-hong-kong...
They are not meaningfully different from any other US company. It's not like they don't give data to china:
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-gave-user-data-to-hon...
Tiktok is just the new banana republic, the new gulf war, etc. The US government is aggressively anti-competitive with non-domestic corporate threats to its largest industries. It has always attempted to destroy competition and maximize domestic control of furs, then produce, then oil, and now social media and advertising.
Google answered 44 police requests for user data. That's not the same as the TikTik firehose.
Even if those claims are not true for whatever reason—why is the claim that they want to polarize the west through TikTok hard to believe? We're currently in a zero sum ideological war with them in which they have meddled in at least two of our last elections, they have spyware in internationally exported Huawei equipment, etc.
Their recommendation algorithm is a black box, and if they weren't doing anything heinous they could possibly provide some audit trail for US regulators or US employees to inspect. As far as I know they haven't provided much here to improve public perception or lower their risk of getting shut down.
Oh come on stop with this.
People need to chill.
If your goal is to persuade others to think more like you, "coming from a crazy place" isn't a good way to do that. If you think that people are making an illogical argument, then either present a parallel argument or better yet find the flaw in their logic.
The way you're engaging makes it seem like "logic" is on one side and "psychosis" is on the other side - so someone reading this who could be persuaded one way or the other, has zero reason to go with you.
Not OP but have a similar view. Behavior of TikTok isn't any different from other social media companies like FB and YouTube. The algos everywhere push higher engagement content and that is mostly dumb or polarising in nature. TikTok is in general averse to political content. It is full of misinformation but so is Youtube and Facebook. Short video is in general a worse format for nuanced content but great for engagement and AI. Now FB and Google have copied that.
We should look at harms of social media in collective and not trying to find some political scapegoats ignoring the root cause.
It’s true in the sense that all of these things are powerful and destructive. The naive thing is to ignore the added danger of the powerful and destructive thing being controlled by your adversary.
You are arguing against a claim that the parent did not make.
It it true that political polarization of rival nations is advantageous. It is also true that filter bubbles do this naturally. There's no need for the CCP to tell TikTok to politically polarize the content they show to people.
That's exactly what the parent was saying.
> China's benefit to encourage moves in both directions
It's disingenuous to suggest that people are talking about tiktok because they think it's just an inherently divisive app. If people want to ban apps that polarize people, twitter would certainly be higher on the list.
"It is to the US's benefit to encourage the Chinese people to learn about democracy."
This is true. And it is a reason that the CCP has banned western social media. These facts do not require any specific action by US authorities to pressure US-based social media companies to carry it out, because those platforms are full of pro-democracy content already.
> It's disingenuous to suggest that people are talking about tiktok because they think it's just an inherently divisive app.
I didn't. There are many reasons people are talking about TikTok, depending on who it is and what they care about. There's not even a single US government view on the matter.
"US officials have long insisted the Chinese government may be able to view the personal information of TikTok users — but that claim was purely speculative. Until now.
"In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes."
Honestly, I feel like you're right.
But at the same time, it'd be a genius strategy to destabilize a country. We'd be getting beat at our own game we pull on other countries.