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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile nearly half of Nepal's population is on Facebook, something I'm sure happened completely organically and there's no chance Facebook influenced this decision at all.

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The U.S. government hasn’t loaned Nepal tons of money to build an airport using Chinese companies and labor that will likely never be used and will almost certainly not pay itself off and was significantly overpriced to begin with putting Nepal in severe debt to China and is currently under investigation by the anti-corruption unit of the Nepalese government, as one simple example of why they might be more suspicious of a Chinese company rather than an American one.

On top of the decades of money and labor given by the US government,

>The U.S. government hasn’t loaned Nepal tons of money to build an airport using Chinese companies and labor

The US government has done that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautam_Buddha_Airport

Is the US encroaching on Nepal's border?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60288007

If China can ban foreign apps for "social harmony", then Nepal can do so too.

After reading the article, all that can eventually be concluded is that China is establishing a tighter control over the hitherto very loose border, and that exactly where the border is remains unclear even to people living close to it.

But the narrative structure of the article - of a leaked government document (!) about Chinese buildings on Nepalese sure of the border (!!) which China denies (!!!) and Nepal sends military to investigate (!!!!) only to find there aren't any (oh) - is an insult to journalism. Maybe I'm naive but I feel BBC used to have higher standards.

As for Nepal banning TikTok, good for them!

Did you read the same article?

> The report also concluded that China had been limiting grazing by Nepalese farmers.

> In the same area, it found China was building a fence around a border pillar, and attempting to construct a canal and a road on the Nepalese side of the border.

Buildings were on Chinese side true, but Chinese roads and canals and fences were on the Nepalese side.

> where the border is remains unclear even to people living close to it.

Thats almost every border in this region.

Limiting grazing by Nepalese farmers... on the Chinese side of the border? Most probably, why else would the article leave that unclear. Also this would be an expected result of border traffic control.

'Attempting' to construct a canal and a road? If this is the explosive payload of the article, why not lean more into the detail?

Facebook is a threat, but not as much as TikTok.

For one, FB data is with the US. While tiktok data is with China.

In the US, there is still some regulatory framework to punish privacy missteps, ask companies to change stuff, etc.

Try doing that in China. Also, China is an existential threat to Nepal.

>For one, FB data is with the US. While tiktok data is with China.

Not convinced those are necessarily positives.

You had no number 'for two'....

More than china , india is an existential threat . Historically gone to war with the british east india . Although it had gone to war with Tibet , tibet at the time was backed by China .

> For one, FB data is with the US.

Hope US will remain a democratic country then. And not move into a technofeudalistic autocracy.

Is choosing 1 of 2 parties reaaaally democratic?

> Facebook is a threat, but not as much as TikTok.

Cambridge Analityca.

Is your point that it happened, there was widespread outrage, penalties and then changes made to prevent it from happening again?

Yes. There were changes. They changed their name.

Yeah. The tendency of Americans to believe their government does not utilize a great amount of unethical power and control while it needs that and not be noticed or can get away with it is unbelievable.

> Cambridge Analityca.

I'm not sure you are supporting your case as well as you think your are.

I get most of my TikTok content via Facebook. I didn’t even really try it before Facebook started putting TikTok videos in my feed. I’m not clear if it’s a Facebook platform that is sucking in TikTok videos or if it’s some kind of agreement with them?

It's FB pages reposting the content

Arguendo, assume Facebook lobbied for it. If only one market player doesn't follow an industry standard on public interest (consensus which prevents industry regulation), of course other players should lobby to get the player out.

I could believe Facebook is a good player in terms of “public interest” or “social harmony” or whatnot if they weren’t credibly accused of enabling a genocide in Myanmar, which is a larger country in roughly the same region as Nepal.

The accusations are only credible if you limit yourself to only looking at stuff on Facebook. If you see posts on Facebook calling for Muslims to be killed and then sometime later you see posts on Facebook of Muslims actually getting killed, you might be forgiven for thinking that the former posts caused the latter posts, and if only Facebook had taken down the former, the latter would never have happened.

But it turns out the posts calling for Muslims to be killed were made by the military's propaganda wing and the killings were perpetrated by the military's armed wing. So the causal chain actually flows through the military, and Facebook was merely a place where you could observe it happen without being there in person.

Blaming Facebook for the genocide seems to be an instance of activists focusing on something they can see and try to influence (Facebook moderation policy) over something they cannot (guys with guns shooting people).

Regardlessly of whether you believe Facebook played a role in amplifying genocidal messages, the fact that Facebook allowed the very clear calls for violence on their platform for years is orders of magnitude more serious than sexually suggestive content (I assume that’s what “indecent material” refers to here) or “kids doing dumb things” which I hear every so often about TikTok.

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