Hacker News Reader

Comment by stemlord | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree that US politicians are corrupt and stupid but as an American citizen I want to be able to access the world's information in order to establish an accurate perspective for myself. Banning media from certain countries is exactly how you develop a delusional worldview and ironically become more susceptible to propaganda.

View on HN

If you want to avoid a delusional world view, I think targeted social media is probably what you want to avoid.

Maybe if TikTok could only serve content sorted by newest, or if you get a direct link URL from someone else.

Exactly this. There is quite a bit of hubris to thinking to that you can consume the media of a propaganda state and be intentional about understanding what is and is not propaganda. It works because it’s subtle. And it works at individual, population, and network levels. So even of you identify and maintain the noble truth, you will have no one in your network to meaningfully corroborate it.

The "beauty" of the plausible deniability in these systems is the hidden reward mechanisms that are in place: you can get a whole country to kick themselves in the groin if the algorithm rewards it and people think they can monetize the attention.

I'm personally quite interested in propaganda and TikTok let's you see both American leftist/rightist propaganda, European leftist/rightist propaganda and pro-Russian/pro-Chinese propaganda. Now there's a lot more on Palestine and Israel obviously. On Reddit it's largely leftist American, although the European right has had a recent resurgence due to refugees.

Weird hobby, I know, but it is actually a great place to look at all the different ways propaganda is done. Everyone is doing it..

These days all news channels send paper sites are doing the government propaganda, even nyt, wp.

Yes, propaganda will always exist. With traditional media (assuming you have cookies and tracking disabled) you are the on that decides what propaganda (which articles) to consume.

With social media like TikTok, they decide what propaganda to feed you.

How about each public video is accessible but not in the algorithm scroll structure?

> Banning media from certain countries is exactly how you develop a delusional worldview and ironically become more susceptible to propaganda

You think banning propaganda machines from other countries makes you more susceptible to propaganda?

It's not banning media from a country though, it's banning an app that is country run and can select specific media to show you.

It is no more country run than Facebook.

That is simply not true of any Chinese enterprise.

Party is inextricably linked to any large commercial or corporate entity, by law but also culture.

If you believe the NSA has less to say about Meta's data than CPC has to say about TikTok's data, then I got an old bridge for sale.

Yeah you're completely uneducated on the topic.

Several media outlets did a dive on the connections the CCP has into TikTok.

Their security auditors implied that they have backdoors.

Per the HN Guidelines:

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

It is quite unnecessary to hear you call everyone you disagree with uneducated or similar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com