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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Every American social media company is a front for NSA surveillance and CIA propaganda, what's your point? I thought we were supposed to believe in free markets and competition around here.

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Every American social media|insurance|telecom|financial|tech company are a surveillance endpoint for the FBI or LE in general and/or a foreign policy endpoint in terms of being an effector for economic warfare.

No legal fiction is inured to the machinations of its host state.

Endpoint != Front

Social media companies have also their own nefarious goals so you don't have only to worry about your government but also about the (un)intended consequences of attention capitalism

Alternatives that exist openly in the US would not be suffered to exist in the PRC -- for instance, Signal.

Again, I see little difference between the PRC and USA in this regard. As an American, I couldn't care less about Chinese surveillance. But my own government has an active interest in monitoring my politics for thoughtcrime and influencing my thoughts and actions. Making a moral panic only about the foreign platform seems, itself, like propaganda.

Thank you. I cannot understand people who are more frightened by foreigners knowing about their penchant for horse porn than by their local cops knowing the same embarrassing facts.

The moral panic isn’t remotely limited to foreign platforms, not even 24 hours ago the Senate Judiciary Committee publicly hung online sexual abuse of children around the CEO of Facebook’s neck, complete with a broadcasted apology before asking the TikTok CEO if they’re a member of the CCP in the same hearing.

Countries other than the USA have agency and interests, and are entirely capable of seeking to influence your thoughts and actions to affect change if it furthers their goals (it is literally an election year).

Tiktok has a superpower of injecting random people into your feed, which could be and would be used for manipulation. Or suppressing specific posts. Probably that is why meta did the same (before they could only do it with ads, but nobody watches ads anyway).

Having a foreign government covertly influence your thoughts and actions should be of concern. It's one thing to have your thoughts and actions be changed by a logical process; it's a whole other concern when an agonistic foreign power is expending non-trivial amounts of resources to bend your opinion.

This isn't mutually exclusive to being concerned about the US government actions in this space but the risks are completely different.

Seems like you are overly concerned with the devil you know while ignoring the threat of the devil you don’t. If you think the US government isn’t your friend, well… you are right. But if you are an American, the PRC is your enemy. They actually want bad things to happen to the citizens of the US. And they have the leverage to cause some of those things to happen.

oh please, spare us. Do tell what china has done to the US citizenry. Consider that you're attempting revolutions, surrounding them with military bases, arming separatists, and instigating trade wars. Your government hates the Chinese people. Don't project your vile tendencies onto others.

No matter the morality of the government’s actions, I would rather be on the side of the biggest guns and do what I can to undermine the size of the other guy’s guns, unless the other guy offers me a better life

then admit that instead of fearmongering and promoting actively harmful sinophobic views. it's the blind and naive i am taking issue with, not the geopolitical realists. even if i disagree with both

Sinophobic? You just sound like a tankie or a shill. The Chinese government is a cartel that actively trade in the stolen organs of their own citizenry. The US may have completely squandered its global hegemony entering into useless wars, but the Chinese preside over a horror show.

And this is a model you feel should be implemented here?

Signal isn't exactly trustworthy here either. Signal still likes to brag about the times when they told the government they couldn't hand over the data the feds wanted because they never collect/store it in the first place, but a long time ago they started collecting and permanently storing in the cloud exactly that same data. Worse, they refuse to update their privacy policy to reflect what they've started doing, meaning that the very first sentence of that policy is an outright lie. Personally, I take that as a massive dead canary and assume that signal has been completely compromised.

There are alternatives out there which I hope still deliver on the promise of allowing secure communications, and we're free to roll our own, but I strongly suspect that the US gov will move in on anything that gains enough of a following.

I think that we're still far better off than the Chinese, but we're not as free as we pretend that we are.

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