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Comment by shrimp_emoji | Hacker News Reader

Not really.

A Facebook or Twitter-esque addiction algorithm is WAY better than a CCP addiction algorithm since the latter tries to socially engineer unrest and disillusion, on purpose, as a targeted act of Nakatomi-esque cyberwarfare against a totalitarian regime's rivals. The former kind maybe does so as an inadvertent externality, and with every reason to wager to a far lesser degree.

Meta won't turn up the heat on antisemitism and down on something the CCP doesn't like. It might turn up the heat on, I don't know, trans rights, and down on neo Nazis, but it's much more benign dystopic info filtering than an actual "what will destabilize the US and fuel stochastic terrorism and civil war?" agenda (which is against Meta's best interest).

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The US social media seems to be encouraging nationalism and conservatism. Which Im also not to happy about. It seems to be creating more unrest in the west rather than strength progress and unity.

China might not even need to influence the west through tiktok, meta and friends seem to be doing plenty of it themselves. None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh

I give TikTok negative benefit of the doubt though. Nobody can prove if the stream of craziness is organic or a result of Chinese propagandists tuning the algorithm, but I'll believe it's the latter every time. Could I even afford not to? It's just game theory at this point.

> None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh

The Nirvana Fallacy is when you reject the better of two outcomes because it's not good enough compared to some mythical optimum.

In this case, the optimum could be some social media service that "strengthens progress and unity" or it could be a total ban on social media altogether, both of which seem pretty mythical. :p

I believe organic, chaotic derangement is better than extrinsic, targeted derangement in magnitude and outcome.

This comment has almost brought me around to supporting a tiktok ban just to remove a leg from the conspiracy theories.

Take some responsibility for Americans posting on social media to other Americans, for the love of god.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted - but I think this is thoughtful and to the point.

The highest ideal American SNS follow is profit. That will generate all kinds of externalities that might be bad for society. Still, at least so far, we've found it to be the least destructive optimization target in modern human history (vs. socialism).

The CCP is clearly tuning the algorithm in the SNS under its control to limit topics it deems undesirable in its goal of an ideal society. Whoever thinks this isn't so bad hasn't experienced an authoritarian state personally or at least highly underestimates the pain and suffering one can inflict.

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