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Comment by gman83 | Hacker News Reader

Where I'm at in Europe, the app is rife with anti-American & pro-Chinese & Russian propaganda. I think that even if the Americans ban the app, it's too late, the entire world is now addicted to this app and it'll have negative consequences for the U.S. for many years to come.

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German here: plenty of pro America, anti Chinese and pro Ukraine propaganda in my feeds. Lot's of it full of AI bits, mixed videos with AI and real footage, partially from other wars and or years old mixed into current, potentially staged bits (it's mostly clusters of facial expressions and gestures that make me doubt but also environment, intensity and location of sweat and dirt and positioning of items and vehicles and stuff, in 'artificial(learned actually, semi-professional) relation' to buildings). It's horrible.

Meh.

Probably the reality is that the internet is filled with propaganda. Every site. Every forum. Even HN is filled with anti-(put pretty much anything here) propaganda.

Try to ignore the noise and tune in more of the signal. That's about all you can do really.

I'm not sure banning websites will do much for you, as you two are rightfully pointing out. You ban a website in Brazil? Well, OK. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in Brazil, but the rest of the world keeps getting the anti-Brazil propaganda. You ban a website in China? Well, OK. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in China, but the rest of the world keeps getting plenty of anti-Chinese propaganda. You ban a website in the US? Same thing. You get to broadcast most of the propaganda in the US, but the rest of the world keeps getting plenty of anti-US propaganda.

The word propaganda itself has been a bit bent out of shape in the last century. It just means to spread information. Information itself is more-or-less inherently biased (as in, not objectively neutral in an omniscient way) and so everything is basically propaganda, although not in the scary obvious way that word usually implies.

The problem with banning things is actually a bit more subtle than just that. Propaganda in isolation isn't necessarily a good or a bad thing. If Big Vegetable embarks on a multi-billion dollar campaign to push pro-vegetable propaganda, that is probably a win for the rest of us. But if Big Tobacco does something similar it is more of a loss.

So we need a mechanism to decide if a specific type of propaganda is acceptable or not. And, if governments get involved, typically they will start restricting propaganda that is truthful but threatening to their chances of holding power (ie, people pointing out the flawed nature of the powers that be). It is better force people to fight propaganda with counter-propaganda and let individuals make their own mistakes.

> It is better force people to fight propaganda with counter-propaganda and let individuals make their own mistakes

The problem is information flow. Propaganda vs propaganda, nowadays, is in-group information and desires fighting against other in-group information and desires.

The lack and importance of truth, facts, the bread and butter of journalists, investigators and scientist, gets out of focus because of governments and other actors blocking access to data, events, locations, partially because often enough, people asking for access tamper with the evidence or start to run all kinds of narratives that would impede an investigation and results that could be 'useful'. There is, of course, much more to all that.

Dead Internet Theory in action. Bots spamming garbage to other bots, mostly, with the goal of squeezing into the cracks to hit a tiny handful of vaguely receptive users.

But it was really too late when nothing was done about Facebook or any of the other US malvertising companies.

The tiktok algorithm famously feeds people what they want and what they most engage with.

If all you are seeing anti-American & pro-Chinese & Russian propaganda, it is on you. If all you are seeing is teenage girls doing provocative dances, it is on you.

>it's too late, the entire world is now addicted

Just like how the world is also addicted to Instagram and Facebook before that?

To be fair the world is still as addicted to IG and FB as before, it's just been normalized at this point and FB is having an aging demographic.

Don't forget MySpace, people loved that site.

It looks like a clone of it is doing all right

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41422311

That’s a problem for Europe but not so much the USA. We should not have a Chinese company controlling our information infrastructure to this degree.

It’s divestiture or ban, not just a ban.

We should not have a US company controlling our information infrastructure

Indeed, PeerTube is preferable.

Yes, it's wise to be aware of how fickle the public's attention can be. TikTok will not be around forever, and likely won't be prominent enough to bother discussing a decade from now.

The parent comment also has a point, though, because stale trends generally manage to limp along around 60 years or so. Ideas tend really to win out conclusively once the opposing side has died off.

So the "culture" that, at Facebook's height of popularity, Facebook fostered, in fact will live on in a certain generation.

And all the nonsense that TikTok seems to foster today will, sadly, affect the world for decades after TikTok turns into a nonentity.

I think the popularity of TikTok is already declining and I always question the effectiveness of such propaganda attempts. Investing in education is the best antidote in my opinion, state level blocking of services just opens a few cans of worms.

To make TikTok unpopular more quickly, governments should probably mandate that parents make an account too.

Do we know what comes after Tiktok?

No, the teens/college kids are still all over tiktok. It's not dying yet

A constant AI generated feed, in and out of fully immersive, no swiping, just eye tracking (incl. pupil dilation) and face tracking to guide. Though some in congress who promoted the ban thought it already worked kind like that.

Ow! My balls!

> mandate that parents make an account too.

Guarantee higher monthly active users and the chance they get addicted too. Nice. I don't know why everyone thinks that:

1) parents are infallible

2) the problem is individuals/families and not the thing itself (infinite scroll feeds)

It was a joke suggesting that young people tend to think a platform becomes less cool if their parents are on it too. Not that parents can stalk the online life of their kids or other things that actually do make them uncool.

>To make TikTok unpopular more quickly, governments should probably mandate that parents make an account too.

Nice. It definitely worked for FB :)

But then I noticed all of the insane stuff that they started reposting and wondered if I ever really knew these people at all?

Popularity will definitely wane, the social media rise and fall cycle will repeat

For me it's videos about working out and climbing. You can train the algorithm pretty well what you don't want to see.

That's more likely just your algorithm, personalized to whatever TikTok considers the best for engagement-farming from you.

Like what? What are some examples of things you've heard from these propaganda videos?

One example is loads of videos from John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs about how what's happening in Ukraine is really NATO's fault. I don't get why these rather niche academics are all over. Also loads of videos about how democracy in general is just really inefficient and we'd be better of copying China's model. Things like that. I never engage with such videos, actively click things like "don't show me content like this" but it's never ending.

Oh. I thought it would be more like the Chinese or Russian version of these US military edits which are widely popular:

Pretty surprising to have so much content like this and it not be suppressed with TikTok being so anti-US and all.

That's just a glimpse of reality you're witnessing for the first time. It can be quite disorienting after decades of indoctrination on US social media. I'm just so sick of all the pro-war propaganda we're getting here in the EU from the US.

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