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Comment by yyuugg | Hacker News Reader

This ban has always felt so silly. If it's privacy and data harvesting as a concern, don't a million apps do that? If it's anti-China sentiment, why TikTok and not a million other things? If it's about protecting elections and propaganda, why not X and Meta and YouTube?

It's so weirdly targeted to me. Why TikTok only?

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> If it's about protecting elections and propaganda, why not X and Meta and YouTube?

Because the government is not threatened by X, Meta, or YouTube. In many ways, it exists in their pocket. There's not a lot of looming dissonance between what those parties are interested in seeing happen and what the modern federal government (as run by either party) is pursuing, and at this point, those each provide far more value as an allied propaganda arm than as a hostile propaganda risk.

But China and the US have directly competing interests in many places around the world, and the radical changes that both countries have undergone in the last 80 years have set the stage of a fresh contest of power. Obviously, both parties would like to navigate that contest in the best position possible. Allowing your anticipated opponent access to unmediated, private communications with hundreds of millions of citizens in an already vulnerable democracy is not a great position to be in during that contest.

It’s very simple, the entire young generation lives on TT. It’s where they get all of their information. It’s owned by a foreign adversary. We already have laws against foreign owned media for radio and TV, why would this be any different given this is TV in 2024?

I’ve used both reels and TT. I’ve only ever gotten lots of pro-China content on TT.

So, you agree that most countries should ban US social media, as most of them probably have laws against foreign owned TV and radio?

most of them probably have laws against foreign owned TV and radio?

Better check on that. I know of a few countries that have no problem with foreign-owned radio stations. I assume that applies to television stations, too.

When the Iron Curtain came down, radio companies from around the world started buying up signals in eastern Europe.

Yeah, I was thinking more in Europe and some countries in Latin America, which I know more. Not in Eastern Europe, where after the end of Soviet Union, a shock treatment were applied, creating a free market without any restrictions.

You would be surprised perhaps, but a lot of countries actually ban US social media.

Yeah, it is true for some definition of "a lot", but still is a minority, a number of countries much smaller than what should be according with that opinion. Nonetheless, it is funny how before US had the urge to do the same to control which parties should be allowed to mass spread messages within its borders, the common sense and default ideology was that those bannings in the Internet were a proof on how evil and dictatorial these countries were, in contrast to how free were the USA. But unsurprisingly, perceptions and ideologies always change with time, always based on how convenient and useful they are for the powerful.

You cannot be dogmatic and unrealistic. When adversaries are systematically abusing your own systems to influence your society repeatedly, you need to take action. This is far less action than say China is, which not only doesn’t allow TikTok as is on their own population, but has banned all us social media for years and years.

Ok, another metric to look at is population access. If you combine population of China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Myanmar, etc it’s more than 2 billion people without access to American social media platforms.

I tried TikTok and never saw much political content at all. The algorithm gave me little dances and bad cooking. I finally got it to ditch the bad cooking and show me some interesting pseudo 70s horror AI videos. But then things kept repeating and I bailed.

How did you manage to get Chinese propaganda?

Just keep using the app. It wasn’t at the beginning.

I used it for like two weeks.

Speak for yourself, I dont have any 'foreign adversaries,' really that sounds like cheap talking points and nothing to do with my interests as an american.

I've used TikTok extensively for the last three years and never found any pro-China content at all.

Data harvesting is a-ok. Propaganda by Americans to Americans is protected by the first amendment. But a foreign state harvesting data and applying influence is more straight forward.

Look at the proposed solution: Just sell TikTok to someone else who isn't China.

Because the AIPAC lobby explicitly called TikTok out for exposing young Americans to footage of the Gaza genocide (causing support for Israel among US youth to reach and all-time low), and pushed for the ban. The US politicians who initially pushed it had received hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations from AIPAC.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/business/tiktok-accusatio...

Its a straight line, openly conceived.

because tiktok was doing FB stuff better and FB got scared and lobbied. I think that about sums it up.

X, Meta, and YouTube are not indirectly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The end.

So... nationalism? We like our surveillance state and demonize their surveillance state?

Yes? And it's not so much about the surveillance in the first place as opposed to the algorithmic manipulation of content to shift narratives and spread propaganda. Whether or not one believes the US based companies do similarly is beside the point, precisely because they're US based, whereas TikTok is the product of the US's primary economic and ideological adversary

oh, but give a chance for rebuttal: I find the US propaganda simplistic and violent. I much prefer this Chinese propaganda, as an american consumer.

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