TikTok was used to push an unknown, unlikable character to almost win the presidential elections in Romania, who shares a lot of border with both Ukraine, the Black Sea and Danube.
See also: is China suddenly a center of human rights activism, or was it Americans who got upset about Israeli treatment of civilians?
China is, when it serves their primary interest of deflecting criticism from the operation of their very extensive totalitarian/authoritarian system. IIRC, they put out "human rights" reports all the time to that end that do stuff like criticize American prison conditions.
> or was it Americans who got upset about Israeli treatment of civilians?
It's worth noting that TikTok could (and probably would) be used by the PRC in very subtle ways, that would be missed in a distinction of "is it Chinese people speaking or is it Americans." I think the influence mechanism would almost certainly consist of giving artificial boosts to American voices that unwittingly serve PRC goals, e.g. anti-war activists if China invades Taiwan. They could even strongly condemn China as a warmonger, but their elevation would still serve Chinese goals if they spread the message that the US should stay out.
And given that the PRC has access to all the TikTok data (I believe no claims the could not access it), they can probably very effectively figure out exactly the voices to elevate that would do their job effectively.
No. This is about using reason to anticipate and prevent problems, not dumbly waiting around until the actualized problem stares you in the face and it's too late to do anything about it.
But if you want evidence, all that is needed is the evidence that China and the US are adversaries.
Then your standards of evidence are too high, and least for making decisions in this area. It's like you're working in computer security, but you demand evidence a vulnerable system was actually hacked and used maliciously before you're willing to take action to patch it and clear out the infiltration. It's foolish. Patch the damn system.
A theory that can explain everything explains nothing.
Aside, Congress is not a courtroom. The legality of the law is on trial, not its motivation or the basis in fact of its public justification.
However, returning to your witty witch-hunt comment, I don't think it's 1:1.
Consider that by that line of reasoning it's very difficult to prove that intelligence agencies ever do anything at all. All they have to do is say "no we didn't, and we don't have to allow anyone to have a close look".
In fact, if we simply relied on governments and faceless corporations to always tell us the truth, we'd probably manage to be even worse off than now! Haha.
There exists a difference between investigating or rejecting that with uncertain sources (esp. large and secretive institutions) and specifically accusing. Or between a witch hunt and demanding that (for example) food manufacturers should have to disclose their secret ingredients and some processes to the government to make it harder to put poison or addictive drugs in there without telling anyone.
It's absolutely absurd to think that the Chinese government doesn't use TikTok to influence non-Chinese users. They'd be incredibly foolish not to do so. And the difference here (as compared to other nations, including the US) is that that Chinese government gets to legally, deeply meddle in the affairs of Chinese companies as a matter of course. Running influence campaigns on a platform owned by a company out of the Chinese government's reach is a bit more work; they get to do it essentially "for free" on TikTok, plus, as a bonus, they'd have access to data they wouldn't get from a foreign-owned platform.
I think any country should have the right to protect its citizens from influence campaigns led by other countries. Whether or not that protection can and will be effective, and whether or not it's a smokescreen for other purposes (e.g. protecting Meta's market share), is another matter, of course. And certainly some kinds of protection -- such as a US TikTok ban -- will be wildly unpopular with a lot of people who love using it.
1.) How Chinese companies interact with the CCP: they are 100% subservient with a CCP party member who can pull the CEO in at anytime and assign them tasks related to studying Xi thought and other party material, as well as demand the company do anything for the state.
2.) What great power competition looks like including economic warfare (tariffs, massive state subsidies to protect national defense, influence operations for allies, securing raw materials, reducing reliance on rivals, etc).
3.) How espionage in general works in support of political aims, and especially how each nation uses it to further their goals. For China, it's always been about vacuuming up as much data as possible, and then later on finding use cases for it. The disruption side of their practices are successful if they make chaos in an adversary that forces them to spend time on dealing with that instead of confronting them. Each nation acts in their own interest and are absolutely ruthless here in a way the average person rarely can comprehend.
4.) The free pass given to China related to tech and social media industries. American Social Media is banned in China[1]. Why do you think that is? There are many reports/cases of American intel/military use cases of social media to influence outcomes worldwide[2]. China wasn't going to allow this. But we are supposed to allow them access to us? We know this is the case because we would do the same in their position[3]. There's a reason it's banned in India[4].
5.) We know China influences the Douyin algorithm[5] locally to promote behaviors the government perceives as healthy or important to state interests. This often manifests in pushing more STEM related content and suppressing the ragebait content that flourishes in other nations[6].
Even if the leadership of Bytedance were 100% on board with not pushing CCP interests to the USA and world, there's no mechanism of protection or redress from them. The CCP can, and will, disappear high profile people at will with no repercussion, and replace you with someone who will listen. Any smart nation who wants to protect the minds of their citizens would do well to extremely regulate social media in their country.
In your case for "Americans upset over Israeli treatment of civilians". Assuming that the American outrage is 100% organic on it's own: It is in the best interest of China to amplify that outrage and make it seem stronger than it is for a variety of reasons:
A. This will have knock on effects for policy makers and their aides who are hyper-tuned in because if their constituents want something, voting for that is how B. Anything that disrupts American foreign policy and allies is an asset at weakening the grip the dollar has on international markets C. Israel is an extremely talented producer of technical people. If the relationship between the USA and Israel sours, then suddenly a pathway opens for China to get access to the incredible tech that Israel develops for various US programs. (This is also ignoring their incredibly advanced spyware capabilities in their private sector, which is morally repugnant, but it does exist).
[0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663 [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit... (look at the most addicted cities) [3] - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... [4] - https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-ban-china-india-... [5] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0xzuh-6rY [6] - https://networkcontagion.us/reports/the-ccps-digital-charm-o... [7] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/25/the-growing-li...
Assuming that's true, TikTok, at the behest of the CCP, can (and will) amplify the reach of that outrage to an outsized impact. If the outrage is 5% of TikTok users in the given nation, and that 5% is thrown into the FYP of 50% of the users in that nation, that's an impact that any power that be dreams to have.
> Any smart nation who wants to protect the minds of their citizens would do well to extremely regulate social media in their country.
Extremely regulating social media isn't going to decrease the gormlessness of the population. In fact it'll probably make it worse. We can try to tamp down manipulative content all we want but it's a losing battle. What we need instead is to educate our masses. The problem is we won't, because our regulators want to be able to manipulate us. They just don't want other countries to be able to.
I'm just not comfortable with a widely used platform for Americans to speak to other Americans being taken away because it might skew one way politically or another, no matter what evil country is advantaged by that. Even if it were heavily edited by enemy of USA Xi himself, I am uncomfortable with that. We are not a country that bans things because it's too dangerous for people to know them.
The government doesn't get to decide what's good for us to learn and say and hear. We do. That's the entire idea of free speech. And this tramples on it significantly
The other government doesn't become in charge because they put out stuff on social media Americans want to watch. Americans are in charge no matter what they think or who they are influenced by. That's the whole idea of democracy
It was about the fact that a firm which is foreign and unsympathetic captured lightning in a bottle: they became the cool platform for a new generation. Why bother trying to figure out why the platform that Mom uses to share AI-generated Trump spam with Aunt Bertha is no longer drawing the 14-year-olds when you can just rattle some sabres in Congress and get them to shut the competition down for you?
If we're so terrified that TikTok can blast a candidate into office, we should be equally concerned that Rumble or Twitter could too. If your media is that powerful, it's dangerous wherever the nominal mailing address of the firm is. Taking potshots at single firms or specific ownership strategies just means the next one will take a slightly different form and dispense slightly different hazards.
The only way to actually regain control is to boost media literacy. TikTok can be part of a balanced media diet, but are we teaching kids "Compare what the BBC and Tass say, and the truth is probably in the middle?"
I'm seeing a lot of attempts to render Tiktok as interchangeable to any number of other examples in order to pose a dilemma about logical equivalences. I just don't think these withstand factual scrutiny. Rumble is not at the scale or engagement of Tiktok and Twitter does not have ties to a major competitive state actor.
You can see how it's meaningfully differentiated if you want to. If you don't want to, you attempt to restate the terms on which the comparison happens to make it look for fuzzy, so everything looks the same.
That is one fucking tie if you ask me.
He has direct motive to influence the operations of the American state, the resources to amplify his messages, and has control of a platform that's mainstreamed in a way that gives it a broader reach than TikTok ever had.
Saying he's an American entity is barely meaningful. When you're that rich, you can probably pull in five new passports given 48 hours notice, so the one you carry at any given point is largely a flag of convenience.
Blaming China is a cheat code for the current political climate. See the Huawei fiasco: No level of audits, disclosures, or actual technical evidence about security would satisfy-- It Is Foreign So It Is Evil. So I'm sure that the hype against TikTok was fanned in part by their competitors who saw an opportunity.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions like this one.
Muzzle social media and make sure everyone gets their news from the "approved" mainstream media platforms which we all know never lie and have never pushed one narrative only instead of providing facts.
I am sure this will end well.
Next step, we should all leave our TVs on 24/7 just so we don't miss a single word from our beloved leaders. Maybe install some cameras in every home while we are it, you know to save the children/defeat terrorism/save the planet (take your pick)...
Nobody in the open knows, that is the problem.
But also russian millitary bloggers are outraged by the IDF. Simply because it is war in the information sphere, not that they care about the people there. Just like China don't give a damn about them - but they can and do use it to weaken the self declared western moral leadership.
No, but is there a question that china still might try to influence and leverage it?
Market place implies transparent exchange of ideas. But if the TikTok algorithm is political biased, it is not a honest exchange of ideas anymore. (same goes for X's or FB, or whatever). But personally I am cool with not using those services.
In essence, the government wants to ban foreign news sources. TikTok may have been less editorialized than Al Jazeera, but it had wider reach.
In short, you have no idea whether it is more or less editorialized than other news outlets, and that's the central issue here.
It is a sign of weakness for a free society.
Ideally in my oppinion, intelligence services would proof the manipulation - and show it to the public. Who then decide on their own to be sceptical of TikTok content.
I am against a direct government intervention.
But it is still a very different situation in terms of impact compared to a single local newspaper.
Based on the fact that FedGov is presenting evidence to the court under seal, it seems likely that intelligence services have proof (or -more likely- "proof") of manipulation, but are only showing it to the judge.
Does the likely fact that the US government is refusing to provide for public inspection and discussion what they're using as evidence of alleged national-security-relevant Chinese interference in domestic affairs make you more comfortable with the veracity of their claims that the Chinese government not only has substantial control over TikTok, but that that control is so harmful to national security that it must be unilaterally terminated?
Why or why not?
With data ranging back years, sometimes even birth of the individuals?
I don't think so.
Newspaper editor edit one newspaper for everyone.
If FedGov is going to be fixing problems with the domestic news and entertainment industry, they should start by reversing that consolidation of control.
A lot of folks have been empowered to say “end the war in Gaza”. A lot of those folks don’t quite know what to say to “should we allow Hamas to seize control of Palestine”?
If this were not the case, democracies would work best when the public was not taught to read. :-) Can we really argue that the public is too stupid to be trusted with the ability to communicate? If that is the idea we should admit, at least, that what is being considered inverts every principle of the free world.
Having a foreign government control the narratives that reach mass audiences is not at all the same as trusting the public with the ability to communicate.
You’re just spouting one cherry picked narrative of an incredibly messy situation.
Bombing people indiscriminately tends to cause them to oppose you and support the people who are most credibly able to stop you - regardless of anything you do. So it was inevitable that support for Israel would plummet and for Hamas would rise, once people learned about the situation.
TikTok only had a hand in this to the extent that it helped Western citizens bypass Western soft censorship and learn about the situation sooner.
Notice that if TikTok was spreading a false or one-sided view of the situation, Israeli and Western government could have effectively countered it by providing an even more complete information with even more evidence, but they did not. This in itself is weak evidence that there isn't a more complete view to provide.
I don’t believe we should determine who rules Palestine. But I also don’t believe we should allow a hostile state to just bankroll effective seizure of Palestine and the military intimidation of Israel.
It’s frankly insanity to tell Israel to be chill while a hostile nation, which is posturing a potential nuclear attack, is actively funding a large and growing base of terrorist operations next door.
Palestine is a proxy battleground of many foreign actors. Reducing it to a conflict that is just Israel vs. Palestine is bullshit
The entire conflict is that Israel believes their safety necessitates that Palestine not be sovereign because they believe a sovereign Palestine will try to take back the land it lost whether in Israel itself or the various illegal encroachments over the years. Palestine on the other hand is not going to accept Israeli sovereignty over it. And thus the conflict. However many or few foreign actors are involved doesn't change the root of the conflict.
It is messy geopolitics. There are dire consequences to sitting back and doing nothing. It’s a prisoners dilemma with large moral negative externalities to playing.
The newer apartment renters (20s-40s typical young urban dwellers) are not surprised by anything they see on the news regarding the conflict. I think they had ways to see what the older generations had just been blind to since before this latest flare up happened.
Despite brigading from any side, anyone can get anything trending on social media, including videos of the aftermath of israeli air strikes, meanwhile nothing but filtered news headlines make it out of editors.
A fun exercise is comparing how big news websites frame headlines when Palestinians die (passive voice) and Ukrainian / israelis are killed.
If one newspaper can convince the United States to support the Spanish-American War because one of her own warships blew up due to poor maintenance, It's not a stretch to believe a sufficiently well-funded state operation with relatively unfettered control over an entire media application could run a similar opinion shaping operation.
Public opinion is the cornerstone of the US system, but the public can be misinformed at scale.
Correct. But (until relatively recently) the proposed solution to deception and propaganda was dismantling them with facts and reason. "Free and open discussion in the public square is critical to a well-functioning society." is one of the foundational principles of our country.
This notion that adults should be protected by deception and propaganda by censorship, rather than frank and open conversation is a distressing resurgence of authoritarianism.
As always, when looking at the machines of control that politicians are assembling, ask what can be done with it by someone who is dedicated not to the protection of their citizens, but rather the suppression or destruction of a section of the citizenry they disfavor. If someone who hates can legally do more harm with the machinery than someone who cares can do good, either ensure that it is built differently, or that it is not built at all.
If you've never looked into it, you'd do well to learn a bit about what it takes to become an AS and get an ASN. There was a post on the red site a while back about someone doing it on the cheap as a dare for their stupid hobby project.
If you think of TikTok as an instrument of the Chinese state, this could look consistent with the phenomenon Anne Applebaum has been talking about lately: a pattern of loose alliances-of-convenience between autocratic nations in service of specific disruptive missions [1]. A less spooky reading might be that Chinese norms don’t align with American ones as far as proactively stopping this kind of thing—that they just don’t care about this kind of Russian caper on the other side of the world. They sure do think carefully about their domestic information environment, though; and they’re probably the best in the world at policing mass thinking when they feel like it.
Where are the lines between mere negligence, complicity, and active participation? That seems a little more delicate than a couple news cycles’ work. The Europeans have asked TikTok to preserve records to find out.
I suspect the light and fire seems to be around whether a nation wants any tool like this to just be lying around, ready to disrupt the nation’s politics at a moment’s notice. Social media may be new in the scheme of things, but in the years since the UN studied Facebook’s genocides [2], governments have at least tried to get a handle on the kinds of monitoring and moderation tools and tactics that can help counter this kind of campaign (some with more deference than others to authentic speech).
As far as I’ve heard, the allegation had never been that Chinese government villains cackled and rubbed their hands together and said “today we take Romania!” Rather, it’s that the tools are powerful enough that we don’t want to leave them lying around unchecked—especially since, at least from the perspective of American and European policy professionals, Chinese thinking doesn’t really recognize a distinction between commercial and national security interests.
Others may have better sourcing than I do for this specific instance, but I think it’s fair to point to Western thinking about China’s Military-Civil Fusion policy [3] to think about dual-use idea-disseminating technologies like TikTok.
[0] https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-russia-election-interference...
[1] e.g., https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-r... and https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/russia-chi...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... , https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/myanmar-ffm/reportoft... , https://iimm.un.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Hate-Speech-R... [PDF, large]
[3] https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/12/chinas-military-civil-f...
Why is it ok then for Youtube to feed violence and awful behavior to people (probably to lots of kids) in the US if it's able to influence people? Is the thought that Meta and Google (both without ethics or morals) are just trying to get us to buy shit we don't need, but Tiktok is trying to get us to agree (or not agree) with their stance on x?
What's the alternative? Even HN has "algorithmic content" the algorithm is based on voting and time.
That model may not work with all social media, but as far as I remember it worked for Facebook.
> We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of content classified as uncivil or containing slur words they saw decreased on Facebook, and the amount of content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences they saw increased on Facebook. Despite these substantial changes in users’ on-platform experience, the chronological feed did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes during the 3-month study period.
I don't think we are okay, but I don't think there's an across the board equivalent. We prioritize the egregious examples while simultaneously searching for a systematic redress that's less heavy handed.
I don't think Facebook marketing Blue Apron to its users is the same kind of issue as undermining democracy in Romania.
There isn't such a thing as a non-manipulatible feed. Even a chronological feed can be manipulated by spam, so it is a bit like asking why is it okay for tools to be made of mass when it means they can be used to bludgeon someone to death.
I think the allegation, implied rather than stated in this case, is that it is not predominantly any of those, but that it is predominantly the Russian state.
Which would serve as an example that it's able to be mobilized, even weaponized, at the behest of state actors. China would not necessarily be culpable under this interpretation of this particular example, but it illustrates that they could exercise that same mechanism.
How does it work? You simply give some money to TikTok and the whole country runs to vote for an unknown, unlikable candidate? It must have superpowers.
... the same power as all media is sufficient
TikTok was required to comply with electoral law and check/enforce all this stuff but did not respond until after the elections, and apparently did not enforce these electoral laws, while pocketing all the illegal ad money.
1) it's a very well known fact that 70% or so of the electorate can't be moved from their positions, even if their party said they were gonna harm them people will still not vote the other ones, thus any real advertisement or anything is gonna only impact a few % of people
2) extremism is on the rise everywhere in the world, from Germany to US, from South Africa to South America. Narratives have made centrist governments, especially those coming from larger coalitions made weak (often for good reasons)
3) we have had multiple scientists (stats, sociologists) look at these allegations of interference and no single data seems to demonstrate that political discourse on TikTok is any different than other media platforms. In fact, if anything, it seems way less controversial than other US based ones.
4) The average European finds supporting Ukraine not only a lost cause nowadays, but gives part of the blame to the west
So what's an "average European"? You and your friends?
A recent poll from Germany, for example, found solid (>60 percent) support for both sanctions against Russia, and military support for Ukraine:
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1312216/umfra...
They would also prefer a diplomatic solution, but that doesn't mean they think "Ukraine is a lost cause".
In Italy, where I live only 55% of the polled people support sending money to Ukraine, and only 33% support sending weapons.
The only Europeans I know that are very pro helping Ukraine, like where it's an exception to be sceptical are Poles.
https://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblicazione/due-anni-di-guerr...
https://www.romania-insider.com/romanians-ukraine-negotiate-...
The average European believes that Ukraine cannot win the war (meaning getting back their 1991 territories), but that's also a reality and the opinion shared by analysts, and is honestly tired of it.
This war is extremely expensive on Europe and with no realistic prospects of Ukraine going anywhere it's hard to be a die hard supporter for Zelenskis official line.
In any case what happened in Romania is a tragedy.
A court canceling a democratic election because one candidate allegedly got financial support from Russia (something that many parties currently ruling in Europe like Italy did too by the way) is a very disturbing fact.
This should've been handled, if true, weeks ago. Not after the candidate got so many votes.
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/how-strong-is-public-support-for-ukrai...
If the poll were taken today, the percentages would probably shift a bit on some of these questions. But what's more interesting is the spread across the 10 countries.
Notice that Italy and Hungary tend to sit more on the "doomer/skeptic" side (in accord with the poll you offered in regard to Italy's sentiment), while countries like the UK, Finalnd and the Baltics are more on the "there's still hope" side. And Germany seems to fight right in the middle.
Which suggests that no, the average European does not simply think Ukraine is a lost cause.
The average European believes that Ukraine cannot win the war (meaning getting back their 1991 territories), but that's also a reality and the opinion shared by analysts, and is honestly tired of it. ... It's hard to be a die hard supporter for Zelenskis official line.
Well that's obviously no longer Zelenskyy's position, right?
Also, you're setting up a false dichotomy here -- either the (now basically collapsed) "die-hard" position, or the "Ukraine is lost cause" position.
My observations indicate that the median sentiment falls somewhere between these extremes.
It's odd for a startup/tech oriented board.
It's not "all about politics". You could have said "Why is it mostly about ...?" and the question would have had an entirely different ring to it. But the wording you chose was weird and distracting, so I don't think I'll be able invest much time in answering.
Other than to say: I respond mostly to muddled thinking and misinformation (and in some cases outright disinformation). Which not coincidentally seems to bubble forth continuously from posts referencing that country (and a certain other one). Which also tend to appear in bursts, as we have seen. So the intent is to keep the conversation at least borderline reality-centered. And hence, per the site guidelines, more "interesting".
(Not that your post is in this category. I just think you're probably mistaken).
In that sense the interest isn't even all that "political" as such. It's more psychological and cognitive.
It's odd for a startup/tech oriented board.
It's not specifically startup/tech-oriented. Check the guidelines again.
I have an interest in tech also, but am also rather burned out on it.
The more powerful it gets, the more boring it gets, somehow.
Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
Same with Trump. I don't agree with many of his policies but hey, did the establishment take care of the people?
I interpreted it as questioning the democratic process. I could be wrong.
So is that promoting Trump? Or is it double reversi and trying to make people more confident to not need to vote, while also telling them to go vote? It gets confusing.
When election campaigns "got going" I started first see pro-Left content for about 2 days off and on. Disliked the F out of it... as I was doing that the algorithm was proly thinking "ohhh the right-winger, here's some awesome pro-right content..." took 2 days (off and on) to dislike that shit... From like August onward I maybe saw 2-3 political videos weekly if that...
Social media companies do not give a shit what you watch/read as long as you read/watch as long as possible. So you will get whatever (on TikTok or otherwise) you actually want to see there :)
look at romania!
china is hacking the elections now!
The far right is rising => everybody is racist. The cost of living is rising too quickly and people are complaining => you are too stupid to see that the economy is doing extremely well and if that doesnt make sense to you then you must be Chinese or Russian puppet.
it's so easy a toddler could do it.