Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

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> See also: is China suddenly a center of human rights activism,

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.

I know that's the conspiracy theory, but shouldn't we be asking for evidence?

> I know that's the conspiracy theory, but shouldn't we be asking for evidence?

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.

That's not sufficient evidence.

> That's not sufficient evidence.

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.

If your observations would be the same whether your conspiracy theory is true or not, then the simplest explanation is that the conspiracy theory is not true.

A theory that can explain everything explains nothing.

That's a farcically absurd statement given the context. Following this logic, Japan and the US being adversaries is the only justification you need for Japanese internment camps.

Equating a ban on Chinese-owned tiktok in the US to putting US citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps is a bit much.

If you're "conspiracy theory"-ometer is asking you for evidence for the proposition that "countries do not simply lie back and fervently hope for things to go their way but take concrete actions to advance their interests", your meter is tuned waaaaaaaay too sensitively. Whether that's a conspiracy is up to your definition, but that it's a theory that somehow needs substantiation is absurd. It's a plain and obvious fact of the world. Organizations of any size in general do not generally just sort of sit back and hope things go their way, but take action. "People take actions to advance their own goals" is not a "conspiracy theory".

The irony is that people with this overly sensitive "conspiracy theory"-ometer largely have it from the amount of influence campaigns ran on them.

Normally I'd be cautious about a witch hunt, but I think the point here is that there isn't much ability to ask for evidence, which is exactly why it's been able to progress through court so quickly.

The funny thing about that analogy is that it is also very difficult to prove that somebody isn't a witch. :-)

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.

Really late to responding (oof, I don't use HN much), but really nicely phrased point, haha. And I do agree on congress not being a courtroom -- my assumption would always be that their motivations are just corporate lobbying or distracting the public from more pressing social issues.

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.

We already know foreign countries attempt to influence American elections using American-owned social media. So why would it be a "conspiracy theory" for them to use foreign-owned social media for similar purposes? I would think it's probably even easier.

I think we should take it as a given that countries try to influence the citizens of other countries using social media. We know for a fact that there are state-run influence campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. That evidence has been well-researched for many years now. And I'm not just talking about China, Russia, etc.; I expect US intelligence agencies also use social media to influence our adversaries.

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.

IMO the bigger issue isn't propaganda posts on tiktok created by the CCP but the more subtle influence the recommendation algorithm can have on what gets eyeballs. There have been several studies that showed that content the CCP doesn't like is a lot less prominent than on other, comparable platforms. Here is the first study I could find again while googling: https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...

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