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Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

Are you aware of what happened in Romania with Tiktok?

A candidate got funded by foreign agents, paid for influencers, and sprinkled with Russian bot accounts it was enough to make a pro-Russian candidate get 20% of votes when he was an unknown political figure.[0]

The app allows this. You can try to distract everyone from an app that enables illegal foreign interference by hiding under the guise of "oh, this is just what people want to hear; the problem isn't Russia but Romanian politicians." - that's a very dangerous stance and a threat to free & fair elections.

[0]https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/romania-tiktok-pr...

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The solution to this is to change the way elections work to make it harder to pull off this kind of short term influence pumping. The problem is that it’s possible to flood the zone with shit before people have a chance to have discourse on it.

I’ve heard a number of ideas including multiple round elections with averaged results. That way if someone pops in round one the discourse can focus a spotlight on them and if people don’t like what they see on closer inspection they can push the other way in round two.

The other problem though is that establishment politicians are so unpopular in so many places around the world that a rando with a simple catchy meme-worthy message can run in from nowhere and upset things. If the establishment were more responsive to the people it would be harder to do this.

All social media is a fertile ground for propaganda and manipulation by bots. The only way forward is to ban politics in all social media.

You can't ban politics. Everything is politics.

If everything is politics then nothing is.

Exactly, and that's why it's so pointless to ban politics. Whatever you include in or exclude from that ban is in itself a political decision.

And that's why X/Twitter should be banned too... ;-)

And Facebook too !! :-D

(obviously kidding but... well... not so much after seing https://www.france.tv/documentaires/documentaires-societe/67... )

Not so much, which is precisely why China does ban Twitter and Facebook. I’d love to have a detente where every country has a permissive policy towards social media apps and accepts some degree of soft power from it, but that’s not where we’re at.

So the US wants to be like China???

The US wants to be much more like a wartime US, in the face of its most intense completion since WWII. I think most Americans have no conception of what WWII era US censorship and propaganda looked like, but it looked a lot like modern peacetime China. TikTok is being treated more gently than Tokyo Rose.

Of course things will not go that far domestically... unless the shooting starts.

And HN! And GitHub!

X is a fine example of a platform tuned to push propaganda, which helped get Trump elected. I wouldn't be shocked if X gets banned on EU for example, hopefully, they will set the example.

But is the issue really the app itself? Or that not a symptom of a larger problem, or even multiple problems, we face, seemingly now more than ever before? I don’t want to say „banning TikTok is wrong“, I honestly do not know. But I don’t think it it solves any of the underlying problems. It may make it harder to hit these vulnerable demographics directly in the short term, but it won’t solve media literacy, corruption, or any of the other issues involved.

Taxing social media companies and using the tax proceeds to fund transparency initiatives would be interesting. E.g. grants to researchers and civil society labs

Make them pay to monitor the problem they potentially create.

1. TikTok isn't being banned in Romania

2. Meta has a far worse track record here.

If your argument is social media allows the subversion of free and fair elections there is no reason for TikTok to be singled out. In fact you could argue that WhatsApp groups should be banned as well.

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