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Comment by onlyhumans | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think anyone is really concerned with privacy, tho it is piled on as a reason to ban. The real issue is our adversary controlling the content the masses in the US see can sway opinions via propaganda

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The "our" in "our adversary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Adversary to who? The 0.01% who are CEOs, IP holders, and State Department goons for sure, but I don't think the average American has any reason to fear China over their own government.

Not sure the American government is really a problem compared to American megacorporations, but I suppose at this point that's kind of splitting hairs since the government's been at the beck and call of said megacorps more and more so since like 1980

The CEO class has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

The Chinese government has a vested interest in American instability and sowing chaos and further economic dependency on China

So I guess you could say bothe of these are “our adversaries” depending on your point of view

If the Chinese want to control our media they're going to have to get one of their citizens to get US citizenship first. Only then can that token citizen build a media empire and engage in a massive, decades-long propaganda campaign against us.

They'd also need to bribe lawmakers to add an exception to the foreign agents law that allows the Chinese to donate to people running for US office without needing to register as foreign agents.

There are other ways to donate to nonpolitician social media owners who then donate to politicians or support through their algorithm Like allow an individual who owns a big media platform to have the first fully foreign owned auto factory in China. In Musk's case it was before the Twitter purchase so not saying that's what happened there, just that that kind of thing is an avenue.

The Australians have already accomplished this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch

As was repeated over, and over, and over again, the CEO of TikTok is Singaporean.

And you are being entirely pedantic or uninformed if you do not understand that the CCP controls TikTok with mechanisms like Golden Shares.

> US citizenship first

Li Hongzhi / EpocheTimes intensifies.

Has the government made that case? I'm indifferent to TikTok's fate, but I've only heard vague allusions, not a concrete case.

They have just made vague comments like "national security risk."

I suppose that'll lose them the case with the public but have no impact on the outcome of the case proper.

Somehow media concentration isn't concerning enough to act...

To paraphrase, one man's freedom of speech is another man's propaganda. There is a reason TikTok was embraced by the younger generations. I don't use it, but I think the whole move only proves that US has no freedom of speech unless it is carefully curated.

edit: To all the negative reactions, argue with me you dullards instead of reactively pressing a button when you see something you disagree with. Use that wit and freedom!

Democrats didn’t ban tiktok because of china, it is also piled on as a reason. They banned it because some donors got mad that their grandkids were hearing anti-israel stuff. Remember, Trump tried to ban it several years ago and then everyone forgot about it until the images started coming out of Gaza last year. When considered this way it is a grotesque 1st amendment violation, but they'll probably get away with.

A republican majority house voted for the ban, so I'm guessing their granddaughters were also hearing dangerous anti-israel stuff (there is no difference between Democrat and Republican on Israel).

And now Trump is against the ban

His mind is spinning all the time....he wanted to ban both Facebook and TikTok.

The government has yet not laid out a strong, unclassified case for that issue to the citizens. If it exists, should it be laid out as such, so these discussions become more meaningful?

Of course the data collection, i.e., the "privacy violation", arguably informs any such propaganda and allows it to be targeted and more effective as a result.

> The real issue is our adversary controlling the content the masses in the US see can sway opinions via propaganda

... but during the 2016 election we saw that Russian-funded interference efforts using FB and Twitter were pretty effective despite those being public, US-based companies. If you're concerned about propaganda, then policies should be concerned with stuff like "is this poster a real human", "does this post make factually untrue assertions", "is this poster paid to say this without it being marked as an ad", along with "is the platform doing view-point-based amplification or suppression".

Further, in Citizens United, the court effectively invited companies, including subsidiaries of foreign companies, to contribute to political campaigns as part of their free-speech rights. And there was press about foreign companies exercising those rights. So it seems inane to me to say that foreign companies have a first amendment right to pay for political ads and statements, but not to operate a service that lets users create and view posts. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/03/citizens-united-for...

Let’s be honest, Trump supporters were going to support Trump even if he “shot someone in the middle of Times Square”.

Even when places like Fox News called the election fairly in 2020, they were roundly criticized by Trump supporters and places like Redstate kicked out life long anti-Trump conservatives.

The Wall Street Journal of all things was being called part of the “liberal media” of all things.

But in 2024, the Democrats lost fair and square. They lied and covered up Biden’s mental decline until it became more than apparent and lost any credibility with the public. They have given up on the “50 state strategy”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty-state_strategy

I agree with you that Trump-supporters are both loyal and ruthless. And I think that's mostly a US-internal matter. I agree with you that in 2024 the Democrats lost fair and square in the sense of not convincing people they were worth voting for.

However, Russia has continued to interfere in US elections including 2020 and 2024.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

I'm not pretending foreign interference only happened in 2016, or only happened when Trump won -- foreign and especially Russian interference has been non-stop because we haven't done anything systematically to stop it. The claimed threat about TikTok is always some vague opportunity for "propaganda". But we can point to many specific cases of Russian interference and misinformation on US-based platforms. The TikTok ban is just not a serious attempt at addressing the "foreign propaganda" problem, and people that make non-specific allegations about propaganda on it without mentioning the very real issues on US-based platforms are being disingenuous.

I don’t disagree with you. But as far as disinformation, why does it matter especially on the national level? How many people’s minds were changed?

We both agree that the Democrats didn’t give the non rabid Trump supporters a reason to vote for them and the rabid Trump voters were going to vote for him no matter what came out for or against him.

We have no idea how many minds were changed. But everything public says that the foreign interference operations that are actually known to be happening are using FB, twitter, reddit, youtube and everything else, are mostly Russian, and we're shutting down TikTok b/c its Chinese owners pose some vague propaganda-related threat, which no lawmaker has described in detail.

Russian disinformation on US-based social media networks is clearly happening, is aggressive and persistent, and perhaps did swing things in 2016. If you think that's doesn't "matter ... on the national level", then surely the TikTok propaganda threat isn't worth shutting down a popular service for?

No TikTok isn’t worth shutting down. As for as Twitter, do you really need foreign interfere and propaganda when it’s American owner is putting its thumb on the scale?

I'm not aware of this insidious Chinese propaganda supposedly controlling the minds of the American masses... Tik Tok just seems to be memes and nonsense as far as I can tell.

I am aware that every other social media platform in the US is being weaponized by the same 'adversaries' as well as the American government and corporations. There's a much better argument for banning Twitter and Facebook than Tiktok on those grounds, yet people go to the mat to defend every troll, nazi and spook on those platforms because "free speech."

TikTok is indeed laden with pro-China propaganda. It also censors, outright or algorithmic demotion, content critical of the CCP. It also censors tons of other stuff unrelated to the CCP.

It doesn’t even need to be ideologically aligned; simple pursuit of engagement is sufficient motive for the observed behavior.

And Twitter is laden with pro-Trump propaganda. It also censors and at least promotes what its CEO and owner wants to be seen and demotes what it doesn’t want to be seen.

It’s CEO is going to have a lot more influence on policy and be a large part of the Trump administration and have an appointed position without divesting his ownership of Twitter.

You should be much more concerned about Twitter than TikTok. I wouldn’t even care about Twitter if Musk wasn’t going to become an official member of government post 1/20.

Truth Social and Gab are quite similar, but smaller still. The intent here is clearly to punish foreign influence, not domestic and that's the first amendment carve out being used to push this through.

X, Truth Social and Gab are all malign (and arguably little better than 4chan or 8chan as homes for civil discussion) but are domestic in origin.

I'd rather wade into the ocean than join any of the above, but they aren't subject to the same legal carve out.

I agree. But Musk either should have to sell Twitter or not be allowed to have an official role in the US government going forward

Oh certainly. He has no interest in governing, he's interested in preserving (and assuredly) increasing the handouts subsidizing his businesses.

X is a political project being run at a loss. It's his blog, the remaining users are commenters.

I think this is whataboutism, but regardless, I have been vocally critical of Twitter’s censorship for about half a decade, as well:

https://sneak.berlin/20201031/goodbye-twitter/

So are youtube shorts and facebook reels (mainly because tiktok content is copied to these platforms). Falun Dafa is also on tiktok, which is very very very Anti CCP, I'm sure the CCP is playing a long game here by allowing them to put their short videos on the platform (see https://www.tiktok.com/discover/the-persecution-of-falun-gon...).

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