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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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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