Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwarfield | Hacker News Reader

The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda. Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't) there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?

And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.

View on HN

Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord, quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the new US government.

Musk making threats against the UK government has gone down badly: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/uk-counter-ext...

Musk, is a representative of Trump's government, right?

A senior member of Trump's government is trying to mess with our political system - how is this not catastrophic for diplomatic relations, coming on top of the threats to our NATO allies?

No, no, you can't do that. Than they'll come after you and claim how you're not free, you don't support free market and whatnot. Banning is tool for them, but not for you.

Any country is free to do this.

TikTok is literally banned in China (along with YouTube, Facebook, Insta, etc, etc).

Is it banned or is it just not available due to the owners already having an app that does the same thing (douyin)?

Yes, it's region banned (not just by IP so VPNs don't even really work well). You'll get a 404, if you try connecting, and your packet rate won't support video through a VPN. Note that it's also banned in HK and India and parts of Europe so it's not really anything new to ban it when you're talking about almost half the world's population.

Couldn't people just say "but Instagram" is just TikTok? Is it really the "same thing" just, because the same people have control, if the algos, servers, content, moderation/censorship, and promotion are different? Like BlueSky, Twitter, and TruthCentral are all the same thing? Or if we want the "same company" company Allo and Hangouts? I mean everyone loved Allo, right, you can have that one.

The US didn’t “ban” anything. If the EU required Meta to divest I imagine they would do that rather than shut down and lose billions.

You think US Meta would relinquish tech to EU Meta? You think they're better then TikTok?

Yeah, we're not buying that story anymore.

US tech companies sell themselves to European tech companies all the time, Meta would definitely sell.

TikTok's main user base is the USA. If TikTok sells their US app, they can't support themselves on the rest of the world. TikTok isn't even the leader in China.

US Meta can definitely support itself at it's current size without EU Meta.

Are there any numbers for that? I highly doubt tiktok is doomed to fail just because is banning it.

It's still way more popular than any Meta or US app for that matter, is right now.

The company scaled to support the world’s largest economy.

Remove that. Recognize they can’t compete in #2 (China).

Then how can you justify their current scale?

What do you mean by more popular than any meta or us app? WhatsApp has 2b monthly active users, where as TikTok has little more than 1b.

More important than user count is user economic purchasing power.

This ban only applies to foreign adversaries (e.g. China, Iran, and Russia).

Which the United States clearly is trying to become with Mexico, Canada and Denmark, UK and Germany. so far.

Hum... Brazil already demanded explanations about the new Meta moderation rules. I remember reading the same about the UK, but I'm not sure.

1. CEOs meeting the President is not evidence of govt. control.

2. Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella .

>Europe is an ally

Was? Isn't a threat of invasion of Nato territory something that ended that situation.

Sure "it's Trump being an insane dickhead", but y'all elected him, then suspended rule of law for him.

Europe is sitting waiting to be shafted if we don't assume Trump will continue to do the absolute worst, most hostile things. We should be taking the threats of invasion seriously despite them appearing to be a way to, for example, invade Panama and not look as insane as was expected.

> Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella

That's an absolute illusion. And definitely absolutely wrong to call it ally. Most govs don't want to have anything to do with trump, musk and all this bullshit.

Most European countries will basically make no deals or anything for 4 years just like we did last time.

There is a literal war thread open of trump claiming to invade parts of Europe. We are pissed. Not allies

You know this was happening before elon bought Twitter, right? Secretly?

Members of congress were texting and emailing with execs from Twitter and Facebook to request post suppression. During an election.

The US is not an enemy to the EU, while China is a clear enemy to the US.

The difference is quite easy to easy to spot.

I mean under Trump the US becomes less and less of an ally, and more an opportunistic bully.

> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)

Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.

Sources:

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...

https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.

Attempting to reconcile that with HRW's article: on the one hand I think HRW might be unrealistic about what FB should be expected to tolerate (for instance, they criticize FB for taking down posts praising designated terrorist organizations); on the other, Meta's approach to content moderation - which combines automated systems with overworked and underpaid humans exposed non-stop to awful content - is notoriously fickle and subject to abuse (including, perhaps, by state actors).

Beyond Israel/Palestine, I regularly encounter content on Facebook that the Powers That Be would censor if "the pro-Western censorship regime on FB [were] extremely strong". I think I subscribe to only one political (left-leaning) group (along with a bunch of local and meme pages), but nevertheless my feed is full of tankies demanding we bring back the guillotine and install full communism.

>Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.

Naturally there is no overt censorship on FB/Meta, but in the wake of October 7th there was a clear difference in what kinds of content was being lifted by the algorithms on both platforms. I think, save for Bella Hadid, you would rarely see "organic" pro-palestine content with millions of views on Instagram, while it was less censored on TikTok.

Human Rights Watch even did a study on it: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?

Can nation states ban email or bittorrent? Entities can be targeted, protocols less so. Where the algorithm is matters.

Nation states definitely can by using port targeting, traffic heuristics, and DPI. The US historically has not done this but several other states have. Even if protocols are preserved, I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I have to run a client on my local machine that consumes from the protocol. I want to be able to use a hosted client.

A user should be able to use another person's hosted Mastodon instance or Bluesky AppView/Relay.

obfs4proxy, Shadowsocks, Snowflake, Xray?

The HRW report’s list of complaints starts with censorship of praising Hamas (a designated terrorist org) and “from the river to the sea” (a call for the elimination of Israel, which lies between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea).

Right, what i take issue with is that you hear similarly dehumanizing things said about palenstinians on mainstream news outlets in the US every single day (my friends in group chats share thme). I don't think any dehumanizing language like that is a good thing but really hard to act like there isn't asymmetric policies applied here

Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule should at least be something like “Europe is welcome to blast propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast propaganda at their teenagers.”

we should probably start banning books from China too, for the same reason

That isn't even a remotely realistic propaganda threat, while tick tock arguably is.

Not at all the same thing.

Comparing books to TikTok algo is like comparing rifles to ICBMs.

This is what people seem to be ignoring: the algorithms are damned near mind reading, and these algos put members of society into separate realities. We would be better off if they were all banned, but at least it should be agreeable that a hostile foreign government should not be allowed to deploy this on Americans without oversight.

> hostile foreign government

I don't take this as a given and I believe the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people, create laws that benefit 1% of its citizens to the detriment of the rest, forces its people to go wars they doesn't support, create rules that target certain genders and races, and so on.

Importantly, the US government is able to enact more harm on its citizens than China when it feels like.

> the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people,

Maybe, maybe not. But when the PRC decides the time is right to take Taiwan, it will have prepared the ground by making sure lots of Americans saw TikToks (made by other Americans) saying basically this.

I mean, Chinese people should be allowed to post videos for Americans, the issue is editorialization.

Like how newspapers and other media can use editorial discretion to create the impression that “all reasonable people” hold some opinion X by only publishing the voices of reasonable people who believe X (manufactured consent), social media platforms can do the same thing, but x1000 thanks to automation and personalization (“the algorithm”)

So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms. If the editors are independent, and part of the same public discourse as their readers and authors, then you wind up with a diverse media ecosystem where the liberal machinery of people working out complex issues through public discourse can hopefully still more or less proceed.

If one part of the ecosystem isn’t letting outside voices in, the feedback mechanisms are broken and you don’t have a healthy public discourse anymore. And growing and maintaining a diverse media ecosystem in a society that does still have a healthy public discourse is slow and fragile (as the posts below comparing the risk of books to TikTok observe).

> So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms.

I certainly agree that editorial discretion is speech. I'm an adult and I think it is my prerogative to participate in as many broken ecosystems I want. Nor do I trust you or 300 million of my peers to accurately assess what is a broken ecosystem.

>Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?

Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I mean, Fox News practically already is.

i absolutely reject this great firewall style of thinking. I’m an American, an adult, and I can read and watch whatever I want.

Cherish it while you still can.

But is there actually any evidence that the US's foreign adversaries can more effectively deliver propaganda on Tiktok compared to other platforms?

I understand the concern over foreign propaganda, but this feels like it's not going to remotely impact the ability for foreign governments to deliver propaganda to Americans. It's perfectly possible to deliver propaganda on US-based social networks.

The best outcome of this is just that Americans find the other social networks so boring that they spend less time on social networks altogether, thus reducing their propaganda intake (at least, from social networks).

Literally same arguments used by Iran.

It’s fascinating honestly. Soon we’re going to have “we need government to be able to DPI and block propaganda!”

> Literally same arguments used by Iran.

All governments/nations have some level of self-interest. That doesn't mean they are all equal in their motivations or approaches.

China is literally controlling the narrative through TikTok. Why shouldn't the US respond to that?

> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans

Is the argument itself correct or not? Or do we evaluate it based on motivation, i.e. it's ok when we do it because we have good reasons for it? Sounds like the ends justify the means to me.

The correct approach would be to increase the critical thinking skills of the population, increase transparency, require corporations to make algorithms fair and equitable. Require all feeds to be chronological or some other uniform, fair rule for showing posts. No boosting certain viewpoints, or paid promotions. But these things would bother corporations and politicians in the west as well as the external forces with "bad motivations", so just ban the external social networks.

The EU I think has a better approach, of course made possible because we don't have any powerful social networks of our own, and so nobody lobbies against these rules. I'm sure the DSA and DMA would be different (if they existed at all) if at least one of FAANG was European. Nevertheless, the concept is better.

The chinese government couldn’t care less about tiktok, your brain has been poisoned by usa propaganda against china

The US literally controls most of the modern internet.

The argument is probably more correct for Iran banning YouTube than it is for the US banning TikTok.

> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.

I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?

The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.

The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.

So many people keep missing this. It's not about data harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the population and controlling that narrative. Of course any social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same rules.

> propaganda

It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.

Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.

Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?

The propaganda on TikTok comes disguised as Americans sharing points of view that just happen to serve CCP interests. Often the creators are expressing a genuine (but rare) viewpoint that China just needs to amplify. This isn't about keeping Americans from reading Pravda.

It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict. "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"

Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.

Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually. Hospitals running out of medical supplies will hit WAY sooner than your existing 4090 needs to be replaced by a new Taiwanese product.

This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline. Surely you can at least admit this. It's just a battle of propaganda, except China unfortunately has common sense on its side in many of these arenas:

USA should not be spending hundreds of billions maintaining a WW2 power projection strategy, 80 years later.

I can't admit this and have no idea what you're talking about. You're right that Taiwan isn't more important to the US than China or any other major trading partner; the key difference is that China is not threatening to invade and conquer any of the other trading partners. Demanding that belligerent countries should not invade their neighbors is not a "WW2 power projection strategy", as China understood perfectly well when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

I disagree (I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means - do you think the U.S. has military bases in Taiwan?), but the point is that these issues need to be debated by Americans without the other side surreptitiously trying to sway public opinion.

> these issues need to be debated by Americans

Yo can we drop the whole “our government executes on the will of the people charade”. If you think your average American has any say in their governments foreign policy I have a bridge to sell you.

> I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means

That's the problem. There's massive lack of historical education on this topic. The Taiwan issue greatly predates TSMC.

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

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

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

>> Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.

> Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually.

Yes, but let's not use that as a justification for letting it get worse.

> This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline.

The whole f*ing modern economy runs on semiconductors, and the most advanced ones are fabbed in Taiwan. You might have a point if Intel wasn't falling on its face, but it is, so you don't

The way we stop making this worse, i.e. reducing our trade deficit with China and in general, is by doing virtually the opposite of what Washington is currently doing.

Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.

> Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.

Reducing risk from Chinese influence is "rebuild[ing] the republic" and is not " hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion."

Also, letting China encroach and control more vital supplies is a good way to make "rebuild[ing] the republic" a lot harder.

What? Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton would never have allowed a hostile foreign government to own a major communications platform.

Bush and Bill would still laugh about nailing jelly to the wall

We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media company since 1934.

This is just updating the standard. TikTok is clearly a massive threat, how is that not obvious?

https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli....

>We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media company since 1934.

False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_America

The link you cited literally explains how they tried to get around this restriction by setting it up as an autonomous non-profit (that was US-based).

Additionally, it was required to register as a foreign agent before shutting down...

This rather proves my point

Meanwhile the rest of the modern world is not banning apps because of propaganda. China and USA is.

I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to democracies, not strengths.

Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The world is increasingly becoming not friendly.

You know the whole idea of “oh, all of our problems are actually because X, Y, Z boogeyman!” thing? Yeah that. Watching from outside, it feels like political landscape of the US knows that they have lost the global competition and scrambling to get back on its feet. Everyone just keeps yelling “no, no, don’t look what’s happening inside, because everything is so much worse in other countries, they’re about to completely fall down! Those europoors with no ACs, China is about to collapse for the 50th time in the last 10 years, Japan is basically dead etc etc.”.

Where's the evidence that TikTok is being used by China to spew propaganda?

Conversely there's a mountain of evidence which strongly suggests that US officials are going after TikTok specifically because they're not in control of the truthful narratives that paint the US in a bad light.

> Please talk when China/Russia opens up.

Careful with this sort of rhetoric. China's constitution enshrines freedom of speech as a constitutional right, just like the US, but they're both taking this freedom away by invoking "national security".

Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.

TikTok has repeatedly shown to nuke political topics on TikTok that China doesn’t like.

Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

> Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.

Why would we wait for TikTok to continue to have greater and greater social influence before we cut off their propaganda tool? Do we have to wait until Taiwan has been leveled by China? And TikTok is being used to push the narrative that the US must not come to the aid of a peaceful nation being brutally conquered? By then it’s too late.

> Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.

None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.

How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?

> None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.

Read the last paragraph of my comment again and you’ll find your answer.

> How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?

This isn’t a reality that exists. Did you spend any time at all on Twitter in the last year? You literally could not go a day without hearing about it. It was front page news on US news sites constantly. Protests against both Biden and Harris were constantly in the news and all over social media. The student protests were all over the news and social media. I don’t know what world you’re living in where you think Americans can’t talk about Gaza because it’s all I’ve been hearing about for a year. And here you are, talking about it on an American social media website.

> This isn’t a reality that exists.

I'll just go ahead and quote my sources. The suppression and narrative shaping are very real, but doesn't mean that nobody on the internet has said anything about it.

Isn't this exactly what you're worried about with TikTok - that an adversary is going to shape the conversation by purposefully biasing the conversation? I'd appreciate it if you applied the same standard to both sides.

> Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel. The documented cases include content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways. This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship. Hundreds of people continued to report censorship after Human Rights Watch completed its analysis for this report, meaning that the total number of cases Human Rights Watch received greatly exceeded 1,050.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

> The CNN staff member described how the policy works in practice. “‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the person said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”

https://theintercept.com/2024/01/04/cnn-israel-gaza-idf-repo...

And where is the United States government directing any of this? Nowhere.

Even your own source says

“Despite the censorship documented in this report, Meta allows a significant amount of pro-Palestinian expression and denunciations of Israeli government policies.”

Just because you dislike the way CNN is covering a conflict doesn’t somehow mean the shadowy US government is pulling the strings behind the scenes.

The Intercept is also an American news organization that is clearly not being censored on this topic, so I’m not sure you’re really making your point here.

Yes, but at least in the USA, I constantly have to hear shouting about how "free" everything is whenever I ask for sane regulations (guns), or something like universal healthcare.

If USA was actually so free, that would at least be consistent. But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests? I get all the bad, none of the good.

Every voting citizen should remember that this TikTok ban was bipartisan. That means they all cared more about this than ANY other sensible legislation. Banning child marriage? Nah! Protecting the childrens physical bodies in school was not as important as a hypothetical "mind attack" from TikTok.

They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"

> But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests?

WTF? In no way do kids have to wear bullet proof vests. That is a very odd statement.

> They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"

They have not literally said that.

They have passed a law to force every schoolkid to:

(B) understand the dangers of communism and similar political ideologies; and

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5349...

And yet nothing is being done for school shootings. Make of that what you will

This is real though- the only other bipartisan bill they passed was the "Crucial Communism Bill" ie. a mandate to teach anticommunist propaganda in schools

Elon Musk seemed to leverage Twitter to try to manipulate the US election along with a myriad of other underhanded actions.

Should Twitter be banned as a propaganda / risk to US democracy?

Yes.

> Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?

They don't have to, Fox News does it for free /zing. But for real I wouldn't see a problem with it. Less now that the world is more globalized than ever, I can get news from every corner of the globe both from our allies and enemies.

Could they be subtly pushing a narrative of communism or something, sure but this kind of "news is biased towards its owners" is beyond commonplace at this point. Jon Stewart just did a whole bit about why he couldn't criticize Apple or China.

To be clear, Russia pays those right wing trolls a fat chunk of change

Citation needed.

Right-wing influencers were duped to work for covert Russian operation: https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-presidential...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com