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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.

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Do you think it would be possible to show this programmatically? As in scrape n posts from TikTok and Reels and show the first displays CCP tendencies?

Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic

It actually doesn't matter whether TT has done it already or not.

What matters is that it has the __capability__ of doing it, in ways that would be difficult to detect, when it proves expedient to do so.

Yup, but of course more than one person has to agree for this to actually happen. Which is not the case for other apps, like Twitter/X. If Musk wants to remove a government, he has only to promote "free speech" and let falsehoods and misinformation dominate his platform.

geopolitics aside could a turing machine identify misinformation / programatically check whether something is true or not? because even among humans there is no agreement

> even among humans there is no agreement

This is just not true. There are objective facts eg. the earth is round. We can all agree on this, and any information to the contrary should be banned.

The majority of us agree that racism is bad for society. Racist content should be banned.

Yes there are always going to be humans who think the earth is flat or has a core of cheese, but these people can be relegated to the fringes of society.

> This is just not true. There are objective facts eg. the earth is round.

The earth isn't round in many ways. It's vaguely spheroid but not a sphere and it has a rough shaped surface.

> We can all agree on this, and any information to the contrary should be banned.

If we can all agree then there is no need to ban anything. By definition, bans for information are means to suppress those who don't agree.

> The majority of us agree that racism is bad for society.

On the contrary, the majority seems to be very happy with racism. They just don't agree who you can be racist towards.

> Racist content should be banned.

I'd rather not have you or anyone else decide what is too racist to say. Especially when existing inforcement shows that "racism" often includes factual but inconvenient information. I do not support banning facts.

> Yes there are always going to be humans who think the earth is flat or has a core of cheese, but these people can be relegated to the fringes of society.

There are many more people that have much more reasonable (and often provably true) views but are going to be targetted with the speech policing your kind wants.

If a government can be removed easily with "mis"information then maybe it does not deserve to be in power in the first place. Maybe if politicians weren't habitual liars selling their votes to the highest bidder instead of acting in the interest of the people they are supposed to represent then those people would have some trust in them.

You are conflating strong Chinese Communist control of the business with how the content behaves. TikTok is full of content that would put a Chinese person in prison.

See this 2019 article outlining Chinese Communist moderation policies that (obviously) were attached to the app when TikTok was new, but were removed for non-Chinese user communities.

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

There's a Chinese creator on there Huey Li who just made a whole video about that as part of a story about how, now living stateside, he can no longer write in his mother language

Your link doesn't appear to work

Oh weird - it works for me. Maybe the discussion got banned somehow? Here is the underlying story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...

https://archive.is/4Y8w5

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