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Comment by shihab | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone aware of any opinion poll among US population about banning tiktok? This to me feels like one of the issues with potentially largest disconnect between voters and politicians

Edit: found one from Pew. "The share of Americans who support the U.S. government banning TikTok now stands at 32%." Sept 05, 2024. In contrast, 87% US lawmakers voted for the law that caused this.

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28% oppose the ban, and 32% support it. So a majority are either in favor or ambivalent. Two years ago a majority supported it: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/05/support-f...

Support has declined and opposition has increased. I don't think there's much of a disconnect here though, since it doesn't seem there are many people with strong opinions counter to what Congress chose to do.

Anytime there are such large numbers of "undecideds" it's likely they are low-information, and an opportunity for Trump (or any unscrupulous politician, but really, Trump) to lie to them and turn them to whatever side they wish.

Since 170M Americans look at TT, I wonder of how much of it was TT propaganda itself.

The amount of propaganda on TT is rather huge, though I won't say any different than US media, just more of it these days oriented to how 'good' China is.

To be fair, self-promotion is a good kind of propaganda to broadcast. It inspires healthy competition.

If tomorrow China becomes a global beacon of high-quality and affordable healthcare, maybe US will actually feel some pressure to fix its issues.

The impetus for this is largely from Congress in both parties. Public support often doesn't align with congressional action and it doesn't stop them.

Vote for your congress members.

>drumpf bad

He is! But I don't call him names; that's lazy.

Guess you were not part of the popular vote

"Not Sure" != "ambivalent". It's a mistake to lump "Not Sure" and "Opposed" together and declare a majority, as the group as a while does not represent a specific stance. Any attempt at nuance for either side gets bucketed into the largest category.

That group seems like the most interesting question... what sub groups do they fall into.

Yep.

But that's why it isn't a direct democracy. Sometimes government needs to do things that are not popular.

But of course this is always going to be an opportunity for a populist to take advantage of the disconnect. Sometimes, as in this case, that is damaging. But of course it's well within the rights of politicians to play that game.

I wonder if those numbers would change if people read the same intel reports and knew how far the Chinese spies are up our asses.

Well, those who made the decision decided to keep the intel secret, so we'll never know.

You bring up valid point. Did the legislators lie en masse to us about national security to remove a competitive app from the American ecosystem or not. If the national security issues exist, where is the outrage from our elected officials? If not, our government is for sale.

Not for sale as much as adjusting to the new reality of feudalism.

> If the national security issues exist, where is the outrage from our elected officials?

The vast majority of security threats does not cause any public outrage. It is dealt with behind the scenes.

You’re overestimating the number of people that care about it. A good chunk of people really don’t care about privacy, data security and potential exposure to propaganda, no matter how much we (engineers who actually care about it) tell them to.

Lots of people do care about the propaganda thing. Like, most normie voters I know definitely don't give a crap about the data privacy stuff, but they haven't forgotten about the cold war and are not bought into this "maybe it's fine if the Chinese government can control what all the kids are seeing" narrative.

But it's a big problem that the framing has often been about the data privacy thing.

People who were born after Cold War are 35. I don't think TikTok's main demographic remembers that.

Yes, but you don't have to be alive to understand the problem. I agree with you that the cold war is very old news to the TikTok demographic, but it isn't to people who were born in the 80s and before, and that is who drives politics. By the time the current young people grow up more, they will have their own direct experiences with geopolitical struggle. It remains to be seen where that will lead.

A lot of normie voters care but they are at least one if not two generations removed from the median TikTok user. Generational divides can be pretty stark and it's clear that future generations increasingly don't care as much about internet privacy. In fact, being a public figure on the internet is a good thing these days since you can make a career out of it.

Again, I don't think it is ever again going to be mainstream to care about the privacy thing.

But I think older people do care now about the potential for hostile foreign propaganda affecting our politics, and I think the younger folks who (reasonably!) care more now about losing their favorite entertainment app will grow up and understand the propaganda problem when they're older. That is, I don't think it's a generational thing, I think it's an age thing. And politics is driven by people over the age of 30.

Engineer who uses TikTok here, I'll let you know once I become a communist.

> people read the same intel reports and knew how far the Chinese spies

People do, and after Snowden revelation, they wonder why they should care.

The population was forced to accept the fact that they are constantly spied on 10 years ago.

Decisions have consequences.

A lot of people hold the view that privacy isn't important unless you have something to hide. They likely wouldn't care about some government on the other side of the world knowing what stupid tiktok videos they watch.

I assume most americans today are already under the impression their government spies on them and facebook/google will gladly give anything that is asked for, how does the chinese spying on them make any difference for the average citizen? If I was a regular american and had to choose I'd take the foreign spy 10/10 times. What will the chinese do to the regular american citizen compared to what his own contry could do with this information?

If you're diaspora and other smaller interest groups for sure, but the general citizen probably wouldn't care at an individual level. I'd argue that the NSA revelations and how everything just got worse and worse since then killed any chance of the public caring about this kind of stuff.

> how does the chinese spying on them make any difference for the average citizen? If I was a regular american and had to choose I'd take the foreign spy 10/10 times

I hope our adversaries believe the same one day!

I'd be surprised if they don't already.

"under the impression" ???

We have proof. There is no guessing here.

Until they're shared to the public, the wise move is to choose not to believe them.

They probably would. But so long as the decisions are made using secret information, how can we know? We can only assume they are lying to us, until they show the proof.

The problem with a poll is that the general public is likely not privy to all the information that the people in charge have. I think the best thing to do here is just come out with all of it, lay it on the table, and see what the public thinks then. If you have a good reason then show us.

That is exactly what the government has not done all these years. Why be tight-lipped if there is solid evidence and data, its not some issue of nuclear weapons/military-strategy.

I've suspected that they have evidence that China is using the platform for social manipulation, but we're using the same techniques on other countries and possibly domestically and the government doesn't want to make the general public aware of it. Or it could be that they don't have evidence of actual wrongdoing, but feel that the risk is too large to allow it to exist.

Whatever it is, this has gone off the rails and the public is going to need a real explanation if they decide to move forward with the ban.

People are fickle and will forget about this in a few months.

Days

More people supported the ban than opposed it in multiple polls. You’re leaving out the people who weren’t sure when polled

>Edit: found one from Pew. "The share of Americans who support the U.S. government banning TikTok now stands at 32%." Sept 05, 2024. In contrast, 87% US lawmakers voted for the law that caused this.

The relevant poll would be one right after the ban was enacted on bipartisan support. It's far too politicized now meaning that a huge percentage of people will simply support/reject it purely based off of "their candidate" being for/against it.

This holds for both sides of the debate.

The timing and rhetoric from lawmakers make this ban really seem about Israel. Lawmakers and citizens are pretty disconnected on that in general.

You know polls are a rotten way to make policy. Easily manipulated. In fact, Hitches said in "Letters..." that any time you see a poll just realize it's someone trying to change your mind with the bandwagon fallacy - isolating your own opinion as wrong and outside the norm or trying to reinforce the "right" opinion by confirming that you're part of the cool-kid club.

Yes, polls are an imperfect tool. But I think they remain the only tool we have to gauge what decisions coming out of Washington are product of broad popular support vs ones product of intense lobbying from shadowy powers.

Most policies aren't the sort of thing that is going to attract broad popular support (or opposition.) Did you look at the opposition numbers? Who are the "shadowy powers?" Lawmakers say that China is the shadowy partner here doing bad things with Tiktok. I don't necessarily trust the US government on this issue, but I was speaking to a Chinese national last year, they asked me why the US was banning Tiktok. When I said "because China is using it to spy on Americans" they replied "Of course they are!" and laughed.

I think there are probably some people who are pushing this for self-interested reasons (American social media apps) but also I think the stated reason for the ban is probably the truthful motivation, and I'm ambivalent about trusting the US government and US corporations not to spy on me, but I tend to trust the US government when they say they are trying to stop China from spying on me. And if zero people spying on me is not an option, well, fewer people would probably be an improvement.

> I was speaking to a Chinese national last year, they asked me why the US was banning Tiktok. When I said "because China is using it to spy on Americans" they replied "Of course they are!" and laughed.

Right. If the Chinese government is not using TikTok to spy on citizens of their adversaries -- or, more likely, influence citizens of their adversaries -- then the Chinese government is full of incompetent fools. And I think it's safe to say that the Chinese government is not full of incompetent fools.

It's not that polls are imperfect, it's that they're often entirely misleading and incorrect. And if the only tool you have to do a job isn't fit for purpose, then that just means that you aren't equipped to do the job properly.

If the only tool we have for measuring Washington's behavior against public opinion is one that doesn't accurately reflect public opinion, then that means that we just don't have a reliable way to measure Washington's behavior against public opinion.

> It's not that polls are imperfect, it's that they're often entirely misleading and incorrect.

Can you point to the source of your argument? Furthermore -- can you point out how this particular poll is one of the misleading and incorrect ones?

The previous commented made an on-target point about how polls can often be manipulated to produce contrived results. I've seen plenty of cases that corroborate this: differently constructed polls showing wildly different breakdowns of opinion on the same issues among the same population, surveys full of obviously leading and loaded questions, etc.

So given all of that, I think the burden of proof is properly the other way around. Why do you think this particular poll is reliable?

Counterpoint: shadowy powers of lobbying publish the polls to manufacture consent and put pressure on politicians.

Alternate tools include:

* elections, e.g. flipping control of house to party opposite the president.

Numerous examples of badly and broadly worded polls exist to tell you 87% of the country agrees on XYZ. There isn’t a damn thing up for debate in the United States that 87% of the population agrees on, so that’s your first tip-off. A nuanced question garnering 56% may be more believable, but even then, stay highly skeptical of polls: poll MoE, poll audience selection, poll respondents, and poll questions. Together these all make for a house of cards.

I often wonder what value a survey has if those surveyed have not enough information and facts at hand.

it's irrelevant in politics because they are still going to act on their own level of information regardless.

we have lawmakers making reproductive laws who don't know how babies are made. Those making the laws don't have enough information on hand.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/super-awkward-clip-republica...

Did they poll AIPAC?

So you are saying Trump went against 87% of lawmakers?

If you exclude "not sure," it's 52% support banning. Also, the survey was not limited to voters.

Note that a majority/plutority becomes more skewed when aggregating constituencies.

Granted 52% -> 87% is still a big increase, but there you have it.

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