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Comment by ourmandave | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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