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Comment by FridayoLeary | Hacker News Reader

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In reading the quote from Vance I was starting to think that American's data is only safe in the hands of European companies.

The quantity of propaganda is going up with the new owners, and this royal family will likely have minimal impact or input.

> letting china potentially use tiktok to spread anti western propoganda

Lol if you bought into this. All the anti-Tiktok stuff & forced sale is just a gift to American businesses that were struggling to compete.

Larry the Lawnmower, to be specific.

"Anti western propaganda" means "dont show whats happening in Palestine and you'll be fine."

Israel has controlled the narrative on Meta and Google. TikTok is the only platform they couldn't control until now.

> it’s not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens.

Yeah sure

Ding ding ding. This is the real goal. They want to weaponize it against us. Far more so even than China did.

You replace china with a directorate with a (possibly different) propaganda goal. Don't know if that will be any better, safer or less evil.

Exactly my point. Hypothetically, even if the level of propoganda stays the same, at least it will be promoting western interests that may be harmful to us or may not. With Chinese propoganda you can be fairly certain their interests are in strengthening their own position and weakening ours. Anyway the western propoganda machine to the extent it exists is far more fragmented and weaker then the Chinese.

In short i trust the West more then china and even if the gulf might be shrinking, it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

I'm not sure I trust the American propaganda machine more than the Chinese one, not any more. Social media has become increasingly hostile, and there are hints that it's becoming violent. Some of these are foreign adversaries, but many of them are home-grown. They might exacerbate it but we seem to be doing it to ourselves just fine.

Not that the Chinese would be better. But I'm not sure if they'd actually make it worse.

China has not made my wife's healthcare illegal, my friends' healthcare illegal, spent my tax dollars on genocide, profited from anti-vaccine propaganda, or sponsored weekly mass shootings in my country. The people running this deal and running American social media platforms have done all of those things. I have way more trust in a platform run by China than one run by Zuckerberg or Musk or Ellison.

So why do they want Americans to use TikTok? It's not like they can't live without it, and anyway, they still have Youtube and Instagram short videos, etc. It's also not to show other countries that US is better and not banning foreign apps (like China does for example), since showing a good example won't change what other countries do. Is it because they know it's a more addictive service that they then control and can influence people's minds? Is it for their friends to make money off this split?

So given their history I suspect much like Twitter, TikTok US will push right wing propaganda and become a platform for MAGA.

I’m still interested if TikTok users in the EU will be able consume US content and vice versa.

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