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Comment by Seattle3503 | Hacker News Reader

Both can be true, no? TikTok can be a tool that China uses to aid its geopolitical goals. TikTok has lots of criticism of Israel. Both can be true.

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TikTok is a social media the US don't control. TikTok has content the US don't want the American public to see. It's the same problem.

Would we be having this conversation if TikTok was EU based?

Probably not, because the EU is politically subservient both to the US and to Israel.

Remember how the USSR used Jim Crow to criticize America and degrade the US's international standing? That Soviet messaging was clearly self-serving, but it doesn't make America's behavior that creating the opening any less reprehensible.

Same deal here.

And it's not like there aren't dozens of equally brain-rot apps made my US and EU based companies that people would love to see banned. The only one, out of SHEER COINCIDENCE I'M SUUUURE, actually on the chopping block is the one that promotes a lot of pro-Gaza content.

Like I'm sorry, there is just no debate to be had here. Israel is committing a genocide, confirmed by the UN, recognized by anyone who looks at what's going on there with an even remotely objective eye, and the only social platform on which that message is getting out is facing legal scrutiny in the entire West is TikTok. This doesn't even require a conspiracy board, it's literally three red strings between TikTok, Israel, and the US. Despite worldwide propaganda efforts on the part of every corporate media in existence all screaming that the genocide isn't a genocide, a full 25% of people according to a poll I saw are fully convinced the genocide Israel is committing is in fact a genocide.

This would be fucking pathetic if not for the fact that every organized world entity involved in this utter sham was so incredibly powerful and their influence wasn't borderline inescapable.

The initial TikTok ban bill was introduced in January 25, 2023, before the Oct 7 attacks.

I don't think we can trust TikTok to be a defender of global human rights. China doesn't have a great record on this, with Muslim minorities in particular. The furor over Uyghurs in China has died down due to China's strong international influence but that doesn't mean China is respecting Uyghurs human rights.

I don't know if TikTok is algorithmically pushing anti-Israel content/genocide-witnessing content. Although if you told me Zuck and Musk were suppressing genocide-witnessing content I'd buy it.

Of course it's opportunistic of China to criticize the West's supply of bombs to drop on civilians that enable said genocide. But how can the West claim to be upholding the values that say "Uyghur genocide is wrong" while being quiet about the Gazan genocide...

Feel free to argue about semantics and meaning of the G word instead of addressing the death of the rules-based International order.

The west is not quiet about Gaza by any measure. I live in the west and hear about it a lot. You practically can't escape reports. At this point I'd say it reflects your media diet if you aren't hearing about it.

In 2023 Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed Nagorno-Karabakh of ethnic Armenians[1]. IMO that is a better example of human rights violations that the west has been silent about. But that happened at the end of September 2023, and folks were more interested in talking about IP.

But my point is you will not hear about Uyghurs on TikTok, and that is a part of why a Chinese controlled media company should not be trusted. To say that you don't have to accept anything about the US or its media companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Nagorno-Karabakh_...

> The west is not quiet

Ah, a semantic misunderstanding. By "The West" I mean the governments. Biden had red lines that Netanyahu walked all over. Germany still have their 80 years old guilt and this got exploited by Netanyahu. Etc, etc. There are pockets of protests by governments, but on the whole the Western bureaucracy kept supporting the genocide...

That might matter more if the the proposal was to hand over TikTok to the US government, but that's not what people are asking. People are asking for media not controlled by the CCP.

Maybe TikTok is controlled by people who are close to CCP leadership... oh that's bad, so now the US government wants to force its sale so it's controlled by people like Larry Ellison, known to be close to Trump.

Wowwww, what a world of difference. /S

Funny you keep picking on nits as if these assholes aren't 2 sides of the same coin. At least admit that you prefer your fascism Trump-branded, at least the alphabet is still legible compared to Chinese Communist fascism.

China is not fascist, communism ands fascism are opposed concepts and mortal enemies. Please do some reading.

What does China have to do with Israel? Israel killed so many children in Ghaza. And Journalists. It is the greatest enemy of the west, for its values (stealing land, no respect for human life or property) is alien to what Voltaire described as western traits (and voltaire by the way regarded both China and Jews in Europe as antithetical to the west, though more out of sinophobia and antisemitism). No impartial observer can look at Israel and see a western nation. I do not know of any country (Russia and Iran included) who has starved a population and committed rape while defending it. Vile people.

You can stop believing in conspiracy theories and that the Jews are behind it all anytime. It will vastly improve your mood.

It is neither a conspiracy nor about any Jews, beyond those at the seats of power in Israel. It is the Global North once again fucking with the Global South, for some combination of resources, money, power, or simply because they can and starting forever wars about nothing is a great way to shovel cash into the military industrial complex. That's no conspiracy theory it's simply neo-Colonialism as a concept and it's been at work for longer than my parents have been alive.

I don't speculate on their motivations, I'm not interested. I rarely use the word evil, but I think this qualifies.

Should American owned or controlled companies be banned in other countries? Should Israel be banned from interfering in American politics? If yes, then I am more open to this concept.

For what it's worth, I am not aware of any evidence that TikTok did anything intentional to promote anti-US narratives. To be honest, I think they accomplished that goal by simply promoting what people wanted to see, which is in large part, simply the truth. The so-called enemies of America do not have to work very hard or lie, they just need to expose our propaganda in a very straightforward fashion.

Since the COVID crisis at least, US owned social media companies have become very censorious and we know they tamper with the algorithms. It may be that simply having a less biased algorithm is too clarifying for American elites.

Try using American social media and offerings in China, and lately, Russia.

But it's not about reciprocity if you're truly committed to free speech right?

Americans still have free speech. There are many other platforms to use. Foreign governments never have had free speech rights and I doubt most people support them having those rights.

> There are many other platforms to use.

That will promptly proceed to bury whatever the government tells them to bury.

The first amendment isn't a suicide pact, and foreign corporations were never covered by it.

It's not a 'suicide pact', it's a clear commitment that the government will not ban speech it finds inconvenient.

It's not done a great job of living up to that promise.

To be fair, in some Russian regions you cannot access even most Russian sites from mobile (we have whitelist mode). Also, not everyone, but some people started using VPN after Instagram ban, and even more after Youtube ban. Like drug addicts who cannot drop their habits.

> Should American owned or controlled companies be banned in other countries? Should Israel be banned from interfering in American politics? If yes, then I am more open to this concept.

I think there are important differences between China any democracy. In China, each company needs a internal party cell or party commitee to police and control that companies actions. If you don't find differences between China and open democracies compelling, we won't find much common ground.

Nonetheless, we are seeing US tech companies facing scrutiny in Europe.

Something else I'll say is I think some of the big tech companies should be broken up, which I see achieving similar goals by similar means. Reduce centralized control by a change in ownership. If China were a corporation instead of a country, old likewise advocating divesting control of TikTok

I mean, having local government and employees represented on the board seems to be an increasingly good idea.

>Should American owned or controlled companies be banned in other countries?

I don't understand why that's your response to a question about them both being true. It seems like a perfectly legitimate observation: China can and probably is leveraging social media to shape global discussion of political topics that they deem sensitive. And it's also the case that at least for some voting block of conservative Republicans in the US Senate, it's an opportunity to potentially shut down communication on Israel's actions in Gaza. It's a classic both can be true situation.

I actually think you're right that Tiktok isn't necessarily intentionally promoting Gaza but that it has organically emerged simply because it legitimately is an issue that is an issue that has provoked moral outrage of the western world. To the extent that China is shaping anything, I think it's more about suppressing disapproved narratives than amplifying approved ones, as well as surveillance of Western opinion that can be channeled into soft power infrastructure outside the bounds of the internet.

I don’t disagree that there is a soft power component, but it is strange in my opinion to narrowly focus on China when there are demonstrable harms from american allies and none so far as I can tell from China.

In my view, people getting exposed to China and seeing them as human will help prevent the war our capitalists are cooking up.

How are you scoping harms this context? Are we setting aside Chinas actions inside of China or Hong Kong?

It is true that China controls the conversation around e.g. Tienanmen square (an event that is not accurately portrayed in U.S. media), nor the Xianjiang "genocide" that Biden concocted for which there was zero proof (we know what a genocide looks like in Gaza, the most tightly controlled, censored, and surveilled territory in the world, it is also laughable that the U.S. would pretend to be the champion of muslims while enacting a genocide of a population that is predominantly muslim and putting a self-proclaimed crusader in charge of the department of war).

However, the "harms" of exposing the U.S. population to Chinese influence would be to tamp down the population's aggression towards China. I cannot see a single problem with that.

China is a democracy, but it is not a liberal democracy. It represses the right wing and allows democracy within a window defined by the communist party. I think we would be hard pressed to call America a democracy at this point. We repress left wing viewpoints that gain traction and allow "democracy" within a right wing capitalist framework. Funnily enough, this is not a symmetric mirror. Right wing viewpoints are oppressive and minoritarian. Left wing viewpoints at least purport to represent the majority of workers and China does in fact increase the material well-being of its population by leaps and bounds year-over-year.

If you are more ready to call China a democracy than the United States, there's too much ground to cover in this conversation. There's a lot to unpack there.

>China is a democracy, but it is not a liberal democracy.

This is a specular redefining of fundamental terms that prevents meaningful discussion in this context.

In America, democracy is defined as liberal democracy to preclude other forms as legitimate. Liberal democracy means theoretically that anyone can contest for political power regardless of political viewpoint. This means that anyone from a monarchist, to a fascist, to religious fundamentalist, to a liberal, to a communist and anything in-between may run in elections. In practice, various devices are used to ensure there is a window of acceptability, and that fire is primarily directed at the left. I used to think at least fascists and monarchists would also be precluded, but I have been shown to be wrong. In this sense, outside of tight parameters, liberal democracy has inherent contradictions that can easily destroy itself and transition to a different point of (usually temporary) stability, such as has been seen in France when the 1st republic became the French Empire under Napoleon, became a republic again, then switched back to monarchy, and so on and so forth.

I'm not sure what the phrase used for what China is doing is (well, there is "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics"), but as an outsider, my understanding is the idea is that a very broad portion of the population should be involved in the communist party and that democracy should be encouraged within a framework of marxism. Nonetheless, several opposition parties are allowed to run in elections though parties too far to the right are excluded. Still, these opposition parties can be fairly critical and given that China is using a significant capitalist mode of production, some elements of capitalist ideology are allowed. It is a little confusing to be sure.

> several opposition parties are allowed to run in elections though parties too far to the right are excluded.

Just today, China sentenced Jimmy Lai, after preventing such left-wing democratic figures from running for office, because they opposed China's right-wing authoritarianism. Not a great time to make this claim.

I don’t know enough about Jimmy Lai to call him left wing. He seemed like a rich capitalist pro west guy to me, but that’s a very surface level read.

It’s been shown years ago that the Chinese government does what the people want much more often and closely than the US government. CCP inside the party is very democratic too, much more rigid, but it is bottom up.

If people actually went to the Chinese language social media as it is instead of algorithimically curated media they would have alot worse opinion.

> Should American owned or controlled companies be banned in other countries?

This is hardly the "gotcha" you're framing it as. Building sovereign capability has shot to the top of a lot nations priority lists.

In a lot of industries this is also just standard even amongst allies: national security related contracts have extensive clauses about ownership, structure and access.

China already bans American media companies from operating in China.

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