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Comment by anthem2025 | Hacker News Reader

anthem2025

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While I agree with this, it confuses me that the same isn't happening to Instagram as well, since it has essentially 0 censorship of anti-Israeli content. However, within the last year it seems that there was a deliberate lift in that censorship, with the whole area of the platform blowing up since the early summer.

What I imagine the incentive is is not the ability to censor the media, but to have the media on record of who posts it and who engages with it and maintain that ledger. When people get banned and slandered for denouncing a genocide, it becomes harder and harder to call this stuff "low-IQ conspiracy slop".

This is such conspiracy theory bullshit. The point was that China controlled an algorithm and platform that was capable of manipulating the views of millions of Americans on _any_ topic. Maybe some people cared about Israel especially, but that wasn't the overall reason for trying to get TikTok in the US out of Chinese control.

You can, of course, make the argument that Facebook, Twitter, etc are also similar threats to other countries and _that is why they aren't allowed in China_.

I agree that this resolution is a worst-case-scenario outcome, though.

This argument means that the Europeans should ban Facebook, X and TikTok.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's the logical endgame here.

Yes, and serious voices have been calling for that since at least the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is especially true now that the owner of X is openly calling for major political changes in the EU.

This only makes sense. People correctly understood that foreign media organizations are a risk to self-governance and the tech companies which took much of their power should be treated the same way.

The American government, even today, simply does not have comparable cooperation with private companies. If Facebook and Twitter decide one day that they’ll no longer permit people to post mean things about American political leaders, a policy that is at least routine and I think universal in China, I think it would be a no-brainer for Europe to ban them. (Even if they release a special global version of the app that they promise isn’t subject to domestic censorship rules.)

They should have done that.

Do you feel the same way about Google?

Surely search is something that should be more neutral than social media.

Facebook and X are not directly controlled by the US government like TikTok is.

The fact that they u-turned on so many policies the second Trump got into power shows otherwise. Not to mention the owner of X was Trumps right hand man for the first 6 months post-election.

Why do people keep repeating this point? TikTok bans have been repeatedly considered for a while. It is as a topic in 2020. And October 7 happened in 2023. The reasons to ban it are a lot more simple than a conspiracy relating to Israel.

They have to make it political because without that there’s no justification.

Fair point, but it's hard to ignore the timing. Netanyahu literally just called TikTok "the most important purchase going on right now" and described social media as a "weapon" to secure Israel's influence in the US [1].

When you see a massive donor to the IDF and Israeli causes like Larry Ellison leading the consortium to buy it right after those comments, dismissing it as a conspiracy is ignorant considering they're basically saying the quiet part out loud.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs

Because Jewish organisations say it themselves:

https://www.jewishfederations.org/blog/all/jewish-federation...

And new owners have directly donated to Israeli's war efforts:

https://www.newarab.com/news/pro-israel-billionaires-and-uae...

> Why do people keep repeating this point?

Probably because like 1/4 of the American economy at this point is held up by surveillance capitalism firms like Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. all of whom's bread and butter is violating privacy on an industrial scale, so saying "TikTok is dangerous because it spies on people" is flagrantly hypocritical.

The fact that the big scary Chinese Government can tweak algorithms to elevate content and potentially sway public opinion is a fair criticism and I would agree with it, if not for the fact that the hypothetical situation being used to justify it is America equally openly funding and supporting an ongoing genocide. That barely qualifies as propaganda, that's literally just pointing out what the United States is doing and why it's ethically indefensible, and we could stop doing it tomorrow and utterly defang the aforementioned propaganda. But we don't.

And, lastly, TikTok is not going away. It's simply going to enrich Americans now, instead of the Chinese. A bit. And I'm sure plenty of that money will find it's way back to the Trump administration because our country is corrupt as all hell.

So forgive me if I've just absolutely not one ounce of patience for this bullshit.

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