The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
The TikTok algorithm in South America. Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
The most brutally honest propaganda is always the most effective propaganda.
When you're in an abusive relationship they say intentions don't matter, only impact does. Because victims often focus on the intentions of their abuser and stay in the cycle of abuse.
Let me repeat it, intentions don't matter, only impact does.
What it should be about is preventing someone else from blocking the spreading of truth.
"Block the spreading of lies" is something authoritarians say when they want to declare any criticism of themselves to be a lie and censor it. You can't block the spreading of "lies" without ordaining someone as the decider of truth and there is nobody you can trust to have that power.
But if we were actually doing what we should then what we would be doing is developing censorship-resistant uncentralized systems rather than fighting over the keys to the censorship apparatus.
If your prosperity depends on using technocracy to deny 1.3 billion people the ability to communicate and share ideas with your citizens, a few things are true:
1) You have created a digital iron curtain
2) You are doomed because information wants to be free
3) If you succeed the result will be war, the only thing left when communication breaks down
I think some people live in movies where the bad guy always loses. Reality doesn't work this way. Bad situations where information is denied from people can last lifetimes.
With modern technology we may be creating systems that end up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape because you'll be killed the moment your technological monitor realizes you're going to fight back.
>With modern technology we may be creating systems that end up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape
That has been the goal of authoritarians for a long time. Orwell's vision of it involved obliterating even the capacity to think or speak about anti-state themes.
Suppose there are thousands of law enforcement officials in the US, some minority of them are violent offenders and as a result of that some minority of police shootings are murders rather than legitimate self-defense or protection of the innocent, where the number of annual illegitimate police shootings is somewhere between 2 and 999, and the propensity for those people to be prosecuted is lower than it ought to be. Suppose further that China has over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and is using them as slave labor and subjecting them to forced sterilization.
Is the first one bad? Yes. Is it as bad? Uh, no. But you can present a distorted picture through selective censorship.
Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.
It's less legitimate when you don't want a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see on their own platforms. The US for example shouldn't dictate what US users see when they visit www.bbc.co.uk
The just US got mad because a Chinese owned/operated social media platform got massively popular and they just wanted the ability to control and censor it.
How the feed is filtered should be a fungible commodity that anyone can swap out for themselves or offer to others without sacrificing the network effect, because the network itself shouldn't be owned.
Notice that the US doesn't censor bbc.co.uk, because the web is a decentralized system. But then ordinary people end up on Facebook or TikTok, which isn't.
I think there are a number of things occurring all at once and it's going to lead to the destabilization of most democracies (which China is a big winner if this occurs).
Democracy has never really been as free as the people living in democracies believe. The rich and large media entities have always controlled the vote with much more impact than the actual issues individual voters had.
If you believe this previous statement to be true this leads to a number of issues in the modern world.
One is that previous to now most countries demanded some kind of local media ownership, so the message would be more aligned with someone living in the country rather than some other entity (not perfect, but still better than nothing).
Another is media groups tended to be smaller and more fractured. They may hold conflicting opinions on things.
Which bring us to now, with huge foreign media organizations holding massive sway over gigantic audiences. This isn't just about China over the US, it's just as much about the US over many EU entities. These are potential powers that can change course of the world and they have governments behind them directing them where to go.
Also don't forget the US absolutely loves to control what gets in the media. The right in the US didn't just start brining up socialism and communism yesterday, it's been a control mechanism on what can be published and what you can see for over 100 years.
The TikTok ban was always an egregious attack on free speech.
The US has been applying soft power and hard power in South America - to put it euphemistically, as the most recent US intervention was just days ago - for close to a century. The Chinese... haven't.
Why should people in South America give a shit about Tiananmen or Tibet and at the same time not give a shit about the escalating authoritarian grip of the US regime, which is infinitely more relevant to their lives?
I threw my computer off the balcony. I look at a web design business. "No fair!" I think to myself, "if only I had a computer I could have a web design business too!"
I smash the web designer's computer out of spite.
I don't know how much more would need to be done for you to think things are being done.
if someone goes to your local walmart and buy stuff from them, is that considered as using soft power on walmart? LOL
I am responding to the fact US TikTok does not show videos of an armored vehicle driving through a crowd of protesters standing in front of it like the lone man in Tiananmen Square. They are being removed.
This ability to control what information TikTok users are presented with is the reason TikTok was originally banned in the United States.
I am being objective discussion how TikTok is being used as a propaganda tool whether or not I personally agree with China influencing people in South America or whether or not what the United States government is doing to protestors is good or bad. I'm not putting a value on it. I'm pointing out that when I'm in South America and someone links a video in a text message and I start to doom scroll after a while I will start to be introduced to videos of the Unites States government committing violence against Spanish speaking people.
> might be immensely popular in South America
Objectively the current United States regime was hugely popular in Spanish speaking countries like it was in Spanish speaking Florida. Up until a couple months ago, people would tell me how much they support and admire the current regime in the United States. That has changed recently which likely has to do with the content they receive via TikTok which is controlled by the Chinese government which is why it was banned in the United States. After being sold, it is not surprising that the United States is using it the way they accused the Chinese of using it.
Aren't these recent events? A better example would be showing US atrocities from the last 50 years, but not Chinese.
Or hiding the suffering of Ukranian and Iranian peoples.
If I doom scroll TikTok without cookies from a residence in South America, after a while, I will be presented with anti American propaganda showing videos of recent events or people speaking in Spanish about the atrocities that the United States is committing against Spanish speaking people that is recent.
I'm am describing objectively what I see.
The United States didn't want TikTok controlling what is visible to people in the United States so they banned TikTok. Later the United States offered allowing it to be sold to an American company.
Currently, there are two extremely influential forces for people under 25 years old in Spanish speaking Latin America, TikTok, a Chinese company, and an American music artist, Bad Bunny, who likely is the single most influential person in the Spanish speaking world. Let's stay tuned for the Superbowl.
Don't need tiktok for that. Besides, a certain party prefers it that way.
In any case, entirely Western oriented platforms also push brainrot to Western viewers, so I don't think there's any conspiracy so much as just cultural differences.
If I was the US blessed feed, let me have it. If I wasn't the Chinese maintained one, why not.
Or, even better, let me make my own! Or use one from an open source that I, the user, trusts.
Hell, EXPOSE THE ALGORITHMS. The simple fact that we can't see the weights, or measure inputs to outputs, means we are in total control of whomever currently holds the reins, and they can literally play God behind the scenes if they have control over enough eyeballs.
> Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
None of this is propaganda, it's just facts.
> Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic manipulation of information—including facts, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion, attitudes, and behaviors toward a specific cause, ideology, or agenda.
And, what are we doing with those facts? We're manipulating them lol
Manipulating the feed of a social media website for the purpose of swaying the viewer's opinion is a cut and dry example of propaganda. Doesn't matter who does it or whether the information displayed is factual or not. Those things make zero difference.
If people are given a wide perspective of a situation and adjusts bias for the Overton window (aka, we don't let Nazis have an equal platform to a more progressive group), then we just call that good reporting. The act of convincing people isn't inherently a bad thing. How you do it matters a lot.
As you said, how you do it matters a lot.
You've also gone and (IIUC) equated the general biases of an outlet with propaganda which I certainly wouldn't agree with. They're similar, and the former can certainly morph into the latter, but they aren't the same thing.
If you think "propaganda" is defined as something being lies, then you have misunderstood the word.
Product advertising is the most widespread form of propaganda. And in some non-english countries it is called "propaganda" and not "marketing".
Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
However, that stream of police murder videos are definitely real.
Propaganda is often stoking tiny sparks into large raging forest fires.
Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.
Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.
If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.
> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop
That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_du_25_mars_2023_...
Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.
The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.
Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.
We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though some people have them such as for hunting). Many police murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen Diarra just this month). According to the most comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were entirely unarmed.
[1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in the media, and those few cases per year don't account for the dozens of deaths every year.
It's easy to track because anytime it happens it's instant major news on the internet. Trust me, in the economy of social media clout, few things rank as valuable as police murder.
Pretti was frontpage of reddit within 30(!) minutes of being shot. Even without bystanders there is a whole group of creators whose whole channel is combing bodycam footage for wrong doing. These videos are worth (tens) of thousands in ad views if nothing else.
As I understand it, the footage is not from bodycams as ICE don't wear them and police will turn them off when it suits them.
Police also definitely don't turn it off when it suites them, although some have, but again, it's a Streisand effect when they do. I really cannot stress enough that police doing bad things has extremely high monetary value for the people who find it, and you also get paid for the crazy bodycam videos you find along the way. If you're a cop and you turn off your cam before breaking the law, you are almost certainly going to be the face of a 1M+ view youtube video. People, like yourself and me, gobble that up.
It doesn't matter much anyway, because there is 100x more footage of cops doing bad things with their cam on.
Relying on the YouTube algorithm for keeping police brutality in check is a flawed methodology as the current censoring of TikTok demonstrates.
That just shows that people's social circles aren't that wide. 1 in 50,000 is rare in your personal bubble. For a town of 1 million people, thats 20 people.
Sounds tiny, but if we were to line up 20 people and have them murdered by law enforcement, it'd pretty much end the careers of anyone in that chain of command. Because that's not a behavior you want to let spread and expand.
Uh.. I know someone who was murdered by cops while having a bad LSD trip (not violent, just incoherent). He was restrained too tightly despite protests of his family, loaded into a vehicle, and suffocated to death.
> Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
Oh I see, you don't consider this murder.
Besides, you're comparing it with the US which is also known for its human rights violations ever since the continent was discovered.
You need far better propaganda materials for your "great leap forward" blames in 2026. There were bad policies, but the intention good, it was all about moving the country forward. It failed horribly with huge consequences, that is just the reminder that a full scale industrialisation for over 1 billion people is not something that can be earned easily.
Like it or not, the "Exceeding the UK, catching the USA" (超英赶美) goal of the great leap forward has been overfulfilled under the leadership of the CCP with the help of brutal state capitalism. Everything else is just cheap talk.
Having a full scale industrialization larger than the G7 combined is not something handed to China on a silver platter - those very sad deaths caused by the failed attempts during the great leap forward was a part of the costs.
> and the cultural revolution have not comparison.
The cultural revolution is brutal, nothing should be used to defend it. It is just so wrong. That being said, the west is going through the exact same cultural revolution -
* extremely polarised society with everything is politicalised * populism taking control * suicidal policies destroying the civilizational foundations
the difference is 99% Han Chinese consider the cultural revolution as extremely bad, while the west is enjoying having its own ongoing cultural revolution.
if you add the recent woke cancer, the western version of the ongoing cultural revolution is far more brutal.
Example, 99% of people are normal, but if all you see is the 1% that isn't you'll start to believe more than 1% aren't normal. Especially if that 1% is of a recognisable ethnicity / religion / background. This is why there's a shift to the right.
There's also the degree of relevance. Tiananmen was over a quarter of a century ago. The USA is killing protestors, bombing Venezuela, threatening Greenland now.
https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/2024/11/05/uyghur-tiktok-...
Do you remember the last Vietnam War? Oh no, not the one you're thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
Several hundred thousand Chinese troops invaded Vietnam with 500 tanks in 1979.
That's not exactly imperialist aggression is it?
The situations are not comparable at all.
Though, neither are really served by TikTok.
Americans who are currently protesting should consider if the apparatus will be subtly manipulating their environment not just in the next months or years but from now on with high quality data it will have perfectly categorized mined and will re-mine.
I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's happened (ever)?
e:
1. tracking string removed per request.
2. it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station) segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters out of the way.
There’s an enormous difference between driving slowly through a crowd of protestors with no injuries versus running over protesters with a tank.
>> the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles
> I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's happened (ever)?
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal...
The person who said I was twisting words said (emphasis mine), "There’s an enormous difference between driving slowly through a crowd of protestors with no injuries versus running over protesters with a tank."
At no point did I nor the comment I responded to use the words, 'running over protesters with a tank'.
"United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles"
"Did this really happen?"
You: Video of it actually happening.
Response: Yea, but that video didn't show them "running over protesters with a tank"
Your comment showed the actual event, thanks. It showed an armored vehicle slowly pushing through protesters to gain access to something.
Not remotely comparable scenes, so I must assume intentional twisting of words. My comment was written sloppily.
you got brainwashed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/1k2ungn/pla_armor...
too bad that China didn't embrace its Beijing Spring back in 1989.
But this isn't new either, western services operating abroad will often comply with local laws, which includes country or region specific laws on acceptable content. Google pulled out of China for a good while because they didn't want to, but they eventually cracked and complied with their content laws. Of course, by then the competition was dominant already.
Another reason why feed ranking algorithms should be published. If we can see the algorithm we can stop playing these yes/no games. The real enemies are social media companies, not the other side of politics.
Buying TikTok to censor it is the move of a fascist government.
Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for the rest of the world
The point is brainwashing.
This kind of narrative is actually one of the more popular forms of propaganda.
"We are the side of the revolutionaries. The status quo is wrong but only about the things we want to change and not the things we want to stay the same. Powerful people are our opponents."
All politics is about opposing powerful people, because if they weren't powerful then it would be easy to defeat them. But there are different groups of powerful people, with different interests, and then it rather matters which ones you align yourself with on a given issue. And if it's always the same ones then you're doing partisanship rather than reasoning.
Authoritarianism has been starting to become normalized because China and Russia are increasingly able to mess with our society in the same way our leaders always messed with theirs.
Don’t worry, everything will return to normal one day. Pinky swear.
An interesting thought I read a couple days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-chin...:
> Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same “if not America, then China” logic applies to political ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian conditions has allowed populism to come to power, bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train. Recoil from that by all means — but recognize that it happened through democratic mechanisms, under freewheeling political conditions.
> Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
It would be efficient for China to have Russia undermine the US while Russia also weakens itself.
China has made huge inroads in Africa, which gives it access to essential metals and other raw materials, and also puts it in a strong position diplomatically.
Taiwan and where else?
I suppose you could also make the argument that they already did invade Tibet and Hong Kong, though that's splitting hairs.
It’s certainly not a given that donating it to China was the right call.
The right call for who?
For the people there? Not good.
For a contracting British empire facing a clearly growing-in-power China it was a graceful exit without military conflict.
But I have a feeling your position is basically "Except for all the cases where they're threatening their neighbors, they're not threatening their neighbors at all."
No, not at all. I don't follow China closely, and was genuinely asking.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna245797
Tibet and Xinjiang already conquered and we have forgotten about them.
As a person whose country is being threatened by China, I support the US.
If China were as developed as the US, a lot of China’s threats would have been reality.
I think that's definitely a thing. What's the term? The narcissism of small differences? That contempt is there, and I've long felt it, and (unusually) I think it's also mirrored by some Americans.
There are a lot of internal contradictions and tensions that Trump is bringing to the surface.
Certain political parties (typically leftwing) in these countries will often leverage, if not outright foment, anti-Americanism for political gain. And then you have the external propaganda campaigns, most notably undertaken by the Soviet Union and later, the Russian Federation. The USSR also funded violent separatist movements, like the IRA and ETA, and propped up "pacifist" protest movements that curiously only ever protested the US and other NATO countries' militaries, disregarding the Eastern Block's military buildup.
Today, Code Pink and other organizations run by power couple Neville Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks) and Jodie Evans do this on behalf of the CCP. Name-dropping them now is contentious, because FOXNews and other rightwing outlets have alleged a link to anti-ICE protests. But there was a lengthy NYT piece covering them and their pro-CCP activism back in 2023: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...
> I think it's also mirrored by some Americans.
It's surely reciprocated, but usually only by Americans who been exposed to enough anti-Americanism from these countries to wise up. The default attitude of Americans towards our allies is overwhelmingly positive: https://news.gallup.com/poll/472421/canada-britain-favored-r...
Oceania has always gotten tech tips from Eastasia.
Commentators: What are we, some kind of Asians?
The US has traditionally had at least some counterweight to the state, in the form of a free press, free speech, opposition parties, checks and balances in branches of government, and an armed populace. The effectiveness of these measures has varied over time but there has never been a point when any single institution had control over the United States to the point that the CPC has control over mainland China.
People are concerned that the US is taking an authoritarian bent under Trump, and many of the tactics being used would lead to a state far more similar to the PRC than the historical US.
that is a common mistake. it is called the "If China can do it, I can do it too" symptom, which has been discussed like a million times on Chinese social media. interestingly, the biggest obstacle for other countries to repeat it is the fact that there is a country called China.
China isn't to blame, but they are a frightening example of where things are headed and they're giving the robber barons screwing us a blueprint to follow.
It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do.
This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks.
It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons.
The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
I'd like to see evidence of that. A third of the country voted to burn the bill of rights, and another third voted they don't care but they'd be ok with it happening.
Ignoring the magnitude to draw a false equivalence is a great way to discredit your position. Neither party is perfect but only one of them is denying the full personhood of over half the population, having armed men threaten the public with lethal violence over constitutionally-protected activities, or saying that the executive should be able to direct private industries for profit. Debates about things like how much the government should ask private companies to enforce their terms of service are valid but it’s like arguing over a hangnail while you’re having a heart attack.
I guess in 90ies version of polymarket nobody would have had that result on their bingo sheet. But, well, they probably also didn't have "something like polymarket could exist in the free world" on those bingo cards, either...
"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.
TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. In the past they haven’t outright censored because that’s too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic will result in very few views.
I wouldn’t be surprised if as part of the transition they’re struggling with the previous methods of simply burying topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step.
The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.
All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users and removed from the front page very soon, just as a similar one[1] was already.
I don't consider user-directed upvotes/downvotes/flags to be in the same category as company or state decided censorship.
Of course not, but other stuff is.
Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).
"The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to."
In the most point-missing, technical kind of way.
Saying "But China also censors!" is the one missing the point.
That's too black and white. The Tiktok sale isn't just one thing by one actor for one reason, it's more complicated. There's the Biden administration bill, there's Trump's deal implementing it, etc. I don't think the bill that forced the sale was passed "so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like." Before Trump got involved, it was heading for a straight blackout (which IMHO would have been better for everyone).
What are the opinions of illegal immigration over there? How do they police it? (If at all).
Does this look like normal government activity? Or are they appalled at the lack of “freedoms” in America?
I am truly naive on their culture or politics around this and how they would use it to show the US as boogeymen government and how their government is better. Is it a grass isn’t always greener type thing for them or is it a way to actually think we’re evil and should be stopped.
As well as racial profiling. There's not that much immigration to China in the first place, legal or otherwise.
My experience in China was that the police were a bit on the bureaucratic side but otherwise far less obtrusive than in the US.
They divide their police forces into civil police and armed police. The civil police tend to be bored looking middle aged guys lounging around in guard booths at museums. They don't have weapons. The only armed police I saw stood at attention at the airport except when they had a changing of the guard ceremony.
As near as I can tell, China only allows immigration if they think that will benefit China. They've been pushing hard on academic scholarships and, in recent years, they've managed to shift net visits from the US to China.
They also seem to be pushing really hard on increasing the number of visiting African scholars. That's likely straight out of the US playbook; they see China as a rising power and want to make sure that their emerging leaders were educated in China and have ties to China.
As near as I can tell, there are essentially 2 kinds of laws; laws that people agree with and laws that they don't.
For the second type, governments often have trouble enforcing them consistently so they often try to compensate by making the punishments harsher (eg mandatory minimum sentencing). As near as I can tell, that tends to fail miserably.
Our government here has been shooting people in the streets and that hasn't stopped protesters from pouring out.
When you see a bunch of people peacefully following laws the most likely explanation is that they just think those laws are reasonable.
They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice as many countries as the locals. They picked up their lives, often learned a second language, and established a home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly motivated people.
In many cases, they know more about the country than the locals do because they've traveled all over said country while the locals never left their home town.
edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than where they currently live. I'm not referring to people who only know about a country through hearsay.
In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to people who live outside the US just purely based on media diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian, etc.
(reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")
That's HSK2 being generous, if you had to plug it into Google Translate, how can you say you know more than the people who speak the language and live there?
but of course. the benchmark is minor influencer and HN darling naomi wu.
I don't think the original intent of the tiktok sale was about censorship as much as it was about the chinese not allowing american platforms in china. Doesn't change that they're trying to use it to its 'fullest'.
EU is coming.
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/cornerstonefinland?lang=en-150
I’m just saying that here in the US we are going to see some funkiness in suggested content soon. Because we hit different servers than you. Even if they are hosted on Oracle Cloud.
It’s really no different than a large org having two clouds that need data synchronized. AWS and Azure for example. Systems Design…
I’m not a TikTok user so I couldn’t recommend content for you to try.
This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
The 60 Minutes Episode on CECOT aired on Jan 18 and it is also on CBS News' website: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-endur...
In the long run, they bought out some dying legacy media in CBS and social media has a short half-life. Nobody's saying they're geniuses but it's clear what they're trying to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_postpon...
Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course they're not being subtle about it.
> its about scrolling and recommendations
Don't scroll and don't take recommendations from these platforms. It's better now that it's American owned, but you really shouldn't have been using it when the Chinese Communist Party owned it.
And I'm only talking about TikTok because that's the OP. I don't use any social media platforms besides LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is such a big piece of trash I don't think it matters if anyone uses it.
Whether you or I think that's effective or not is up for debate, I also avoid social media, but OP made a statement about intentions.
(And, aside, the current intentions appear far more pointed and ideological than when it was owned by ByteDance as a lottery winner with a surprise overseas success, optimizing for youth engagement.)
Restating the OP ^
I don't know exactly what the OP intended, and they are welcome to clarify, but based on the words above I read it as selling TikTok is a means of suppressing information that the rest of the world has access to from Americans. I disagree with the notion because what matters is whether or not information is suppressed holistically, not whether or not information is suppressed in a limited manner on a platform. If you think it's a problem, by the way, you should reach out to the EU, China, India, and every other major government that influences what content is posted on social media platforms including but not limited to TikTok.
If you want to argue the US obtaining control of the content from TikTok in America is tantamount to information suppression, you can only do so by also arguing it's true only for people who use TikTok. In which case it's an improvement anyway since the CCP is no longer influencing content.
Ok, well here where I live the government has never physically assaulted me or my neighbors, nor used tear gas around the elementary school my friends and family members children attend. But the government is clearing my streets of snow, gave me an opportunity to get an education, and generally helps make sure my life isn't so bad.
On the other hand, the CCP (and others) has created lots of fake accounts, engaged in paying off people to help incite riots, and is responsible for algorithmically promoting divisive content which has caused people to go out and riot, shoot at each other, become white nationalist goons or antifa goons, and helped get Donald Trump elected.
Donald Trump himself claims TikTok helped him get elected, he was wildly popular on the platform.
> It's interesting to me that you're so certain about your threat model here but I don't share it.
It's not that interesting, and this isn't warranted. I don't even know what you mean by threat model, and you never asked, so there was never an opportunity for it to be shared. Please don't wantonly levy suspicion here.
Lucky for you I hope you can keep saying that. But uh, where you live didn't need to have a civil rights movement?
Plain and simple I think americans, and the american government, and movements formed in america and made of americans, are far more likely to harm me than any foreign power and I act accordingly.
In fact they already have!
> On the other hand, the CCP (and others) has created lots of fake accounts, engaged in paying off people to help incite riots, and is responsible for algorithmically promoting divisive content which has caused people to go out and riot, shoot at each other, become white nationalist goons or antifa goons
This is americans doing this to americans with the help of the american tech industry for the benefit of american elites. How have you come to lay the whole thing at chinese feet. I know... but do you know? You worried about the wrong propaganda my man.
1) A philosophical debate along the lines you've indicated here, how much is it worth to control the algorithm, and how much does that equate to controlling speech.
2) The allegation that current buyers bought it specifically to bring their ideology to the algorithm, however effective or valid you think that is (I think it just hastens TikTok becoming something for "old people").
Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not:
TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source.
An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question).
Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?
That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read.
> An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app.
Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone without your best intentions in mind owns your platform. Maybe you should stop using it.
The post you were replying to stated:
> hiding information from the US public
They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public.
Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them.
If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden.
Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.
> The post you were replying to stated:
Now you're cherry-picking what the OP wrote.
> But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
I didn't suggest that any of that was an "excuse" for anything - instead I called out that regardless of how TikTok operates you still have access to whatever information you want. If you choose to silo yourself, whether that's TikTok or FoxNews, that doesn't change the fact that you still have access to information.
Reminder of the OP:
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
If what you are suggesting is true, than OP's claim is untrue because all governments and all social media platforms regardless of where they exist or who owns them curate content to some degree and are thus "hiding information from the public".
You can't have it both ways here.
What that commenter means by easy access is that the information is in mainstream sources pushed to people such that you are likely to know about it without having looked.
For example I made a comment here on HN recently that immigrants commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people. That sends a segment of Americans into a flying rage even though they have access to that information, they were never going to hear it in their ordinary channels, even if they stick to "mainstream" media.
Sorry, this doesn't pass the smell test for me.
But this complaint is pretty old, I think of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. (Setting aside his Epstein connections for a moment) The way we do censorship is much less the methods of a traditional totalitarian state and more like the private sector policing what is acceptable discourse.
As for what he suggested, this is reminding me that I never read his work On anarchism. I heard him speak favorably about the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. I also found that topic very interesting when I was getting a Spanish minor many years ago at college. I am sure many HN commenters will disagree that it's something to emulate.
I think his writing is very interesting, in general, and it always helps expand the mind to new or reframed ideas.
The information is everywhere. Visit any news site, open any general social media feed, turn on any TV. We’re discussing it right now in the front page of HN!
Everyone in the US has easy access to the same information. Acting like only the rest of the world has easy access to this information is ridiculous.
Censorship of TikTok is inevitable given the owners, and it will inevitably lead to a new news bubble.
TikTok users are also known for being experts at evading filters and censors. Remember the rising popularity of “unalived” when talk of suicide was filtered out on the platform?
I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good, because it’s not! I’m saying it’s ridiculous to claim that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
I hope not because it’s bad and that’s really all that matters in this conversation. And nitpicking whether or not there are other avenues for information is completely besides the point. I don’t even really understand what point you’re trying to make. If you think this is bad, then say it’s bad and we shouldn’t be ok with it. Saying “I’m not saying it’s good” then muddying the waters reads like you’re trying to defend the action.
That was literally the argument I was responding to and talking about.
Given the downvotes and angry responses I think a lot of people misinterpreted it as something else. I should learn to avoid comment sections about politics.
If you’re looking for feedback, “I’m not saying…” without saying what you are saying generally comes off as obfuscating or at best wishy washy.
When it comes to the _younger generation_, I don't think it's an over-estimation; they don't read news sites at all.
I’m saying it’s silly hyperbole to make the leap to implying that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
These absurd claims always turn into a game of motte and bailey when they’re called out, with retreats to safer claims. I’m talking about the original claim, that “people in other countries” have easy access to this information which we, in the US, see everywhere all the time right now (except TikTok apparently).
For those who know to look for it, sure.
For those who do not already know it, discovery is increasingly challenged by the deliberately obscurant curators of the information space, who are oddly tightly and uniformly aligned with special interest groups openly declaring their intent to hide that information and punish dissemination thereof.
Without antitrust regulation, TikTok would have been sold to Meta, and that would be it. We'd have an even worse monopoly (which is not a good thing), but at least we wouldn't have this. With such regulations present, the US government both forced a sale and disallowed a sale to anybody who they didn't like, basically forcing TikTok to choose a government-approved partner. What did that partner do to become government approved? We'll never know.
Antitrust in the US (and GDPR in Europe) give regulators wide latitude over who to prosecute and for what. This makes it much easier to do under-the-table deals to achieve objectives that you can't or don't want to achieve by regulation, like restricting free speech.
Subjecting companies to such regulation was ok when it was about transporting cattle or selling bricks, but giving governments the ability to regulate companies that have a wide impact on speech, even if the regulations don't seem to have anything to do with speech, is just asking for trouble.
I think you might have forgotten recent moves from Meta about removal of moderation, relaxing rules on hate speech, settling lawsuits with Trump and similar moves that imply they wouldn't really fight hard against what this administration wants.
The spectator is allegedly a reliable media source, I am not personally familiar.
(I really don’t know, but it does seem that this info at least is coming from multiple places?)
It's a funny old magazine though, they really do get all sorts in there and print stuff that others wouldn't. It's entirely editorial though with huge biases.
I'm glad it exists and read it often, but I'd go checking everything I read in it if I was after some facts.
(by contrast, while the Daily Mail is absolutely terrible at opinion and domestic news, they seem to have some capacity left for doing overseas reporting that isn't just wire service, so if they report on overseas events you can be reasonably sure that something like that happened)
The question isn't whether to trust The Spectator, it's whether to trust this unconfirmed, unnamed source.
Gordon Chang has been making this prediction for almost a quarter century. Will it happen before or after the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world??
Zhang Youxia Arrested After Failed Coup; Gunfight Allegedly Occurred at Jingxi Hotel in Western Beijing (https://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2026/01/25/1130776.h...)
both are bad, I liked when tiktok was supposed to be just "banned". it's always been a tool for repressive governments
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/tiktok-huawei-surveil...
No, at least during the Biden administration when the law was passed, it wasn't.
This shit is a lot more complicated that a hot take based on today's news.
Note that there have been multiple instances over the past two years of high level ex/current officials repeating the same general point.
If you haven't noticed a sweeping attack on free speech in US media, then I just don't think you're paying attention, and playing it off as if it's "just" Tiktok is at best disingenuous.
Now you wonder what these companies are doing to shape events, and the answer is that Tim Cook is attending a private showing of a PR project for the wife of the president premiering on a competing streaming network whilst people hold vigils for the people that the regime has murdered.
Alternate explanation: they are paying intense attention... to the palms that are pressed desperately against their eye sockets as they attempt to See No Evil.
Sucks to suck, I guess.
You'd do that I guess, right, if you saw something happening you thought was bad - you'd run straight into a legal fight that could bankrupt you? Nah, you're a tough guy on the internet! Nothing scares you!
Are we talking about the Trump administration or the Biden administration? The current ban was passed under Biden with supermajorities in both houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_U...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else. Who cares, they all can come crashing down.
No, the point isn't "protecting Biden", it's pure self interest. Tiktok is a social media platform that's very popular with Democrat's electorate and is already left leaning. Why risk it falling into the other party's control (especially near the end of Biden's term), just so you can maybe push more left leaning talking points?
> control of tiktok doesn't pass to the next administration
Huh?
Boden's good, Grump's bad, simple as that. Or Grump's good, Boden's bad doesn't matter.
Now I’m not saying things are inevitable. Trump has a bull-in-china-shop mentality. But he is only being manipulated to set the same agenda, just faster than any president in living memory.
Just murdered two protestors. A bit of a change there.
But I'm talking about political tools. Breaking down the norms about how power is supposed to be wielded. Concentrating more and more power in the executive because Congress would rather be powerless and blameless than have responsibility.
For example, giving the President the power to set tariffs was done with the understanding that the President would use this power wisely in an actual national emergency. That created a political tool. Now we have a deeply unwise President who declared a nonsense national emergency and is playing havoc with trade using this tool. If the tool hadn't been created then I don't think we'd have that problem. I doubt Congress would be willing to pass sweeping emergency powers in an environment where there is no emergency and no need for those powers. And there was never a need for those powers. Tariffs don't need to be enacted so rapidly that they can't wait for Congress to convene and pass a law.
In this case, we've created a political tool giving the President broad power to interfere in a specific private business. It's no surprise if that tool gets abused, and it was completely unnecessary to begin with.
So I'd phrase it as: "Good guys shouldn't make political tools that are far more powerful than they need to be assuming that they'll be used wisely, because bad guys will happily use the full power of those tools."
It would be interesting to consider if there is a form of democracy such that voters themselves can't vote their way out of, I personally doubt it, rules themselves are chosen by votes. If you insist on voting for hostility for the current system of rules, there's a chance you'll win a majority and those rules can go away.
We in the US need to suck it up and accept the truth, voting Trump has consequences, doing it twice lol good luck with that.
It's illegal for an insurrectionist to be President, and it's illegal for federal agents to shoot a subdued man ten times in the back, but that clearly doesn't stop it from happening.
On the other hand, consider an attempt to dictate to states how they should manage their voter rolls. Trump has tried this without success. The problem isn't that it's illegal to do this, although it obviously is. It didn't work because that power doesn't exist in the first place. He can declare that states must do this or that, but his words have no more effect than if I had said them.
Of course there are ways around this. He could cut off funding, send in goons to try to arrest officials, or send in the tanks. But this is much more difficult and makes it much more likely that he'll fail.
Imagine the situation if we didn't have a law that allowed the President to declare a national emergency and set tariffs at will. Right now, Trump can say "100% tariffs on Elbonia" and that automatically happens. Without that law, he could still say that, but it wouldn't do anything. The people who would actually enforce and collect those tariffs just wouldn't do it. We saw this happen with other tax changes like no taxes on tips. Trump couldn't just declare it and make it happen, he had to actually negotiate with Congress, and they could have blocked it if they wanted to.
Rules that say "You can't do X" are easily ignored. But structures that make it so that control is not granted in the first place are a lot harder to overcome. Not impossible, certainly, but much more difficult, and that's very much worthwhile.
It is literally on the front page of news papers....
Also, you can see it on Instagram, X, etc.
Even a cursory search on TikTok reveals anti-ICE content...
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco...
This is why the administration has gone out of its way to try to get Kimmel and Colbert off the air, why it has commandeered CBS and tried to kill 60 minutes pieces critical of the administration, why it violated the law in order to keep TikTok (already fervently pro-Trump) up and running, and why allies of the administration have been put in charge of TikTok after the transition. It's why Bezos is slowly strangling the Washington Post, why Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same to the LA Times, and why the administration is putting their thumb on the scale for Paramount, rather than Netflix, to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN). It's why Musk bought Twitter. It's why they blatantly lie in their press conferences and statements to the media about how the ICE killings happened.
If you walked into a Turning-Point USA meeting in a high school, do you think the kids attending that meeting could accurately tell you what ICE has been doing? I don't.
If you introduce friction with something that millions or more use, a few % peeling off or missing things means tens of thousands of people are impacted. And tiktok has a hell of a lot more than a million users.
I still don’t get what you’re trying to say or why you’re downplaying this.