Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision?
Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the public in harmful ways?
I read what you quoted as a matter of fact statement, not an assertion of what is ethically righteous
But with that, I don't agree that it's a fact, maybe the FCC regulates what you broadcast on radio and TV, but if you don't take federal funding, the government doesn't really have a pull in what is created or prompted AFAIK. Journalists in the press pool may trade subservience for access but that's about it.
FCC is a special cause because private entities are using a public resource that must be managed. The content controls were a way to prevent Hearst style journalism spreading to radio and television. It worked well until the era of entertainment news developed.
How about copyright infringement, false advertising, sharing classified documents, tobacco advertising? There are a LOT of special cases.
Maybe there shouldn’t be and all of those things should be free from government interference, but the status quo is that plenty of speech is regulated.
So basically controls on speech that are good are not censorship and therefore good, but ones that are bad are censorship and therefore bad? That doesn’t feel like an especially defensible view.
Copying someone else's work and presenting it as your own is not protected speech, it is fraud. If you want to still consider this speech, someone is using it to actively and intentionally harm others.
If you're so intent on free speech, how would you feel if someone followed you around screaming profanities and abuse? Are you engaging in harmful and immoral censorship by calling the cops to remove this person? Are you suppressing his right to free speech by taking out a restraining order?
So let me get this straight - you want to go from a system where:
- the government hands out money to the media
- the law says that they need to give it to everyone without political discrimination
- if they try to withold funding, you can sue them and probably win
To a system where:
- if you have a ton of money, you can be a media outlet
- if you don't have a ton of money, get fucked
I'm struggling to see how the latter is better for anyone other than rich people who want to influence the masses.
In theory your argument could be good, in practice the state is governed by the same horrible people that run corporations, and at least with corporations they topple over every 25 years.
So yes I’d prefer not to let leeches take my money by force to give it to media, worst of all to tell the things they said against whites during the last 4 years. I mean, the proof that they’re bad is exactly what you paid them to say recently.
Easiest way to spot an authorian is the complaining something is not democratic while also spending time promoting antidemocratic messages.
It is a cop out. I do not believe everyone who argue against some of my views are against everyone of them. I have no idea of what part of the far right pleases you, but the point about a democracy is that nothing is fixed everything ebbs and flows. This is something conservative people have a hard time with, and when the leftwings ebbs they have a hard time.
The media is not left wing. It might be more left than the far right, but it is also along way from the far left.
Just be honest about your ideas and intentions, do not blame others for your failures.
NYT does have a left leaning bias. Here's an example where a conservative person and a liberal person each did the same donation tax avoidance strategy, and the NYT said the conservative got "an enormous personal tax windfall", but the liberal got "no tax benefit". In reality they both got the same benefit. NYT describes the conservative person as greedy and the liberal person as selfless, for doing the same thing.
A few scattered examples of this does nothing to counterbalance the neoliberalism and outright cronyism of NYT. They are probably a big reason why you might even (wrongly) associate neoliberalism with leftist ideology.
Back in 2004 they withheld publishing the fact that the NSA had spliced themselves into every internet backbone. (RIP Qwest).
Back in 2002/2003, they drummed for war like all the good sycophants.
A few examples of them painting some of their toadies in a good light while trashing some of their enemies is hardly evidence of “leftism”.
If the NYT were even moderately leftist, they would have endorsed Bernie Sanders.
Your comment and others are great examples of how the NYT, as good journalism does, angers everyone. They've taken positions all over the spectrum. Look at their editorial page (though that does omit Trumpism, possibly because that is often based on falsehoods).
> If the NYT were even moderately leftist, they would have endorsed Bernie Sanders.
Only progressives think Sanders is 'moderately leftist'.
No, I will shower you with good old capitalist critiques. The market is not all powerful. Market failures exists because not every market is capable of self-regulation. Some market players can and do abuse their market power. State intervention so that journalists, policeman, waste managers, water distributors, electricity distributors, internet providers, health care providers, health insurance providers, food producers, etc. can do their job effectively, because they provide needs that are too sensitive to leave to private self-interests. That's why many of those are subsidized _and_ regulated.
It can make laws that prohibit or discourage publishing certain content. It can also shape the discourse in such a way that these laws are not viewed as restrictions on free speech.
As someone not living the us but regularly reading news from both sides of your media landscape, I can tell you that it's not regulated what they can write or say or what's promoted. Your media is all over the place. There are differences in how far they go on the spectrum and some are definitely insane on what they publish to the level of leaving out all the important details about certain situations to push their agenda. How do you think that there is any regulation at all?
Also for tiktok, the algorithm needs less than an hour to almost fully understand you and it will then push a mix of what you already like and agree with, things that you don't like and absolutely disagree with but in a way that makes it look bad so in the end you also agree with that, and some funny videos to keep you entertained. This way they are maximizing the time you stay in the app to increase their revenue. It polarizes your world view further and further and without people to talk to and discuss, your ideas and beliefs will be turned into religious level thinking, radicalizing you and making it more and more difficult to accept different opinions. If you only consume what you already believe, things will go downhill very quickly. That's the reason people can't talk to each other anymore, the truth in most if not all cases is somewhere in the middle.
What we need is social media that is not algorithm driven, not optimized to keep you at the device for as long as possible but to show you a multitude of opinions to a topic from different angles, not just the one you have already chosen as your truth. We need to talk again, accept that other people can have different opinions without shouting them down. We need to try to look at things from different perspectives not just our own.
And most importantly, we need to accept that we can't have an opinion about facts. We need to listen to people that actually have professional knowledge about a topic. The guy that used to be a fitness trainer but now has a telegram channel to spread some important truths about climate change actually knows shit about how the world works. They want to make money selling you any truth that works for you.
I think you misunderstand me: I'm not in favor of banning tiktok on its own. I think you're right that that misweights things, further consolidating power in the hands of those who hold the remaining platforms.
What I'm saying is that all of these platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in that they exist to predictably change individual behavior with a high degree of precision, through custom tailored information feeds that can be shaped to alter someone's perspectives on the world in the interests of whoever controls the feed.
I don't think it's better for that power to be in the hands of Elon Musk or of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that that power needs to be banned worldwide if democracy is to survive. Democracy hinges on the idea that voters will in general vote in their own interest, and the ability to individually manipulate voters into measurably changing their behavior breaks that assumption.
And note that this is fundamentally different than traditional media sources, which have a harder time shaping someone's entire life and worldview. WaPo can control what someone perceives the WaPo editorial board as believing. Only a social media platform can control their perspective of what their friends think.
You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
>You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
It's a cool phenomena tbh if I was rich enough to go to college I would love to do a thesis on it
We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering.
We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China
But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering.
And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see
A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
This made me chuckle :) it truly is beautiful it's sad its one of those fields you can't take credit for what you do but the people running it deserve all the credit. An impossible ask but would be cool to read about the tech behind it in today's digital age.
The obvious answer is that the US is still a democracy with free media and rule of law. That means you're likely to be found out and have a huge scandal if you try to use government resources to manipulate the public at scale. This is somewhat confirmed by the huge scandals causes by relatively small scale manipulations, which form the somewhat worn examples commenters on this website like to bring up whenever criticism of China is voiced. Note that in China there is no such risk of discovery or pushback as media and courts are fully controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Would they? My understanding is that all their issues stem specifically from dealing in information the government has explicitly classified, rather than simply speech the government doesn't like. You can spend all day ranting about Uncle Sam on the internet, how the President is the worst person ever, etc etc, and the feds really couldn't care less, which is a _sharp_ contrast to China, where you can't share pictures of Winnie the Pooh because some wag once said they thought Xi looked like him.
> Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
I guess you are trying to muddy the water here by invoking the names of people who are known for their resistance to a certain kind of American misbehaviour.
That behaviour is not really the same as the kind of wide-ranging and complete media restrictions we are talking about, but it sounds kind of similar so this is a good way for you to do some whataboutism with extra steps.
If you think that American media is controlled in the same way at the same scale and intensity as Chinese media please provide your arguments for that view explicitly.
Snowden's work doesn't say anything on the matter. The information he released concerned government data collection, not data restriction or manipulation.
So I'm definitely not saying that TikTok itself provides better checks and balances, but TikTok, in an ecosystem of other media providers under different governments, would be a much healthier for civil society.
For example, US social media companies were vital in kicking off the Arab spring. How different would such movements be if they only had access to a media monoculture controlled by their respective regimes?
US social media companies contributing to widespread social unrest that ultimately led nowhere[0] or created more oppressive Islamic regimes and sectarian violence - well, this seems like an argument against TikTok, not for it.
Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions.
I totally agree that the Arab spring ended in near complete failure, and is not an ideal in and of itself, and violent revolution is in no way desirable for societies like the US. Maybe I should have connected the analogy fully:
Suppose that there was an issue that most citizens would normally feel very strongly about, but which benefits the state: war immediately comes to mind. There should be protests and (non-violent of course) civil unrest against wars the public feels to be unjust or immoral. Such demonstrations could easily be lulled in the right media environment, which is why alternative channels are important. I can easily imagine a future where TikTok is the premier dissonant chord against the drumming of war.
I'm not going to hide by biases here, I rather do romanticize popular anti-war movements.
Romanticizing anti-war movements is reasonable, in my opinion.
But TikTok was used heavily for the past year and half to glorify terrorist violence and spread misinformation. Well... it's been used to spread misinformation for longer. But all my TikTok addicted friends are happily justifying murder of Jews, applauding the assassination of an insurance CEO, and spreading other crazy bullshit. It really is disruptive to these people - they aren't smart enough to distill truth from the barrage of bullshit, and they are easily manipulated.
Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.
I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy.
Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.
But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good.
If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now
ccp bans certain brain rot contents which the algorithms hm happily spreads in the west.
the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.
I can never really tell, but I hope it's not malicious. When I was in college, a dorm neighbor told me that Obama had said/did something bad. I don't remember what, but it was incredibly dubious. I told him I didn't believe it and asked him to prove it; I'd even accept a Fox News article as evidence. He was red in the face because he couldn't find any article suggesting anything close to what he had said. Looking back on it now, I realize he genuinely believed what he had heard, but he had fallen for well-crafted language that created a new reality. It was so well-crafted, all that remained was the idea he was propagandized to believe rather than even a remnant of the title of the original article.
This same thing has happened to me over the years - I read an article and then it becomes relevant in some future discussion. I find the article (which is hard to find, because I'm searching by what the author[s] wanted me to think, not the actual article content) and read it again, only to find out that, upon a more critical reading, it doesn't say what I thought it said at all! Or the conclusion is much weaker than I had originally thought.
It's pretty amazing to see, though. Weak evidence used to support very strong American propaganda about seemingly weak Chinese propaganda. The goal posts inevitably get moved too - oh we have strong evidence of it, but we might tip off the Chinese! Like, huh? What does it matter if they're tipped off if you're going to force the sale?
I also don't think TikTok was ever a national security threat, at least not any more than any other social media platform. What are (were?) all the DoD recruiters and other military influencer accounts on TikTok like Nikko Ortiz (a counter intelligence agent from '18-'23) doing on TikTok? It was wild to see how during certain recruitment pushes, my FYP would be like a direct view into a platoon headquarters. (And yes, before anyone responds, US military social media policies like being aware of adversaries using social media predates the popularization of TikTok, no need to speculate about them not knowing that TT was a threat, especially not after the first ban attempt during the Trump administration)
I think the question is actually asked incorrectly in the reverse.
Maybe start with the not at all controversial position that China is effectively an authoritarian dictatorship who is well known to use censorship and public manipulation as one of its key levers of control and then ask if you have any evidence whatsoever that for some reason they wouldn’t include TikTok in that mix?
The way actual professionals in the field look at this problem is through a lens of:
1. Do they have the capabily to take this specific action? (A resounding yes)
2. Do they have the intent to take this action? I mean this is where you would look at literally all of the other instances where they did choose censorship over free expression and also come to a resounding yes.
3. Do they have the opportunity to take this action? Which is also a clear yes as defined by their own national security laws and other methods of control over what TikTok does.
Thats how people have come to the conclusion that it’s a legitimate threat even in the absence of some smoking gun where people wrote everything down and then conveniently leaked it for you.
At some point you have to be able to make decisions in the absence of perfect information and this is specifically how threat modelling works just to provide some context because some of the comments here are incredibly low quality.
I agree overall with your analysis. Nonetheless when one says that there is good evidence for something, rather than that there is good circumstantial evidence or that there are very reasonable grounds to assume something, one is making a different claim.
We must also ask whether circumstantial evidence or reasonable assumptions alone should be enough to force a company to divest its assets.
The thing about nation state level conspiracies is that they rarely are kind enough to write down all of the details about their intents in any format you’re going to see. That is the very nature of a conspiracy.
And so knowing this you are going to need some kind of framework in order to make decisions off in the absence of perfect information.
The one I outlined above is the same one that was used in this case and is really at the foundation of everything to do with threat modelling, this isn’t some kooky thing I just made up.
This is actually so cool it's the first study I have seen that tries to use numbers kind of hilarious they did not filter scrapped posts by date to account for TikTok being a newer platform. Some data engineer got a promotion off that study too probably :)
Another thing they did not take into account is the presence of social engineering botnets that can be used by both sides (if record labels have them I'm sure anyone rlse can too)
Yes, read about the kind of things employees of TikTok have to agree to. The summary is that they essentially have to uphold the goals of the Chinese government. They also have two different managers, one in America and a second handler from mainland China.
> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment.
But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing".
This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem.
> It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.
> "Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa."
The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse. It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
> The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse.
What you need is not just diversity but independence. You can find all kinds of views on social media, but if there are only a handful of social media sites and the government can lean on the sites themselves to suppress things they don't like, that's not independence.
> It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
It's obviously not optimal for the only alternative to be the CCP. What you would really like is to have no major platforms at all and instead have thousands of federated independent smaller services hosted in every country in the world. Which was basically the web and email/usenet until Google took 90% search market share and then devastated the former by downranking smaller sites and the latter got displaced by non-federated walled garden social media that actively suppresses third party client interoperability.
So now you practically need the resources of a state to put up a viable rival to that stuff, and maybe the problem you need to solve is that.
First they ousted 8chan because of something-something-terrorism something-pedophilia. Then they have banned RT, because Russia and US are clearly at war (nope). Now they are banning TikTok for "spreading propaganda".
The "wide range of national and international media" you can access is shrinking rather quickly.
Anti-trust laws are the obvious example that was already listed in the post you replied to, e.g. Meta wants to be able to buy Instagram and Apple wants to lock all iPhone users out of third party app stores. But the government has passed so many laws at this point that you can hardly walk down the street without committing a felony, see e.g. Three Felonies a Day, to the point that it's now only a matter of prosecutorial discretion that any given person isn't in prison.
They've also threatened to pass new laws that the targets wouldn't like if the targets don't "voluntarily" do things the law isn't allowed to make them do.
> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government ...
I had a chuckle at the naivety of this statement. Even HN shadow-bans posts here that are perceived as anti-US or pro-Russia / pro-Israel (I am not talking about off-topic political posts, which are against HN rules, but on political threads on Russia - Ukraine and Israel - Palestine conflicts that were allowed by the mods). HN algorithms also give undue preference to western media sources. It is the same with StackExchange (on politics and skeptics SE, for e.g.) where even factual posts countering US propaganda on Russia-Ukraine war or Israel-Palestine conflict is highly discouraged with downvotes or deletion. When complaints were raised about biased moderation, one SE mod even publicly commented that they are under heavy pressure to "moderate" the content on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Let's also not forget that RT . com is now banned on most US social media networks like FB and Youtube. And during COVID pandemic, we saw how the US government strong-armed the social media platform to prevent the spread dubious and unverified news on the disease, its treatment and the vaccines (which was the right thing to do).
I have realised that as a non-westerner (Indian), the political space for me online is continuously shrinking and increasingly suffocating because I refuse to subscribe to the western political black-and-white world view. This is readily apparent when you look at how Americans are shaping these platforms into echo-chambers - Bluesky and Reddit is for American left- content while 9gag and Twitter / X is for the American right- , and whether you want it or not, both of these shove American political content on you.
Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the public in harmful ways?