No, that's not a defense of "China" (whatever that's supposed to mean in internet comments). It's just a defense of HN for its intended mandate, which is curious conversation. Flamewar talking points are incompatible with that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I don't doubt that Bytedance shares Chinese TouTiao user data with the Chinese government, akin to how Apple does it with iCloud, but Bytedance has been pretty adamant that TikTok is external to China and doesn't share data. Even when there was an executive order to ban TikTok for being a national security threat, they couldn't prove that it was.
Does anyone have actual evidence of TikTok sharing with the Chinese government, outside of political hit pieces like the one above?
Here is the one on TikTok with references.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46543
I was going to give quotes from the CRS, but there are so many.
If you want to learn about current issues just go to the home page and search with an empty search field.
https://crsreports.congress.gov
I check it daily.
1. The Chinese government does not deserve our trust.
2. All Chinese businesses are extensions of the Chinese government.
The default assumption should be that your information is being sent to China and that China is using Tiktok as an extention of their propaganda arm.
One couldn't say the same.. at all.
What China does inside of China doesn’t have any bearing on the western internet. The topic at hand is the data collection that tic tok is engaging in, which already has plenty of precedent in the west, unfortunately.
It’s completely contrary to the values enshrined in the US constitution to make arguments like, “ah well but that person/group/country is bad and we aren’t” the entire political theory our nation is supposed to be built on is the notion that people with too much power will do bad things.
Reporters without borders reports 2 million employed in government censorship in 2013. https://rsf.org/en/news/chinas-cyber-censorship-figures
> watch every conversation happening in real time.
Even with 2 million people, you can’t follow even a fraction of the conversations of 1000x the population without automation doing most of the heavy lifting.
You only has to shut down the major channels. Over 22,000 influencers were openly censored last year. Even in the past week, several Olympics-related hashtags have been blocked on Weibo. You can control the conversation even with just one person.
https://scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3159947/chinas-internet...
WeChat censors live, and automatically
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/15/134178/how-wecha...
Because changing what is important to a group or people can make pushing your agenda easier.
What would be important to China's propaganda wing? Most important would be to maintain control over China and downplaying anything that reflects negatively. So controlling negative speech or shifting blame to someone else if a covid virus is discovered to original from territory you control would be important.
Tiktok's algo focuses on keeping you occupied in a state of mind where you zone out.
Propaganda is not just about "pushing" a message but also about smothering discussion. In fact, pushing a message via something like Tiktok is ham fisted, what the Chinese government can do instead is stifle any discussion related to topics that they consider "dangerous". For example, shadow banning any tiktok videos related to the Uighur genocide.
They can blame any manipulation on some ranking algorithm.
I only wish y'all could hear yourselves when you say these things, with even a fraction more rational clarity, even an ounce more suspicion of the political narratives at work here.
These conversations are deeply troubling to me, makes me absolutely ashamed to be a westerner of any sorts. I think I will go find greener pastures now, thanks for the wake up call, hope you find peace too.
Got it, so since you couldn't argue against my statements with reason you are now attacking my character.
> makes me absolutely ashamed to be a westerner of any sorts
Absolutely nobody that is from the west calls themselves a westerner whatever the hell that means. Also FYI, there is an extreme mistrust and dislike of China from almost every country in the so called East. So it isn't a west vs east thing.
It feels so bizarre to have someone convey seething hate for the government in private while seemingly being supportive in public. What is less obvious is how brittle it makes the country, it could literally dissolve into anarchy tomorrow or last for hundreds of years.
edit: but you know what. Since you want evidence I'll give you some. The entire Alibaba debacle where the CEO was forced into hiding because he dared to contradict the Chinese political elite is my evidence that the Chinese government has implicit control over every business based out of China.
So you think his words are much better than "I have friends"? You can find all Alibaba sites are still running. Alibaba Cloud is still providing services. You can also contact to sales and support. Then you still want to believe "entire Alibaba debacle".
Also nice CNN name drop, you clearly know me very well.
Most of the authors of the books express their love for the Chinese people. Most of them lived there at one point, and separate that view from their issues with the CCP and government. If you do due diligence in the area you may change your viewpoint. Maybe not. No-one on this thread is going to convince you in a few paragraphs to change your mind on a subject this charged and complex.
A more fun book, less academic, was published last year by Desmond Shum detailing his rise to becoming a billionaire as a China native and Hong Kong resident. He wrote the book after his billionaire ex-wife was abducted. She was not heard of for four years. She called him the day before he was to publish the book asking him not to.
> https://www.npr.org/2021/09/06/1034556269/red-roulette-revea...
Do I need to provide evidence that the Chinese government should not be trusted and that China has control over all businesses based within its borders? This is common knowledge.
> I'm less worried than if it were used by American companies to target me specifically for ads
You should try practicing what you preach regarding so called xenophobia. Also your defensiveness in this regard is misplaced because my post is not pro American ad companies and it is not pro data collection. I am anti data collection. So not only am I against tiktok because it's controlled by a genocidal dictatorship that has raised a legion of indoctrinated nationalists, I'm anti tiktok because it represents the absolute worst of social media.
Fine, you disagree with me, I'm not putting in any more effort discussing this with you because I don't believe you are arguing in good faith. I'll let the reader of HN decide using their own judgement.
> Ironically this is most of the world's opinion of America.
You keep up bringing up America despite me not mentioning them or even defending the country. This is a classic tactic for derailing conversations.
Do you believe in earnest that China is not a genocidal dictatorship?
Considering that there are TikTok employees in china - both engineers and moderators, there is no chance that china doesn't influence TikTok. Even Zoom which is a clearly american company that has chinese employees wasn't immune to chinese influence.
source: i personally know a tiktok employee in china.
Also, until recently they employed moderators in china, who by definition have access to customer data. So yes, the Chinese offices have/had access to customer data.
On the other hand, many of the same companies have been involved in scandals where employees abused their position to stalk people or whatever, so maybe their access controls aren't actually that strict.
So it would've been interesting to hear about TikTok's internal security culture.
I'm not sure whether I'd call what moderators get "access to customer data", since it's not like they're in control, right? And aren't the posts they're moderating usually public anyway?
Oh well if they've been _adamant_ then I guess it's true.
Don't let guilt by association bias your thinking in this, but give the subject the deliberation it deserves. If you value the integrity of democracy and public discourse, ignore the messengers for whom the optics are politically convenient and focus on the message.
The data collection horse is out of the barn, has legitimate uses, and is an incredibly thorny issue to legislate appropriately. And will be adjusted for the next 20+ years.
What needs to be done now is to say that (1) at a certain user count ("too big to democratically ignore") then (2) production recommendation algorithms must be auditable.
Allow the details of audits to be kept secret from public record, but the DoJ should be able to go to Google, Facebook, Netflix, or TikTok and say "Show me how this works, now."
It's burying your head in the sand to suggest this doesn't have a clear impact on democracy and is currently solely in control of private companies and completely opaque. And it's the opaqueness that's the biggest danger.
Fundamentally, modern media/social is different from everything that came before because of the economic feasibility of microtargeting. Newspapers couldn't afford to track their customers individually & print a unique paper for each of them, which resulted in an auditable public record. All of the companies above can do exactly that, without leaving any public record.
Let's say we had this. We had some ML/AI team go up to Congress/DoJ and show them some tensors, some "back propagating LSTM" horseshit. How does that help the people that don't understand how the ad model works?
Hell, I bet there is _no one_ using AI or tensors or any of that shit that can tell you _why_ their model output Foo instead of Bar.
If explainability is a problem (e.g. "We don't know why our algorithm recommends higher-interest rate loan products to African Americans"), then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.
agreed and I was flippant to make a point. I did not mean to say there aren't smart people in government. But I would venture to say that people who understand ML/AI are _not_ working in the government. Or put more correctly, the _odds_ of a person working in government being up to date on how LSTM works today is such a low number, that I would be fair to say it is extremely unlikely that anyone on any board would be smarter than Sen Hatch _in this domain_.
> then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.
Agreed and is the larger point I was trying to make: we currently, no matter how smart you are, have _any_ way of knowing what your "algorithm" is doing. Or if you do, it's a rule-based system and isn't AI/ML. We should though! And I think pursuing that will give us much higher rate of return than our black-box strategy everyone seems to be using.
This should be measurable.
If a foreign nation's service uses algorithms to promote its interests and quell that of its adversaries or attempts to alter election outcomes to be favorable, then we're in for trouble.
Imagine social media creating worker strikes, riots, getting certain politicians elected, influencing the next generation of kids to prefer limits on free speech, influencing kids to not pursue science and engineering, etc.
This is a complicated issue.
The algorithm can be used for warfare.
Beyond that, I'm not sure how easy it would really be to detect. Seems like the method for that kind of thing would more likely be to have networks of users/bots/whatever that take advantage of facially neutral recommendation algorithms. So would you catch that by auditing the algorithm?
I said measure. We need to understand if we're being manipulated, and if so, figure out what an appropriate response should be. Maybe it's as simple as releasing a report and letting the media talk about it. Knowing gives us the ability to develop a response.
Filter bubbles are relatively new, and it's not yet clear the extent to which they can be used to shape a democratic society.
We don’t need to find that out because we are being manipulated. These are algorithms designed to maintain attention and sell ads. It is impossible for that to not be manipulative. The goal shouldn’t be to understand the algorithms, but to stop them from ruining our lives.
My understanding (vastly simplifying) is that the current standard is: does not infringe on rights of protected classes, does not incite imminent violence, & subject to national security concerns.
All of which are fuzzy lines, subject to court interpretation on a case by case basis, as they should be. (Even national security, which courts have traditionally granted wider latitude to)
All three are plausible rationales under which to bring a hypothetical "antidemocratic" case (to use a catch-all term that encompasses what people seem to be implying).
At core, and first principles, what "we" probably want as a nation is a sliding scale that moves from primacy of shareholder / owner to primacy of public, according to user count & market percentage.
Aka if you're a 10,000 user app, and you think (non-inciteful) racist content will make you the most money, that's your (terribly immoral) business.
But if you're a 100,000,000+ user multi-app company, then public and democratic interest takes primacy over your shareholders. Don't like that? Spin off some products.
I've had this same argument with military friends lamenting the prevalence of ex-military citizens among right wing nationalist groups. IMHO, "make people attend classes to fight indoctrination" is too easily repurposed by a future administration to do the exact opposite.
I can't see exactly how we do all this, but the root cause of many a social ill is that corporations are taking over social roles from government. This must be arrested, somehow, or we'll sleepwalk into the dystopian future of every damn 70s scifi film.
That metaphor means that there is no stopping it, you can't get the horse back in the barn. How is data collection like that? Why can't we make a law stopping it? The EU limits data collection. Apple restricted it. Nobody told them we couldn't put the horse back in the barn.
A good thing about 'software eating the world' is that it's not like saying, 'train rail gauge should be 1 meter wider', which would take incredible capital and labor. The software can be quickly and easily changed.
Many countries ask this of US companies, so there's no reason we shouldn't adopt a similar stance.
It's the same as Facebook now threatening to leave the EU if they have to comply with EU data protection laws.
A US company operating in China under its own international brand is a sucker who fell for a pretty blatant con.
2) On "China didn't ban ...", that's the case for Google and Linkedin China, but it's actually a kind of "soft" ban that the cost to meet the regulatory requirements is too high to afford even for biggest companies in the world.
3) FB case was a bit different. It was never given any opportunity to operate in China, so FB didn't "chose" to leave. We would never know what FB would do if given the chance. Maybe leave all user data there inside the great wall, as Apple does in its special version of iCloud in China.
Also, Google actually has a sizeable office in Beijing. I'm not sure what they do specifically since it's not easy to access any of their public services without an obscure VPN (the most popular ones get blocked pretty quickly).
It's not like others are better, but those three are the worst when it comes to spying shaping public opinion only because they are the biggest and most powerful.
If I had to choose who will influence the public in my country, let it better be some company (or government) that has my country interest first, and not China or the USA interests.
Because there's a rule of law, legal records, required disclosures, all subject to investigation and enforcement by an independent judiciary that creates a public record.
We can bemoan that wealthy people control a majority of assets or that some exceptions slip through the cracks at smaller scale (e.g. offshore shell companies owning assets). But by and large there's no question as to "Who owns Exxon? Or Google? Or Facebook?"
China does not have that.
Why should we ban people voluntarily using a short video service that shows them things they like and whose business model is virtually identical to every other social media company?
The NSA listens.
TikTok listens, engages, and suggests new content and ideas to millions.
TikTok shows you 80s commercials and clips from industrial films after figuring out that you want to see 80s commercials and clips from industrial films.
Based on the ads that I get, which are pretty unintrusive, easily identifiable and always skippable, it doesn't seem like their analytics are that advanced. Besides random major brands, who are essentially broadcasting ads, I get ads for diesel mechanic tech schools and random wish products.
Trump admin tried to restrict its use, at least among government/military, and perhaps predictably he was accused of racism/sinophobia...but the threat was just as real then as now.
In the US it really does matter how you do things. Just the whim of the president is not enough for it to happen.
Trump had no legal basis for his order. He liked to act like he was doing things with grand strokes, many of them were doomed to fail. I'm not convinced that he or those around him even cared if they did or not.
I don't think you can read much into an amateur hour / foolish attempt.
I don't think its so clear cut. In any case its hardly the first time that a president made a potentially unconditional to be ruled upon by courts later.
Not sure what we're talking about at this point. Trump's executive orders about tiktok that were thrown out of court were something different.
Trump or just the department who owns a given device can of course say "don't put X on government phones" and so on, but that's way different than what Trump tried and failed to do with tiktok.
Regarding Huawei , Trump basically told the Commerce Department to take action, Huawei was already (or was in the process of being) blacklisted by the commerce department, the commerce department does have the legal right to do that given the nature of Huawei's products and sensitivity of communications equipment.
The commerce department doesn't currently (although I believe lawmakers are looking into it) have the authority to simply blanket ban an app like tiktok on a whim / order. They simply can't do that for any old reason the POTUS says.
As I noted in another comment, in the US it does matter HOW you do things, the courts are independent (compared to say China) regardless how "right" someone might be they need to follow the law.
But as far as tiktok until someone gives the commerce department or someone else new powers, so far that seems out of reach.
Granted, I believe there are efforts to give them that option.
I thought it was the judicial branch and an injunction that stopped it.
>> On 23 September 2020, TikTok filed a request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the app from being banned by the Trump administration. This request was filed with the District Court for the District of Columbia. The preliminary injunction was approved by Judge Carl J. Nichols on September 27.
Then, the current President rescinded it and ordered an actual review of the risks. Something we probably should have done prior to the attempted banning.
>> In June 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration ban on TikTok, and instead ordered the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the app to determine if it poses a threat to U.S. national security.
I'm confused on exactly what you think happened.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_...
As the wiki article you shared lays out, there was a decent amount of nonpartisan momentum behind narrower limitations on Tiktok, along with serious consideration of it as a national security threat. Trump's threat of an outright ban immediately polarized the conversation and deflated much of that momentum, helped along by the fact his specific approach and messaging were typically incautious instead of incremental.
The courts did indeed issue an injunction against Trump's EO, and I don't have any reason to believe they were wrong to do so. Biden, again typically, _has_ taken the first steps of an incremental approach towards assessing the risks that tiktok poses. But as implied by the Wikipedia page you linked, we're nowhere near the level of Congressional and institutional attention that we were at in 2019 and 2020, and it's pretty reasonable to attribute this to Trump's engagement with the issue reorienting the political valence of the conversation. Specifically, the "Trump vs tiktok" association is so strong that (eg) a Senator that makes too much noise about it will now be loaded with an association that he may not want.
I actually don't have a strong opinion about tiktok's ban, see risks in both courses of action, and am a fan of the Biden admin's ostensible careful approach. I just resent the degree to which the idiocy of the public drives so many issues further away from thoughtful engagement with reality and towards partisan sportsball.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok_v._Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_co...
Doing anything else means that Chinese companies have the ability to build international platforms—where both Chinese and US citizens can participate—and US companies do not. Furthermore, those international platforms could potentially be made to enforce the CCP's standards for speech, setting the tone for conversations about Uyghurs and Taiwan worldwide.
Facebook is not allowed to operate in China not because they are American, but because they do not want to comply with Chinese law.
TikTok does follow US law, so instead of flat out banning it, the reasonable thing to do would be to enact sensible privacy legislation... But oh wait, then tech giants can't exploit the local population anymore.
For a generally accepted instance, see the EU GDPR.
Everything he rails against was present in both recent US elections but for whatever reason he seems content to focus only on the most recent one.
Maybe he's spineless and holds that line because right-wing hosts are the only ones that will host him to get his message out. Maybe he really does believe that and is being a complete hypocrite. Neither option is respectable.
Sorry, do you have a better link handy? This primarily looks like a fundraising page.
But I'm even more curious, would you not describe Tucker Carlson as far right in his views?
Dubious.
On what social issues are excatly Euros more left wing compared to Americans?
> ask any non-European person who has lived on both continents where he feels more welcome.
I gladly concede this, but this is just one element of social issues.
> Universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, workers' rights, LGBTQ rights, prison policy, police behavior and control, social safety net, lack of religion in politics, free or extremely cheap education including higher education
> Matter of a fact in Eastern Europe...
Thats why my first answer was: Certainly not Western Europe. My knowledge of Easter Europe is nonexistent, so I won't dare say anything about their circumstances.
which ones ?? russiagate hrc lies ??
Liz Cheney
Mitt Romney
David French
Reason media (Libertarian)
Andrew Sullivan
These all tend to fall under the more 80s/90s Neoconservative or Liberalism banner instead of the more aggressive New Right
It also has a Washington Post article[4] discussing a (since-deleted) video that purportedly showed potentially-manipulated differences between how Bing and Google autocompleted "Hillary Clinton" searches. But none of the 3 main sources cover what the impact of autocomplete could be.
Do you have any links about Google being caught red-handed politicizing ranking order?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547273/
[2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-c...
[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0370#m...
[4] https://archive.is/fHzW8. Is Politifact trustworthy? They investigated this and found "Google’s suggested searches, for the most part, avoid offensive suggestions for everyone, not just Clinton." That isn't a total debunk, of course. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/23/andrew-nap...
>>A preliminary analysis of the data shows that Google search results (but NOT search results on Bing or Yahoo) had a significant liberal bias – enough to have shifted at least 6 million votes in the months leading up to the election.
You need to know the methodology being used to understand the results, as they tracked ephemeral experiences using surveillance software with volunteers.
This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you.
The Rogan podcast was awkward af but he does provide a lot of substantive content if you're open to listening.
https://www.aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies is probably the most coherent site, but there's no salient tldr breakdown, to learn more you'll need to watch the videos.
https://youtu.be/-7qT_38iRSc is the most comprehensive video, but I'll need to spend more time later to gather better links.
>Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content.
>https://mygoogleresearch.com/
There's no research on that page. Many of the linked articles that this individual has written also are vague on actual details/proof and only contain vague "this could happen!" comments. Beyond that, many of them also end with a plea for more fundraising.
>This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you.
All he needs to do is spend a little more time uploading data and evidence, and less time shoving as many "DONATE" buttons onto his page as he can. None of this looks like solid work, even his television appearances; it looks like someone who goes around throwing out lots and lots of loose speculation while asking to be paid to do so.
He submitted a paper on this in June 2021 to the AABSS but they have yet to publish it. He also has 5 other, earlier SEME papers submitted for publication.[1]
I appreciate you going the distance on providing these links but I'm loath to trust this data until it's been peer-reviewed.
His AIBRT presentation[2] has some seemingly spurious logic. Here's one slide: https://i.imgur.com/t4rGv3e.png
The graph depicts 300k undecided voters resolving to a party over time. Here's Epstein talking about it:
> ...by the time we hit election day, we have an enormous gap - more than 100,000 people - between the conservatives and liberals. And we've created that gap with our biased search results.
Assigning that movement to a single cause seems unlikely to me.
His presentation does include a relevant WSJ article titled "Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function to Counter Travel Ban."[3] That's not "red-handed," since they didn't do it, but it's very relevant. HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036353
[0] https://hackernoon.com/taming-big-tech-5fef0df0f00d
[1] https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf
[2] Video: https://www.aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2021-Large-Sca...
Put another way, you can't expect me to spend my time listening to a podcast just to be able to guess at what your argument is.
Who is? I don't mean to be trite or contrary, but TikTok is coming into an environment where norms are pretty damned shady. Google as you and the article say, also consume user data quite unethically.
FB likewise surveil us for their advertising businesses. They both also happen to host and control a good chunk of political and politically adjacent content within that framework. Police and regulate it with no transparency. FB are also gave us our first big "scandals" with third party trackers and/or data sharing.
Other countries (including, but definitely not exclusively) also use tech companies as espionage assets.
TikTok is just a new pig at the trough.
You don't really see much difference? Democratically elected politicians versus central party that allows no dissent and has complete control over information and actions of its citizens to the point of genocidal assimilation.
You're saying the Chinese government is so powerful and competent that they have complete control over information and actions of over one BILLION people? Wild claims like this one should be substantiated.
Although your name is wildly sinophobic and racist so I doubt there is any evidence you can pull up.
How would we know if that was or was not happening, either here or, more aptly (for the analogy to be accurate), abroad?
Bear in mind that we don't really know much about how our data is being used at any of these, either directly by the company or by security agencies in their home countries. US security also has access to foreign citizens' FB & Google data via prism or its successors.
The whole argument here seems (to me) to be [1] TikTok collects a scary and unjustifiable amount of data about its customers, just like youtube, FB Etc. [2] We don't know exactly what's collected and why [3] TikTok are chinese.
Singling out Tiktok is neither helpful nor honest, IMO.
That was my thought. Listing the 'good faith' operators might be feasible, if only because the list would be very short.
This issue isn't a bee stuck in my presonal bonnet, but this is a fraudulent response that convinces nobody that didn't already agree with you. I'll explain why.
The people complaining about TikTok were probably complaining about the others for ages too.
Those complainers were shouted down with some version of "well, they're not THAT bad."
Now there is one actor that is seen (at least by some) as worse than the others. The difference in the actor is being raised as a reason to care about their actions (and maybe renew concern about the category of actions at large).
Your response that their actions are not novel is either ignorant or perpetuating a fraud.
If the underlying assertion is "ccp is evil," where and why does this relate to TikTok specifically? Why not every other item you are probably consuming?
>> Say what you will about Facebook, Google, et al., but they haven't come that far yet.
They're tech/media companies, not governments. FB & Google are however responsible for the norms under which TikTok can collect data for whatever purposes they want. They're the ones who normalised this sort of shady behaviour. It's a pretty straight line between one and the other.
Well, neither is the USA and its NSA and its Five Eyes and all these actors who spy on pretty much everything and everyone. American companies are either complicit or blissfully ignorant. They violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, principles their own country was literally founded upon, so there's no telling what they'd do to a foreigner. People are so afraid of them when they talk security they just assume you won't be taking them on.
The process can sometimes result in some of the same things happening, but the fact that they are not being done unilaterally is a major differentiator in multiple ways.
Your data in the US is much more likely to be abused when corporate interests voluntarily want to make money off it, than any abuse by executive power.
The solution to this (and other problems of social engineering) is to educate the general (democratic) population, so they are aware of and resilient against such attacks. I don't think it's possible to stop everyone from using a given service, but if every user understands the real tradeoffs, then we have a chance. If individuals (and more importantly voters) cannot think and reason for themself, given the facts of a given subject, democracy has no future.
In general though, I think people are smart. They make decisions and tradeoffs with the information they have. The problem here is that they don't understand the real risks. More than the loss of privacy and security, the real problem here is that a hostile nation state seeks to influence the thoughts of free citizens of other (democratic) countries. This is how wars are won and lost -- in the hearts and minds of the people. If everyone who used TikTok saw the situation in a similar light, I doubt it would have the adoption it currently has.
Obviously the behavioral profiles are unaffected by this, considering it focuses primarily on browsing habits.
Also > How much are the CCP paying you to defend TikTok in all these comments?
This is surely not the way to have a rational conversation about the topic?
If you find them objectionable, change the industry.
It's not easy at all to do, there's a lot of grey area, and sometimes I just don't know. But I try.
It's not about the individuals in those countries, I suspect just making their way through life they may have the best of intentions but still could be forced to participate.
(Having said al that, that google research page seems pretty suspect to me.)
“China to enter talks with the United States about social media” would not mean all Chinese people will talk to all Americans. This is true whether the content is positive, negative, or neutral.
It really depends on what one is optimizing for. If one is optimizing for ethnic division, or just not at all optimizing for change in the future led from within said country.. then sure "China" or "Muslims" not "CCP" or "Wahhabism."
How would an American react to a foreigner saying "America is evil and not trustworthy" vs "American leadership has done X and therefore is not trustworthy?" I have been largely abroad for years and I would still process the information in the latter statement with much less emotion.
With a few days of interactions, you can very precisely logically profile a person enough to figure out how to socially engineer them. You also have enough interest and behavioral data to be able setup a blackmail scheme.
It is not hard to imagine how the close integration with the government allows the law enforcement to conduct very skilled operations using the psychological map that can be built about a person.
The CCP is way past knowing if you vote dem/rep or are a 21yr old female.
Reporting like this is also a refutation of their service.
Actually there's no need to influence "voting".
My personal pet theory about the recent rise in various 'challenges' is effectively weaponization of this particular medium in an attempt at social manipulation. It is all fun games now, but as recent 'gun challenge' shows, it can be easily turned into mayhem.
The growing inequality and the increasing government overreach which strangely always seems to benefit a few rich uber-companies is a symptom that our institutions are fairly unreliable.
An alternative to more regulation and more surveillance to prevent mass manipulation would be NOT to have the power of millions of people in the hands of a handful of barely-elected representatives and to keep that power in local communities.
No more taxes that go to Washington and gets "redistributed" - aka used to enrich the usual lobbyists. No more public services - aka monopolies. Just private local companies providing services to local citizens.
China is not a good faith operator. Given the data needed to influence public opinion and voting, they will engage in manipulation favorable to their interests. That alone is sufficient to run tiktok at a loss, but the market manipulation possible, advertisement platform potential, and other monetization makes it look like just another app.
Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content.
https://mygoogleresearch.com/
The idea that tiktok isn't used for the same type of manipulation is dangerously naive.
There's a need for social media manipulation watchdogs that can monitor content being delivered to different users so the companies and countries involved can be held accountable.
It's sad that a massively scaled invasion of privacy can only be countered by more surveillance. Because of the ephemeral nature of tiktok interactions, the only way to combat manipulation is to surveil the content being delivered to user feeds and compare subsequent opinion poling and purchases.