They aren’t just going to surveil you though. They will actively work to promote disinformation to you.

Do you have examples of this?

China's big players from what I have seen have incompetent at even just advertising in the west. I remember reading an American study that went into this around the time these alerts around foreign misinformation started to get big. Turns out Russia is pretty damn good at it. The bit China tries is small and again incompetent (An example given was at small scale shelling out to buy popular content accounts and suddenly turning them from a volkswagen beetle account into a full on propaganda account only to get instabanned) and there's somehow a lot more anti china bots on twitter than pro. Having no horse in either place i'm not particularly outraged about the attempts especially considering the US does similar more effectively.

The past and present is not the future. Only 20 years ago China was a third world country and conventional wisdom was that China could only make cheap trinkets and never be a threat to the mighty US economy.

Now they manufacture practically everything: the computers that drive our lives, makeup that fancies our wives, widgets for all of our digits, and even some foods to feed our broods.

Why can’t China improve in other areas like influential advertising and media campaigns? Having more data from TikTok doesn’t hurt their chances.

You're trying have obvious, bad attempts prove the absence of better, unnoticed attempts, which isn't necessarily true. The point stands though; that any property (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok) with an algorithmic feed has an immense amount of control over the social discourse and direction of a country. More than newspapers do, and yellow journalism pulled us into the Spanish–American War.

Ah yes. Unlike honest ole' Uncle Sam. He would never do such a thing.

And the only time they'll be any good at it is when they parrot your local sources of disinformation, so at most they can amplify the entirely domestic problems that already exist.

The more I read about the dangers of disinformation, the more I get the idea that 'disinformation' just means 'information my current government does not agree with'.

Welcome to the Matrix.

The US government does not agree with China that the US army created SARS-CoV-2 in a lab. But every scientist and rational person also doesn't agree with China. You're going to have to update your definition.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/vaccines-c...