1) Chinese Tiktok scaring the US government: Sure OUR corps can mentally rape our citizenry, but someone else? Nononononononono. This may provoke the first real debate on pernicious ubiquitous algorithmic manipulation.
2) Are we really out of "think of the children" political movements? With the polarity of Democratic and Republican parties changing, we may be ripe for protections for children (I mean, the tactics that childrens games use in the app store are utterly depraved: gambling games, social payouts, a litany of PTW strategies for fleecing adults applied to children) that may bleed into general society and adult welfare
3) fear of AI: AI is a boogeyman, and will continue to be. AI is just an algorithm, the next mass corporation/state algorithmic weapon to be deployed.
4) democratic institutions. maintain a functioning government and the core aspects of western "free" society such that they maintain a massive competitive advantage over totalitarian states in the long run.
One thing I will say is that people are smarter from the first (pre-social-network/mobiles) internet, and the initial stages of mobile/social network internet. I think people are educated at a rapid rate to deal with advertising and manipulation, and from an early age. I think it is making saavier people, even if in the short run your kids will get swept up in some manipulation/scam at some point. Better they get manipulated and conned early on by the Nigerian prince before they have real money to lose.
We shall see with AI.
What is abundantly apparent with the later stages of social/mobile internet is the massive distrust users of social networks now have of the platforms, even if they continue to consume it. This is what is underlying the very very correct distrust people have of corporate AI: if the social network corps have gone to such depraved degrees with the last round of algorithms, what will they do with new AI weapons? We already know: nothing remotely good.
The larger social network companies are firmly in their ossification phases: the biggest hallmark, publicly and openly having contempt for their customers. They are all ripe for collapse.
In a perverse gradiose manner, consider Conway's Law applied to the entire internet: the current internet mirrors the open trade period provided and maintained by post-WWII US hegemony.
Many many many people predict that globalization and trade is coming to an end, and the internet will change to reflect a less global and guarded real world.
We are also in a world of first-world demographic decline. Despite the rise of AI, people are about to get MORE important, because there will be less of them in the peak/prime years. If regard for human rights tracks the economic value of a productive human, it may increase substantially in the coming decades.
It will not, in any way, because it is only a pretense. The original push to ban Tiktok was for the government to get access to Tiktok moderation. After they got it, the push petered out to a few local loudmouthed Republicans who had run with a hardcore anti-China stance. Then, after October 7th, when Tiktok accurately reflected the views of the younger half of the American public on Palestine, the push was renewed by the usual arms dealers and allies, which got it through.
Nobody cares about Tiktok's algorithm. They care that people are anti-Israeli on Tiktok. When all of those people move to another app, they'll suddenly be concerned about that other app, or young people's access to social networks in general. Tell them girls are killing themselves over social networks, they don't care, tell them that arms dealers incomes are threatened by girls talking on social networks, our government gets very concerned.
Probably 2/3rds of the younger half, at best.
Only saying this because it's how people in power legitimize their own power over everyone else. External boogie men help as well. Of course foreign influence is a real factor that works against people in their own country. The USA has done many foreign influence operations that has been detrimental to those people. I'm not surprised that foreign governments would do the same over here.
All in all, the general population often suffer downstream from these games of power.
However, i have some ability to influence my government in how it influences social media platforms and which messages it spreads. I might have much much less, if any, ability to influence foreign governments in how they influence social media platforms and what messages they spread. And most non-Americans realize how helpless they have been to influence American laws and decisions, and maybe it's just a time when Americans also realize this helplessness in the face of foreign corporations.
Prior to that, most, if not all, social media platforms were American run, which allowed Congress to have more influence on how they were run and more power to investigate and learn how they were run, compared to one owned by a foreign country, especially one we haven't considered to be a close ally.
It brings to mind declassified documents that revealed how the KGB basically pissed money away trying to destabilize the US economy by engaging in large irrational trades. All they really did was make money for those who had the fortune to be on the opposite side of the trades.
This very much would be a prime realization of the "social debt" the author is talking about, the mass polarization and instability caused by the overreliance on such networks, and the divestment can be argued to be an direct attempt to restablize things onto a common ground. In many ways it's already quite a liberal approach by divestment rather than a straight ban.
For me personally, I've unfortunately turned to the opinion that the "accuracy" of what consumes ultimately is going to be defined by the individual, not the source. I'm reminded of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in that yes, of course these networks can influence one's views, but it's not deterministic. If one seeks the truth, one can easily just read from other sources freely availiable on the internet.
The problem here is that most people, including many in this thread and in HN I'd argue and perhaps myself, are not interested in the truth. The problem isn't that people are using TikTok or Instagram, the problem is that they are ONLY using TikTok or Instagram. Nobody reads actual articles instead of headlines. And that's because for most people, including many in this thread and HN and myself, we're here just to consume for entertainment, or to confirm our own priors. Why would we question our own beliefs? It's hard work, and there no real consequences if we get it wrong. We can retreat into our social circles and be told it's okay for it. Face it, the majority of people ARE easily manipulable, most in this thread included. People are only going to seek the truth if their job depends on it, and that is only going to include a narrow slice of domain knowledge. Outside of that, everything really is just noise.
I was involved with this effort. Gaza was immaterial in the Senate and worth maybe a handful of votes in the House (where they weren’t needed, but helped).
The binding energy came from Bytedance pushing a political message to its users, including children [1], and the Chinese embassy lobbying against the bill [2]. (Keep in mind this has been a multi-year effort of iteration and refinement [3].)
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/krishnamoorthi-gallagher-tiktok...
[2] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2024...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-timeline-ban-biden-india-d...
Also that western politicians and journalists are chronic purveyors of untruths/lies, mis/disinformation, etc.
It wont: It will be 'okay' for the US govt. and corps to do it, but it wont be 'okay' for others to do even a fraction of it. This kind of double standard and exceptionalism has been the lynchpin of the public discourse in the US throughout history. The people treat international things as if they were sports matches: They think that they are 'on a side', which is "their country's side", and they create group cohesion by uniting against the purported external enemy regardless of what happens at home. The problems at home are 'okay' to ignore until the external enemy is 'dealt with' because the country is 'more democratic'.
But the external enemies never stop coming up as they are manufactured by the establishment itself, based on real threats or, if none exist, made-up threats (at one point in mid to late 2000s they even went to the extent of talking about an extraterrestrial threat, which nobody bought so they had to drop it), and the fake democracy at home never allows the public to change anything. So things stay as they are at home, with the US govt. raping its citizens directly or by outsourcing it to private corporations and everyone just gets on with their lives in this horrible pandemonium - but at least feeling good about themselves because they live in 'the best country in the world', 'most advanced democracy', 'the shining beacon of freedom and prosperity'.
Although the unit price of content has decreased so much, I think the total value of content created has gone up significantly. It’s just that the new price people are willing to pay for is below the price floor companies can charge people using existing solutions such as debit/credit cards. With those solutions you can’t profitable go below a dollar.
The unavailability of the infrastructure prevents entrepreneurs from developing the business and related revenue models.
It’s less of a tech industry problem and more of a banking/payments/finance industry problem.
Great article, wish it talked about how we might address the issue.