> See also: is China suddenly a center of human rights activism,

China is, when it serves their primary interest of deflecting criticism from the operation of their very extensive totalitarian/authoritarian system. IIRC, they put out "human rights" reports all the time to that end that do stuff like criticize American prison conditions.

> or was it Americans who got upset about Israeli treatment of civilians?

It's worth noting that TikTok could (and probably would) be used by the PRC in very subtle ways, that would be missed in a distinction of "is it Chinese people speaking or is it Americans." I think the influence mechanism would almost certainly consist of giving artificial boosts to American voices that unwittingly serve PRC goals, e.g. anti-war activists if China invades Taiwan. They could even strongly condemn China as a warmonger, but their elevation would still serve Chinese goals if they spread the message that the US should stay out.

And given that the PRC has access to all the TikTok data (I believe no claims the could not access it), they can probably very effectively figure out exactly the voices to elevate that would do their job effectively.

I know that's the conspiracy theory, but shouldn't we be asking for evidence?

Normally I'd be cautious about a witch hunt, but I think the point here is that there isn't much ability to ask for evidence, which is exactly why it's been able to progress through court so quickly.

The funny thing about that analogy is that it is also very difficult to prove that somebody isn't a witch. :-)

Aside, Congress is not a courtroom. The legality of the law is on trial, not its motivation or the basis in fact of its public justification.

Really late to responding (oof, I don't use HN much), but really nicely phrased point, haha. And I do agree on congress not being a courtroom -- my assumption would always be that their motivations are just corporate lobbying or distracting the public from more pressing social issues.

However, returning to your witty witch-hunt comment, I don't think it's 1:1.

Consider that by that line of reasoning it's very difficult to prove that intelligence agencies ever do anything at all. All they have to do is say "no we didn't, and we don't have to allow anyone to have a close look".

In fact, if we simply relied on governments and faceless corporations to always tell us the truth, we'd probably manage to be even worse off than now! Haha.

There exists a difference between investigating or rejecting that with uncertain sources (esp. large and secretive institutions) and specifically accusing. Or between a witch hunt and demanding that (for example) food manufacturers should have to disclose their secret ingredients and some processes to the government to make it harder to put poison or addictive drugs in there without telling anyone.

If you're "conspiracy theory"-ometer is asking you for evidence for the proposition that "countries do not simply lie back and fervently hope for things to go their way but take concrete actions to advance their interests", your meter is tuned waaaaaaaay too sensitively. Whether that's a conspiracy is up to your definition, but that it's a theory that somehow needs substantiation is absurd. It's a plain and obvious fact of the world. Organizations of any size in general do not generally just sort of sit back and hope things go their way, but take action. "People take actions to advance their own goals" is not a "conspiracy theory".

The irony is that people with this overly sensitive "conspiracy theory"-ometer largely have it from the amount of influence campaigns ran on them.

We already know foreign countries attempt to influence American elections using American-owned social media. So why would it be a "conspiracy theory" for them to use foreign-owned social media for similar purposes? I would think it's probably even easier.

> I know that's the conspiracy theory, but shouldn't we be asking for evidence?

No. This is about using reason to anticipate and prevent problems, not dumbly waiting around until the actualized problem stares you in the face and it's too late to do anything about it.

But if you want evidence, all that is needed is the evidence that China and the US are adversaries.

That's not sufficient evidence.

> That's not sufficient evidence.

Then your standards of evidence are too high, and least for making decisions in this area. It's like you're working in computer security, but you demand evidence a vulnerable system was actually hacked and used maliciously before you're willing to take action to patch it and clear out the infiltration. It's foolish. Patch the damn system.

If your observations would be the same whether your conspiracy theory is true or not, then the simplest explanation is that the conspiracy theory is not true.

A theory that can explain everything explains nothing.

That's a farcically absurd statement given the context. Following this logic, Japan and the US being adversaries is the only justification you need for Japanese internment camps.

Equating a ban on Chinese-owned tiktok in the US to putting US citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps is a bit much.

I think we should take it as a given that countries try to influence the citizens of other countries using social media. We know for a fact that there are state-run influence campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. That evidence has been well-researched for many years now. And I'm not just talking about China, Russia, etc.; I expect US intelligence agencies also use social media to influence our adversaries.

It's absolutely absurd to think that the Chinese government doesn't use TikTok to influence non-Chinese users. They'd be incredibly foolish not to do so. And the difference here (as compared to other nations, including the US) is that that Chinese government gets to legally, deeply meddle in the affairs of Chinese companies as a matter of course. Running influence campaigns on a platform owned by a company out of the Chinese government's reach is a bit more work; they get to do it essentially "for free" on TikTok, plus, as a bonus, they'd have access to data they wouldn't get from a foreign-owned platform.

I think any country should have the right to protect its citizens from influence campaigns led by other countries. Whether or not that protection can and will be effective, and whether or not it's a smokescreen for other purposes (e.g. protecting Meta's market share), is another matter, of course. And certainly some kinds of protection -- such as a US TikTok ban -- will be wildly unpopular with a lot of people who love using it.

IMO the bigger issue isn't propaganda posts on tiktok created by the CCP but the more subtle influence the recommendation algorithm can have on what gets eyeballs. There have been several studies that showed that content the CCP doesn't like is a lot less prominent than on other, comparable platforms. Here is the first study I could find again while googling: https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...

At best this comment implies there's actual an actual smoking gun related to what functionally are nation-state capability and operations to influence populations external to their own, specifically related to TikTok/ByteDance. If you have an AP government level understanding of how China and the USA work, then you can probably understand that this is an intersection of: government laws, great power competition, and wealth seeking behaviors. When you control the algorithm, everyone downstream of it is at the mercy of the power structures and incentives of your top level leadership [0]. Consider the following:

1.) How Chinese companies interact with the CCP: they are 100% subservient with a CCP party member who can pull the CEO in at anytime and assign them tasks related to studying Xi thought and other party material, as well as demand the company do anything for the state.

2.) What great power competition looks like including economic warfare (tariffs, massive state subsidies to protect national defense, influence operations for allies, securing raw materials, reducing reliance on rivals, etc).

3.) How espionage in general works in support of political aims, and especially how each nation uses it to further their goals. For China, it's always been about vacuuming up as much data as possible, and then later on finding use cases for it. The disruption side of their practices are successful if they make chaos in an adversary that forces them to spend time on dealing with that instead of confronting them. Each nation acts in their own interest and are absolutely ruthless here in a way the average person rarely can comprehend.

4.) The free pass given to China related to tech and social media industries. American Social Media is banned in China[1]. Why do you think that is? There are many reports/cases of American intel/military use cases of social media to influence outcomes worldwide[2]. China wasn't going to allow this. But we are supposed to allow them access to us? We know this is the case because we would do the same in their position[3]. There's a reason it's banned in India[4].

5.) We know China influences the Douyin algorithm[5] locally to promote behaviors the government perceives as healthy or important to state interests. This often manifests in pushing more STEM related content and suppressing the ragebait content that flourishes in other nations[6].

Even if the leadership of Bytedance were 100% on board with not pushing CCP interests to the USA and world, there's no mechanism of protection or redress from them. The CCP can, and will, disappear high profile people at will with no repercussion, and replace you with someone who will listen. Any smart nation who wants to protect the minds of their citizens would do well to extremely regulate social media in their country.

In your case for "Americans upset over Israeli treatment of civilians". Assuming that the American outrage is 100% organic on it's own: It is in the best interest of China to amplify that outrage and make it seem stronger than it is for a variety of reasons:

A. This will have knock on effects for policy makers and their aides who are hyper-tuned in because if their constituents want something, voting for that is how B. Anything that disrupts American foreign policy and allies is an asset at weakening the grip the dollar has on international markets C. Israel is an extremely talented producer of technical people. If the relationship between the USA and Israel sours, then suddenly a pathway opens for China to get access to the incredible tech that Israel develops for various US programs. (This is also ignoring their incredibly advanced spyware capabilities in their private sector, which is morally repugnant, but it does exist).

[0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663 [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit... (look at the most addicted cities) [3] - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... [4] - https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-ban-china-india-... [5] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0xzuh-6rY [6] - https://networkcontagion.us/reports/the-ccps-digital-charm-o... [7] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/25/the-growing-li...

This is an extremely well formed comment, and thanks for all the sources backing it up.

> Any smart nation who wants to protect the minds of their citizens would do well to extremely regulate social media in their country.

Extremely regulating social media isn't going to decrease the gormlessness of the population. In fact it'll probably make it worse. We can try to tamp down manipulative content all we want but it's a losing battle. What we need instead is to educate our masses. The problem is we won't, because our regulators want to be able to manipulate us. They just don't want other countries to be able to.

I still can't believe we're supposed to imagine the current or next president as the chief protectors of our minds, of all things. :-) How can anyone desire that much paternalism from our government? Not only are we responsible for it, not the other way around, it is kind of terrible!

If we are working on the basis of "it could have happened, therefore it did," Americans could have had a legitimate reaction to the war footage, and Romanians could have been frustrated with both major parties and voted for a spoiler candidate, therefore they did. :-)

I'm probably responding to you being intentionally obtuse but:

Assuming that's true, TikTok, at the behest of the CCP, can (and will) amplify the reach of that outrage to an outsized impact. If the outrage is 5% of TikTok users in the given nation, and that 5% is thrown into the FYP of 50% of the users in that nation, that's an impact that any power that be dreams to have.

> It is in the best interest of China to amplify that outrage and make it seem stronger than it is for a variety of reasons:

I'm just not comfortable with a widely used platform for Americans to speak to other Americans being taken away because it might skew one way politically or another, no matter what evil country is advantaged by that. Even if it were heavily edited by enemy of USA Xi himself, I am uncomfortable with that. We are not a country that bans things because it's too dangerous for people to know them.

The government doesn't get to decide what's good for us to learn and say and hear. We do. That's the entire idea of free speech. And this tramples on it significantly

The question isn't if our government gets to do that, it's if another government gets to do that for us. our government is for the people by the people. this other government isn't like that for their people. and we want to put them in charge?

What? Our government is only by the people if the people have the power to consume whatever information they want to.

The other government doesn't become in charge because they put out stuff on social media Americans want to watch. Americans are in charge no matter what they think or who they are influenced by. That's the whole idea of democracy

To me, the story was never about even about the hypothetical "they could pull some strings and somehow get every 17-year-old in the US swearing fealty to Chairman Xi." If nothing else, do you really want to focus your political infleunce campaign on demographics known for being low-political-activity and with relatively low disposable income the best choice?

It was about the fact that a firm which is foreign and unsympathetic captured lightning in a bottle: they became the cool platform for a new generation. Why bother trying to figure out why the platform that Mom uses to share AI-generated Trump spam with Aunt Bertha is no longer drawing the 14-year-olds when you can just rattle some sabres in Congress and get them to shut the competition down for you?

If we're so terrified that TikTok can blast a candidate into office, we should be equally concerned that Rumble or Twitter could too. If your media is that powerful, it's dangerous wherever the nominal mailing address of the firm is. Taking potshots at single firms or specific ownership strategies just means the next one will take a slightly different form and dispense slightly different hazards.

The only way to actually regain control is to boost media literacy. TikTok can be part of a balanced media diet, but are we teaching kids "Compare what the BBC and Tass say, and the truth is probably in the middle?"

>If we're so terrified that TikTok can blast a candidate into office, we should be equally concerned that Rumble or Twitter could too

I'm seeing a lot of attempts to render Tiktok as interchangeable to any number of other examples in order to pose a dilemma about logical equivalences. I just don't think these withstand factual scrutiny. Rumble is not at the scale or engagement of Tiktok and Twitter does not have ties to a major competitive state actor.

You can see how it's meaningfully differentiated if you want to. If you don't want to, you attempt to restate the terms on which the comparison happens to make it look for fuzzy, so everything looks the same.

Twitter is run by the world’s richest man who is backed by Saudi wealth.

That is one fucking tie if you ask me.

To be blunt, "the richest man in the world" is equally as dangerous as a "competitive state actor".

He has direct motive to influence the operations of the American state, the resources to amplify his messages, and has control of a platform that's mainstreamed in a way that gives it a broader reach than TikTok ever had.

Saying he's an American entity is barely meaningful. When you're that rich, you can probably pull in five new passports given 48 hours notice, so the one you carry at any given point is largely a flag of convenience.

Blaming China is a cheat code for the current political climate. See the Huawei fiasco: No level of audits, disclosures, or actual technical evidence about security would satisfy-- It Is Foreign So It Is Evil. So I'm sure that the hype against TikTok was fanned in part by their competitors who saw an opportunity.

> Any smart nation who wants to protect the minds of their citizens would do well to extremely regulate social media in their country.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions like this one.

Muzzle social media and make sure everyone gets their news from the "approved" mainstream media platforms which we all know never lie and have never pushed one narrative only instead of providing facts.

I am sure this will end well.

Next step, we should all leave our TVs on 24/7 just so we don't miss a single word from our beloved leaders. Maybe install some cameras in every home while we are it, you know to save the children/defeat terrorism/save the planet (take your pick)...

"or was it Americans who got upset about Israeli treatment of civilians?"

Nobody in the open knows, that is the problem.

But also russian millitary bloggers are outraged by the IDF. Simply because it is war in the information sphere, not that they care about the people there. Just like China don't give a damn about them - but they can and do use it to weaken the self declared western moral leadership.

Is there really any question that Americans have reacted negatively to Israeli war tactics? I think there is also a comment from an actual Romanian somewhere in this threat observing that their fellow citizens are legitimately frustrated with the two major parties.

I’m not convinced they would have reacted this way otherwise.

A lot of folks have been empowered to say “end the war in Gaza”. A lot of those folks don’t quite know what to say to “should we allow Hamas to seize control of Palestine”?

The best opinion is the one formed with the most information. If learning something new about the facts of the case changes someone's reaction to it, it is probably for the better.

If this were not the case, democracies would work best when the public was not taught to read. :-) Can we really argue that the public is too stupid to be trusted with the ability to communicate? If that is the idea we should admit, at least, that what is being considered inverts every principle of the free world.

The best opinion is formed from complete information. More information is strictly harmful if it’s driven by one-sided bad faith distribution networks.

Having a foreign government control the narratives that reach mass audiences is not at all the same as trusting the public with the ability to communicate.

Maybe it would help if we distilled the abstract ideas ("foreign influence on the narrative ") to the specific event (current administration wanted to hide the human cost of Israeli tactics / the existence of a spoiler candidate).

I think you missed some important details salient to understanding the conflict in Gaza.

Imagine how you would feel if the administration was more Saudi-aligned and wanted to shut down HN because you were doing too good a job of sharing those details! I support all the truth getting out.

Ok great. Could you share the _whole truth_ then please? Could you discuss rocket attacks from Hezbollah? Massive tunnel networks and arms networks? Funding, military training, and arms coordination from Iran? The geopolitical implications of a weak Israel? The complicated connections with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

You’re just spouting one cherry picked narrative of an incredibly messy situation.

It's ironic that you would talk about the whole truth, while not mentioning the rocket attacks on Hezbollah, or who exactly built those tunnel networks or supplied those arms. The geopolitical implications of Israel's existence at all. How Israel got there in the first place. At least you called it "Russia's invasion of Ukraine" though, rather than "America's proxy invasion of Russia in Ukraine"

Like the fact it's been continuously invaded and mass-murdered by Israel since Israel began? They call it "mowing the lawn". You mow the lawn periodically so the grass doesn't get too tall.

Hamas already has control of Gaza, and if there's any chance of it seizing control of the West Bank, bombing Gaza will not prevent it from doing so.

Bombing people indiscriminately tends to cause them to oppose you and support the people who are most credibly able to stop you - regardless of anything you do. So it was inevitable that support for Israel would plummet and for Hamas would rise, once people learned about the situation.

TikTok only had a hand in this to the extent that it helped Western citizens bypass Western soft censorship and learn about the situation sooner.

Notice that if TikTok was spreading a false or one-sided view of the situation, Israeli and Western government could have effectively countered it by providing an even more complete information with even more evidence, but they did not. This in itself is weak evidence that there isn't a more complete view to provide.

But most Americans didn't want Hamas to rule Palestine ever from the beginning. It's not as if they went mask off last year only. The entire root of the conflict is that all of Palestine basically is not sovereign. Us deciding who rules Palestine just makes that issue worse.

And yet 93% of Hamas’ funding comes from Iran.

I don’t believe we should determine who rules Palestine. But I also don’t believe we should allow a hostile state to just bankroll effective seizure of Palestine and the military intimidation of Israel.

It’s frankly insanity to tell Israel to be chill while a hostile nation, which is posturing a potential nuclear attack, is actively funding a large and growing base of terrorist operations next door.

Palestine is a proxy battleground of many foreign actors. Reducing it to a conflict that is just Israel vs. Palestine is bullshit

So, if we don't determine who rules Palestine, how do we remove the currently in power party and also any future parties if they happen to be insufficiently homegrown to our standards (the funding aspect)?

The entire conflict is that Israel believes their safety necessitates that Palestine not be sovereign because they believe a sovereign Palestine will try to take back the land it lost whether in Israel itself or the various illegal encroachments over the years. Palestine on the other hand is not going to accept Israeli sovereignty over it. And thus the conflict. However many or few foreign actors are involved doesn't change the root of the conflict.

They believe that because Iran is in fact funding military conflict.

It is messy geopolitics. There are dire consequences to sitting back and doing nothing. It’s a prisoners dilemma with large moral negative externalities to playing.

"Is there really any question that Americans have reacted negatively to Israeli war tactics?"

No, but is there a question that china still might try to influence and leverage it?

The international marketplace of ideas may pose some risk of allowing the American system of government to fufill its potential as a representative democracy, but the officials in Washington face no hazard greater than that. :-)

"The international marketplace of ideas "

Market place implies transparent exchange of ideas. But if the TikTok algorithm is political biased, it is not a honest exchange of ideas anymore. (same goes for X's or FB, or whatever). But personally I am cool with not using those services.

A newspaper's editorial columns aren't the marketplace of ideas, the sum of all newspapers is. If TikTok were as editorially controlled as a newspaper, it would still represent one venue in the marketplace.

In essence, the government wants to ban foreign news sources. TikTok may have been less editorialized than Al Jazeera, but it had wider reach.

For some people TikTok contains all the newspapers.

For others, there is only one newspaper they think is worth reading.

Indeed. But newspapers do not work by hooking up their audience via individually targeted algorithms that make their users addictive.

They do, actually. An editor's job is to pick stories, oftentimes from syndicated networks, which maximize engagement

"individually targeted algorithms"?

With data ranging back years, sometimes even birth of the individuals?

I don't think so.

Newspaper editor edit one newspaper for everyone.

In the days of local papers, editors would learn the names of everybody in town, and would try to print things about them so people would buy the papers.

I am aware. Still, do you think this is the same as TikTok's automated algorithm?

What "social media" companies are doing with "automated algorithms" are no worse than the massive domestic newspaper, radio, television, and entertainment company consolidation that has been permitted over the past several decades.

If FedGov is going to be fixing problems with the domestic news and entertainment industry, they should start by reversing that consolidation of control.

This argument is weak. Editorials are marked as such. The board makeup is known. Tiktok is a platform wherein its impossible to know which content is organically popular and what is being artificially weighted, we have no insight into who is doing the weighting, and which pieces of content are controlled by state media.

In short, you have no idea whether it is more or less editorialized than other news outlets, and that's the central issue here.

Even if TikTok were 100% editorialized - like the most biased newspapers - it would be an affront to the principles of a free society to ban it for failing to encourage people to support the general line. That's on top of the fact that it hasn't even been demonstrated to be editorialized.

I do agree in general.

It is a sign of weakness for a free society.

Ideally in my oppinion, intelligence services would proof the manipulation - and show it to the public. Who then decide on their own to be sceptical of TikTok content.

I am against a direct government intervention.

But it is still a very different situation in terms of impact compared to a single local newspaper.

> Ideally in my oppinion, intelligence services would proof the manipulation - and show it to the public.

Based on the fact that FedGov is presenting evidence to the court under seal, it seems likely that intelligence services have proof (or -more likely- "proof") of manipulation, but are only showing it to the judge.

Does the likely fact that the US government is refusing to provide for public inspection and discussion what they're using as evidence of alleged national-security-relevant Chinese interference in domestic affairs make you more comfortable with the veracity of their claims that the Chinese government not only has substantial control over TikTok, but that that control is so harmful to national security that it must be unilaterally terminated?

Why or why not?

Notice the extreme generational divide in how Americans react to Israeli war tactics? I feel this is caused by younger people consuming vastly more social media in general and TikTok specifically.

I live in a senior home converted to apartment buildings, and all the senior people (who still live in the building even after the conversion) have been shocked throughout this war, as if a person they knew flipped 180 and turned out to be nothing like you thought they were.

The newer apartment renters (20s-40s typical young urban dwellers) are not surprised by anything they see on the news regarding the conflict. I think they had ways to see what the older generations had just been blind to since before this latest flare up happened.

I'd argue this is because social media is ironically enough, manipulated less than traditional mass media.

Despite brigading from any side, anyone can get anything trending on social media, including videos of the aftermath of israeli air strikes, meanwhile nothing but filtered news headlines make it out of editors.

A fun exercise is comparing how big news websites frame headlines when Palestinians die (passive voice) and Ukrainian / israelis are killed.

It's not any less manipulated - there are just more parties doing psychological operations and not just established players. In the case of TikTok, China gets to pick and choose which operations are free to run, and likely picks the ones that are more destabilizing to the US.

Public opinion isn't destabilising in the US, instead it forms the basis of our system of government.

There are multiple historical examples of public opinion being shaped by propaganda.

If one newspaper can convince the United States to support the Spanish-American War because one of her own warships blew up due to poor maintenance, It's not a stretch to believe a sufficiently well-funded state operation with relatively unfettered control over an entire media application could run a similar opinion shaping operation.

Public opinion is the cornerstone of the US system, but the public can be misinformed at scale.

> There are multiple historical examples of public opinion being shaped by propaganda.

Correct. But (until relatively recently) the proposed solution to deception and propaganda was dismantling them with facts and reason. "Free and open discussion in the public square is critical to a well-functioning society." is one of the foundational principles of our country.

This notion that adults should be protected by deception and propaganda by censorship, rather than frank and open conversation is a distressing resurgence of authoritarianism.

As always, when looking at the machines of control that politicians are assembling, ask what can be done with it by someone who is dedicated not to the protection of their citizens, but rather the suppression or destruction of a section of the citizenry they disfavor. If someone who hates can legally do more harm with the machinery than someone who cares can do good, either ensure that it is built differently, or that it is not built at all.

Unfortunately, by that reasoning we probably shouldn't have let the Internet get so big and omnidirectional.

That's like comparing a Golgi apparatus to Hubble.

If you've never looked into it, you'd do well to learn a bit about what it takes to become an AS and get an ASN. There was a post on the red site a while back about someone doing it on the cheap as a dare for their stupid hobby project.

I'm afraid I don't understand the analogy. A Golgi apparatus and Hubble?

Exactly.

The allegation [0] is that a Russian influence campaign used TikTok as at least one of its platforms, to major effect. The subtext is that TikTok was at the very least complicit, in that, at a minimum, it tolerated what I believe Facebook calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

If you think of TikTok as an instrument of the Chinese state, this could look consistent with the phenomenon Anne Applebaum has been talking about lately: a pattern of loose alliances-of-convenience between autocratic nations in service of specific disruptive missions [1]. A less spooky reading might be that Chinese norms don’t align with American ones as far as proactively stopping this kind of thing—that they just don’t care about this kind of Russian caper on the other side of the world. They sure do think carefully about their domestic information environment, though; and they’re probably the best in the world at policing mass thinking when they feel like it.

Where are the lines between mere negligence, complicity, and active participation? That seems a little more delicate than a couple news cycles’ work. The Europeans have asked TikTok to preserve records to find out.

I suspect the light and fire seems to be around whether a nation wants any tool like this to just be lying around, ready to disrupt the nation’s politics at a moment’s notice. Social media may be new in the scheme of things, but in the years since the UN studied Facebook’s genocides [2], governments have at least tried to get a handle on the kinds of monitoring and moderation tools and tactics that can help counter this kind of campaign (some with more deference than others to authentic speech).

As far as I’ve heard, the allegation had never been that Chinese government villains cackled and rubbed their hands together and said “today we take Romania!” Rather, it’s that the tools are powerful enough that we don’t want to leave them lying around unchecked—especially since, at least from the perspective of American and European policy professionals, Chinese thinking doesn’t really recognize a distinction between commercial and national security interests.

Others may have better sourcing than I do for this specific instance, but I think it’s fair to point to Western thinking about China’s Military-Civil Fusion policy [3] to think about dual-use idea-disseminating technologies like TikTok.

[0] https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-russia-election-interference...

[1] e.g., https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-r... and https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/russia-chi...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... , https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/myanmar-ffm/reportoft... , https://iimm.un.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Hate-Speech-R... [PDF, large]

[3] https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/12/chinas-military-civil-f...

I don't have an answer to this, but why if the algorithm can manipulate people, regardless of who directed it, why are we ok with the algorithmic content of all the platforms? I'm not much of a social media user but a lot of the argument here is the algorithm can feed propoganda that people will succumb to.

Why is it ok then for Youtube to feed violence and awful behavior to people (probably to lots of kids) in the US if it's able to influence people? Is the thought that Meta and Google (both without ethics or morals) are just trying to get us to buy shit we don't need, but Tiktok is trying to get us to agree (or not agree) with their stance on x?

> why are we ok with the algorithmic content of all the platforms?

What's the alternative? Even HN has "algorithmic content" the algorithm is based on voting and time.

While still algorithmic, a strictly chronological timeline is not really manipulatable, at least not in the same way

Spamming is the trivial way to manipulate chronological feeds. It is so bad that they need active moderation or ranking to prevent a board from going into a state of absolute uselessness.

I haven't used Facebook in 15 years, but I don't recall spam being a problem. I saw my friend's posts and replies by people who are friends with my friend.

That model may not work with all social media, but as far as I remember it worked for Facebook.

Friends' posts are a tiny fraction of what you see on FB nowadays.

Regulation forcing the unbundling of client software from content hosting. Then people can choose different client software depending on which algorithms they'd like to sort things by.

Tangent: There's a study that I can't access, but the abstract claims that during the 2020 election, chronological feeds exposed Facebook users to more "untrustworthy content", without necessarily having an effect on people's political knowledge or polarization [1]:

> We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of content classified as uncivil or containing slur words they saw decreased on Facebook, and the amount of content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences they saw increased on Facebook. Despite these substantial changes in users’ on-platform experience, the chronological feed did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes during the 3-month study period.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp9364

>why are we ok with the algorithmic content of all the platforms?

I don't think we are okay, but I don't think there's an across the board equivalent. We prioritize the egregious examples while simultaneously searching for a systematic redress that's less heavy handed.

I don't think Facebook marketing Blue Apron to its users is the same kind of issue as undermining democracy in Romania.

Because influence being illegal means "speech which causes an impact" is illegal. You don't want a law that outlaws propaganda because whomever decides what is propaganda has massive power.

There isn't such a thing as a non-manipulatible feed. Even a chronological feed can be manipulated by spam, so it is a bit like asking why is it okay for tools to be made of mass when it means they can be used to bludgeon someone to death.

>Was it used by China, by the candidate, or by romainians?

I think the allegation, implied rather than stated in this case, is that it is not predominantly any of those, but that it is predominantly the Russian state.

Which would serve as an example that it's able to be mobilized, even weaponized, at the behest of state actors. China would not necessarily be culpable under this interpretation of this particular example, but it illustrates that they could exercise that same mechanism.