I'm baffled at folks wanting to overlook that a Chinese-controlled brainworm is even more dangerous than a US-operated brainworm.
Yes, we should steer clear of all brainworms, but we should be exterminating the brainworms run by adversaries ASAP.
To me it seems China made a superior app that the American youth wanted to use and the American social media apparatus was jealous so lobbied to have it banned.
I (a US citizen) do think of the Chinese government as an adversary. I believe many Americans would agree with me. (See, I can make the same assertion without evidence.)
> To me it seems China made a superior app that the American youth wanted to use and the American social media apparatus was jealous so lobbied to have it banned.
Sure, that's certainly part of it. It's economic protectionism. Which, honestly, when it's protectionism against a nation with a fairly closed market, where US companies and capital have much less access (and access comes with strict restrictions and censorship requirements) than Chinese companies (and their government), I'm having a hard time getting all up in arms about it.
Sheesh, I'll never understand people smart enough to see their local government as bad but dumb enough to idolise every other foreign power
Yes, definitely has nothing to do with the fact the Chinese are using it to inject their propaganda and way of view into the mainstream by, for example, massively spreading lies about the Israel-Hamas debacle which, without TikTok, nobody would care about (as it should be).
I never bought the idea that the American people are super gun ho about Israel. My family are all conservative Midwest folks and they don’t see why we give them so much money when Americans at home suffer.
It’s not just the “left” that thinks this.
- There's a Chinese-controlled brainworm which is more harmful than a US-operated brainworm - How you know this - The US-operated brainworm told me
* and why use '-controlled' vs '-operated', I'm not a native English speeker and I'm very curious about it
The US government has faults. A lot of them. And I (a US citizen) can't claim to be perfectly objective and unbiased. But I don't think you're going to be able to convince me that I should prefer Chinese propaganda and election interference over US propaganda. Or that US propaganda is as effective and all-encompassing within US borders as Chinese propaganda is within Chinese borders.
1. How it works
a) Chinese propaganda within borders, is mostly about: "We serve the people, and we're doing it good", "We are on the road to greatness", with content cencorship and State medias, it's not quite efficient, since everyone are aware about it for example, if you question the CPC's leadership, you'll be censored
This part is handled by Publicity Department and Cyberspace Administration.
b) Chinese propaganda in the US, is by 'sponsored' influencers and some official accounts, you can identify them easily. and, these influencers are not sponsored with cashes directly, it's like if you have influence, and you show kindness to China, certain people may come to you, to award you with some titles, to invite you to attend some meetings and write articles in newspaper whichi nobody reads
This part is handled mostly by 'united front work department', MOFA, and Publicity Department, you can see how chaos it is by its organization
2. What it does
a) see 1.a
b) Chinese propaganda abroad is mostly defensive, it has a guideline, "Tell the Chinese story well", it's quite descriptively, for example, there're some topics with most efforts: 'Taiwan', 'Xinjiang', 'South China Sea', 'China threats', 'commodity dumping', and, 'election interference' The US/West set the agenda, CPC dispute it One topic is the exception, '89/64', there's some disciplines about it so that they never mention it, so if you saw someone defend CPC about this, it's 100% not an official behavior
c) It never describes the US as an enemy, both at home and abroad, and it never exaggerates threats from the US, on the contrary, it downplays these threats. - which may come as a surprise to some people.
For everyone who think CPC is good at propagandizing, or CPC has some super power of propaganda, you overestimate it, it's just positive about propaganda
I don't know how the US propaganda works, I think that's the most impressive part 99% Chinese know CPC blocks Google is about censorship, but many Americans will say the Tiktok ban is different, it's about national security and children protection, it's justice of the procedure, it's part of democracy, blah blah
Totally right! Now let me log off to catch the nightly 6 hour programming block of CIA/FBI/military dramas. It helps me forget about all those scary Chinese drones flying around. Oh and did you see the trailer for the latest Alex Garland movie about our brave soldiers in Iraq? True heroes!
Banning TikTok is not going to impact the free flow of information. That traffic will just move (back?) to other social media platforms.
"Back in the day", the Soviets didn't want their people to know what life was like outside the USSR. Banning TikTok will not reduce anyone's knowledge about what's going on outside the US.
As a US citizen, I am absolutely fine with my government taking steps to prevent a totalitarian foreign adversary from influencing political thought in my country. The US is far (far!) from perfect, but moves like this don't affect freedom of speech or access to different viewpoints.
> Banning TikTok is not going to impact the free flow of information. That traffic will just move (back?) to other social media platforms.
It's like saying people should have switched back to reading Pravda, instead of listening to Radio Free Europe.
Maybe taking over the recommendations algorithm (or banning any kind of algorithmic feed other than chronogical) would have sparked less concerns. But changing the algorithm to make it less addictive would probably effectively kill the platform through loss of user interest.
Literally all they had to do was sell the CCPs stake in the company to anybody not in the CCP and they were unwilling to do that, opting to burn the whole company down instead.
If they did that one thing all this would be avoided.
If the Chinese government benefits from TikTok's ability to influence Western minds, then right, they may prefer the company dies than lose that capability.
If they aren't running influence campaigns on TikTok that targets Americans, then they should be fine with a sale to a fully-non-Chinese owner. Sure, they lose future revenue, but I'm sure they could sell it for a pretty nice sum.
(Honestly, if the Chinese government is not using TikTok to spread propaganda to the West, they are wildly incompetent to pass up such a fantastic opportunity.)
tl;dr - Sure the CCP is probably doing ‘the thing’, but it is not going to lead to the downfall of the mythical ‘West’
Did you ever see that in person? I feel like this is just typical outrage about something that maybe a total of 5 people did, so basically irrelevant.
Unfortunately, this is pretty bad precedent. While I love my country, these sorts of decisions are as federal level are pretty scary and I question whether the government should wield this power.