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With chat programs, the concern is over monitoring. The US can issue warrants to get your chat records from Messenger/Hangouts. Those warrants are obtained a bi

With chat programs, the concern is over monitoring. The US can issue warrants to get your chat records from Messenger/Hangouts. Those warrants are obtained a bit too easily due to FISA/Security Letters, but that's another due process issue/policy issue. With Chinese companies, they don't even need the illusion of warrants or due process. FB/Twitter/Tiktok are different because they control WHAT you see. None of them show things chronologically. Their algorithms show things that are popular, and the weights they use are trade secrets. Being able to influence ideas takes classic advertising, or even targeted advertising, to an entirely new level. It has an entirely different set of legal and ethical challenges.

abc-xyz 6y ago
Tencent/WeChat also control what you see in your feeds. I often notice when I share information/pictures related to Hong Kong/Xinjiang then my posts doesn’t always appear in my friends feeds (because the image hash/phrase cause the post to be shadowbanned). Their approach is quite evil because it will make you think people might not like your post (since they don’t “like” it) when in fact they simply can’t see it. To bypass the filter then I slightly modify images to change their hash, or record video of the video/image/text. Maybe soon they’ll start making fake likes from friends so that people can’t use inactivity as a way of detecting shadowbans, or maybe they’ll make the posts only visible to a small subset of friends.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  Interesting. For Facebook/Twitter, if you don't interact and only post occasionally, few people will see your posts (which the opposite of someone in real life who rarely talks; when they do, people tend to listen). I wrote a post about it: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-effect/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-e...

abc-xyz 6y ago

Tencent/WeChat also control what you see in your feeds. I often notice when I share information/pictures related to Hong Kong/Xinjiang then my posts doesn’t always appear in my friends feeds (because the image hash/phrase cause the post to be shadowbanned). Their approach is quite evil because it will make you think people might not like your post (since they don’t “like” it) when in fact they simply can’t see it. To bypass the filter then I slightly modify images to change their hash, or record video of the video/image/text. Maybe soon they’ll start making fake likes from friends so that people can’t use inactivity as a way of detecting shadowbans, or maybe they’ll make the posts only visible to a small subset of friends.

djsumdog 6y ago
Interesting. For Facebook/Twitter, if you don't interact and only post occasionally, few people will see your posts (which the opposite of someone in real life who rarely talks; when they do, people tend to listen). I wrote a post about it: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-effect/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-e...