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It's not unclear at all. It's Chinese data harvesting software. They'll do token public appeasement to avoid negative pressure, but every feature in the app is

It's not unclear at all. It's Chinese data harvesting software. They'll do token public appeasement to avoid negative pressure, but every feature in the app is designed to collect biometrics and behavioral data. China is not a good faith operator. Given the data needed to influence public opinion and voting, they will engage in manipulation favorable to their interests. That alone is sufficient to run tiktok at a loss, but the market manipulation possible, advertisement platform potential, and other monetization makes it look like just another app. Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content. https://mygoogleresearch.com/ https://mygoogleresearch.com/ The idea that tiktok isn't used for the same type of manipulation is dangerously naive. There's a need for social media manipulation watchdogs that can monitor content being delivered to different users so the companies and countries involved can be held accountable. It's sad that a massively scaled invasion of privacy can only be countered by more surveillance. Because of the ephemeral nature of tiktok interactions, the only way to combat manipulation is to surveil the content being delivered to user feeds and compare subsequent opinion poling and purchases.

lelandfe 5y ago
> Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content Sorry, do you have a better link handy? This primarily looks like a fundraising page.
- maxehmookau 5y ago
  A really strange fundraising page too that claims to be non-partisan but quotes three different far-right hacks.
  - cloutchaser 5y ago
    I'm really curious, can you name someone who you think is just "right"? Like who isn't "far-right" in your opinion?
    - maxehmookau 5y ago
      I'm from the UK, so it's a relative concept. The US, except for some fairly small pockets of actual socialist left-wing thinking, is much further to the right. A lot of western europe loved Obama, but in reality he was closer to the UK Conservative party than the UK Labour party. But I'm even more curious, would you not describe Tucker Carlson as far right in his views?
      - Dma54rhs 5y ago
        On social issues average European and its country is way more conservative than average American. You're comparing economical standpoint here and I agree with that.
        ericmay 5y ago
        At great risk here, I have to say I agree based on my own experience. Often times people conflate government-funded systems like healthcare or taxpayer-funded university as being socially progressive. I wouldn't do that. You can have universal healthcare and ban gay marriage in your country, for example.
        conjectures 5y ago
        > On social issues average European and its country is way more conservative than average American. Dubious.
        rtsil 5y ago
        Certainly not Western Europe.
        Dma54rhs 5y ago
        I mean it's simply not true, ask any non-European person who has lived on both continents where he feels more welcome. On what social issues are excatly Euros more left wing compared to Americans?
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    That's a coverage artifact - if Google is manipulating politics in favor of democrats, then the only coverage you'll find is going to be on the center to the right wing platforms. American media in all its glory.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  - nsajko 5y ago
    Podcasts are entertainment, they're a wildly inappropriate medium for rational argumentation or giving evidence or anything similar. Put another way, you can't expect me to spend my time listening to a podcast just to be able to guess at what your argument is.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    On that Wikipedia page, the two Robert Epstein sources (one a PNAS paper[1], the other a Politico article[2]) are theoretical ("whether they could be manipulated") and pre-2016. The other main source[3] is similarly theoretical and provides policy recommendations to combat SEME. It also has a Washington Post article[4] discussing a (since-deleted) video that purportedly showed potentially-manipulated differences between how Bing and Google autocompleted "Hillary Clinton" searches. But none of the 3 main sources cover what the impact of autocomplete could be. Do you have any links about Google being caught red-handed politicizing ranking order? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547273/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547273/ [2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-c... [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0370#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0370#m... [4] https://archive.is/fHzW8 https://archive.is/fHzW8. Is Politifact trustworthy? They investigated this and found "Google’s suggested searches, for the most part, avoid offensive suggestions for everyone, not just Clinton." That isn't a total debunk, of course. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/23/andrew-napolitano/did-google-adjust-its-autocomplete-algorithm-hide-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/23/andrew-nap...
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      >>The 2020 presidential election monitoring project successfully recruited a diverse group of 732 registered voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. It preserved more than 500,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Facebook. These are the fleeting experiences that Big Tech companies use to influence votes and opinions worldwide and that are normally lost forever. >>A preliminary analysis of the data shows that Google search results (but NOT search results on Bing or Yahoo) had a significant liberal bias – enough to have shifted at least 6 million votes in the months leading up to the election. You need to know the methodology being used to understand the results, as they tracked ephemeral experiences using surveillance software with volunteers. This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you. The Rogan podcast was awkward af but he does provide a lot of substantive content if you're open to listening. https://www.aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies https://www.aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies is probably the most coherent site, but there's no salient tldr breakdown, to learn more you'll need to watch the videos. https://youtu.be/-7qT_38iRSc https://youtu.be/-7qT_38iRSc is the most comprehensive video, but I'll need to spend more time later to gather better links.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
I don't think we'll ever be able to avoid mass manipulation with the technology we have available - which makes large scale democracy useless and easily controllable by foreign state actors and local political parties. The growing inequality and the increasing government overreach which strangely always seems to benefit a few rich uber-companies is a symptom that our institutions are fairly unreliable. An alternative to more regulation and more surveillance to prevent mass manipulation would be NOT to have the power of millions of people in the hands of a handful of barely-elected representatives and to keep that power in local communities. No more taxes that go to Washington and gets "redistributed" - aka used to enrich the usual lobbyists. No more public services - aka monopolies. Just private local companies providing services to local citizens.
netcan 5y ago
>> China is not a good faith operator. Who is? I don't mean to be trite or contrary, but TikTok is coming into an environment where norms are pretty damned shady. Google as you and the article say, also consume user data quite unethically. FB likewise surveil us for their advertising businesses. They both also happen to host and control a good chunk of political and politically adjacent content within that framework. Police and regulate it with no transparency. FB are also gave us our first big "scandals" with third party trackers and/or data sharing. Other countries (including, but definitely not exclusively) also use tech companies as espionage assets. TikTok is just a new pig at the trough.
- saas_sam 5y ago
  Every tech company executive in the USA is not required to operate as an agent for one political party by threat of being disappeared. Our entire internet is not locked down to prevent political dissidents from sharing their views. Our government doesn't pay to flood our social media networks with astroturfing to create the illusion of popular support for its policies. These things add a more serious tone to the conversation, don'tcha think?
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    No, but they intelligence agencies do the same stuff. And private hidden funders of politicians do the astroturfing... I don't really see much difference if it done by government or people who pay the politicians running the government.
    - ketzo 5y ago
      I think it's hugely disingenuous, to the point of bad faith, to pretend there's not a massive difference between the internet in the U.S. and in China.
      - wbsss4412 5y ago
        There’s a massive difference in the internet itself, but the topic of discussion here is data collection, which isn’t really a massive difference.
cm2012 5y ago
TikTok should be banned in the US. China banned all of our homegrown social networks, its pretty standard international precedent to ban theirs, given the security risks.
- Bombthecat 5y ago
  Tried that already, didn't work..
  - duxup 5y ago
    They banned tik tok ?
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      - duxup 5y ago
        I honestly can't parse that sentence, it seems pretty loaded to the point that it makes no sense to me.
      - long_time_gone 5y ago
        > Trump it mobilized the 99% of people who don't have beliefs as much as they have I thought it was the judicial branch and an injunction that stopped it. >> On 23 September 2020, TikTok filed a request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the app from being banned by the Trump administration. This request was filed with the District Court for the District of Columbia. The preliminary injunction was approved by Judge Carl J. Nichols on September 27. Then, the current President rescinded it and ordered an actual review of the risks. Something we probably should have done prior to the attempted banning. >> In June 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration ban on TikTok, and instead ordered the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the app to determine if it poses a threat to U.S. national security. I'm confused on exactly what you think happened. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_...
snehk 5y ago
The "Chinese data harvesting software" has less trackers than the site reporting about it (CNBC.com).
- lpcvoid 5y ago
  Yet the site does not have access to biometrics. What point are you making?
  - snehk 5y ago
    Neither does TikTok if you don't upload anything.
    - yua_mikami 5y ago
      - ok123456 5y ago
        They're using industry standard techniques for user tracking. If you find them objectionable, change the industry.
      - ailef 5y ago
        All of this applies to Instagram, FB, etc... too? Also > How much are the CCP paying you to defend TikTok in all these comments? This is surely not the way to have a rational conversation about the topic?
        StopDarkPattern 5y ago
        [flagged]
      - bduerst 5y ago
        Accusing HN users of being paid shills doesn't add to the conversation. If we can't scrutinize overtly-vague technical criticisms w/o being called names then what's the point?
duxup 5y ago
At this point I do my best to avoid exposure to software / hardware / services from 'non-free' countries. It's not easy at all to do, there's a lot of grey area, and sometimes I just don't know. But I try. It's not about the individuals in those countries, I suspect just making their way through life they may have the best of intentions but still could be forced to participate. (Having said al that, that google research page seems pretty suspect to me.)
new_stranger 5y ago
tikTok collects data like a great many other companies, unfortunately they aren't just doing it sell more ads. With a few days of interactions, you can very precisely logically profile a person enough to figure out how to socially engineer them. You also have enough interest and behavioral data to be able setup a blackmail scheme. It is not hard to imagine how the close integration with the government allows the law enforcement to conduct very skilled operations using the psychological map that can be built about a person. The CCP is way past knowing if you vote dem/rep or are a 21yr old female.
uoaei 5y ago
Reading more of the recent work of this Dr. Epstein and something tells me his broader intentions for such an initiative have less to do with "big tech" than the "moral corruption of modern society" and is primarily animated toward the cause because things went the other way 4 years after 2016. Everything he rails against was present in both recent US elections but for whatever reason he seems content to focus only on the most recent one. Maybe he's spineless and holds that line because right-wing hosts are the only ones that will host him to get his message out. Maybe he really does believe that and is being a complete hypocrite. Neither option is respectable.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
Thank you for mentioning this. My personal pet theory about the recent rise in various 'challenges' is effectively weaponization of this particular medium in an attempt at social manipulation. It is all fun games now, but as recent 'gun challenge' shows, it can be easily turned into mayhem.
varispeed 5y ago
selfportrait 5y ago
I don’t refute anything you say, but linking to a page that features Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson doesn’t help your case. Not to mention the clear partisanship and call for donation to the “American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology” - a rabbit hole I’m happy to avoid.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  That's an artifact of the politics. If a company had been tilting this in favor of the right, you would find Maddow, Lemon, and other left wing bobbleheads instead of right wing bobbleheads. Don't let guilt by association bias your thinking in this, but give the subject the deliberation it deserves. If you value the integrity of democracy and public discourse, ignore the messengers for whom the optics are politically convenient and focus on the message.
  - msrenee 5y ago
    What am I supposed to see on that site besides a guy trying to market a monitoring system that he made?
  - dessant 5y ago
    No, we should not ignore the messengers. There are enough credible people and content supporting your arguments, and there is no need to shove in the fundraising campaigns of opportunistic people that regularily argue against human rights.
  - selfportrait 5y ago
    This isn’t guilt by association. That website is purely a grift, starting from its appeal to authority, leading into the Fox News nonsense and pseudoscientific slant, all the way to its Rush Limbaugh, early 2000s aesthetics. It doesn’t take a scientist to know that this isn’t how credible scientists operate, especially with the partisan hackery on display.
- bduerst 5y ago
  Isn't the whole, "TikTok spies for China" meme also politically motivated, per the last Republican president? I don't doubt that Bytedance shares Chinese TouTiao user data with the Chinese government, akin to how Apple does it with iCloud, but Bytedance has been pretty adamant that TikTok is external to China and doesn't share data. Even when there was an executive order to ban TikTok for being a national security threat, they couldn't prove that it was. Does anyone have actual evidence of TikTok sharing with the Chinese government, outside of political hit pieces like the one above?
electrondood 5y ago
You lost credibility in my eyes with the link to a spammy website with DONATE NOW widgets posted everywhere.
consumer451 5y ago
My one nitpick is that I believe it would be best to replace "China" with "CCP" in your statement. It's important to be specific in cases like these. I think it likely that it is not geographical China, nor all Chinese people you are attempting to reference, but their leadership the CCP.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  That’s not a nitpick. That’s redefining the way we talk about nations. It’s already clear from context he’s not talking about “all Chinese people.” “China to enter talks with the United States about social media” would not mean all Chinese people will talk to all Americans. This is true whether the content is positive, negative, or neutral.
  - consumer451 5y ago
    Yeah, it is major. You are correct. I want us to be more specific in the way we talk about geopolitics because there is much room for improvement. My real point is that if you don't want to polarize an entire ethnic group against your position, then don't refer to the ethnic group when you mean to attack their economic or political ideology. It really depends on what one is optimizing for. If one is optimizing for ethnic division, or just not at all optimizing for change in the future led from within said country.. then sure "China" or "Muslims" not "CCP" or "Wahhabism." How would an American react to a foreigner saying "America is evil and not trustworthy" vs "American leadership has done X and therefore is not trustworthy?" I have been largely abroad for years and I would still process the information in the latter statement with much less emotion.
gtsop 5y ago
Well, same as facebook and US.
bigmattystyles 5y ago
I try to remain grounded and check myself, and this may be me in tin foil hat territory, but the game here on the part of the CCP is long. If ever there is a time for 'think of the children', this is it. Political scandals are already getting more and more private - just imagine what it will be like in 20 years when the current crop of teens are starting to run for high office. And in case you're thinking, well too bad for them, plenty of teens don't do dumb things - that's true, but this will be dream kompromat for nation states controlling this data. I know Meta et al have the same data and are insanely powerful, but they're not nation states and are at least in theory, accountable.
natvert 5y ago
I agree with your assessment, however I don't think the response is more surveillance. If recent data breeches have taught us anything it is that data aggregation (necessary for surveillance) is just another source of Chinese intelligence. The solution to this (and other problems of social engineering) is to educate the general (democratic) population, so they are aware of and resilient against such attacks. I don't think it's possible to stop everyone from using a given service, but if every user understands the real tradeoffs, then we have a chance. If individuals (and more importantly voters) cannot think and reason for themself, given the facts of a given subject, democracy has no future. In general though, I think people are smart. They make decisions and tradeoffs with the information they have. The problem here is that they don't understand the real risks. More than the loss of privacy and security, the real problem here is that a hostile nation state seeks to influence the thoughts of free citizens of other (democratic) countries. This is how wars are won and lost -- in the hearts and minds of the people. If everyone who used TikTok saw the situation in a similar light, I doubt it would have the adoption it currently has.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> China is not a good faith operator. Well, neither is the USA and its NSA and its Five Eyes and all these actors who spy on pretty much everything and everyone. American companies are either complicit or blissfully ignorant. They violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, principles their own country was literally founded upon, so there's no telling what they'd do to a foreigner. People are so afraid of them when they talk security they just assume you won't be taking them on.
- kube-system 5y ago
  The difference is that most western countries allow private organizations to have a significantly higher degree of autonomy from executive action and checks-and-balances to back it up. The process can sometimes result in some of the same things happening, but the fact that they are not being done unilaterally is a major differentiator in multiple ways. Your data in the US is much more likely to be abused when corporate interests voluntarily want to make money off it, than any abuse by executive power.
kant_adorn_arts 5y ago
I've seen more advertisments for major brand products, targetted at kids through Tik Tok than I have seen political propoganda. If anything, Tik Tok just reinforces the current "western" status quo than anything else. It probably reinforces what ever the advertisers in any country can pay for.
wolverine876 5y ago
What social media company is in good faith? Facebook?
unityByFreedom 5y ago
> It's sad that a massively scaled invasion of privacy can only be countered by more surveillance. Reporting like this is also a refutation of their service.
astkaasa 5y ago
> Given the data needed to influence public opinion and voting Actually there's no need to influence "voting".
mushbino 5y ago
Is this just a guess or do you have any evidence? We know about PRISM because of Snowden and all of the backdoors in American products. That seems to be about as bad as it gets.
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads into tedious nationalistic or ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You started a doozy here—exactly what we don't need. No, that's not a defense of "China" (whatever that's supposed to mean in internet comments). It's just a defense of HN for its intended mandate, which is curious conversation. Flamewar talking points are incompatible with that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

lelandfe 5y ago

> Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content Sorry, do you have a better link handy? This primarily looks like a fundraising page.

maxehmookau 5y ago
A really strange fundraising page too that claims to be non-partisan but quotes three different far-right hacks.
- cloutchaser 5y ago
  I'm really curious, can you name someone who you think is just "right"? Like who isn't "far-right" in your opinion?
  - maxehmookau 5y ago
    I'm from the UK, so it's a relative concept. The US, except for some fairly small pockets of actual socialist left-wing thinking, is much further to the right. A lot of western europe loved Obama, but in reality he was closer to the UK Conservative party than the UK Labour party. But I'm even more curious, would you not describe Tucker Carlson as far right in his views?
    - Dma54rhs 5y ago
      On social issues average European and its country is way more conservative than average American. You're comparing economical standpoint here and I agree with that.
      - ericmay 5y ago
        At great risk here, I have to say I agree based on my own experience. Often times people conflate government-funded systems like healthcare or taxpayer-funded university as being socially progressive. I wouldn't do that. You can have universal healthcare and ban gay marriage in your country, for example.
      - conjectures 5y ago
        > On social issues average European and its country is way more conservative than average American. Dubious.
      - rtsil 5y ago
        Certainly not Western Europe.
        Dma54rhs 5y ago
        I mean it's simply not true, ask any non-European person who has lived on both continents where he feels more welcome. On what social issues are excatly Euros more left wing compared to Americans?
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  That's a coverage artifact - if Google is manipulating politics in favor of democrats, then the only coverage you'll find is going to be on the center to the right wing platforms. American media in all its glory.
robbedpeter 5y ago
- nsajko 5y ago
  Podcasts are entertainment, they're a wildly inappropriate medium for rational argumentation or giving evidence or anything similar. Put another way, you can't expect me to spend my time listening to a podcast just to be able to guess at what your argument is.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  On that Wikipedia page, the two Robert Epstein sources (one a PNAS paper[1], the other a Politico article[2]) are theoretical ("whether they could be manipulated") and pre-2016. The other main source[3] is similarly theoretical and provides policy recommendations to combat SEME. It also has a Washington Post article[4] discussing a (since-deleted) video that purportedly showed potentially-manipulated differences between how Bing and Google autocompleted "Hillary Clinton" searches. But none of the 3 main sources cover what the impact of autocomplete could be. Do you have any links about Google being caught red-handed politicizing ranking order? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547273/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547273/ [2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-c... [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0370#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0370#m... [4] https://archive.is/fHzW8 https://archive.is/fHzW8. Is Politifact trustworthy? They investigated this and found "Google’s suggested searches, for the most part, avoid offensive suggestions for everyone, not just Clinton." That isn't a total debunk, of course. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/23/andrew-napolitano/did-google-adjust-its-autocomplete-algorithm-hide-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/23/andrew-nap...
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    >>The 2020 presidential election monitoring project successfully recruited a diverse group of 732 registered voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. It preserved more than 500,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Facebook. These are the fleeting experiences that Big Tech companies use to influence votes and opinions worldwide and that are normally lost forever. >>A preliminary analysis of the data shows that Google search results (but NOT search results on Bing or Yahoo) had a significant liberal bias – enough to have shifted at least 6 million votes in the months leading up to the election. You need to know the methodology being used to understand the results, as they tracked ephemeral experiences using surveillance software with volunteers. This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you. The Rogan podcast was awkward af but he does provide a lot of substantive content if you're open to listening. https://www.aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies https://www.aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies is probably the most coherent site, but there's no salient tldr breakdown, to learn more you'll need to watch the videos. https://youtu.be/-7qT_38iRSc https://youtu.be/-7qT_38iRSc is the most comprehensive video, but I'll need to spend more time later to gather better links.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

I don't think we'll ever be able to avoid mass manipulation with the technology we have available - which makes large scale democracy useless and easily controllable by foreign state actors and local political parties. The growing inequality and the increasing government overreach which strangely always seems to benefit a few rich uber-companies is a symptom that our institutions are fairly unreliable. An alternative to more regulation and more surveillance to prevent mass manipulation would be NOT to have the power of millions of people in the hands of a handful of barely-elected representatives and to keep that power in local communities. No more taxes that go to Washington and gets "redistributed" - aka used to enrich the usual lobbyists. No more public services - aka monopolies. Just private local companies providing services to local citizens.

netcan 5y ago

>> China is not a good faith operator. Who is? I don't mean to be trite or contrary, but TikTok is coming into an environment where norms are pretty damned shady. Google as you and the article say, also consume user data quite unethically. FB likewise surveil us for their advertising businesses. They both also happen to host and control a good chunk of political and politically adjacent content within that framework. Police and regulate it with no transparency. FB are also gave us our first big "scandals" with third party trackers and/or data sharing. Other countries (including, but definitely not exclusively) also use tech companies as espionage assets. TikTok is just a new pig at the trough.

saas_sam 5y ago
Every tech company executive in the USA is not required to operate as an agent for one political party by threat of being disappeared. Our entire internet is not locked down to prevent political dissidents from sharing their views. Our government doesn't pay to flood our social media networks with astroturfing to create the illusion of popular support for its policies. These things add a more serious tone to the conversation, don'tcha think?
- Ekaros 5y ago
  No, but they intelligence agencies do the same stuff. And private hidden funders of politicians do the astroturfing... I don't really see much difference if it done by government or people who pay the politicians running the government.
  - ketzo 5y ago
    I think it's hugely disingenuous, to the point of bad faith, to pretend there's not a massive difference between the internet in the U.S. and in China.
    - wbsss4412 5y ago
      There’s a massive difference in the internet itself, but the topic of discussion here is data collection, which isn’t really a massive difference.

cm2012 5y ago

TikTok should be banned in the US. China banned all of our homegrown social networks, its pretty standard international precedent to ban theirs, given the security risks.

Bombthecat 5y ago
Tried that already, didn't work..
- duxup 5y ago
  They banned tik tok ?
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    - duxup 5y ago
      I honestly can't parse that sentence, it seems pretty loaded to the point that it makes no sense to me.
    - long_time_gone 5y ago
      > Trump it mobilized the 99% of people who don't have beliefs as much as they have I thought it was the judicial branch and an injunction that stopped it. >> On 23 September 2020, TikTok filed a request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the app from being banned by the Trump administration. This request was filed with the District Court for the District of Columbia. The preliminary injunction was approved by Judge Carl J. Nichols on September 27. Then, the current President rescinded it and ordered an actual review of the risks. Something we probably should have done prior to the attempted banning. >> In June 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration ban on TikTok, and instead ordered the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the app to determine if it poses a threat to U.S. national security. I'm confused on exactly what you think happened. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_...

snehk 5y ago

The "Chinese data harvesting software" has less trackers than the site reporting about it (CNBC.com).

lpcvoid 5y ago
Yet the site does not have access to biometrics. What point are you making?
- snehk 5y ago
  Neither does TikTok if you don't upload anything.
  - yua_mikami 5y ago
    - ok123456 5y ago
      They're using industry standard techniques for user tracking. If you find them objectionable, change the industry.
    - ailef 5y ago
      All of this applies to Instagram, FB, etc... too? Also > How much are the CCP paying you to defend TikTok in all these comments? This is surely not the way to have a rational conversation about the topic?
      - StopDarkPattern 5y ago
        [flagged]
    - bduerst 5y ago
      Accusing HN users of being paid shills doesn't add to the conversation. If we can't scrutinize overtly-vague technical criticisms w/o being called names then what's the point?

duxup 5y ago

At this point I do my best to avoid exposure to software / hardware / services from 'non-free' countries. It's not easy at all to do, there's a lot of grey area, and sometimes I just don't know. But I try. It's not about the individuals in those countries, I suspect just making their way through life they may have the best of intentions but still could be forced to participate. (Having said al that, that google research page seems pretty suspect to me.)

new_stranger 5y ago

tikTok collects data like a great many other companies, unfortunately they aren't just doing it sell more ads. With a few days of interactions, you can very precisely logically profile a person enough to figure out how to socially engineer them. You also have enough interest and behavioral data to be able setup a blackmail scheme. It is not hard to imagine how the close integration with the government allows the law enforcement to conduct very skilled operations using the psychological map that can be built about a person. The CCP is way past knowing if you vote dem/rep or are a 21yr old female.

uoaei 5y ago

Reading more of the recent work of this Dr. Epstein and something tells me his broader intentions for such an initiative have less to do with "big tech" than the "moral corruption of modern society" and is primarily animated toward the cause because things went the other way 4 years after 2016. Everything he rails against was present in both recent US elections but for whatever reason he seems content to focus only on the most recent one. Maybe he's spineless and holds that line because right-wing hosts are the only ones that will host him to get his message out. Maybe he really does believe that and is being a complete hypocrite. Neither option is respectable.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

Thank you for mentioning this. My personal pet theory about the recent rise in various 'challenges' is effectively weaponization of this particular medium in an attempt at social manipulation. It is all fun games now, but as recent 'gun challenge' shows, it can be easily turned into mayhem.

varispeed 5y ago

selfportrait 5y ago

I don’t refute anything you say, but linking to a page that features Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson doesn’t help your case. Not to mention the clear partisanship and call for donation to the “American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology” - a rabbit hole I’m happy to avoid.

robbedpeter 5y ago
That's an artifact of the politics. If a company had been tilting this in favor of the right, you would find Maddow, Lemon, and other left wing bobbleheads instead of right wing bobbleheads. Don't let guilt by association bias your thinking in this, but give the subject the deliberation it deserves. If you value the integrity of democracy and public discourse, ignore the messengers for whom the optics are politically convenient and focus on the message.
- msrenee 5y ago
  What am I supposed to see on that site besides a guy trying to market a monitoring system that he made?
- dessant 5y ago
  No, we should not ignore the messengers. There are enough credible people and content supporting your arguments, and there is no need to shove in the fundraising campaigns of opportunistic people that regularily argue against human rights.
- selfportrait 5y ago
  This isn’t guilt by association. That website is purely a grift, starting from its appeal to authority, leading into the Fox News nonsense and pseudoscientific slant, all the way to its Rush Limbaugh, early 2000s aesthetics. It doesn’t take a scientist to know that this isn’t how credible scientists operate, especially with the partisan hackery on display.
bduerst 5y ago
Isn't the whole, "TikTok spies for China" meme also politically motivated, per the last Republican president? I don't doubt that Bytedance shares Chinese TouTiao user data with the Chinese government, akin to how Apple does it with iCloud, but Bytedance has been pretty adamant that TikTok is external to China and doesn't share data. Even when there was an executive order to ban TikTok for being a national security threat, they couldn't prove that it was. Does anyone have actual evidence of TikTok sharing with the Chinese government, outside of political hit pieces like the one above?

electrondood 5y ago

You lost credibility in my eyes with the link to a spammy website with DONATE NOW widgets posted everywhere.

consumer451 5y ago

My one nitpick is that I believe it would be best to replace "China" with "CCP" in your statement. It's important to be specific in cases like these. I think it likely that it is not geographical China, nor all Chinese people you are attempting to reference, but their leadership the CCP.

cgriswald 5y ago
That’s not a nitpick. That’s redefining the way we talk about nations. It’s already clear from context he’s not talking about “all Chinese people.” “China to enter talks with the United States about social media” would not mean all Chinese people will talk to all Americans. This is true whether the content is positive, negative, or neutral.
- consumer451 5y ago
  Yeah, it is major. You are correct. I want us to be more specific in the way we talk about geopolitics because there is much room for improvement. My real point is that if you don't want to polarize an entire ethnic group against your position, then don't refer to the ethnic group when you mean to attack their economic or political ideology. It really depends on what one is optimizing for. If one is optimizing for ethnic division, or just not at all optimizing for change in the future led from within said country.. then sure "China" or "Muslims" not "CCP" or "Wahhabism." How would an American react to a foreigner saying "America is evil and not trustworthy" vs "American leadership has done X and therefore is not trustworthy?" I have been largely abroad for years and I would still process the information in the latter statement with much less emotion.

gtsop 5y ago

Well, same as facebook and US.

bigmattystyles 5y ago

I try to remain grounded and check myself, and this may be me in tin foil hat territory, but the game here on the part of the CCP is long. If ever there is a time for 'think of the children', this is it. Political scandals are already getting more and more private - just imagine what it will be like in 20 years when the current crop of teens are starting to run for high office. And in case you're thinking, well too bad for them, plenty of teens don't do dumb things - that's true, but this will be dream kompromat for nation states controlling this data. I know Meta et al have the same data and are insanely powerful, but they're not nation states and are at least in theory, accountable.

natvert 5y ago

I agree with your assessment, however I don't think the response is more surveillance. If recent data breeches have taught us anything it is that data aggregation (necessary for surveillance) is just another source of Chinese intelligence. The solution to this (and other problems of social engineering) is to educate the general (democratic) population, so they are aware of and resilient against such attacks. I don't think it's possible to stop everyone from using a given service, but if every user understands the real tradeoffs, then we have a chance. If individuals (and more importantly voters) cannot think and reason for themself, given the facts of a given subject, democracy has no future. In general though, I think people are smart. They make decisions and tradeoffs with the information they have. The problem here is that they don't understand the real risks. More than the loss of privacy and security, the real problem here is that a hostile nation state seeks to influence the thoughts of free citizens of other (democratic) countries. This is how wars are won and lost -- in the hearts and minds of the people. If everyone who used TikTok saw the situation in a similar light, I doubt it would have the adoption it currently has.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> China is not a good faith operator. Well, neither is the USA and its NSA and its Five Eyes and all these actors who spy on pretty much everything and everyone. American companies are either complicit or blissfully ignorant. They violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, principles their own country was literally founded upon, so there's no telling what they'd do to a foreigner. People are so afraid of them when they talk security they just assume you won't be taking them on.

kube-system 5y ago
The difference is that most western countries allow private organizations to have a significantly higher degree of autonomy from executive action and checks-and-balances to back it up. The process can sometimes result in some of the same things happening, but the fact that they are not being done unilaterally is a major differentiator in multiple ways. Your data in the US is much more likely to be abused when corporate interests voluntarily want to make money off it, than any abuse by executive power.

kant_adorn_arts 5y ago

I've seen more advertisments for major brand products, targetted at kids through Tik Tok than I have seen political propoganda. If anything, Tik Tok just reinforces the current "western" status quo than anything else. It probably reinforces what ever the advertisers in any country can pay for.

wolverine876 5y ago

What social media company is in good faith? Facebook?

unityByFreedom 5y ago

> It's sad that a massively scaled invasion of privacy can only be countered by more surveillance. Reporting like this is also a refutation of their service.

astkaasa 5y ago

> Given the data needed to influence public opinion and voting Actually there's no need to influence "voting".

mushbino 5y ago

Is this just a guess or do you have any evidence? We know about PRISM because of Snowden and all of the backdoors in American products. That seems to be about as bad as it gets.

dang 5y ago

Please don't take HN threads into tedious nationalistic or ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You started a doozy here—exactly what we don't need. No, that's not a defense of "China" (whatever that's supposed to mean in internet comments). It's just a defense of HN for its intended mandate, which is curious conversation. Flamewar talking points are incompatible with that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.