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It's the conspiracy theory I 100% believe in. I don't think the reason to ban TikTok is that it gathers information, I think the reason to ban it is that its r

It's the conspiracy theory I 100% believe in. I don't think the reason to ban TikTok is that it gathers information, I think the reason to ban it is that its ranking algorithm is deliberately destructive. Maybe it's a coincidence that all the dangerous stunts and vandalism "pranks" come from TikTok and not Meta and Twitter, but I don't buy it. I'm leftist liberal and I have no particular paranoia about China, but I'm not going to pretend that we are besties Edit: I won't remove the classification of myself as "leftist liberal" because it would make some of the replies to my comment confusing. I will apologize for it because it has derailed the discussion of China and TikTok. In the future I'll be more specific and avoid labels that no two people can agree on. Suffice to say that I don't believe China deliberately created and released Covid.

vlunkr 4y ago
> I'm a completely leftist liberal I'm confused. Do you think the CPP is liberal? It's very authoritarian.
- justsocrateasin 4y ago
  How are you under the impression OP that thinks the CPP is liberal??
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    Maybe they're a LLM and got confused by the keyword "conspiracy theory" and the double negative in the statement.
    - vlunkr 4y ago
      Shhh
- GordonS 4y ago
  I'm not the OP, but I read that qualification as meaning "I'm not some right-wing nutter that's paranoid about Red Danger, and I don't believe everything mainstream media tells me".
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    I blame the broken ass left/right political spectrum that's so popular in the U.S. Liberal != Leftist And neither a leftist nor a liberal has to answer for Communist China. Nor do you gain any special "objectivity" about China by being either one.
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      The left/right view of the political spectrum doesn’t accurately characterise politics anywhere. Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense. The only generalisation I think reliably separates left/right is the level of government intervention, in both economic and social issues, that they ideologically support. But I don’t think that translates very well into the level of intervention they end up implementing. That also doesn’t really relate very well to the actual core ideas of liberalism or conservatism. But that’s messed up everywhere. It’s only that most of the world generally pays attention to US politics.
      - CuriousSkeptic 4y ago
        > Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense. There is an interesting case made[1] that while this used to be true, it is actually not the case any more and that things are starting to become rather anti-liberal on both sides of the political spectrum. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-problem https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...
        AmericanChopper 4y ago
        I’m not sure I buy that argument. When I was a kid I remember we had the PMRC, panic over violence in video games, and endless debates over a different flavour of “political correctness”. They purveyors of moral panic has a different cast today (on both sides of the political spectrum), but I don’t really buy into this “everything is worse than it used to be” idea. I guess government encroachment on civil liberties tends to only head in one direction, but I’m not sure that’s the topic of the book?
- Spivak 4y ago
  There's a difference between recognizing that China has a political structure I don't like and the "everything China bad" red scare bullshit that is going on. The US is plenty authoritarian and China becoming a democracy wouldn't actually change any of the things that people are paranoid about. The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers. Taken as a single political entity on the national stage China is just USA but in italics. It makes total sense that we would be uneasy in the US but that unease is how everyone not in the US feels about us. The unwavering belief that we're the good guys leads us to project our military might much more freely which doesn't exactly make us popular. It is crazy that TikTok being a Chinese based company is obviously some ploy to undermine the US while in reality the CCP just forced TikTok to change their algorithm to be educational in China where such a thing wouldn't fly in the US because of the first amendment. China's video game ban for under-18s operates on the same principal.
  - augment002 4y ago
    > The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers. Ludicrous false equivalency. The USA doesn’t have laws preventing its citizens from criticizing the government, nor are its corporations required by law to participate in policing speech. This is the reason why criticism of China is so muted.
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    I agree with you. I think America's system overall has more popular accountability in who holds power but "the foreign policy blob" does a very good job of diffusing that popular accountability in foreign matters.
- sandman8 4y ago
  In contemporary American politics, "liberal" and "authoritarian" are often overlapping categories. The two-party system makes for all sorts of weird alliances of distinct groups getting lumped together- there's really no reason that one's opinions on gun rights should be related to one's opinions on energy policy, or why one's opinion on abortion should be related to one's opinion on foreign affairs policy, but with two parties all these separate issues get grouped into two camps associated with either "Republican" or "Democrat" and then in turn everything "Republican" can also be called "Conservative" or "Right-Wing" and everything "Democrat" can also be called "Liberal" or "Left-Wing". Using some academic definition of what "liberal" or "right-wing" or whatever meant in Europe in the 1890s or 1930s doesn't really work in popular English-language media today.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    I'm amazed at how people will happily (enough) coalesce into two parties and align their views accordingly. Maybe it's just an exercise in dimensionality reduction.
    - loeg 4y ago
      It's hard to get anything done without a majority coalition. The two party system endures due to quirks of our election design that the two parties themselves are both very happy to keep in place (any change to elections that would make 3rd parties viable would cause the two current parties to lose some power).
      - dehrmann 4y ago
        > quirks Winner-takes-all popular elections have proven to be naive, but I wouldn't say it's a quirk. It's probably the first election format you'd try. My point wasn't that you need a coalition as much as that people will change their views to align with their coalition.
- whitemary 4y ago
  Liberalism is just authoritarianism with a lot of competing authorities. My American workplace is 100% authoritarian.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
whitemary 4y ago
> leftist liberal That's an oxymoron.
- ouid 4y ago
  "Liberal" is an oxymoron. The social contract is not optional. We agree to be bound by rules because we prefer it to being by force, which is the default. Security is liberty, in the optimization sense.
- werber 4y ago
  I think the Americanism for that would be Progressive
- wk_end 4y ago
  No it's not, because personal politics aren't pure embodiments of monolithic ideologies. It's a shorthand for a political perspective that incorporates aspects of both liberalism and leftism.
ouid 4y ago
"I'm a completely leftist liberal, therefore I don't have any particular paranoia about China" is a type error. China is an autocracy, with a track record of doing things that warrant paranoia. I don't really care what you mean by leftist, but you definitely cannot claim to be a liberal and have no "paranoia" about China.
- nineplay 4y ago
  There's a scale I suppose. Paranoia is "China deliberately created and released Covid". My non-paranoid opinion is that China is a large and powerful country which has complete control over its citizens and companies and very much wants the US out of its hair so that it can take over large chunks of Asia with no pushback.
- loeg 4y ago
  OP meant left in contrast to right-wing Americans, who typically espouse a more anti-China worldview.
ecshafer 4y ago
>leftist liberal American political discourse is so messed up because people will gladly sit two contradictory ideas into one.
Name_Chawps 4y ago
It is not unreasonable to believe in conspiracy theories involving China, because they have a centralized, authoritarian government, which means that true conspiracies occur frequently, and are mandated by the government.
- pphysch 4y ago
  "Centralized, authoritarian government" is a tautology.
pphysch 4y ago
USA has Hollywood, Super Bowl, and the NRA, and yet people clutch pearls when Americans get shown violent debauchery through a specific social media app. Totally unserious. These are parts of our culture that aren't necessarily universal (i.e. that would be reflected on Douyin).
tracker1 4y ago
On the last bit... I don't believe they deliberately created and released it, I do believe it was likely a lab leak, and likely negligence. There were a few similar protocol breaches with sensitive materials the prior two years. I also do think that any knowledge to be had was covered up for political reasons. Deny and cover-up, it's what major governments do. I do think that through malice or neglegence, that tiktok's algorithm is harmful to children.

vlunkr 4y ago

> I'm a completely leftist liberal I'm confused. Do you think the CPP is liberal? It's very authoritarian.

justsocrateasin 4y ago
How are you under the impression OP that thinks the CPP is liberal??
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  Maybe they're a LLM and got confused by the keyword "conspiracy theory" and the double negative in the statement.
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    Shhh
GordonS 4y ago
I'm not the OP, but I read that qualification as meaning "I'm not some right-wing nutter that's paranoid about Red Danger, and I don't believe everything mainstream media tells me".
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  I blame the broken ass left/right political spectrum that's so popular in the U.S. Liberal != Leftist And neither a leftist nor a liberal has to answer for Communist China. Nor do you gain any special "objectivity" about China by being either one.
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    The left/right view of the political spectrum doesn’t accurately characterise politics anywhere. Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense. The only generalisation I think reliably separates left/right is the level of government intervention, in both economic and social issues, that they ideologically support. But I don’t think that translates very well into the level of intervention they end up implementing. That also doesn’t really relate very well to the actual core ideas of liberalism or conservatism. But that’s messed up everywhere. It’s only that most of the world generally pays attention to US politics.
    - CuriousSkeptic 4y ago
      > Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense. There is an interesting case made[1] that while this used to be true, it is actually not the case any more and that things are starting to become rather anti-liberal on both sides of the political spectrum. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-problem https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...
      - AmericanChopper 4y ago
        I’m not sure I buy that argument. When I was a kid I remember we had the PMRC, panic over violence in video games, and endless debates over a different flavour of “political correctness”. They purveyors of moral panic has a different cast today (on both sides of the political spectrum), but I don’t really buy into this “everything is worse than it used to be” idea. I guess government encroachment on civil liberties tends to only head in one direction, but I’m not sure that’s the topic of the book?
Spivak 4y ago
There's a difference between recognizing that China has a political structure I don't like and the "everything China bad" red scare bullshit that is going on. The US is plenty authoritarian and China becoming a democracy wouldn't actually change any of the things that people are paranoid about. The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers. Taken as a single political entity on the national stage China is just USA but in italics. It makes total sense that we would be uneasy in the US but that unease is how everyone not in the US feels about us. The unwavering belief that we're the good guys leads us to project our military might much more freely which doesn't exactly make us popular. It is crazy that TikTok being a Chinese based company is obviously some ploy to undermine the US while in reality the CCP just forced TikTok to change their algorithm to be educational in China where such a thing wouldn't fly in the US because of the first amendment. China's video game ban for under-18s operates on the same principal.
- augment002 4y ago
  > The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers. Ludicrous false equivalency. The USA doesn’t have laws preventing its citizens from criticizing the government, nor are its corporations required by law to participate in policing speech. This is the reason why criticism of China is so muted.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  I agree with you. I think America's system overall has more popular accountability in who holds power but "the foreign policy blob" does a very good job of diffusing that popular accountability in foreign matters.
sandman8 4y ago
In contemporary American politics, "liberal" and "authoritarian" are often overlapping categories. The two-party system makes for all sorts of weird alliances of distinct groups getting lumped together- there's really no reason that one's opinions on gun rights should be related to one's opinions on energy policy, or why one's opinion on abortion should be related to one's opinion on foreign affairs policy, but with two parties all these separate issues get grouped into two camps associated with either "Republican" or "Democrat" and then in turn everything "Republican" can also be called "Conservative" or "Right-Wing" and everything "Democrat" can also be called "Liberal" or "Left-Wing". Using some academic definition of what "liberal" or "right-wing" or whatever meant in Europe in the 1890s or 1930s doesn't really work in popular English-language media today.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I'm amazed at how people will happily (enough) coalesce into two parties and align their views accordingly. Maybe it's just an exercise in dimensionality reduction.
  - loeg 4y ago
    It's hard to get anything done without a majority coalition. The two party system endures due to quirks of our election design that the two parties themselves are both very happy to keep in place (any change to elections that would make 3rd parties viable would cause the two current parties to lose some power).
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      > quirks Winner-takes-all popular elections have proven to be naive, but I wouldn't say it's a quirk. It's probably the first election format you'd try. My point wasn't that you need a coalition as much as that people will change their views to align with their coalition.
whitemary 4y ago
Liberalism is just authoritarianism with a lot of competing authorities. My American workplace is 100% authoritarian.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

whitemary 4y ago

> leftist liberal That's an oxymoron.

ouid 4y ago
"Liberal" is an oxymoron. The social contract is not optional. We agree to be bound by rules because we prefer it to being by force, which is the default. Security is liberty, in the optimization sense.
werber 4y ago
I think the Americanism for that would be Progressive
wk_end 4y ago
No it's not, because personal politics aren't pure embodiments of monolithic ideologies. It's a shorthand for a political perspective that incorporates aspects of both liberalism and leftism.

ouid 4y ago

"I'm a completely leftist liberal, therefore I don't have any particular paranoia about China" is a type error. China is an autocracy, with a track record of doing things that warrant paranoia. I don't really care what you mean by leftist, but you definitely cannot claim to be a liberal and have no "paranoia" about China.

nineplay 4y ago
There's a scale I suppose. Paranoia is "China deliberately created and released Covid". My non-paranoid opinion is that China is a large and powerful country which has complete control over its citizens and companies and very much wants the US out of its hair so that it can take over large chunks of Asia with no pushback.
loeg 4y ago
OP meant left in contrast to right-wing Americans, who typically espouse a more anti-China worldview.

ecshafer 4y ago

>leftist liberal American political discourse is so messed up because people will gladly sit two contradictory ideas into one.

Name_Chawps 4y ago

It is not unreasonable to believe in conspiracy theories involving China, because they have a centralized, authoritarian government, which means that true conspiracies occur frequently, and are mandated by the government.

pphysch 4y ago
"Centralized, authoritarian government" is a tautology.

pphysch 4y ago

USA has Hollywood, Super Bowl, and the NRA, and yet people clutch pearls when Americans get shown violent debauchery through a specific social media app. Totally unserious. These are parts of our culture that aren't necessarily universal (i.e. that would be reflected on Douyin).

tracker1 4y ago

On the last bit... I don't believe they deliberately created and released it, I do believe it was likely a lab leak, and likely negligence. There were a few similar protocol breaches with sensitive materials the prior two years. I also do think that any knowledge to be had was covered up for political reasons. Deny and cover-up, it's what major governments do. I do think that through malice or neglegence, that tiktok's algorithm is harmful to children.