4 ms·

I don't think the founders could account for international influence in the age of the Internet and smart phones. No one is asking for a great wall around the

I don't think the founders could account for international influence in the age of the Internet and smart phones. No one is asking for a great wall around the US. People are just asking that major influencers are not under the control of hostile governments.

jrockway 3y ago
Is international influence something that should be stopped? Like, I should check the citizenship of someone before I listen to their ideas? It just doesn't make sense to me. If someone tells me nonsense I can ignore the nonsense. It doesn't mean the government should smash their printing press. It's annoying when people in other countries rile up people to change how they vote, but ultimately, that's a problem with democracy. It's the worst system out there, except for all the others. People not understanding their government is the deeper problem. Does banning TikTok fix this problem? It sounds like we're saying "only opinion columnists who work for The New York Times and Fox News should be able to tell you how to vote and what issues you care about". That's really not great either, is it? It's really depressing watching the government strip away the rights of women and transgender people. We can't blame social media influence bots for that. It's elected officials that are doing it. TikTok is just a distraction from the true hardcore hatred that we've elected.
- wdh505 3y ago
  I'll try to weigh in. Democratic republics like the USA are heavily swayed by people, protests, etc. In the digital age, just-in-time censorship of social media like Facebook or Twitter have been extremely effective at preventing "good/bad" protests, and each government sets the rules for the social media in the country (read easy censorship). Additionally, there have been a number of international propaganda campaigns that were successful to disrupt regular elections in the USA recently. See evidence of certain protests getting huge right before and during the russo-ukrainian conflict and covid shutdowns. Tik tok the platform's users generally contribute and consume as a "community that generates content in good faith" (I use that definition loosely), but it is a arm of soft CCP power that could just-in-time promote something terrible (brainstorming here: cultivate civil-war-esque mindsets then trigger, convince the population to avoid polio vaccines, etc.) Elections are tumultuous enough without having each "town square" potentially weaponized by potentially hostile nations, so requiring that free press be free from foreign control (influence is okay under free speech) is what is being decided here.
- vizzier 3y ago
  > Is international influence something that should be stopped? This should be a simple yes. External authoritarian governments (Russia's IRA, CCP via bytedance) should not have their thumb on the scale (trollfarms & the algorithm) for what is viewed in western democracies. I'm actually amazed that this view is controversial. I agree with the rest of your premises, but the above should be a separate issue from them.
paganel 3y ago
If American democracy goes down because of "foreign influencers" from platforms like TikTok then it means that it wasn't all that strong to begin with.
- cutemonster 3y ago
  I don't think there's any country that can withstand someone having direct access to manipulate more than half of the population
  - paganel 3y ago
    I stand by my point, if half of the population can be ideologically "switched"/manipulated by a smartphone app then the original ideology (I would assume liberal-democracy in the case of US) wasn't that heavily implanted to begin with. The US politicians should look into why that is so, why is that suddenly the US population so easy to "manipulate" away from an ideology it has strongly believed in for more than 200 years, but I guess that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).
    - cutemonster 3y ago
      What if the US and most other countries have always been sheepishly easy to manipulate -- but it wasn't noticeable, until modern tech like FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok appeared? It seems to me that Xi in China agrees about this, in that they've blocked all those things (except for their own). > that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem). How do you mean? That they too manipulate the population, and are part of a manipulation problem?

jrockway 3y ago

Is international influence something that should be stopped? Like, I should check the citizenship of someone before I listen to their ideas? It just doesn't make sense to me. If someone tells me nonsense I can ignore the nonsense. It doesn't mean the government should smash their printing press. It's annoying when people in other countries rile up people to change how they vote, but ultimately, that's a problem with democracy. It's the worst system out there, except for all the others. People not understanding their government is the deeper problem. Does banning TikTok fix this problem? It sounds like we're saying "only opinion columnists who work for The New York Times and Fox News should be able to tell you how to vote and what issues you care about". That's really not great either, is it? It's really depressing watching the government strip away the rights of women and transgender people. We can't blame social media influence bots for that. It's elected officials that are doing it. TikTok is just a distraction from the true hardcore hatred that we've elected.

wdh505 3y ago
I'll try to weigh in. Democratic republics like the USA are heavily swayed by people, protests, etc. In the digital age, just-in-time censorship of social media like Facebook or Twitter have been extremely effective at preventing "good/bad" protests, and each government sets the rules for the social media in the country (read easy censorship). Additionally, there have been a number of international propaganda campaigns that were successful to disrupt regular elections in the USA recently. See evidence of certain protests getting huge right before and during the russo-ukrainian conflict and covid shutdowns. Tik tok the platform's users generally contribute and consume as a "community that generates content in good faith" (I use that definition loosely), but it is a arm of soft CCP power that could just-in-time promote something terrible (brainstorming here: cultivate civil-war-esque mindsets then trigger, convince the population to avoid polio vaccines, etc.) Elections are tumultuous enough without having each "town square" potentially weaponized by potentially hostile nations, so requiring that free press be free from foreign control (influence is okay under free speech) is what is being decided here.
vizzier 3y ago
> Is international influence something that should be stopped? This should be a simple yes. External authoritarian governments (Russia's IRA, CCP via bytedance) should not have their thumb on the scale (trollfarms & the algorithm) for what is viewed in western democracies. I'm actually amazed that this view is controversial. I agree with the rest of your premises, but the above should be a separate issue from them.

paganel 3y ago

If American democracy goes down because of "foreign influencers" from platforms like TikTok then it means that it wasn't all that strong to begin with.

cutemonster 3y ago
I don't think there's any country that can withstand someone having direct access to manipulate more than half of the population
- paganel 3y ago
  I stand by my point, if half of the population can be ideologically "switched"/manipulated by a smartphone app then the original ideology (I would assume liberal-democracy in the case of US) wasn't that heavily implanted to begin with. The US politicians should look into why that is so, why is that suddenly the US population so easy to "manipulate" away from an ideology it has strongly believed in for more than 200 years, but I guess that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).
  - cutemonster 3y ago
    What if the US and most other countries have always been sheepishly easy to manipulate -- but it wasn't noticeable, until modern tech like FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok appeared? It seems to me that Xi in China agrees about this, in that they've blocked all those things (except for their own). > that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem). How do you mean? That they too manipulate the population, and are part of a manipulation problem?