4 ms·

You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and vio

by tmnvdb 2y ago

You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.

onei 2y ago
Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.
- tmnvdb 2y ago
  There is good evidence that topics the CCP does not like are significantly underrepresented compared to other social media platforms. I would add that if you know the CCP you would be extremely surprised if they did not take such an opportunity for information warfare.
  - dqv 2y ago
    You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence. If you're talking about the study about hash tag counts, that's not good evidence. https://www.cato.org/blog/lies-damned-lies-statistics-misleading-study-compares-tiktok-instagram https://www.cato.org/blog/lies-damned-lies-statistics-mislea...
    - gunian 2y ago
      This is actually so cool it's the first study I have seen that tries to use numbers kind of hilarious they did not filter scrapped posts by date to account for TikTok being a newer platform. Some data engineer got a promotion off that study too probably :) Another thing they did not take into account is the presence of social engineering botnets that can be used by both sides (if record labels have them I'm sure anyone rlse can too)
    - _t9ow 2y ago
      > You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence Unfortunately very common these days; people who say this probably hope that they won't ever be asked to provide receipts.
      - mdhb 2y ago
        I think the question is actually asked incorrectly in the reverse. Maybe start with the not at all controversial position that China is effectively an authoritarian dictatorship who is well known to use censorship and public manipulation as one of its key levers of control and then ask if you have any evidence whatsoever that for some reason they wouldn’t include TikTok in that mix? The way actual professionals in the field look at this problem is through a lens of: 1. Do they have the capabily to take this specific action? (A resounding yes) 2. Do they have the intent to take this action? I mean this is where you would look at literally all of the other instances where they did choose censorship over free expression and also come to a resounding yes. 3. Do they have the opportunity to take this action? Which is also a clear yes as defined by their own national security laws and other methods of control over what TikTok does. Thats how people have come to the conclusion that it’s a legitimate threat even in the absence of some smoking gun where people wrote everything down and then conveniently leaked it for you. At some point you have to be able to make decisions in the absence of perfect information and this is specifically how threat modelling works just to provide some context because some of the comments here are incredibly low quality.
        _t9ow 2y ago
        I agree overall with your analysis. Nonetheless when one says that there is good evidence for something, rather than that there is good circumstantial evidence or that there are very reasonable grounds to assume something, one is making a different claim. We must also ask whether circumstantial evidence or reasonable assumptions alone should be enough to force a company to divest its assets.
        lsaferite 2y ago
        Divest the assets or leave the foreign market they are in that's regulated them out.
- alisonatwork 2y ago
  I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy. Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Yes, read about the kind of things employees of TikTok have to agree to. The summary is that they essentially have to uphold the goals of the Chinese government. They also have two different managers, one in America and a second handler from mainland China. https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths-china-socialist-system-court-documents/ https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
- suraci 2y ago
  > Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP I can't say it's not at all But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good. If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now I've talked abt how CPC doing propaganda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769
- froh 2y ago
  ccp bans certain brain rot contents which the algorithms hm happily spreads in the west. the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment. But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing". This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem. > It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party. Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.
- blackqueeriroh 2y ago
  What laws did they pass that they didn’t enforce but then threatened to enforce? Because from my perspective that statement smells like bullshit.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Anti-trust laws are the obvious example that was already listed in the post you replied to, e.g. Meta wants to be able to buy Instagram and Apple wants to lock all iPhone users out of third party app stores. But the government has passed so many laws at this point that you can hardly walk down the street without committing a felony, see e.g. Three Felonies a Day, to the point that it's now only a matter of prosecutorial discretion that any given person isn't in prison. They've also threatened to pass new laws that the targets wouldn't like if the targets don't "voluntarily" do things the law isn't allowed to make them do.
cship2 2y ago
>You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gunian 2y ago
  It's a cool phenomena tbh if I was rich enough to go to college I would love to do a thesis on it We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering. We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering. And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see
  - suraci 2y ago
    Their's an old joke about this: A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
    - gunian 2y ago
      This made me chuckle :) it truly is beautiful it's sad its one of those fields you can't take credit for what you do but the people running it deserve all the credit. An impossible ask but would be cool to read about the tech behind it in today's digital age.
uludag 2y ago
So I'm definitely not saying that TikTok itself provides better checks and balances, but TikTok, in an ecosystem of other media providers under different governments, would be a much healthier for civil society. For example, US social media companies were vital in kicking off the Arab spring. How different would such movements be if they only had access to a media monoculture controlled by their respective regimes?
- grumple 2y ago
  US social media companies contributing to widespread social unrest that ultimately led nowhere[0] or created more oppressive Islamic regimes and sectarian violence - well, this seems like an argument against TikTok, not for it. Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermat...
  - uludag 2y ago
    I totally agree that the Arab spring ended in near complete failure, and is not an ideal in and of itself, and violent revolution is in no way desirable for societies like the US. Maybe I should have connected the analogy fully: Suppose that there was an issue that most citizens would normally feel very strongly about, but which benefits the state: war immediately comes to mind. There should be protests and (non-violent of course) civil unrest against wars the public feels to be unjust or immoral. Such demonstrations could easily be lulled in the right media environment, which is why alternative channels are important. I can easily imagine a future where TikTok is the premier dissonant chord against the drumming of war. I'm not going to hide by biases here, I rather do romanticize popular anti-war movements.
    - grumple 2y ago
thisislife2 2y ago
> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government ... I had a chuckle at the naivety of this statement. Even HN shadow-bans posts here that are perceived as anti-US or pro-Russia / pro-Israel (I am not talking about off-topic political posts, which are against HN rules, but on political threads on Russia - Ukraine and Israel - Palestine conflicts that were allowed by the mods). HN algorithms also give undue preference to western media sources. It is the same with StackExchange (on politics and skeptics SE, for e.g.) where even factual posts countering US propaganda on Russia-Ukraine war or Israel-Palestine conflict is highly discouraged with downvotes or deletion. When complaints were raised about biased moderation, one SE mod even publicly commented that they are under heavy pressure to "moderate" the content on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Let's also not forget that RT . com is now banned on most US social media networks like FB and Youtube. And during COVID pandemic, we saw how the US government strong-armed the social media platform to prevent the spread dubious and unverified news on the disease, its treatment and the vaccines (which was the right thing to do). I have realised that as a non-westerner (Indian), the political space for me online is continuously shrinking and increasingly suffocating because I refuse to subscribe to the western political black-and-white world view. This is readily apparent when you look at how Americans are shaping these platforms into echo-chambers - Bluesky and Reddit is for American left- content while 9gag and Twitter / X is for the American right- , and whether you want it or not, both of these shove American political content on you.

by tmnvdb 2y ago

onei 2y ago

Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.

tmnvdb 2y ago
There is good evidence that topics the CCP does not like are significantly underrepresented compared to other social media platforms. I would add that if you know the CCP you would be extremely surprised if they did not take such an opportunity for information warfare.
- dqv 2y ago
  You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence. If you're talking about the study about hash tag counts, that's not good evidence. https://www.cato.org/blog/lies-damned-lies-statistics-misleading-study-compares-tiktok-instagram https://www.cato.org/blog/lies-damned-lies-statistics-mislea...
  - gunian 2y ago
    This is actually so cool it's the first study I have seen that tries to use numbers kind of hilarious they did not filter scrapped posts by date to account for TikTok being a newer platform. Some data engineer got a promotion off that study too probably :) Another thing they did not take into account is the presence of social engineering botnets that can be used by both sides (if record labels have them I'm sure anyone rlse can too)
  - _t9ow 2y ago
    > You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence Unfortunately very common these days; people who say this probably hope that they won't ever be asked to provide receipts.
    - mdhb 2y ago
      I think the question is actually asked incorrectly in the reverse. Maybe start with the not at all controversial position that China is effectively an authoritarian dictatorship who is well known to use censorship and public manipulation as one of its key levers of control and then ask if you have any evidence whatsoever that for some reason they wouldn’t include TikTok in that mix? The way actual professionals in the field look at this problem is through a lens of: 1. Do they have the capabily to take this specific action? (A resounding yes) 2. Do they have the intent to take this action? I mean this is where you would look at literally all of the other instances where they did choose censorship over free expression and also come to a resounding yes. 3. Do they have the opportunity to take this action? Which is also a clear yes as defined by their own national security laws and other methods of control over what TikTok does. Thats how people have come to the conclusion that it’s a legitimate threat even in the absence of some smoking gun where people wrote everything down and then conveniently leaked it for you. At some point you have to be able to make decisions in the absence of perfect information and this is specifically how threat modelling works just to provide some context because some of the comments here are incredibly low quality.
      - _t9ow 2y ago
        I agree overall with your analysis. Nonetheless when one says that there is good evidence for something, rather than that there is good circumstantial evidence or that there are very reasonable grounds to assume something, one is making a different claim. We must also ask whether circumstantial evidence or reasonable assumptions alone should be enough to force a company to divest its assets.
        lsaferite 2y ago
        Divest the assets or leave the foreign market they are in that's regulated them out.
alisonatwork 2y ago
I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy. Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Yes, read about the kind of things employees of TikTok have to agree to. The summary is that they essentially have to uphold the goals of the Chinese government. They also have two different managers, one in America and a second handler from mainland China. https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths-china-socialist-system-court-documents/ https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
suraci 2y ago
> Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP I can't say it's not at all But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good. If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now I've talked abt how CPC doing propaganda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769
froh 2y ago
ccp bans certain brain rot contents which the algorithms hm happily spreads in the west. the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet. That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment. But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing". This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem. > It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party. Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.

blackqueeriroh 2y ago
What laws did they pass that they didn’t enforce but then threatened to enforce? Because from my perspective that statement smells like bullshit.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Anti-trust laws are the obvious example that was already listed in the post you replied to, e.g. Meta wants to be able to buy Instagram and Apple wants to lock all iPhone users out of third party app stores. But the government has passed so many laws at this point that you can hardly walk down the street without committing a felony, see e.g. Three Felonies a Day, to the point that it's now only a matter of prosecutorial discretion that any given person isn't in prison. They've also threatened to pass new laws that the targets wouldn't like if the targets don't "voluntarily" do things the law isn't allowed to make them do.

cship2 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gunian 2y ago
It's a cool phenomena tbh if I was rich enough to go to college I would love to do a thesis on it We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering. We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering. And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see
- suraci 2y ago
  Their's an old joke about this: A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
  - gunian 2y ago
    This made me chuckle :) it truly is beautiful it's sad its one of those fields you can't take credit for what you do but the people running it deserve all the credit. An impossible ask but would be cool to read about the tech behind it in today's digital age.

uludag 2y ago

So I'm definitely not saying that TikTok itself provides better checks and balances, but TikTok, in an ecosystem of other media providers under different governments, would be a much healthier for civil society. For example, US social media companies were vital in kicking off the Arab spring. How different would such movements be if they only had access to a media monoculture controlled by their respective regimes?

grumple 2y ago
US social media companies contributing to widespread social unrest that ultimately led nowhere[0] or created more oppressive Islamic regimes and sectarian violence - well, this seems like an argument against TikTok, not for it. Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermat...
- uludag 2y ago
  I totally agree that the Arab spring ended in near complete failure, and is not an ideal in and of itself, and violent revolution is in no way desirable for societies like the US. Maybe I should have connected the analogy fully: Suppose that there was an issue that most citizens would normally feel very strongly about, but which benefits the state: war immediately comes to mind. There should be protests and (non-violent of course) civil unrest against wars the public feels to be unjust or immoral. Such demonstrations could easily be lulled in the right media environment, which is why alternative channels are important. I can easily imagine a future where TikTok is the premier dissonant chord against the drumming of war. I'm not going to hide by biases here, I rather do romanticize popular anti-war movements.
  - grumple 2y ago

thisislife2 2y ago

> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government ... I had a chuckle at the naivety of this statement. Even HN shadow-bans posts here that are perceived as anti-US or pro-Russia / pro-Israel (I am not talking about off-topic political posts, which are against HN rules, but on political threads on Russia - Ukraine and Israel - Palestine conflicts that were allowed by the mods). HN algorithms also give undue preference to western media sources. It is the same with StackExchange (on politics and skeptics SE, for e.g.) where even factual posts countering US propaganda on Russia-Ukraine war or Israel-Palestine conflict is highly discouraged with downvotes or deletion. When complaints were raised about biased moderation, one SE mod even publicly commented that they are under heavy pressure to "moderate" the content on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Let's also not forget that RT . com is now banned on most US social media networks like FB and Youtube. And during COVID pandemic, we saw how the US government strong-armed the social media platform to prevent the spread dubious and unverified news on the disease, its treatment and the vaccines (which was the right thing to do). I have realised that as a non-westerner (Indian), the political space for me online is continuously shrinking and increasingly suffocating because I refuse to subscribe to the western political black-and-white world view. This is readily apparent when you look at how Americans are shaping these platforms into echo-chambers - Bluesky and Reddit is for American left- content while 9gag and Twitter / X is for the American right- , and whether you want it or not, both of these shove American political content on you.