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A point I think most people don’t understand is that the government interest in TikTok has little to do with exploiting user data per se, a lot of other compani

A point I think most people don’t understand is that the government interest in TikTok has little to do with exploiting user data per se, a lot of other companies do that. The issue is that TikTok is somewhat unique in being aggressively weaponized in currently very active “grey zone” conflicts. This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters. Geopolitic strategies are increasingly executed as grey zone warfare, and some hybrid warfare, because the costs and risks of traditional overt warfare have become unacceptably high.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
>but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters. Education?
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  College degree here, I have no idea what it actually means.
IAmNotACellist 2y ago
"Grey zone conflict" sounds a lot like our powers are upset they don't have the level of control over information that the adversary has. They want to be the ones to censor, suppress, and promote, rather than another country. The goal isn't more open access to information.
- alwa 2y ago
  “More open access to information” is not the adversary’s goal, either. Is that goal served by preserving the adversary’s control over the information environment?
- deepsun 2y ago
  Whether they want or not, they cannot. The democratic system, even deficient as one in US, still does its job and works against blatant information suppression.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Huh?
- raverbashing 2y ago
  You are not wrong per se > This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters Looks like you're just confirming what OP said Might as well look up the definition of "5th column"
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- red_admiral 2y ago
  I think it's more the other way round, that they don't want others to have the same powers they do? If you control the "last mile" infrastructure, you have a pretty good idea what's going on. If you control the mobile network, you can track everyone, and flash their baseband processor if you like. (see also: concerns about Huawei equipment in our internet infrastructure) The documents that Snowden released confirmed that this kind of thing was going on. To be honest, I don't think that really surprised anyone in the security community. We just don't want China to have the same power to monitor our citizens as we have ourselves.
  - paweladamczuk 2y ago
    > and flash their baseband processor if you like Could you please give some source on that info?
    - red_admiral 2y ago
      All the real documentation for this is likely to be classified, but here's a backdoor: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-find-and-close-samsung-galaxy-backdoor https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-fin... a patent for doing it in "civilian" applications: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2013114317A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2013114317A1/en sure, the NSA will respect that
      - paweladamczuk 2y ago
        Well damn. I had a vague feeling that something like that was possible, but this is eye opening, thank you.
  - surfaceofthesun 2y ago
    In the US we allow significantly more spying on foreigners than US citizens. That’s not as controversial as domestic spying. Look at the backlash against the US government trying to clamp down on Covid misinformation with a national emergency declaration [1]. There’s exactly zero reason to expect the CCP has an incentive to behave differently, especially when there’s effectively no way for companies to push back in China. And no that doesn’t excuse the nonsense some US administrations get up to. Like undermining the effectiveness of the Chinese covid vaccine [2]. There is already evidence of pressure being applied to ByteDance by the CCP for data on Hong Kong citizens [3]. So it would be silly to think that: 1) data for different TikTok users is more or less difficult for the CCP to access based on their specific locations (technically or practically) And 2) the CCP has more respect for foreigners than Western governments do. ——— 1 - https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-case-misinformation https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-ca... 2 - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi... 3 - https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-d257d98125f69ac80f983e6067a84911 https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-...
- wolletd 2y ago
  You make it sound like that's generally a negative thing, implying that the information being promoted by other countries is made equal and has some implicit right to be spread. But it's not, it's geopolitic information warfare.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    It is? The problem has no easy solution. At the end of the day, either users are really in control for what they can or they cannot talk about or it's censored one way or another and thus not free. Information war is complex and if we don't allow our foes to express their povs then all we're left is our own manipulated media. If we do allow it we might face a spread of a different kind of information. I wish this was all solved by allowing everybody to spread whatever information and educating citizens since young age about raising a lot of doubt about anything they hear/see in the news/socials. But again this is also complicated on a social media level especially with those auto feeder algorithms that will either push you controversial content because it makes views or just because you stumbled on few videos on the topic so it's gonna push you even further in the hole. In any case there's no simple solution. The issue with China is that our own information and misinformation cannot reach them either. We allowed Russian state media for long on our platforms because they allowed our on theirs too. Reddit or YouTube or X were never banned there. But again 90% of Russians get informed by tv, and the minority that doesn't gets it on VK or other Russian social media.
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      Users aren't in control. Because you can post whatever you want, but the platform decides if it gets seen or not. This is valid for any social media. Is it freedom of speech if there is no freedom of hearing?
  - jajko 2y ago
    So we get down to actual situation - TikTok is way too popular and not under reach nor control. The hell will sooner freeze that me as an European will believe US government is not weaponizing data of all US companies it can get it hands on, and well, it can get hands on all data. That's decade old story at best. For an European, this is really funny, fight for who can control general population more. Don't get me wrong, I consider all social networks a brain and societal cancer, but to claim one is weaponized and the other is not, pinky promise... Snowden, NSA, secret courts and rulings that can't be even made public, recording basically whole internet traffic for further analysis including this comment (maybe apart from youtube traffic). Discussion who is doing worse is then just an academic one, lets make an Excel spreadsheet and compare numbers.
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  It has absolutely made things more difficult not having distinct spheres of information with well defined boundaries. It's genuinely made things much more difficult to plan about. The global Internet absolutely has made a lot of people upset for a lot of reasons that make intuitive sense. That's what growing conservative "anti globalist" movements backed by national security elements are really about. Not ultimately immigration or racism or tax cuts (that's how you get the tubes on board), but about how the inability to keep civilians out of information conflicts has made running countries incredibly difficult. This is one area where China absolutely has the right approach and we need to wake up about what it means in the public rather than complain that we can't scroll silly waste of time videos all the time. The US public is incredibly uneducated about this concept and why it poses a threat, so the discussion needs to be had. I think we should be far more critical of American internet companies as well and quite a few of them should probably be banned because they are creating the same sort of problem w.r.t how we can practically organize a functioning society. That's the unfortunate thing, is a bunch of libertarians in silicon valley a while back decided to invent a business model that could cause a global war.
- op00to 2y ago
  Why drop bombs on your adversary when you can use social media influence to achieve the same ends of reducing productivity? This is far cheaper and gives you plausible deniability.
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  This misunderstands the topic, it literally has nothing to do with information access. The Chinese government invested a lot for decades in R&D around population-scale behavioral manipulation, including running a lot of experiments on their own population. It was an impressive research effort; other countries invest in this too but the Chinese commitment to mastery of it was next level. Not an issue. These capabilities and techniques can make populations wired into it dance like predictable puppets in aggregate but they don’t work that effectively over generic undifferentiated communication channels because humans are too chaotic. It requires tight real-time feedback, control, and instrumentation of the information channels with sufficient critical mass population-wise to matter. Those kinds of tight feedback and control loops under direct control of government systems for constructive manipulation aren’t really a thing at most social media companies. You can spam propaganda but that is qualitatively inferior. Divestiture of TikTok removes the access and control the Chinese government needs to effect outcomes with TikTok beyond typical propaganda and influence operations. Most countries desire this capability but the technical implementation and requirement of sufficiently tight control of the channel has been a formidable barrier. China outright banned any vehicle that had the potential to allow foreign governments to do the same in their own country. All of this has been known and discussed in national security settings for decades. The difficulty of implementation in the real world made it mostly a hypothetical risk at any non-trivial scale until TikTok. The most insidious aspect is that sophisticated operational analytics has made it such that the manipulation may seem completely unrelated to the desired population-scale effect, it is not propaganda in a conventional sense. Done well, the individual never perceives it but the aggregate effect reliably emerges. The extent to which humans can be analytically manipulated in very indirect ways at scale is both fascinating and scary. (Many years ago I used to work on problems related to population-scale operational behavioral analysis. China was on the cutting edge of this research even back then. None of the experimental theory is new, but apparently the tech finally caught up.)
  - DirkH 2y ago
    Do you have reading material you can recommend on this for someone that wants to learn enough to get an informed opinion on this?
Dalewyn 2y ago
>The issue is that TikTok is somewhat unique in being aggressively weaponized in currently very active “grey zone” conflicts. That has been happening since time immemorial. What is actually the issue is that for the first time ever in the post-WW2 Pax Americana era, media is being weaponized by a powerful non-American state (China). America does through Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, CNN, Fox News, PBS, et al. what China does through TikTok. If anything, other countries should also seriously consider banning foreign media and realize insofar as future geopolitics that Pax Americana is ending.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  Didn't the USSR have a pretty good "foreign relations" propaganda team?
  - Applejinx 2y ago
    Has.
- sirisaysgpt 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    I'm not a "China supporter" so much as I am simply stating reality for what it is. America banned TikTok because it's not something America can control, that really is all there is to it. It's even stated right there in the law: Sell TikTok to America and they can do business.
- superjan 2y ago
  According to wikipedia, China is blocking most of the sites you mentioned. I was surprised to see that Russia does not. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_i...
- csomar 2y ago
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
You mean, Romania?
- t-3 2y ago
  That one appears to be an own-goal by an opposing party: https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-liberals-tiktok-campaign-pro-russia-candidate-calin-georgescu/ https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    Interesting, so that doesn't have to be CCP to wield influence over TikTok, anyone can pay to a marketing firm to promote whatever they want.
jmkni 2y ago
You mention “grey zone conflicts” then opine that people don’t know what that is…then don’t actually explain what it is!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  This is the very top of the "Description" section of the Wikipedia page for "Grey-zone (international relations)"[0]: > Use of the term grey-zone is widespread in national security circles, but there is no universal agreement on the definition of grey-zone, or even whether it is a useful term, with views about the term ranging from "faddish" or "vague", to "useful" or "brilliant" It goes on to say: > Grey zone warfare generally means a middle, unclear space that exists between direct conflict and peace in international relations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relations) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relat...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - wickedsight 2y ago
    So it's pretty much a cold war, but we don't want to say that?
    - vanderZwan 2y ago
      I guess "The Cold War" is very specific to a historical period, and the term "grey zone conflict" is a generalization of what went on there. Also the Cold War involved lots of proxy wars, not thing "grey zone conflict" necessarily does. Also, I'm starting to feel like the vagueness of "are we at war or not?" is an intentional feature that gives people in power leverage to gaslight the public. That applies to both cold war and grey zone conflict.
    - angled 2y ago
dp-hackernews 2y ago
Chase Hughes: "Manipulation Playbook: The 20 Indicators of Reality Control" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3AN2wY4qAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3AN2wY4qAM
- mordae 2y ago
  But there is no big conspiracy. Just a lot or small ones.
int_ 2y ago
They can’t manufacture consent anymore regarding false flag wars that only benefit large war profiteering corporations.
- wilg 2y ago
  the problem this law solves is that in tiktok's case the "they" who has the power to manufacture consent is the PRC
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    They don't need to, people share and watch the content voluntarily because it has novel value. "Why wasn't I told this before?" Is a common sentiment in those videos.
    - wilg 2y ago
      often the reason is because it wasn’t true or they were told and weren’t listening!
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  what “false flag” war has the US engaged in? would love a single legit example of a false flag, closest i can think of is gulf of tonkin which was quite some time ago and not actually a false flag. i hate that nationalism is becoming another hyper-polarized topic - now we get people who are ridiculously jingoistic/anti-cosmopolitan and other people who reject fully the notion that a government’s first responsibility is to its own citizens. both are radical views that are no way to govern a well-functioning republic.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Remember when we overthrew Saddam’s government because Iraq had WMDs?
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
nikanj 2y ago
TikTok is somewhat unique in presenting a real, non-us-based competitor to FB/Instagram. A bit of lobbying to block your competitor is a deft move on Mark’s part
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Also a competitor to Google and X.
- airstrike 2y ago
  The ban on TikTok has been in the works since Trump 1.0, way before Musk destroyed Twitter
varsketiz 2y ago
This. I suggest to read Unrestricted Warfare to understand more on how TikTok (or FB, X, Instagram and such) can be used as tools in modern conflict.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Brexit and Trump #1 would've not happened without the likes of Cambridge analytica targeting undecided voters with precision. Social media manipulation has already been effective.
iamnotsure 2y ago
[flagged]
atsjie 2y ago
These arguments become so vague to me that it just feels like an excuse for governments to do whatever they want. Calling it "Grey zone conflict" feels like the "Deep state" shenanigans... It's primarily marketing to achieve your goal. We've seen the invasion of Iraq; that was all based on lies. We got ISIS as a result... "National security circles" look for evidence so it fits their narrative. Like watching FoxNews. It's a very narrowminded funnel of carefully picked pieces of evidence. They are not truth seekers that aim to provide a holistic view of the situation. No, they are scared aged men who love to control the narrative and see danger in everything in the hope to get more funding for their next projects. Btw; banning TikTok is a good thing, but for other reasons entirely.
epolanski 2y ago
Is there solid evidence about that? The only study I've seen said that TikTok wasn't any more biased than other social medias.
- roca 2y ago
  https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tiktoks-content-political-subjects-aligns-chinese-government-study-say-rcna130448 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tiktoks-content-political-subje...
  - epolanski 2y ago
    That's not a scientific study but a report from a no profit and the method and data has not been reviewed. It's not like those hashtags were even banned, so what's the point here? It's also likely that demographics between the apps are different.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    belief laundering, as if “network contagion research institute” is some long-standing research org and not basically an extension of the state like the “Atlantic Council” anyone with half a statistics brain can see the problems in this analysis
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Other ways [0] to think about "grey zone" conflict: cold-war (not an obsolete term) ambient non-linear conflict cyberwar business [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/after-war/ https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/after-war/
pbiggar 2y ago
The "aggressively weaponized in currently very active grey zone conflicts" sounds very very scary! Do you actually mean that young Americans are using it to teach each other about the US-enabled Israeli occupation of Palestine?
- p2detar 2y ago
  A guy in Romania nobody knew existed almost became a president thanks to TikTok [0] last December. Almost every right-wing party in Europe has a huge presence in TikTok, from the Balkans to Western Europe. I guess that’s what they mean. I’m sorry, but not everything on this world is Israel/Palestine. 0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2v13nz202o.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2v13nz202o.amp
  - spacechild1 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - p2detar 2y ago
      [flagged]
dns_snek 2y ago
Do you have any evidence supporting anything you claimed as a matter of fact? "grey zone conflicts", "aggressively weaponized", "national security circles" are just scary/serious sounding phrases that sound a lot more legitimate than I suspect they actually are. AOC published a video talking about how she (and some other representatives) believed that the arguments that were presented to them were just as vague, nonspecific and theoretical as these online arguments I keep reading.
- joenot443 2y ago
  Grey Zone is a pretty well documented concept in geopolitics, it's a fascinating read if you're interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relations) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relat...
- op00to 2y ago
  Gray zone conflicts: Evidence shows that China, Russia, and other foreign governments are actively using social media to manipulate and influence Americans through covert and deceptive tactics. “Aggressively weaponized”: These conflicts rely on information as a primary weapon because it is more cost-effective and impactful than traditional warfare. “National security circles”: This term commonly refers to the U.S. security establishment, including its agencies and defense systems.
- TrackerFF 2y ago
  Well, you have the recent Romanian election. Pro-Russian, right-wing candidate (Calin Georgescu) with zero funding becomes leading candidate overnight. Turns out there's coordinate campaigns to push him on social media channels, like TikTok, where tens of thousands of accounts were opened a couple of weeks prior to polls opening. All pushing Calin. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2v13nz202o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2v13nz202o
  - quotemstr 2y ago
    So what? People freely chose to vote for Calin. He won. Why does it matter how these voters came to their decisions? Deep down, the sorts of people who'd ban TikTok and overturn the Romanian election are those who believe they, not the people collectively, get to weigh the merit of ideas. They see democracy as a rubber stamp for elite consensus. If the rubber stamp malfunctions, it's time to fix it. This attitude is a betrayal of centuries of liberal values that made this country and the west generally what it is today.
buyucu 2y ago
whenever the words ''national security'' appear in a paragraph, what follows next is usually nonsense or propaganda.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago

>but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters. Education?

pandemic_region 2y ago
College degree here, I have no idea what it actually means.

IAmNotACellist 2y ago

"Grey zone conflict" sounds a lot like our powers are upset they don't have the level of control over information that the adversary has. They want to be the ones to censor, suppress, and promote, rather than another country. The goal isn't more open access to information.

alwa 2y ago
“More open access to information” is not the adversary’s goal, either. Is that goal served by preserving the adversary’s control over the information environment?
deepsun 2y ago
Whether they want or not, they cannot. The democratic system, even deficient as one in US, still does its job and works against blatant information suppression.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Huh?
raverbashing 2y ago
You are not wrong per se > This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters Looks like you're just confirming what OP said Might as well look up the definition of "5th column"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
red_admiral 2y ago
I think it's more the other way round, that they don't want others to have the same powers they do? If you control the "last mile" infrastructure, you have a pretty good idea what's going on. If you control the mobile network, you can track everyone, and flash their baseband processor if you like. (see also: concerns about Huawei equipment in our internet infrastructure) The documents that Snowden released confirmed that this kind of thing was going on. To be honest, I don't think that really surprised anyone in the security community. We just don't want China to have the same power to monitor our citizens as we have ourselves.
- paweladamczuk 2y ago
  > and flash their baseband processor if you like Could you please give some source on that info?
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    All the real documentation for this is likely to be classified, but here's a backdoor: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-find-and-close-samsung-galaxy-backdoor https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-fin... a patent for doing it in "civilian" applications: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2013114317A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2013114317A1/en sure, the NSA will respect that
    - paweladamczuk 2y ago
      Well damn. I had a vague feeling that something like that was possible, but this is eye opening, thank you.
- surfaceofthesun 2y ago
  In the US we allow significantly more spying on foreigners than US citizens. That’s not as controversial as domestic spying. Look at the backlash against the US government trying to clamp down on Covid misinformation with a national emergency declaration [1]. There’s exactly zero reason to expect the CCP has an incentive to behave differently, especially when there’s effectively no way for companies to push back in China. And no that doesn’t excuse the nonsense some US administrations get up to. Like undermining the effectiveness of the Chinese covid vaccine [2]. There is already evidence of pressure being applied to ByteDance by the CCP for data on Hong Kong citizens [3]. So it would be silly to think that: 1) data for different TikTok users is more or less difficult for the CCP to access based on their specific locations (technically or practically) And 2) the CCP has more respect for foreigners than Western governments do. ——— 1 - https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-case-misinformation https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-ca... 2 - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi... 3 - https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-d257d98125f69ac80f983e6067a84911 https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-...
wolletd 2y ago
You make it sound like that's generally a negative thing, implying that the information being promoted by other countries is made equal and has some implicit right to be spread. But it's not, it's geopolitic information warfare.
- epolanski 2y ago
  It is? The problem has no easy solution. At the end of the day, either users are really in control for what they can or they cannot talk about or it's censored one way or another and thus not free. Information war is complex and if we don't allow our foes to express their povs then all we're left is our own manipulated media. If we do allow it we might face a spread of a different kind of information. I wish this was all solved by allowing everybody to spread whatever information and educating citizens since young age about raising a lot of doubt about anything they hear/see in the news/socials. But again this is also complicated on a social media level especially with those auto feeder algorithms that will either push you controversial content because it makes views or just because you stumbled on few videos on the topic so it's gonna push you even further in the hole. In any case there's no simple solution. The issue with China is that our own information and misinformation cannot reach them either. We allowed Russian state media for long on our platforms because they allowed our on theirs too. Reddit or YouTube or X were never banned there. But again 90% of Russians get informed by tv, and the minority that doesn't gets it on VK or other Russian social media.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    Users aren't in control. Because you can post whatever you want, but the platform decides if it gets seen or not. This is valid for any social media. Is it freedom of speech if there is no freedom of hearing?
- jajko 2y ago
  So we get down to actual situation - TikTok is way too popular and not under reach nor control. The hell will sooner freeze that me as an European will believe US government is not weaponizing data of all US companies it can get it hands on, and well, it can get hands on all data. That's decade old story at best. For an European, this is really funny, fight for who can control general population more. Don't get me wrong, I consider all social networks a brain and societal cancer, but to claim one is weaponized and the other is not, pinky promise... Snowden, NSA, secret courts and rulings that can't be even made public, recording basically whole internet traffic for further analysis including this comment (maybe apart from youtube traffic). Discussion who is doing worse is then just an academic one, lets make an Excel spreadsheet and compare numbers.
zifpanachr23 2y ago
It has absolutely made things more difficult not having distinct spheres of information with well defined boundaries. It's genuinely made things much more difficult to plan about. The global Internet absolutely has made a lot of people upset for a lot of reasons that make intuitive sense. That's what growing conservative "anti globalist" movements backed by national security elements are really about. Not ultimately immigration or racism or tax cuts (that's how you get the tubes on board), but about how the inability to keep civilians out of information conflicts has made running countries incredibly difficult. This is one area where China absolutely has the right approach and we need to wake up about what it means in the public rather than complain that we can't scroll silly waste of time videos all the time. The US public is incredibly uneducated about this concept and why it poses a threat, so the discussion needs to be had. I think we should be far more critical of American internet companies as well and quite a few of them should probably be banned because they are creating the same sort of problem w.r.t how we can practically organize a functioning society. That's the unfortunate thing, is a bunch of libertarians in silicon valley a while back decided to invent a business model that could cause a global war.
op00to 2y ago
Why drop bombs on your adversary when you can use social media influence to achieve the same ends of reducing productivity? This is far cheaper and gives you plausible deniability.
jandrewrogers 2y ago
This misunderstands the topic, it literally has nothing to do with information access. The Chinese government invested a lot for decades in R&D around population-scale behavioral manipulation, including running a lot of experiments on their own population. It was an impressive research effort; other countries invest in this too but the Chinese commitment to mastery of it was next level. Not an issue. These capabilities and techniques can make populations wired into it dance like predictable puppets in aggregate but they don’t work that effectively over generic undifferentiated communication channels because humans are too chaotic. It requires tight real-time feedback, control, and instrumentation of the information channels with sufficient critical mass population-wise to matter. Those kinds of tight feedback and control loops under direct control of government systems for constructive manipulation aren’t really a thing at most social media companies. You can spam propaganda but that is qualitatively inferior. Divestiture of TikTok removes the access and control the Chinese government needs to effect outcomes with TikTok beyond typical propaganda and influence operations. Most countries desire this capability but the technical implementation and requirement of sufficiently tight control of the channel has been a formidable barrier. China outright banned any vehicle that had the potential to allow foreign governments to do the same in their own country. All of this has been known and discussed in national security settings for decades. The difficulty of implementation in the real world made it mostly a hypothetical risk at any non-trivial scale until TikTok. The most insidious aspect is that sophisticated operational analytics has made it such that the manipulation may seem completely unrelated to the desired population-scale effect, it is not propaganda in a conventional sense. Done well, the individual never perceives it but the aggregate effect reliably emerges. The extent to which humans can be analytically manipulated in very indirect ways at scale is both fascinating and scary. (Many years ago I used to work on problems related to population-scale operational behavioral analysis. China was on the cutting edge of this research even back then. None of the experimental theory is new, but apparently the tech finally caught up.)
- DirkH 2y ago
  Do you have reading material you can recommend on this for someone that wants to learn enough to get an informed opinion on this?

Dalewyn 2y ago

>The issue is that TikTok is somewhat unique in being aggressively weaponized in currently very active “grey zone” conflicts. That has been happening since time immemorial. What is actually the issue is that for the first time ever in the post-WW2 Pax Americana era, media is being weaponized by a powerful non-American state (China). America does through Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, CNN, Fox News, PBS, et al. what China does through TikTok. If anything, other countries should also seriously consider banning foreign media and realize insofar as future geopolitics that Pax Americana is ending.

red_admiral 2y ago
Didn't the USSR have a pretty good "foreign relations" propaganda team?
- Applejinx 2y ago
  Has.
sirisaysgpt 2y ago
[flagged]
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I'm not a "China supporter" so much as I am simply stating reality for what it is. America banned TikTok because it's not something America can control, that really is all there is to it. It's even stated right there in the law: Sell TikTok to America and they can do business.
superjan 2y ago
According to wikipedia, China is blocking most of the sites you mentioned. I was surprised to see that Russia does not. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_i...
csomar 2y ago

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

You mean, Romania?

t-3 2y ago
That one appears to be an own-goal by an opposing party: https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-liberals-tiktok-campaign-pro-russia-candidate-calin-georgescu/ https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  Interesting, so that doesn't have to be CCP to wield influence over TikTok, anyone can pay to a marketing firm to promote whatever they want.

jmkni 2y ago

You mention “grey zone conflicts” then opine that people don’t know what that is…then don’t actually explain what it is!

deleted 2y ago
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Vegenoid 2y ago
This is the very top of the "Description" section of the Wikipedia page for "Grey-zone (international relations)"[0]: > Use of the term grey-zone is widespread in national security circles, but there is no universal agreement on the definition of grey-zone, or even whether it is a useful term, with views about the term ranging from "faddish" or "vague", to "useful" or "brilliant" It goes on to say: > Grey zone warfare generally means a middle, unclear space that exists between direct conflict and peace in international relations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relations) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relat...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- wickedsight 2y ago
  So it's pretty much a cold war, but we don't want to say that?
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    I guess "The Cold War" is very specific to a historical period, and the term "grey zone conflict" is a generalization of what went on there. Also the Cold War involved lots of proxy wars, not thing "grey zone conflict" necessarily does. Also, I'm starting to feel like the vagueness of "are we at war or not?" is an intentional feature that gives people in power leverage to gaslight the public. That applies to both cold war and grey zone conflict.
  - angled 2y ago

dp-hackernews 2y ago

Chase Hughes: "Manipulation Playbook: The 20 Indicators of Reality Control" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3AN2wY4qAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3AN2wY4qAM

mordae 2y ago
But there is no big conspiracy. Just a lot or small ones.

int_ 2y ago

They can’t manufacture consent anymore regarding false flag wars that only benefit large war profiteering corporations.

wilg 2y ago
the problem this law solves is that in tiktok's case the "they" who has the power to manufacture consent is the PRC
- theshrike79 2y ago
  They don't need to, people share and watch the content voluntarily because it has novel value. "Why wasn't I told this before?" Is a common sentiment in those videos.
  - wilg 2y ago
    often the reason is because it wasn’t true or they were told and weren’t listening!
whimsicalism 2y ago
what “false flag” war has the US engaged in? would love a single legit example of a false flag, closest i can think of is gulf of tonkin which was quite some time ago and not actually a false flag. i hate that nationalism is becoming another hyper-polarized topic - now we get people who are ridiculously jingoistic/anti-cosmopolitan and other people who reject fully the notion that a government’s first responsibility is to its own citizens. both are radical views that are no way to govern a well-functioning republic.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Remember when we overthrew Saddam’s government because Iraq had WMDs?
  - whimsicalism 2y ago

nikanj 2y ago

TikTok is somewhat unique in presenting a real, non-us-based competitor to FB/Instagram. A bit of lobbying to block your competitor is a deft move on Mark’s part

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
Also a competitor to Google and X.
airstrike 2y ago
The ban on TikTok has been in the works since Trump 1.0, way before Musk destroyed Twitter

varsketiz 2y ago

This. I suggest to read Unrestricted Warfare to understand more on how TikTok (or FB, X, Instagram and such) can be used as tools in modern conflict.

epolanski 2y ago
Brexit and Trump #1 would've not happened without the likes of Cambridge analytica targeting undecided voters with precision. Social media manipulation has already been effective.

iamnotsure 2y ago

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atsjie 2y ago

These arguments become so vague to me that it just feels like an excuse for governments to do whatever they want. Calling it "Grey zone conflict" feels like the "Deep state" shenanigans... It's primarily marketing to achieve your goal. We've seen the invasion of Iraq; that was all based on lies. We got ISIS as a result... "National security circles" look for evidence so it fits their narrative. Like watching FoxNews. It's a very narrowminded funnel of carefully picked pieces of evidence. They are not truth seekers that aim to provide a holistic view of the situation. No, they are scared aged men who love to control the narrative and see danger in everything in the hope to get more funding for their next projects. Btw; banning TikTok is a good thing, but for other reasons entirely.

epolanski 2y ago

Is there solid evidence about that? The only study I've seen said that TikTok wasn't any more biased than other social medias.

roca 2y ago
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tiktoks-content-political-subjects-aligns-chinese-government-study-say-rcna130448 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tiktoks-content-political-subje...
- epolanski 2y ago
  That's not a scientific study but a report from a no profit and the method and data has not been reviewed. It's not like those hashtags were even banned, so what's the point here? It's also likely that demographics between the apps are different.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  belief laundering, as if “network contagion research institute” is some long-standing research org and not basically an extension of the state like the “Atlantic Council” anyone with half a statistics brain can see the problems in this analysis

nonrandomstring 2y ago

Other ways [0] to think about "grey zone" conflict: cold-war (not an obsolete term) ambient non-linear conflict cyberwar business [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/after-war/ https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/after-war/

pbiggar 2y ago

The "aggressively weaponized in currently very active grey zone conflicts" sounds very very scary! Do you actually mean that young Americans are using it to teach each other about the US-enabled Israeli occupation of Palestine?

p2detar 2y ago
A guy in Romania nobody knew existed almost became a president thanks to TikTok [0] last December. Almost every right-wing party in Europe has a huge presence in TikTok, from the Balkans to Western Europe. I guess that’s what they mean. I’m sorry, but not everything on this world is Israel/Palestine. 0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2v13nz202o.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2v13nz202o.amp
- spacechild1 2y ago
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  - p2detar 2y ago
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dns_snek 2y ago

Do you have any evidence supporting anything you claimed as a matter of fact? "grey zone conflicts", "aggressively weaponized", "national security circles" are just scary/serious sounding phrases that sound a lot more legitimate than I suspect they actually are. AOC published a video talking about how she (and some other representatives) believed that the arguments that were presented to them were just as vague, nonspecific and theoretical as these online arguments I keep reading.

joenot443 2y ago
Grey Zone is a pretty well documented concept in geopolitics, it's a fascinating read if you're interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relations) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relat...
op00to 2y ago
Gray zone conflicts: Evidence shows that China, Russia, and other foreign governments are actively using social media to manipulate and influence Americans through covert and deceptive tactics. “Aggressively weaponized”: These conflicts rely on information as a primary weapon because it is more cost-effective and impactful than traditional warfare. “National security circles”: This term commonly refers to the U.S. security establishment, including its agencies and defense systems.
TrackerFF 2y ago
Well, you have the recent Romanian election. Pro-Russian, right-wing candidate (Calin Georgescu) with zero funding becomes leading candidate overnight. Turns out there's coordinate campaigns to push him on social media channels, like TikTok, where tens of thousands of accounts were opened a couple of weeks prior to polls opening. All pushing Calin. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2v13nz202o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2v13nz202o
- quotemstr 2y ago
  So what? People freely chose to vote for Calin. He won. Why does it matter how these voters came to their decisions? Deep down, the sorts of people who'd ban TikTok and overturn the Romanian election are those who believe they, not the people collectively, get to weigh the merit of ideas. They see democracy as a rubber stamp for elite consensus. If the rubber stamp malfunctions, it's time to fix it. This attitude is a betrayal of centuries of liberal values that made this country and the west generally what it is today.

buyucu 2y ago

whenever the words ''national security'' appear in a paragraph, what follows next is usually nonsense or propaganda.