7 ms·

> the rest of the world have easy access to. Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for the rest of the world

LauraMedia 8mo ago
Which is basically what the US also wants.
- Swoerd123 8mo ago
  except with a different brand of fascism.
embedding-shape 8mo ago
Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship" but after some time it seems like the US is aiming for the very same thing. Classy.
- mc32 8mo ago
  I mean, they say it’s not censorship when it’s not the government doing it even when the government has embeds with “suggestions” ala facebook, twitter and reddit somewhere around 2020…
- Gud 8mo ago
  It’s more sinister than simple censorship. The point is brainwashing.
  - xanthor 8mo ago
    How do you know that conclusion is not the product of brainwashing? MKULTRA is just what we know about with certainty.
    - Gud 8mo ago
      I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with the powerful.
      - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
        > I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with the powerful. This kind of narrative is actually one of the more popular forms of propaganda. "We are the side of the revolutionaries. The status quo is wrong but only about the things we want to change and not the things we want to stay the same. Powerful people are our opponents." All politics is about opposing powerful people, because if they weren't powerful then it would be easy to defeat them. But there are different groups of powerful people, with different interests, and then it rather matters which ones you align yourself with on a given issue. And if it's always the same ones then you're doing partisanship rather than reasoning.
        Gud 8mo ago
        I didn't say I was a revolutionary. I am observing the world.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
    - steve1977 8mo ago
      Hard to tell for sure, but one data point might be that most people outside of the US probably come to the same conclusion.
  - autoexec 8mo ago
    Censorship is just a form of brainwashing.
- lenerdenator 8mo ago
  Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
  - pydry 8mo ago
    If a large outside power is intent on screwing with your populace I think the only way to really stop it is with diplomacy or a crackdown on free speech. Authoritarianism has been starting to become normalized because China and Russia are increasingly able to mess with our society in the same way our leaders always messed with theirs.
    - mistercheph 8mo ago
      True, true, so true. Actually when a large outside power is screwing with your populace you gotta crackdown on the whole constitution. Yep, that's the only solution i think, sign of the times, I guess!
      - iamnothere 8mo ago
        Unfortunately so. Niceties like civil rights and free elections were great before the rise of mortal enemies like Russia and China. Now we have to curtail those for a time to protect our democracy. Don’t worry, everything will return to normal one day. Pinky swear.
      - fogzen 8mo ago
        The U.S. government has not publicly presented any concrete evidence showing that TikTok has actually been used to influence US public opinion in line with CCP policy.
  - palmotea 8mo ago
    > Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society. An interesting thought I read a couple days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-china-rupture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-chin...: > Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same “if not America, then China” logic applies to political ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian conditions has allowed populism to come to power, bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train. Recoil from that by all means — but recognize that it happened through democratic mechanisms, under freewheeling political conditions. > Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
- pessimizer 8mo ago
  > Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship" It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do. This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks. It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons. The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
  - lukeschlather 8mo ago
    Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights. The Trump administration is determined to ignore every single amendment, but even a lot of the Republican party I don't really think wants this. People are genuinely worried about Chinese media control. But Trump obviously wants to control the media and censor things. I hope the right turns around. Assuming that everyone in politics is working in bad faith is how we become an authoritarian country like China. It is hard when the leadership is obviously working in bad faith and the entire Republican party deliberately chooses bad faith and lies over any reasonable alternatives.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      > Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights. I'd like to see evidence of that. A third of the country voted to burn the bill of rights, and another third voted they don't care but they'd be ok with it happening.
- maest 8mo ago
  A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink. "I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says. "Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them." The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
lambdasquirrel 8mo ago
People in China know. Believe me they know.
- prmoustache 8mo ago
  Knowing is not enough. We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.
Aurornis 8mo ago
TikTok is different in China, but the rest of the world isn’t getting a completely free TikTok. TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. In the past they haven’t outright censored because that’s too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic will result in very few views. I wouldn’t be surprised if as part of the transition they’re struggling with the previous methods of simply burying topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step. The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  > TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users and removed from the front page very soon, just as a similar one[1] was already. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
  - Aurornis 8mo ago
    > All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). I don't consider user-directed upvotes/downvotes/flags to be in the same category as company or state decided censorship.
    - ryandrake 8mo ago
      The observed effect is the same: A relatively small number of people decide, based on political leanings, what is on-topic and off-topic, on behalf of the rest of the users.
fwip 8mo ago
Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?
- palmotea 8mo ago
  > Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China? Of course not, but other stuff is. Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).
  - fwip 8mo ago
    Then the GP statement is still correct. "The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to."
    - palmotea 8mo ago
      > Then the GP statement is still correct. In the most point-missing, technical kind of way.
      - fwip 8mo ago
        No? The point is that the US government made this deal with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like. Saying "But China also censors!" is the one missing the point.
        palmotea 8mo ago
        > No? The point is that the US government made this deal with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like. That's too black and white. The Tiktok sale isn't just one thing by one actor for one reason, it's more complicated. There's the Biden administration bill, there's Trump's deal implementing it, etc. I don't think the bill that forced the sale was passed "so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like." Before Trump got involved, it was heading for a straight blackout (which IMHO would have been better for everyone).
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
aprentic 8mo ago
A bunch of people around the world used 小红书 for months when they were worried about a twitter ban. They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
- contagiousflow 8mo ago
  Well you could say that every educated country is far better informed about the US than vice versa.
  - mikepurvis 8mo ago
    You could even say that many foreigners are better informed about the US than US citizens are about the US, but that's not a high bar... I mean, 38% still approve of the current administration so that's already over one in three who don't understand the basic functioning of government or the economy.
    - aprentic 8mo ago
      I think foreigners tend to be better informed than the locals wherever you go. As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice as many countries as the locals. They picked up their lives, often learned a second language, and established a home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly motivated people. In many cases, they know more about the country than the locals do because they've traveled all over said country while the locals never left their home town. edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than where they currently live. I'm not referring to people who only know about a country through hearsay.
      - mikepurvis 8mo ago
        Yeah, it took me a moment to clue in, but I think maybe "expat" is the more common term there. In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to people who live outside the US just purely based on media diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian, etc.
PearlRiver 8mo ago
At least the Chinese are not pretending to be a free democracy.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  The population of the DPRK think they are, and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
  - bigfishrunning 8mo ago
    To be fair, they're not really allowed to show any evidence that they think otherwise...

LauraMedia 8mo ago

Which is basically what the US also wants.

Swoerd123 8mo ago
except with a different brand of fascism.

embedding-shape 8mo ago

Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship" but after some time it seems like the US is aiming for the very same thing. Classy.

mc32 8mo ago
I mean, they say it’s not censorship when it’s not the government doing it even when the government has embeds with “suggestions” ala facebook, twitter and reddit somewhere around 2020…
Gud 8mo ago
It’s more sinister than simple censorship. The point is brainwashing.
- xanthor 8mo ago
  How do you know that conclusion is not the product of brainwashing? MKULTRA is just what we know about with certainty.
  - Gud 8mo ago
    I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with the powerful.
    - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      > I am an open minded, well traveled man. I disagree with the powerful. This kind of narrative is actually one of the more popular forms of propaganda. "We are the side of the revolutionaries. The status quo is wrong but only about the things we want to change and not the things we want to stay the same. Powerful people are our opponents." All politics is about opposing powerful people, because if they weren't powerful then it would be easy to defeat them. But there are different groups of powerful people, with different interests, and then it rather matters which ones you align yourself with on a given issue. And if it's always the same ones then you're doing partisanship rather than reasoning.
      - Gud 8mo ago
        I didn't say I was a revolutionary. I am observing the world.
        deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
  - steve1977 8mo ago
    Hard to tell for sure, but one data point might be that most people outside of the US probably come to the same conclusion.
- autoexec 8mo ago
  Censorship is just a form of brainwashing.
lenerdenator 8mo ago
Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
- pydry 8mo ago
  If a large outside power is intent on screwing with your populace I think the only way to really stop it is with diplomacy or a crackdown on free speech. Authoritarianism has been starting to become normalized because China and Russia are increasingly able to mess with our society in the same way our leaders always messed with theirs.
  - mistercheph 8mo ago
    True, true, so true. Actually when a large outside power is screwing with your populace you gotta crackdown on the whole constitution. Yep, that's the only solution i think, sign of the times, I guess!
    - iamnothere 8mo ago
      Unfortunately so. Niceties like civil rights and free elections were great before the rise of mortal enemies like Russia and China. Now we have to curtail those for a time to protect our democracy. Don’t worry, everything will return to normal one day. Pinky swear.
    - fogzen 8mo ago
      The U.S. government has not publicly presented any concrete evidence showing that TikTok has actually been used to influence US public opinion in line with CCP policy.
- palmotea 8mo ago
  > Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society. An interesting thought I read a couple days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-china-rupture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-chin...: > Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same “if not America, then China” logic applies to political ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian conditions has allowed populism to come to power, bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train. Recoil from that by all means — but recognize that it happened through democratic mechanisms, under freewheeling political conditions. > Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
pessimizer 8mo ago
> Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship" It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do. This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks. It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons. The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
- lukeschlather 8mo ago
  Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights. The Trump administration is determined to ignore every single amendment, but even a lot of the Republican party I don't really think wants this. People are genuinely worried about Chinese media control. But Trump obviously wants to control the media and censor things. I hope the right turns around. Assuming that everyone in politics is working in bad faith is how we become an authoritarian country like China. It is hard when the leadership is obviously working in bad faith and the entire Republican party deliberately chooses bad faith and lies over any reasonable alternatives.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    > Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights. I'd like to see evidence of that. A third of the country voted to burn the bill of rights, and another third voted they don't care but they'd be ok with it happening.
maest 8mo ago
A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink. "I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says. "Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them." The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."

lambdasquirrel 8mo ago

People in China know. Believe me they know.

prmoustache 8mo ago
Knowing is not enough. We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.

Aurornis 8mo ago

TikTok is different in China, but the rest of the world isn’t getting a completely free TikTok. TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. In the past they haven’t outright censored because that’s too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic will result in very few views. I wouldn’t be surprised if as part of the transition they’re struggling with the previous methods of simply burying topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step. The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.

ryandrake 8mo ago
> TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users and removed from the front page very soon, just as a similar one[1] was already. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  > All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). I don't consider user-directed upvotes/downvotes/flags to be in the same category as company or state decided censorship.
  - ryandrake 8mo ago
    The observed effect is the same: A relatively small number of people decide, based on political leanings, what is on-topic and off-topic, on behalf of the rest of the users.

fwip 8mo ago

Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?

palmotea 8mo ago
> Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China? Of course not, but other stuff is. Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).
- fwip 8mo ago
  Then the GP statement is still correct. "The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to."
  - palmotea 8mo ago
    > Then the GP statement is still correct. In the most point-missing, technical kind of way.
    - fwip 8mo ago
      No? The point is that the US government made this deal with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like. Saying "But China also censors!" is the one missing the point.
      - palmotea 8mo ago
        > No? The point is that the US government made this deal with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like. That's too black and white. The Tiktok sale isn't just one thing by one actor for one reason, it's more complicated. There's the Biden administration bill, there's Trump's deal implementing it, etc. I don't think the bill that forced the sale was passed "so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like." Before Trump got involved, it was heading for a straight blackout (which IMHO would have been better for everyone).

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

aprentic 8mo ago

A bunch of people around the world used 小红书 for months when they were worried about a twitter ban. They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.

contagiousflow 8mo ago
Well you could say that every educated country is far better informed about the US than vice versa.
- mikepurvis 8mo ago
  You could even say that many foreigners are better informed about the US than US citizens are about the US, but that's not a high bar... I mean, 38% still approve of the current administration so that's already over one in three who don't understand the basic functioning of government or the economy.
  - aprentic 8mo ago
    I think foreigners tend to be better informed than the locals wherever you go. As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice as many countries as the locals. They picked up their lives, often learned a second language, and established a home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly motivated people. In many cases, they know more about the country than the locals do because they've traveled all over said country while the locals never left their home town. edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than where they currently live. I'm not referring to people who only know about a country through hearsay.
    - mikepurvis 8mo ago
      Yeah, it took me a moment to clue in, but I think maybe "expat" is the more common term there. In any case, I think it also applies to some degree to people who live outside the US just purely based on media diet. We all see clips of CNN and MSNBC and Fox on YouTube, but a person elsewhere will have the additional perspective of BBC, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, The Guardian, etc.

PearlRiver 8mo ago

At least the Chinese are not pretending to be a free democracy.

direwolf20 8mo ago
The population of the DPRK think they are, and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
- bigfishrunning 8mo ago
  To be fair, they're not really allowed to show any evidence that they think otherwise...