Comment by lenerdenator 4 days ago
It's generally not wise to let your geopolitical rival have extensive influence over your populace, which is why CCP doesn't let American companies like Meta operate in China.
Turnabout is fair play.
The usual story, it is OK for the Americans to have military bases all around the world, much less so when it comes to any other countries.
All of those military bases are there in partnership with and at the invitation of the host country. The US doesn't just slap down a base in Poland and say "deal with it."
You mean the Government of the host country, not the people.
See: 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War.
Well the alternative, in realpolitik terms, is having everything owned by Chinese companies.
I suppose they're free to pick.
Absent any of these conversations is, in my experience, any notion of what exactly China aims to achieve with TikTok that is so sinister? I'm not even arguing, I wouldn't doubt China has plans or another that involve America, specifically that wouldn't be too great for America, I'm just struggling to connect TikTok to any of them, and any discussion seems to take it as granted that the shifty Chinese government is up to something with it.
So it's several things. Bear with me because finding news reports that I remember is difficult now because search results are flooded with stuff about the ban so I can't find what I'm looking for.
One concern is a general one that the Chinese government is directing the recommendation algorithms to act as propaganda. So subtly shifting user's opinions in favor of things that suit it and away from things that don't.
Another is that it is using TikTok to surveil journalists, emigres, and other persons of interest who are using TikTok. My understanding is there are credible reports of journalists being targeted by the Chinese government, where they used TikTok to find their personal details, location, etc.
There's also been increasing reports of the Chinese government operating detention centers in the US and other countries, where they bring kidnapped Chinese nationals. Basically arresting nationals on foreign soil. In some of these cases at least TikTok has been implicated as the method of locating them etc.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/764194/intelligence-officials...
Discussion of this has all been out there over the years, but the way it's been covered has admittedly been weird. Maybe this is yet another sign of a fractured media landscape, but I think some of it has to do with the US not doing a great job of publicizing some things, possibly because it involves intelligence services.
I'm generally very in favor of unfettered freedom of speech, but have mixed feelings about this case. I guess I still side on that, and am skeptical about a ban, but this is getting into different territory and also don't feel strongly about it. I think the effects of foreign (and domestic) propaganda in social networks are very real, and although I generally think censorship is a very bad idea, I'm not sure I can blame a country for wanting an app banned if there's solid information that another country is using it in this way; it seems to be in this gray area of espionage versus free speech which is kind of an unusual territory to be in. Also, I'm fully aware that the US probably does similar things, but two wrongs don't really make a right to me, and if China produced solid evidence of the US doing something similar I wouldn't blame them for banning something either on similar grounds.
To me this all just maybe speaks to the need for a shift to open decentralized social network platforms. I realize that's easier said than done, but there's so many examples in the last few years of problems with control of centralized platforms (by private, government, or private-government combinations) leading to huge problems, either in reality or in appearance (which can sometimes be almost as equally concerning).
So literally all the same things the US does, but because China's doing it, now it's wrong. Got it.
I am being glib but I do want it understood that I appreciate the nuance and documentation you put the work into to show. It's just that, literally every one of these I already know about the United States doing so the outrage on it's part feels incredibly, hilariously hypocritical.
How can this be surprising?
If you identify, contemplate, and sometimes activate an attack vector against rivals, how could you possibly be dumb enough to leave yourself exposed to the same attack?
Also, note that China has blocked this attack vector from the US.
So how colossally dumb would it be for the US to not reciprocally block this attack vector from China?
Hypocrisy is irrelevant. Attack vectors are real.
If these things are truly happening -- especially the alleged arrests on US soil -- then that should be really easy to demonstrate to the American people. That the government hasn't bothered to prove the allegations is telling.
Of course, if the allegations were proven, the people would demand more action than merely banning a video app. Action which would have an huge negative impact the economy and would be unpopular among the powerful. So maybe that's why they haven't bothered?
Oh, you could probably make some effective arguments that they're using it to influence American thought in a way that's designed to diminish the US as a world power through internal strife.
Israel/Hamas would probably be an example.
Its clear to anyone that's looking that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide
I mean, I'm not on TikTok at all and Israel is committing a genocide. China didn't tell me that, the Israeli's killing Palestinians en masse told me that. Because that's what the word "genocide" means.
It seems to be if the US Government wants not to be associated with a genocide-committing country they should just... do that. TikTok might have the largest share of the pro-Palestine mood as it were, but like... it's on all the platforms. Because again... they're committing a genocide, and filming it.
I would argue that even though you're not on tiktok, you are being influenced by the narrative that China is pushing. There are numerous genocides happening in the world today. Sudan. China (try talking about THAT one on TikTok...). Why aren't those being treated with equal concern? Because China knows that only the Isreal/Gaza one is a wedge in America, so they push that to sow discord.
What makes this a genocide and not every other war where far more people, including more civilians, died? And at higher ratios of the dead? You can find hundreds of videos of Israel targeting militants, Hamas using schools and hospitals as bases, and more.
Nearly a million died in the Iraq war. In a single battle, Mosul, almost as many were killed as in Gaza, including similar ratios of militants and civilians. In Ukraine, far more have been killed, both combatants and civilians - and Russia clearly targets civilians there, and they started the war (while Hamas started the Gaza war). In Syria, half a million died, mostly civilians. Ditto the Lebanese civil war. Ditto the Yemen-Houthi war.
Social disruption. That's plainly clear given that Douyin is prevented from having the destructive content that proliferates on TikTok. Keep your competition mired in anti-inellectualism for a generation and it accelerates the rot.
It's taken for granted that the shifty [any] government is up to something because they always are, 100% of the time. Why would you expect the evil overlords to not be up to something with the big evil brainwashing program that has access to almost everyone on earth?
This but unironically.
Seriously, given all the crazy shit that's been uncovered in the last 20 years — PRISM, Five Eyes, Cambridge Analytica — why would an influence campaign run over one of the world's biggest social networks controlled by the actual, real life authoritarian Big Brother state be the one scenario that crosses the line from plausible to fantasy for you?
I don't necessarily buy the argument that we should play the same game as a communist dictatorship in the name of fairness. If we eat our own dogfood then we ought to conclude that suppression of speech in fact marks a critical weakness of their system. Why not take the free real estate, then, and leave our system's open nature unmolested?
Yes, but then we also need to realise that pretty much the whole world outside of China is 'controlled' by American tech companies (both hardware and software/apps)
So if the US think it is not OK to have something like Tiktok owned by a Chinese company the rest of the world might wonder if it is OK for them to have everything owned by American companies...