Comment by rwarfield

Any country is free to do this.

You think US Meta would relinquish tech to EU Meta? You think they're better then TikTok?

Yeah, we're not buying that story anymore.

Which the United States clearly is trying to become with Mexico, Canada and Denmark, UK and Germany. so far.

>Europe is an ally

Was? Isn't a threat of invasion of Nato territory something that ended that situation.

Sure "it's Trump being an insane dickhead", but y'all elected him, then suspended rule of law for him.

Europe is sitting waiting to be shafted if we don't assume Trump will continue to do the absolute worst, most hostile things. We should be taking the threats of invasion seriously despite them appearing to be a way to, for example, invade Panama and not look as insane as was expected.

> Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella

That's an absolute illusion. And definitely absolutely wrong to call it ally. Most govs don't want to have anything to do with trump, musk and all this bullshit.

Most European countries will basically make no deals or anything for 4 years just like we did last time.

There is a literal war thread open of trump claiming to invade parts of Europe. We are pissed. Not allies

Musk, is a representative of Trump's government, right?

A senior member of Trump's government is trying to mess with our political system - how is this not catastrophic for diplomatic relations, coming on top of the threats to our NATO allies?

I mean under Trump the US becomes less and less of an ally, and more an opportunistic bully.

Right, what i take issue with is that you hear similarly dehumanizing things said about palenstinians on mainstream news outlets in the US every single day (my friends in group chats share thme). I don't think any dehumanizing language like that is a good thing but really hard to act like there isn't asymmetric policies applied here

Can nation states ban email or bittorrent? Entities can be targeted, protocols less so. Where the algorithm is matters.

>Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.

Naturally there is no overt censorship on FB/Meta, but in the wake of October 7th there was a clear difference in what kinds of content was being lifted by the algorithms on both platforms. I think, save for Bella Hadid, you would rarely see "organic" pro-palestine content with millions of views on Instagram, while it was less censored on TikTok.

Human Rights Watch even did a study on it: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

That isn't even a remotely realistic propaganda threat, while tick tock arguably is.

I mean, Chinese people should be allowed to post videos for Americans, the issue is editorialization.

Like how newspapers and other media can use editorial discretion to create the impression that “all reasonable people” hold some opinion X by only publishing the voices of reasonable people who believe X (manufactured consent), social media platforms can do the same thing, but x1000 thanks to automation and personalization (“the algorithm”)

So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms. If the editors are independent, and part of the same public discourse as their readers and authors, then you wind up with a diverse media ecosystem where the liberal machinery of people working out complex issues through public discourse can hopefully still more or less proceed.

If one part of the ecosystem isn’t letting outside voices in, the feedback mechanisms are broken and you don’t have a healthy public discourse anymore. And growing and maintaining a diverse media ecosystem in a society that does still have a healthy public discourse is slow and fragile (as the posts below comparing the risk of books to TikTok observe).

Not at all the same thing.

Comparing books to TikTok algo is like comparing rifles to ICBMs.

This is what people seem to be ignoring: the algorithms are damned near mind reading, and these algos put members of society into separate realities. We would be better off if they were all banned, but at least it should be agreeable that a hostile foreign government should not be allowed to deploy this on Americans without oversight.

> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans

Is the argument itself correct or not? Or do we evaluate it based on motivation, i.e. it's ok when we do it because we have good reasons for it? Sounds like the ends justify the means to me.

The correct approach would be to increase the critical thinking skills of the population, increase transparency, require corporations to make algorithms fair and equitable. Require all feeds to be chronological or some other uniform, fair rule for showing posts. No boosting certain viewpoints, or paid promotions. But these things would bother corporations and politicians in the west as well as the external forces with "bad motivations", so just ban the external social networks.

The EU I think has a better approach, of course made possible because we don't have any powerful social networks of our own, and so nobody lobbies against these rules. I'm sure the DSA and DMA would be different (if they existed at all) if at least one of FAANG was European. Nevertheless, the concept is better.

The US literally controls most of the modern internet.

The argument is probably more correct for Iran banning YouTube than it is for the US banning TikTok.

The chinese government couldn’t care less about tiktok, your brain has been poisoned by usa propaganda against china

Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually. Hospitals running out of medical supplies will hit WAY sooner than your existing 4090 needs to be replaced by a new Taiwanese product.

This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline. Surely you can at least admit this. It's just a battle of propaganda, except China unfortunately has common sense on its side in many of these arenas:

USA should not be spending hundreds of billions maintaining a WW2 power projection strategy, 80 years later.

>We haven't allowed a foreign adversary to own a media company since 1934.

False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_America

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Bush and Bill would still laugh about nailing jelly to the wall

This is real though- the only other bipartisan bill they passed was the "Crucial Communism Bill" ie. a mandate to teach anticommunist propaganda in schools

> But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests?

WTF? In no way do kids have to wear bullet proof vests. That is a very odd statement.

> They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"

They have not literally said that.

TikTok has repeatedly shown to nuke political topics on TikTok that China doesn’t like.

Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

> Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.

Why would we wait for TikTok to continue to have greater and greater social influence before we cut off their propaganda tool? Do we have to wait until Taiwan has been leveled by China? And TikTok is being used to push the narrative that the US must not come to the aid of a peaceful nation being brutally conquered? By then it’s too late.

I was referring only to the desired governance structure of the US algorithms, not the general hedging strategies of billionaires. People can diversify their portfolios in whatever way is most advantageous to them and by whatever means they can get away with across the global financial system.

Citation needed.