Comment by tnt128

I have been coming around to the idea that we should ban all* algorithmic content surfacing.

It's taken a while, but the longer we go down this path, the more clear it seems that it is impossible to design a content algorithm that does not have significant negative cultural side effects. This is not to say that content algorithms don't have benefits; they do. It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.

I think something like asbestos is a good metaphor: Extremely useful, but the long-term risks outweigh any possible gains.

You strained to look past the parent’s point, nowhere did they excuse the private institutions for their part in this; just that a totally unaccountable foreign power having this capability is not ideal.

I guess the counterpoint here is that we have lots of data how external actors (e.g. Russia) is influencing large parts of the political landscape in Europe right now.

> having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us

Dogs kill more Americans than lions, but that doesn't mean that we should be letting people have lions as pets.

I'd personally be happy to see something like Australia's recent restriction of teen use of social media in the US, but bringing that up now is just a whataboutism.

uh... "... worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us"... yet. this is only true because we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation-- up to now, the U.S. has had a monopoloy on social media giants and the like. it is absolutely not guaranteed that this will hold true, and there are many reasons to suspect that it won't be true. given how china views about U.S. sovereignty when it comes to setting up their own (secret) de facto government, police state, etc. on U.S. soil, it would be shocking if they didn't put their thumb on the scale.

and none of that is to say that i agree with the ban-- i think the mere fact of how unamerican, frankly, taking possession of foreign assets for american gain at others' expense is as blatant a signal as possible that we shouldn't be doing it. if we are trying to protect america, western values, etc., if we don't act in accordance with those values, what are we even protecting? the way to protect the american way of life is not through becoming more "unamerican".

in my personal opinion, the so-called "decline of western values", or whatever, has nothing to do with imperialism, nor to do with those values being short-sighted or wrong. it is because of our collective crisis of confidence in these values because of the (many) mistakes we have made along the way. the moral compass still points essentially in the same direction; it's just that for whatever reason we seem to have convinced ourselves that we don't want to go North after all, and instead prefer to just wander around the map aimlessly (all the while shitting on how the compass isn't taking us where we want to go). and so now we have people who unironically defend organizations like Hamas at the expense of the United States as though believing in universal freedom and equality of opportunity is merely a "cultural" value, rather than an absolute one. and, more insanely, that these values are somehow subordinate to the political issue du jour. these values don't give anyone carte blanche to coerce others who don't share them, but the idea that they are somehow subjective or relative-- that they are negotiable-- is the height of insanity.

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> I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.

That's pure, shameless whataboutism, and one that desperately tries to hide the fact that totalitarian regimes are using social media service as a tool to control you and your opinions.

You can bring up any bogeyman you'd like, but you are failing to address the fact that these totalitarian regimes clearly are manipulating you to act against your own best interests.

> A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies.

The nice thing about fiction is that you can make anything sound plausible. Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary. If anything, nihilist platitudes like this that have created a void in civic engagement that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.

"You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions" - the overwhelming majority of HN users would support U.K style ISP blocking of websites and apps deemed hostile to the government.

Endless comments about reciprocity, as if the American citizen doesn't have freedom of expression rights vastly different than Chinese citizens.

Agreed; let's ban social media.

The type of power China has is very different than Zuck's. You aren't going to get taken to a black site for talking about Tianamen Square on Facebook. (or something like the Tusla Race Massacre may be a better example, since that is embarrassing to the US similarly to Tianamen Square in China)

China didn’t ban U.S. apps. it maintains a policy that sets a high bar for foreign operators, such as requiring domestic servers, domestic partners legally responsible for operations, content access and moderation to meet local standards, etc.

U.S. apps and websites simply choose not to operate there due to these requirements.

The U.S. has been complaining about this for years, advocating for a free internet without censorship in the Chinese market. But now that Chinese apps have access to American data, we’ve begun implementing the same measures.

I think the OP is saying that both nations are banning software because of the risks of the software/data collection posing risks to the political stability of each nation. You can obviously say "our reason is better because X", but the outcomes being the same means that there is justification.

Both sides say it's worth banning "Tiktok/Google for granting the CCP/USA the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Chinese/Americans".

Data sovereignty — the idea that every country should protect and prevent its citizens’ data from foreign entities.

We never discussed this seriously before because we held a monopoly on it. For decades, other countries provided us with a direct feed of their data. Only recently have they begun to grasp the ramifications of that.

China never bought into that narrative. They have consistently upheld their data sovereignty policy, requiring foreign entities to host servers within their borders to operate, and that looks like the direction the rest of the world is heading.

I wish for an open world where data & communication flows freely, but it's unclear who can be trusted to wield that power.

The US government has never provided any direct evidence of their claims of CCP puppet-mastery, the whole thing is generally some combination of "Trust me bro" and "Well obviously China's government is gonna control a Chinese company."

Meanwhile China's reasoning for blocking US companies has been eerily similar arguments the entire time. Hard to prove them wrong when we have the major aristocrats of US tech companies completely prostrating themselves at Mar-a-Lago, offering bribes (er, sorry, the going term is "funding inauguration parties") to the incoming administration in broad daylight, staffing themselves with party officials, etc.

Arguably both are right, and it's a shame because the general working class people of both nations have more in common with each other than they do with their ruling classes. I think the thing that terrifies those in authority the most is the idea that the citizenry might realize this if there's enough communication.

You fundamentally misunderstand the rights American citizens have that are being violated. The government doesn't get to decide where it's citizens get their information from. We're supposed to be free to come to our own conclusions even if presented with propaganda and disinformation.

Once the government decides it has the right to curate what media it's citizens are exposed to you are living in a n authoritarian state.

These actions make me more hostile to my country.

Just yesterday the US Senate was holding confirmations for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. For the last 10 years he's been a co-host on a Fox News show.

I suggest making a substantive argument instead of just posting snark.

What are the driving platforms behind the American right wing?

Fox News viewers watched 14 hours/week in 2022. The average US Tikok user spends 10.5 hours/week in the app.

Are you implying that this was a deliberate attempt by an agent to create tourettes-like tics? Are you also asserting that this hypothetical boogieman can do similar attacks on demand because of their understanding of social contagion [1]?

The idea of social networking (or other broadcast or widely disseminated media) being able to influence beliefs or behavior is kind of inarguable. In specific cases there might be causal confusion - whether the media was effective because of existing trends or piggybacked on other phenomena vs. creating the effect directly. But this is a far cry from claiming that it can be deliberately weaponized, or that it is more effective for this purpose than other means of information dissemination.

[1] Social contagion, a phenomenon that long predates the internet