Comment by lolinder

I read what you quoted as a matter of fact statement, not an assertion of what is ethically righteous

But with that, I don't agree that it's a fact, maybe the FCC regulates what you broadcast on radio and TV, but if you don't take federal funding, the government doesn't really have a pull in what is created or prompted AFAIK. Journalists in the press pool may trade subservience for access but that's about it.

It can make laws that prohibit or discourage publishing certain content. It can also shape the discourse in such a way that these laws are not viewed as restrictions on free speech.

Yes, this comment makes more sense to me.

>You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.

Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.

So I'm definitely not saying that TikTok itself provides better checks and balances, but TikTok, in an ecosystem of other media providers under different governments, would be a much healthier for civil society.

For example, US social media companies were vital in kicking off the Arab spring. How different would such movements be if they only had access to a media monoculture controlled by their respective regimes?

Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.

> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.

That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment.

But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing".

This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem.

> It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.

Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.

> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government ...

I had a chuckle at the naivety of this statement. Even HN shadow-bans posts here that are perceived as anti-US or pro-Russia / pro-Israel (I am not talking about off-topic political posts, which are against HN rules, but on political threads on Russia - Ukraine and Israel - Palestine conflicts that were allowed by the mods). HN algorithms also give undue preference to western media sources. It is the same with StackExchange (on politics and skeptics SE, for e.g.) where even factual posts countering US propaganda on Russia-Ukraine war or Israel-Palestine conflict is highly discouraged with downvotes or deletion. When complaints were raised about biased moderation, one SE mod even publicly commented that they are under heavy pressure to "moderate" the content on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Let's also not forget that RT . com is now banned on most US social media networks like FB and Youtube. And during COVID pandemic, we saw how the US government strong-armed the social media platform to prevent the spread dubious and unverified news on the disease, its treatment and the vaccines (which was the right thing to do).

I have realised that as a non-westerner (Indian), the political space for me online is continuously shrinking and increasingly suffocating because I refuse to subscribe to the western political black-and-white world view. This is readily apparent when you look at how Americans are shaping these platforms into echo-chambers - Bluesky and Reddit is for American left- content while 9gag and Twitter / X is for the American right- , and whether you want it or not, both of these shove American political content on you.

And how well did kicking them out of the mainstream social platforms to hide them under the rug do? Rumble, Truth Social, Kick, and how many more echo chambers?

You even gave the example of Alex Jones, he was silenced by the mainstream social media sites.

Yes, fake and misleading news is easier to spread than issuing corrections or fact checking, but that doesn't mean that we should pretend they don't exist, because it's NOT working.

EDIT: Mind you, I'm not advocating for what Twitter has essentially become, but hiding away these people is also not working very clearly based on how well things are going.

> How much is astroturfing and illusion can be debated forever, but any positive value is greater than zero.

That's an easy way to toss aside a very damaging attack on the public and freedom, with power unlike anything humanity has seen. I'm not sure what "any positive value is greater than zero" means, other than a mathematical tautology, but I certainly don't accept that social media is a net positive.

> Journalistic integrity and trust in institutions has been sold off for shareholder value.

Your reasoning is circular. You both conclude and use as your premise that they've been sold off.

Sadly, after generations of (mostly) not being sold off, of standing up for freedom and professional journalism, in the last couple of months many of the institutions have capitulated.

Part of the cause is you (and people like you): Serious journalism was a threat to the far right, so they did what they always do: Use a campaign of constant repitition and demonization. They do it also to immigrants, trans people, liberals, Democrats, and individuals they see as threats (including any leading Democrats). Part of that campaign is getting everyone repeating it on social media.

Now we have few reliable sources of news left.

> When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position

I hesitate to reference politics here, but read Nate Silver's writings on what he's termed "the Indigo Blob"[0][1]...

> The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions

When I think back to how things went down during the pandemic, I'm convinced that the "real opinions" that most people held were based on blindly following position of whatever media they were consuming (and that media likely blindly following whatever government messaging).

Actual scientists posting actual statistics?[2] No-one wanted to see the data on who was - and wasn't - at significant risk from Covid.

At one point back then, one of my closest friends bluntly told me in a group chat that I was "a sociopath", despite him knowing that out of the two of us, I'm the one with the science PhD + published papers, and (at least science-wise) he's the layman.

Hey ho, he and I eventually made up...

[0] https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo... [1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/how-the-indigo-blob-runs-a-bluf... [2] https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...

> The Washington Post has changed considerably in the last few months, specifically from being fiercely free to being bought.

I read it every day and hadn't noticed. Can you give examples, beyond having heard of the Presidential Endorsement saga?

> It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication.

Exactly.

It seems the only way to sidestep this growing problem is to create a profit free platform, and view it almost as a utility but is openly owned and controlled by "the people."

The vTaiwan and g0v ("gov zero") projects are relevant starter examples for a newer type of distributed governance:

https://www.stearthinktank.com/post/deconstructing-binary-ci...

It's their legal out against having to research stuff to prevent libel liability. And they can embed social media photos and videos that weren't even from the rights holder to avoid having to clear rights to anything.

That would require legacy reporters to get out on the streets and do some reporting.

Isn’t that what Facebook is supposed to provide? From anecdotal evidence, people are happy to engage in vitriol online that they would never do face to face, real name or not.

Google+ famously instituted real name policies before it was cool. You used to get banned on Facebook for using a nickname but I think drag queens pushed back, god bless.

(2014) https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/28/35...

Why do people insist upon sacrificing anominity and thinking they will get anything in return for it? I could forgive it in the 00s but it is inexcusable in the 20s. Real name policies just causes people to double down more. It has not been a pancaea.

> which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus

Sounds no different to Fox News and CNN to me.

I hate advertising too, but I'd be troubled if it were banned.

Creative + precedence, I like it. How can we get the fediverse enough funding to lobby Congress?

> Absurd. To use just one example, if the US Gov has that mandate, why is extreme gerrymandering allowed?

Because worthwhile barriers to gerrymandering are difficult and complex to construct. Effective barriers would need to be overseen and updated by capable, uncompromised people.

Instead, it is easier for Gov to yield to its political handlers. There are lots of reasons for this; I think those reasons can be grouped together under one human failing:

    No One Anywhere Wants To Clean Their Own House

It’s less Cold War and more population control. The US government refuses to allow for communist sympathizing or class consciousness, and there’s a lot of that on TikTok.

The solution for the other half of the problem is anti-trust divestment of client apps from hosted services. Let TikTok (and Faceboot, and so on) keep their own assortments of services. But the mobile and web apps should be spun out into different companies, only communicating with openly documented APIs that are available for every other developer/user.

This won't solve the issue with propaganda that still manages to be compelling in the court of public opinion, but it will at least level the playing field rather than having such topics inescapably amplified for "engagement" and whatnot. There's definitely a mechanic of people realizing specific social media apps make them feel bad, but as of right now it is extremely hard to switch to an alternative due to the anticompetitive bundling of client presentation software (including "the algorithm") with hosted services (intrinsic Metcalfe's law attractors).

The voting algorithm needs to change so that destructive (negative) campaigning is not so effective.

Duverger's law makes campaigns devolve into undermining and destroying the competition, with the two parties hosting primaries to see which of them can "turn the wheel" the hardest before the general election where they claim "don't worry I won't crash the car!" despite their prior incentives.

If we used plurality voting for the inputs to a decision problem that follows the classic tragedy of the commons, we'd see a similar result. If instead of just {+1, +0, +0, ...} without repeats, we instead voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, ...} cooperation (or at least constructive competitive frameworks) would at least be at parity with destructive and potentially mutually destructive competition.

> It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.

I think it's more likely that it's able to pass muster when the threat is a foreign state. The US may be more limited in what it can do with it's own entities (I don't know for sure) and would probably receive far more push back from the courts if they tried heavy handed measures before going through the proper legislation regulation (as states are doing) or the FBI route(if it were in their realm of bad). The threat that is more concerning than US owned and operated companies getting US citizens to vote for their prefered US president, is a foreign state slowly radicalizing US citizens(without their knowledge it's happening) against themselves (the US), more than voter manipulation.

Expanding this further Europe should ban Chinese AND U.S. social media networks. What’s good for the goose…

Debunked? That article says the election was annulled after evidence of Russian interference was provided.

Anyway Russian interference doesn't usually involve the Kremlin giving money to voters directly (unless you are a citizen of Moldova), but through people in the country willing to sell themselves to Russia. Like "Bogdan Peșchir" in the article who donated €1 million to Tiktok users who promoted Georgescu.

That's the campaign that was hijacked by Russia. The PR company tried (and failed) to use a teasing campaign to promote another candidate without naming him. The Russian bots were commenting with the far-right ultranationalist's candidate name the day before the election under the unsuspecting influencers' videos paid for by the PR company.

In parallel there were other campaigns in the ultranationalist's favour, paid for with crypto.

He's also linked to a former secret service figure¹ who betrayed NATO to the KGB in the '60s, so he's either a FSB trojan, an useful idiot, or both.

1. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihai_Caraman

The "ties" are bots boosting up Georgescu on Kensington Communications' campaign (by adding comments to the videos and reposting it). The PR's company management were dumb enough to do a teaser campaign. Russia used this opportunity to hijack it by using bots that answeed the question describe the profile of your ideal candidate, the subject of the videos paid for by the PR company. The hijackers also used a very similar hastag. Accounts used to hijack the campaign predate Tiktok's launch worldwide. Russia bough dormant accounts and weaponized them to generate over 100M posts in a single day.

The problem is regular people do not fully understand this narrative manipulation mechanism. Not even the infuencers involved in the campaign, or the company that ran it realized who they were promoting until it was too late.

The EU should use this incident to at least fine Tiktok into oblivion, but they're obviously sleeping at the wheel. The Biden Administration, as weak as it has been, has made the correct decision yet again: ban the Chinese propaganda blowhorn.

If you correlate the hacks of anonymous to that you will get an interesting picture to say the least :)

As someone that loves dev stuff it is so beautiful not a single soldier deployed but an entire region destabilized and so many people killed

Although i would never put it past the DoD under Clinton to manipulate an election here and a revolution there, my impression of Silicon Valley during the Arab Spring is a bunch of self congratulatory preening over the power of social media.

I always felt the CIAs greatest trick is letting people credit them with overthrowing governments, a power they don't actually possess, except to tip the scales with a little gun-running. Same with the so called Twitter revolution. Assange and Manning can take credit for leaking the cables, but the anger was domestic and already extant.

Do people have the prerogative to have successful industries? Do people have the prerogative to cheap energy, food, and other life basics? In the US, this is not actually enshrined anywhere, is it? The right to life simply means you roll the dice with life, doesn't it? One might say that even the beggars on the streets are enjoying their right to speech and life as we speak.

Are we afraid to list the topology of our values? A framework for comparing which values are actually superior? That's all I asked for.

Personally I think if China found the right narrative to pinpoint destroy Apple & Tesla, or moved too quickly to capture Taiwanese industry, then the US would seriously contemplate war.

Just out of curiosity, do you think the 2nd amendment obligates the USA to sell foreign enemies any and all weapons?