Comment by tmnvdb

It's a cool phenomena tbh if I was rich enough to go to college I would love to do a thesis on it

We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering.

We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China

But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering.

And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see

Would they? My understanding is that all their issues stem specifically from dealing in information the government has explicitly classified, rather than simply speech the government doesn't like. You can spend all day ranting about Uncle Sam on the internet, how the President is the worst person ever, etc etc, and the feds really couldn't care less, which is a _sharp_ contrast to China, where you can't share pictures of Winnie the Pooh because some wag once said they thought Xi looked like him.

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

I guess you are trying to muddy the water here by invoking the names of people who are known for their resistance to a certain kind of American misbehaviour. That behaviour is not really the same as the kind of wide-ranging and complete media restrictions we are talking about, but it sounds kind of similar so this is a good way for you to do some whataboutism with extra steps.

If you think that American media is controlled in the same way at the same scale and intensity as Chinese media please provide your arguments for that view explicitly.

Snowden's work doesn't say anything on the matter. The information he released concerned government data collection, not data restriction or manipulation.

US social media companies contributing to widespread social unrest that ultimately led nowhere[0] or created more oppressive Islamic regimes and sectarian violence - well, this seems like an argument against TikTok, not for it.

Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermat...

I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy.

Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.

> Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP

I can't say it's not at all

But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good.

If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now

I've talked abt how CPC doing propaganda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769

ccp bans certain brain rot contents which the algorithms hm happily spreads in the west.

the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.

There is good evidence that topics the CCP does not like are significantly underrepresented compared to other social media platforms.

I would add that if you know the CCP you would be extremely surprised if they did not take such an opportunity for information warfare.

Yes, read about the kind of things employees of TikTok have to agree to. The summary is that they essentially have to uphold the goals of the Chinese government. They also have two different managers, one in America and a second handler from mainland China.

https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...

> "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."

The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse. It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.

What laws did they pass that they didn’t enforce but then threatened to enforce? Because from my perspective that statement smells like bullshit.