Comment by mark_l_watson
Comment by mark_l_watson 5 days ago
The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
Comment by mark_l_watson 5 days ago
The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
> Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
There's also the degree of relevance. Tiananmen was over a quarter of a century ago. The USA is killing protestors, bombing Venezuela, threatening Greenland now.
The persecution of Uighurs continues apace. Even if it is not allowed to be called genocide on TikTok. The political elements to this are pretty obvious, but conflating two terrible Minneapolis ICE killings in 3 weeks to the horror that occurred in Xinjiang is beyond the pale. While we may go down the authoritarian path with a Clown King, we're still at least 10-15 years behind China.
https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/2024/11/05/uyghur-tiktok-...
China had the less sophisticated tools of groups like the Stasi in that era.. 3 weeks of terror was not much more in retrospect.
Americans who are currently protesting should consider if the apparatus will be subtly manipulating their environment not just in the next months or years but from now on with high quality data it will have perfectly categorized mined and will re-mine.
Does China go around the world invading countries in the name of freedom?
> Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
None of this is propaganda, it's just facts.
What China did to the Han Chinese makes them worse than ANY other modern country. The great leap forward and the cultural revolution have not comparison. Add in the chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 and 1979 invasion of Vietnam and they are butchers and imperialists.
Propaganda can be entirely factual. In fact, the best propaganda is.
I think you're being sarcastic, but just in case you're not
> Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic manipulation of information—including facts, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion, attitudes, and behaviors toward a specific cause, ideology, or agenda.
That might be, but if it's amplified through social media it becomes propaganda.
Example, 99% of people are normal, but if all you see is the 1% that isn't you'll start to believe more than 1% aren't normal. Especially if that 1% is of a recognisable ethnicity / religion / background. This is why there's a shift to the right.
all 3 places you mentioned have been integrated into china longer than the us has been a country
> TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos.
I am responding to the fact US TikTok does not show videos of an armored vehicle driving through a crowd of protesters standing in front of it like the lone man in Tiananmen Square. They are being removed.
This ability to control what information TikTok users are presented with is the reason TikTok was originally banned in the United States.
I am being objective discussion how TikTok is being used as a propaganda tool whether or not I personally agree with China influencing people in South America or whether or not what the United States government is doing to protestors is good or bad. I'm not putting a value on it. I'm pointing out that when I'm in South America and someone links a video in a text message and I start to doom scroll after a while I will start to be introduced to videos of the Unites States government committing violence against Spanish speaking people.
> might be immensely popular in South America
Objectively the current United States regime was hugely popular in Spanish speaking countries like it was in Spanish speaking Florida. Up until a couple months ago, people would tell me how much they support and admire the current regime in the United States. That has changed recently which likely has to do with the content they receive via TikTok which is controlled by the Chinese government which is why it was banned in the United States. After being sold, it is not surprising that the United States is using it the way they accused the Chinese of using it.
On mastodon, with the non-algorithmic feed, following mostly accounts that aren’t particularly political, those things are still at the top of the feed. If you’re not seeing those topics at the top of your feed you’re probably being misled by your algorithm.
Another reason why feed ranking algorithms should be published. If we can see the algorithm we can stop playing these yes/no games. The real enemies are social media companies, not the other side of politics.
> Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
Aren't these recent events? A better example would be showing US atrocities from the last 50 years, but not Chinese.
Or hiding the suffering of Ukranian and Iranian peoples.
I'm in South America.
If I doom scroll TikTok without cookies from a residence in South America, after a while, I will be presented with anti American propaganda showing videos of recent events or people speaking in Spanish about the atrocities that the United States is committing against Spanish speaking people that is recent.
I'm am describing objectively what I see.
The United States didn't want TikTok controlling what is visible to people in the United States so they banned TikTok. Later the United States offered allowing it to be sold to an American company.
Currently, there are two extremely influential forces for people under 25 years old in Spanish speaking Latin America, TikTok, a Chinese company, and an American music artist, Bad Bunny, who likely is the single most influential person in the Spanish speaking world. Let's stay tuned for the Superbowl.
>It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see.
If your prosperity depends on using technocracy to deny 1.3 billion people the ability to communicate and share ideas with your citizens, a few things are true:
1) You have created a digital iron curtain
2) You are doomed because information wants to be free
3) If you succeed the result will be war, the only thing left when communication breaks down
2) Why?
I think some people live in movies where the bad guy always loses. Reality doesn't work this way. Bad situations where information is denied from people can last lifetimes.
With modern technology we may be creating systems that end up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape because you'll be killed the moment your technological monitor realizes you're going to fight back.
"Information wanting to be free" is a concept less rooted in idealism and more in a cynical view of human nature. Even the most closely guarded secrets eventually leak, and as the utility of knowing the secrets increases, the pressure to leak also does. The physical universe itself appears to favor disclosure and abhor secrecy.
>With modern technology we may be creating systems that end up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape
That has been the goal of authoritarians for a long time. Orwell's vision of it involved obliterating even the capacity to think or speak about anti-state themes.
I see people saying this a lot, but I've also seen videos demonstrating that you can easily post and search for Tiananmen Square content. I don't use Tiktok myself but it seems like this is basically untrue.
This will likely depend on the country, I presume it wouldn't work in China.
But this isn't new either, western services operating abroad will often comply with local laws, which includes country or region specific laws on acceptable content. Google pulled out of China for a good while because they didn't want to, but they eventually cracked and complied with their content laws. Of course, by then the competition was dominant already.
> the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles
I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's happened (ever)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbMRywfYiM8&t=105s
e:
1. tracking string removed per request.
2. it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station) segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters out of the way.
Nice subtle twisting of words.
There’s an enormous difference between driving slowly through a crowd of protestors with no injuries versus running over protesters with a tank.
That's some very obtuse thinking.
The US has been applying soft power and hard power in South America - to put it euphemistically, as the most recent US intervention was just days ago - for close to a century. The Chinese... haven't.
Why should people in South America give a shit about Tiananmen or Tibet and at the same time not give a shit about the escalating authoritarian grip of the US regime, which is infinitely more relevant to their lives?
How can you say the Chinese "haven't"? They've been using soft power for some time with Venezuela. They've been importing Venezuelan oil. They have been making loans as well. The loans a are a huge part of "soft power". They've also replaced a lot of items impacted by Trump's tariffs from South America.
Things the US could also do if it unsanctioned them.
I threw my computer off the balcony. I look at a web design business. "No fair!" I think to myself, "if only I had a computer I could have a web design business too!"
I smash the web designer's computer out of spite.
The US could? The US has used soft/hard influence for a long time. We've crop dusted Colombian fields attempting to eradicate cocaine. We've eliminated leaders in Central and South America. We've influenced elections trying to get specific leaders elected. We've sanctioned the shit out of one little island, we blockaded the island when it was allowing itself to be used/influenced by another government we didn't like. We've allowed US corps to invest and build infrastructure within these countries. We've given them millions/billions in various ways including straight cash injections.
I don't know how much more would need to be done for you to think things are being done.
If I was a foreign government I would promote division. For the left promote anti-center truth. For the right, anti-center truth. For the center, anti-wing truth. Recommendation systems do this automatically, they are inherently anti-social. This power needs to be controlled domestically were we can force changes to algorithms if needed.
How about just letting the user choose, instead of foisting your own idea of 'right' on them.
If I was the US blessed feed, let me have it. If I wasn't the Chinese maintained one, why not.
Or, even better, let me make my own! Or use one from an open source that I, the user, trusts.
Hell, EXPOSE THE ALGORITHMS. The simple fact that we can't see the weights, or measure inputs to outputs, means we are in total control of whomever currently holds the reins, and they can literally play God behind the scenes if they have control over enough eyeballs.
China has media laws that would make much of what appears on any sort of Western media platform illegal, so they're obviously going to get a very different experience in China. From anything that might violate social ethics, to clickbait titles - all illegal in China. They've even cracked down on overly effeminate men - 'girly guns' [1] and a million other things I'm not listing here. Basically Western style social media simply is impossible there.
In any case, entirely Western oriented platforms also push brainrot to Western viewers, so I don't think there's any conspiracy so much as just cultural differences.
>Turning Americans stupid might count.
Don't need tiktok for that. Besides, a certain party prefers it that way.
Tribalism is part of the brainrot. Divide and conquer. To paraphrase Carlin, wealth and power are are big club and we ain't in it.
China is less interested in turning Americans into carriers of the red banner, and more interested in sowing political discord and instability. Just like Russia was doing in 2016, creating faux Bernie rallies and organizing them across the street from faux Trump rallies.
Oh bullshit it’s entirely about controlling narratives around Israel, and now that they owe Trump it’s about censoring any opposition as well.
The TikTok ban was always an egregious attack on free speech.
We should let people know how bad politicians are. If everyone knows every time a politician is a mass murderer, it might provide an incentive for politicians to stop mass murdering people.
The general problem is that people think based on relativity.
Suppose there are thousands of law enforcement officials in the US, some minority of them are violent offenders and as a result of that some minority of police shootings are murders rather than legitimate self-defense or protection of the innocent, where the number of annual illegitimate police shootings is somewhere between 2 and 999, and the propensity for those people to be prosecuted is lower than it ought to be. Suppose further that China has over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and is using them as slave labor and subjecting them to forced sterilization.
Is the first one bad? Yes. Is it as bad? Uh, no. But you can present a distorted picture through selective censorship.
Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.
> Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.
It's less legitimate when you don't want a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see on their own platforms. The US for example shouldn't dictate what US users see when they visit www.bbc.co.uk
The just US got mad because a Chinese owned/operated social media platform got massively popular and they just wanted the ability to control and censor it.
> the rest of the world have easy access to.
Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for the rest of the world
Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship" but after some time it seems like the US is aiming for the very same thing. Classy.
A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink.
"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
America: does the usual American thing Americanly
Commentators: What are we, some kind of Asians?
I lived in China as an American a while back and had a similar take. Their ability to grow successfully and manage their populace definitely presented a new model to a lot of countries.
Why blame China? This dire situation is not on foreign nations seeking to destroy US democracy, it's entirely on domestic robber barons capturing the State for their own gains. China has very little soft power among the general population, while Musk, Ellison and the other propagandists run the show.
> Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
An interesting thought I read a couple days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-chin...:
> Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same “if not America, then China” logic applies to political ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian conditions has allowed populism to come to power, bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train. Recoil from that by all means — but recognize that it happened through democratic mechanisms, under freewheeling political conditions.
> Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
If a large outside power is intent on screwing with your populace I think the only way to really stop it is with diplomacy or a crackdown on free speech.
Authoritarianism has been starting to become normalized because China and Russia are increasingly able to mess with our society in the same way our leaders always messed with theirs.
> Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship"
It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do.
This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks.
It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons.
The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
> This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights
Ignoring the magnitude to draw a false equivalence is a great way to discredit your position. Neither party is perfect but only one of them is denying the full personhood of over half the population, having armed men threaten the public with lethal violence over constitutionally-protected activities, or saying that the executive should be able to direct private industries for profit. Debates about things like how much the government should ask private companies to enforce their terms of service are valid but it’s like arguing over a hangnail while you’re having a heart attack.
Police in all states systemically violate it. MAGA ramped it up to 11 though.
"The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media"
I guess in 90ies version of polymarket nobody would have had that result on their bingo sheet. But, well, they probably also didn't have "something like polymarket could exist in the free world" on those bingo cards, either...
Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights. The Trump administration is determined to ignore every single amendment, but even a lot of the Republican party I don't really think wants this. People are genuinely worried about Chinese media control. But Trump obviously wants to control the media and censor things. I hope the right turns around. Assuming that everyone in politics is working in bad faith is how we become an authoritarian country like China. It is hard when the leadership is obviously working in bad faith and the entire Republican party deliberately chooses bad faith and lies over any reasonable alternatives.
> Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights.
I'd like to see evidence of that. A third of the country voted to burn the bill of rights, and another third voted they don't care but they'd be ok with it happening.
TikTok is different in China, but the rest of the world isn’t getting a completely free TikTok.
TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. In the past they haven’t outright censored because that’s too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic will result in very few views.
I wouldn’t be surprised if as part of the transition they’re struggling with the previous methods of simply burying topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step.
The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.
> TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere.
All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users and removed from the front page very soon, just as a similar one[1] was already.
A bunch of people around the world used 小红书 for months when they were worried about a twitter ban.
They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
Well, yes, China doesn't have open media for its citizens. Chinese people will on average be less well informed about China, even accounting for the extent of Americans who choose trashy propaganda channels.
(reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")
western arrogance is truly astounding. somehow people who consume 0 chinese media and cant speak a lick of the language somehow are intricately aware of not only chinese media, but chinese society.
but of course. the benchmark is minor influencer and HN darling naomi wu.
Well you could say that every educated country is far better informed about the US than vice versa.
You could even say that many foreigners are better informed about the US than US citizens are about the US, but that's not a high bar... I mean, 38% still approve of the current administration so that's already over one in three who don't understand the basic functioning of government or the economy.
Knowing is not enough.
We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.
Out of curiosity. What do those videos mean to an average Chinese person?
What are the opinions of illegal immigration over there? How do they police it? (If at all).
Does this look like normal government activity? Or are they appalled at the lack of “freedoms” in America?
I am truly naive on their culture or politics around this and how they would use it to show the US as boogeymen government and how their government is better. Is it a grass isn’t always greener type thing for them or is it a way to actually think we’re evil and should be stopped.
Don't forget that the regular operation of Chinese policing is already much less free than what Americans are used to, plus the restrictions on internal freedom of migration (Hukou, less onerous than it used to be, plus the two SAR of Macao and HK). Mandatory state-issued ID, linked to your phone and bank account and so on.
As well as racial profiling. There's not that much immigration to China in the first place, legal or otherwise.
> Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?
Of course not, but other stuff is.
Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).
probably not, in fact, the CCP likes to promote content that shows the "US in disarray", while simultaneously censoring and suppressing any content that is critical of the CCP or that exposes its bad actions
At least the Chinese are not pretending to be a free democracy.
The population of the DPRK think they are, and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
To be fair, they're not really allowed to show any evidence that they think otherwise...
A lot of American propaganda hasn't been about strict censorship (as in making it strictly impossible to find out about things). It's about shifting the narrative enough. Most people have been made lazy enough to the point they don't read anything, certainly not fringe opinions. As long as people get their Mcdonalds, Soda and TV they won't do much.
I don't think the original intent of the tiktok sale was about censorship as much as it was about the chinese not allowing american platforms in china. Doesn't change that they're trying to use it to its 'fullest'.
No, the rest of the world operates on different servers now.
Interesting. How is it implemented? I opened Tiktok here in Denmark and went to something I, assume, would be in the US and it seems to load fine for me? Do you an example of something I shouldn't be able to view so I can try?
I imagine the same way you would link multiple data centers together. Only they don’t own the US ones OR the algorithm that’s used to suggest content.
EU is coming.
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/cornerstonefinland?lang=en-150
I’m just saying that here in the US we are going to see some funkiness in suggested content soon. Because we hit different servers than you. Even if they are hosted on Oracle Cloud.
It’s really no different than a large org having two clouds that need data synchronized. AWS and Azure for example. Systems Design…
I’m not a TikTok user so I couldn’t recommend content for you to try.
I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?
It's not about legality, its about scrolling and recommendations. Young people see stuff by other young people by default.
Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course they're not being subtle about it.
Yeah, this is where the friction is because it's ambiguous. "Access to" and "promoted by" are not the same thing, especially on platforms where you don't have a pure-chronological feed and all "home screen" content and its ordering is selected by the platform. Leaky, imperfect filters are still filters.
There's 2 orthogonal lanes:
1) A philosophical debate along the lines you've indicated here, how much is it worth to control the algorithm, and how much does that equate to controlling speech.
2) The allegation that current buyers bought it specifically to bring their ideology to the algorithm, however effective or valid you think that is (I think it just hastens TikTok becoming something for "old people").
So I do have easy access to information, and the OP was incorrect?
> its about scrolling and recommendations
Don't scroll and don't take recommendations from these platforms. It's better now that it's American owned, but you really shouldn't have been using it when the Chinese Communist Party owned it.
And I'm only talking about TikTok because that's the OP. I don't use any social media platforms besides LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is such a big piece of trash I don't think it matters if anyone uses it.
OP said "buying TikTok was about hiding information from people", and the people who bought TikTok are trying to suppress certain information on TikTok.
Whether you or I think that's effective or not is up for debate, I also avoid social media, but OP made a statement about intentions.
(And, aside, the current intentions appear far more pointed and ideological than when it was owned by ByteDance as a lottery winner with a surprise overseas success, optimizing for youth engagement.)
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
Restating the OP ^
I don't know exactly what the OP intended, and they are welcome to clarify, but based on the words above I read it as selling TikTok is a means of suppressing information that the rest of the world has access to from Americans. I disagree with the notion because what matters is whether or not information is suppressed holistically, not whether or not information is suppressed in a limited manner on a platform. If you think it's a problem, by the way, you should reach out to the EU, China, India, and every other major government that influences what content is posted on social media platforms including but not limited to TikTok.
If you want to argue the US obtaining control of the content from TikTok in America is tantamount to information suppression, you can only do so by also arguing it's true only for people who use TikTok. In which case it's an improvement anyway since the CCP is no longer influencing content.
The chinese government has never physically assaulted me or my neighbors, never used tear gas around the elementary school my family attends. The united states government has. It's interesting to me that you're so certain about your threat model here but I don't share it.
You have easy access in that you can find things if you look for it.
What that commenter means by easy access is that the information is in mainstream sources pushed to people such that you are likely to know about it without having looked.
For example I made a comment here on HN recently that immigrants commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people. That sends a segment of Americans into a flying rage even though they have access to that information, they were never going to hear it in their ordinary channels, even if they stick to "mainstream" media.
Right now the Ellison family owns both CBS and the US version of TikTok, so sometimes the connection is kind of literal.
But this complaint is pretty old, I think of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. (Setting aside his Epstein connections for a moment) The way we do censorship is much less the methods of a traditional totalitarian state and more like the private sector policing what is acceptable discourse.
I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?
Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not:
TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source.
An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question).
Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?
> For many users, this is their primary news source.
That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read.
> An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app.
Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone without your best intentions in mind owns your platform. Maybe you should stop using it.
Goalpost moving, this one.
The post you were replying to stated:
> hiding information from the US public
They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public.
Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them.
If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden.
Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.
Nope, didn't move the goalpost, let's set that aside.
> The post you were replying to stated:
Now you're cherry-picking what the OP wrote.
> But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.
I didn't suggest that any of that was an "excuse" for anything - instead I called out that regardless of how TikTok operates you still have access to whatever information you want. If you choose to silo yourself, whether that's TikTok or FoxNews, that doesn't change the fact that you still have access to information.
Reminder of the OP:
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
If what you are suggesting is true, than OP's claim is untrue because all governments and all social media platforms regardless of where they exist or who owns them curate content to some degree and are thus "hiding information from the public".
You can't have it both ways here.
Larry and David Ellison have been buying media outlets and those media outlets have started spiking (or delaying, editing, etc) stories that look bad for Trump. It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it.
This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
> It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it. This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
The 60 Minutes Episode on CECOT aired on Jan 18 and it is also on CBS News' website: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-endur...
And it got a Streisand Effect from the attempted scuttling. That doesn't change what they were trying to do, it just means they're not always executing perfectly.
In the long run, they bought out some dying legacy media in CBS and social media has a short half-life. Nobody's saying they're geniuses but it's clear what they're trying to do.
The fact it was released a month later and only after large internal and external pressure (including a Canadian station just airing it anyway since it was already complete and ready to air) is the problem. These large fights are the sign of a huge change in how it's run, which includes a purposeful political shift. Changes at an organization are slow (all of us software engineers should know this by now) but this is going to be a continual battle and there isn't going to be this fight for every story. We can't see everything an organization is doing as CBS is mostly opaque but from these few public fights (also previous work by these people) we can tell a lot
Nice of you to delete their first sentence which includes "delay". Which is what happened if you read the wikipedia article instead of holding water for propagandists, e.g., Bari Weiss.
It got delayed, didn't it? In the meantime the news cycle moved onto Trump's intervention in Venezuela and even greater ICE violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_postpon...
NPR article about the rest of the right wing spin that's happening at CBS news is pretty insightful: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-sta...
> that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to
The information is everywhere. Visit any news site, open any general social media feed, turn on any TV. We’re discussing it right now in the front page of HN!
Everyone in the US has easy access to the same information. Acting like only the rest of the world has easy access to this information is ridiculous.
I’m not condoning censorship. It’s bad.
I’m saying it’s silly hyperbole to make the leap to implying that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
These absurd claims always turn into a game of motte and bailey when they’re called out, with retreats to safer claims. I’m talking about the original claim, that “people in other countries” have easy access to this information which we, in the US, see everywhere all the time right now (except TikTok apparently).
That information may be readily accessible but if it isn't on the screen you're currently engaged with, it may as well not exist.
I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of people who only use one social media platform and never check any other news source at all.
TikTok users are also known for being experts at evading filters and censors. Remember the rising popularity of “unalived” when talk of suicide was filtered out on the platform?
I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good, because it’s not! I’m saying it’s ridiculous to claim that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
> I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good
I hope not because it’s bad and that’s really all that matters in this conversation. And nitpicking whether or not there are other avenues for information is completely besides the point. I don’t even really understand what point you’re trying to make. If you think this is bad, then say it’s bad and we shouldn’t be ok with it. Saying “I’m not saying it’s good” then muddying the waters reads like you’re trying to defend the action.
> I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of people who only use one social media platform and never check any other news source at all.
When it comes to the _younger generation_, I don't think it's an over-estimation; they don't read news sites at all.
>The information is everywhere.
For those who know to look for it, sure.
For those who do not already know it, discovery is increasingly challenged by the deliberately obscurant curators of the information space, who are oddly tightly and uniformly aligned with special interest groups openly declaring their intent to hide that information and punish dissemination thereof.
The TikTok ban is the hammer, antitrust is the anvil.
Without antitrust regulation, TikTok would have been sold to Meta, and that would be it. We'd have an even worse monopoly (which is not a good thing), but at least we wouldn't have this. With such regulations present, the US government both forced a sale and disallowed a sale to anybody who they didn't like, basically forcing TikTok to choose a government-approved partner. What did that partner do to become government approved? We'll never know.
Antitrust in the US (and GDPR in Europe) give regulators wide latitude over who to prosecute and for what. This makes it much easier to do under-the-table deals to achieve objectives that you can't or don't want to achieve by regulation, like restricting free speech.
Subjecting companies to such regulation was ok when it was about transporting cattle or selling bricks, but giving governments the ability to regulate companies that have a wide impact on speech, even if the regulations don't seem to have anything to do with speech, is just asking for trouble.
> but at least we wouldn't have this
I think you might have forgotten recent moves from Meta about removal of moderation, relaxing rules on hate speech, settling lawsuits with Trump and similar moves that imply they wouldn't really fight hard against what this administration wants.
It's pretty clear this is a misuse of antitrust. Actually the details of these deals have very little to do with antitrust, it's likely simplecorruption. Antitrust might be used as a cover for those deals, not the other way around. The prevention of monopolies is one of the few regulations necessary for meritocratic capitalism to thrive.
I wonder where all the TikTok videos are about all the tanks and hotel shoot outs in Beijing over the last week or so are… where various party factions fought it out over control of the central committee and you have the disappearance of various generals in the PLA.
I was able to find this pretty quickly:
Zhang Youxia Arrested After Failed Coup; Gunfight Allegedly Occurred at Jingxi Hotel in Western Beijing (https://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2026/01/25/1130776.h...)
Oh nice, what would the coup be about? Would it be for something closer to western interests or would it be about because theyre too far from marxism, like when the students at Tiananmen Square were trying to democratically vote in more marxism but the Americans only saw democratically
Most Americans are unaware of how China is collapsing. All news is censored.
tiktok always censored, it's just now it censors anti-Trump content instead of anti-CCP content [1]
both are bad, I liked when tiktok was supposed to be just "banned". it's always been a tool for repressive governments
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/tiktok-huawei-surveil...
TikTok was the only popular platform where you could doomscroll and see bad things the US is doing. All others censored it to please the administration. And now TikTok does too.
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
No, at least during the Biden administration when the law was passed, it wasn't.
This shit is a lot more complicated that a hot take based on today's news.
Forcing the sale of TikTok predates the current war in Gaza by a good bit. It's obviously a complex thing that encompassed a bunch of different people with different motivations. And considering there is pro-Palestinian videos all over American social media, I don't think it is kind of absurd to think this was the motivation.
It started out with the "China bad" narrative, but it only got bipartisan support and momentum when US people started seeing Palestinian videos on TikTok.
What kind of cyber warfare? Just knowing what kidz today are into? Or is it an actual malware? Is it targeting certain people?
I'm sure it leaks privacy like crazy, just like any other social app. I'm just still unclear on just how useful it would be, and whether that really merited intervention at the very highest levels.
Something along the lines of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywxENdhYoXw
The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is about stealing China's cyberweapon so our own elites can use it.
> believe the government has no right to deport convicted criminals who are in the country illegally.
You mean execute American citizens in broad daylight in the middle of the street? Because that's what they are doing. Or tell me, what crimes did the 5 year old they kidnapped commit?
For most, the deportation of criminals isn’t the issue. It’s the process and methodology being employed people are disagreeing with. It’s creating unconstitutional situations and chaos/death in the streets.
People like you overwhelmingly misunderstand the position of others and in making incorrect assessments create more noise to divide the nation further. You try it is “criminal” to lump together the cartel death squad and MS13 street gang type people together into the same cohort as people who simply came here illegally and have lived here peacefully even contributing to our society and economy positively.
How is uploading video of Ice related operations brain washing?
Americans have racistly insinuated that asians brainwash our sweet young people since the Korean War when we killed 20% of North Korea. POWs were treated somewhat humanely and educated by Korean communists, many of them denounced the United States for criminality. This led to a CIA program to try to replicate "brainwashing" including eventually the MKULTRA program.
This kind of history resonates today as you can see people continue to make these kinds of accusations because we are the good guys and revealing derogatory information about our society is basically treason.
Rights don't actually exist. That's a made-up idea to avoid the very real concept of human needs and putting liberation into that context.
The issue is you can't easily justify oppressing people if you have a finite checklist of needs. You clearly can if you use a nebulous debatable term like "rights".
It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see. If you are in a South American country using a residential IP in new incognito session, doom scroll, after the initial disturbing content, you will start to notice videos of the United States government physically attacking people born in the country of the residential IP address.
The TikTok algorithm in South America. Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
The most brutally honest propaganda is always the most effective propaganda.