Hacker News is for technical people. They know this is bullshit. Its not their algo that means anything. Its the data collection and sending it to China/Singapore that is the problem.
- Bytedance's global TikTok app is based out of datacenters in Singapore.
- Bytedance's Chinese Toutiao app is based out of datacenters in China.
Bytedance itself is a Cayman company, so in regards to the Chinese National Intelligence law, TikTok technically isn't required to share data with China nor am I aware of any evidence that they actually do (despite the memes).
> TikTok technically isn't required to share data with China
That can change in a few months. China is drafting Data Security Law whose “broad scope and extraterritorial reach pose particular risks for foreign companies as well as media organizations and their personnel. Most importantly, the Draft Law grants sweeping power in the name of national security to relevant Chinese government officials to access the data itself and regulate (including the powers to prosecute and investigate) data controllers regardless of whether they are located inside or outside China.” [0]
China also just implemented National Security Law in Hong Kong that is also extraterritorial and requires hosting service to provide information to China, regardless of where they are located [1].
Which, if passed, applies to all tech companies in China, including Apple and Amazon (who do comply with the Chinese National Intelligence law already).
ByteDance is legally domiciled in the Cayman islands but it's physical headquarters are in Beijing and it is very much a Chinese company, with its own internal CCP committee.
Which doesn't matter, because Chinese National Intelligence law only applies to subsidiaries that are in-country, not buildings in Beijing and not parent companies in the Caymans. Bytedance has a CCP committee for Toutiao, their in-China subsidiary.
It's same reason why Apple only shares personal user information with the Chinese government about it's Chinese customers, and not Apple's global customers.
Well, that is really strange because I'm fairly sure data centers are distributed around the world instead of being centered in Singapore. APAC peering and bandwidth costs are extremely high compared to EU/NA.
Singapore is ethnically Chinese and historically there have been some cracks. There are some University affiliations with China and Chinese employers in Singapore.
Death of Shane Todd is popular conspiracy theory. You can look it up. There is a very startling difference in the behavior of the suicide note if you look at it carefully.
At the end of the day, if the data doesn't need to be in Singapore, it shouldn't go there. If it does, you know they are up to no good, but don't necessarily understand what they are upto.
I could see a malicious recommendation algorithm being a large problem, but even if that did exist there is no way they would show that. By malicious, I mean one that identifies content and then recommends it in a way that would achieve a goal people would not support TikTok openly supporting. The simplest is if it automatically ranked content as pro or anti China and used that to influence the recommendations, so for two similar pieces of content with regards to what the user has indicated they want to see, the more pro-china one would be shown. A small bias would be hard to detect and wouldn't achieve much for any given person, but given tens of millions of users over a few years and it would cause a noticeable shift. Other options include slightly promoting content that would cause a social/moral decay in targeted countries. Examples of that would include a slight favoritism to content that promotes violence as a means for conflict resolution or a disregard of a users age when deciding to show or allow for upload more purient content. Once again, almost no impact on a single user, but potentially enough to cause a social shift.
That's not to say any of this is happening. I was just coming up with hypothetical ways an intelligent enough recommendation/moderation algorithm could be harmful even without the whole data collection aspect.
Exactly, it's not about relevancy of content, is what it's being done with the data.
I mean unless they are trying to pull the hook of "no you can see we don't give any benefit to pro-ccp/china/anti-western content, so this can't be a ccp propaganda machine!"
We know there's propaganda there, it's on every social media.
The problem is what's being harvested and shared with the CCP.
There may be concerns that TikTok's algorithms manipulate content to push certain trends and control public opinion so hypothetically there could be value in releasing the algorithms. They could also just as easily lie and leave out important sections. At this point there is no point except for empty posturing because no one will trust anything they release.
