Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stimuli with almost surgical precision, and completely unbeknownst to them. This is uncomfortable to recognize and discuss, so the conversation is sadly reduced to "China/AI is bad/evil" to further foment hate and division.
Regarding your comment about behavioral management at scale. Carl Sagan once said: "If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
It would be interesting to know if this were true in that case.
The US is uniquely oriented around pain elimination. For example, the opioid epidemic ravaging the US after the overprescription of painkillers is absent in most European and Asian countries, because they were not optimizing patient outcomes for pain elimination.
It may also be that working conditions, poverty, lack of vacation, and differences in the practice of medicine, put Americans in more physical and mental pain than the average European, and so are more likely to turn to painkillers.
98% of the population gets its reality from authority (the opinions of the hive being #1). Independent thought is unimaginable. Not even on the table. May as well ask a grain of sand lodged in a eastgoing glacier to consider heading south.
Upvotes and disagreeing comments.. hard to parse. Anyway, my understanding is that Plato’s cave refers to being bamboozled a core lie about the world, and then when someone tells you how you’re wrong they will reject it because they lack the ability or language to process the alternative view, or it conflicts with their identity that they’d rather stay in the world they know. In Plato’s cave, it’s iirc a former prisoner who tells the other prisoners, ie someone they previously trusted. Yet, they are still upset and violently reject his message.
Is that the same statement as Carl Sagan’s? No. I’m just casually associating. To me they both seem to cover the same aspect of human psychology, our core beliefs that basically cannot be altered later in life.
Moreover, it’s really interesting that people only seem to agree about this observation when it comes to other people–they are stuck in their ways, they are beyond salvation. Very few accept that they themselves suffer from this.
Forgive my dusty memory but I think the relation is that most people stay in the cave, not because they enjoy the experience or they're completely ignorant of the sky, they stay because they are unprepared, incapable, or unwilling to leave.
I doubt most people believe that TikTok is valuable to them but I'm sure many find it irresistible once they are hooked.
My understanding of Plato's cave is that it is about the disparity between the ideas in our head and reality. For example, you know what a triangle is, but there is no such thing as a triangle in the world, only imperfect shapes with three sides that approximate a triangle.
This means that it is not "most people stay in the cave" - it is, "we all stay in the cave because it is impossible to bridge the gap between theoretical construct and lived experience, but we all know about both".
Indeed. Like thinking Tiktok is "such a serious danger" while having apps such as Spotify, Snapchat, and Amazon or Meta < anything > installed on our phones, using Google < anything >, or using devices such as "smart-tvs" and computers with Windows OS. Let's not forget the mild tinge of prejudice/racism that colors the messaging.
> People are literally being programmed [...] by the specific triggers
I hate marketing/PR as much as the next person, but have become part of daily life. How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing?
Edit: Rereading your comment I realize you're talking about something else, but I guess the same applies nonetheless.
Can you get rid of it? No. Doing so would result in the loss of many important rights and have unintended consequences. Not even China can get rid of this. BUT that doesn't mean you can't put regulations and limitations on them.
As one example, we may want to make laws that ensure that ads are easily recognizable as ads. I'm referencing Native Advertising. I want to use an example from the NYT[0] that is marked, to give an example of how nefarious this can actually be. The article itself only mentions the show once, in the middle, and mostly discusses women's lives in prison. It would not be surprising to believe that this is not an ad but actually a news story. It is both, but that's why it is nefarious. Is this ad easily recognizable? Even with the notice?
We can talk about dark patterns (native advertising might be one), and prevent many of them. Not allowing for bait and switches. Ensuring that options are easily conveyed. I don't think it matters which side of the political spectrum you're on or many of your philosophical ideals, but tricking people into buying things they don't want or need is not ethical. We live in a specialized world and one person can't be an expert in everything. If the game is supercomputers and teams of psychologists and lawyers against individuals then I think we all know this is an unfair game. We have to talk about how to level this playing field if we want to preserve individual freedoms and safety.
So I know this doesn't really answer your question, and the truth is that I don't have a good answer. I think the topic itself is surprisingly complicated and we need to think carefully about it. The path we're going down clearly isn't acceptable to most people. But overreacting will also be similarly bad. We need to have a tough social conversation and figure out what we want together. We have to learn, a lot, because this is nuanced. We have to be open to being wrong, with a focus on learning and improving rather than asserting our positions (because they are all wrong in some form or another). Which that might be the hardest thing of all, but if we can do this then we can solve a lot more problems. Maybe this is the great filter?
While i think these are ideas worth considering, what I think is the answer is perhaps staring us in the face: put regulatory limits on the amount and kind of data that apps and websites can collect.
The real problem with tiktok is not the CCP; it seems likely in my mind that our own government has equally nefarious techniques at play in other countries, and I think its unfair to single out a single company over this or any other behavior that is otherwise legal.
So cut them off at the knees—make the behavior of tiktok illegal, for them and for any other of the thousands of companies doing basically the same thing. Pointedly i mean the extra-application data collection, cross-checking with third-party data miners (which should be illegal already), and the sorts of things we've just become accustomed to being par for the course.
> put regulatory limits on the amount and kind of data that apps and websites can collect.
Yeah, I would be in full support of this. I think there's a double edged sword that people are playing with and don't see the other edge. Any data that you use to control your population can also be used by an adversary for the same purpose. The same is true about encryption. We have two competing forces in our own government. Blue team and red teams. But we know red team gets a lot more money and is a lot flashier. Focusing all on red team is fun and exciting but makes you a glass cannon.
You would have to make it illegal to show different content to different users. Get rid of "the algorithm" and every website becomes a simple catalog of content.
I also think if you do any moderation of content, you lose your "common carrier" status and become a publisher, responsible for any content you publish.
Anyone every consider making a social media site/app like fb, tiktok, insta, twitter, where the user can control the algo, and or have sum input of the algo, in so much that the user can "control" what they see, still have ads [company gets paid] but the user can control those ads to a certain degree...[sort of like brave browser][but for social media]
Just wondering, not saying data collection is good, but perhaps, if it were more transparent and interactive, people would be more accepting to using and capitalizing on their own data. Value for value, the user gets to decide what data to share, and the company gets to push ads based on known algorithm unique to each user's approved data metrics... perhaps this already exists???
Is this a pipedream? Or a yes, yes, "if you build it, they will come" life changing moment? I need to know, it is important I change my outfit if it's the latter, athletic shorts and a tshirt, (in my opinion) don't convene much confidence when shopping around for angel investors... ;)
So distinguish between, you're seeing this content because a company paid us to show it to users like you, and because users like you watch similar things. what if someone pays to have similar users be shown things that give a certain impression? the advertiser didn't create the content or even choose what content, is it an ad?
how would you enforce that? without open sourcing it you'd have no way of knowing why a thing was recommended. giving access only to the government is not possible.
It's possible in some far future. Just rewire brains of people to ignore any kind of biases and susceptibility to manipulation. This new society would be 1000x times better than what we have now.
Not sure you can eliminate it, but you can certainly reduce the impact and scale by fighting anti-competitive behavior . A major reason this sort of mass manipulation is so lucrative and effective is because you only have operate on a couple of platforms to reach a majority of eyeballs.
It seems to have vanished from curricula and I wonder why. It's not as though anyone stands to benefit from an electorate that is less capable of identifying propaganda.
I feel like a large push from the AD council would be appropriate. (Not sure what the exact message would be) It feels like some of the largest industries rely on the masses being easily programmable. TV, Radio, Billboard, basically advertisements. Most are designed to make you give them your money.
It's easy to spot and ignore when you realize it's happening.
Never before has a foreign entity been able to deliver personalized content at the individual level. Not at this scale. The only way a device could get any more embedded would be through rectal insertion.
Not every problem can be solved. Sometimes the best we can do is mitigate.
[Smart]phones are spyware in every pocket...by design.
> How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing?
Perhaps the first step towards getting rid of it is realizing that it is not "we" who legislate things. That is, not a collective including yourself which has your best interest in mind to a significant extent. "We" have to face the reality in which "they" set up this system - legislatively and commercially.
And I don't mean some evil cabal; you (or me) sometimes participate in the activity of "them". It's just that "we" need to stop identifying "their" actions as what "we" decided to do.
This is not something new. History shows that when the government controls the media, it can control people's opinions and beliefs. The only difference is that now the control over TikTok users' minds is not in the hands of US Government and that's why they are unhappy.
The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis is a great doc on how this took shape in the early 20th century; its primary focus was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud who invented public relations and was a powerful political consultant for many US administrations.
One of his main areas of research was using media as a tool for crowd control... he had a somewhat noble viewpoint about it, believing that large crowds by nature devolved into anarchy: "Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos".
This guy's a big part of the reason America is so deeply screwed. America's eating habits have been artfully manipulated to the point that dietary common sense in the US is likely among the lowest in the Western world.
That the larger the population got, the harder it would be to control, politically or otherwise. That there would be all sorts of competing factions for mindshare and ideology, radicalization, etc, in a fully free society.
He more or less viewed consumerism as a means pacify these tensions, to indirectly exert control... hence the development of closer ties between big business and the government.
Propaganda is such a destructive tool, it's a one way trip. Just being forced to pondering if you have been manipulated in some capacity, for example while working in the offices, is damaging to psyche and undermining someone's sense of the world and even sense of self, but now it's additionally done at literally global scale. We're kicking the ground out from our own feet and adamantly keep searching for a reason everything isn't right.
Correct. The other issue is to not develop pro-CCP rhetoric out of this false dichotomy too. It’s all just varying degrees of social pollution created by some propagandists.
Presumably most viewers have chosen that echo chamber, so it really isn’t the same to compare it.
Also Fox News has only a few million viewers each night e.g. “Fox News Channel coasted to an easy win in prime time Monday night, delivering an average total audience of 2.351 million viewers”.
Reach, cost and effectiveness. Newspapers can't follow you around like social networking sites do. A handful of Twitter/FB accounts can do an amount of damage that newspapers can only dream of.
None of which is to say newspapers are great. After all, Murdoch honed his skills in print media first. Just that they are nowhere near as effective as online
It doesn't. "Propaganda" is a western word for any argument coming from the eastern enemies of the state, and "Brainwashing" is a western word for being convinced by them.
The way we control behavior is by depriving people of unfiltered information, not showing them cat videos and remembering if they liked them.
The modern sense of the word "propaganda" emerged during the first World War to describe information deliberately disseminated to influence political opinion. I'm pretty sure that's still what people mean when they use the word.
Usage then and now also conveys a sense of purposeful distortion or fabrication.
A year ago I saw (and thoroughly enjoyed) an exhibition of 80's arts posters in Spain. What struck me were the description labels, and especially the terminology used. Where the English part described something as "advertising", the Spanish descriptions unashamedly used the word "propaganda".
Let's not fool ourselves. The mechanisms of advertising have been lifted, adapted and further weaponised from war-time propaganda, or as we'd call them these days, influence operations.
...the Spanish descriptions unashamedly used the word "propaganda"
That's not what you think. At the time it was common to use that word instead of publicidad to mean advertising. A construction typical from Latin, propaganda just meant it's made to be propagated, similar to addenda, Amanda or Miranda.
Now it's limited to politics in Spanish too. People working with ads didn't like the connotations of the term, understandably :)
I was pretty amused when I first visited China and saw that the university communications/marketing department translated its name to "Propaganda Department".
You have to actively seek it out, or be told about it. Rather than it being presented in your face the moment you wake up out of bed. Referring to folks so addicted it's the first thing they grab, see all the notifications, and are back at it by morning time.
They don't directly tickle the reward center of the brain like social media does, cf. e.g. "Brain anatomy alterations associated with Social Networking Site (SNS) addiction" [0].
This is by design, btw, cf. e.g. "Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis--and How to Restore Our Sanity " [1]; not itself a primary source but it seems to be well received.
My point being, it's like cigarettes with a message. The message being divisive in all likelihood, in order to override rationality with emotion and increase engagement. [2]
Just look at how people were programmed into believing that masks were bad. At best they could save lives, at worst they were an inconvenience. But some people acted like you had just punched them in the face if you asked them to wear one
And why? Because certain politicians and media outlets decided to randomly make it a political issue, and then suddenly you have people angrily spouting all kinds of crap rather than be slightly inconvenienced and have to smell their own breath
Furthermore you can target specific persons : heads of states, gov personnel, parliament representatives,... and their families, friends. You can get them "conditioned", you can drive them to commit errors for the purpose of black mailing them, etc...
Absolutely correct. Along with the usual reduction, there is also the, "Actually, it's too free speech that is bad we need censorship." Meanwhile, no issues with operant conditioning from the Skinner Box Phone.
When you hear something outrageous on FOX or CNN, you yell "bullshit" at the TV.
When you read the same thing on Facebook and see 20 of your friends positively interacting with the news story and showing their approval, you remain quiet at best, join the lunacy at worst.
What you don't see is the three shadowbanned accounts explaining why it's lunacy.
How much traction could a lawsuit against Reddit, Twitter, etc. have against the practice of banning or shadowbanning?
If a user could show good faith participation, could they claim they've been prohibited from exercising freedom of expression in a public forum?
Suppose someone was banned from a subreddit for their particular hobby or, worse, city or region. This might be the single biggest forum for that person to address their neighbors and peers, and banning could prohibit their ability to find work, housing, opportunities, etc.
Moderators often ban users on a whim. Sometimes they ban users for merely commenting on other items or subreddits that they deem "wrong", and this practice is often automated.
If you can't sue Reddit, could you sue the moderators?
Yes. How close are these platforms to being de facto public squares?
If you're banned from /r/sanfrancisco etc., what do you do? Your voice and ability to participate in the community has been blinded and muffled.
Reddit and Twitter are bigger than Reddit and Twitter. If you're banned, you have less of an ability to participate in modern life. Events, jobs, commentary, and more are gone. There is no alternative, because platforms Hoover up as much as they possibly can.
Ideally these platforms would be protocols, but in the meantime the common carriers that operate them should be held to preserving accessibility.
Moderation isn't easy. It should probably be an order of magnitude more expensive than it already is so that safeguards against "personhood erasure" can be put in place.
You don't want racists, trolls, and bigots spouting hate speech, but you also need to keep the lines open for when these individuals are behaving. Because the pendulum swings and sometimes you find yourself on the other side of the censorship zeitgeist.
Perfectly salient thoughts and people can be memory holed. And that's not just a possibility - it's happening right now.
> If Fox News had a DNA test, it would trace its origins to the Nixon administration. In 1970, political consultant Roger Ailes and other Nixon aides came up with a plan to create a new TV network that would circumvent existing media and provide "pro-administration" coverage to millions. "People are lazy," the aides explained in a memo. "With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you." Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed "our own news" from a network that would lead "a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition."
But they're domestic companies whose staff members, all the way up to the owners and CEOs, are not under threat of disappearance by the totalitarian regime of a hostile state...
Yes, as has been pointed out countless times, the US left would be considered further right than the Nazi party to all you enlightened Europeans. We know, we get it. Doesn’t change the fact that there is something called left wing politics in the US, and it’s considerably different from right wing politics in the US.
This is exactly what Russia did in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The Trump campaign gave voter polling data to Konstatin Kilimnik. Russia then proceeded to exploit Facebook to target swing voters, and Trump won because of 80k voters across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
This is literally just the anti-China "brainwashing" propaganda warmed up for a new paranoid generation. I used to collect John Birch and anti-communist publications from the 50s for their histrionic historical value, but now I'm thinking I should start reprinting them and changing the dates. Both Democrats and Republicans would eat it up.
edit: somehow Cambridge Analytica's bullshit marketing material combined with The Manchurian Candidate in the boomer mind.
> “The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”
> The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured.
> [...]
> Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that “totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing.
If you’re an adult watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day that’s on you to fix. When I was at my “peak”, I was watching 2-3 hours a day and that felt like a lot.
If a kid is watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day, that’s on the parents to fix.
This is like the hot dog man meme. “Who’s responsible for this?” Ultimately you are in control of your eyeballs and your time. Stop watching!
Or not. TikTok is awesome. Watch it 8-10 hours a day if you want.
> Ultimately you are in control of your eyeballs and your time. Stop watching!
There are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars whose sole job is to get you locked into a feedback loop in these apps. We are engineering addiction.
Why would TikTok or FaceBook not engineer addiction? It generates more money for them. If they don't engineer addiction, another company will emerge and engineer addiction.
I think this type of problem has to be solved by the government.
My point was, my parent was in a sense blaming the victim for not peeling their eyes away from the screen when literally millions of dollars of thought and effort went into making sure that they don't.
I agree that in the absence of direct negative consequences it seems unlikely we will see a change in the status quo.
No, to be clear I wasn’t “in a sense” blaming the victim. I’m directly blaming anyone who hates their relationship with TikTok and leaves the app on their phone and continues to watch it.
Do you similarly blame people stuck in abusive relationships or those who abuse substances? You haven't addressed the fact that the app on their phone is an engineered pachinko literally designed to glue you to the screen.
No. Just because I blame one set of victims doesn’t mean I blame all sets of victims.
And I don’t need to address that fact because the root of the issue is the person installing the app. It doesn’t matter how well engineered the pachinko machine is if I can long-press it out of my existence.
You regulate or outlaw products when they negatively impact self or public health or safety.
There's a brief scene on Bojack Horseman involving a commercial for some chicken product. In it, a kid yells at his parents "I don't want to go to school, I want Chicken-4-Dayz!"
Some kids are badly-behaved. They get a lot of validation and reinforcement of their behavior from these platforms, especially since any disciplinary misstep by a parent invites CPS visits. But we should ask why products like "Chicken-4-Dayz" influence children to reject their own actual needs and tone that shit down.
I hear a lot of stories from teachers about teenage boys coming to school exhausted beyond functioning. Child labor abuses from working extra shifts at the factory? No. They're up all night all week playing Call of Duty.
When people opt to consume a product instead of doing the things they need to do to survive past their consumption, it's addiction. All controlled substances have this trait. Given an infinite supply of amphetamines, most people will dehydrate or starve to death.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, possibly because the message is uncomfortably paternalistic if taken to its logical conclusion? I don't think that government should serve the role of surrogate parent but at the same time recognize that there exists substances (physical or otherwise) from which some humans have an incredibly difficult time tearing themselves away once they've been exposed (and there likely exist substances which any of us would find hard to deny after exposure).
At the same time, is it the role of the state to prevent people from realizing their own destruction? And further, what is the role of the state in regulating things that were designed outright to be as addictive as possible?
Many people here have lucrative careers that depend on maintaining the status quo, so heretics are unpopular.
> I don't think that government should serve the role of surrogate parent
Neither do I, but at some point it needs to be a backstop against implosion of the country. We're being subject to the Opium Wars playbook (brought to you by TikTok: China's Revenge).
What purpose does government serve if not doing something to mitigate?
It seems most interested in facilitating this behavior for the sake of economic growth, but that engine is destined to seize. Money in the hands of the middle/lower classes is the oil that keeps it running.
> And further, what is the role of the state in regulating things that were designed outright to be as addictive as possible?
So far we've managed it with alcohol, tobacco, slot machines and hard drugs. The role of the state on this matter is pretty well-defined.
It's also OK to go after the shady character spending all its effort manipulating and spying. I get lots of things do their best to do this, but this is the CCP in your living room. There should be a line somewhere.
OK but if you don’t want the shady character in your living room, don’t let them in. Don’t complain when somebody else doesn’t close the door you left wide open.
Half of the comments in this thread sound like they were written by CCP propaganda chatbots. A dead giveaway is the failure to address the topic at hand and immediately deflect to "but the USA does XYZ too!" No one is disputing such a claim, but that's also not what we're talking about here.
You have to be aware, that many people here are not from USA, and their/our first thought is, that facebook and many others do that too. So for many of us, a foreign entity already has access to our conversations, content, and all the same data now china has from tiktok. For americans it might be different, since until now, it was only their three-letter agencies checking up on them (which technically is even worse, since chinese have a lot less access to those people if they start causing trouble than the local US agencies), and now it's someone else too.. but for "the rest of the world", it's just another country doing the same as has been done before by americans.
If you're bothered by social networks having access to a lot of very personal data, you're late to the game... if you're bothered because it's a different country, then welcome to the club.
> if you're bothered because it's a different country, then welcome to the club.
The issue is which country has access to our very personal data, not simply a "different country". There are many countries whose citizens would trust a foreign government ahead of their own.
Let's say you're an american... and that you're plotting some anti-government movement at home. Which is more problematic... china knowing that, or your own government knowing that?
I live in a small eu country... and as in most other eu countries, any weird request from china (for extradition or whatever) would just get ignored... if US asked... well, just look at assange.
> Let's say you're an american... and that you're plotting some anti-government movement at home. Which is more problematic
Okay and for the hundreds of millions of us who are not, do we prefer our govt knowing about us or the CCP.
I’m not a fan of the USG by any means - I have many many criticisms of the govt and I’ve participated in protests. To put contemporary USG and CCP in the same league is crazy talk.
How is that compared to 20 years ago? Did it get better or worse?
I in no way support the chinese political system, but the one we have in the west (EU for me), made average rent higher than an average pension while buying is impossible for a huge percent of people due to overinflated prices. I used to live in a communist country (still live here, just the country doesn't exist anymore), and out of all the bad things they did, atleast they knew how to build affordable housing.
> and now it's someone else too.. but for "the rest of the world", it's just another country doing the same as has been done before by americans.
As someone from Europe, I strongly disagree. There's a HUGE fucking difference between China having our (western) data compared to the USA. Unsure why you'd even make such a silly argument.
Yes, because you live in the west. Again, that's not true for the rest of the world. I for sure would rather prefer China reading my stuff than the US if I was still living in the middle east, for example.
Why? If you say “fuck Biden” nothing is gonna happen to you. If you say “fuck Xi” then you better hope you never travel to China. There’s a massive difference between east and west and what you say on the internet.
Perhaps change the example to someone in the Middle East saying, "fuck the US" or "down with the US", versus "fuck Biden". I don't think the person from the Middle East would necessarily have an easy time traveling to the US either. In the end there's just different "trigger" words that would make traveling to different countries more difficult.
I'm pretty sure I can say fuck China and still travel there if I live in the middle east unless I'm a particularly vocal critic I guess. Saying down with the US can get you on a no fly list too by the way, if you live in the middle east. And whatever I say about China won't get me droned which is absolutely not the case for the US.
If I say that I was affiliated with Al Qaïda? In any case it is much more likely to get droned by the US than by China, no matter how unlikely it is in the absolute.
What? Are you linking to the fallacy you yourself just used? I was talking about the middle east, so that's a pretty weird deflection. I guess it's fine if the US invades middle eastern countries and drones civilians as long as they are on Taiwan's side? What
You asked if you said you were Al Qaïda. You’re saying “I’m part of a terrorist organization” and expecting not to get flagged?
I’m talking about disagreeing with the government. If you called out Biden for being worse than trump and he touches children and sniffs their hair. Nothing will happen to you. If you did that to Xi. You would end up in a reeducation camp.
But you’re like “how come I can’t claim to be part of a terrorist organization and then still travel to America”
If I say death to America, unironically and openly from Syria or Yemen or most of the middle east I'll absolutely get flight restricted. My example about saying that I was part of Al Qaïda was about getting droned, not just get on a no fly list.
Again, from the middle east the US is a much bigger threat. China isn't, at all. There is no denying that and no amount of "but you have free speech in the US!!" Matters in this context
Of course I am familiar with PRISM. It did not have backdoor access to social media. And that was sort of my my point. If you have a reliable source to the contrary, I would be happy to see it.
It had direct access to Facebook content before it got encrypted for transit. How is that not backdoor access to social media? That sounds exactly like what it is alleged TikTok has.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
The US is collecting vastly more data from our social media companies and using it to launch drone strikes that actually kill people. Nobody is outraged by this, it's "normal".
"Condemning the actions of a foreign government" and "condemning similar actions by your own government" seem a little more related and on-topic than "social media and car crashes".
And in my own personal opinion, that's especially true if those questionable actions by your own government overshadow any other similar effort both in scope, size and funding by several orders of magnitude when compared to the rest of the world.
This obsession with shills is unhealthy. I'm glad there's a rule against it.
I'm not Chinese either, and I find it quite sad that you have to state that in here sometimes just to be taken seriously, or else be called a shill.
The obsession about shills directly stems from the Red Scare which remains part of the core programming of Americans ever since. The CCP employes lots of commentators on domestic social media to enforce government narrative, but there is no evidence they are doing the same on English-speaking forums posing as grass root users. Native-level English skills are rare to come across in China, and anyone with that level of knowledge can easily find better paying jobs than this. LLMs may change that some day, but they won't be the only one deploying LLMs to attempt to influence online opinion.
I know this feeling. It probably just means that you live in different reality than half the people commenting here. Maybe half the people commenting here are not americans ? It's still interesting and on subject, because social networks are probably what is causing this divide, because bubbles are isolated by design
I'm one of those not-americans, and for me it's just another different country getting my data (well.. would-be, if I had tiktok installed... or if i had facebook... so for me personally, it's only google that's problematic right now).
Americans, welcome to the club of "the rest of the world"-ers, where foreign governments get access to our data :)
I'm not American, but even for people living in the US - China peering at your TikTok data is less threatening than the Feds peering at your Facebook posts.
One of those two groups is much more likely to cause trouble for US citizens. The Chinese won't have so many ex-lovers looking up their old flame for example, simply because there aren't so many cross-country relationships. And China is less likely to brand Americans as domestic terrorists. The Chinese won't tempted to use it to enforce laws retroactively or hunt down minorities as the US government would be if it goes rogue. There are just less opportunities overall to abuse the knowledge.
And you are preemptively accusing without proof against users who are simply voicing their opinions like everyone is allowed to do here. Why are you attempting to act like an arbiter of legitimacy when you are clearly not one?
When faced with undeniable criticism: I believe China/CCP learned this "defense" tactic from the Soviet Union, who if, not inventing it, at the very least brought it to new standardized levels.
Talking about the truth is not a distraction. You are being taken for a ride. “No don’t look behind the curtain! It’s just a distraction!”
The healthy adult thing to do would be to own up to it and work on fixing the problem.
“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.”
It's strange that old expressions like "the US is throwing stones from a glass house" or "the US is like a pot calling the kettle black" have existed for a long enough time to be idioms, but the term for decrying such expressions "whataboutism" is relatively much newer and more of a political term than a language idiom.
I mean... "the rest of the world" (except china, north korea and maybe some other country with a "great firewall") allows US to spy on millions and billions of it's citizens daily... all the android phones, facebook apps, instagrams, snapchats etc.
Based off your past comments, you have some pretty strong feelings about both China and the USA which might lead one to think you’re not really approaching this discussion in good faith.
Oh good, another thing is to accuse people who have different opinions of being propagandized drones. Pretty effective is controlling the narrative too.
I don't think you're a drone or that you're propagandized, I just that you have strong opinions. I'm admittedly flattered that you think my idle observations are part of some concentrated effort of 'controlling the narrative' though :)
You have to understand it's really annoying when people accuse you of not arguing in good faith, especially for something like having "strong opinions". These kinds of accusations are itself not "approaching the discussion in good faith", so you just go in a circle and don't get anywhere. You can try passing it off as idle observations but not after you admitted going through my comments lol.
> Yu is a former engineering lead for ByteDance in the US who worked at the company between 2017 and 2018.
This seems like an outrage bait lawsuit. The facts in the case are five years out of date, ByteDance has been through the wringer in the ensuing years and there’s no evidence that this backdoor exists in the current app.
There's a ton of evidence that the TikTok app is used for tracking and to assume the CCP doesnt have access to a huge trove of personal data from its primary geo-strategic competitor is ridiculouly naive.
The lawsuit isn’t about tracking users. Pretty much every social media app tracks users, that’s how surveillance capitalism works.
The lawsuit is also not about whether China has access to US citizens’ information. And even if it was, why should I, as a US citizen, worry about that? They can’t put me in jail or fire me. If you’re an American, you should be worried about what the US government knows about you.
Anyways, the lawsuit is about an alleged backdoor. I can’t see how the plaintiff could know what present day code they’re running, and I can’t see why they waited so long to report it.
The lawsuit isn’t really even about backdoors or tracking, it’s for wrongful termination. When I say it’s outrage bait, I mean it’s making explosive allegations that ByteDance would really prefer not to deal with right now. It feels like a legal move calculated to pressure the company into a quiet and generous settlement.
Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP. I’ve heard of bans of Tiktok use by politicians and army bases and such. Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data… Not a Tiktok user myself, if anyone could illuminate me on this it’s be great. For example does tiktok have direct messages from users to users that could be spied on? My naive assumption is that Tiktok is a meme sharing platform and timesink
> Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP
Let's pretend I hire two people: The first is a private detective, the other is an entertainer.
The private detective is able to follow you around and watch everything you do. They know when you eat, when you sleep, and even when you poop. They know who you talk to and for how long. They know everything that interests you and bores you, down to the microsecond (knowing what makes you pause). The PI gets to know you pretty well and honestly, probably better than many close friends.
The entertainer is your main source of entertainment. They offer a wide variety of things and they're highly addictive and prevent you from being bored. Since they are a major part of your day, they are a major influence of the information that you consume. Be this in comedy, politics, academic information, or whatever. That all depends on what interests you that day.
Now I've hired these two people and am able to direct them. The PI are my eyes and ears, the entertainer are my hands. If I want to make the most profit off of you I can make deals with McDonalds and get the entertainer to influence you that way (maybe do comedy bits about burgers) and the PI can track how interested and influential the entertainer is. Allowing us to refine our techniques on a personal level. On the other hand, if I am interested in politics I can do the same. I know what makes you afraid. I know what makes you sad. I know what makes you angry. I know what makes you feel good.
Now we're just looking at you, a single person here. But I have a billion PIs and entertainers. I know all your friends, family members, and even your crushes. I know how close all these bonds are because I'm doing to them what I am doing to you. Consider this and then tell me that I don't have influence over you. I am a significant part of your environment. You may have free will, but you are also a product of your environment.
> My naive assumption is that Tiktok is a meme sharing platform and timesink
And that's why I have influence over you. The less important you think it is, the more influence I have since your guard is down. Same way comedians crack people up.
But to do most of what you discussed, you don't need any "private" data. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit does and uses your browsing and posting data in the exact same way.
Imagine that a state actor would seek to flip a foreign National to their cause. You can do so with either a carrot or a stick or both. The carrot can be fancy dinners, free vacations, or access to what they want. The carrot can be threat of exposure of deep secrets, etc. Now imagine that there is an app that has the AMAZING ability to figure out EXACTLY what you like and don’t like. You haven’t used TikTok yourself so you don’t know it firsthand but this app is uncanny in its ability to feed you stuff that only you would find fascinating that you didn’t even know about yourself. In the wrong hands it can give incredible amounts of information on an individual’s interests at a level of detail that was previously impossible
And the 66% of US teens on TikTok are 66% of the next generation of US senators, presidents, cabinet members, military chiefs, etc. Imagine the competitive advantage of having a deep psychological profile for each of these personas of your geopolitical adversary.
And remember that political games do not have to be won in a generation, simply knowing the direction your opponent is going and bending them towards your preference is sufficient to be worthwhile.
Simply over subscribe the generations on antiwork and the cons (as opposed to pros) of (Democracy, America, Freedom, Modern thought, etc. whatever are the targets) and you can bend a generational trend.
Humans aren't particularly good at seeing evidence and realizing they're only seeing part of the whole picture.
Is American turnover in Congress actually that fast enough for this to happen? We have more people over 40 than younger people and the influx of youth is being floated by an immigration policy that favors middle- and upper-class, basically the brain drain, of the rest of the world (read: people interested in business-friendly policy, etc), and older people, say, everyone 40 - 60, will have even greater life expectancy, so those who are in power may be in power when current teens are adults, just as Nancy Pelosi has been a Congresswoman my entire life and a good chunk of my mother's.
I think it's about knowing what people are interested in and having an algorithm that can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things.
Eugene Wei's article [0] helped me see how TikTok uses more of an interest graph, whereas many of the other platforms use more social graphs. By this, I think he means that TikTok cares much more about knowing what people are interested in than knowing to whom they're connected.
> But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?
I think the fear is that the algorithm can be tweaked to nudge people towards things that the platform, or in this case, the CCP, want them to want.
For example, if I see you watching videos about the book 1984, and I want you to be less interested in things that promote fear of a totalitarian government, and I also know that you feel really afraid of your home getting robbed, I can have the algorithm show you more videos about homes getting robbed so that you boost your feelings of fear of neighbors and therefore you may even want to have a stronger government to protect you from your neighbors.
Sure, but it’s much more effective when the messaging is targeted to an individual (or, small cohort of similar individuals) based on their interests (known, at a granular level, because of what they watch for how long etc)
Is mainstream media designing a user-specific content feed that is adjusted to your specific preferences? Your argument sounds similar to the one used against arguments of an encroaching police state: sure it has been done before but not at this scale or with this level of sophistication.
Yes, now just imagine if mainstream media could create millions of TV channels specifically designed for each human being instead of broadcasting one channel to millions of human beings?
The memes you share are a representative of you...
Lets say you're sharing a bunch of memes about being a private in the army. What is the likelihood you are actually a private in the army? Can tiktok use that to propagandize you in any way? For example, by sending you a lot of what I would consider far right propaganda that the US military is weak because it believes in 'wokeness', could this cause you to be less effective in the military?
Also it's a place with many subjects for psychological experiments. What propaganda is best to fool someone like you? Or someone like person A, person B? And if "Program P" works best to convert people to whatever, hey hey, you still have the captive audience, just apply that program
Probably Cambridge Analytica has the best information on how such programming works. Or, Google/YouTube with their "What goes viral" algorithms.
Yes, there is a private/direct messaging feature in TikTok that should of course be considered accessible to ByteDance, and by extension the Chinese government.
However, that is not the only valuable information.
The user behavioral profiles (which users have viewed what videos when, what do they engage with, what do they re-share to others) are valuable, particularly if you can de-anonymize them against account registration data. Also, the social graph of a big service like TT is a goldmine.
Both types of information are useful whether you're doing traditional espionage, targeted influence operations, or mass-influence/propaganda.
For traditional espionage, knowing what sort of content someone watches could give you direct insight into non-public aspects of their life that could be leveraged. (I.e. mental or physical illness, sexual interests, relationship problems, fringe political leanings, etc. etc.) There's a fair amount of not-exactly-porn but porn-adjacent stuff (and lots of health/wellness/lifestyle content) on TT that could give you leverage or at least ideas on how to approach someone if you wanted to convince them to pass information to you, provide access to something, etc.
The real value is in targeted influence ops, though. Find someone you want to influence, or a small subset of the population you want to influence, and drill down to figure out who their 'thought leaders' / opinion-setters are within their social circle. Figure out what kind of media engages them. Go after them indirectly via their friends/colleagues/family. TT is demographically limited right now, so you're probably not changing many Senators' votes directly, but you might be able to get their kids, their kids' friends, their junior staffers, etc. thinking a particular way. Done the right way, the actual influence target might never even need to be messaged-to directly. They'd get the full social-media 'Inception' treatment and probably think they came up with their opinion organically or by being in touch with the culture.
And then of course for mass-messaging/propaganda, you use the information in aggregate just like any big advertising company does, but for political ends, and without having to engage an actual advertising company that's going to create a tangible trail.
in my rudimentary understanding, the knowledge would be useful more in an aggregate nature. finding effective ways to target include/exclude propaganda and gathering real-time data around memes/info sharing topics that relate to whatever information campaigns they are currently running. lies seem to spread faster than the truth, and very few places are as actively in use as tiktok.
The ccp pays visits to relatives who still reside in China - and sometimes those abroad - for behaviors of people who’ve emigrated out of China. Tiktok gives them easy insight on whose relatives need a visit.
Second, it’s easy to find secrets on important people or politicians through their online habits - it’s pretty easy to see how that can be used for influence.
The fact that many Westerners are still unsure about this and not aware that they're in the middle of an unconventional war¹ is fascinating. Xi does not care about memes of course. The app itself is the backdoor, Bytedance (which has the Communist Party right inside the company, like other Mainland corporations) controls what the users see. And what they're shown is completely different from Douyin, there is a reason Chinese residents aren't even permitted to download TikTok - the foreign propaganda version. No one will be able to tell you their strategy for certain but it's not hard to guess when you look at the content that gets boosted. It's like Twitter on steroids, it's designed to cause division and radicalize the users. The data harvesting is an added bonus and with more data they can be better manipulated.
Btw on a meta level this doesn't matter when the CCP has completely walled 1.4 billion people in. Every single American social media app is banned, the vast majority of foreign news sites is censored. It should not even be a question what the app is about, the regime is as obvious an enemy to free society as it gets and before they open up as was promised in the past in exchange for economic investment, no Chinese internet company should be permitted operating anywhere.
While the Chinese internet is so tightly controlled and the US & co are attacked in Chinese state media on a daily basis, foreign countries let them move in this Trojan horse. There's a book called Unrestricted Warfare where the authors describe just this sort of weakness of the US to political/information warfare 20 years ago. It turns out they were spot on.
> Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data…
Speculation about how adversaries might advantageously use data is meaningless unless coupled with policy that allows access to such data only with binding agreements about how that data can be used.
As a general principle, I believe adversaries should not have blanket access to data of US citizens.
My belief, however, is meaningless when US powers-that-be to date show little interest in regulating data policy with respect to any business, foreign or domestic.
Location data is the least interesting thing they're harvesting. Modern targeting models are able to understand the most intimate personality traits of their users, and manipulate users based on those traits. They're capable of weaponizong user's unique levels of skepticism, political leaning, depression, or dysmorphia, weaponizing them against entire cultures and society
It's a massive platform for propaganda and mass data collection entirely without the ability for us to regulate it in an effective way without entry cutting it out of China's control
Have a neutral mutually beneficial idea? Let’s contextualize it as a divisive political issue that is championed by the political leader you hate the most.
This seems sloppy. If I were to build an app that was popular in say Cuba or something I wouldn't leave myself technical gateways to access the data and manipulate things directly. That would leave a clear paper trail and open me up to some innocent engineer stumbling across what's happening.
Rather I would embed trusted people into the company at low to mid-level positions of power, like software engineers, content moderators, etc. where they could quietly use their influence on shape things in ways that are favorable to my goals. I would do this with every company I could get them hired at not just the one making my app.
If I really had a need to exert undue influence I would use a side-channel to communicate instructions to people at the company (potentially even the leadership) and rely on them to carry out the orders. Remoting in and changing things myself seems silly.
But it shows a level of not-giving-a-fuck if they're just leaving not-even-well-hidden "backdoors" in, so people in China can get access.
It suggests to me that the software engineers writing this stuff don't really think of ByteDance US or the US version of TikTok as being any different from ByteDance China. Because of course they don't: I don't think ByteDance itself, or its leadership, does. The whole idea of separating the company internally is a sham, and it's almost always a sham when companies claim to do internal firewalling or controls like that. (See also: pre-2008 financial companies that did both consulting and accounting/audit, and claimed they never talked across that line. Of course they did!)
TikTok is a shining example of both China being China (no real private/public sector separation, lying as standard practice, economic policy is just war by other means) and the US being the US (everything is for sale, everyone's loyalty can be rented, all laws are negotiable, workers / average people exist to be exploited rather than protected, if it's profitable it can't be that wrong)... and we wonder why it's a trainwreck for average users.
From a Leninist bureaucratic perspective, a paper trail is exactly what someone wants as a mid-level official: if something goes wrong a paper trail transfers responsibility to her higher-ups, reducing the chance this person becoming a scapegoat. Especially useful if someone's caught in a intra-party power struggle, in an area dealing with foreign entities where waters are muddier. Trust is very rare in the Leninist party. Not sure if the same logic works in other governments though.
I would be extremely surprised if a state-actor like China couldn’t access most US company data at will. If you can invest several billions and have thousands of people working to create a breach, no company is safe, not even AWS or Microsoft.
In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected?
I’m much more concerned by the laziness of most western governments in understanding if this was a threat or not.
The Chinese government, like the US government or any other large national government, is not monolithic.
Having information available for easy perusal via a commercial channel (which is potentially not even illegal) is very different from having information accessible via use of national-asset intelligence capabilities. Information which can only be obtained the second way is almost certainly going to receive different treatment than the first.
There is value in making information more difficult (and more illegal, and less socially and politically acceptable) to access, even if that control is not 100% effective or if there are still ways of getting around it.
Increasing the friction involved in accessing personal information is an imperfect win, but a win nonetheless.
For most users of commercial software, your system is penetrable and should be considered insecure against a nation-state level attacker willing to spend a 0-day on getting in. But that doesn't mean you should just leave everything hanging out in the open where any doofus can get to it, or voluntarily hand your information over to an unfriendly government's partner corporation. At least make them work for it.
The Chinese government, like the US government or any other large national government, is not monolithic.
In what meaningful way does one part of the Chinese government differ from another part of the Chinese government? Isn't Xi basically the supreme leader for life now?
Even assuming he is the supreme leader, he can’t be everywhere, know everything and oversee all aspects of the regime.
Every sufficiently large organization, such as a government, has delegated areas of responsibility to various sub organizations. Those scopes will have varying overlap with other sub organizations, where it will result in political battles. It is more like competing microservices than monolith.
Xi is head of state as president, but not head of government (like King of England).
Li Qiang is head of government as premier and is chief executive of the Chinese government.
If you ask a Chinese citizen what their biggest problem is, many of them would say too much federalism. Individual provinces have more individual authority than even US States and most controversial policies (1 child, social credit, lockdowns) you hear about are provincial and not federal policies.
> If you ask a Chinese citizen what their biggest problem is, many of them would say too much federalism.
Presumably that’s because protesting against the central government endangers not just your own livelihood but also the livelihoods of your relatives. Much safer to criticise the region next door.
There was (is?) a whole thing where local governments would kidnap people trying to petition the central government to crack down on some local government wrongdoing.
> Xi is head of state as president, but not head of government (like King of England).
Uhm: the king of England (which incidentally happens to be king of quite a number of other territories that have yet to fully emancipate themselves from monarchy) is NOT the head of government in any of the the territories he is king of, but merely the head of state… which in constitutional monarchies is a rather formal show pomp role with very little political power. Conversely, the head of government in the UK with actual executive power is the Prime Minister, not the king.
> We can still fix the issue now though, by creating a targeted law against them.
That's not a great idea, since it will invite a lawsuit on the (potentially valid) grounds that it's a de facto bill of attainder. Which the US has traditionally taken a dim view on for very good reasons.
Better would be if it prompted a more general law about foreign ownership of corporations which have access to large amounts of information on US persons, regardless of how it is obtained or who they are.
As a US citizen, I don't want any government that I don't have input into -- even the relatively indirect and less-than-satisfying input of casting one vote among millions -- compiling a dossier on me, and I expect my government to do what it can to make that at least somewhat difficult. (And yes, I am aware there is no way to stop it completely. If the Chinese government wants to task its intelligence service to compile a dossier on me, there's nothing much that can be done about it. But let's at least try to raise the bar on the difficulty and effort involved. The more difficult and expensive, the more illegal, and the more internationally frowned-upon the task becomes, the harder it is to do at scale to millions or billions of people at once.)
> a more general law about foreign ownership of corporations
Sure make it targeted against large scale companies owned by china, or "owned by countries on this specific government list, which happens to only include china and a few of our other enemies, like Russia".
Same thing, and we are more than able to get away with it, even though it is basically just targeted at TikTok.
> the laziness of most western governments in understanding if this was a threat or not
I think USA recognized the threat very early on. It's been a hot-button topic for several years. Remember when the Trump administration tried to force a sale of ByteDance's USA operations to Microsoft? And even now the apps and services are blocked on US government devices and networks. And even at a lot of public universities. The concern is there. I don't think it's laziness.
Even if the tech is secure there are still thousands of foreign employees working in those companies. It's not uncommon for people to be sympathisers of their homeland. And it's not symmetrical since very few westerners work for Alibaba, Huawei etc.
It doesn't even have to be a state actor but it isn't as simple as "at will" a compromise requires effort and resources and discovery would be attributed back to the actor. Willful access has none of that problem.
I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening.
Is Larry Ellison a Chinese spy? He would probably have to either be complicit or criminally negligent to allow this to happen given he was given the contract precisely for this reason.
I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.
And US insistence that "dumb" 5g aerials already vetted by national security agencies had to be banned (along with kit that was absolutely a legitimate risk) because they could potentially possibly harbor listening devices maybe.
Hosting with oracle doesn’t change a thing. Just because the data would be on US servers don’t stop the data from being accessible from outside of the region.
And is it really that hard to imagine a world where a hostile and ambitious nation would seek to leverage a technology platform to listen to sensitive conversations? The US has done it in the past and you better believe China will be doing it too.
So when the US government made a song and dance 18 months ago about why it was absolutely critical that it be done to protect against exactly this threat you think they were lying or staggeringly incompetent?
What do you mean "this time"? I just see a personal lawsuit?
But if the government did say the chinese government still has access, I don't think there would be much reason to disbelieve them. If the government claims there is a problem, and then a (possibly halfassed) attempt to fix it happens, and then the government claims the problem still exists... there is some credibility lost on the "fixing" front but the "problem exists" front is likely still credible. Especially if the different parts of that saga are coming from different parts of the government.
It's better than not hosting the data in friendly or neutral turf, but you're trusting a U.S. company (Oracle) to somehow some way mitigate Chinese surveillance and algorithmic manipulation.
Erecting an industrial complex dedicated to a poorly-defined and probably impossible anti-China mission on a Chinese-controlled platform, run by entities that salivate at Chinese $$$, doesn't seem like the best idea.
Forcing ByteDance to host the data in the US, on Oracle's servers or anyone else's, doesn't mean a lot if there are a bunch of people in China with the login to those servers. Who has access to the data and the various administrative controls over it are more important than where it physically resides.
ByteDance has claimed that their US operations were administratively firewalled from their Chinese ones, and then it's been repeatedly shown not to be the case. At this point they have lost all credibility about their ability to 'firewall' or internally control access to user data, probably because they (or certain parts of the company) don't really want to.
I would have been unsurprised if the US government hadn't already forced them to host with Oracle a year or two ago supposedly to prevent exactly this from happening.
The allegations are from 2017-18 when the guy was fired. The migration of user data was last year, but it is not like they are disconnected from China
I'm also reminded of that fake story from the WSJ about American chips being hacked that turned out to be entirely fabricated.
It was a 2018 Bloomberg story. Bloomberg still refuses to admit they were wrong, and doubled down in 2021. That no "tiny chips" have turned up yet should be near definitive proof that story was bogus.
Imagine the worms put on phones of employees of various tech companies - specifically datacenter employees in various commerical and government agencies - recall the STRAVA scandal which revealed secret military bases...
The TikTok angle is like stuxnet for that type of corporate/gov espionage....
Its ludicris how poorly the USG has handled this.
But then again, you have so many people in congress with dual citizenship (which should be illegal and a capital crime IMO)
but then look at the spouses of lawmakers, their investments, their citizenship, their network ranking over the time their spouce was in congress, and their kids...
FFS we are still arguing over Biden's ties to money laundering in Ukraine and China, but we dont talk about the GOAT of grifters ; Mitch McConnell?
the CCP has more backdoors into the USG than they do with just TikTok ... and lets not even talk about Israel's backdoors which are actually a front-door-fire-hose.
The US government is and has always been reactive, not proactive.
About the most forward-thinking the US gets is writing the occasional contingency plan. Everything else is done in haste once a serious problem becomes plainly obvious to everyone, and people (deep-pocketed ones especially) start screaming to their elected representatives to fucking do something about it. Then and only then do the gears start to turn.
Sam - we've been asking you for years not to break the site guidelines, let alone this badly. We've cut you as much slack as anyone in the history of this site. I don't want to ban you but the slack is definitely going to run out someday. No more, please.
TikTok is allegedly staffed with dozens of ex-FBI, CIA, and US State Department officials who moderate content[1].
Somehow PRISM and the closed-doors FISA court hearings, Lavabit, etc seem to be collectively memory-holed by USians. Nowadays their anxiety about state surveillance is reserved for the "CCP".
The thing is, this is a pretty standard playbook for many intelligence-turned-civilian types. They become "consultants" for basically every industry. Not defending it, but it's not really unique to TikTok.
Fairly sure that's an online communication thing. Wider geographic reach of messages + it works a lot better written than spoken, and it's been used at least since the early 2000s?
This I get, and have seen before (cool Mexican tv shows), but I'm more intersted in a detailed history of "USian"'s initial use and spread. So far I've only seen it on hn, but definitely more than I'd expect since it's such an odd to read word.
Agreed. It's also evident in the types of propaganda that appear, at least on my FYP. I guess they are running out of fresh spins on the old psyops wheel of manipulation.
> In the summer of 2021, he went straight from his top State Department job to become product policy manager for trust and safety at TikTok, a position that, on paper, he appears completely unqualified for. Earlier this year, Cardona left the company.
Fascinating stuff in here. Wouldn't it be funny if the situation was any of these:
- TikTok is some revolving-door communications center for off-the-record relations between USG and PRC
- Your TikTok device is a node in a cluster that's being used for info-wars against some extraterrestrial threat as PRC and USG combine forces
- Nah, USG just uses TikTok as a way to backdoor PRC
When it comes to the CCP is it even a "backdoor"? They assert full LEGAL right to all data from companies in their jurisdiction. Everyone who operates in China, domestic or foreign, knows the costs of doing business.
Meanwhile, the CCP can just open their huge wallets and pay US-based data-brokers for all the private information of US citizens that they ever dreamed of ...
Please don't use your naivety as a shield from recognizing a purposeful "gap" in implementation, across all social media we consume in the US (as well as technological devices), as dictated by the US government.
They might be trying, but the end result will be a petty destruction of progress. "In order to make any change you must fix my much larger and harder to solve issue" will ensure that nothing ever gets done.
In the face of just how serious this risk is, this sort of stance is self destructive and nearly malicious.
Given the serious risk, we should fix the bigger loophole where foreign or national bodies can use our data.
"In the face of just how serious this risk is, this sort of stance is self destructive and nearly malicious." Unfortunately, such narrow views will not help us go anywhere. This is the best way to kill any thought process.
The way you would solve both issues is simply have data protection laws that affect all social media companies, rather than singling/discriminating against one company because it's "foreign", and moreover "Chinese".
That's also a copout that liberals spent a few years repeating in Spanish for some reason. TikTok is not at all a problem. The fact that all of your data is already on sale, cheaply, publicly, and legally, is.
You say it's a copout and then you don't explain why. I can believe US data through TikTok is at risk due to CCP origins and I can believe our data is on sale in general. I can also believe that both are an issue.
Oh dear. I won't be surprised to see this being true since TikTok is just a worse version of Facebook/Instagram who has already admitted and shown evidence of them violating the privacy of its users [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], and its defenders are just running out of excuses faster than a running tap at this point.
Before anyone says 'All social media companies do this', If large social networks like Facebook have been fined in the billions of dollars for such repeated privacy violations, then given the size of TikTok, you might as well agree that for TikTok to continue to operate in the US, it must to pay a multi-billion dollar fine for such repeat offenses and abuses of its user's privacy simply on the grounds of the size of the many users on the platform.
I get the random insertion of AI-generated "Russian man" shouting hyper-conservative/far-right propaganda. I always leave a comment stating it is propaganda, and flag for removal.
I see you government, trying to infiltrate my wholesome FYP of booktok, math, and physics.
But it's the US, it's the bastion of democracy.
Govt here doesn't put backdoors, doesn't sponsor crypto companies, doesn't target individuals and ship them to overseas camps to avoid torture laws. Wage fake wars.
Doesn't use it's intelligence agencies to interfere with other countries. Oh!
For all our faults, we're not the ccp. Bashing America doesn't undo the horrors committed by the ccp. We're talking about an authoritarian regime that is currently committing genocide. Should we really just roll over and give them unfettered access to our markets while they are incredibly hostile to our companies and where we only get access by giving away ip?
I decided to see if your "death rate" claim was accurate; but, found conflicting evidence that the mortality rates in US prisons are generally lower than the general US population, "The mortality rate of state prisoners in 2018 (319 per 100,000) was lower than the mortality rate for the entire adult U.S. population (1,110/100,000) even when adjusted for age, race or ethnicity, and sex (419/100,000) [0]." Also, mortality rates for federal prisons are lower than state prisons [1].
Could you point me to a reliable data source for Chinese prisoner mortality rates? A ~19/100,000 mortality rate would be an amazing achievement.
It sounds like you are consuming far too much anti-American and pro-Chinese propaganda.
The Chinese succeeding in their geopolitical goals is the suppression of the individual at scale. Extinguishing of the light.
Collectivism looks good on paper but ultimately is high minded and has fatal flaws which resulted in horrible outcomes whenever tried. 100 million+ dead in the 20th century.
The US generally imprisons only those people who commit serious crimes. There are likely some biases that result in imperfect application of the law. We’re working on it.
China imprisons and enslaves people simply for being members of the “wrong” ethnic group.
Please explain how these are even close to the same thing.
China doesn't "enslave" people for being from the wrong ethnic group. These claims are a fiction of Adrian Zenz. The US actually "enslaves" people from the wrong ethnic group at Guantanamo.
Can you please point out the references that are circulatory in the evidence he gave? I don't see any references that are pointing at that guy. Maybe this guy is in cahoots with Google earth too and those massive prisons visible from space are just because of this one guy you mentioned.
It's debunked by the fact you can go to Xinjiang. No need for an "expert" on the CIA payroll to annotate a map, like they did to Osama's underground cave complex.
By debunked do you call them schools with walls and armed guards instead of prisons? Are you saying the massive prisons they built in that area don't actually exist and are fake? I've seen news reports with pictures showing them as well.
Edit to reply:
Yes, the schools don't look like the "schools" in Xinjiang. I can't tell if you're being paid or if you really believe what you say. Did the famines caused by mao not kill millions? Did tianamen square not happen?
> Did the famines caused by mao not kill millions?
A quarter of the Irish population died during their famine. Why do we let the criminals who orchestrated that purely for colonial reasons remain in power? Mao made mistakes in agricultural planning but it wasn't intentional as was the case with the British and Ireland.
> Did tianamen square not happen?
Tienanmen Square was an economic protest over inflation and material conditions. The framing of it being a democratic revolution is a post hoc fantasy by the western media.
I don't see what the Irish famine has to do with the mao's "mistakes". Trying to distract from the conversation by talking about other atrocities doesn't prove any point.
It was an economic protest by students? Did thousands die by the hands of tanks and rifles? Or was it peacefully disbanded? Why aren't you allowed to even mention it China if it was so benign? I'm guessing you aren't living there right now or else you would be too scared to mentioned it for fear of being disappeared.
Why no response about those massive schools with armed guards in Xinjiang? The government has admitted they are "reeducating" them. The buildings are obviously there and in huge numbers.
>I don't see what the Irish famine has to do with the mao's "mistakes". Trying to distract from the conversation by talking about other atrocities doesn't prove any point.
I was just responding to your non-sequitur about the great leap forward. One was a earnest policy failure. The other was imposed to maintain a colonial mercantile arrangement, which killed two orders of magnitude more on a per-capital basis.
Should we impose economic sanctions against the UK for their human rights abuses?
> It was an economic protest by students?
Yes.
> Did thousands die by the hands of tanks and rifles? Or was it peacefully disbanded? Why aren't you allowed to even mention it China if it was so benign? I'm guessing you aren't living there right now or else you would be too scared to mentioned it for fear of being disappeared.
It was widely reported on state media. You can mention it, just like the other economic protests earlier in the 1980s. It just doesn't have the cultural and historical significance that the people in Washington with lanyards, and people who consume nothing but propaganda think it has.
> Why no response about those massive schools with armed guards in Xinjiang? The government has admitted they are "reeducating" them. The buildings are obviously there and in huge numbers.
Is the existence of prisons in the US an obvious sign of a genocide against African Americans?
> Should we impose economic sanctions against the UK for their human rights abuses?
Are they doing this now? No. Is the CCP committing genocide now? Yes.
> It was widely reported on state media. You can mention it, just like the other economic protests earlier in the 1980s. It just doesn't have the cultural and historical significance that the people in Washington with lanyards, and people who consume nothing but propaganda think it has.
Can you show me some examples of discussions about tianamen square in Chinese social media to show that any conversations that don't follow the party line are allowed?
Was the "economic" protest not put down with extreme force and did thousands of people not die?
> Is the existence of prisons in the US an obvious sign of a genocide against African Americans?
You are ignoring my question that is trying to get the heart of this whole conversation, the genocide taking place in xinjiang and with some distracting question. Your government has admitted to building these as "reeducation" facilities and a large population is getting oppressed and processed through these. These facilities exist, there is a ton of evidence to support it. There are guard towers, walls, armed guards, etc. Are you asserting these prisons are empty?
I'm starting to become fatigued by all this TikTok news. Either ban the app or don't. Causing anxiety over TikTok without any action is the worst of both worlds.
So rather than exposing the cost/benefits of an app, you just want the government to make a decision about what methods of communication are available to everyone? And instead of making a thorough case why a particular method has to be banned for good reasons tangential to the content, you want them to make that choice and announce it?
I think banning very invasive social media until it minimizes tracking is a reasonable option, but that's something that should be done by passing laws and public debate.
Banning TikTok until it minimizes tracking pushes the blame onto TikTok (unfairly IMHO). Apps all have the same Android/iOS permissions to work with, so if there's really a problem, the Govt should consult with OS vendors on tightening controls across the board.
The news is literally designed to do that to you. Stop consuming so much of it for your own mental well-being, and that of everyone else you interact with.
That's not an interesting question. No, no they should not. And that would be true even if there were US investors. Just like we don't compensate AirBnB shareholders when cities outlaw short term rentals.
But, there are no non-Chinese investors in Bytedance. There are US investors in Hong Kong (?) companies that have exposure to Bytedance and move 1:1 with Bytedance, but explicitly included in their risk analysis is that government action may zero out that 1:1 nature at any time by political action.
It is very interesting to me to see if the US government is capable of putting the average citizen's welfare above that of heavy hitting investors. It would be a welcome change if they did.
> ByteDance is financially backed by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, and Hillhouse Capital Group.
Not an interesting question at all, IMO. The government is not required to protect you or make you whole, if you invest in an enterprise that the government later decides to prohibit, or makes illegal, or decides to regulate in some other manner.
I mean, think that through for a second: if the government had to compensate everyone for the negative impact of legislation, it would be almost impossible to pass laws. If my town says I can't burn tires in my back yard, do they need to pay me to shut down my tire-burning operation? What if I don't even have a tire-burning operation, but I could have started one, except now I'm prohibited from doing so... did they impair the value of my property by prohibiting a potential use? What about all the other things I could have done with my property, absent any pesky zoning restrictions, Clean Water Act rules, or just centuries of common law precedent? Do they have to pay me for the impairment of each of them, each time a law is passed that eliminates a hypothetical option?
No, of course not, because that would paralyze government and be ridiculous.
The government has no responsibility to make anyone whole if they decide someone's business model is counter to the public good and make it illegal. It's on my investors to take into account the risk of legislation that might impact the business and factor that into their investment decisions and subsequent valuation of the business. If they do that poorly, or fail to recognize a legal risk, that's on them.
This is literally why sovereign immunity is a thing.
>Critics also state that treaties are written so that any legislation causing lost profits is by definition a treaty violation, rendering the argument null that only treaty violations are subject to ISDS.
Even if they didn't have an official backdoor, they would have many backdoors by just placing people on staff (getting them hired in the normal way.) You can't stop state intelligence agencies from getting into any domestic data that they want, even with law (which they can just ignore.) Social media is full of 'ex-'state intelligence operatives, and objections to that situation are made out to be bizarre, or even banned from discussion on these same social networks.
As far as I can tell, what we're supposed to think is that managing a social network, or any communications service, is within the same field as covert intelligence and surveillance, so of course that would be the hiring pool.
Non-Chinese have little to fear from Chinese government monitoring of their activity on TikTok. Chinese people know their government (which openly censors, rather than laundering their censorship through covert means like the Five Eyes), and know how to act to keep safe.
People have plenty to fear from state surveillance regardless of their nationality. The Indian Army had their troop movements monitored by the PLA via TikTok data during a recent conflict, so please don’t pretend that this is merely an abstract fear.
If the Indian Army, in the midst of secret movements, is accessing social networks through their phones, everybody knows where they are and they are incompetent. Please don't pretend the problems of a military force playing on social networks are in any way related to normal people's problems. Ban TikTok from nuclear submarines, too, but I don't know why you would allow any other social network service on there either. I could be running it myself and sending all of your information to the Chinese government.
> Non-Chinese have little to fear from Chinese government monitoring of their activity on TikTok. Chinese people know their government (which openly censors, rather than laundering their censorship through covert means like the Five Eyes), and know how to act to keep safe.
This is so laughable that I don't even know where to start.
How many Chinese individuals got busted for "corruption" because the Chinese Communist Party told people down the line to "do something" and conspicuous social media posters were easy targets? How many Chinese got busted for posting something that happened to contradict the party narrative about Covid?
Even if a Chinese citizen understands how to act right now in the moment (and I don't even concede that), when Dear Leader decides to change the standards you can easily wind up on the wrong side of "proper and correct" with a nice big trail to justify shutting off your social credit.
Surveillance is bad and evil and a threat. Period. It doesn't matter which government is doing it.
There are two main problems with social media, as it exists today:
First, the company that operates the social media system, has access to data that exposes extremely personal information about the users, sometimes directly, and sometimes through inference based on user behavior. This naturally attracts parties that might benefit from this information, originally advertisers, but increasingly nation states. Personally, I think the solution to this involves both privacy legislation, and legislation that dramatically restricts what foreign entities can do in the United States, but I acknowledge this is very controversial.
Second, the algorithms that the social media site uses to decide what content to presented to users is extremely susceptible to manipulation and to causing undesirable side effects. Even if the site operator is benign, the algorithm might magnify, extreme or emotional content in order to maximize engagement. We have seen this for several years now. And, of course, the site operators may choose to amplify messaging that they like or suppress messaging that they don’t. This may seem great if your values align with the site operator, but remember that operators change, e.g., Twitter. And of course, the site operator might be hostile to your values, e.g., TikTok. I think that the solution to this problem is actually much easier than the solution to the first problem. The solution to algorithmic problems is to make the algorithm opt-in. For example, when you join a social media site, you initially might be presented with the option to use company, curated prioritization, or to use time and subscription-based prioritization. However, social media sites should be encouraged or perhaps forced to allow community curated, prioritization, and allow community members to opt into, a community feed versus the company curated feed. I think we would see a small number of users and communities who would quickly come up with their own curated feeds, that would be popular with like-minded individuals.
Of course the party committee can access data. That's how China works under Xi.[1][2] Party committees had less presence in private companies post-Mao and pre-2003, but now they're back. Most larger non-state owned companies now have one, so the party can keep an eye on the private sector from the inside. They have roughly board-level authority.
Nominally, the party committee represents the party members who work for the company. But they're not chosen by the employees; they're appointed by higher levels of the party.
The conversation here dances around the topic, but nobody really talks about it. The same applies to almost every media outlet. Everyone is talking about something, but that is mostly irrelevant and doesn't give any insight. Interesting pattern.
In the old days, parents had an unwritten responsibility to steer their kids away from neighborhood kids who are a bad influence. Their kids aren’t running around in the neighborhood any more; the bad influences are social media algorithms.
Will you install a secuirty camera in your daughters room, specifically when the the camera comes from country with most leaked cam footage!(where various reports argue that State is involved in such leaks)
Are there even IP cameras manufactured domestically to even choose? I have some inside my home (pointed at exterior doors; not inside bedrooms which seems borderline creepy and/or sadistic), but they're not connected to public networks and thus I don't consider them a risk.
There are companies that make security hardware here in the US, but the market is mostly very high-end government and military customers. And TBH mostly they are still using Chinese components, just assembling stuff here in the US and marking the price up enough that they can justify calling it 'made in USA' by virtue of the value-add. Sometimes the software is coded or at least audited, though.
You can avoid the worst Chinese-made hardware if you look for "NDAA compliant" rather than US domestic manufacture. NDAA compliance means that a product isn't made by a number of prohibited Chinese suppliers who are known to be very thoroughly compromised (as opposed to the average level of compromise that you should assume most companies in China have... but China is a big place, so that difference isn't nothing).
Axis and Bosch both have NDAA-compliant product lines.
I was giving an analogy. You won't risk installing any camera near to your kids, so is similar is the risk of handing mobile phone with a camera, which is capable of spying them/software that modulate them all the time!
Blue Whale was an example which forced people to commit suicide.
In TikTok's case the probability of immoral use is the most. As its has a connection with CCP, or is obliged to co-operate if required with CCP. Not juts USA, many countries had its suspecision with this APP. Ignoring all that why would any one wanted to risk there kids with this one specific APP ?
I was giving an analogy. You won't risk installing any camera near to your kids, so is similar is the risk of handing mobile phone with a camera, which is capable of spying them/software that modulate them all the time!
Blue Whale was an example which forced people to commit suicide.
Tiktok doesn’t need a back door for CCP to have access. It’s Chinese law that requires bytedance to hand over any information requested without question.
No one can dispute this. It’s literally the law in China.
Business Insider is almost entirely a propaganda outlet and not actually a business publication, insider or otherwise.
The claim comes from an ex-employee from 2018. Most people want it to be true, so it is. I have no idea.
My default for TikTok stories is that NOTHING they can do is not first made possible by Apple and Google who take zero blame in any of this. That right there tells me it’s all game. TikTok/China is being used to trick people into supporting more domestic spying.
It'd be extremely naive to assume that they didn't have a back door, didn't have the ability to 'direct' TikTok to do as they required for pretty much anything, and didn't use it to further whatever their agenda is.
The inverse problem is to think of TT as directly an agent of the CCP, which it is not. TT is a company that wants to make money, that exists in a regime where there is no effective rule of law, meaning the regime can do pretty much as it pleases, when it please, and they do do that, particularly for censorship, content control etc.. But otherwise, the company is left to it's own devices.
Much like if you use Google or FB, you can be assured that the US Gov. will leverage that within the normal constraints of the US, which is to say for local policing warrants and judges, and for narrow issues of national security, well, probably 'anything goes' with respect to non-US citizens, 'almost anything goes' with respect to US citizens, but that ultimately the scope of the more acute stuff will be narrow, and ultimately there will be leakers.
Aka Snowden and Assange sadly get a different form of justice, but at least it's a kind of justice and it's in the public domain. You can speak out against Biden all day long but if you leak sensitive docs, that's probably a line that will get you in trouble.
Finally, we need to start to account for corporate surveillance.
Who uses TikTok for sensitive information? Government access to TikTok user data is of limited additional value compared to whatever TikTok sells to large advertisers and analytics partners.
When you couple this with the fact that China had secret police stations in the US trying to capture Chinese dissidents, you could use such data to track those people to kidnap them, regardless of if the information was sensitive on the app or not.
This is like saying "When you couple 30 seconds of girls dancing with assault rifles, it could kill you."
China policing emigres in the US is way out of bounds and I dare you to find anyone who thinks otherwise. Whereas posting on any social media and expecting that post to not be seen by foreign adversaries is... what?
It's multiple countries that have had issues with them e.g. Australia, Canada, Ireland.
And I personally know of students here in Australia who have been targeted by the Chinese consulate for participating in pro-Taiwan and pro-HK protests. So the idea that they wouldn't apply this technique to people of all ages isn't far-fetched.
> U.S. Asks to Drop Case Accusing N.Y.P.D. Officer of Spying for China
> The charges against Officer Angwang came amid growing concern on the part of law enforcement authorities in the United States and other Western countries about Beijing’s efforts to monitor Chinese nationals abroad, including dissidents.
> Prosecutors cited recorded phone calls in charging Officer Angwang and said he had reported regularly to two Chinese consular officials in New York on the activities of ethnic Tibetans. One of the officials was responsible for “neutralizing sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority” opposed to the Chinese government’s policies and authority, court filings said.
> But Mr. Carman, Officer Angwang’s lawyer, argued that the conversations described by prosecutors as “nefarious” were actually “pedestrian” efforts by his client to maintain good relations with Chinese officials so that he could obtain a visa to visit his parents in China and to introduce them to his daughter.
Is this the threshold of credulity now for extraordinary claims? The authorities arrested people so they must have done something wrong? This way of thinking seems fraught historically.
i know these probably just look like "fun videos" and most are likely of no consequence, but my guess is some of the military footage submitted on there is recent and potentially not in the interest of US national defense.
the value of china gaining that info is immeasurable. specifically, what im saying we are underestimating the amount and value of the data even this one example provides to china. That was just one search
okay for example. weapon/equipment types, base locations, squad sizes, army morale, etc.. Does that not make sense? You can glean a lot from those videos. I cant possibly name every one
> "Mr. Yu observed a culture of lawlessness within the company," the suit says. "This ByteDance culture focused on growth at all costs. The attitude was to violate the law first, continue to grow, and pay fines later."
Damn these dirty communists! That's not how we do business in Silicon Valley!
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Has anyone noticed that at least 99% of any "news", forum posts, etc. containing "CCP" are pure regurgitated political garbage? It cannot be just bots and psy ops. Real people do this sort of thing, too. Quite impressive how an entire population has been whipped into parroting this crap while pointing the finger. It wish it was funny but it isn't.
