HelixDab2 ,

“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” a TikTok spokesperson said.

That is patently false. It only bans TikTok if ByteDanse refuses to spin TikTok off and take the control of TikTok outside of China. The company that owns TikTok could be based in very nearly any country other than China, and TikTok would be fine. China already exerts significant direct control over social media that’s inside China; Facebook and Twitter have both been banned because they haven’t been willing to give the Chinese gov’t the level of control that it wants over expressions by users. The concern is that the Chinese gov’t can exert the same level of control over TikTok’s data that they do over Weibo, and that they can for the company to change the way that they feed information to people in order to serve pro-China propaganda to people. That’s a concern in the same way that a social media platform serving pro-Russian propaganda is.

MossyFeathers ,

The concern is that the Chinese gov’t can exert the same level of control over TikTok’s data that they do over Weibo, and that they can for the company to change the way that they feed information to people in order to serve pro-China propaganda to people. That’s a concern in the same way that a social media platform serving pro-Russian propaganda is.

Pretty much how I feel about it. There was a point where I was upset from a privacy standpoint, but somewhere along the way I realized that if China really wants my info they can probably easily get it from one of the many databrokers who almost certainly have my entire life on file; and doing so would likely provide them with more info on who I am than tiktok ever could.

At this point I’m more concerned about how the CCP might be manipulating the app’s algorithms and to what end. I don’t use tiktok, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that Chinese tiktok tends to be very wholesome with trends that tend to highlight people’s talents and skills, while western tiktok tends to be very cancerous with destructive or (ironically) anti-social trends that keep popping up. It seems odd that the quality of socialization would vary so dramatically. Maybe westerners are just really shitty compared to people living in China, or maybe China’s social credit system just makes that much of a difference, but I find it hard to believe that westerners are really that different from people in China. I find it hard to believe that there isn’t some amount of manipulation going on, either on China’s side (skewed to make people in China look better) or the international side (skewed to make westerners look worse).

HelixDab2 ,

We know that Russian troll farms amplified political divisions in 2016 and 2020 in order to make the US less cohesive; the intent was to weaken our home support against Russia’s planned in vasion of Ukraine. While I don’t think that China has any similar intentions, anything that makes the US less cohesive makes it harder for us to assist our regional allies in resisting their imperialism. So you do the same thing: amplify the most extreme voices.

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