cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12876226
The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance.
US officials have cited the widespread commercial availability of US citizens’ data as another source of national security risk. The US government and other domestic law enforcement agencies are also known to have purchased US citizens’ data from commercial data brokers.
Fuck your whatsboutism. This is good news; tiktok is a propaganda machine.
The cyber security professional inside of me wants to agree with you. The Liberal in me doesn’t want to give the government the authority to ban speech and what citizens are allowed to watch.
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So you’re going to shut down YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc as well right? Considering they all do the same thing and FB even interfered in an election?
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Then do so. This idea that tiktok is any worse because it’s Chinese is ridiculous.
Either the propaganda is working or there’s no hope for any of us. And I’m not saying this facetiously.
The idea of a company in China versus in the West is very different. In the West a company has near complete autonomy within the confines of law in the democratic country it’s in. In China, a company is completely beholden to the will of the CCP. Smaller companies are not worth getting involved with, but larger companies like Bytedance and Baidu are effectively corporate offices of the CCP.
We’re talking about a communist dictatorship that’s constantly threatening Taiwan with invasion and death threats. Goes around the South China Sea harassing the countries there by attacking their military and civilian ships with high power water cannons. Putting nets and markers right up against those same countries, in some instances within 50 or so kilometers. Then there’s the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people. The constant suppression of any negative news. The complete isolation of its people from accessing the internet or news from the rest of the world. It just goes on.
China is an adversarial power to Western nations and even many Asian ones.
The issue isn’t that Bytedance is simply Chinese. The issue is that China does not allow a single bit of information leaving its borders without its explicit say so. Which is why any Chinese company that conducts any business outside China has CCP officials stationed at the company’s offices and have to examine and approve everything that goes out.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
military and civilian ships with high power water cannons
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
So what’s the difference between the CCP getting it for free from Tiktok and paying for it from an “American” corporation?
None of what you said matters in this. Not when Zuckerberg is specifically courting China to spend advertising dollars and buy data.
Is the money changing hands making the end effect any different?
TikTok is both a sacrifice to make it look like something is being done and a called hit on a competitor.
Whataboutism at its finest.
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I’m really not. I want Congress to pass actual laws, not operate as an adjunct to American Corporations.
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Same. Just make it so Tiktok cannot advertise to American users or monetize American views. Start with that and wait for another non-ccp app to take that market.
Edit: Curious why every seems to disagree.
are we going to ban youtube as well? which has more than tiktok? or lemmy for that matter? or any other forms of social media?
people who fear monger tiktok make me worry that they fail to see the bigger picture.
tiktok isn’t the problem. the fact that propaganda is monetized is the problem. and banning tiktok will fix nothing whatsoever.
Propaganda is a major problem no matter what.
I mentioned in another comment that Tiktok is a massively direct pipeline to the minds of younger people by the CCP. Studies have demonstrated that the Chinese only version of Tiktok (Douyin) promotes positive content to users whereas Tiktok promotes highly negative content. To the point that a study concluded it was affecting the mental health of younger people.
How do you differentiate purposeful manipulation vs it being a natural effect of Western social media? I stopped using Facebook and Twitter because it was obviously toxic and affecting my mental health. I use TikTok a fair amount and don’t find it nearly as bad.
It’s also possible that there’s manipulation in the other direction. In their own app they could be artificially increasing positive content while allowing the natural social media toxicity and ragebait to dominate in other areas.
My personal opinion is that TikTok is a way that peer to peer information and news travels very quickly in a way that they can’t control, and they don’t like that. As with all things, they want to keep us isolated.
Well, Tiktok is owned by a Chinese company. Every major Chinese company, especially ones that operate outside of China, have CCP offices within the company. The “rights” that individuals and companies have in China are at best a facade. What the CCP says to do is what happens.
The major difference is tested by looking at how the algorithm promotes or suppresses certain topics. Tiktok has a Chinese counterpart called Douyin (which IIRC is the “original” Tiktok) that’s only available to people in China. The findings point to more positive content being promoted on Douyin and negative content on Tiktok.
What’s also noticed is that Douyin heavily promotes anti-west and specifically anti-American propaganda. And promotes pro-China and pro-CCP stuff, such as “China has solved homelessness and homelessness doesn’t exist there” and “China has solved poverty”. The second one is technically true on paper, because they recently reduced the poverty threshold to $600 a year.
On Tiktok huge pro-CCP campaigns have been discovered and that content is constantly being pushed. They use Western shills mostly and the propaganda aspect is cleverly veiled.
In the context of Tiktok, that doesn’t make sense. And what’s even more ironic is that Tiktok is Chinese owned, and people in China have zero access to the outside world. People are going to jail or even disappeared now for simply using a VPN. News coming out of China is almost completely censored. China has basically become North Korea with more money. And they have direct control over the content on the most widely used social media platform in the West.
I’m not here to be pro-china, and I definitely believe that they’re putting those things in douyin. I’m just not convinced they’re purposefully putting negative things in TikTok purposefully to harm mental health.
This is anecdotal and my personal experience, but I haven’t noticed any pro-ccp things on my personal algorithm. What I do notice is anti-US and anti-capitalist content by Americans. Whether or not they are shills, I can’t say for sure, but it feels like it would border on conspiracy theory thinking to suggest that many of them are.
To clarify the isolation comment, I mean that TikTok is a place where community building and the spreading of ideas or news (not necessarily good or bad ideas/news) spreads rapidly, especially among young people, in a way the people who run traditional media can’t control. Taking away this tool makes us more reliant on forms of media that they do control.
This is true for many platforms like Reddit, Lemmy, Mastadon, etc., including ones that no longer exist like Vine. There have always been pages on the internet to share censored free content, and there likely will always be. The issue with Tiktok being a “way to spread news” is that most of the content is just “hearsay” without being verifiable. And that means false information spreads quickly and easily on Tiktok. There’s a reason most of the flat earthers have flocked to Tiktok lately.
Additionally, Tiktok is terrible for searchability. The platform isn’t designed to work that way. It’s designed to just doom scroll and you see what the platform tells you to see. The only other time you see something else is if someone shares a video. The random nature of the next video is where the issue lies, and considering it’s a CCP controlled company that controls the algorithm that picks the next video, I wouldn’t trust it with a video of watching paint dry.
There have been many studies demonstrating that the TikTok algorithm is hugely problematic.
I agree with you. The difference between the other platforms mentioned and TikTok is that TikTok is where the action is right now, so it’s the target. The unverified hearsay problem is certainly there, but I don’t think it’s inherent to TikTok more than any other platform. No matter the platform, rage and engagement are the most important things so the algorithms will always reward them. Even YouTube’s algorithm has been highly criticized for funneling people down extremist pipelines.
The TikTok algorithm is incredibly efficient at locking people, especially young people, into scrolling forever. That’s bad. However that same criticism has been made against more traditional social media platforms too. Twitter especially has a similar although less effective problem.
Besides vague gesturing at China, I don’t see any problem that TikTok has that isn’t already present in other social media platforms. If we want to go after all of them, I’d 100% be for it, but this legislation is too targeted and creates a dangerous precedent imo.
100% agree on the searchability. It’s totally unusable.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-pushes-potentially-harmful-content-to-users-as-often-as-every-39-seconds-study/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-04-20/tiktok-effects-on-mental-health-in-focus-after-teen-suicide
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/tiktok-risks-pushing-children-towards-harmful-content/
The issue is measurable.
I’ll agree with you up to a point. The difference here is the interests of the company. The money angle is easy to understand and figure out, because there’s no reason to hide that.
It’s less obvious or easy when the intention is to influence people away from a societal or political ideation. So many people hand-wave away the fact that Bytedance is a Chinese company. The reason is that most people think “company” like Google or Microsoft in a democratic country, where access to data has (mostly) a lot of red tape and legal protections.
Now I’m sure anyone reading that would laugh and say “have you heard of Snowden?” which is absolutely a fair and correct thing to say. So with that in mind, Western companies still have a ton of autonomy and legal protections from their governments when compared to China. In China a “company” like Bytedance or Baidu are more like “corporate offices” for the CCP.
So Tiktok is effectively owned by the CCP, and it’s the Chinese Communist Party that’s coding the algorithm on Tiktok. There’s no other way to approach it.
No, it’s not vague gesturing. This is 100% a demonstrable issue. The I-Soon leaks demonstrate that. China is absolutely an adversarial country to places like the US, Canada, and Europe. The fact that they have covert Chinese police stations in the US and Canada to track and intimidate Chinese citizens in these countries is being alarming.
It baffles me that people even want to use Tiktok on the fact that it’s CCP owned in the first place.
https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1765823031966904671
do you have a link to that study?
https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/china-is-hurting-us-kids-with-tiktok-but-protecting-its-own/
https://www.newsweek.com/douyin-tiktok-use-link-favorable-views-china-public-opinion-poll-1855311
I can’t find the study I’m thinking of. It’s been at least 6 months since I saw it. But these articles at least backup some of what I said.
Lemmy is also a propaganda machine, let’s ban this platform too then.
So you’re going to shut down YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc as well right? Considering they all do the same thing and FB even interfered in an election?
I would 100% be for shutting those down. Doing so would probably lead us into the next Renaissance.
so is instagram and facebook but you don’t see people rabidly want to ban them.
Instagram and Facebook aren’t run by the CCP
they are propaganda machines though
yes they are run by the us empire, which has a more violent history.
still not seeing the point of banning one over the other