The impact the Chinese government can have on an individual American is minor compared to the US govt and the same goes for the American and Chinese govts on the average Chinese person.
ICE are fighting hard to change this.
The real challenge to this is that most Chinese apps aren't in English.
Nothing a tin-foil hat can't prevent
As if the public needed any manipulation. You can just read what actual public figures, journalists, and such have been openly saying for the last 15-20 years...
When a long-time political player, wife of a President, and presidential candidate calls a big chunk of the population "deplorables", when opposing candidates call for the jailing or even shooting of their opponent, or when the current President is saying what he says and doing what he does, you need more to get "chaos" and "distrust of the neighbor"?
[0] https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43vxbytjDSM&themeRefresh=1
Yes there were very active causes and groups in the US to correct this issue, but that outside pressure forced leadership to be nudged towards corrective action and I wonder if the USSR hadn't been there would we have gotten Civil Rights legislation passed when we did?
Maybe the same will happen with China showing the US how fast they can get stuff done and what they provide as benefits to their citizens vs a declining US. Already TikTok has helped Gen-Z realize how Israel gets so many benefits (universal healthcare, college tuition, benefits for birthing kids etc.) while the US is in massive debt and continues to send money to Israel. That continued propaganda may lead to an eventual backlash and subsequent reform.
I don't really have respect for this idea; we do this to ourselves far more effectively than people who frankly have a pretty hamfisted cultural understanding- just as we have of china or russia.
IMO influence over real concrete choices is much more alarming. Someone with household-level information has an insane amount of advantage in an election. You can target politcal messaging street by street to play up the worst aspects of your opposed candidate and the least repulsive aspects of your own candidate.
But if you're in china, the most you can do is try to push towards whatever of the two candidates is least bad for you. And spoiler, zero american politicians are pro-china.
America has been trying to spread it's way of life for a hundred years. People liked the fridges and cars but never cared much for the Christianity and croony capitalism.
..Other than, well possibly, Trump. Maybe not directly, but the Tiktok deal, withdrawing from the TPP, the eventual outcome of the trade war, the praise for Xi—all stands to benefit China at the expense of the US.
> I don't really have respect for this idea; we do this to ourselves far more effectively than people who frankly have a pretty hamfisted cultural understanding- just as we have of china or russia.
The two need not be mutually exclusive.
As far as I can tell at least among the American left, criticism of israel has become so commonplace and part of the culture that its become a "memeable" event at this point.
I wonder how the Israel lobby will manage to turn that ship around at this point?
The effect of popular criticism of Israel in the US has been the normalization of mass censorship and deportation, and nil on Israeli policy or American support for it (other than being the catalyst for killing Kamala Harris' campaign.) The ship doesn't need to be turned around, it continues on its course unabated.
Last I heard Trump intends to pave Gaza over and sell the land for data centers to the Saudis.
>Last I heard Trump intends to pave Gaza over and sell the land for data centers to the Saudis.
Honestly anything is possible. Maybe they will continue unabated and finish their project before Trump kicks the can. Maybe this upcoming Iran 'adventure' will be a massive disaster and will lead to a step change in hatred of Israel and anyone who supports them. I just dont see any of the old propaganda used in Iraq working this time around.
Maybe Israel completes their complete expulsion of Palestinians and then forms a solid base as the center of the middle east with everyone else being a vassal state. Would they even need the US at that point?
First instinct is USDS stands for usds.gov and it literally turned into nationalized social media. Upon further research USDS is apparently short for U.S. Data Security. WTF is with this naming. Imagine TikTok DHS (Digital High School) JV.
It's sort've cliche at this point but we got the worst of both Orwell and Huxley in that our super-invasive surveillance apparatus is also a super-addictive apparatus designed to hit all our evolutionary buttons like a slot machine.
That’s how addiction works
"Everyone should simultaneously quit doing the harmful thing" is a "solution" to our present surveillance advertising problem in the way that advice to save money is a solution to poverty or "have you tried farming?" is a solution to world hunger.
I.e. not a solution for humans, but a description of a beeline to the desired state as performed by a hive mind.
I don't like or use Tiktok, but clearly it provides some value to the people who do. Telling people to stop using it without even attempting to address what benefit (perceived or actual) it provides is self-defeating advice.
Humanity, in person, in the context of common interests, is fulfilling for the soul.
But yeah, the solution is to not let them collect data about you.
Most of what keeps people on it isn't heroin-like dependence but convenience and habit.
My mother used it to communicate with her COPD support group and chat with in-laws in Australia. I use it to follow up on work groups and authors and developers I'm interested in. Most people's usage of social media is banal and mundane, little different than watching television in the 1990s. They use social media because it provides value for them, not because they're addicted to dopamine.
it’s also meaningfully different in structure from tv. tv was 7-10 min of content and a couple of ads in between. and you grew annoyed by the ads. only toddlers were captivated. now most content is designed like ads were. and now they grow annoyed when outside it. and toddlers and older people are captivated.
And I don't think believing social media provides some practical value for people beyond addiction is "very idealized."
edit: I remember a very different past than you do. People of all ages watched tv for hours at a time, everyone was captivated. Saturday morning cartoons (all of which were toy commercials) were a mandatory childhood ritual. And the ads when popular were often the memes of their time. Different in structure but not much different in influence.
All for the sake of "security & safety", I‘d assume.
Because TikTok in the US is run by an American company now, right?
It was only a problem when TikTok was owned by a Chinese company, right?
Then, it was little more than a propaganda and surveillance platform for a hostile foreign government but now it's a propaganda and surveillance platform for a government that can actually harm you. But getting black-bagged by ICE or whatever other band of Christofascist moral police the next decade brings is a price worth paying to avoid the risk of indoctrinating the youth into Communism, right?
Right?
The theoretical difference is that the people can push their govt to restrict what data the American version of TikTok collects and what it does.
Unfortunately it’s looking likely this difference will remain theoretical.
Because even if it was true that TikTok was a "CCP weapon of war" - which I have yet to see actual evidence of - that's still less of a threat than the USG and existing Western social media platforms, all of which are definitely full of foreign and domestic psychological operations.
And when that same lot (it's mostly the same people) gets Section 230 repealed and has the US internet regulated by the FCC and all online speech within the Western world gets censored and monitored for wrongthink UK style, I'll mock them again from behind my nine illegal proxies.
Think about the evolution of the term "social media". It evolved from social networks, which themselves evolved from forums.
The "media" in "social media" refers to third-party content that is algorithmically boosted through social signals, with signals from your own network weighting higher, and in the end creating a personalized algorithm of media content.
There is no personalized media on HN. It's the same feed for everyone. There is no network on HN. No friends, follows, private messages.
So there's no social to HN, and no (personalized) media, and no network.
I also think HN has become too general purpose to be similar in spirit to most forums. Being seen on HN has major dollar value just like trending on Reddit does.
Also, have you used Reddit recently?
Open up Reddit on the app. No using old.reddit.com, doesn’t count. That’s not the experience most users are using.
Go to the watch section. I think you swipe left or right or something? I forget, I deleted the app.
Bam, it’s TikTok.
It's like saying "don't do drugs" (thinking of heroin, meth, coke and that sort) and someone else says "caffeine is a drug too".
So, why on earth are they displaying stuff that you say is disturbing? There is no profit in that and TikTok is all about profit, ideally from abroad, ie market share.
I'm sure that the American population is incapable of being dumbed down any further.
Log a bug.
> it was suggesting feeds featuring clearly mentally impaired people with large audiences throwing money at them for saying their name
I've never seen that. I saw D&D content and discussions about gamedev. The feed is what you make of it, and TikTok's very famous algorithm shows you what you signal you will watch.
Feel free to disagree, and maybe you are the very rare exception, but you watched that stuff for a week or so, and I have no idea what you are referring to.