Comment by saltedonion
6 years ago
India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat.
As long as the platforms recommendation and ranking algos are a black box, there is no guarantee that China isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform.
At the very least, the government should audit the algos and make sure China can’t arbitrarily alter ranking results.
Are YouTube algorithms open? I don't really see a difference here. Nation state vs. private corporation is different on paper, but I don't see why. They're both going to react to material stimuli to increase their standings.
Nation states have military, intelligence, diplomacy and police corps. They reserve the power to stop, detain, arrest, jail, try, sentence, imprison, and kill. That’s why how we go about those things is a Big Deal, and why we have so many rules about who can go about it, how, under what circumstances, what the laws are that they’re enforcing, what the processes and procedures are for enforcement and how guilt is determined.
Corporations as a rule, and there have been exceptions, but as a rule have none of those powers. Theoretically the worst crimes they’re going to commit are fraudulent in nature and crimes of negligence. They’re not just a separate org chart ultimately serving as a private arm of the State with its own private rules that it self-enforces; they’re different beasts entirely.
The problem with PRC-based corporations is that they muddy the waters entirely between what is private and public. As far as the PRC is concerned, all private life is subject to the State and should serve the interests of the State. Google and Facebook and your favorite café or tea house can and do have interests that lie entirely outside of the State and are free to pursue them. That is the difference between a free society and an authoritarian State.
I think you forget a detail. Nation state, or any state, are sovereign.
If the national community agrees on something, it's all that matter. We don't have to abide by other countries standards on everything especially if we dont like it.
Im thinking as a French I had to fight a lot with free speech absolutists abroad, while at home we're quite okay with selective censorship... it sounds scary to an American sometimes, but hell we dont care :D
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>Corporations as a rule, and there have been exceptions, but as a rule have none of those powers. Theoretically the worst crimes they’re going to commit are fraudulent in nature and crimes of negligence.
Not that clear cut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
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Aren’t big corporations usually lobbying the US government? Under this perspective I cannot really trust them more than any government.
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This is ridiculous nonsense.
You have a good point. But TikTok is much more risky, and as as such requires much more scrutiny given existing body of knowledge between how chinese social media / chat companies such as WeChat enforce government censorship and aid in propagating misinformation.
This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.
The reality is that Chinese firms and government operates together intimately. Nearly all sizable firms have a party secretary that is involved in board level decisions, and steps in when things get political. You can ponder who has the final say.
> The reality is that Chinese firms and government operates together intimately
No, I get this, but here's the thing: YouTube and, more specifically, it's advertisers do everything that you're accusing China of. There are material consequences if YouTube doesn't keep in line. What this means is that a status quo that pleases advertisers will be maintained.
It's every bit propaganda as dropping leaflets, but you can't point out a boogeyman pulling the strings.
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> This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.
Those people would be even more shocked by the extent to which this is true in the western world as well.
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> The reality is that Chinese firms and government operates together intimately
In China, the government has more power than corporations. In the US, corporations have more power than the government.
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>This might be a shock to most people in the western world, but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda.
I still can't get over the lack of self-awareness in this post.
> Nearly all sizable firms have a party secretary that is involved in board level decisions, and steps in when things get political.
That's scary and still people have the audacity to compare Chinese propaganda outlets with YouTube, Google etc.
> but if you go on almost ANY news website in china, the headline news is dedicated to government propaganda
Well I have news for you... Most of the news about international politics you read in the west are propaganda as well- and it works so well you're about to hit the downvote button in disbelief.
Why should India ban a Chinese social media company and not an US social media company, it's a matter of national security? This claim is just xenophobic nonsense.
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China is a special case because they are among the very few number of countries in the world where the government openly controls the media and the private companies.
A U.S. company like Twitter even bans the U.S. president's posts on their platform, and so does Facebook. Something like that is impossible in China as whoever does that will instantly get shut down. Think about the implication of this. This means you have to assume that any Chinese tech company will have to comply when the government tells them to spread some propaganda through their media.
This is what has been called in a science fiction as "information warfare", and it can be even more catastrophic than a real war, but I don't think most people realize this because they've never seen one before. What's even scarier is that even as this is happening, nobody knows this is happening, which is worse than a war because, unlike a physical war where everything is visible, one country can "attack" another country without anyone else realizing, causing a huge damage to their economy.
Forget the economy. The damage to social infrastructure and trust is far more serious.
Groups violently turning on eachother, families splitting over political divides, lynchings... these matter a lot more than whether people have nice cars.
If India (or any other country for that matter) would be in an armed conflict with the US, they would probably also consider banning various US controlled services.
China is not in armed conflict with US , why does it ban every app that civilized world uses ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
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I asked about the algorithm thing--that's what I'm curious about. Where specifically does that belief end.
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Biggest difference is motives, as long as we are making the assumption you mean private corporations that aren’t proxies for their respective government(s)
A private company will optimize profit, all things being equal. Sometimes this means it’s product/platform can be used to disseminate possibly dangerous information, but it also can be regulated in response.
Another government? Not so easy
Only way to really assert influence is through a much more narrow and limited scope like diplomacy, economic sanction, war, or otherwise influence the state/affairs of the country through target regulations like the ones mentioned in the article
> Sometimes this means it’s product/platform can be used to disseminate possibly dangerous information, but it also can be regulated in response.
I don't think this is true specifically in the case of America. Who are you going to get to actually grapple that beast of a multi national? Yeah, lots of people talk about it, but politics ultimately requires a degree of consensus.
When you have investors calling up their representatives saying they will donate to their opponent next election or they will move jobs out of the area, politicians are going to start falling off. Oh, these politicians are all probably invested in these companies to some degree, or maybe they rent apartments to their workers. There's also the gridlock issue that likely can't be resolved unless we start adding states, so legislation will be hard there.
Companies like alphabet and Facebook are the culmination of the last 40 years of politics in America.
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It’s about allies versus active enemies. There are shootouts on a regular basis between India and China, and they’ve intensified recently.
> There are shootouts on a regular basis between India and China, and they’ve intensified recently.
There are no "shootouts". There are standoffs sometimes (think once a year if you want to define regularity) due to the loosely demarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China. It's usually a melee. Even the recent escalated incident wasn't a shootout. There are agreements between Indian and Chinese governments that prevent usage of firearms in standoffs like these.
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Ah right. Because the U.S. is never involved in war, it's a different story for youtube etc...
So it's just opportunism, then? Condemn the other; refuse reflection. Or am I misunderstanding you?
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Good point. But YouTube is not controlled by an authoritarian fascist-like government which has a world view in direct opposition to what you could refer handwaveingly as "western" and is currently pushing to become the dominant power in the world.
If you furthermore consider how bad the "western world" (mainly Britten and the East India Company) had treated it in the past, some aspects of the Chinese culture and the current Goverment direction western countries expecting any fair or reasonable treatment once china succeeded to become the worlds dominant power is kinda a sad joke.
This is a joke. The "western world" created PRISM and Five Eyes and has been meddling in elections in the third world for almost a century. Additionally, what do you define as the "western world", because by some measures it includes some actually fascist governments like e.g. Saudi Arabia.
A) Having democracy does not correlate with having transparency and freedom, this has been de facto proven.
B) If the "western world" is the bar, the bar is low.
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> has a world view in direct opposition to what you could refer handwaveingly as "western"
I don't think this is even hand-wavingly a thing. If it is then it doesn't bode well because "we" don't exactly have a great track record of treating people on the other side of the world well.
YouTube isn't controlled by an authoritarian fascist-like government - it is run by the fascist-lite corporate oligarchy which runs the US. The US may not be as bad as china in some ways but that doesn't absolve them from responsibility.
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Youtube is censoring like crazy the last months. They ARE fascists, too
Since you mention East India Company, what makes YouTube different from them?
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YT has a legal framework that gives it protection to an extent from government interference, especially where it touches upon freedom of speech. Whether they want to use it or not is another question.
But the Party can just put officials in the Douyin (TikTok) offices and ask for any encryption key without having to divulge anything and without the company having any recourse. This in complete legality.
Large corporations becoming the end point for debate is a real problem, but I don't think it really overlaps with public/private collusion (or the lack of true private in China's case).
TikTok apps add a vector for arbitrary code download and execution. What "algorithm" you get would seem to depend on what they'd like to run on your device that day.
> Nation state vs. private corporation is different on paper,
A nation state and a company are different in substance as well. I am sympathetic to the idea that companies (in America) can do more to curtail your freedoms. But, this is only true because of our system of government. In principle, a government can do much more than a company to curtail your freedoms. In practice, this is often less true. (although if you bump into eminent domain, or similar laws, then the government is much more threatening to you.)
We don't have to look far for this theoretical: the Chinese government rounds up people and puts them in camps, and disappears people for having the wrong opinions.
Because YouTube doesn’t have nuclear weapons and a plan to invade western allies?
Let's be honest here; if India's relations with USA had soured to the same degree as with PRC, Youtube would be the one getting banned.
USA and India are friends unlike CCP which can't be trusted by anyone.
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Politics does. That's the difference. Acting on above is solely depends on political bias instead of a concrete notice. No official research conducted and released stating the harm about the apps, right?
Not to mention state sponsored private firm, being private is just optics.
There are no private companies in China, all of the corporate entities directly or indirectly depend on CCP, which uses every opportunity to damage national security of its enemies.
On YouTube at least the user has the option to search and subscribe the videos, there by controlling what is shown, it is not the same with TikTok
Xi is censoring protests on their platforms, but it's clear that Trump can't.
That's a clear proof of difference.
You don't see a difference between an ideological party which interns millions of people by ethnicity (among other glaring issues), and a corporation seeking profits from a video platform?
On the question of black box algorithms, no because it's not relevant.
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3/5 board of directors of ByteDance that owns TikTok are western.
because China is enemy and America is friend.
hmm google or the ccp. Take your pick!
The Chinese State is based on Marxism-Leninism and wants to dominate the world. There is a difference in that and any other country that acknowledges natural rights. If you believe rights are innate, then you can’t openly tolerate a state that denies them.
I often think what would California look like if it had the laws of Texas. Or what would China look like if it had the structure and motivations of Nevada? Both have Elon Musk and gambling.
I mean, they both are made of people, right? And those people have brains that they use, right? And brains are made of molecules, right? At the end of the day it's all just molecules reacting to stimuli, and basically there's no difference. Because they are molecules.
Chinese immigrant in US here:
I don't think it's a stretch to state the risk of tiktok being mass propaganda machine, from India's perspective.
Additionally, I don't take this as a particular politically charged statement against China, as quite a few replies stated. The reason is that China and India are on a very delicate geopolitical environment. The history is long and ambiguous. The current rivalry is subtle and dangerous. You just cannot give any chance in this situation. After all, China do not have any foreign social network services anyway. There is no reason to gift the opponent an potential upper hand.
The Pandora's box was formally opened in the Arab spring already. It was a well intended start, followed with an ugly development and messy prospect left for generations to suffer and struggle.
Now the whole idea of social networking services as an actual helper of connecting people with different cultural background roughly reduces to nil. That really was a buffer.
Lastly, I don't think it makes sense for any sovereign government to force their country's corporation to serve them directly.
That would immediately destroy any chance of those organizations to expand beyond their home country. Someone might argue Chinese firms are OK to that because they had a big market already. That's a totally unreasonable imagination on Chinese business men's brain structure. I never encountered any such Chinese business man who believe loyalty to CCP is higher than their profit. Other argument is that Chinese law can coerce, but all the laws are saying the company ought to corporate when necessary for the security of the country. I cannot imagine any sane political personnel can convince anyone else that offensive propaganda in peace time is necessary for national security. At least I did not see any such behavior or even minor behavior with hint of such reasoning from past history.
>As long as the platforms recommendation and ranking algos are a black box
All platforms recommendation and ranking algos are ultimately a black box. Why is TikTok special here?
TikTok is controlled by an authoritarian dictatorship engaged in a war against Western/Democratic values and human rights.
Not sure if you're talking about China or some Silicon Valley technocracies.
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Many around of the world see the US also an authoritarian state with little regard for human rights.
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This is funny, can you elaborate how come a ranking algorithm is a national security threat? It reminds me of the time when Google/FB/Instagram/Twitter still worked in China, Chinese govt used the same excuse to ban big tech social platforms.
Propaganda is powerful. If China wanted to send a message to change public opinion around the world tweaking the recommendation algorithm to do that would be a very helpful tool.
The CCP band western propaganda platforms, which Facebook etc could be said to be. Fine, I think any set of ideologies need propaganda, like every company needs advertisement.
If you understand that, then surely you must see the symmetry in banning Tiktok etc?
The great firewall should work both ways, otherwise it encourages more selective censorship.
> India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat.
This is just a lame attempt at economic warfare and "misinformation campaigns" is a very weak excuse.
What concerns me the most is that in 2020 people are overwhelmingly in favor of governments and corporations controlling what their people watch and read and think.
This is a consequence of Brexit and the election of Trump, democratic decisions that caught many people in power by surprise. Sophisticated use of social media platforms turned out to have a significant influence on public opinion. Although I agree that in principle everyone should be enabled to seek out their own information sources and form their own independent opinions, this is not what happens in the age of polarized sensationalist identity politics.
Well technically China did it first. China banned tons of foreign apps or websites because "significant national securities threat"
In the case of Facebook being banned, there is precedence for that.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/01/23/facebook-banned-in...
foreign apps or websites?
99.9% of them are US apps and websites. you don't need to ban india apps in China as I've never heard any of them, you don't need to ban india website as the india infrastructure won't be able to serve requests from a country like China anyway.
Serving large number of requests is not an unsolved problem which only China has monopoly on. You just spin up more servers in the cloud as you get more and more users. Cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud and technologies like Kubernetes, Docker etc has made the job way too easy.
Anyway, India's hotstar holds the world record of maximum number of consecutive users watching a live stream.
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/entertainment/news/hotstar-world-re...
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/12/hotstar-disneys-indian-str...
Very interesting. I would like to know more about this thought.
Is the problem, let's say, with:
- the country of origin, so if this was the exact same app from US it would have been less harmful, or,
- the amount of time people spend on it, so if people spent time on something like facebook it would have been less harmful?
The amount of data they harvest off the app is scary, but I wish we'd be just as strict with Google over it. It's like the industry is slowly moving towards limiting these things, or making this type of spying much more covert as new things become exposed like the clipboard thing that TikTok does on iOS I can only imagine it's just as bad on Android, to the point where it should be a permission on a per app basis.
I think it is the sum of the two. They don't want the Chinese government to have that much influence over their population.
It is an extreme move, but I see the logic behind it.
All RS algorithms follows non-trivial logic based on the user’s feedback. They constantly adapt and upgraded. You can add some fuzzy-rules based on your moderation principles — remove porn, videos about flat earth, abusive content, and etc. But the core algorithm hard for interpreting.
Letting government step into this space creates an alternative form of censorship. I would rather ask all content platforms for transparent open-sourced moderation rules.
At the meantime, TikTok has a remarkable traction that put in a row of the greatest product of the decade. Previously ByteDance tried to move HQ away from China, but I now I guess they might even consider selling their product.
I guess it is more political decision rather than Indian government really cares about data security. Seems that US and specifically Facebook become the absolute winner in India.
> As long as the platforms recommendation and ranking algos are a black box, there is no guarantee that [insert platform here] isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform.
Honestly, I don't see the difference between TikTok and other social media apps and the old media. Why not ban Hollywood, the Beatles, and McDonald's then? Aren't they a source of pernicious American influence on this generation's youth?
> Aren't they a source of pernicious American influence on this generation's youth?
Many countries have broadcast laws around a maximum amount of foreign programming (for one example amongst many, private French radios have to play French music for at least 40% of their programming).
The difference is that China = bad and America = good.
Yes.
Just from a more farcical standpoint, the idea of one country attacking another via dance trends feels like a page out of Zoolander.
This is a world I want to live in. Where do I sign up?
My reading of the article is that it has a lot more to do with the border clash with China that killed 20 Indian soldiers with more believed to be captured (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/world/asia/indian-china-b...) and a subsequent desire to distance themselves from Chinese goods and services than it has to do with algorithmic transparency.
A reddit user reverse engineered Tiktok and listed some of the information they collect and the extent to which they go to obfuscate their data exfiltration.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...
See the top comment as the video has now been removed from YouTube.
^ Someone just posted this link and got 100 points. I got downvoted. Feels bad man.
Wasn't TikTok also caught intercepting the clipboard contents of the phones on which it was installed? Not sure about malware, but it could certainly be qualified as spyware if it actually does that.
But, if a nation can be threatened by an application, a chat, or a social network, can the ban solve the problem?
The app is not the entire problem so banning it won't/doesn't have to solve the entire problem either.
The same can be said of companies like FB and GOOG. They operate black boxes with little scrutiny from society.
FB and GOOG don't have troops stationed on India's border.
Neither does TikTok proper, and those two are in close & opaque cooperation with the US government.
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Imo they are even worse than TikTok since they are actively being used by decision making bodies in nation states. The amount of classified information those companies are privy to is mind-boggling. Political parties, NGOs, companies, private citizens - they all store their information on servers belonging to American companies.
If you consider that they also run on operating systems made by American-owned companies who don't really care that much about privacy, it's even scarier.
China isn't the boogeyman here. The United States is.
They at least have been accountable to gov officials when called upon.
But I doubt any due process was done before the ban, if any and concrete proof of wrongdoing is established before doing such things. Most of the bigger app developers will surely goto court.
If any this sounds like a propaganda move aimed at giving the people a feeling that the government has done something about it.
Some of these may relaunched as a web service, some may relaunch under a different branding, there are any number of things the app makers can legitimately do to skirt around this.
Using summary executive powers to do such is a rather undemocratic move, and which time and again this Indian Government has indicated it has no qualms of using.
This is a politically motivated move, where as it should not be. If there was established wrongdoing then ban the apps, not because it is politically convenient to do it.
There is no such thing as ABSOLUTELY right. We don't even know what's actually going on at higher levels in the government. Why isn't Alibaba & AliExpress banned?
Alibaba and AliExpress aren't banned because Indians aren't involved as much in drop-shipping as the West is. And US has already banned ePacket. AliBaba and AliExpress will collapse on its own if the West doesn't lift ban on commercial shipping. There is a huge backlog right now with shipping time going through the roof. You need to have a reliable agent in China to get goods out of China. It is pretty terrible state of affairs. If you are part of any drop-shipping groups on Facebook you'll get to see how drop-shippers are having a hard time getting packages delivered to customers.
I ordered direct from a manufacturer a month ago, order shipped from Shenzhen via Hong Kong to Europe using DHL Express (sellers choice). Total cost including shipping was less than similar offers on Amazon with standard shipping. Package arrived in 6 days (could have been 5 days if it hadn't missed a flight by mere minutes). No need for an agent, just a reputable seller and parcel delivery service.
Because the Chinese government cannot directly alter the content and rankings in AliExpress to immediately spread out it's propaganda directly to easily impressionable teenagers in the form of audio visuals.
Are kids committing suicide while using Alibaba website?
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/bengaluru...
https://www.indiatoday.in/lifestyle/people/story/tiktok-star...
People have been committing suicides due to social media in General. It's nothing new. Nothing to do particularly with TikTok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_suicide
Social media is polarising, if someone thinks their life is shitty - social media magnifies it several hundred times untill you've become very sure only your life suck and all people are having it easy other than you.
> India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat.
As opposed to Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and all the others?
The difference being TikTok is operated by India’s adversary.
> At the very least, the government should audit the algos and make sure China can’t arbitrarily alter ranking results.
Can we do the same for YouTube ?!
The ranking algorithm is the least of anyone's worries in my opinion.
This looks mostly like gimmick PR stunt to cover the recent setback India had with China in the border. For example see this news from a channel that supports govt. shorturl.at/acjoM This is not a comedy show, its a real prime time new show.
If India was serious about taking action it would have done something about the Chinese branded phone and Chinese infra project. All the largest phone brands in India are chinese. Same is true for Tv's. All unicorn startups in the country has considerable chinese interest. This ban carefully stays away from all apps, businesses and things that could really invite a response from China.
And it worked. As in the link above, Modi's followed have taken the bait. They are happy and all over social media celebrating this as a fitting reply for the soldiers life lost in the border.
Since this is HN, what’s the easiest way to roll your own brainwashing machine like Facebook or TikTok? I mean isn’t it going to be fun to plant your own ideas on people...
Going from what currently seems to be popular: huge botnets that carefully try to curate "real" users from random accounts. Rolling your own (Network that is, like FB or TikTok) seems pretty unlikely regarding initial investments, user base etc.
I wonder what's stopping them. Initial investments is likely an issue for small, poor countries, but it can't be an issue for a country like India or Saudi Arabia, and the user base can be "convinced" to use the domestic thing by doing what India does: block foreign services.
It seems more sustainable and much easier to work with if you have your own network, and you don't rely on US-services looking away / Twitter tolerating your stuff.
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First, you need a few hundred million dollars.
we, non americans, think facebook is doing everything you describe and even worse.
> there is no guarantee that China isn’t conducting misinformation campaigns via the platform.
And who cares if they are? We live in an open society, and in the US, freedom of speech is a foundational principle. This is among the trade-offs you face when prioritizing absolute freedom of speech.
Foreign propaganda broadcast and pushed by a hostile foreign government isn't protected speech. Not sure why anyone would need to say that out loud, but here we are. 2020, going hard.
Freedom of speech is not just to protect the speaker, it's to protect the rights of the citizens to hear it.
Foreign propaganda is explicitly legal and protected in the United States. I'm sorry that you think it should not be, but it is, and it always has been throughout the entire history of the country.
How exactly do you intend to distinguish the types of speech that the government is allowed to ban? Any foreign ownership of a media organization from a country deemed an enemy of the state? And you're wondering about what needs to be said out loud?
That's not to say the United States Government cannot take _diplomatic action_ to counter propaganda. It certainly can, and it does. And indeed, the Congress just passed the Countering Foreign Propaganda Act a few years ago, to do precisely that in response to Russian efforts in the 2016 election.
But you know what it doesn't do? Ban the protected speech. We don't ban RT, which is broadcast into most of the homes in the country, despite being directly controlled by and funded by the Russian State, because that would be unconstitutional, and the Congress does not have the power to do it.
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This argument can be used to ban all foreign press. It's nonsense, but unfortunately common in 2020.
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I care
China bad
Yes. That's a given.
I think the poster was saying that sarcastically - a variation of the "Orange Man Bad" meme
> "India is absolutely right in banning TikTok as it is a significant national securities threat."
I'm surprised, actually, that Trump hasn't expressed a desire ban TikTok. Especially after they trolled him so badly at that Tulsa rally!
He's managed to ban Huawei over (unproven and strenuously denied) security issues. Yet TikTok has direct influence over something much more important than 5G radio equipment: the hearts and minds of a generation of American children!
What I fear is whether this data could be incorporated into the state facial recognition systems already well deployed throughout China. You're potentially helping the CCP in training a tool to aid in the violent suppression of ethnic minorities.
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senators-hawley-scott-introduc...
I hope other countries follow this absolutely wise decision. China will not hesitate to use any measures for weakening national security of countries it believes to be its enemies
US should follow suit.
I bet this is just a corrupted ban for promoting local app of friends of friends of some minister.
I kind of agree, but 99% of the videos I see on FYP are just absolutely silly, hilarious content.
Same reason the EU should ban Facebook and Google right?
I mean, if they feel like the US is a threat to their sovereignty, and may use the platforms to push public opinions that undermine their stability, yes. If not, then why bother?
Governments may seem dumb and bureaucratic, but good ones tend to have some level of pragmatism.
It's like comparing Apples and Oranges.
like fb, youtube, twitter, linkedIn algos are audited. Just because tiktok is Chinese app, audit it?? what kind of hypocrisy is this.
I doubt they can audit close source software.
Yeah, when I saw my neece on TikTok I was feeling really bad.
Most people don't see it, but I hate it to realize that she's being slowly influenced by hidden propaganda :(
One problem is, that often you cannot easily tell people or explain to them how bad it is, because "all their friends do it too" and the network effect is particularly strong in environments like schools. You can try at least though, asking them, whether they want to know how it works.
Have you seen what people share on facebook? The toxicity on twitter? The conspiracies on youtube?
> it is a significant national securities threat
come on...
Is this regulated for US companies?
You are going to use the government to audit black box algos?
I'm chinese and I'm glad the indian government is taking action before the US/Europe, which still haven't rstricted the spread of Chinese spyware.
1. Tiktok and wechat are bigger threats than huawei as they taken user generated data and biometric data to build a large surveillance network of not only chinese, but also folks living outside of the great fire wall. 2. The chinese government essentially bans the top 20 websites outside of china. Not seeking reciprocal treatment is the extension of clinton era illusion that somehow china will open up as they get richer.
I unfortunately can't disclose details on zoom's infringement but hope yall can figure out what going on behind the scene
I was skeptical about this, but I think they are surely are.
I installed tiktok just maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago.. it was kind of fun at first and was amused by some stuff on there. What it was showing me I thought was very relevant to prior stuff I had seen in some regard (just the type of humor) so I was kind of impressed.
Then all the sudden it started showing me all this pro-Trump/pro-religion/antiBLM stuff. And look, a platform like this and the age demographic the amount of pro-trump & pro-religion stuff is TINY. The amount that was coming up was baffling. And it would just be inserted at the weirdest times, where it honestly felt like I was being targeted to see this stuff.
I'm not one to be a conspiracy nut at all, but there were some flags hitting in my head that something weird was going on.. so I promptly uninstalled.
Honestly it's too bad, I think tiktok is a very unique thing, and seemed to fill some type of space where people just want to create stupid little videos that either say a little message or are just funny. But there's something weird going on.
Tiktok is just a terrible implementation of Vine. It's not unique.
I don't think there's any mystery here, I also started seeing pro-Trump posts but that's because I'd watched other posts. If you start swiping immediately on those videos, they stop showing up. The algorithm doesn't care if you watched a video because you were enjoying it or were upset but couldn't turn away (or if you left a comment to support the content or argue with the creator). They tune it to glue your eyeball to the screen.
I wouldn't watch them though, I was flipping away pretty quick.
Hard to explain exactly, just saying that it really seemed unusual. Again it was also the amount that were coming up. I watched a descent amount of BLM related videos a few nights.. like, a lot. Then a few insane trump ones which maybe I watch a few moments but keep swiping away, only to be suggested more Trump and less BLM?
Anyway- I understand it's conjecture and hard to say what I was seeing.. just seemed off, and it's pretty easy to jump to the conclusion that it was attempting to manipulate me.
Well, the same applies to FaceBook, just to name one prominent example. Or Google, for that matter.
I also bet the Chinese version of TikTok, if it is even allowed in their country, has a completely different content moderation system. They are more than likely promoting degeneracy in our country while promoting their own ideals at home.
You are spreading baseless, racist speculation.
Speculation? Yeah, sure. Baseless? Not really, considering the great firewall and all. Racism? Where?
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China is a shithole fascist country of oppression and slavery, not a race. That you associate a nation state directly with a race, is frankly racist. Maybe you should be canceled, Björn.
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There is no guarantee any app is not doing this, should we ban all apps?
Covid-19 is biting extremely hard in India. Handling has been very poor so far.
Stroking nationalism and pointing at foreign enemies in hard times is a tried and tested tactic.
That's not true in this case. There is continued aggression by China, infringing into India borders. It would be stupid of Indian govt. not to react.
Exactly what I'm saying. A tried and tested tactic that works well. And in fact I think China is playing a similar game, and the Chinese public buys it in the same way.
But it is a dangerous game because it can get out of hands. I think both sides know it and they don't want things to escalate. We need to see how the pandemic develops and hits both countries and their economies. I'm more worried about the Indian side at the moment because the pandemic situation seems out of hands and deteriorating fast there.
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Covid-19 originated in China and is a global pandemic due to the CCP's negligence.
I agree. Similar to using terrorist attacks to stoke nationalist feelings and distract from demonetization
There is no Chinese aggression on the Indian border, they are not interning anyone, China is not a police state. It's all in people's dreams.