Comment by felbane
4 days ago
Devil's advocate: Can this not also happen on literally any other social network? Can this kind of shit not also be initiated by domestic agents, or agents of allied nations, or even just some bored haxor group with a penchant for chaos?
If what you said is the primary reason for banning TikTok (bad actors can do bad things), it's also a valid reason to ban literally every social network, or possibly even all user-generated content on the internet.
On non CCP controlled platforms, they cannot chose what stories to "organically" promote and who to promote them too. Most people have no concept of the 99% of posts to social media that never get traction.
They can still kind of do it, but it requires a lot of work to fool other companies algo's into artificially promoting what you want. Much easier to just call up Bytedance and say "We need everyone in this area seeing this tiktok tomorrow".
If you think domestic social media companies aren't capable of silently promoting certain content at the request of someone with influence... you wouldn't happen to be in the market for a bridge, would you?
Non CCP controlled platforms can definitely choose what stories to promote. Musk does it every day on twitter. Oligarch controlled social media is just as much a blight as government controlled social media.
Of course they do, but they aren't interested in toppling the west.
1 reply →
To your first paragraph, yes, across the board, and yes to more scenarios than you even laid out here.
To the second, you misunderstand the issue the US government has here. It is not that the social network is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority. It is that it is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority that they are enemies with.
Whether you consider them your enemy, whether they consider you theirs, whether you think that China really is or is not an enemy of the US government, and whether you consider the US government your enemy or not is all irrelevant to the point at hand, as interesting as they may be in other contexts; this is about the beliefs of the US government.
China has similar concerns and has already taken numerous similar steps, and it's equally not any sort of hypocrisy or anything because the principle they operate under is not about the existence of control, but who has the control.