Comment by hxegon
16 days ago
It's honestly wild how many people in these comments are defending some vague, unsubstantiated, paper thin national security scare vs recognizing this as a clear suppression of free speech and active stoking of xenophobia.
I would genuinely rather drop ship the CCP my SSN/banking info than trust the US government to do something in favor of it's own people when there's lobbying money involved. Why are so many of you pro-government and anti competition only when it comes to tiktok specifically? It's completely the opposite on nearly every other topic from what I've seen.
The most disheartening part of this ban is that it’s just about the only thing the government can agree on. IMO Mitt Romney slipped the truth in saying: “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
TikTok is the first and just about the only place I’ve seen content about corporate greed, the accelerating disappearance of the middle class and the real downstream effects of US foreign policy that hasn’t been whitewashed.
The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better (though I think magnitudes greater) returns than Russia’s recent social campaigns.
> The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better
We can hope the CCP's consciousness grows and they shutdown their concentration camps, stop organ harvesting, and start having elections.
The ball is in their court.
We can talk TikTok being allowed after that.
Maybe every other country should ban American imports until we stop bankrolling Israel if that's your position.
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What's the implication? That we as a society and/or government have a more just consciousness?
There are certainly are issues in China but are these "popular headline" talking points worse than the suffering we have here? And that's even after assuming they are factual.
We sell prison labor for pennies. We allow individuals to create epidemics and slap them on the wrist. We allow the future of our next generations to be squandered for today's profits. We allow our government to be just as captive to the desires of private parties in a way that's effectually reduced elections to a non-choice.
I don't think anyone with a conscious can say we're any better and that's without taking into account our worst contributions of genocides/wars/instability to the global community.
But in the end w/e, you have your freedom tinted glasses on (it must be nice) and the average american is screwed on our current trajectory.
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if you trust the CCP (which to be clear refers to the government of China, not the actual people who live there, just like any country) to be more respectful and magnanimous to its citizens and human rights overall than the US, you might want to do some research on that (and not on Tiktok)
This isn't how the about how the CCP treats it's own citizens, it's about how the US is currently treating it's citizens.
Oh stop, it has nothing to do with xenophobia, the CCP has a terrible spying and human rights track record (organ harvesting, concentration camps, child labor, etc.).
Nothing to do with the Chinese people as a whole, and everything to do about their overlords.
Before you do some whataboutism, yes the US spies, even on it's own citizens. That is a separate issue we should make sure doesn't happen.
Two things can be bad and is not an excuse for more spying or letting foreign adversaries broadcast psyops.
What psyops are you talking about? Is it a bunch of US citizens talking about how they don't like the US bankrolling a genocide? Why is it more important to protect tiktok users from a threat no one can actually point to versus preserving a place a lot of people feel like is very important to their day to day lives? Why are these lawmakers prioritizing this over actual threats like school shootings? Honestly the general opinion is that this is extremely obviously not about national security for anybody I've talked to about this and I can't possibly disagree.
Yeah that's a good example.
Framing Gaza as the victims in this whole ordeal.
That's like the 3rd time you dropped Israel in this China topic.
Really trying to shoehorn that in eh?
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I feel the same.
I think there are two things in play.
First, folks on this site don't know what real propaganda looks like. Based on growing up in Texas, as far as I can tell you'd have to publish and mandate textbooks to make a meaningful impact on peoples' belief systems. I have seen it happen, and I've had the experience of often leaning that things I had thought were true (or some underlying assumption) was in fact false, and then been able to trace that to my early education. So propaganda feels likely, but it also doesn't seem like some easy magic that can happen at the behest of some autocrat somewhere.
Unfortunately the folks here don't really have much perspective to judge the ways in which their own assumptions about the world are shaped by the rhetoric of the systems that raised them.
Second, many people likely generally haven't had many positive and genuine experiences on social media, or at least not on contemporary short-form video social media. Having been on the net since usenet days, I believe that it's possible to learn how to have those kinds of experiences, just as it's possible to engage with trolls and have a bad day or whatever. I don't consider HN to be fundamentally different than other social media sites, but I also understand that is a marginal view.
However, since folks here have generally never used something like Tiktok in a way that has had a positive impact in their life, the folks using it look like they are addicted doom scrollers instead of people highly engaged in conversations with their community.
I've personally gotten a lot out of Tiktok- the quality of the discussions there is much higher and more diverse than HN. I've also interacted with a lot of folks there in ways that make me fairly certain that I am dealing with actual humans and not, like, a PRC Botnet or something.
It's tough for me to disregard my own experience:
TT doesn't feel any more propaganda-laden than any other media stream, and certainly not in ways that are driven more by the PRC than by the content creators themselves
Further, I feel a little fury at folks who are happy engaging in whatever crappy media they like: mass sports, bad sitcoms, poorly written TV news, etc and feeling like the hour they might spend with that is somehow better than the half hour I might spend listening to some lakota guy talk about some nuance of tribal politics, and then have the gall to tell me that I'm addicted.
However, at the same time those folks apparently have a lot of power- they can happily elect folks who will hake it harder for me to hear some conversations that I found useful. So I suppose it's important to understand that these sociopaths view me as just another addicted, over-propagandized NPC.
I can see what you mean about a lack of positive experiences on social media, I think tiktok is the first one I see genuinely having a positive impact on myself and others. It's so frustrating seeing all these people who have clearly never been on there talk about it like it's the CCP selling us heroin.