Comment by blackeyeblitzar
11 hours ago
TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.
Do you think it would be possible to show this programmatically? As in scrape n posts from TikTok and Reels and show the first displays CCP tendencies?
Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic
It actually doesn't matter whether TT has done it already or not.
What matters is that it has the __capability__ of doing it, in ways that would be difficult to detect, when it proves expedient to do so.
Yup, but of course more than one person has to agree for this to actually happen. Which is not the case for other apps, like Twitter/X. If Musk wants to remove a government, he has only to promote "free speech" and let falsehoods and misinformation dominate his platform.
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Your link doesn't appear to work
https://archive.is/4Y8w5
Oh weird - it works for me. Maybe the discussion got banned somehow? Here is the underlying story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
You are conflating strong Chinese Communist control of the business with how the content behaves. TikTok is full of content that would put a Chinese person in prison.
See this 2019 article outlining Chinese Communist moderation policies that (obviously) were attached to the app when TikTok was new, but were removed for non-Chinese user communities.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...