Comment by lolinder
9 hours ago
> Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature, increasingly so in the age of LLMs. They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright). They're places where a small minority of people can become an unstoppable movement that seems to have real support, sucking gullible voters in to join the growing "consensus".
In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.
What's next? Should we prevent giving air time to people from 'adversarial' countries at all? Or only allow it when accompanied by a sanctioned commentary to 'correct' any unwanted information?
While we're at it, how about 'adversarial' parties within our own country? Why should they be allowed to mislead gullible people?
Making things up is inherently vastly cheaper than flighting misinformation.
Spreading misinformation takes nothing more than being persuasive. Being able to pick and choose stuff out of context or even just say anything without a shred of support makes hours of “content” easy.
> The counter to incorrect information is facts - not trying to hide it.
We've seen how well it worked with Fox News, ONN, Alex Jones...
And how well did kicking them out of the mainstream social platforms to hide them under the rug do? Rumble, Truth Social, Kick, and how many more echo chambers?
You even gave the example of Alex Jones, he was silenced by the mainstream social media sites.
Yes, fake and misleading news is easier to spread than issuing corrections or fact checking, but that doesn't mean that we should pretend they don't exist, because it's NOT working.
EDIT: Mind you, I'm not advocating for what Twitter has essentially become, but hiding away these people is also not working very clearly based on how well things are going.
Ironically this is exactly why I think TikTok is so important. Obviously every media site is used for manufacturing content, from NYT to Facebook. Also, obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted. Wouldn't it be good then to have checks and balances to this, by having media not under the US government supervision?
Unless are you suggesting that the US government doesn't misinform the public in harmful ways?
> obviously the US government has a say in what gets published and promoted
That's not at all obvious to me. On what grounds, moral or legal, should the US government tell anyone what to publish or promote?
I read what you quoted as a matter of fact statement, not an assertion of what is ethically righteous
But with that, I don't agree that it's a fact, maybe the FCC regulates what you broadcast on radio and TV, but if you don't take federal funding, the government doesn't really have a pull in what is created or prompted AFAIK. Journalists in the press pool may trade subservience for access but that's about it.
It can make laws that prohibit or discourage publishing certain content. It can also shape the discourse in such a way that these laws are not viewed as restrictions on free speech.
You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
>You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
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Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP? I could never quite tell if that was merely scaremongering and hypothesising by American politicians, or based on evidence of past transgressions.
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> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government except for legal restrictions on hate speech and violence, and that there is an extremely diverse set of voices that can be heard on the 'American' (or rather non-Chinese) internet.
That's how it's supposed to work in the US. For example, "hate speech" isn't actually one of the things the government is allowed to prohibit under the First Amendment.
But then the government passed a whole bunch of laws they don't actually enforce, and then instead of actually enforcing them, they started threatening to enforce them if platforms didn't start censoring the stuff the government wanted them to, i.e. "take that stuff down or we'll charge you with the antitrust violations you're already committing".
This is basically an end-run around the constitution for free speech in the same way as parallel construction is for illegal searches and the courts should put a stop to it, but they haven't yet and it's not clear if or when they will, so it's still a problem.
> It is also not clear to me how TikTok is supposed to provide better "checks and balances" just because it is owned and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Suppose you have one platform that censors criticism of the current US administration and another platform that censors videos of Tienanmen. This is better than only having one of those things, because you can then get the first one from the second one and vice versa.
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> They're places where people buy a voice and the illusion of support by astroturfing the platform and/or manipulating the algorithm (either through paid advertisements or by owning a platform and controlling the algorithm outright)
Anyone willing to take a good-faith stab at why this couldn't equally well be a description of traditional media too - say - the WaPo?
The Washington Post has changed considerably in the last few months, specifically from being fiercely free to being bought.
> couldn't
Hypothetically, almost anything could happen.
> The Washington Post has changed considerably in the last few months, specifically from being fiercely free to being bought.
I read it every day and hadn't noticed. Can you give examples, beyond having heard of the Presidential Endorsement saga?
It's a shame that this is true for many platforms. Social media platforms have the potential to be incredibly democratic. The more people watch content the more it's shown to other people. Anyone's voice could be amplified in a way that was limited to broadcast networking and printing presses in the past. A million small conversations can occur in such a way that they create a chorus of discussion about public interests. Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
> Social media platforms have the potential to be incredibly democratic.
> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication. For a brief period we had some social media platforms that made gestures in the direction of free communication. Then the investor capital came rolling in, and they were expected to increase revenue. How do you increase revenue of your free communication platform? You sell the messaging. Call it promotion, advertising, whatever. The only thing of value you have at your disposal are people's eyeball, you're going to sell what they see. You could ask your users to pay for the service... but then 80% of them will flake to a rival service that's still free. If there's a way to marry the profit motive and a truly democratic social media platform then our best and brightest have yet to find it. I suspect it doesn't exist.
> Now it seems like most platforms seem to be thinly veiled psyops hoping to trade quick dopamine for mindshare.
The first step to reform would be to persuade legacy media to stop reporting the opinions trending on X/Twitter as "news". Stop reporting it entirely, it's manipulated, at best unverified, rubbish.
That would require legacy reporters to get out on the streets and do some reporting.
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This is part of why I think there should exist a popular real-name-only network. It'd go far to prevent these types of attacks on the megaphone.
Google+ famously instituted real name policies before it was cool. You used to get banned on Facebook for using a nickname but I think drag queens pushed back, god bless.
(2014) https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/28/35...
Isn’t that what Facebook is supposed to provide? From anecdotal evidence, people are happy to engage in vitriol online that they would never do face to face, real name or not.
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I blame the Zuck algorithmic feed ruined it all he was my favorite out of all the feudal barons too :(
> In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent. The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
Which should be a major concerning point. Censoring a powerful media gives more power to the censor than censoring less powerful ones. Now the censor has the power to ensure that only US government and related big tech corporations are allowed to manufacturate consent over the public, with no way of having options of different views. Suddenly the media becomes even more dangerous.
> These platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in their very nature
The US Gov has a mandate to preserve and uphold democracy. Shuttering communication is prior restraint - an anti-democratic action.
Platforms have no mandate to preserve and uphold democracy.
Restricting who can own what, however… that’s long been fair game.
In my dream world we’d get something like the rules we had, until fairly recently, restricting max broadcast media audience control in a given market for a single owner, but for Web platforms. Don’t like being limited to five million users or whatever? Then use a standard that puts control over curation and presentation in the hands of the user. Want to control all that, like all these awful platforms do? Then live with the limit.
Creative + precedence, I like it. How can we get the fediverse enough funding to lobby Congress?
You're presuming that these are communication platforms. I argue that they aren't—to the extent that they are useful for communication it's a pure coincidence, not a design choice.
Each of these platforms is fundamentally a propaganda platform—they're explicitly designed to manipulate people into buying stuff, and that capability is frequently turned to voter manipulation. The US government has decided that while US-based billionaires having access to such influence is fine and dandy, the CCP should not. So tiktok must be sold to a US owner.
"Forcing" people to be "free".
If you want peace, you better prepare for war.
It is forbidden to forbid.
The necessary evil.
All that to say, we live in a complicated world, and beautiful ideals are only a direction to keep, never to be reached.
The state is under no obligation to allow known foreign propagandists attached to a known communist party to engage in activities well outside the protections of the first amendment.
Of course, they don't HAVE to shutter. They can sell their interest in Tiktok and stay open. They have chosen not to do that thus far, and hence they have chosen to shutter.
There's a better way: privacy laws. The US government decided not to use it.
Privacy legislation isn't going to happen because it's too late.
It's now an industry, with enough companies with enough employees and, more importantly, enough political and economic power to destroy almost any attempts to push legislation that may actually protect privacy in any real way.
But, honestly, I don't think the TikTok ban has any overlap with privacy concerns. It's pure cold war.
Privacy laws don't solve the real problem, they would only solve the fig leaf that politicians are hiding behind when it comes to tiktok.
The actual problem is and always has been control over the content being fed to users. It's not an issue of privacy, it's an issue of voter manipulation. It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.
On the one hand that's a very rational position for people who owe their election to algorithmic voter manipulation to take, but that doesn't really make it better ethically.
The voting algorithm needs to change so that destructive (negative) campaigning is not so effective.
Duverger's law makes campaigns devolve into undermining and destroying the competition, with the two parties hosting primaries to see which of them can "turn the wheel" the hardest before the general election where they claim "don't worry I won't crash the car!" despite their prior incentives.
If we used plurality voting for the inputs to a decision problem that follows the classic tragedy of the commons, we'd see a similar result. If instead of just {+1, +0, +0, ...} without repeats, we instead voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, ...} cooperation (or at least constructive competitive frameworks) would at least be at parity with destructive and potentially mutually destructive competition.
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> It's just that the US has decided that it's okay with its own plutocrats manipulating voters while it's not okay with the CCP doing so.
I think it's more likely that it's able to pass muster when the threat is a foreign state. The US may be more limited in what it can do with it's own entities (I don't know for sure) and would probably receive far more push back from the courts if they tried heavy handed measures before going through the proper legislation regulation (as states are doing) or the FBI route(if it were in their realm of bad). The threat that is more concerning than US owned and operated companies getting US citizens to vote for their prefered US president, is a foreign state slowly radicalizing US citizens(without their knowledge it's happening) against themselves (the US), more than voter manipulation.
The solution for the other half of the problem is anti-trust divestment of client apps from hosted services. Let TikTok (and Faceboot, and so on) keep their own assortments of services. But the mobile and web apps should be spun out into different companies, only communicating with openly documented APIs that are available for every other developer/user.
This won't solve the issue with propaganda that still manages to be compelling in the court of public opinion, but it will at least level the playing field rather than having such topics inescapably amplified for "engagement" and whatnot. There's definitely a mechanic of people realizing specific social media apps make them feel bad, but as of right now it is extremely hard to switch to an alternative due to the anticompetitive bundling of client presentation software (including "the algorithm") with hosted services (intrinsic Metcalfe's law attractors).
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How exactly does this differ from Facebook and Instagram?
Reds under TikTok beds.
yes these platforms are BAD. But still, tiktok is a tailored app for US market and bends to US regulations. You think this is bad? There are worse, some US users even chose to signup Douyin or REDnote. How would you ban THAT? Build a national firewall like the communists?
Precisely how Russia tainted the Romanian presidential elections using Tiktok dormant accounts to hijack another PR campaign.
I'm with the SCotUS on this.
I mean, so are newspapers, but you don't want to ban those either.
(I don't like TikTok and I agree it is damaging, but this is just reasoning I can't get behind)
>The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
This logic applies to all media publications, not just internet platforms in the United States. When people say "anti-democratic" in the US I'm pretty certain they take it to mean "the government interfering in the speech of a private entity", not failing to uphold the principle of "1 tweet, 1 impression".
Every newspaper, television station, blog post, what have you consists of a small minority of people both creating and selling reach in unequal ways. If it is anti-democratic and therefore presumably not tolerated for a small minority to exercise or sell speech, then that's just equivalent to saying no private media enterprise should exist.
Needlessly to say the only person who can make this claim with a straight face is Noam Chomsky because he's been saying that about everyone for 50 years, but this is obviously not a position held by anyone currently trying to ban TikTok
There's a major difference with the modern social media platforms, which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus. That illusion makes them much more powerful than anything that came before, to the point where they are different in kind, not just in degree.
When a mainstream media outlet takes a position, most people are able to distinguish between that outlet's position and a large social movement in favor of a particular political position. The same cannot be said for these platforms, which by design attempt to make you feel like you're interacting with a large number of real people who hold real opinions. They much more effectively become seen as peers, and from that position can much more effectively manipulate people.
The role of "influencer" is a thousand times more potent than anything that we had in the previous era, and that's without even getting into the possibility of creating hundreds of AI-powered sock puppets or of deliberately constructing an algorithm to put specific people into specific types of echo chambers.
At this point in the game, the only way to equate speech-by-corporations with democracy is to be willfully blind to this difference in kind. The very rich at this point don't just have a megaphone, they have a direct neural link into an enormous number of brains. That's not free speech, that's free votes.
I hate advertising too, but I'd be troubled if it were banned.
>In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent
These platforms are much less subject to manufactured consent than the traditional news media, which was controlled by a small number of entities aligned with the elites of the day. Decentralised information transmission is fundamentally better for the people than centralised information transmission controlled by a few gatekeepers who suppress anything not in their interests.
Look at how homogenous in views the baby boomers are relatively to the younger generations, as evidence of how much more effective at manufacturing consent the traditional media are.
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This is nothing new. Google's instrumental role in the "Arab Spring" is old hat by now.
If you correlate the hacks of anonymous to that you will get an interesting picture to say the least :)
As someone that loves dev stuff it is so beautiful not a single soldier deployed but an entire region destabilized and so many people killed
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Although i would never put it past the DoD under Clinton to manipulate an election here and a revolution there, my impression of Silicon Valley during the Arab Spring is a bunch of self congratulatory preening over the power of social media.
I always felt the CIAs greatest trick is letting people credit them with overthrowing governments, a power they don't actually possess, except to tip the scales with a little gun-running. Same with the so called Twitter revolution. Assange and Manning can take credit for leaking the cables, but the anger was domestic and already extant.
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>They're places where a small minority of people can become an unstoppable movement that seems to have real support
All other social media platforms are places where a small minority of people silence dissent of what international experts have classed as a genocide, perpetuated by leaders who are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. TikTok is the only platform that allowed footage of this genocide to be spread, so that small minority had to do everything in their power to shut it down.
In a trade war any company is fair game. A trade war thus naturally reaches across multiple values that a nation may hold, bringing them simultaneously under tension. Free speech is just a coincidence to the nature of TikTok, but what about cars, drones, phones, or even soybeans?
When values are in conflict, which should win? In the hierarchy of values, where does economic world position stand in terms of national concerns?
What? You're musing that a fucking trade war could possibly be placed above freedom of speech? The answer of which "values" should win is 110% clear.
Just out of curiosity, do you think the 2nd amendment obligates the USA to sell foreign enemies any and all weapons?
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