Comment by lolinder
2 months 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.
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.
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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.
As someone not living the us but regularly reading news from both sides of your media landscape, I can tell you that it's not regulated what they can write or say or what's promoted. Your media is all over the place. There are differences in how far they go on the spectrum and some are definitely insane on what they publish to the level of leaving out all the important details about certain situations to push their agenda. How do you think that there is any regulation at all?
Also for tiktok, the algorithm needs less than an hour to almost fully understand you and it will then push a mix of what you already like and agree with, things that you don't like and absolutely disagree with but in a way that makes it look bad so in the end you also agree with that, and some funny videos to keep you entertained. This way they are maximizing the time you stay in the app to increase their revenue. It polarizes your world view further and further and without people to talk to and discuss, your ideas and beliefs will be turned into religious level thinking, radicalizing you and making it more and more difficult to accept different opinions. If you only consume what you already believe, things will go downhill very quickly. That's the reason people can't talk to each other anymore, the truth in most if not all cases is somewhere in the middle.
What we need is social media that is not algorithm driven, not optimized to keep you at the device for as long as possible but to show you a multitude of opinions to a topic from different angles, not just the one you have already chosen as your truth. We need to talk again, accept that other people can have different opinions without shouting them down. We need to try to look at things from different perspectives not just our own.
And most importantly, we need to accept that we can't have an opinion about facts. We need to listen to people that actually have professional knowledge about a topic. The guy that used to be a fitness trainer but now has a telegram channel to spread some important truths about climate change actually knows shit about how the world works. They want to make money selling you any truth that works for you.
I think you misunderstand me: I'm not in favor of banning tiktok on its own. I think you're right that that misweights things, further consolidating power in the hands of those who hold the remaining platforms.
What I'm saying is that all of these platforms are fundamentally anti-democratic in that they exist to predictably change individual behavior with a high degree of precision, through custom tailored information feeds that can be shaped to alter someone's perspectives on the world in the interests of whoever controls the feed.
I don't think it's better for that power to be in the hands of Elon Musk or of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that that power needs to be banned worldwide if democracy is to survive. Democracy hinges on the idea that voters will in general vote in their own interest, and the ability to individually manipulate voters into measurably changing their behavior breaks that assumption.
And note that this is fundamentally different than traditional media sources, which have a harder time shaping someone's entire life and worldview. WaPo can control what someone perceives the WaPo editorial board as believing. Only a social media platform can control their perspective of what their friends think.
Yes, this comment makes more sense to me.
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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So I'm definitely not saying that TikTok itself provides better checks and balances, but TikTok, in an ecosystem of other media providers under different governments, would be a much healthier for civil society.
For example, US social media companies were vital in kicking off the Arab spring. How different would such movements be if they only had access to a media monoculture controlled by their respective regimes?
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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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> You are glancing over the fact that American media platforms are not really controlled by the US government ...
I had a chuckle at the naivety of this statement. Even HN shadow-bans posts here that are perceived as anti-US or pro-Russia / pro-Israel (I am not talking about off-topic political posts, which are against HN rules, but on political threads on Russia - Ukraine and Israel - Palestine conflicts that were allowed by the mods). HN algorithms also give undue preference to western media sources. It is the same with StackExchange (on politics and skeptics SE, for e.g.) where even factual posts countering US propaganda on Russia-Ukraine war or Israel-Palestine conflict is highly discouraged with downvotes or deletion. When complaints were raised about biased moderation, one SE mod even publicly commented that they are under heavy pressure to "moderate" the content on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Let's also not forget that RT . com is now banned on most US social media networks like FB and Youtube. And during COVID pandemic, we saw how the US government strong-armed the social media platform to prevent the spread dubious and unverified news on the disease, its treatment and the vaccines (which was the right thing to do).
I have realised that as a non-westerner (Indian), the political space for me online is continuously shrinking and increasingly suffocating because I refuse to subscribe to the western political black-and-white world view. This is readily apparent when you look at how Americans are shaping these platforms into echo-chambers - Bluesky and Reddit is for American left- content while 9gag and Twitter / X is for the American right- , and whether you want it or not, both of these shove American political content on you.
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?
> 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.
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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.
I'm sorry, but that's a load of baloney on par with "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear".
Second of all: it's obviously false. There are loads of examples - contemporary as well as older - where people actively peddled "incorrect information" to line their own pockets at the expense of the money/health/wellbeing of others. Having the facts does not repair the damage, nor does it prevent future harm.
But, firstly and more importantly, this framing suggests we should allow for misinformation. We absolutely shouldn't. The public debate isn't resilient to malicious actors. That's what makes misinformation so dangerous and what makes this slogan so hollow. It assumes good faith on all parties. There isn't, so stop advocating for solutions that require that.
In more detail: the public debate is meant for an actual exchange of ideas, thereby enlightening the participants. Anyone who is not interested in that, shouldn't participate. In particular, misinformation should be barred from the public debate. - and those spreading it held to account.
Whether it is knowingly claiming that lead is harmless, that smoking has no negative effects on your health, or anything vaguely political of the last dozen or so years: if you're unaware, it's not your fault yet, but you'll need to stop being ignorant. If you're aware that the information you're spreading is wrong: shame on you! You should be barred from participating in (that line of the) public debate.
I'm not arguing against incorrect information being spread, I'm arguing against the existence of platforms that are specifically designed to drip feed people information that, true or not, changes their minds about something with a high degree of predictability.
Ad-funded algorithmic feeds exist to change people's behavior. They're indoctrination machines, ostensibly designed to sell products (which is supposedly a good thing in a capitalist world) but very easily turned to indoctrinating about anything else. I don't believe that indoctrination machines should be allowed to exist. We've proven how malleable people are in the face of these machines, and it's simply too much power to let any one entity hold, regardless of who it is in charge.
The problem is Brandolini's law - “it takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute bullshit than that needed to produce it”. So allowing widely disseminated bullshit effectively opens our society up to a denial-of-service attack.
> 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?
I challenge the notion that they're equal. Social media at least provides vox while traditional media is completely one-way. How much is astroturfing and illusion can be debated forever, but any positive value is greater than zero. Traditional media acts as programming first. Journalistic integrity and trust in institutions has been sold off for shareholder value.
> How much is astroturfing and illusion can be debated forever, but any positive value is greater than zero.
That's an easy way to toss aside a very damaging attack on the public and freedom, with power unlike anything humanity has seen. I'm not sure what "any positive value is greater than zero" means, other than a mathematical tautology, but I certainly don't accept that social media is a net positive.
> Journalistic integrity and trust in institutions has been sold off for shareholder value.
Your reasoning is circular. You both conclude and use as your premise that they've been sold off.
Sadly, after generations of (mostly) not being sold off, of standing up for freedom and professional journalism, in the last couple of months many of the institutions have capitulated.
Part of the cause is you (and people like you): Serious journalism was a threat to the far right, so they did what they always do: Use a campaign of constant repitition and demonization. They do it also to immigrants, trans people, liberals, Democrats, and individuals they see as threats (including any leading Democrats). Part of that campaign is getting everyone repeating it on social media.
Now we have few reliable sources of news left.
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I posted this elsewhere:
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.
> 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
I hesitate to reference politics here, but read Nate Silver's writings on what he's termed "the Indigo Blob"[0][1]...
> 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
When I think back to how things went down during the pandemic, I'm convinced that the "real opinions" that most people held were based on blindly following position of whatever media they were consuming (and that media likely blindly following whatever government messaging).
Actual scientists posting actual statistics?[2] No-one wanted to see the data on who was - and wasn't - at significant risk from Covid.
At one point back then, one of my closest friends bluntly told me in a group chat that I was "a sociopath", despite him knowing that out of the two of us, I'm the one with the science PhD + published papers, and (at least science-wise) he's the layman.
Hey ho, he and I eventually made up...
[0] https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo... [1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/how-the-indigo-blob-runs-a-bluf... [2] https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...
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?
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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.
> It's a matter of incentives. The profit motive is fundamentally opposed to a low-intervention platform for democratic communication.
Exactly.
It seems the only way to sidestep this growing problem is to create a profit free platform, and view it almost as a utility but is openly owned and controlled by "the people."
The vTaiwan and g0v ("gov zero") projects are relevant starter examples for a newer type of distributed governance:
https://www.stearthinktank.com/post/deconstructing-binary-ci...
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> 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.
It's their legal out against having to research stuff to prevent libel liability. And they can embed social media photos and videos that weren't even from the rights holder to avoid having to clear rights to anything.
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.
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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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...
Why do people insist upon sacrificing anominity and thinking they will get anything in return for it? I could forgive it in the 00s but it is inexcusable in the 20s. Real name policies just causes people to double down more. It has not been a pancaea.
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I blame the Zuck algorithmic feed ruined it all he was my favorite out of all the feudal barons too :(
>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.
> which is that the way in which they manufacture consent gives the illusion of popular consensus
Sounds no different to Fox News and CNN to me.
I hate advertising too, but I'd be troubled if it were banned.
> 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.
Absurd. To use just one example, if the US Gov has that mandate, why is extreme gerrymandering allowed? Seems like it's common for Americans to just repeat what they've been told without actually thinking about it.
> Absurd. To use just one example, if the US Gov has that mandate, why is extreme gerrymandering allowed?
Because worthwhile barriers to gerrymandering are difficult and complex to construct. Effective barriers would need to be overseen and updated by capable, uncompromised people.
Instead, it is easier for Gov to yield to its political handlers. There are lots of reasons for this; I think those reasons can be grouped together under one human failing:
"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.
It’s less Cold War and more population control. The US government refuses to allow for communist sympathizing or class consciousness, and there’s a lot of that on TikTok.
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 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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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.
> 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.
It’s fascinating to talk to people from different cultures or different political leanings and find out how the internet that they browse is vastly different to the one I experience. Yet we aren’t necessarily seeking out different things. It’s just that tithe things presented to us align with (and reinforce) a different worldview. They’ll get annoyed about hearing about something constantly, and I’ll have little impression of the thing at all. We will have different “facts” established in our heads but not be able to pinpoint where we learned them. We have different realities.
How exactly does this differ from Facebook and Instagram?
I don't think it does, I think they all should be banned by the same reasoning.
Expanding this further Europe should ban Chinese AND U.S. social media networks. What’s good for the goose…
Owners residency/citizenship
Reds under TikTok beds.
Precisely how Russia tainted the Romanian presidential elections using Tiktok dormant accounts to hijack another PR campaign.
I'm with the SCotUS on this.
Hasn't the Russia story been already debunked? https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/12/23/romanian-centre-rig...
Debunked? That article says the election was annulled after evidence of Russian interference was provided.
Anyway Russian interference doesn't usually involve the Kremlin giving money to voters directly (unless you are a citizen of Moldova), but through people in the country willing to sell themselves to Russia. Like "Bogdan Peșchir" in the article who donated €1 million to Tiktok users who promoted Georgescu.
That's the campaign that was hijacked by Russia. The PR company tried (and failed) to use a teasing campaign to promote another candidate without naming him. The Russian bots were commenting with the far-right ultranationalist's candidate name the day before the election under the unsuspecting influencers' videos paid for by the PR company.
In parallel there were other campaigns in the ultranationalist's favour, paid for with crypto.
He's also linked to a former secret service figure¹ who betrayed NATO to the KGB in the '60s, so he's either a FSB trojan, an useful idiot, or both.
1. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihai_Caraman
There has been very little public investigation. This is what I could find:
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
The Romanian National Liberal Party (opponents of Georgescu) bought the campaign. Their hashtag was "hijacked" (whatever that means) to boost Georgescu instead.
I do not know how TikTok works. Perhaps it is as simple as Georgescu supporters simply using the paid for hashtag for their own messages.
So, according to this article, the Russians did nothing. The Liberal Party engaged in questionable TikTok interference and Georgescu supporters jumped on the bandwagon.
The Western media falling silent on the issue would indicate that this politico.eu is correct.
The "ties" are bots boosting up Georgescu on Kensington Communications' campaign (by adding comments to the videos and reposting it). The PR's company management were dumb enough to do a teaser campaign. Russia used this opportunity to hijack it by using bots that answeed the question describe the profile of your ideal candidate, the subject of the videos paid for by the PR company. The hijackers also used a very similar hastag. Accounts used to hijack the campaign predate Tiktok's launch worldwide. Russia bough dormant accounts and weaponized them to generate over 100M posts in a single day.
The problem is regular people do not fully understand this narrative manipulation mechanism. Not even the infuencers involved in the campaign, or the company that ran it realized who they were promoting until it was too late.
The EU should use this incident to at least fine Tiktok into oblivion, but they're obviously sleeping at the wheel. The Biden Administration, as weak as it has been, has made the correct decision yet again: ban the Chinese propaganda blowhorn.
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)
> In short, these platforms are places for manufacturing consent.
Like Hollywood, then.
In other words, some of the Westerners’ hypocrisy when it comes to the views they hold on their socio-economic system never ceases to amaze me, especially now, as we’re in the middle of a new translatio imperii phase.
>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.
> The only sense in which banning one is anti-democratic is that it's selectively applied to tiktok instead of to all such platforms.
Personally I don’t think singling them out is anti democratic, because this platform and Chinese run companies in general have issues unique to them.
TikTok lied under oath about the location of data they claimed was stored in the US. That’s fraud and has concerning privacy and national security implications:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index....
This is why divestiture to an American entity with no ties back to a mainland China owner makes sense - it severs the tie that results in illegal surveillance. It’s not a ban on specific content or even the app - just a ban on the owner.
Another issue - it has also come out that TikTok (not Douyin) employees have to uphold the goals of the CCP as part of their job:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
And then there’s the basic lack of reciprocity in market access, since all non Chinese social media is banned in China and yet their apps can access consumers outside China.
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?
Now do twitter.
Agreed. And Facebook and Instagram. The US government appears to think that a US billionaire owning an algorithmic mind-shaper is fine, but I disagree.
The biggest concern is having just one player directly or indirectly controlling all of them. One voice, under Trump (or anyone else) control.
The "small minority" label has been applied to Trump supporters on social media, yet they have won in the elections twice.
Manufacturing consent still works via the traditional newspapers. That is where "the (current) truth" originates from. That is what is amplified on social media, including here. It takes years of struggle of independently minded people to argue against mainstream. Often after two years mainstream takes the position of independently minded people and takes the credit.
TikTok is different in that it addresses teenagers. They don't have any political power and will change their opinions in their 20s/30s. The data collection and blackmail arguments are still valid. But they also happen in the West, except that three letter agencies collect compromising material on domestic and foreign politicians.
I mean, really? On social media anti-China sentiment is at an all time high. This Chinese manipulation operation must have really failed.
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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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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.
Do people have the prerogative to have successful industries? Do people have the prerogative to cheap energy, food, and other life basics? In the US, this is not actually enshrined anywhere, is it? The right to life simply means you roll the dice with life, doesn't it? One might say that even the beggars on the streets are enjoying their right to speech and life as we speak.
Are we afraid to list the topology of our values? A framework for comparing which values are actually superior? That's all I asked for.
Personally I think if China found the right narrative to pinpoint destroy Apple & Tesla, or moved too quickly to capture Taiwanese industry, then the US would seriously contemplate war.
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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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