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Comment by onei

6 hours ago

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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onei

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suraci  3 hours ago

> Is Tiktok genuinely manipulated by the CCP

I can't say it's not at all

But I can say it's far beyond CPC's capability, Americans like talking abt CPC like it's some kind of secret darkness powerful villain in Gotham City, no, it's not that good.

If CPC executed any order to a company operated in US by Americans, there'll be clear and strong evidence about it, CPC is not good at hiding schemes, if you didn't see such evidence, it means there's no such thing, at least for now

I've talked abt how CPC doing propaganda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42429769

alisonatwork  5 hours ago

I can't speak for Tiktok, but the CCP did explicitly shut down Bytedance's very popular Neihuan Duanzi humor app, and put pressure on them to change the Toutiao algorithm because it was promoting inappropriate content. It's not much of a leap to think that by the time Douyin started getting popular Bytedance had learned their lesson and would proactively moderate their platforms to stay well within the party lines. In theory Tiktok should be independent of that since it targets foreign users, but in practice any media product coming out of a Chinese-owned company is going to be influenced whether explicitly or incidentally by CCP policy.

Of course Americans have the freedom to access thousands of other media outlets not influenced by the CCP, so it seems pretty silly to just restrict this one.

tmnvdb  6 hours ago

There is good evidence that topics the CCP does not like are significantly underrepresented compared to other social media platforms.

I would add that if you know the CCP you would be extremely surprised if they did not take such an opportunity for information warfare.

  • dqv  5 hours ago

    You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence. If you're talking about the study about hash tag counts, that's not good evidence. https://www.cato.org/blog/lies-damned-lies-statistics-mislea...

    • eagleislandsong  5 hours ago

      > You can't say "there is good evidence" and then not provide the evidence

      Unfortunately very common these days; people who say this probably hope that they won't ever be asked to provide receipts.

      3 replies →

    • gunian  5 hours ago

      This is actually so cool it's the first study I have seen that tries to use numbers kind of hilarious they did not filter scrapped posts by date to account for TikTok being a newer platform. Some data engineer got a promotion off that study too probably :)

      Another thing they did not take into account is the presence of social engineering botnets that can be used by both sides (if record labels have them I'm sure anyone rlse can too)