Comment by mark_l_watson
8 hours ago
The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
8 hours ago
The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see. If you are in a South American country using a residential IP in new incognito session, doom scroll, after the initial disturbing content, you will start to notice videos of the United States government physically attacking people born in the country of the residential IP address.
The TikTok algorithm in South America. Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
The most brutally honest propaganda is always the most effective propaganda.
> Content about Tiananmen Square and Tibet gets filtered out. Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
There's also the degree of relevance. Tiananmen was over a quarter of a century ago. The USA is killing protestors, bombing Venezuela, threatening Greenland now.
The persecution of Uighurs continues apace. Even if it is not allowed to be called genocide on TikTok. The political elements to this are pretty obvious, but conflating two terrible Minneapolis ICE killings in 3 weeks to the horror that occurred in Xinjiang is beyond the pale. While we may go down the authoritarian path with a Clown King, we're still at least 10-15 years behind China.
https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/2024/11/05/uyghur-tiktok-...
4 replies →
Does China go around the world invading countries in the name of freedom?
> Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
None of this is propaganda, it's just facts.
China: for Taiwan, they are in the planning phase. (Vietnam, Hong Kong, Tibet, Aksai Chin, Korea, Scarborough Shoal do not count in your view of course). Not saying they are worse than the US.
2 replies →
Propaganda can be entirely factual. In fact, the best propaganda is.
14 replies →
You should see how some people justify Tibet..
I mean China is not exactly a poster child for a benevolent hegemon - tibet / taiwan / uyghurs to name a few
[dead]
You don’t think that there could be purely organic reasons why content showing US hypocricy might be immensely popular in South America?
> TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos.
I am responding to the fact US TikTok does not show videos of an armored vehicle driving through a crowd of protesters standing in front of it like the lone man in Tiananmen Square. They are being removed.
This ability to control what information TikTok users are presented with is the reason TikTok was originally banned in the United States.
I am being objective discussion how TikTok is being used as a propaganda tool whether or not I personally agree with China influencing people in South America or whether or not what the United States government is doing to protestors is good or bad. I'm not putting a value on it. I'm pointing out that when I'm in South America and someone links a video in a text message and I start to doom scroll after a while I will start to be introduced to videos of the Unites States government committing violence against Spanish speaking people.
> might be immensely popular in South America
Objectively the current United States regime was hugely popular in Spanish speaking countries like it was in Spanish speaking Florida. Up until a couple months ago, people would tell me how much they support and admire the current regime in the United States. That has changed recently which likely has to do with the content they receive via TikTok which is controlled by the Chinese government which is why it was banned in the United States. After being sold, it is not surprising that the United States is using it the way they accused the Chinese of using it.
> Content about the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles, killing people in Venezuela with bombs, and threatening Greenland, straight to top of feed.
Aren't these recent events? A better example would be showing US atrocities from the last 50 years, but not Chinese.
Or hiding the suffering of Ukranian and Iranian peoples.
I'm in South America.
If I doom scroll TikTok without cookies from a residence in South America, after a while, I will be presented with anti American propaganda showing videos of recent events or people speaking in Spanish about the atrocities that the United States is committing against Spanish speaking people that is recent.
I'm am describing objectively what I see.
The United States didn't want TikTok controlling what is visible to people in the United States so they banned TikTok. Later the United States offered allowing it to be sold to an American company.
Currently, there are two extremely influential forces for people under 25 years old in Spanish speaking Latin America, TikTok, a Chinese company, and an American music artist, Bad Bunny, who likely is the single most influential person in the Spanish speaking world. Let's stay tuned for the Superbowl.
1 reply →
On mastodon, with the non-algorithmic feed, following mostly accounts that aren’t particularly political, those things are still at the top of the feed. If you’re not seeing those topics at the top of your feed you’re probably being misled by your algorithm.
Another reason why feed ranking algorithms should be published. If we can see the algorithm we can stop playing these yes/no games. The real enemies are social media companies, not the other side of politics.
I think the more concerning thing here is the US government attacking people of different ethnicities.
I'm confused. I thought there was Douyin in China and TikTok for the rest of the world. TikTok used to be under Chinese control but now is essentially under US control. Isn't western TikTok a single entity?
The news only dropped about 5 days ago about the US partnership. Its still a Chinese app. Now the deal with Oracle will have them designing the algo, storing US users data, and doing US moderation. It wasn't this way before.
1 reply →
> the United States government rolling through protesters in armored vehicles
I'm sorry, did I miss something? Is this something that's happened (ever)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbMRywfYiM8&t=105s
e:
1. tracking string removed per request.
2. it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station) segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters out of the way.
6 replies →
I see people saying this a lot, but I've also seen videos demonstrating that you can easily post and search for Tiananmen Square content. I don't use Tiktok myself but it seems like this is basically untrue.
key word is "search," tianamen square will never be recommended in a feed. This is the illusion of "choice." Most people think they can "train" their feed, this is not true.
That's some very obtuse thinking.
The US has been applying soft power and hard power in South America - to put it euphemistically, as the most recent US intervention was just days ago - for close to a century. The Chinese... haven't.
Why should people in South America give a shit about Tiananmen or Tibet and at the same time not give a shit about the escalating authoritarian grip of the US regime, which is infinitely more relevant to their lives?
How can you say the Chinese "haven't"? They've been using soft power for some time with Venezuela. They've been importing Venezuelan oil. They have been making loans as well. The loans a are a huge part of "soft power". They've also replaced a lot of items impacted by Trump's tariffs from South America.
2 replies →
>It isn't so much as the rest of the world having easy access. It is what the Chinese want the rest of the world to see.
If your prosperity depends on using technocracy to deny 1.3 billion people the ability to communicate and share ideas with your citizens, a few things are true:
1) You have created a digital iron curtain
2) You are doomed because information wants to be free
3) If you succeed the result will be war, the only thing left when communication breaks down
2) Why?
I think some people live in movies where the bad guy always loses. Reality doesn't work this way. Bad situations where information is denied from people can last lifetimes.
With modern technology we may be creating systems that end up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape because you'll be killed the moment your technological monitor realizes you're going to fight back.
TikTok US it no longer controlled by the Chinese.
Sounds like you're in agreement with the parent - outside the US, people see content that reflects poorly on the US, and which is blocked for US citizens
5 replies →
The U.S. government has not publicly presented any concrete evidence showing that TikTok has actually been used to influence US public opinion in line with CCP policy.
If I was a foreign government I would promote division. For the left promote anti-center truth. For the right, anti-center truth. For the center, anti-wing truth. Recommendation systems do this automatically, they are inherently anti-social. This power needs to be controlled domestically were we can force changes to algorithms if needed.
1 reply →
Wasn't there something about the algorithm pushing brainrot to US audiences while Chinese users got more educational/high quality content? Turning Americans stupid might count.
4 replies →
China is less interested in turning Americans into carriers of the red banner, and more interested in sowing political discord and instability. Just like Russia was doing in 2016, creating faux Bernie rallies and organizing them across the street from faux Trump rallies.
Using whataboutism doesn't negate the fact that the first amendment is being trampled over by the US administration.
Buying TikTok to censor it is the move of a fascist government.
[dead]
We should let people know how bad politicians are. If everyone knows every time a politician is a mass murderer, it might provide an incentive for politicians to stop mass murdering people.
The general problem is that people think based on relativity.
Suppose there are thousands of law enforcement officials in the US, some minority of them are violent offenders and as a result of that some minority of police shootings are murders rather than legitimate self-defense or protection of the innocent, where the number of annual illegitimate police shootings is somewhere between 2 and 999, and the propensity for those people to be prosecuted is lower than it ought to be. Suppose further that China has over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and is using them as slave labor and subjecting them to forced sterilization.
Is the first one bad? Yes. Is it as bad? Uh, no. But you can present a distorted picture through selective censorship.
Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.
3 replies →
> the rest of the world have easy access to.
Except for China, where TikTok is nothing like the TikTok for the rest of the world
Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship" but after some time it seems like the US is aiming for the very same thing. Classy.
It’s more sinister than simple censorship.
The point is brainwashing.
6 replies →
I mean, they say it’s not censorship when it’s not the government doing it even when the government has embeds with “suggestions” ala facebook, twitter and reddit somewhere around 2020…
Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.
33 replies →
> Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship"
It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do.
This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks.
It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons.
The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
4 replies →
TikTok is different in China, but the rest of the world isn’t getting a completely free TikTok.
TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere. In the past they haven’t outright censored because that’s too obvious, but uploading videos on the wrong side (according to TikTok, of course) of a political topic will result in very few views.
I wouldn’t be surprised if as part of the transition they’re struggling with the previous methods of simply burying topics, so the obvious ban was their intermediate step.
The comments claiming this is specific to the US are simply wrong. TikTok has always done this everywhere.
> TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere.
All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users and removed from the front page very soon, just as a similar one[1] was already.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652
2 replies →
A bunch of people around the world used 小红书 for months when they were worried about a twitter ban.
They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
Well, yes, China doesn't have open media for its citizens. Chinese people will on average be less well informed about China, even accounting for the extent of Americans who choose trashy propaganda channels.
(reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")
6 replies →
Well you could say that every educated country is far better informed about the US than vice versa.
3 replies →
Which is basically what the US also wants.
except with a different brand of fascism.
People in China know. Believe me they know.
Knowing is not enough.
We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.
At least the Chinese are not pretending to be a free democracy.
The population of the DPRK think they are, and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
1 reply →
Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?
Out of curiosity. What do those videos mean to an average Chinese person?
What are the opinions of illegal immigration over there? How do they police it? (If at all).
Does this look like normal government activity? Or are they appalled at the lack of “freedoms” in America?
I am truly naive on their culture or politics around this and how they would use it to show the US as boogeymen government and how their government is better. Is it a grass isn’t always greener type thing for them or is it a way to actually think we’re evil and should be stopped.
6 replies →
> Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?
Of course not, but other stuff is.
Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).
4 replies →
probably not, in fact, the CCP likes to promote content that shows the "US in disarray", while simultaneously censoring and suppressing any content that is critical of the CCP or that exposes its bad actions
This information is all over American social media... Even the article references that Megan Stalter posted her videos on Instagram.
A lot of American propaganda hasn't been about strict censorship (as in making it strictly impossible to find out about things). It's about shifting the narrative enough. Most people have been made lazy enough to the point they don't read anything, certainly not fringe opinions. As long as people get their Mcdonalds, Soda and TV they won't do much.
I don't think the original intent of the tiktok sale was about censorship as much as it was about the chinese not allowing american platforms in china. Doesn't change that they're trying to use it to its 'fullest'.
Just because the information is out there doesn’t mean it’s where people are looking. You see this based on the news people watch where things they don’t cover might as well not exist. Which has always been true but it’s especially true today.
By preventing uploads, they are preventing the world from gaining access, not just the US public.
No, the rest of the world operates on different servers now.
Interesting. How is it implemented? I opened Tiktok here in Denmark and went to something I, assume, would be in the US and it seems to load fine for me? Do you an example of something I shouldn't be able to view so I can try?
> that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to
The information is everywhere. Visit any news site, open any general social media feed, turn on any TV. We’re discussing it right now in the front page of HN!
Everyone in the US has easy access to the same information. Acting like only the rest of the world has easy access to this information is ridiculous.
Everyone has easy access right now. Everyone had easier access before the TikTok deal. That's the wrong direction for a free country and it's particularly alarming because the deal was forced by the government.
Censorship doesn’t become okay when it’s easy to work around it.
I’m not condoning censorship. It’s bad.
I’m saying it’s silly hyperbole to make the leap to implying that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
These absurd claims always turn into a game of motte and bailey when they’re called out, with retreats to safer claims. I’m talking about the original claim, that “people in other countries” have easy access to this information which we, in the US, see everywhere all the time right now (except TikTok apparently).
That information may be readily accessible but if it isn't on the screen you're currently engaged with, it may as well not exist.
_you_ have access to it, for an increasingly large number of people TikTok is their only source of news. Same as Fox News or CNN, one news source.
Censorship of TikTok is inevitable given the owners, and it will inevitably lead to a new news bubble.
I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of people who only use one social media platform and never check any other news source at all.
TikTok users are also known for being experts at evading filters and censors. Remember the rising popularity of “unalived” when talk of suicide was filtered out on the platform?
I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good, because it’s not! I’m saying it’s ridiculous to claim that only people in other countries have easy access to information.
8 replies →
>The information is everywhere.
For those who know to look for it, sure.
For those who do not already know it, discovery is increasingly challenged by the deliberately obscurant curators of the information space, who are oddly tightly and uniformly aligned with special interest groups openly declaring their intent to hide that information and punish dissemination thereof.
Of course, because TikTok is the only way people in the US can access information.
No, they also access information through Facebook owned by Trump ally Zuckerberg, X owned by Trump doner and DOGE former official Musk, or via media organisations like CBS who have recently had their editorial standards changed to be more friendly to the regime. It's fine though people can here about the regime through neutral pundits like Jimmy Kimmel, who definitely hasn't come under any pressure to comply with the regime talking points. It's alright we've got NPR, which is definitely not under attack.
If you haven't noticed a sweeping attack on free speech in US media, then I just don't think you're paying attention, and playing it off as if it's "just" Tiktok is at best disingenuous.
We were so naive in the 2000s. 'Tech will democratize everything' forgetting they will just flood us with bullshit so that nothing means anything.
2 replies →
>I just don't think you're paying attention
Alternate explanation: they are paying intense attention... to the palms that are pressed desperately against their eye sockets as they attempt to See No Evil.
I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?
It's not about legality, its about scrolling and recommendations. Young people see stuff by other young people by default.
Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course they're not being subtle about it.
Yeah, this is where the friction is because it's ambiguous. "Access to" and "promoted by" are not the same thing, especially on platforms where you don't have a pure-chronological feed and all "home screen" content and its ordering is selected by the platform. Leaky, imperfect filters are still filters.
1 reply →
So I do have easy access to information, and the OP was incorrect?
> its about scrolling and recommendations
Don't scroll and don't take recommendations from these platforms. It's better now that it's American owned, but you really shouldn't have been using it when the Chinese Communist Party owned it.
And I'm only talking about TikTok because that's the OP. I don't use any social media platforms besides LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is such a big piece of trash I don't think it matters if anyone uses it.
5 replies →
[deleted]
1 reply →
You have easy access in that you can find things if you look for it.
What that commenter means by easy access is that the information is in mainstream sources pushed to people such that you are likely to know about it without having looked.
For example I made a comment here on HN recently that immigrants commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people. That sends a segment of Americans into a flying rage even though they have access to that information, they were never going to hear it in their ordinary channels, even if they stick to "mainstream" media.
Mainstream sources that control narratives, and are owned by the same extremely wealthy people that we're complaining about now owning TikTok?
Sorry, this doesn't pass the smell test for me.
4 replies →
I've never in my life used TikTok. Can you please point to a specific article, news source, journal, any piece of information that is legal in the United States that I don't have easy access to so I can see what I'm missing?
Whataboutism. You presumably know full well what the parent was describing, but if not:
TikTok presents users with feeds of videos. For many users, this is their primary news source.
An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app. Therefore, the regime has the capability to shape the narrative by boosting or hiding videos from the feed (whether or not they are doing so is an open question).
Could users still hypothetically find the same information elsewhere? Sure. But if this app is their primary source of information, would they even know they should bother doing so?
> For many users, this is their primary news source.
That's their problem. You can't make blanket claims saying Americans now don't have easy access to information when there are other sources, ranging from the NYT to the Intercept, to anything you want to read being written and translated right on your computer from the EU or Japan or anywhere else you want to read.
> An American oligarch and party loyalist now has de facto control of the app.
Chinese oligarch, American oligarch. Either way someone without your best intentions in mind owns your platform. Maybe you should stop using it.
2 replies →
Larry and David Ellison have been buying media outlets and those media outlets have started spiking (or delaying, editing, etc) stories that look bad for Trump. It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it.
This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
> It's not that you don't have access at all, it's that these specific platforms are starting to suppress it. This is the notable example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT
The 60 Minutes Episode on CECOT aired on Jan 18 and it is also on CBS News' website: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-deported-venezuelans-endur...
3 replies →
NPR article about the rest of the right wing spin that's happening at CBS news is pretty insightful: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-sta...
The TikTok ban is the hammer, antitrust is the anvil.
Without antitrust regulation, TikTok would have been sold to Meta, and that would be it. We'd have an even worse monopoly (which is not a good thing), but at least we wouldn't have this. With such regulations present, the US government both forced a sale and disallowed a sale to anybody who they didn't like, basically forcing TikTok to choose a government-approved partner. What did that partner do to become government approved? We'll never know.
Antitrust in the US (and GDPR in Europe) give regulators wide latitude over who to prosecute and for what. This makes it much easier to do under-the-table deals to achieve objectives that you can't or don't want to achieve by regulation, like restricting free speech.
Subjecting companies to such regulation was ok when it was about transporting cattle or selling bricks, but giving governments the ability to regulate companies that have a wide impact on speech, even if the regulations don't seem to have anything to do with speech, is just asking for trouble.
It's pretty clear this is a misuse of antitrust. Actually the details of these deals have very little to do with antitrust, it's likely simplecorruption. Antitrust might be used as a cover for those deals, not the other way around. The prevention of monopolies is one of the few regulations necessary for meritocratic capitalism to thrive.
> but at least we wouldn't have this
I think you might have forgotten recent moves from Meta about removal of moderation, relaxing rules on hate speech, settling lawsuits with Trump and similar moves that imply they wouldn't really fight hard against what this administration wants.
I wonder where all the TikTok videos are about all the tanks and hotel shoot outs in Beijing over the last week or so are… where various party factions fought it out over control of the central committee and you have the disappearance of various generals in the PLA.
Care to elaborate?
I was able to find this pretty quickly:
Zhang Youxia Arrested After Failed Coup; Gunfight Allegedly Occurred at Jingxi Hotel in Western Beijing (https://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2026/01/25/1130776.h...)
2 replies →
Most Americans are unaware of how China is collapsing. All news is censored.
10 replies →
What do you mean "you wonder where they are"? Do you even use tiktok to be able to see them? Because if you search about that on there you can find videos
tiktok always censored, it's just now it censors anti-Trump content instead of anti-CCP content [1]
both are bad, I liked when tiktok was supposed to be just "banned". it's always been a tool for repressive governments
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-28/tiktok-huawei-surveil...
If it’s true for TikTok it will likely be true for all other forms of popular social media (twitter, instagram, etc) too, so a ban wouldn’t have made a big difference probably.
TikTok was the only popular platform where you could doomscroll and see bad things the US is doing. All others censored it to please the administration. And now TikTok does too.
2 replies →
> The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
No, at least during the Biden administration when the law was passed, it wasn't.
This shit is a lot more complicated that a hot take based on today's news.
It was even during Biden. The idea was to stop pro Palestine videos. Anti ice videos are in the same realm
Forcing the sale of TikTok predates the current war in Gaza by a good bit. It's obviously a complex thing that encompassed a bunch of different people with different motivations. And considering there is pro-Palestinian videos all over American social media, I don't think it is kind of absurd to think this was the motivation.
2 replies →
You have no evidence that this is true and it sounds like a para kid conspiracy theory from the depths of the worst subreddits. Stop being silly.
[dead]
[flagged]
> believe the government has no right to deport convicted criminals who are in the country illegally.
You mean execute American citizens in broad daylight in the middle of the street? Because that's what they are doing. Or tell me, what crimes did the 5 year old they kidnapped commit?
For most, the deportation of criminals isn’t the issue. It’s the process and methodology being employed people are disagreeing with. It’s creating unconstitutional situations and chaos/death in the streets.
People like you overwhelmingly misunderstand the position of others and in making incorrect assessments create more noise to divide the nation further. You try it is “criminal” to lump together the cartel death squad and MS13 street gang type people together into the same cohort as people who simply came here illegally and have lived here peacefully even contributing to our society and economy positively.
How is uploading video of Ice related operations brain washing?
Americans have racistly insinuated that asians brainwash our sweet young people since the Korean War when we killed 20% of North Korea. POWs were treated somewhat humanely and educated by Korean communists, many of them denounced the United States for criminality. This led to a CIA program to try to replicate "brainwashing" including eventually the MKULTRA program.
This kind of history resonates today as you can see people continue to make these kinds of accusations because we are the good guys and revealing derogatory information about our society is basically treason.
Rights don't actually exist. That's a made-up idea to avoid the very real concept of human needs and putting liberation into that context.
The issue is you can't easily justify oppressing people if you have a finite checklist of needs. You clearly can if you use a nebulous debatable term like "rights".
[flagged]
What kind of cyber warfare? Just knowing what kidz today are into? Or is it an actual malware? Is it targeting certain people?
I'm sure it leaks privacy like crazy, just like any other social app. I'm just still unclear on just how useful it would be, and whether that really merited intervention at the very highest levels.
The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is about stealing China's cyberweapon so our own elites can use it.
We have Trump's word on that.
mark_l_watson has the more believable take.
Not really. It was about preventing CCP control of information.
The CCP angle is the PR version. From last year: https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
Note that there have been multiple instances over the past two years of high level ex/current officials repeating the same general point.
[flagged]
4 replies →
>is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to.
Are we talking about the Trump administration or the Biden administration? The current ban was passed under Biden with supermajorities in both houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_U...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...
How can that be that during any single administration there always are bipartisan votes in favor of digital surveillance and censorship, oh, I mean online protection for kids and puppies? Pure coincidence I think.
Boden's good, Grump's bad, simple as that. Or Grump's good, Boden's bad doesn't matter.
One is clearly worse than the other on some issues — only one of them executed US citizens in the street for protesting, during both terms.
1 reply →
Both.
I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else. Who cares, they all can come crashing down.
>I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else.
No, the point isn't "protecting Biden", it's pure self interest. Tiktok is a social media platform that's very popular with Democrat's electorate and is already left leaning. Why risk it falling into the other party's control (especially near the end of Biden's term), just so you can maybe push more left leaning talking points?
3 replies →
I am not sure. I think we're talking about the one where Trump illegally and unilaterally ignored the sale or de-list deadline passed in said bipartisan bill so he could figure out which Trump loyalists would be taking over. I'm glad they finally got it sorted out a little over a year after the January 19, 2025 deadline in the bill.
I think you'll find that pro-privacy, anti-right-wing people often don't have the highest opinion of "their" guy
The current nonsense has been enabled by decades of overreach. A small minority kept saying, this stuff is going to be really bad if a bad guy takes power. Well, guess what happened.
The bad guys would have done it anyway. That's the important part. "Good guys shouldn't make tools because bad guys might (or will) use them" isn't how we should operate. No more should we say "the [internet|source code|pen testing tools|etc] could be used by bad guys so good guys shouldn't have it."
1 reply →
Why is it always a blame game? What dos that accomplish? There’s no “good guy” administrations. There’s just realpolitik. The current iteration of ICE is an outgrowth of the Obama admin, as is the problem with billionaires in politics. Biden put a target on Maduro's head before leaving office (continuing to fill a multi-administration powder keg re: Venezuela). Trump just had the panache to brazenly do the deed instead of waiting for the next guy to do it. Horrible? yes. Unprecedented? Hardly.
Now I’m not saying things are inevitable. Trump has a bull-in-china-shop mentality. But he is only being manipulated to set the same agenda, just faster than any president in living memory.
"The current iteration of ICE…"
Just murdered two protestors. A bit of a change there.
//
1 reply →
The Democrats always have been nothing but controlled opposition, designed to give you the illusion of choice.
> hiding information from the US public
It is literally on the front page of news papers....
Also, you can see it on Instagram, X, etc.
Even a cursory search on TikTok reveals anti-ICE content...
TikTok is hugely influential, and the younger people they're trying to influence don't read newspapers and don't hang out on X or Instagram (both of which also censor certain political content).
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic...
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/comments/1i9zf5u/rco...
https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13375v1
I am willing to bet that the vast majority of young people are very much aware of what ICE has been doing. Do you believe otherwise?
3 replies →