4 comments

  • flobosg 11 hours ago
  • dh2022 3 hours ago
    They should wait a week and hire the moderators fired by Tik-tok…
  • renewiltord 9 hours ago
    We are going to break their culture like we have everyone else’s. The hegemon will conquer all.
    • didgeoridoo 9 hours ago
      The showdown for the soul of the 21st century: CCP vs. Skibidi Rizz.
  • stogot 11 hours ago
    I don’t understand why people would WANT to join this platform over others knowing they’re being monitored & influenced by a foreign government? Is it a contrarian thing like when you’re told you can’t have something?

    I remember that the prohibition actually increased alcohol consumption.

    • marssaxman 9 hours ago
      Why should Americans care what the Chinese government thinks of them and their video-watching choices? What are they going to do about it, all the way over on the other side of the planet? If you worry that you might have watched or said something which "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people", you can just stay home and refrain from going there, like most of us were always going to do anyway.

      I am far more concerned about being monitored and influenced by a domestic government, because they have power where I live, and they can wreck my life anytime they want to.

      • Salgat 8 hours ago
        In the individual level I don't care either, but having seen the damage Russia has done through their ongoing online influence, I understand how big a problem it is at the macro-scale.
        • lemon_zest 7 hours ago
          Agreed but if you think about it if Russia managed to influence the US election with just some facebook ads the US has far more bigger problems. Then again, the app is in mandarin and clearly for Chinese users. I would be more worried about data brokers who can sell you data at any time.
    • Molitor5901 10 hours ago
      I think a lot of the people using TikTok are looking for the constant dopamine hits, and so they will go to whichever app will fill it. Not sure if social media could be considered a drug, but sometimes it feels like it.
    • MilnerRoute 10 hours ago
      The number of Americans doing this is only in the hundreds of thousands, according to the article, while RedNote has 300 million (Chinese) users.

      It's odd that this happened - but I don't think it will have a big impact on anything.

      • IOT_Apprentice 7 hours ago
        There are over 170 million users on TikTok.

        Go look for the audio recording from the head of AIPAC COMPLAINING about public opinion against their war.

        They want it silenced, as does Zuckerberg, Musk & Bezos for the latter Temu & TikTok have to have impacted sales).

        According to Congress it is a national security threat. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed. And yet Trump may restart TikTok as is after he is inaugurated.

    • guerrilla 10 hours ago
      Everyone is monitored and influenced on every other platform, except in all of those cases it actually effects them directly.

      Check out all of the mentions of Palestine in the original thread though. This is interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710339

    • jacooper 10 hours ago
      Because people don't trust their own government and want to see the content that their government hides/dislikes, the tiktok ban was in part motiviated and accelerated by tiktok not making its algorithm biased against Palestinian content.
    • IOT_Apprentice 7 hours ago
      They are interested in a platform other than X (filled with alt right, Q, megalomaniac Elon & his worshippers) or Meta who tracks everything you do ion the internet & sells that data, that nation states use to spread propaganda to influence our elections and general falsehoods, spread by a handful of people that as a result, turned family members into conspiracy fanatics & turned them to MAGA).

      Cambridge Analytics partnered with Meta to target elections around the world, bragged of using the data to install into office whoever paid them the most.

      Americans, found in TikTok a place where they could learn about history, hobbies, comedy, and information about things NEVER taught in schools & being able to use it as a search engine instead of google to find people talking about what they wanted to find.

      The world is already filled with propaganda from the US government, at the behest of corporations.

      It is all out in the open.

      As for monitoring? We have been monitored heavily and all our data is in the hands of the NSA, GCHQ, the Chinese government, the 5 eyes & every social media platform. There must have been thousands of data breaches with ALL. Of your financial data, your credit history, and more.

      All governments use propaganda and have done evil by their citizens in the interests of power,control & wealth.

      We are monitored by our devices with our internet traffic collected and sold.

      We are tracked by TransUnion, Experian et al.

      Our license plates are scanned on the roads, at shopping center, malls.

      Google will send police lists of whose phones were in what area based on geofencing.

      NSA was copying ALL inter data center traffic between all google data centers.

      Our banks file SARS reports on deposits & withdrawals.

      • jhanschoo 2 hours ago
        You have made many claims, but my understanding of this claim

        > Cambridge Analytics partnered with Meta to target elections around the world,

        is that there was no coordinated effort. Rather, FB's early APIs were extremely permissive, as were many other social media apps trying to be platforms with 3rd-party developers building apps on them. CA exploited this permissivity to obtain a whole lot of PII.

    • toofy 8 hours ago
      i realize this may come across as whataboutism, but i think it really is an important question to ask: please keep in mind, i absolutely am not challenging your concerns, but if this concerns you, are you under the impression places like twitter and meta/facebook aren’t pushing gross tiers of propaganda and malicious information?

      we know with absolute certainty they have been/are actively being used for the same purposes—from both internal and external manipulations. i mean in addition to the mess from the past couple of years, does anyone else remember facebook getting caught intentionally running experiments on unknowing users? [0][1][2][3]

      they were caught intentionally trying to manipulate humans into being sad. again, without the users knowledge (or consent) they were running experiments on people.

      their owners are definitely manipulating humans, their algorithms are being manipulated by highly paid groups of people, and on and on.

      if foreign ownership concerns you, twitter is not owned by someone born in the US, and it’s second largest shareholder are saudis. and the vc money people behind so many of these sites have repeatedly shown they have some very antisocial tendencies, and maybe this is hyperbolic, i can’t tell anymore, but im confident in saying an awful lot of them have no loyalty to any country/civilization and many of them would be perfectly happy to watch the world burn as long as they’re making money.

      if manipulation concerns you (i’m still debating myself on the issue, but i’m leaning towards worry) i find it strange not to mention twitter and meta/facebook with just as much weight/concern. for the average american/european the manipulations coming from their platforms have the potential to be significantly more material. and they are rabidly against any kind of interference that would protect citizens from the very manipulations that seem to concern people.

      [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

      [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/furor-erupts-over-facebook-expe...

      [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...

      [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28051930.amp