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.
Think Binney, Snowden, Assange would probably disagree with you.
We know both China and the US are nation states with global ambitions so it would be logical for both to use digital platforms to surveil and perform social engineering.
We also have had whistleblowers on both sides that have come forward and said this is a common practice. We also know based on simple game theory it is in the interest of any nation state to do so not just the US or China
But even on a site like HN that presents itself as rational and factual the sentiment is the US does not do any surveillance or social engineering.
And for the life of me I just don't understand why maybe nationalism? Or the aforementioned social engineering being so effective? But it is so cool to see
A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
The impression I have of the sentiment on this site is closer to the opposite.
I guess you are trying to muddy the water here by invoking the names of people who are known for their resistance to a certain kind of American misbehaviour. That behaviour is not really the same as the kind of wide-ranging and complete media restrictions we are talking about, but it sounds kind of similar so this is a good way for you to do some whataboutism with extra steps.
If you think that American media is controlled in the same way at the same scale and intensity as Chinese media please provide your arguments for that view explicitly.
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?
Despite any personal romanticism towards violent revolution you may have, that is not something that societies actually want against democracies. Even against authoritarian regimes, society often goes from bad to worse (see Iran, Lebanon). You want violent revolution against actual oppressive regimes, not democracies where you can change the society with a vote, but even then, you want it led by pro-democratic factions.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Long-term_aftermat...
Suppose that there was an issue that most citizens would normally feel very strongly about, but which benefits the state: war immediately comes to mind. There should be protests and (non-violent of course) civil unrest against wars the public feels to be unjust or immoral. Such demonstrations could easily be lulled in the right media environment, which is why alternative channels are important. I can easily imagine a future where TikTok is the premier dissonant chord against the drumming of war.
I'm not going to hide by biases here, I rather do romanticize popular anti-war movements.
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.
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
the biggest problem for western competition (insta & co) is the dramatically "better" (more addictive) algorithm. But trump and Co happily use tiktok to grab power, see the most recent Romanian elections.
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.
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
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.
The problem with this analysis is that American internet users don't just have one government controlled website to get their news from. Instead, they can access a wide range of national and international media that is quite diverse. It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
What you need is not just diversity but independence. You can find all kinds of views on social media, but if there are only a handful of social media sites and the government can lean on the sites themselves to suppress things they don't like, that's not independence.
> It's not clear how adding the CCP propaganda manipulations to that would be especially useful.
It's obviously not optimal for the only alternative to be the CCP. What you would really like is to have no major platforms at all and instead have thousands of federated independent smaller services hosted in every country in the world. Which was basically the web and email/usenet until Google took 90% search market share and then devastated the former by downranking smaller sites and the latter got displaced by non-federated walled garden social media that actively suppresses third party client interoperability.
So now you practically need the resources of a state to put up a viable rival to that stuff, and maybe the problem you need to solve is that.
The "wide range of national and international media" you can access is shrinking rather quickly.
They've also threatened to pass new laws that the targets wouldn't like if the targets don't "voluntarily" do things the law isn't allowed to make them do.
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.
