You really can't tell the difference between Americans doing it and a foreign nation doing it?

I agree. I'm not saying TikTok is much different than others. I'm saying when we see TikTok banned we shouldn't feel like "Oh no, not that!", we should feel like "Well, it's a start, but let's do more in that direction."

> It feels silly with this coloring of TikTok as the evil when meta, Google and a dozen other American companies are doing the same

Ban them all...

You're arguing crack should be legal because cigarettes are

The odds [edit: ^W^W^W^Wchances] are just lower that Google and Meta would rig the algorithm to subtly color peoples opinion in favor of China and Russia.

If TikTok is doing propaganda by subtly promoting some reels over others -- who would know? Why would they not be doing it and how can anyone know they are not already doing it?

Not anything blatant of course. Blatant stuff does not change peoples opinions anyway. Just subtly bump some reels that has been proven to shift a demography in a certain direction.

TikTok has all the data it needs to work with the minds of people and also all the ability. And China has the motiviation..

Of course Google and Meta might promote other goals in their algorithms, but the chances of a leak of that happening is definitely higher in current American companies

“Intentionally trying to destabilize the country and trying to sell you things are literally identical issues.”

The US has very little privacy law.

This isn't about privacy; it's about who gets to promote what ideas to Americans. Do you think that a post about Tienanmen Square, about Uyghur persecution, or about Taiwanese independence, will get nearly as far on a Chinese controlled media platform?

They don't. https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...

Because the Chinese Communist Part is not stupid enough to just exploit their leverage over sovereign nations for shits and giggles. You don't need a smoking gun to understand how corporations in China operate. They operate with the blessing of the CCP, and regardless of whether they've ever done anything, the scale of what they could do if they wanted to would be some spectacular lessons in modern propaganda.

> TikTok (and other foreign-run social media) normally aren’t as susceptible to domestic pressure

TikTok has been uniquely subject to political pressure over the last half decade. They didn’t buddy up with Larry Ellison because Oracle has the best servers.

At least for the time being, traditional media outlets don't seem to have a problem airing US politicians' dirty laundry.

You talk about censorship but if things are happening it will be a lot more subtle than that; more about what you show than what you hide. Peoples opinions are already shifted a lot by what reels they watch. By controlling what people see you control what people think; at least many enough.

Censorship is outdated. With the amount of data and reach TikTok has they have something more akin to mind control.

Principle being the same as traditional politisized media, but the effectiveness of TikTok is just on another level. You see "people like you" sharing what they honestly believe for good reasons. Only thing TikTok did was decide to show that clip, and not the other clip of a person like you saying the opposite thing, also hearthfeltly and for good reasons...

There is by now "free speech" being published for every single combination of personal interests, demographic, and personal opinion and personality traits.

If you wanted to push, say, white supremacy, to a trans mountain bike riding sci fi fan -- I am sure the content that will do that job is out there. Not with 100% certainty but enough to control a population. The question about controlling the population is only about picking the right reels to show to whom in what order.

If you control the algorithmic firehose and control who sees what, you basically control the minds of the population.

Not by explicit propaganda. Only by nudging and bumping content.

People can make conscious decisions to not want their worldview defined by traditional sources, whether it is Fox News or The Daily Show or whatever. But with TikTok everyone gets something different and who knows how it is geared or rigged.

A diminished attention span. Assuming that's still considered a harmful effect.

I'm not saying the ban is about that, but it does accomplish something in that direction, and we need more bans that are explicitly about that.

Ultimately though I don't think regulations about privacy and data handling are sufficient. To go just one level deeper, a large proportion of the data in question should not even be collected, regardless of how it's handled or who it's shared with. But many of the problems are even deeper, and have to do with things like how big companies are allowed to get and how much venture capital is allowed to destroy things that work by funding things that don't.

It's not about the algorithmic feed, it's about allowing your #1 adversarial state to have control over that algorithms parameters. They don't let Twitter, Google, or Meta operate in China.