Agreed, the underlying was more interested than the summary. And also seems to be a case of measuring what's conveniently measurable.
The fact that {product} has only 1 connection to {product first party domain} doesn't say a lot about anything, given they could be internally proxying to and from who knows how many partners?
It'd be more helpful to at least see total traffic per domain.
It made me curious that the highest "first-party ratio" companies tended to be tech companies capable of realizing their own architectures (Amazon/Google/Apple).
Yes, third-party direct connections from apps is useful information in some ways and I'd prefer to keep it down rather than spread things around widely.
But what people are really worried about with Facebook or TikTok or whoever building and aggregating information about them, doesn't require talking to a third party at all, and if you clamp down on these direct connections everything could just pass through the "first party" and through to whoever they wish on the server side where you can't see the connections anyway.
These network contacts provide $$$ to those companies. They're low effort, easy revenue for them. Privacy for customers be d*mned.
I once met a senior-level dev who worked for a company, they wouldn't have their own app on his phone, due to those invasive practices tracking his behaviour.
I thought the most curious was the ratio of third:first party domains for magazines and news.
It suggests they control very little of their technical, revenue-generating infrastructure.
Which is interesting when the narrative is "The internet is destroying journalism." But another way to phrase it might be "All of these companies drastically underinvested in web/mobile, and continue to do so." (Although the NYT seems to have a higher ratio than most, but I believe they divorced themselves from Google and brought a lot back in-house?)
It's a matter of scale in relation to your audience and data. Your local news site with users in the tens of thousands, is unlikely to have the capital to invest in geographic and demographic tracking necessary to provide a robust ads business. Easier to plug into a number of providers who already have that data about their visitors.
These sites have to do that to remain competitive.
One thing that I found very interesting when I looked into what TikTok does: it's scary good at aggregating data about you. I live in a foreign country, my phone's network is behind a VPN to a different foreign country and I gave the app no extra permissions, yet somehow I still got recommended content from the country where I was born. Since it's a small country there's no way that's a coincidence. I'm both intrigued and spooked as to how they figured that connection out.
I think they use the SIM card country ID and also the ad audience categories to suggest content.
For example swapping the SIM card with a fresh installation of TikTok shows different "local" videos. Even if the public IP address is unchanged like when using WiFi instead of Data.
I've also think they use ad categories to suggest videos. Using a fresh TikTok installation and then spending some time navigating a subreddit of a topic, would likely show videos of that topic the next time you open TikTok.
How could they tell you were on that subreddit? Presumably you were doing it from a separate browser on the phone -- can they really snoop on behavior in completely separate apps?
Indeed they shouldn't be able to know that without deliberately bypassing the phone's security features using vulnerabilities. Maybe confirmation bias is at play here?
> How could they tell you were on that subreddit? Presumably you were doing it from a separate browser on the phone -- can they really snoop on behavior in completely separate apps?
The subreddit was opened in an incognito window, and the native app on the same phone.
I had the exact opposite experience. I also live in a foreign country (The Netherlands) and even after explicitly watching content from my native country I still only got videos in Dutch (should mention that I don't even speak Dutch).
Totally off topic but how are you received being a resident in a country and not being able to speak the language? Not that I'm looking to emigrate but damn if your country isn't appealing to the cargo-bike riding cyclist in me.
It's pretty easy to derive longitude with some accuracy simply from active hours. Combine that with population densities and your guesses might get closer, combine that with how long you dwell on some videos or what videos you like and you get closer. Your Opsec isn't as good as you think, it's just nobody has been watching. If you combine statistical guesswork across hundreds of vectors its very easy to narrow your target to a creepy extent. Eliminating some easy leaks is the first step to good opsec but so is reducing your interaction and adding a little chaos.
This argument doesn't really hold up to any scrutiny, by the longitude and active hours logic, the app should've figured out the country that I'm in, not where I was born. This was also on first startup, not after extended use.
While this would make sense in a different setup, as I already elaborated under a different comment, this occurred right after I installed the app, not after extended use.
Does your native country use a different language and you have something set to it on your phone? I had a Korean friend get freaked out by similar, but we figured out that he had something fingerprintable set to use Korean even though his interface was set to English.
I would guess it zeroed in on common interests. Videos you like, comment on, or even just watch for more than one time can all give clues into what interests you.
Sorry for not being clear enough, this was straight after I installed the app. I didn't search for any content or anything, I was simply recommended things that were clearly from my home country.
I would guess that your device has been fingerprinted through other app usage you have used, and that fingerprint has an association with the country of your birth.
It's possible that such a service is provided by a state actor, or part of a marketing/advertising service.
I recall when Apple made device UUID's unique to a specific app install, rather than a device.
Entirely speculation on my part--I assumed that someone would eventually figure out a way to approximate a uuid at the device level, and use that across applications and app installs.
What kind of data? TikTok knows what content I interact to... on tiktok. That's it. Unless they have an android 0-day or something. It has no access to my mic, camera, browsing history, contacts list, or anything useful. Guess who has access to all that, if they want it, though? Google and Facebook (through whatsapp). What is the privacy concern here, exactly?
If you've logged in it can potentially match your login information or email address to other activity on the web. TikTok's servers could also place you geographically somewhat roughly based on ip address.
Outside of that I agree. It's unclear what data TikTok is supposedly gathering that other apps aren't already and why that's a cause for alarm.
It’s a bit ignorant for you think that data is limited to “mic, camera, browsing history, contact list” etc. TikTok can harvest data on the type of content posted and what users interact with. Although it feels harmless, I’m sure there are troves of insights to be derived just from that.
When you sign up for an account, they also can find the friends in your Contact that also have a TikTok account. But you can bypass this of course. Other than that, I'm also a bit confused as to what data they have access to
The conversation here on HN is quite funny. I can imagine the same conversation taking place in China: the data on US apps goes straight to the US government.
This is what I meant by how hard it is to talk about 'all'. Someone says all and then someone gives an example that's not all and so what are we talking about?
Ultimately I think there are differences between country A and country B's methods and etc.
In terms of internet traffic, my understanding is that the NSA would have access to a significant fraction of all of it via this room (and perhaps others). A significant enough fraction that there’s a high likelihood any given internet communication could be intercepted. Maybe not every time but enough stuff routes through the US that eventually it will be seen.
So to me I’ve feel comfortable using “all” in a loose (empirical) sense. But I see your point that it’s not as clear.
It's pretty common for everyone to assume such things... particularly if you're doing it.
I recall when Trump ran into issues with contacts made with some Russian agents he publicly stated that he thought everyone else did it (to be specific he meant sending someone to meet with agents who said they had information he would want). When in fact almost every recent presidential candidate had reported attempted contacts by Russian agents (the lone exceptions were Trump, and George Bush Sr... but Bush had been head of the CIA so it seems likely the Russians might not try).
It seems it makes it easy to imagine these things by default if you're up to it.
The title and article smells of China-bad-clickbait.
There's no uncertainty here. Like in every other case, it goes to any company that is willing to purchase it. Overwhelmingly it will be American companies using it for direct marketing.
I feel like TikTok is significantly underdiscussed, almost like the tech and business press are assuming it's a flash-in-the-pan more similar to Snapchat than Facebook. It is almost certainly having a major impact on the business of some of the most prominent publicly traded companies in the US, yet there are just a handful of articles discussing their impact on Facebook's disastrous quarterly results.
The aspect that worries me the most is the recommendation: Facebook and Twitter discovered a little late that they had the ability to to influence opinion with simple tweaks. That raised internal questions and that model is under close surveillance by people who have talked about those questions in public and who I know have and would raise, at least internally, their concerns. People can explore the updates from their friends and can identity ommissions. Snap is more secretive, but their employees are loud Californians who can about justice, they have access to journalists if they feel the need to push back. Users can also see updates from their friends and people their follow without just having to trust the flow.
I don’t believe that TikTok has a similar internal culture of debate. I haven’t seen anything published by their academic team. I don’t believe that you can check on your friend’s page to see what they posted lately. They are examples of topics that they have favoured or censored that was worrisome and they didn’t adress the controversy. The pool of possible content is much larger so there’s more opportunity to fill strategically.
I know people who work for one but not the other, so I understand that this influence my judgement but I believe that their are objective difference in company values and product design that make TikTok more able to manipulate.
I haven’t seen anyone discuss that, and I have plenty of people who discuss those questions profesionally in my feed.
>but their employees are loud Californians who can about justice
In my experience, Californians care about justice the same way they care about anything, fashion. Only the injustices that are fashionable to be against ever get any attention.
If you need proof they don't care about justice look no further than they fact the keep electing Peloci.
The users of TikTok are mostly teenagers and young adults, that's why. Nearly everybody in journalism is late 20s or 30+. They just don't get it, though to be fair vine had a similar type of content and that failed.
I'm in my mid-40s: there's nothing deep or mysterious to "get" about TikTok. It's short-form video snips/vignettes, mainly of people showing off for their friends, trying to cash in on short-lived audio trends and meme pipelines, and sometimes both. It reminds me of the kind of bravado/showing off my peers in middle- and high-school did: because that's essentially what it is. Edit for more context: I happen to be dating someone who is a young adult (early/mid-20s), so I have even more context/insight into what makes this app interesting to them: I stand by what I wrote.
Those late 20s and up journalists get it, but they recognize (correctly) that like all social networks of this sort the early adopters (kids/young adults) are going to turn into adults with spending power and either change the nature of the platform or move on to something else. In either case, what TikTok is now is largely irrelevant (not to mention trite and shallow).
> I'm in my mid-40s: there's nothing deep or mysterious to "get" about TikTok. It's short-form video snips/vignettes, mainly of people showing off for their friends, trying to cash in on short-lived audio trends and meme pipelines, and sometimes both.
What this misses is that TikTok is a radically different experience for different people.
For some people, this description is very accurate. For other people, they would barely recognize TikTok on the basis of this description.
This is what has led to so many mis-representations of TikTok in the media, and the misunderstandings that result from that.
TikTok has a very good algorithm for suggesting content for users, and this can end up with different users being exposed to radically different subsets of content offered through TikTok: in scientific terms, it’s very easy to get stuck in different local minima.
So for many users, TikTok will
not involve “showing off to friends”, will not involve audio trends, and will not involve memes at all.
These users would describe it as containing short-form video content relevant to whatever their particular niche or interest may be.
Yes, the algorithm is a poor algorithm that overfits. It is not a good algorithm by any reasonable measure, unless the intent specifically is to commit users to such a funnel.
Whether the content is stupid cat videos or a DIY isn't relevant to my original point: it's short-form video content developed by people attempting to cash in on some meme (or niche), and very much in the vein of showing off for one's peers. Some like to think that if it's not an audio meme, but rather an undergrad waxing poetic about just learning Schrodinger's Equation or some handy person displaying his DIY skills that it's not about cashing in/showing off. But it is.
Of course the intent is to commit users to a funnel or funnels.
I still don’t think you get that when you complain about the content being trite or juvenile or commercial(?), you’re outing yourself as someone who will stop to watch that kind of stuff.
If you were writing this in 2019 I would agree with you.
This perception is just already 3 years old now and so that social network has already gotten its additional audiences and many of those high schoolers (and their influencers) have grown up.
There is a similarity of looking at Facebook in 2005 and looking at Facebook in 2008, and add in a much faster adoption cycle and infrastructure.
OTOH what happens to companies with teen users who grow up is that they lose their userbase and they die out along with other big influences of that current generation. You just don't have the time to stare at ticktock for 3 hours at 25 years old that you had at 15 years old, whether you are at the top or the bottom of the economic ladder. We see that trend in every social network.
In one large segment it has turned into a streaming platform like twitch, as in a side screen and additional chat people keep up while also streaming on twitch
I dont see a vine-like fate for tiktok
Bytedance is so much better positioned as well and already monetizing it
I'm not much younger and tried it after some HN thread. Basically the algorithm is really good, as it should be on more platforms. So if you don't like memes and dance and beauty contents, you won't get that. It can be just DIY videos, niche musicians and short science videos if that's what you want to see.
I don't think it's shallow. I've learned a lot from it. It just gives you what you want to watch and what you want to watch may be based on the idea that you have about the platform.
The algorithm is really good! At overfitting. Snark aside, what you describe is short form videos intended to show off or cash in to a trend: that it’s not stupid cat videos, or dance-offs or whatever doesn’t change that.
There is absolutely a strong 20s-30s and even 40s userbase on TikTok. “The Algorithm”, though, is very very good at only showing people what they want to see, so much so that two people can have wildly different experiences.
For example, my TikTok is full of LGBTQ+, PNW housing complaints, DnD and religion.
Edit: and a good percentage of them are around 30.
I wonder if the accessibility as far as the media goes to Facebook staff and willingness to engage with the press exposes Facebook a bit more than TikTok.
I think you are each using nationalist a different way. I'm pretty sure the GP meant it as "buy American" nationalists and you meant it as "I want an ethnostate" nationalists.
Nobody cares because (it is perceived that) there is no political discourse on TikTok yet.
It was the same for Twitter and Facebook. Then Trump happened and People With Important Jobs started paying attention to them. There has not been such a catalyst event for TikTok yet. Like with Zoom, there is a vague feeling among the security-paranoid that the Chinese are leveraging it for data-gathering, but as long as they get bazillion videos of teenagers pulling faces, who cares?
In my country (Philippines), TikTok has been one of the main sources of political misinformation besides Facebook and YouTube (for a lesser degree). It's gotten so bad that it's impacting the coming national election wherein the platform of the currently leading candidate is focused on the glorification of the past dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
It 100% depends on what you like. I've been using tiktok forever and a day and all I see is funny stuff that is relevant to me. Very obscure niche things that have 1000 hearts - it's scary good at recommending relevant content.
If you are seeing political content, it's just because you told the algorithm that you enjoy interacting with that type of content.
I don't understand what useful information could be harvested, as unlike Google/Facebook there is no massive tracking pixel product that follows you across the web. I'm a massive critic of the CCP, but I don't see what useful information they would get from this.
I think a bigger "conspiracy theory" I'd buy into would be the algrorithm exploiting political extremes and pushing insane voices to the top...but every social media/media company does that in some way (though not always intentionally.)
1. Having Data
2. Using it to Predict
3. Using it to Manipulate
There are major, major leaps from collection to then even having effective prediction models. Prediction is hard, especially when it comes to longer term behaviors.
Manipulation is extremely hard especially when the content space is so crowded.
My fear of TikTok is far more mundane. It just dulls us into the most passive form of entertainment the world has ever known making us a basically disengaged, lifeless people. Its the modal opposite in life to 'touching grass'.
>My fear of TikTok is far more mundane. It just dulls us into the most passive form of entertainment the world has ever known making us a basically disengaged, lifeless people. Its the modal opposite in life to 'touching grass'.
Nail on the head. When I was first sent a link to a tik tok post, it was jarring, because as soon as that video ended another random video popped up and started playing full volume. It's a constant never ending stream of content. As long as you are looking at the app, there is not one moment where your attention isn't captured. You have no time for independent thoughts. How do you even think in long form topics when you interject your attention span with these videos constantly?
I think there will be a time when there is a mountain of research showing how harmful this 'fast food content' type of platform can be for mental health, and we really do consider platforms like ticktok or other attention demanding patterns like autoplaying instagram stories or a constant stream of youtube videos like we consider smoking tobacco today. People really need to be meditating and thinking freely, but it seems the technologists have decided monetizing (or at least convincing investors you are monetizing) all available time for independent thought is too profitable.
A state actor always desires insight into an adversary. The survival of nations depends on being able to either cooperate with others or subdue those who will not. The result of a state's strategy in these arenas is predominantly determined by their ability to predict the counterpart's behaviors, both at a citizen and leadership level.
Why TikTok is not seen as the ultimate embodiment of these incentives and immediately banned from the US is beyond me.
Even if it didn't share data.. it's designed from the beginning to be addictive. While other platforms like Facebook and Instagram grew into being platforms with aims to be addictive, I believe they started in a more neutral place. This type of app should be treated like smoking imo.
Queue the "you can find educational material on tiktok!" posts by the subset of HN who really love the app and the company.
Yes, as Cal Newport would point out - it’s not that social apps aren’t in some way useful, it’s whether the value they deliver is worth the price they exact by “stealing” large amounts of your time.
It's too jarring to me with the constant playing of the next thing. It's just content content content with no free time in between for you to be alone with your own thoughts. You could spend three hours on the app and have no time for a single independent thought of your own at all. At least three hours in front of cable TV would mean you'd do some introspection when you got up to pee during the commercials.
> For TikTok, the results were even more mysterious: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn’t opt into allowing tracking in each app’s settings, according to the study.
It seems like Apple is lacking on tracking enforcement of privacy. This mobile marketing company can do this so I'm guessing Apple has the resources to do this properly. You could even do it for the largest 1000 apps.
Beyond removing the unique identifier that allows advertisers to track you across applications (IDFA), Apple really hasn't done much to enforce tracking via other means. Depending on who you talk to, they tacitly endorse any and all non-IDFA tracking even when users opt out.
I refuse to download TikTok because I think we've reached peak social media and don't need another app that siphons off data and turns it into gold ingots. Besides, TikTok videos leak out into other platforms and you can tell by the little logo in the video that it was ripped from TikTok.
It's just Vine 2.0[1]. Many Vine videos got ripped and re-posted to YouTube so we have a small piece of internet culture surviving the death of an app and preserved.
These types of articles always frustrate me because the authors never seem to question where and how these apps are getting your data. These APIs and privileges are granted by iOS and Android. If only we had real privacy legislation in the US that could limit what is exposed to apps rather than being at the mercy of Google and Apple to put limits in place. It's not like TikTok is hacking into your phone
...
Articles such as these frame the debate around comparing different corporate and government influenced social media and never mention free social media as an alternative. https://fediverse.party/
Yes they cost me electricity, bandwidth, and time to administer. They are free of advertising, data tracking, and influence of corporations or governments. My friends who use the ones I host can donate money, but I have never asked them.
Nobody knows where any of their data goes and few people care. Tiktok is currently better at Algorithms than other SM, go figure. Some people hate Tiktok because they’ve never used it and incorrectly think it’s all dancing 14 year olds; others simply hate China because despite having a market economy its government has a little more power than in the West, which allows China to sometimes act outside the myopic lens of market logic when necessary (blasphemy) while reaping the market’s gains.
I believe that Facebook and Google collect more of my data than any other company in the world. And I know very well that they share all that data with US intelligence, because that's what they are required to do. That said, I don't see any problem in using another countries' app that might be doing the same thing that bigger violators like FB and Google are already doing. And, notice, I live in the US. For people oversees I can guarantee that this sentiment is even more common.
Who they are sharing it with shouldn't even matter. The act of covertly collecting it and giving users no real recourse is the problem, and what we should regulate. Turn the social networks into dumb feeds driven by explicit user choices rather than algorithms. Solve that problem, and you solve the TikTok problem.
But people don't want to talk about that. They want to ban the platforms they perceive as being used to push an opposing political agenda while preserving the platforms they themselves abuse for the same purpose. It is almost funny seeing people who directly benefited from Cambridge Analytica/Facebook turn around and complain about TikTok.
I think there is a case for a mandatory warning label, like on the app store and 5 sec interstitial that says:
“ Warning: this application sends your behavior to a foreign party. It may be stored indefinitely and used for personal retribution, social scoring, and manipulation of your political views. Proceed with caution”.
If that seems extreme, an outright ban of the app is worse. The US and others have had a good history of getting results this way, but it still respects individual and corporate liberties. Thoughts?
I think this should be included if there is non-zero risk that any foreign party other than maker of the app can read the data. That is if there is theoretical risk of it leaking or the encryption being used being broken by any party.
I think one of the things we don’t appreciate (perhaps most of the people on HN do) is that many of these platforms are not, as billed, social networks. They are, in fact, data collecting applications with a user facing, attention acquisition mechanism in the form of a fun little app. They are addictive for a reason. To get data off you.
Why does this and many similar articles frame the debate around comparing different corporate and government influenced social media platforms without mentioning free community run social media as an alternative? https://fediverse.party/
This is why I only install a few absolutely necessary apps, and mostly from fdroid. It makes me anxious to see friends install 3 different electric scooter apps in the space of 10 minutes just to try and unlock a scooter. I doubt those apps ever get removed once no longer needed.
Why or you can just accept the fact that your phone is your personal bug device your willingly carry around. The only safe space is your brain/thoughts and even that space is something they want to monitor with computer-brain interfaces.
Reading the title at cnbc right now says "TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app — and it’s unclear where it goes, study says" for me. I guess it was edited to get shorter and within the 80 character limit that HN has for submission titles.
"TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app" fits easily in the 80 character limit. No need to change "any other social media app" to "any other app" for that reason. This feels like it's actively trying to mislead people.
Unless they wanna keep the "and it’s unclear where it goes" part of course, which seems like they wanted to. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that there can be multiple reasons, and it's not that obvious of why.
In any other way, social media applications surely are the ones that extract the most data, and TikTok being on top of that list makes it to the top of the list of total applications too.
Just curious. May it be that TikTok pushes more anti US and pro Chinese clips? I mean it was just my observation using the app, that if I'm getting political clips it is mostly against the west and never against china.
A buddy of mine lamented something similar recently.
He was talking about the free apps his children use on their tablets, and while he likes diversity, was astonished at how much of the apps were pushing chinese culture.
Both my boys (neither are ethnic Chinese) speak mandarin. None have come home from school espousing any ideals that differ from our family values, but it will be interesting to see as they grow.
Final off-topic comment, the world of Firefly is one where Chinese culture became the dominant culture (though for obvious reasons the show is in English)
It's not unclear at all. It's Chinese data harvesting software. They'll do token public appeasement to avoid negative pressure, but every feature in the app is designed to collect biometrics and behavioral data.
China is not a good faith operator. Given the data needed to influence public opinion and voting, they will engage in manipulation favorable to their interests. That alone is sufficient to run tiktok at a loss, but the market manipulation possible, advertisement platform potential, and other monetization makes it look like just another app.
Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content.
The idea that tiktok isn't used for the same type of manipulation is dangerously naive.
There's a need for social media manipulation watchdogs that can monitor content being delivered to different users so the companies and countries involved can be held accountable.
It's sad that a massively scaled invasion of privacy can only be countered by more surveillance. Because of the ephemeral nature of tiktok interactions, the only way to combat manipulation is to surveil the content being delivered to user feeds and compare subsequent opinion poling and purchases.
Please don't take HN threads into tedious nationalistic or ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You started a doozy here—exactly what we don't need.
No, that's not a defense of "China" (whatever that's supposed to mean in internet comments). It's just a defense of HN for its intended mandate, which is curious conversation. Flamewar talking points are incompatible with that.
I don’t refute anything you say, but linking to a page that features Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson doesn’t help your case. Not to mention the clear partisanship and call for donation to the “American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology” - a rabbit hole I’m happy to avoid.
Isn't the whole, "TikTok spies for China" meme also politically motivated, per the last Republican president?
I don't doubt that Bytedance shares Chinese TouTiao user data with the Chinese government, akin to how Apple does it with iCloud, but Bytedance has been pretty adamant that TikTok is external to China and doesn't share data. Even when there was an executive order to ban TikTok for being a national security threat, they couldn't prove that it was.
Does anyone have actual evidence of TikTok sharing with the Chinese government, outside of political hit pieces like the one above?
To answer your question on evidence, when I'm looking for information on politically charged questions I often reference the Congressional Research Service whose purpose it is to take complex issues and boil them down to something digestible and generally apolitical for Congress (I know that's hard to believe, but I've read a lot of them, they are way less political than most other sources I find).
It is a little different with the nsa tapping the underwater cable trying to steal info where in China they create an internet where they hire millions of people to watch every conversation happening in real time.
Yes, if you completely minimize the level of bulk data collection the NSA and the US does through its partners, it’s completely different. You’ve left out all of the prism program, wherein the government had direct access to telecom and tech company servers.
What China does inside of China doesn’t have any bearing on the western internet. The topic at hand is the data collection that tic tok is engaging in, which already has plenty of precedent in the west, unfortunately.
It’s completely contrary to the values enshrined in the US constitution to make arguments like, “ah well but that person/group/country is bad and we aren’t” the entire political theory our nation is supposed to be built on is the notion that people with too much power will do bad things.
> watch every conversation happening in real time
Eh.... are you sure? A lot of my childhood friends are now working in various ares of what you might consider 'authoritative post' or the infamous 有关部门 but I think it's still a bit too divorced from reality. Censorship and blatant blockage for sure but millions spying on billions in real time? I don't think that's how they work.
Yes, parent’s assertion is fairly preposterous. There is no way one could conduct surveillance on that scale in a non automated fashion. There are too many resources required.
> watch every conversation happening in real time.
Even with 2 million people, you can’t follow even a fraction of the conversations of 1000x the population without automation doing most of the heavy lifting.
Peng Shuai was a recent censorship failure that has cost the party face globally.
You only has to shut down the major channels. Over 22,000 influencers were openly censored last year. Even in the past week, several Olympics-related hashtags have been blocked on Weibo. You can control the conversation even with just one person.
well I'm not sure whether the goal is to "save the party's face". To be honest it could be anybody, any hot issues of celeb big or small or could even be nobody can ignite some kind of sentiment, just like anywhere else. The difference is that domestically although censored, the social issues were sometimes genuinely flagged / monitored and led to change for better polices, in a sort of top down / authoritarian way, which to be honest surprises me.
It depends on how you define employed for censorship roles. On Douyin there are a lot of memes about passing censorship as a writer/reporter, jokes like 'night is dark' but it's actually 'night club'. Plenty of turks are just mechanically checking according to a theme. 'No brainer' as they call it. What's considered lighthearted there is probably horrifying sounding here.
People are talking about the other parts pretty well, but the idea of a "propaganda arm" seems a little funny to me. What is the propaganda they want to push? To what end?
Why do countries use propaganda?
Why do companies use it?
Why do people use it?
Because changing what is important to a group or people can make pushing your agenda easier.
What would be important to China's propaganda wing? Most important would be to maintain control over China and downplaying anything that reflects negatively. So controlling negative speech or shifting blame to someone else if a covid virus is discovered to original from territory you control would be important.
Tiktok's algo focuses on keeping you occupied in a state of mind where you zone out.
> What is the propaganda they want to push? To what end?
Propaganda is not just about "pushing" a message but also about smothering discussion. In fact, pushing a message via something like Tiktok is ham fisted, what the Chinese government can do instead is stifle any discussion related to topics that they consider "dangerous". For example, shadow banning any tiktok videos related to the Uighur genocide.
They can blame any manipulation on some ranking algorithm.
But then isn't this circular? They create the app to harvest the data to help them stifle the conversation they have made possible by creating the app in the first place!
You are assuming that the platform would not exist if the company didn't create it. But if tiktok doesn't exist the discussion would just happen somewhere else. I should also say that I'm not suggesting that tiktok was created for the sole purpose of pushing propaganda from its inception.
Well then I guess there is nothing left to say, as there is absolutely nothing that can be falsified in your beliefs, only the single-minded faith in an absolute national enemy.
I only wish y'all could hear yourselves when you say these things, with even a fraction more rational clarity, even an ounce more suspicion of the political narratives at work here.
These conversations are deeply troubling to me, makes me absolutely ashamed to be a westerner of any sorts. I think I will go find greener pastures now, thanks for the wake up call, hope you find peace too.
> Well then I guess there is nothing left to say, as there is absolutely nothing that can be falsified in your beliefs, only the single-minded faith in an absolute national enemy.
Got it, so since you couldn't argue against my statements with reason you are now attacking my character.
> makes me absolutely ashamed to be a westerner of any sorts
Absolutely nobody that is from the west calls themselves a westerner whatever the hell that means. Also FYI, there is an extreme mistrust and dislike of China from almost every country in the so called East. So it isn't a west vs east thing.
There is also serious mistrust of the Chinese government by the citizens of China. They just rarely communicate it as there is real risks to doing so.
It feels so bizarre to have someone convey seething hate for the government in private while seemingly being supportive in public. What is less obvious is how brittle it makes the country, it could literally dissolve into anarchy tomorrow or last for hundreds of years.
well not so uncommon, there are plenty of posts everywhere before it's taken down. If you use wechat the amount of 'read before deletion' are just a major category of gossips. I sometimes wonder do people outside of China really know the chinese 'domestic' circle well or am I so out of touch now? Also imho people don't tend to go 'against' the highest level government since it's very abstract. It's the everyday stuff that people care, which means local authorities that almost never get involved in any internationally focused affairs.
I wish you could hear yourself as you defend a country who’s listed as a communicated but is in every definition a dictatorship. Why are you defending them so hard, are you being paid?
The conversations would've been held elsewhere. Control the biggest platform, people gravitate there, shut down the topics you don't like, pay big names to visit the Forbidden City.
Technically all businesses with a large interest inside X jurisdiction will have leverage against it in some way. For example Microsoft had to hand over its Windows source code to China. By extension of that leverage you can assume that jurisdiction has some control over it. In US it could be national security letters issued to TikTok. In China it could be their equivalent issued to someone physically on their soil.
Like I said in another comment, I'll allow HN readers to use their own judgement.
edit: but you know what. Since you want evidence I'll give you some. The entire Alibaba debacle where the CEO was forced into hiding because he dared to contradict the Chinese political elite is my evidence that the Chinese government has implicit control over every business based out of China.
> edit: but you know what. Since you want evidence I'll give you some. The entire Alibaba debacle where the CEO was forced into hiding because he dared to contradict the Chinese political elite is my evidence that the Chinese government has implicit control over every business based out of China.
So you think his words are much better than "I have friends"? You can find all Alibaba sites are still running. Alibaba Cloud is still providing services. You can also contact to sales and support. Then you still want to believe "entire Alibaba debacle".
I just shared the information based my real life. I live in China and had some business with Alibaba, even though I don't like the company.
I did not say anything about politics or dictatorship, I just shared the fact that Alibaba is still running well.
If you think whatever you don't believe is just fake, then you would better go back to watch your CNN.
So who is brainwashed?
Nothing is being asserted. Statements 1 and 2 are truths, and from those two truths, we arrive at an ounce of prevention that we'd be wise to heed, whether our assumption is correct or not.
Nothing that Christopher Hitchens ever said struck me as remotely insightful. Characterizing one of his reductive proclamations as a "razor" does not make it more useful or accurate.
There are many books published on the topic that layout the evidence. A discussion here cannot begin to explain the depth of the problem, the reasons why our foreign policy has failed, and the evidence that exists. A superficial discussion almost does the topic a disservice and comes off as xenophobic. If you are truly interested in the topic I recommend "The World According to China" by Economy published 2022. I have 8 other book recommendations to cover the breadth of the field and the opinions if you care.
Most of the authors of the books express their love for the Chinese people. Most of them lived there at one point, and separate that view from their issues with the CCP and government. If you do due diligence in the area you may change your viewpoint. Maybe not. No-one on this thread is going to convince you in a few paragraphs to change your mind on a subject this charged and complex.
A more fun book, less academic, was published last year by Desmond Shum detailing his rise to becoming a billionaire as a China native and Hong Kong resident. He wrote the book after his billionaire ex-wife was abducted. She was not heard of for four years. She called him the day before he was to publish the book asking him not to.
> You claim there is "sufficient evidence" yet provide none
Do I need to provide evidence that the Chinese government should not be trusted and that China has control over all businesses based within its borders? This is common knowledge.
> I'm less worried than if it were used by American companies to target me specifically for ads
You should try practicing what you preach regarding so called xenophobia. Also your defensiveness in this regard is misplaced because my post is not pro American ad companies and it is not pro data collection. I am anti data collection. So not only am I against tiktok because it's controlled by a genocidal dictatorship that has raised a legion of indoctrinated nationalists, I'm anti tiktok because it represents the absolute worst of social media.
> Yes, because it's likely your "common knowledge" is a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of reality
Fine, you disagree with me, I'm not putting in any more effort discussing this with you because I don't believe you are arguing in good faith. I'll let the reader of HN decide using their own judgement.
> Ironically this is most of the world's opinion of America.
You keep up bringing up America despite me not mentioning them or even defending the country. This is a classic tactic for derailing conversations.
> Bytedance has been pretty adamant that TikTok is external to China and doesn't share data.
Considering that there are TikTok employees in china - both engineers and moderators, there is no chance that china doesn't influence TikTok. Even Zoom which is a clearly american company that has chinese employees wasn't immune to chinese influence.
source: i personally know a tiktok employee in china.
Does it matter? The presence of an office full of people in china means that there is an office full of people that can be exploited and controlled by the Chinese government.
Also, until recently they employed moderators in china, who by definition have access to customer data. So yes, the Chinese offices have/had access to customer data.
Many globally operating software companies have offices full of people in China, but presumably they have access controls in place to minimize the risk of data exfiltration.
On the other hand, many of the same companies have been involved in scandals where employees abused their position to stalk people or whatever, so maybe their access controls aren't actually that strict.
So it would've been interesting to hear about TikTok's internal security culture.
I'm not sure whether I'd call what moderators get "access to customer data", since it's not like they're in control, right? And aren't the posts they're moderating usually public anyway?
That's an artifact of the politics. If a company had been tilting this in favor of the right, you would find Maddow, Lemon, and other left wing bobbleheads instead of right wing bobbleheads.
Don't let guilt by association bias your thinking in this, but give the subject the deliberation it deserves. If you value the integrity of democracy and public discourse, ignore the messengers for whom the optics are politically convenient and focus on the message.
No, we should not ignore the messengers. There are enough credible people and content supporting your arguments, and there is no need to shove in the fundraising campaigns of opportunistic people that regularily argue against human rights.
This isn’t guilt by association. That website is purely a grift, starting from its appeal to authority, leading into the Fox News nonsense and pseudoscientific slant, all the way to its Rush Limbaugh, early 2000s aesthetics. It doesn’t take a scientist to know that this isn’t how credible scientists operate, especially with the partisan hackery on display.
TikTok should be banned in the US. China banned all of our homegrown social networks, its pretty standard international precedent to ban theirs, given the security risks.
It feels like debate is a generation behind practice here. The greatest danger isn't from data collection, but from algorithmic recommendation.
The data collection horse is out of the barn, has legitimate uses, and is an incredibly thorny issue to legislate appropriately. And will be adjusted for the next 20+ years.
What needs to be done now is to say that (1) at a certain user count ("too big to democratically ignore") then (2) production recommendation algorithms must be auditable.
Allow the details of audits to be kept secret from public record, but the DoJ should be able to go to Google, Facebook, Netflix, or TikTok and say "Show me how this works, now."
It's burying your head in the sand to suggest this doesn't have a clear impact on democracy and is currently solely in control of private companies and completely opaque. And it's the opaqueness that's the biggest danger.
Fundamentally, modern media/social is different from everything that came before because of the economic feasibility of microtargeting. Newspapers couldn't afford to track their customers individually & print a unique paper for each of them, which resulted in an auditable public record. All of the companies above can do exactly that, without leaving any public record.
Let's say we had this. We had some ML/AI team go up to Congress/DoJ and show them some tensors, some "back propagating LSTM" horseshit. How does that help the people that don't understand how the ad model works?
Hell, I bet there is _no one_ using AI or tensors or any of that shit that can tell you _why_ their model output Foo instead of Bar.
Just because the 84-year-old Sen. Hatch (who retired in 2019) asked a dumb question doesn't mean there aren't smart people in government. (Edit: Although I might have been misreading your ad model sentence as the above)
If explainability is a problem (e.g. "We don't know why our algorithm recommends higher-interest rate loan products to African Americans"), then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.
> doesn't mean there aren't smart people in government.
agreed and I was flippant to make a point. I did not mean to say there aren't smart people in government. But I would venture to say that people who understand ML/AI are _not_ working in the government. Or put more correctly, the _odds_ of a person working in government being up to date on how LSTM works today is such a low number, that I would be fair to say it is extremely unlikely that anyone on any board would be smarter than Sen Hatch _in this domain_.
> then that's a rabbit hole that needs to have funding put towards digging up as well.
Agreed and is the larger point I was trying to make: we currently, no matter how smart you are, have _any_ way of knowing what your "algorithm" is doing. Or if you do, it's a rule-based system and isn't AI/ML. We should though! And I think pursuing that will give us much higher rate of return than our black-box strategy everyone seems to be using.
The government can retain its own experts for opinions, just like how in court they can get expert testimony rather than relying on the judge or jury to know and decide all.
Instead of "the government" how about an independent NGO that was comprised of people who included industry or ex-industry ML/AI folks as well as academic or government people? There's a fairly robust emerging group of "ethics in tech" people who have worked on the industry algorithms and could be resources if their were policy requirements for audits.
Completely agree. Just like we have financial audits for a reason, we also need some form of algorithm audit process. Present day algorithms optimised for engagement and ad revenue growth are a clear and present danger to democracy as we have known it.
That is a massive rabbit hole. "anti-democratic messages" and "anti-us sentiment" is going to inevitably be used to further undemocratic process and imperialism. An article "The US blew up a hospital" gets flagged as anti-us sentiment, and buried. A journalist covering political contributions gets buried by "anti-democratic messages". This is basically inevitable.
I totally get you and absolutely agree, but we're entering into in a vastly new world and your concern isn't the only one anymore.
If a foreign nation's service uses algorithms to promote its interests and quell that of its adversaries or attempts to alter election outcomes to be favorable, then we're in for trouble.
Imagine social media creating worker strikes, riots, getting certain politicians elected, influencing the next generation of kids to prefer limits on free speech, influencing kids to not pursue science and engineering, etc.
But can the government legally restrict that kind of activity? It would be pretty cut-and-dried viewpoint discrimination triggering the most severe First Amendment scrutiny.
Beyond that, I'm not sure how easy it would really be to detect. Seems like the method for that kind of thing would more likely be to have networks of users/bots/whatever that take advantage of facially neutral recommendation algorithms. So would you catch that by auditing the algorithm?
yea these convos really make me think 'all hope is lost'
when you get some decent idea fleshed out re: adtech algorithm auditing and your first thought is:
yea lets root out anti american sentiment in the algo. facepalm
strong fox news vibes around here these days
> lets root out anti american sentiment in the algo. facepalm strong fox news vibes around here these days
I said measure. We need to understand if we're being manipulated, and if so, figure out what an appropriate response should be. Maybe it's as simple as releasing a report and letting the media talk about it. Knowing gives us the ability to develop a response.
Filter bubbles are relatively new, and it's not yet clear the extent to which they can be used to shape a democratic society.
> We need to understand if we're being manipulated
We don’t need to find that out because we are being manipulated. These are algorithms designed to maintain attention and sell ads. It is impossible for that to not be manipulative. The goal shouldn’t be to understand the algorithms, but to stop them from ruining our lives.
Isn't this an issue that US First Amendment law has dealt with since the founding of the country?
My understanding (vastly simplifying) is that the current standard is: does not infringe on rights of protected classes, does not incite imminent violence, & subject to national security concerns.
All of which are fuzzy lines, subject to court interpretation on a case by case basis, as they should be. (Even national security, which courts have traditionally granted wider latitude to)
All three are plausible rationales under which to bring a hypothetical "antidemocratic" case (to use a catch-all term that encompasses what people seem to be implying).
At core, and first principles, what "we" probably want as a nation is a sliding scale that moves from primacy of shareholder / owner to primacy of public, according to user count & market percentage.
Aka if you're a 10,000 user app, and you think (non-inciteful) racist content will make you the most money, that's your (terribly immoral) business.
But if you're a 100,000,000+ user multi-app company, then public and democratic interest takes primacy over your shareholders. Don't like that? Spin off some products.
That's why in matters of redress, I always skew towards visibility over modification. The latter is too powerful, in the hands of too few.
I've had this same argument with military friends lamenting the prevalence of ex-military citizens among right wing nationalist groups. IMHO, "make people attend classes to fight indoctrination" is too easily repurposed by a future administration to do the exact opposite.
You're absolutely right, but I don't think you go far enough. If a company is too large to ignore - if they insinuate themselves into "infrastructure" roles - then we need to treat them like government. They need to be subject to FOI requests. They need to justify that their work is in the public interest. They must not be permitted to "lobby" (i.e. bribe officials).
I can't see exactly how we do all this, but the root cause of many a social ill is that corporations are taking over social roles from government. This must be arrested, somehow, or we'll sleepwalk into the dystopian future of every damn 70s scifi film.
That metaphor means that there is no stopping it, you can't get the horse back in the barn. How is data collection like that? Why can't we make a law stopping it? The EU limits data collection. Apple restricted it. Nobody told them we couldn't put the horse back in the barn.
A good thing about 'software eating the world' is that it's not like saying, 'train rail gauge should be 1 meter wider', which would take incredible capital and labor. The software can be quickly and easily changed.
No, we should not give up on regulating data collection. The GDPR is a straightforward legal framework that gives individuals the ability to opt out of corporate surveillance, including post-hoc auditing and deletion of surveillance records. The US desperately needs an equivalent if we're to have any digital trust that lets us exist between the extremes of "complete abstinence" and "totalitarian free for all".
Introduce general data protection rules, then forbid data transfers to countries that cannot guarantee protection of users' data. That what's happening in the EU with US-based software.
It's common trade policy to block imports in response to another country blocking our exports. Although in reality it's usually a matter of leveraging tariffs. One doesn't need a general policy to respond in kind.
China didn't specifically "ban" US social networks because they were US social networks. The companies themselves didn't want to comply with Chinese laws so they cannot operate there.
It's the same as Facebook now threatening to leave the EU if they have to comply with EU data protection laws.
China structures things overwhelmingly in favor of its domestic companies to the point of ridiculousness. It's well past simple tariffs when you need joint ventures, a license to operate a website, source code disclosure, key escrow, government censors, Taiwan/Tibet/Hong Kong/Uiyghur tiptoeing, and who knows what else.
A US company operating in China under its own international brand is a sucker who fell for a pretty blatant con.
US companies go to China because they want to make money. Pure and simple. China has laws, that they need to comply with. Nobody is being forced to do things, in one side or another. If US companies want to operate overseas, they need to follow other countries rules, the same way that happens inside the US. If US companies don't want to make money from the Chinese market, they can just chose to leave.
It really doesn't matter. We can say that it's good that companies like Google or Facebook don't want to be part in any of this or we can say that even the slightest interest in user privacy makes it morally impossible for companies to operate in China. What's simply not true is the idea that Google or Facebook not being in China has anything to do with them being American companies.
2) On "China didn't ban ...", that's the case for Google and Linkedin China, but it's actually a kind of "soft" ban that the cost to meet the regulatory requirements is too high to afford even for biggest companies in the world.
3) FB case was a bit different. It was never given any opportunity to operate in China, so FB didn't "chose" to leave. We would never know what FB would do if given the chance. Maybe leave all user data there inside the great wall, as Apple does in its special version of iCloud in China.
Not quite. The Great Firewall of China has the ability to shut off access to specific sites, services, and even communications protocols very easily and very effectively. Trying to access Google from China doesn't result in a page from Google apologizing that they won't comply with Chinese laws. It's as if the services simply doesn't exist and you get a 404 error.
Also, Google actually has a sizeable office in Beijing. I'm not sure what they do specifically since it's not easy to access any of their public services without an obscure VPN (the most popular ones get blocked pretty quickly).
As a European, I would be happy to ban TikTok, but also Facebook and all its subsidiaries (Instagram, WhatsApp) and Google and all its subsidiaries.
It's not like others are better, but those three are the worst when it comes to spying shaping public opinion only because they are the biggest and most powerful.
If I had to choose who will influence the public in my country, let it better be some company (or government) that has my country interest first, and not China or the USA interests.
I understand the point, but I don't see how companies can be "nationalist", or think in "their country's interests". They only care about money and who knows who really control any corporation with the size that a competing social network service would require?
That's part of the point though: in most of the developed world, it is possible to know who controls a given corporation.
Because there's a rule of law, legal records, required disclosures, all subject to investigation and enforcement by an independent judiciary that creates a public record.
We can bemoan that wealthy people control a majority of assets or that some exceptions slip through the cracks at smaller scale (e.g. offshore shell companies owning assets). But by and large there's no question as to "Who owns Exxon? Or Google? Or Facebook?"
Snowden exposed the wholesale, unauthorized data collection operation the US NatSec complex was performing and we haven't banned the us government from peering to the internet.
Why should we ban people voluntarily using a short video service that shows them things they like and whose business model is virtually identical to every other social media company?
NSA works against infrastructure providers to breech their security guards so they can continue to hoover up data, and backdoors products/algorithms.
TikTok shows you 80s commercials and clips from industrial films after figuring out that you want to see 80s commercials and clips from industrial films.
Based on the ads that I get, which are pretty unintrusive, easily identifiable and always skippable, it doesn't seem like their analytics are that advanced. Besides random major brands, who are essentially broadcasting ads, I get ads for diesel mechanic tech schools and random wish products.
I for one am a proponent for free and open internet and net neutrality. Banning any sites/services in the US is a slippery slope. There has to be better ways to deal with these problems.
No US tech just doesn't want to follow Chinese law so they left, kind of like how facebook threatened to leave EU recently. If the EU continues with their cyber law.
Trump admin tried to restrict its use, at least among government/military, and perhaps predictably he was accused of racism/sinophobia...but the threat was just as real then as now.
The prevailing sentiment had nothing to do with racism, I recall the more liberal circles of the Internet lambasting his "small government, pro-business" stance while he uses executive orders to clamp down on private businesses.
There was literally an executive order which banned TikTok if the Chinese parent company did not sell the platform[1]. That's a pretty real "tried to ban tiktok".
Legislation, a department taking action within their legal powers.
In the US it really does matter how you do things. Just the whim of the president is not enough for it to happen.
Trump had no legal basis for his order. He liked to act like he was doing things with grand strokes, many of them were doomed to fail. I'm not convinced that he or those around him even cared if they did or not.
I don't think you can read much into an amateur hour / foolish attempt.
Are you sure that the head of the executive branch does not have authority to ban federal employees from using an app which potentially poses a national security threat?
I don't think its so clear cut. In any case its hardly the first time that a president made a potentially unconditional to be ruled upon by courts later.
>have authority to ban federal employees from using an app
Not sure what we're talking about at this point. Trump's executive orders about tiktok that were thrown out of court were something different.
Trump or just the department who owns a given device can of course say "don't put X on government phones" and so on, but that's way different than what Trump tried and failed to do with tiktok.
The failure was known the moment Trump took his action. We're talking about a guy who I don't know if he really even cared if it was legal / carried out or not.
The short answer is Trump's order had actual legal grounds to stick as far as Huawei goes.
Regarding Huawei , Trump basically told the Commerce Department to take action, Huawei was already (or was in the process of being) blacklisted by the commerce department, the commerce department does have the legal right to do that given the nature of Huawei's products and sensitivity of communications equipment.
The commerce department doesn't currently (although I believe lawmakers are looking into it) have the authority to simply blanket ban an app like tiktok on a whim / order. They simply can't do that for any old reason the POTUS says.
As I noted in another comment, in the US it does matter HOW you do things, the courts are independent (compared to say China) regardless how "right" someone might be they need to follow the law.
My understanding was that the real teeth behind both EOs is that they prohibited American companies from doing business with Huawei and TikTok. So Huawei would not be able to sell through American retailers, and TikTok wouldn't be available in the Apple store or the Play store, and they couldn't get an American CDN.
Those are the only powers that would be necessary to effectively ban TikTok from the US. Without app store access and without CDNs, TikTok would be dead in the US. And from my understanding of the Huawei situation, doing these by prohibiting US companies from doing business with TikTok is within the power of the President.
> Trump it mobilized the 99% of people who don't have beliefs as much as they have
I thought it was the judicial branch and an injunction that stopped it.
>> On 23 September 2020, TikTok filed a request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the app from being banned by the Trump administration. This request was filed with the District Court for the District of Columbia. The preliminary injunction was approved by Judge Carl J. Nichols on September 27.
Then, the current President rescinded it and ordered an actual review of the risks. Something we probably should have done prior to the attempted banning.
>> In June 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration ban on TikTok, and instead ordered the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the app to determine if it poses a threat to U.S. national security.
As the wiki article you shared lays out, there was a decent amount of nonpartisan momentum behind narrower limitations on Tiktok, along with serious consideration of it as a national security threat. Trump's threat of an outright ban immediately polarized the conversation and deflated much of that momentum, helped along by the fact his specific approach and messaging were typically incautious instead of incremental.
The courts did indeed issue an injunction against Trump's EO, and I don't have any reason to believe they were wrong to do so. Biden, again typically, _has_ taken the first steps of an incremental approach towards assessing the risks that tiktok poses. But as implied by the Wikipedia page you linked, we're nowhere near the level of Congressional and institutional attention that we were at in 2019 and 2020, and it's pretty reasonable to attribute this to Trump's engagement with the issue reorienting the political valence of the conversation. Specifically, the "Trump vs tiktok" association is so strong that (eg) a Senator that makes too much noise about it will now be loaded with an association that he may not want.
I actually don't have a strong opinion about tiktok's ban, see risks in both courses of action, and am a fan of the Biden admin's ostensible careful approach. I just resent the degree to which the idiocy of the public drives so many issues further away from thoughtful engagement with reality and towards partisan sportsball.
Not only that. You can't operate an online store in China, but Chinese sellers can sell good to Europe or the US.
It's baffling why this lack of reciprocity is allowed.
Right, I actually see this as a very simple trade issue! China doesn't allow US social networks in China, so the US shouldn't allow Chinese social networks in the US.
Doing anything else means that Chinese companies have the ability to build international platforms—where both Chinese and US citizens can participate—and US companies do not. Furthermore, those international platforms could potentially be made to enforce the CCP's standards for speech, setting the tone for conversations about Uyghurs and Taiwan worldwide.
To do this, we can't just say "Chinese social networks are not allowed in the US", because that is not what China is doing. You need to outlaw whatever it is TikTok is doing that you do not like in the first place.
Facebook is not allowed to operate in China not because they are American, but because they do not want to comply with Chinese law.
US social networks are allowed to operate in China, they just have to follow the local law. Facebook was banned after denying the authorities the data of Uighur protesters after a deathly riot in 2009. Imagine the outcry here if a riot that left more than a hundred people dead was organized on facebook, and then the company decides to protect the rioters. Google and Twitter decided that the backlash back home wasn't worth the attempt to enter the market, since they would have to comply with strict censorship laws. Some US social media platforms do operate within China.
TikTok does follow US law, so instead of flat out banning it, the reasonable thing to do would be to enact sensible privacy legislation... But oh wait, then tech giants can't exploit the local population anymore.
Let me remind you that once upon a time a US company gave some email data to the authorities of China, the CEO of the company was sued in US and later resigned. That company was Yahoo!
No thanks, don't need any more authoritarian moves from presidential over reach. Privacy laws for companies making X$ in yearly revenue is much saner approach.
Countries deciding that foreigners can't use their citizen's data willy-nilly is neither authoritarian nor over-reach, and neither is restricting those foreigners from access when they don't comply.
For a generally accepted instance, see the EU GDPR.
I just have a hard time accepting that the people who made every website implement a cookie warning that is equivalent to the “don’t use in bathtub” stickers all over appliances know enough about to write airtight laws that would actually solve any of this.
The cookie warning as irritatingly implemented is a bit of false-flagging by people who make their money from adtech surveillance. They intentionally make the experience suck as much as possible, then point at the law and say "talk to the government, they're making us do this" when challenged.
The GDPR is an excellent law and has nothing to do with the cookie warnings you see. I’m speaking as someone who read it carefully for implementing compliance in a small business.
And only competitive advantage it really gives is that data must remain inside EU. Which seem pretty reasonable ask. And not too big hurdle for any company with enough power to enter the market.
I think parent was commenting on the "China bans US tech, we should ban TikTok", which is just reflexive poop throwing between two countries. GDPR is totally different: it's a level headed statement of principles for how ALL tech companies should treat user data.
Reading more of the recent work of this Dr. Epstein and something tells me his broader intentions for such an initiative have less to do with "big tech" than the "moral corruption of modern society" and is primarily animated toward the cause because things went the other way 4 years after 2016.
Everything he rails against was present in both recent US elections but for whatever reason he seems content to focus only on the most recent one.
Maybe he's spineless and holds that line because right-wing hosts are the only ones that will host him to get his message out. Maybe he really does believe that and is being a complete hypocrite. Neither option is respectable.
I'm from the UK, so it's a relative concept. The US, except for some fairly small pockets of actual socialist left-wing thinking, is much further to the right. A lot of western europe loved Obama, but in reality he was closer to the UK Conservative party than the UK Labour party.
But I'm even more curious, would you not describe Tucker Carlson as far right in his views?
On social issues average European and its country is way more conservative than average American. You're comparing economical standpoint here and I agree with that.
At great risk here, I have to say I agree based on my own experience. Often times people conflate government-funded systems like healthcare or taxpayer-funded university as being socially progressive. I wouldn't do that. You can have universal healthcare and ban gay marriage in your country, for example.
Universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, workers' rights, LGBTQ rights, prison policy, police behavior and control, social safety net, lack of religion in politics, free or extremely cheap education including higher education, and that's just off the top if my mind?
> ask any non-European person who has lived on both continents where he feels more welcome.
I gladly concede this, but this is just one element of social issues.
LGBT rights are definetly better off in America and then you listed a lot of economical issues that have very little to do with left or right in Europe. Matter of a fact in Eastern Europe the left wing economical policies are what is keeping socially Conservative people in power.
I really don't see how these are economical issues:
> Universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, workers' rights, LGBTQ rights, prison policy, police behavior and control, social safety net, lack of religion in politics, free or extremely cheap education including higher education
> Matter of a fact in Eastern Europe...
Thats why my first answer was: Certainly not Western Europe. My knowledge of Easter Europe is nonexistent, so I won't dare say anything about their circumstances.
That's a coverage artifact - if Google is manipulating politics in favor of democrats, then the only coverage you'll find is going to be on the center to the right wing platforms. American media in all its glory.
On that Wikipedia page, the two Robert Epstein sources (one a PNAS paper[1], the other a Politico article[2]) are theoretical ("whether they could be manipulated") and pre-2016. The other main source[3] is similarly theoretical and provides policy recommendations to combat SEME.
It also has a Washington Post article[4] discussing a (since-deleted) video that purportedly showed potentially-manipulated differences between how Bing and Google autocompleted "Hillary Clinton" searches. But none of the 3 main sources cover what the impact of autocomplete could be.
Do you have any links about Google being caught red-handed politicizing ranking order?
>>The 2020 presidential election monitoring project successfully recruited a diverse group of 732 registered voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. It preserved more than 500,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Facebook. These are the fleeting experiences that Big Tech companies use to influence votes and opinions worldwide and that are normally lost forever.
>>A preliminary analysis of the data shows that Google search results (but NOT search results on Bing or Yahoo) had a significant liberal bias – enough to have shifted at least 6 million votes in the months leading up to the election.
You need to know the methodology being used to understand the results, as they tracked ephemeral experiences using surveillance software with volunteers.
This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you.
The Rogan podcast was awkward af but he does provide a lot of substantive content if you're open to listening.
There's no research on that page. Many of the linked articles that this individual has written also are vague on actual details/proof and only contain vague "this could happen!" comments. Beyond that, many of them also end with a plea for more fundraising.
>This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you.
All he needs to do is spend a little more time uploading data and evidence, and less time shoving as many "DONATE" buttons onto his page as he can. None of this looks like solid work, even his television appearances; it looks like someone who goes around throwing out lots and lots of loose speculation while asking to be paid to do so.
OK, his SEME bias analysis is based on recruiting people through a "passive monitoring system," which recorded SERP rankings over time (what Epstein deems "ephemeral experiences"). Participants' SERP rankings, and raw HTML of each of the top X links, were stored on Epstein's servers. He then had "online workers" (likely mturk?) rate each archived page as pro-Trump or Clinton.[0]
He submitted a paper on this in June 2021 to the AABSS but they have yet to publish it. He also has 5 other, earlier SEME papers submitted for publication.[1]
I appreciate you going the distance on providing these links but I'm loath to trust this data until it's been peer-reviewed.
The graph depicts 300k undecided voters resolving to a party over time. Here's Epstein talking about it:
> ...by the time we hit election day, we have an enormous gap - more than 100,000 people - between the conservatives and liberals. And we've created that gap with our biased search results.
Assigning that movement to a single cause seems unlikely to me.
His presentation does include a relevant WSJ article titled "Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function to Counter Travel Ban."[3] That's not "red-handed," since they didn't do it, but it's very relevant. HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036353
Who is? I don't mean to be trite or contrary, but TikTok is coming into an environment where norms are pretty damned shady. Google as you and the article say, also consume user data quite unethically.
FB likewise surveil us for their advertising businesses. They both also happen to host and control a good chunk of political and politically adjacent content within that framework. Police and regulate it with no transparency. FB are also gave us our first big "scandals" with third party trackers and/or data sharing.
Other countries (including, but definitely not exclusively) also use tech companies as espionage assets.
Every tech company executive in the USA is not required to operate as an agent for one political party by threat of being disappeared. Our entire internet is not locked down to prevent political dissidents from sharing their views. Our government doesn't pay to flood our social media networks with astroturfing to create the illusion of popular support for its policies. These things add a more serious tone to the conversation, don'tcha think?
No, but they intelligence agencies do the same stuff. And private hidden funders of politicians do the astroturfing... I don't really see much difference if it done by government or people who pay the politicians running the government.
I think it's hugely disingenuous, to the point of bad faith, to pretend there's not a massive difference between the internet in the U.S. and in China.
Exactly. This isn't a general comparison of china to the US. It's a specific comparison of how bad data collection practices and the only (IMO) sane conclusion is that it's all quite terrible. One is not disconnected to the other either. The reason tiktok can collect all this data is precedents and norms established by google and FB.
Politicians are voted in by the people, and giving money to politicians to advance an initiative isn't guaranteed.
You don't really see much difference? Democratically elected politicians versus central party that allows no dissent and has complete control over information and actions of its citizens to the point of genocidal assimilation.
> Democratically elected politicians versus central party that allows no dissent and has complete control over information and actions of its citizens to the point of genocidal assimilation.
You're saying the Chinese government is so powerful and competent that they have complete control over information and actions of over one BILLION people? Wild claims like this one should be substantiated.
Although your name is wildly sinophobic and racist so I doubt there is any evidence you can pull up.
I think it would be a mistake for anyone to conclude that because none of these companies is good, they're all equally bad. There is a lesser and greater evil in this case.
Bear in mind that we don't really know much about how our data is being used at any of these, either directly by the company or by security agencies in their home countries. US security also has access to foreign citizens' FB & Google data via prism or its successors.
The whole argument here seems (to me) to be [1] TikTok collects a scary and unjustifiable amount of data about its customers, just like youtube, FB Etc. [2] We don't know exactly what's collected and why [3] TikTok are chinese.
Singling out Tiktok is neither helpful nor honest, IMO.
Agreed. Rather than targeting a specific country or specific company, make it a large category. Grey areas are where companies, regardless of national origin, can optimize and manipulate. We need to shift the conversation away from "China bad; ban Chinese companies" to one about protecting people and their right to privacy. After all, this is the goal, right? We don't want to be saying "Privacy violations are OK as long as the companies are Western." but rather "People have a right to privacy."
This issue isn't a bee stuck in my presonal bonnet, but this is a fraudulent response that convinces nobody that didn't already agree with you. I'll explain why.
The people complaining about TikTok were probably complaining about the others for ages too.
Those complainers were shouted down with some version of "well, they're not THAT bad."
Now there is one actor that is seen (at least by some) as worse than the others. The difference in the actor is being raised as a reason to care about their actions (and maybe renew concern about the category of actions at large).
Your response that their actions are not novel is either ignorant or perpetuating a fraud.
Just in cast it makes any difference to you, the Chinese government, who collects all the TikTok data, is a bunch of oppressive mass murderers. Say what you will about Facebook, Google, et al., but they haven't come that far yet.
If the underlying assertion is "ccp is evil," where and why does this relate to TikTok specifically? Why not every other item you are probably consuming?
>> Say what you will about Facebook, Google, et al., but they haven't come that far yet.
They're tech/media companies, not governments. FB & Google are however responsible for the norms under which TikTok can collect data for whatever purposes they want. They're the ones who normalised this sort of shady behaviour. It's a pretty straight line between one and the other.
Well, neither is the USA and its NSA and its Five Eyes and all these actors who spy on pretty much everything and everyone. American companies are either complicit or blissfully ignorant. They violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, principles their own country was literally founded upon, so there's no telling what they'd do to a foreigner. People are so afraid of them when they talk security they just assume you won't be taking them on.
The difference is that most western countries allow private organizations to have a significantly higher degree of autonomy from executive action and checks-and-balances to back it up.
The process can sometimes result in some of the same things happening, but the fact that they are not being done unilaterally is a major differentiator in multiple ways.
Your data in the US is much more likely to be abused when corporate interests voluntarily want to make money off it, than any abuse by executive power.
I agree with your assessment, however I don't think the response is more surveillance. If recent data breeches have taught us anything it is that data aggregation (necessary for surveillance) is just another source of Chinese intelligence.
The solution to this (and other problems of social engineering) is to educate the general (democratic) population, so they are aware of and resilient against such attacks. I don't think it's possible to stop everyone from using a given service, but if every user understands the real tradeoffs, then we have a chance. If individuals (and more importantly voters) cannot think and reason for themself, given the facts of a given subject, democracy has no future.
In general though, I think people are smart. They make decisions and tradeoffs with the information they have. The problem here is that they don't understand the real risks. More than the loss of privacy and security, the real problem here is that a hostile nation state seeks to influence the thoughts of free citizens of other (democratic) countries. This is how wars are won and lost -- in the hearts and minds of the people. If everyone who used TikTok saw the situation in a similar light, I doubt it would have the adoption it currently has.
Accusing HN users of being paid shills doesn't add to the conversation. If we can't scrutinize overtly-vague technical criticisms w/o being called names then what's the point?
Yes, many trackers, for many different companies that all serve their own ends. TikTok on the other hand only serves one master, the Chinese government. They only need this one tentacle, no need for multiple trackers.
At this point I do my best to avoid exposure to software / hardware / services from 'non-free' countries.
It's not easy at all to do, there's a lot of grey area, and sometimes I just don't know. But I try.
It's not about the individuals in those countries, I suspect just making their way through life they may have the best of intentions but still could be forced to participate.
(Having said al that, that google research page seems pretty suspect to me.)
I try to remain grounded and check myself, and this may be me in tin foil hat territory, but the game here on the part of the CCP is long. If ever there is a time for 'think of the children', this is it. Political scandals are already getting more and more private - just imagine what it will be like in 20 years when the current crop of teens are starting to run for high office. And in case you're thinking, well too bad for them, plenty of teens don't do dumb things - that's true, but this will be dream kompromat for nation states controlling this data. I know Meta et al have the same data and are insanely powerful, but they're not nation states and are at least in theory, accountable.
My one nitpick is that I believe it would be best to replace "China" with "CCP" in your statement. It's important to be specific in cases like these. I think it likely that it is not geographical China, nor all Chinese people you are attempting to reference, but their leadership the CCP.
That’s not a nitpick. That’s redefining the way we talk about nations. It’s already clear from context he’s not talking about “all Chinese people.”
“China to enter talks with the United States about social media” would not mean all Chinese people will talk to all Americans. This is true whether the content is positive, negative, or neutral.
Yeah, it is major. You are correct. I want us to be more specific in the way we talk about geopolitics because there is much room for improvement. My real point is that if you don't want to polarize an entire ethnic group against your position, then don't refer to the ethnic group when you mean to attack their economic or political ideology.
It really depends on what one is optimizing for. If one is optimizing for ethnic division, or just not at all optimizing for change in the future led from within said country.. then sure "China" or "Muslims" not "CCP" or "Wahhabism."
How would an American react to a foreigner saying "America is evil and not trustworthy" vs "American leadership has done X and therefore is not trustworthy?" I have been largely abroad for years and I would still process the information in the latter statement with much less emotion.
I've seen more advertisments for major brand products, targetted at kids through Tik Tok than I have seen political propoganda. If anything, Tik Tok just reinforces the current "western" status quo than anything else. It probably reinforces what ever the advertisers in any country can pay for.
tikTok collects data like a great many other companies, unfortunately they aren't just doing it sell more ads.
With a few days of interactions, you can very precisely logically profile a person enough to figure out how to socially engineer them. You also have enough interest and behavioral data to be able setup a blackmail scheme.
It is not hard to imagine how the close integration with the government allows the law enforcement to conduct very skilled operations using the psychological map that can be built about a person.
The CCP is way past knowing if you vote dem/rep or are a 21yr old female.
Is this just a guess or do you have any evidence? We know about PRISM because of Snowden and all of the backdoors in American products. That seems to be about as bad as it gets.
My personal pet theory about the recent rise in various 'challenges' is effectively weaponization of this particular medium in an attempt at social manipulation. It is all fun games now, but as recent 'gun challenge' shows, it can be easily turned into mayhem.
I don't think we'll ever be able to avoid mass manipulation with the technology we have available - which makes large scale democracy useless and easily controllable by foreign state actors and local political parties.
The growing inequality and the increasing government overreach which strangely always seems to benefit a few rich uber-companies is a symptom that our institutions are fairly unreliable.
An alternative to more regulation and more surveillance to prevent mass manipulation would be NOT to have the power of millions of people in the hands of a handful of barely-elected representatives and to keep that power in local communities.
No more taxes that go to Washington and gets "redistributed" - aka used to enrich the usual lobbyists. No more public services - aka monopolies. Just private local companies providing services to local citizens.
I occasionally check TikTok to see what it's like. I notice quite a bit of very "pro-China" type propaganda; idyllic Chinese farmers teaching their kids, muscular Chinese male athletes, etc.
Very much a tool to influence Western users and thought.
https://app.urlgeni.us/blog/new-research-across-200-ios-apps...
Just a few of the highlights:
Magazine apps had the highest number of total network contacts (28), and the highest percentage of third party domain contacts (93%)
Social apps, followed by Games apps, made the fewest number of network contacts, 6 and 7 respectively.
Apps making the most number network contacts included iHeartRadio (56), Wall Street Journal (48), ESPN (42), Popeyes (42), and WattPad (36)