The concern over tiktok is not that Xi’s autocratic regime is surveilling you, but manipulating the algorithms in its large social media market share to foment anti-American (& anti-Israeli) sentiment.
What is the real risk here? The only thing they can really do is make the case that if China invades Taiwan then the US shouldn't get involved. There problem is they might well be right; if I compare Hong Kong and Ukraine, I'd expect Taiwan would be better off going with the HK model of an "invasion" rather than fighting an actual war with the world's #2 or arguably #1 economy. So I'm not sure what the case is for quelling the message; there are some important issues there to debate.
Even if we start with the questionable idea that the US has the moral and physical might to be deciding where the borders are drawn in Asia; it isn't obvious that TikTok would be influential enough to matter. The military-industrial complex lobbyists in the US have a lot of actual power in pushing for war and experience in getting messages to the public.
I’m exaggerating a little (but not much): the risk with tiktok is that it is brainwashing Americans—particularly young ones—with anti-American sentiment. Not only does that suck for the individual, but diminishes the civil-service talent pool and weakens US institutions.
It’s like the CCP looked at what social media was doing to mental health and cable news to our political discourse and said “I can do something with that, I’ll take the extra large.”
They may well be right that the people of Taiwan, a country with a democratically elected government, should just lie down and accept a complete and undemocratic Chinese takeover of their country?
All because China is saying: "Either you submit to us completely voluntarily, or you submit by force, but you will submit"?
Yep. Just because we don't like something doesn't mean that there are good alternatives. If I were in Tawian, Option A is status quo. Option B is to put the best and brightest into diplomatic posts. And they probably have a stack of other options they're thinking about. But all else failing Option Imperial-Subject is a much better one than Option Taipei-Becomes-A-Pancake-And-Then-Imperial-Subject. If there is going to be war it'd better be war with a credible good outcome to it.
The US could step in and police this back when it was 8x, 4x, 2x the size of China. I'd be surprised if it can now. China is pretty powerful.
The good alternative is China not wanting to take over a sovereign country, and for the world to gradually normalise Taiwan as a legitimate country.
China has no urgent or pressing self defence need to attack Taiwan. It also does not have a strong legal case to justify taking it over. In any rational sense the strongest case is for China to leave it alone.
Allowing the status quo to continue is better for the people of China, for the people of Taiwan, and for the rest of us around the world.
It's pure imperialist nonsense and we shouldn't seek to legitimise it just because China is powerful.
You're thinking too literal about what to influence. The more internal divide that foreign powers can amplify, the more likely that US will not/can not intervene in other places around the world.
There's also general propaganda to make people more empathetic towards China/Russia prior to any events occurring.
Sure, there are many avenues to spread this sort of propaganda, but a state-run social media platform can certainly be a lot more effective than someone flooding someone else's social media platform with propaganda.
Assuming the Chinese government is using TikTok for influence campaigns (they'd be foolish not to), they only way to stop it is to outright ban it in your country (which the US seems to be trying to do, with possibly-disastrous effects), or find a way to get your citizens to dislike it (good luck with that).
While Russia is doing pretty well at their influence campaigns on other platforms, those platforms can choose, if they so desire, to step up their detection and banning efforts. It's a constant cat-and-mouse game, of course, but it's at least possible to stamp out most of that crap if you're willing to spend the resources to do so.
Over the years I have personally found multiple accounts on Twitter/X that appeared to be Russian propaganda trolls (or someone with resources looking to appear that way).
They would pretend to be Americans and pushing certain narratives by retweeting/following/commenting/etc.
I found one that claimed to be a single mother living in the midwest USA. It was using a cropped photo from the personal blog of an Australian woman (who had multiple kids and a husband). If you went far enough back in the history you could find accidental Russian language usage. The timestamp trends in the posting behavior were clearly not American. It followed, and was followed by, other similar troll accounts.
Most recently I found one that claimed to be a 26 year old woman from the US. No reverse image search hits on the English web. But reverse image search with yandex you'd get hits for a couple of vk profile picture databases.
From there it was possible to find the actual vk account, which was a Russian woman who clearly was not the same person.
I could link you some of the accounts but the ones I've reported have been banned or deleted by now. I'm sure the US government is wrong on some stuff but there's too much evidence for stuff like the Internet Research Agency to be fake [1]
This is a comment I made on hackernews, replying to someone who (IIRC) claimed to be German but (in my opinion) was clearly a Russian astroturfing account.
After I mentioned it they deleted their comments, and they have since all been flagged by the moderators here.
My goodness, there are so many examples of more or less direct Russian influence operations. Here's a recent one where a bunch of political influencers were being paid ~$100,000 per single podcast episode by a company in Tennessee, whose founders were fully aware that their super-generous investor was located in Moscow.
the USA tried to invade Cuba when the soviets put missiles there, and somehow people are surprised that Russia would do the same thing in the same situation.
It feels like they're spending more on pro-israel sentiments, and have for decades. A biblical quote about a beam in one's eye comes to mind whenever people go "but china!".
My concern with tiktok is that it rots your brain like television, but far more effectively because it's rapid fire content constantly tuned to the individual user to keep them hooked on it. It's an instant gratification machine, effectively a drug, that fries people's attention spans. It has people spending hours a day consuming vapid short-form nonsense, and alters their psyche to make them less effective in other endeavors even when they aren't distracted by the app (particularly school, since it hits children particularly hard.)
I'm not sure why influence should be illegal. What about books and movies? Or even schools and universities? American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXm-NYyWEAA1jNs?format=jpg&name=...
If you believe in freedom of speech, you should also accept that people, including foreign people, may try to influence you. China doesn't believe in freedom of speech so they censor foreign sources of influence. Does America really want to go down that path?
But dynamic algorithms, targeting exactly you, knowing what mood you have in that moment (by analyzing what you have looked at, liked, disliked), what opinions you have etc. opens up a whole different world of influence possibilities amd I think those possibilities are just starting to get explored with AI. The data is already there.
> American schools are probably the greatest source of anti-American / anti-Israel sentiment in the country.
Damn the education system, and it's penchant for teaching the history of colonialism instead of a revisionist policy. What's next, after Mandatory Palestine we'll teach our children about the Civil War and slavery too? What an anti-America sentiment, clearly we need our conservative lawmakers to... I dunno, rewrite history for both countries? Teach feel-good cookie recipes instead of international politics?
As long as America has anti-BDS laws there won't be any freedom of speech in the first place. Our first amendment rights are currently being suspended by international lobbyists that can't handle their share of due criticism. A shame, considering the US does so well to educate others on it's own embarrassing history, but is threatened with a lawsuit when anyone tries to meaningfully criticize Israel.
I'm not sure the American pov is really the topic here. This story can have consequences for everyone. The USian government is not the center of the world
