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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Facebook and Google are pushing all these articles about/against Tiktok because it’s a threat to them.

And I wonder whether comments like yours are spread by the Chinese Government to undermine trust in our media/democracy.

If I could prove I'm not associated with China in any way, and in fact don't like what they do, could it be proved that the wave of Tiktok-related posts has nothing to do with Facebook/Google?

I'm 99% sure that you are not affiliated with the Chinese Government. I just wanted to show that accusations like these are not really helpful. It's not the responsibility of Goole/Facebook to prove that they aren't sponsoring bad faith anti-TikTok articles. It's your responsibility as a commentator to show at least some proof (beside a convincing motive). I think the bar for that proof should be rather low, but there needs to be something. Otherwise we are switching from a commenting system based on a reason to a commenting system based on feelings/opinions.

Recently, I can't help but think this way everytime I see controversial comment/post in HN and reddit.

Maybe TikTok is not collecting data and operating ads in any way worse than Facebook or Google but we can expect companies from democratic countries to face some level of scrutiny from free press and government accountable to people. The thought of Chinese government having access to companies with reaches like Facebook/Google to global population worries me.

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