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> Twitter is a popular information-sharing social platform, and there are Chinese actors on it, but this argument isn't extended to suggest that it be banned, either. But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist? I don't get it.

Is it that hard to understand? Twitter and Facebook will at least try to make a genuine effort to root out and ban "coordinated inauthentic activity" by the Chinese government (and if they don't they could probably be compelled to do so): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/23/facebook-.... A Chinese-owned TikTok won't: either it won't do it at all, or it will make a fake/bad-faith effort.

Similarly, Twitter and Facebook may gather a lot of non-public user data, but there's pretty much no chance that any of that data will be willingly handed over to Chinese intelligence.

It should be noted that Chinese intelligence is not exclusively after top secret government data: they're also interested in many kinds of mundane information that you might be surprised by that can be leveraged to get it: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-china-t....

Banning/setting up a firewall makes us no different than the CCP!

Personally I think all the effort and resources spent policing social media platforms is a complete waste and malinvestment. This looks like an overreach of government power.

> Banning/setting up a firewall makes us no different than the CCP! [1]

That's pretty clearly not the case. Context matters. For instance: if I shot someone in self defense, and you shot someone to murder them, we're not "no different" because we both performed the action of shooting a gun at someone. In that case, like this one, the context motivating the action is more important than the action itself in determining its meaning.

> Personally I think all the effort and resources spent policing social media platforms is a complete waste and malinvestment. This looks like an overreach of government power.

Some people say the same thing about having any military at all.

[1] Italicizing something like that is a common quote style, but I'm assuming you're italicizing your own statement for emphasis because that isn't anything like what I said.

@localhost’s link has an answer to that:

> Perhaps the most powerful argument against taking any sort of action is that we aren’t China, and isn’t blocking TikTok something that China would do? Well yes, we know that is what they would do, because the Chinese government has blocked U.S. social networks for years. Wars, though, are fought not because we lust for battle, but because we pray for peace. If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only within its borders but within ours, it is in liberalism’s interest to cut off a vector that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want.

There are pretty massive differences in reach and impact between english.gov.cn and TikTok. I don't think that comparison really holds much water.

OK so we should ban something if it gets popular, but it doesn't matter if it's worse but it's not popular.

By extension should we ignore someone who's selling 1 gram of heroin at a time but we should definitely put a guy transporting 1 ton of industrial hemp in prison, on the ground that hemp can be turned into pot, somehow.

You’re comparing Apples to Oranges, or in your case, heroin to hemp; no ones banning the components that make up TikTok (the code, the business, the algorithms etc)...

Comparing heroin to heroin though, yes we do ignore someone who’s selling 1 gram of heroin at a time over someone selling 1 ton of heroin at a time.

So is tiktok full of literal official Chinese propaganda? Or is it full of people doing stupid things? Or is people doing stupid things Chinese propaganda nowadays?

You're saying it's comparing heroin to heroin, is it?

For what it's worth, I was only pointing out that a guy transporting 1 gram of heroin would be a lower priority for investigation compared to a guy transporting a larger quantity of the same product. So a social media platform that's worse but less popular would not be on anyones radar for a ban, precisely because its on nobodies radar to begin with.

But I see the point you're making. I'd say that, in the case of hemp vs heroin, the guy transporting 1 ton of industrial hemp would be subject to close scrutiny since the product could be used for illicit purposes (turning into heroin). If there was any evidence or suspicion of foul play, his capability to transport industrial hemp would be removed and he would face investigation. I'd apply the same logic to software too.

But the difference is that it's hard to scrutinise closed-source software and it's also difficult to "trace" data and know that data isn't being harvested for re-use by the CCP for other nefarious purposes. We do have suspicion of foul play though – TikTok routinely blocks anything anti-China and we're aware of the massive data gathering that the CCP performs to monitor its own citizens. We also know they (and others) are manipulating western social media using the data they've gathered.

Your subsequent argument that TikTok is just full of people doing stupid things is, I think, a bit disingenuous to the potential for harm that TikTok is capable of. The top level commenters link (https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/) explains it quite well. It's also worth noting that the same argument could be made for any social media platform when they first got started. Example, facebook = "just a bunch of teens socialising online". Obviously if you're one of the people who doesn't think facebook has become a problem then this debate is pointless. But if you do see the harm that facebook has caused globally, I personally believe that TikTok has even greater potential for harm.

> I think that’s a jump to conclusions that is illogical it does not follow from the priors.

You’re misreading that line. It’s: “This explains why TikTok succeeds, and why it is an app the United States ought to be concerned about. <continue reading post to find out why>”. The author subsequently explains why.

You mention that you get Fact A and Fact B. Fact C isn’t, “Therefore, TikTok should be banned”. Fact C, according to that post, is that China has begun ideological warfare. For supporters of a ban, Fact D then, is “The US should respond with defensive manoeuvres”. A ban is a defensive move. Nobody’s advocating for an offensive counter-attack (by running misinformation campaigns on their own social media platforms for instance). It’s perfectly reasonable to defend when under attack from a foreign entity.

Whether you think the US is under attack is the real question. But you said you agree with Fact B, so you agree that the possibility for China to use TikTok as a tool for ideological warfare is definitely there. The authors argument is that, combined with the evidence we’ve seen so far (censorship on domestic platforms, censorship on foreign platforms), maybe the US should be taking China’s own words on the matter more seriously.

Ah, I think I'm starting to understand. Ideological warfare, IMO, is not real war and should be countered by facts and public education, not by declaring a War on Memes and defense with censorship.

If a platform is afraid that an adult might see a particular piece of information or a particular idea, and be radicalized by it, they've not adjusted to the Information Age. We might need a better way to authenticate trustworthy sources, but I don't think the attack from Tiktok is a sharing of authoritative facts, it's at worst a message that the Chinese government is less evil than the US would like to represent them.

As you pointed out, it seems like he's saying from China's point of view, their survival is predicated on an ideological war:

> China is not simply resisting Western ideals of freedom, but seeking to impose their own

And that it is likely they would be willing to use TikTok to further their ideology in the US:

> China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?

While no one is proposing banning the other platforms you mentioned that are influenced by China, I feel like that is irrelevant from the TikTok argument. If the two statements above are taken at face value (or the whole article really), then it seems to me that TikTok is indeed a concerning platform when it comes to preserving liberal ideology.

There is a much simpler argument to be made, with regard to protectionism. Whether you agree with the morality or not, it it benefits American companies to have their competition banned. They are then free to clone it, without having to fight for users. Considering the isolationist and nationalist tendencies of the current administration, such a decision is consistent and fitting. One could argue, it most benefits the national security of the country to keep its tech giants strong, and free from external threats. And that entire argument can be made without bringing up data.

To me, this question is easier to model as a function of some scalar impact metric. Suppose we could quantify influence somehow. What people are arguing over is whether TikTok crosses some line of “too much influence” not “existence of influence” for which there are plenty of sources.

Approaching this from an unemotional, abstract, systems analysis perspective seems like a good way to go about this.

If we were debating something like "where shall we go for lunch, Restaurant A or B", most people here likely wouldn't have trouble identifying (or wouldn't deny the existence of) attributes that one might take into consideration (price, location, quality, cleanliness, decor, types and variety of dishes, friendliness of wait staff, etc), and differences in the values of those attributes.

If we slightly change the context to one where rather than comparing restaurants, we are instead comparing software applications (excluding code editors and operating systems, let's say: alarm clocks), most people could likely still competently exercise their systems analysis skills.

But if we make one more slight context change, from comparing alarm clocks, to comparing TikTok to Twitter/Facebook/etc, some very curious things start to happen. Suddenly, people seems to no longer have the ability to reliably identify attributes of each application, or that the value of those attributes differ.

What is the nature of this small context change, such that it seems to have such a remarkably negative effect on the systems analysis capabilities of human beings? On its face, the conversational behavior seems clearly illogical - and yet, based on my 10+ years on HN, I have a rich intuition that the average intelligence level around here is very high.

Something seems very paradoxical about this situation.

My guess is there are two different factors at play.

- Marketing and propaganda cloud everything they touch, and that one market is full of both. We can't even be certain of the public features of those platforms, because there are a bunch of incoherent messages controlling the communication channels.

- Most of the features of those products are not public. They impact your life, but you have no chance of even knowing they exist. Both platforms apply editorial governance on their contents, what kind and how much is anybody's guess. Both platforms profile their users, who has that profile and what they do with it is anybody's guess.

It is hard to discuss some unknowable thing over a noisy channel.

Agreed, there's a lot of hidden complexity, but I'm talking about this phenomenon where people seem to lose access to the ability to properly identify things that are clearly visible.

For example, higher in the thread someone seems unable to see a distinction between TikTok and Twitter, and even http://english.www.gov.cn. They indeed have many similar attributes, but this similarity seems to then be presumed to extend to all other attributes. There are blatantly obvious differences in both distinct attributes, and values of those attributes (otherwise, they wouldn't be different applications), yet people seem to be in some sort of a state where they cannot see them.

This is just one example, this thread is full of all sorts of other counter-intuitive (compared to historical norms on HN) behavior, or at least the surface level appearance of it. The way people describe observable reality is just....weird. How can there be such massive variance in observations between (presumably) intelligent people, but only under certain scenarios? And this isn't a one-off anomalous thread either, I strongly believe that this phenomenon has been present and clearly observable for quite some time now. Am I maybe imagining things?

I read that post as asking exactly what distinction creates a problem, not a denial that there are many of them.

Clearly establishing the problem is key on determining how it can be solved. e.g. The solution for foreign editorial influence will only make discourse control more concentrated, and the other way around.

> I read that post as asking exactly what distinction creates a problem, not a denial that there are many of them.

That question was being asked in a roundabout way, but if you're not so generous, do you not pick up a bit of a whiff of incredulity?

>> http://english.www.gov.cn/ is another platform that's controlled exclusively by the Chinese government. But no one's proposing a book-burning, that the US firewall all information controlled by the CCP or those with ideological differences. Twitter is a popular information-sharing social platform, and there are Chinese actors on it, but this argument isn't extended to suggest that it be banned, either. But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist? I don't get it.

"But somehow, a platform that does both must not be allowed to exist?" seems either disingenuous, or that the person is unable to realize that an application that has ~100M users (and significant usage/day), most in a young impressionable demographic, that consists of ~60 second viral videos, just might have distinct and noteworthy differences from a national security point than Twitter, or http://english.www.gov.cn.

To be clear: the onus is not on this person to disprove their counterpart's assertion, far from it. I am referring to the apparent inability to notice that a valid difference might exist, and all of this in a world where we've been constantly told by the media that Russian hackers have been undermining our democracy, and occurring on HN, a site frequented by some of the brightest minds on the planet when it comes to software.

And this is just one example. Reading through the rest of the discussions in this thread, is there not something that seems "a little off" in the way people describe reality? Are so many people simultaneously faking that they are literally unable to see any valid concerns here, or in the arguments put forth in their counterpart in each discussion (and this goes both ways), or are they literally unable to see?

If this was to happen in every thread on HN, one might just write it off to "people being people", but it doesn't happen in every thread, it only seems to happen in certain types of threads. Is this a coincidence? Am I seeing things? Or might something interesting actually be going on here? Is this odd behavior restricted only to HN, or do we see similar behavior elsewhere?

On the context of the post he was replying to, yes, I agree. If it's taken as a simple answer, that question sounds completely disingenuous. But I also find it hard to read the comment as a literal answer to the parent.

But anyway, the reason people are uneasy all over the thread is quite simple. Banning a platform this way is a serious interference on the freedoms of expression and initiative, but letting the platform unchecked is a serious offense to the US sovereignty. There are no good options among the ones presented to the people, and the real non-damaging options depend on coordinating a system that is so complex that nobody is certain that they can.

By the way, just for completeness, that's how people around the world feel about Facebook too.

> But anyway, the reason people are uneasy all over the thread is quite simple.

That's a nice simple explanation, and perhaps there's truth to it, but people aren't just "uneasy" - if that was all that was going on, there wouldn't be such a massive variance in perception of reality, and I also suspect we wouldn't be observing so many instances of weird cognitive failure on simple tasks. I don't know what the explanation is, but something unique is going on that you do not see in other threads, on more complicated topics.

> Banning a platform this way is a serious interference on the freedoms of expression and initiative, but letting the platform unchecked is a serious offense to the US sovereignty.

I have the same take as you, but ours seems to be a minority opinion. Personal opinions on what should be done about the situation are perfectly appropriate, but widespread disagreement and confusion about what the state of affairs of this rather simple scenario, that seems like something else entirely.