Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

It's not about attention - if tiktok was merely wasting everyone's time we wouldn't even be discussing it. It's about the fact that a corporation controlled by a foreign government has an app installed on the phones of most Americans, and that app captures a huge amount of information. That's why it's a national security issue. At least that's the way I understand it.

View on HN

As a non-American I really don't see how it's different to Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.

And those are all owned by one American corporation.

Those services aren't controlled by an authoritarian government (yet).

That said, we encourage you to block them all (don't forget Twitter!) in your country.

Facebook isn’t effectively run by the US government. If it was and one considered the US to be a hostile power then you should ban it.

China, Iran and North Korea all ban Facebook under similar reasoning.

Well of course, and your government should protest it as well. But don't expect American government to do anything about an American corporation capturing the data of their (and foreign) citizens - I bet it's considered convenient more than anything.

Oh no, I agree that it's a natsec issue. I'm just saying it's sad that this is the point at which people start to pay attention. People should know better than to interact with it as much as they do anyway. Also, if it wasn't such a glorious attention-robbing mechanism, then the amount of information captured wouldn't be as big of an issue.

The attention aspect is what will eventually cause the most harm. Attention feeds databases. The future of AGI is dependent on its utility to make decisions for us. The primary users of AGI as a personal decision maker will be those who are feeding the most information to these systems.

Not just any foreign government, but an authoritarian rival Great Power. In addition to data-capture, the app also employs a closed-source algorithm that can promote or bury certain types of content. It's a window into the minds of the citizens of competing, democratic nations, and those nations do not have reciprocal methods of such access.

The information collected isn’t great, but a large part of the concern is related to attention. Attention allows influence. For instance, the CCO could use TikTok to push conspiracy theories that undermine faith in the electoral system.

> That app captures a huge amount of information.

I've heard that bandied about, but banning an app over that seems... inefficient at the least. What exactly is it this app is capturing and how?

And why not fix this by limiting the permissions of the app?

It isn't the kind of information that can be fixed with permissions. Basically use tiktok long enough and they build a profile that includes everything about you purely based on your interests . Yes people are giving up this information about themselves voluntarily and there is nothing nefarious going on - but the fact that another country is building up such a database of your citizens is understandably worrisome to the American government.

Eh... how?

Isn't this exactly what every single advertiser does? Isn't this what amazon does?

Can anybody describe a single credible threatening scenario, even hypothetically?

Sure - on the day of the next presidential election in US, tiktok shows everyone political content that makes them vote one way or another - tailored specifically to their interests and presented in the way that is most likely to have an impact. Before the government has any chance to react, the damage is already done - what do you do then?

Or they can do the same but in a way more subtle way over months or years, they control the algorithm after all.

Or they can influence how people feel about Taiwan, Ukraine, military, religion or a million other topics - they have the audience. They do this already elsewhere too - see comparison between what tiktok shows you in Russia and what it shows you in Ukraine.

And yes Amazon Facebook and Google can do the same - but they are American corporations so the American government obviously isn't going to act against them..

Yeah this makes a lot more sense to me than "stealing our information" that I saw elsewhere.

Definitely bears thinking about as a hypothetical, but a ban would seem rather preemptive.

I'm still a bit lost. Maybe you can help me understand. From my perspective it looks like

1. TikTok is foreign owned and the line between the CCP and Chinese businesses is blurred.

2. TikTok collects a lot of data from its[US] users.

3. ????

4. Bad stuff happens.

We know, beyond any doubt, that you can influence someone's behaviour by just showing them targeted videos and ads. It isn't rocket science or some conspiracy nonsense - just basic psychology. The argument being that if a foreign government has an app on the phones of most Americans it can, at any point, decide to show them content that will influence how they lean politically, morally, religiously, or in any other way - the possibilities are really quite endless. Knowing exactly what all users like and what kind of content they are likely to consume is just a tool that could enable it.

If you ask "well why aren't we concerned about Facebook doing the same to citizens of some other country(or even Americans)" - we are, but this is specifically about American government.

Thank you. I feel like I'm halfway to understanding. I'm afraid I'm not quite sure what the part "this is specifically about American government" means. Is it that the American government is afraid of this being done to Americans by the Chinese government? Are there any concrete concerns like, "China wishes to destabilize the US by decreasing social cohesion/increasing social divide" or "China wishes to destabilize capitalism itself"?

American government is worried about the Chinese government acting against it.

I'm not aware of any concrete threats from China currently, but seeing as a conflict is brewing slowly(over Taiwan) I understand why the American government wants to limit this specific activity.

Thank you, that makes sense. I think the last point of confusion I have is just, did people suddenly come to this realization?

It seems evidently clear that we exist an a mental ocean of teaming memetic competition. I wouldn't expect less of businesses, media, the US government, other governments, even here when discussing ideas with other people, I'm keenly aware of the fact that nearly all exchanges are an attempt to convince or be convinced of some idea. Am I skeptical, cynical, or hardened, or did people genuinely believe the marketplace of ideas represented a path toward an objective truth?

>>did people suddenly come to this realization?

Yes I think the American government was somewhat surprised by the fact that another country can run such an effective media machine within their own country and it took a really long time to react to this. It's as if they woke up one day to discover that most Americans watch Al Jazeera as their main news source instead of a domestic channel that can be controlled or influenced more easily.

Hmm, I guess it's just that establishing China as a memetic threat is an admission that the marketplace of ideas was itself an illusion crafted to appease, contain, and diffuse critique and wouldn't that be a kicking out a sort of load-bearing idea for a lot of people?

I suppose I'm having a hard time grasping at how letting the cat out of the bag could be contained to just China, but maybe I'm missing something. It feels like it's a perfectly logical conclusion to say, "The ability to control the narrative ideas stops at existential threats to the US government and it's economic hegemony." Doesn't that sort of seem like a totalitarian stance? Maybe that's more acceptable to people than I thought?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com