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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

I’ll be frank, Palantir and their customers and their suppliers scare the bejesus out of me. Chinese spy apps and balloons and what not, not so much.

I can be convinced though. The trouble is I’ve not heard a coherent explanation what China is going to do with a bunch of videos of people doing stupid stuff that could remotely impact my life or national security. If I were China I’d just use my overwhelming dominance in all manufacturing to make Trojan horses in basically everything then back door the world. Seems like they would be capable and it would be a lot more effective than knowing what every tween in America is interested in.

In my career I’ve seen what Palantir offers behind closed doors. I’ve seen what Google at least at one point was offering behind closed doors using their dominance in real time local data. Even if you trust Google, why on earth do you trust their data customers?

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Have you seen bioemerl's comment about television? The one who controls the weights in TikTok's selection algorithm determines what people are going to believe.

Are you seriously suggesting that the Chinese government is actively adjusting the weighting of the TikTok algorithms to sway mass opinion on the TikTok app? It’s already a stretch saying that the Chinese government controls ByteDance because they clearly don’t.

If this is true, are you also concerned about the algorithms controlled by American billionaires? I think that's a national security risk as well.

I don’t believe that social media has nearly as much influence on most people as people seem to believe. I think it absolutely impacts some people, but most people have much stronger social influence from their local social sphere - family, friends, school.

But still some people are strongly influenced and that’s not good. But to what end? I think if it started pumping out Chinese communist party propaganda folks would notice. So, what’s left?

I’ve heard “dumbing people down” by pointing to the fact the Chinese version of TikTok shows more educational and improving content.

This isn’t because TikTok thinks Chinese people prefer educational content or that they get more revenue, it’s because the Chinese government requires them to show educational content. They show everyone else whatever garbage addicts them because, just like every other social media company, showing addictive garbage creates addicted customers and therefore dollars. If our government, say, instead of banning tiktok, did whah the Chinese government is doing - required social media to present more wholesome content to its users, guess what - tiktok would show more wholesome content to its users. As would Facebook, instagram, YouTube, and hacker news.

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