Comment by pizza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pizza | Hacker News Reader

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The hysteria is reaching HUAC levels. You can read the statements from the congresspersons in support of the bill [0] and they all read like one variant or another of General Jack D Ripper in Dr. Strangelove quavering about how the communists want to sully our precious bodily fluids. Won’t someone think of the helplessly feeble median voter who cannot be entrusted to not let something dissenting from the Washington consensus not stymie my chance to harvest their vote.. woe is me.. /s

If they believed Americans shouldn’t be surveilled then they should pass a law enshrining our right to freedom from surveillance with teeth to match. But they would never do that because that’s not really what this is about.

Nor would they encourage smartphone manufacturers to better sandbox users from profiling by apps, nor would they pass laws placing restrictions on the seedy data broker industry, nor would they pass laws preventing telcos from selling your data to the data brokers.

Nor would they pass laws that publicly refer to the USA’s own public influence campaigns in non-adversary countries (remember the SinoVax scandal [1] ? Where we seeded antivax sentiment on Facebook in the Philippines etc so that nobody would want to get the Chinese covid vaccine? Which probably actually led to people dying? I guess this type of story only has legs if it’s hypothetically plausible that our adversaries are doing it - not when we actually did it, smoking gun and everything)

The additional irony now that there is a serious likelihood this incoming administration is going to be against the fluoridation of water too is not lost upon me..

[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/bills/bill-p...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

The issue isn't surveillance, it's the ability for China to 'put their thumb on the scale' of the black box algorithm responsible for populating every user's feed to emphasize or de-emphasize topics/ideas that are strategically beneficial to China, and bad for us. This is not hypothetical, this is happening, and has been happening.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/briefing/tiktok-ban-bill-...

Ok, I can accept that that kind of downweighting or delisting of inconvenient posts is definitely suboptimal, sure.

Does that mean we’re all going to sleepwalk into quoting from The Governance of China? Unless our congress sees us all as dangerously impressionable morons - which I actually seem to think is their opinion of us more and more.. - who lack critical thinking skills to such an extent that we basically shouldn’t even have the option to make up our own opinions in response to feed recommendations… well excuse me for thinking that that is more than a little patronizing.

Ultimately, who is the one most overtly putting their thumb on the scale here…?

- China, if for every 100 Hong Kong related posts on Instagram there are only 0.7 posts on TikTok, or

- USA: delete every single post about every topic.

Do you really actually have the opinion that China is the most censorious here? Really? The possibility that, just maybe, you might be served a video that would embarrass the CCP once in every 500 videos instead of every 100 videos… therefore you are not allowed to view the 499 other videos - no matter what they may have meant to you, or what value you might have derived from them, or what new connections or community you may have been building… well gee, thanks, I guess.

I have to say that when I came across this bit from that article:

“The move resembled a classic strategy of authoritarian governments: burying inconvenient information.”

the sheer lack of awareness of the irony had my eyes just about nearly rolling out of their sockets. If that’s the case then I can’t think of a single more authoritarian move Congress could make than just nuking TikTok outright since it poses an inconvenience for congress? Am I just taking crazy pills here??

Note: whether or not this all ends up being the right or wise move on the state, is not even the place I am really coming from here. It’s just that I haven’t heard a single justification for this ban that actually didn’t either just immediately fall apart under its own internal logical inconsistencies or otherwise just give the impression of a lazy half measure, or possibly blatant corruption, by being such a selective application of law.

In other words, yet more bad law by lawmakers who don’t care about getting it right. Nor will they be the ones to clean up their mess, if it ever does get cleaned up, by setting this precedent.

> who lack critical thinking skills to such an extent that we basically shouldn’t even have the option to make up our own opinions in response to feed recommendations

I think it's easy to be insulted by this perspective if you spend too much of your time surrounded by people who fall more than one standard deviation to the right on the intelligence bell curve. 84% of people are to the left of that, and can vote.

> Ultimately, who is the one most overtly putting their thumb on the scale here

The expression "putting their thumb on the scale" means influencing subtly and deceitfully, so China. I chose this expression intentionally.

> Do you really actually have the opinion that China is the most censorious here

Nowhere did I mention censorship. Its not merely about suppressing perspectives, it's about influencing them. Hong Kong is too obvious-- what about amplifying anti-AI sentiment to increase regulation and hobble AI progress in the US, giving a decisive advantage to China in the AI arms race? Amplifying anti-nuclear energy sentiment, to erode US energy security and create economic advantages for the Chinese solar industry?

I do agree w.r.t. the messiness of precedent, though.

> Nor would they encourage smartphone manufacturers to better sandbox users from profiling by apps, nor would they pass laws placing restrictions on the seedy data broker industry, nor would they pass laws preventing telcos from selling your data to the data brokers.

Even with this legislation, the Chinese government can just buy similar data from data brokers who aggregate it from Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Twitter and other social media outlets. Hell, they can probably just buy TikTok's data from data brokers too - the law doesn't block TikTok selling their data anymore than it blocks Facebook et al.

So... it's pretty clear this isn't really about surveilling U.S. citizens. That's just a convenient excuse. Per the WSJ's article today:

> "Lawmakers received classified briefings in which intelligence officials warned that China could use the app to spread Chinese propaganda and surveil Americans."

The other cited reason is "Chinese propaganda". But foreign governments already massively plant and promote propaganda across U.S. owned social networks - both overtly with paid ads and covertly with highly sophisticated astroturfing campaigns which manipulate social media recommendation algorithms. I'm not really sure the Chinese government theoretically having direct control of TikTok's algorithm vs indirectly manipulating the same algorithm from the outside is that big of a strategic advantage. Any manipulation has to be subtle because the TikTok algorithm has to remain highly optimized for retaining viewers as the highest priority. Pushing government favored propaganda has to be strictly limited so it doesn't nerf retention or become obvious.

Also, despite the massive resources foreign (and domestic) governments have dedicated to propagandizing social media, most experts think it hasn't been all that effective. It can occasionally shift broad public opinion a tiny bit but, like overt political advertising, more meaningful movement tends to be limited to partisans who already agreed anyway. The overall predictability, repeatability and ROI are falling while the costs of adapting to game the system and avoid detection continue to increase.

So, let me try to 'steel man' the government's case here... if the Chinese government actually does control TikTok's algorithm and data in a meaningful way, and assuming this actually gives them a significant effectiveness advantage and/or cost discount, maybe the true purpose of the U.S. legislation is to force the Chinese government to pay the same costs the U.S. government, U.S. political parties and foreign governments have to pay when trying to manipulate social media? Even assuming all that to be true, it doesn't sound important enough to be worth trying to tiptoe around the first amendment. Maybe the primary driver really is just political grandstanding and appearing to "do something" on an issue that naively appears 'important' to most voters. (As usual, it doesn't matter that the "something" being done won't change much. The important thing is appearing to do it.)

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