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Comment by enos_feedler | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why people are so obtuse about national security being an excuse. Do we really believe the Chinese are going to infiltrate by way of tiktok when they can hack into our telecom networks or any significant figures individual machines? This is about neutering our biggest global economic threat.

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This reads like a denial of the existence of hybrid warfare. Why wouldn't China use TikTok to sow negative sentiment about the US?

Plenty of negative sentiment already on US owned platforms, it gets the clicks and the clicks pay the bills.

Economics, prestige, etc. It’s worth a lot to China to be competing with the US in social media / Internet stuff. China (and Russia) have been pushing a narrative that the US operates on two sets of rules for them vs everyone else.

The US is happy to invade countries and turns a blind eye to Israeli aggression but Russia or China want to do it and they are met with sanctions etc. The last bastion of American exceptionalism was how it’s a free market and values free speech and free competition.

There was a national security threat but the US walked right into it: China is making a move for the top spot as global hegemon. It’s recruiting other countries to say don’t work with the US, work with us instead. The US flinched. Ralph blew the conch and all the kids just installed RedNote .

RedNote falls afoul of the exact same law and will probably be banned soon after TikTok.

Except that's not the point at all. The US just proved to the world that it doesn't care about competition and it's citizens (in some number) have rejected the concept of "National Security" by switching to a more explicitly Chinese company.

That's a blow to hegemony that will have lasting consequences.

I’d assume the concern is more swaying public opinion, sowing division to make us incapable of unified political effort, or even to destabilize us, things like that, not so much infiltrating networks - they already manufacture much of that equipment.

If I understand correctly how it works, it’s a propagandist’s dream, building personalized psych profiles on each person. You could imagine that it’d be the perfect place to try generating novel videos to fit specific purposes, as well - the signals from this could feed back directly into the loss functions for the generative models.

I think politicians’ efforts to regulate tech are generally not great, but I think this one is pretty spot-on.

I think we are already cooked on unifying political effort and destabilization. We don’t need help from China on this.

National security doesn't have to mean they use the app to take over the devices it is installed on. It can also be used to spread misinformation or blackmail people.

Oh. Like what our domestic social media company let happen with Cambridge Analytica? Glad our government is so focused on this one. Great work.

This is the argument that a group of toddlers make when one of them gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar. "Yeah...yah....but Mrs. Spangler, I saw Sally steal a cookie last week". OK, cool....your friend is stealing one now and currently has their hand in the cookie jar.

Terrible comparison. China hasn’t been caught doing anything nefarious with Tiktok whereas Facebook was caught red handed. The problem is a tiktok ban is based on speculation and playing on the fears of the american people. The irony is the story is pitched as China using tiktok to program a bunch of american monkeys, meanwhile our own government is programming us with “china is the adversary”

Sally stole a cookie from the cookie jar and now the teacher is pointing at the fat kid and not letting him be in the classroom alone with the cookie jar. Just bc he is fat.

> China hasn’t been caught doing anything nefarious with Tiktok whereas Facebook was caught red handed.

Sure they haven't:

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-far-right-european-pa...

Facebook deserves more scrutiny, that doesn't forgive or waive TikTok's issues. It's a bad faith deflection.

This article literally makes my point and says nothing about China being caught red handed:

“Parliament and other institutions as well as national governments issued restrictions on its use in 2023 over fears of Beijing’s access to the data”

Thanks for wasting my fucking time reading your bullshit links.

If you say so.

> Do we really believe the Chinese are going to infiltrate by way of tiktok when they can hack into our telecom networks or any significant figures individual machines?

The allegation is that it's used to spread misinformation and affect public sentiment, not for infiltration.

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