If you already acknowledge that China (the CCP really; the average Chinese citizen is not complicit) is doing "evil" things — then do you not also acknowledge that one of the "evil" things the CCP does, is to suborn/coerce private Chinese individuals and companies into temporarily acting as foreign propaganda arms for CCP messaging?
Even in a country with near-total freedom of speech, why would you knowingly permit a state-backed influence tool from such a known-"evil" country, to have a stranglehold over much of the attention of your civilian population?
(Compare/contrast: the Canadian government's inquiry[1] into suspected foreign-state-led tampering of Canadian elections as executed through social-media marketing and psy-ops. Same question: why would any government knowingly permit this, if they had the tools to block it?)
China is a dystopia, because the CCP combines internal propaganda against the West, with strong filters on Internet, news media, etc., such that it's very difficult (and often illegal) to "be informed" — i.e. to get any idea of what Western thought about China actually is, without the tainted lens of the CCP viewpoint. It's not just that you can't access "US propaganda mouthpieces" in China; you can't access any foreign media reporting about the US in China.
Banning one foreign propaganda mouthpiece does not create a dystopia; and in fact, depending on what that propaganda vehicle is stating, can make your own state less dystopian. For the US to become "like China" in how it is manipulating the views of its citizens, it would have to be banning not only all Chinese-owned media (which it is not doing), but also banning any reporting on China from any neutral-third-party country — such that the only way to hear about China would be through US news media that the US government could suborn. Which is... not happening.
Also, for the comparison to be valid, the US ban on Tiktok would have to be somehow analogous to China's ban on US news media. Which it's not, because Tiktok is not Chinese news media. (You could say that Douyin is Chinese news media of a sort — insofar as you might call Twitter "American news media." But Tiktok is not Douyin; no Douyin content is accessible on Tiktok.) Tiktok does not give Americans access to a bunch of Chinese-sourced information about China that the US government would want to suppress. Tiktok just does the same thing Instagram or Snapchat does — give Westerners a place to share their short-form content — but with the CCP being able to step in at any point and inject psy-ops or "tune the algorithm" toward their ends, because of their ultimate control over the platform.
Rather than thinking of Tiktok as "Chinese news media", I think a more apt way to think about it, is as one of those scam apps that you find on app stores, that has stolen the (decompiled or FOSS) code from a popular app; injected a backdoor into it; and reuploaded it. Tiktok is the higher-effort version of this — it hasn't stolen anything, but instead independently implemented a (basically fungible) competitor to the other apps in its space. But, from the CCP's perspective, it's to the same end: like scam apps, Tiktok redirects Western civilian engagement and attention from apps that the CCP can't touch, into an app that the CCP is able to "nudge" at will.
>Even in a country with near-total freedom of speech, why would you knowingly permit a state-backed influence tool from such a known-"evil" country, to have a stranglehold over much of the attention of your civilian population?
Because Americans fought for the right to "be influenced" aka access information the government doesn't want us to see. No one forced Americans to use TikTok en masse. And no one hid from them the fact that it's a Chinese company.
This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong. It's completely bizarre that anyone would use the treatment of the Uyghurs as the beacon of immorality for the chinese, while the US currently bombs more muslims with the efficiency that the CCP could ever dream of.
If the China is evil for suppressing all social media for the purpose of spreading propoganda, what do you call what the US is doing with TikTok. Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices? With your standard, couldn't the US also be considered a dystopia?
I view banning of TikTok as dangerous, especially considering the political climate. Is my "freedom of choice" really freedom if my only choices are thouse controlled US hegemonic powers? If it was instead China that ruled world, and Douyin, WeChat and Weibo were used world wide, would it seem that China is the "free" society, and that America in banning TikTok was the autocratic one? You could even imagine them using Trump as "proof" of dysfunction in our system.
> This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong.
No? I think you're engaging in very black-and-white thinking yourself. The spectrum from "utopia" to "dystopia" is very wide. I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side.
A country is an effective dystopia, to the degree that, among other things, its citizens are:
• manipulated by the state into not realizing the bad things the state does (both locally and on the world stage);
• manipulated by the state into developing a negatively-biased view of countries that oppose that country in conflicts (usually involving many entirely-false beliefs about those countries), where countries neutral to those conflicts would not support those views;
• and controlled + influenced by the state into not visiting other countries where they could "learn the truth."
China does all three of these things, in the strongest and most active sense. News companies are state-owned or coerced. Citizen journalists are arrested. Individuals sharing things they shouldn't are arrested. People have low social credit scores and can't leave the country by default, and have to earn their way out by presenting as brainwashed. Etc.
The US, meanwhile, does some of these things, but in much weaker senses:
• the US very well probably manipulates its own mainstream media; but it does nothing to prevent access to foreign news sources (where, again, Tiktok is not a foreign news source — you can't learn anything about China on Tiktok. But you can still read CCP-mouthpiece Chinese MSM outlets like https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ just fine.)
• the US suppresses virally-disseminated citizen journalism in the sense of telling social-media services to blacklist keywords in their recommendation algorithms; but they aren't arresting the people who post those things. There is no risk in the US to spreading samizdat — in fact, there is no concept in the US of samizdat, because there is no news or fact that will get you arrested by sharing it. Anyone who wants can join a group chat (even one hosted on a US-based service!) about these topics, and spread info there without a problem. People can put up posters or even run billboards calling for people to join these meetings, and the government won't go around tearing them down. (This is what your much-underappreciated right to "freedom of assembly" gets you!)
• Random US citizens have no trouble visiting other countries — even the countries the US doesn't like. You can buy a plane ticket to Beijing right this moment if you like. A US citizen can also legally visit Russia, despite the global sanctions (though you'll have to fly to a neighbouring country and come in via land.) In neither case will this get you in trouble with the US government. It won't even disrupt an application for security clearance.
(Also, if you're curious, I'm not American. I'm Canadian. Here in Canada, we have things like hate-speech laws. We believe that there is such a right as "freedom of speech", but that it can come into opposition of other rights — such as the right to one's own safety. Or the right to a fair election.)
> Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices?
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Especially when the past performance is in peacetime, and the future results are in wartime.
Which is to say: IMHO the CCP has not yet done any kind of real manipulation through Tiktok. In fact, they've likely encouraged ByteDance to be perfect little boy-scouts and build up as much social trust among Gen Z and Gen Alpha as possible. (Whereas Facebook et al likely were told by the US government to suppress certain sentiments.)
The thing the US government fears — the thing any US citizen should fear — isn't any already ongoing manipulation on Tiktok. The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent. And anyone who believes that a war between the US and China is inevitable, wants to get that sleeper agent out of the room before they wake up.
>I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side.
I think we are going to disagree on this because you are playing geopolitics and I'm looking at this from the angle of individual freedoms. I don't think this is a bad thing - for geopolitical reasons, individuals are barred from owning nuclear weapons. This line is will be different for everyone. Personally I'm glad that there is a foreign owned media platform in the west that at the very least offered a different point of view. I don't believe the chicken littles that somehow China had come up with a magic algorithm that makes all the kids dumb (I think the DoEdu has a _far_ greater impact of the deterioration of schools in America than Xi).
My discomfort with the ban is, on its face, is that first, it's just protectionism, and second, by isolating tiktok it makes it clear that propaganda is fine, as long as were the ones doing the propaganda. I'd love to see better data protection regulation in the space - but it's clear that anything that would hinder Meta and Google's ability to vacuum up data in the rest of the world is "bad". Rules for thee and not for me.
>The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent.
This can be used an argument for banning all media. If your threat vector is that you fear that $enemy may use $platform to spread propaganda; I posit that banning $platform isn't an affective strategy. Russia already shown they could spread propaganda on US owned media sites. If the populace either isn't educated or, IMO, is primed to eat propaganda, that's a problem of local regulation.
On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled. We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.
> This can be used an argument for banning all media.
No, because to be clear, the worry is that people (mostly: young teens) don't have any conception of Tiktok being a CCP mouthpiece.
Anyone reading China Daily is going to realize it's a Chinese news source. And, as far as the American government is concerned, that is adequate to inform a citizen's decision-making with regards to how they interpret content from that source. People in the US don't tend to read China Daily — and it's not because the US government prevents them from doing so, or even tells them not to.
But there's nothing about Tiktok that looks Chinese. The content isn't Chinese; the UI isn't Chinese; it doesn't run sponsored ads from Chinese companies; even the PR announcements and interviews are usually done by Caucasian, ethnically-American "figurehead" employees. The whole company wants to portray itself as if it was an arms'-length American subsidiary of a foreign company, rather than a plain-old foreign company. There is no level of "media literacy" that you can apply to interacting with Tiktok itself, that would enable you to realize that Tiktok might slipstream CCP propaganda into your feed at some point. To realize that, you have to research the app "out of band" — which is research that the average citizen (but esp. a teenager) has no motivation to do.
To put this another way: the US government would likely be perfectly fine with Douyin being exposed to Western audiences; or with Tiktok and Douyin being merged together, such that logging into Tiktok shows both Tiktok and Douyin content (but presumably doesn't allow American comments to filter back up to Chinese posters, for CCP reasons.) Americans would sign up for this app, and immediately be barraged by the majority-Chinese content already on the platform — and so would quickly realize that this is a Chinese app, with all that that implies.
This is how, for example, WeChat is. Its design and messaging makes it clear that it's the international version of a Chinese app. The default phone country code on signup is +86, even for the release of the app published in the US App Store. When you see signs saying "we accept WeChat Pay", those signs are usually printed once in English and then again in Chinese, even in countries without much of a Chinese population. Etc. Nobody thinks that WeChat is an American company. And so the US government has never considered banning WeChat — and likely never would, even in wartime. They'd trust US citizens to avoid it of their own volition.
> On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled.
Not "that cannot be controlled"; specifically "can and likely will be controlled for malicious purposes, by a state actor who the US is planning to go to war with quite soon, and who has proven to have competent propaganda and cyberwar arms."
The US would never ban a media platform hosted in e.g. the UAE — no matter how much of a propaganda mouthpiece it might be for non-aligned interests — because the US has no plans to go to war with the UAE; and so the US has no reason to predict that the UAE itself would coerce a platform run by one of their own private companies, into doing psy-ops on Americans.
Likewise, the US has no strong desire to ban entirely-uncontrollable-by-anybody media platforms, like certain anonymous p2p chat clients. If there's no central lever that anyone can pull to turn the platform systematically toward being a psy-op machine (with nobody noticing), then it's not the concern of the US DHS to defend people from it.
> We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.
China was right to ban Google/Meta, precisely insofar as China also believes war with the US is imminent. In the event of a war, these US-owned platforms would almost certainly be used by the US to manipulate Chinese citizens, in exactly the same way Tiktok would be used against US citizens. There's no reason not to use this tactic as part of a war, if you have the know-how. Both the US and China have the know-how.
(I hope people the world over wake up one day and realize that they the only "safe" social media platform, is one hosted in — and with legal ownership by a company headquartered in — a neutral country like Switzerland or Austria, that explicitly intends to never make war with anybody, and so has no need for a foreign propaganda arm!)
> individual freedoms
I would note that it won't be illegal to access Tiktok. Tiktok would still exist in every country other than the US. So the ban on Tiktok would be more like an EPA-mandated "hazard zone" fence around a site, than like an FDA scheduling of a controlled substance.
A hazard-zone declaration stops any business in the zone from operating there (illegal to make your employees work in a hazard zone); and also disincentivizes unknowing individuals from entering the zone by mistake. But you can just, like, climb the fence. You're not going to be arrested; a hazard zone is not inherently private property, so you are not trespassing by entering it. You're just (likely) being an idiot, and voiding any insurance claims you'll make. But maybe you have some very specific reason to go there. Maybe you're filming a documentary. You can still do that.
Likewise, it won't be illegal to download a VPN, set it to (any country other than the US), switch to that same region of the App Store, download Tiktok, and sign up / log into it. You're jumping the hazard-zone fence, but there's no crime inherent in that. As an individual, you're free to do so. It's just a fence, to keep out the people who don't have a motivation to be there that exceeds the motivation to ignore some scary warnings and climb a fence.
(Compare and contrast: quarantined subreddits, which are basically the self-policing version of this at a sub-platform level.)
Even in a country with near-total freedom of speech, why would you knowingly permit a state-backed influence tool from such a known-"evil" country, to have a stranglehold over much of the attention of your civilian population?
(Compare/contrast: the Canadian government's inquiry[1] into suspected foreign-state-led tampering of Canadian elections as executed through social-media marketing and psy-ops. Same question: why would any government knowingly permit this, if they had the tools to block it?)
[1] https://apnews.com/article/public-inquiry-canada-foreign-int...
China is a dystopia, because the CCP combines internal propaganda against the West, with strong filters on Internet, news media, etc., such that it's very difficult (and often illegal) to "be informed" — i.e. to get any idea of what Western thought about China actually is, without the tainted lens of the CCP viewpoint. It's not just that you can't access "US propaganda mouthpieces" in China; you can't access any foreign media reporting about the US in China.
Banning one foreign propaganda mouthpiece does not create a dystopia; and in fact, depending on what that propaganda vehicle is stating, can make your own state less dystopian. For the US to become "like China" in how it is manipulating the views of its citizens, it would have to be banning not only all Chinese-owned media (which it is not doing), but also banning any reporting on China from any neutral-third-party country — such that the only way to hear about China would be through US news media that the US government could suborn. Which is... not happening.
Also, for the comparison to be valid, the US ban on Tiktok would have to be somehow analogous to China's ban on US news media. Which it's not, because Tiktok is not Chinese news media. (You could say that Douyin is Chinese news media of a sort — insofar as you might call Twitter "American news media." But Tiktok is not Douyin; no Douyin content is accessible on Tiktok.) Tiktok does not give Americans access to a bunch of Chinese-sourced information about China that the US government would want to suppress. Tiktok just does the same thing Instagram or Snapchat does — give Westerners a place to share their short-form content — but with the CCP being able to step in at any point and inject psy-ops or "tune the algorithm" toward their ends, because of their ultimate control over the platform.
Rather than thinking of Tiktok as "Chinese news media", I think a more apt way to think about it, is as one of those scam apps that you find on app stores, that has stolen the (decompiled or FOSS) code from a popular app; injected a backdoor into it; and reuploaded it. Tiktok is the higher-effort version of this — it hasn't stolen anything, but instead independently implemented a (basically fungible) competitor to the other apps in its space. But, from the CCP's perspective, it's to the same end: like scam apps, Tiktok redirects Western civilian engagement and attention from apps that the CCP can't touch, into an app that the CCP is able to "nudge" at will.