[msbarnett]

Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country. Hand wringing about TikTok seems more rooted in sinophobia than genuine privacy concerns, from where I’m sitting.

[xapata]

Do you agree with the censorship and propaganda policies of mainland China? If not, Sinophobia is not paranoia.

[msbarnett]

No, but then again I’m equally opposed to much of contemporary US politics and the long history of US meddling in foreign countries affairs to obtain anti-democratic results that happen to favour US goals (broadly, Latin American 20th century history), so again, this “TikTok’s data gathering is an existential threat to freedom but please pay Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google et al no mind” framing is... unconvincing to say the least.

[addison-lee]

No doubt spyware is bad from either country, but TikTok was caught trying to suppress content from "ugly, poor, or disabled" users. Do you still support the app knowing that?

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

[msbarnett]

I didn’t say I supported it at all.

I merely said I don’t see how it’s worse than the major US social networks. Like say Facebook, which has been caught multiple times allowing employers and housing advertisers to illegally exclude groups like Black people, from seeing job postings and apartment listings.

Again, I don’t know that what TikTok has been shown to be doing is any worse.

[addison-lee]

Sorry, didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

[foepys]

Look at Hong Kong where China just yesterday told the political parties that holding any pre-election for Hong Kong's parliament is an aggressive act against China.

Or look at the Uyghur internment camps. Or the one child policy that effectively turned some communitys 80% male.

There is no opposition in China that can speak up against this.

[ardy42]

> Not sure I consider Chinese spyware any worse than the US spyware of Facebook, as a resident of neither country.

I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US. The US isn't intractably opposed to liberal democracy, but the CCP is:

From the OP:

> To that end, this long history looms large in how China thinks about its relationship to the U.S. specifically, and the West generally. China is driven to reverse its “century of humiliation”, and to retake what it sees as its rightful place as a dominant force in the world. What few in the West seem to realize, though, is that the Chinese Communist Party very much believes that Marxism is the means by which that must be accomplished, and that Western liberal values are actively hostile to that goal. Tanner Greer wrote in Tablet:

> ...

> This understanding of China’s belief that it is fighting an ideological war explains why the severe curtailing of freedom that happened in Hong Kong this month was inevitable; if the Party’s ideology is ultimately opposed to liberalism anywhere, “one country-two systems” were always empty words in service of China’s rejuvenation, and Marxism’s triumph. To see that reality, though, means taking China seriously, and believing what they say.

[msbarnett]

> I consider it quite different, because I know I'm more opposed to the ideology of the CCP than I am of the US.

I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.

[ardy42]

> I don’t know that I’m particularly enthused about either country’s ideology, hence my more skeptical view of the idea that any of the major US social media networks are “better”.

Could you go into more detail about your thoughts on "[each] country’s ideology" and why you think that makes their social networks (which IMHO are a form of media) roughly equivalently desirable?

IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better. China's government, on the other hand, is pretty unrepentant about the bad things it does, and explicitly rejects and suppresses the mechanisms that could lead positive change in those areas. If the OP is correct and China's government sees itself in an ideological war with the West and its ideas of liberal democracy, then I'd expect that Chinese social networks will be drafted to serve in that war, either now or in the future.

If I dislike beef, I might not be enthusiastic about eating a steak, but I'd still prefer that to some chicken cooked in motor oil.

[msbarnett]

> IMHO, the US does have faults and does do bad things, but those bad things are usually domestically controversial (to some degree). Since it's a liberal democracy, that controversy is tolerated, which means there's a path to something better

From the outside, I think Americans generally over-estimate the degree to which modern America is actually a liberal democracy. The tolerated range of speech seems to in reality run a perilously narrow gamut from "neo-conservative" to "arch-neo-conservative", with anything left of the former routinely subject to exercises of state force to attack and undermine that dissent in practice (declarations of turning the nebulous self-applied label of "Antifascist" into a "terror organization", COINTELPRO, etc, etc), regardless of what freedoms are claimed to be enshrined in the US constitution.

And this is merely its internal opposition to liberal democracy; again, even a cursory glance at modern Latin American history demonstrates that the US happily prefers right-wing dictators to democratically elected leftists, if the latter is at all detrimental to the US government's interests.

[scottLobster]

Don't need to be enthused to acknowledge one is better than the other. At the end of the day the NSA/facebook is far less likely to use my information to hurt me than the CCP. The only difference is I live in the US, so the CCP doesn't really care and can't really reach me without committing a potential act of war anyway. If I moved to China and maintained my same social media habits I'd be disappeared rather quickly, and possibly organ harvested.

Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist. And you're giving that info freely, better hope the CCP doesn't decide to use it against you while you're there to make a political statement. They've done and are doing far worse over less.

[msbarnett]

> At the end of the day the NSA/facebook is far less likely to use my information to hurt me than the CCP.

Again, I do not reside in the US and do not imagine that the NSA is on "my side", so obviously I'm going to take a more jaundiced view of surveillance apps of US origin.

> Consider that if you use TikTok anything you post will show up in your dossier should you ever visit China, even as a tourist.

Yes. This is equally true of the US. You are ordered to disclose all social media accounts at the border, and can and will be denied entry to the country if your social media posts contain political statements (or even apolitical statements) that the interviewing officer objects to, whether posted by you or merely sent to you: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/27/border-deny-entry-united-s..., https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16810312, etc