[Firebrand]

This is why the U.S. government is so concerned about TikTok being used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese government:

https://m.tiktok.com/v/6880901448872234245.html

Make a video about disaffected military enlistees go viral on an app filled with impressionable young teens and it’ll discourage them enlisting in the future. Then the algorithm drip feeds them more anti-American content until they become more jaded about the country as a whole.

There’s certainly a discussion to be had about the way the U.S. treats its service members, but I just don’t trust TikTok being the impetus of it.

[boomboomsubban]

>Make a video about disaffected military enlistees go viral on an app filled with impressionable young teens and it’ll discourage them enlisting in the future

How dare they try and counteract the billions of dollars the US military has spent making sure everyone "supports the troops" and convincing teens enlisting is a heroic act.

Basically every complaint I hear about Tik Took is that it opens a path to oppose the omnipresent US propaganda. While I'd prefer getting rid of the propaganda wholesale, I don't understand the strong objection to a Chinese source while showing no concern for the US source.

[barumi]

> How dare they try and counteract (...)

It seems you misspelled "ingerence" with a lot of words.

Even for the absurdly autistic anti-US enthusiasts among us, no one in their right mind sides with the Chinese regime on anything at all, specially human rights.

If the Chinese regime has you in their crosshairs, which I remind you is right now engaged in a massive ethnic cleansing campaign, you better believe they do not have your best interests in mind at all.

[pydry]

Why not? Just because they're a hypocrite doesn't mean they're wrong.

If we applied that logic to the US we'd ignore everything they have to say about camps in Xinjiang (which Chinese nationals with views that are a mirror image of yours usually do).

[barumi]

> Why not? Just because they're a hypocrite doesn't mean they're wrong.

They are wrong. It boggles the mind how anyone refused to understand this. Talk about cutting the nose to spite the face.

> we applied that logic to the US (...)

Putting the blatant whataboutism aside, if you were trying to be honest then you'd be complaining that no one had the right to meddle in anyone else's affairs.

But no, to you having a totalitarian and extensively oppressive regime like the Chinese one, which I remind you is right now executing a blatant ethnic cleansing campaign that would impress Nazi germany, is somehow awesome because it's sabotaging the US?

[boomboomsubban]

>If the Chinese regime has you in their crosshairs, which I remind you is right now engaged in a massive ethnic cleansing campaign

Their target are a people very similar to the Afghanis, which the US has spent twenty years killing far more of then the current Chinese body count. Those Chinese cross hairs don't seem much worse than the US ones.

>you better believe they do not have your best interests in mind at all.

Neither does the US propaganda machine, encouraging me to enlist is far more dangerous to me personally.

[refurb]

You don't understand why propaganda from an authoritarian system with a vested interest in the decline of the US is bad?

[criddell]

I think the point was that propaganda from the military industrial complex with a vested interest in eternal war is also bad for the US.

[throwmeaway_pls]

There are other channels for expressing that opinion. We don’t need a newsfeed from the CCP in the hands of every other teenager in the country.

[boomboomsubban]

We don't need every teenager exposed to countless hours of propaganda glorifying war and demonizing foreigners either but nobody is pushing for the banning of TV and movies.

[cscurmudgeon]

Let us talk when China's TikTok equivalent allows similar content by PLA members inside China.

[FooBarWidget]

If they go down that route, doesn't that legitimize other countries banning any app for 'national security' reasons? A lot of people are bitter about China banning Facebook and Google, and support the banning of Tiktok in order to take revenge, but what about the implications of it?

[jdeibele]

If India, France, Tunisia, Zimbabwe and many others all have their own home-grown version of Facebook, is that a bad thing? It would reflect the local culture and keep the advertising revenue in the same country.

There have been few, if any, improvements on the user side of Facebook since inception. All their attention is focused on driving engagement and advertising revenue.

[FooBarWidget]

I am not saying that having local versions of apps is a bad thing. I am just annoyed that so many people yell 'but China is not playing fair, so it's revenge time' at the same time. It's both disingenuous and pure spite.

[ashtonkem]

Of course, this also raises the uncomfortable prospect that the disaffected enlistee content is genuine, and that the propagandists don’t like it.

[bilbo0s]

That only proves there's propaganda on all sides. No one said anyone is a good guy, only that the interest is in keeping adversarial propaganda at bay.

[jariel]

The issue is not the authenticity of the claim.

It's easy to find anyone to have any opinion you want.

The issues is the legitimacy of the popularity, targets, the censorship of opposing claims etc. etc..

It's easy to see how many press outlets bend the truth to suit their narrative, now imagine how far that could be bent by a foreign actor.

'Media' in it's classical forms is effectively a protected industry, it's less evident in the US, but it's de-facto true.

TikTok content is all over the place - some of it is surely going to be problematic and those things can spike. Most things that are 'taboo' attract considerable attention, and are likely to be promoted by attention-based algorithms.

In particular, I've seen a lot of young girls advertising their personal porn pages. I don't so much have a problem with that legally ... but I certainly have concerns about normalizing sex work among our 18 year olds. We actually do curate content out of social concerns etc. - it's why you don't see 'porn' on CNN, but if you want to get it, of course you can in a free society.

[082349872349872]

As an impressionable teenager my friends and I watched The Hunger, a nearly six thousand second movie, but (as far as I know) none of us ever became lesbian vampires.

In fact, it wasn't until a few years ago that I even learned of the 1872 context, thanks to a second-world remake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla

[gabruoy]

You didn't go to the theater for your news, and by your own admission you didn't assume that the movie you were watching was reality.

Teenagers on TikTok believe that the things are of real people giving real stories, as they likely are. But the sense of popularity and constant repetition gives a false narrative of a vocal minority that likely isn't real, but is impossible to verify, except that the powers that be (being the Chinese government) are allowed to manipulate the recommendations for or against whatever the content is going to be.

[garyfirestorm]

What happened to first amendment?

[dwaltrip]

The first amendment doesn’t apply to foreigners outside the US.

[retrac]

That's an interesting interpretation. In Canada, Charter free expression rights have been interpreted to include the right to access and read information, so censorship of foreign publications generally infringes the rights of Canadians who might wish to view them.

Of course I suppose that infringement is sometimes justifiable. Obviously free expression has limits and we do have probably-constitutional laws against foreign propaganda. But the government can't just ban a book because it was by a foreigner, thankfully.

[vaccinator]

I'd be ok with most wars if they took place in space with remote controlled toys.