Sure but the obsession regarding China is leaving everyone vulnerable and blind to the methods being utilized by everyone else. It's not as if TikTok is using some alien technology here that nobody else has access to.
Cambridge Analytica anyone? Did we all just forget? That wasn't even Chinese influence and still it had tremendous impact on the US (and how her citizens view each other).
The US is already influencing US mass psychology, but I guess people are more ok with being manipulated by people who were born in the same border as them, than by people who were born outside that border.
They do have a camp, considered illegal by most of the world, yet still in operation, with middle eastern people, plenty of them innocent, that even has a MC Donald's on the island. Which is literally the most American thing imagineable to put a Mac Donald's on their illegal prison island...
That's a legitimate concern. We've recently had examples of the US government influencing US mass psychology via Twitter, including examples where Twitter was asked to suppress information the government stated was factually correct.
The CCP is trash, and the US government is far better (it has elections, for one thing) but I suggest we should be concerned about any attempt to manipulate the populace.
Being a representative democracy, the USA's critical weakness is that it is ruled by stupid people that are voted in by the stupid people they represent. So yea, the US government is better but dumb, and it is vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation. Our global rivals know this. It shouldn't be a huge surprise that we're being (at best) pen-tested (and at worst) attacked through things like tiktok and troll farms.
It's ruled by monied people, who manufacture consent amongst the stupid people partly by convincing them that the executive and legislative branches are somehow answering to the stupid people, and not the monied people.
Yes. At the moment I expect Facebook, Twitter, etc to be focused mainly on using the data they collect to drive engagement and serve more ads. I expect the US government to have relatively weak and ineffective information operations on those platforms because they don't own the platforms and are relatively inexperienced with internet scale information operations. I expect TikTok to be focused mainly on using the data they collect to drive engagement more effectively than previously feasible and serve information operations. I expect the Chinese government to have strong and effective information operations on that platform because in a real sense the government and by extension the Chinese Communist Party does own the platform and have large amounts of experience in internet scale information operations.
Cambridge Analytica anyone? Did we all just forget? That wasn't even Chinese influence and still it had tremendous impact on the US (and how her citizens view each other).