[hakfoo]

Whenever I see politicians screaming about TikTok, it reminds me of the South Park Underpants Gnome business model.

1. Build platform teens love 2. ??? 3. Compromise national security.

Fundamentally, the product isn't an effective way to get into secure spaces. Its core audience does not generally have direct access to those spaces, and if they did, that feels like an institutional security breakdown that they allowed any personal devices or software there.

At this point, War Thunder and Discord have both proven to deliver more high-secrecy documents than TikTok has, yet nobody's demanding widespread bans.

"Ooh, but it will spread propaganda or filter things in a way Beijing likes." And if that happens, the audience moves on. Haven't we noticed that social platforms are hyper-fickle, especially for ones targeted towards a youth and entertainment market? How many "look at China's awesome high-speed rail" videos can you slip into the feed before the kids say "screw this, I'm moving to this new platform which pioneered the Drink An Entire Litre of Bleach challenge"? They actually built a very non-sticky platform compared to Facebook (which will persist for decades because people need to talk to Aunt Bertha who never learned any other platform) or YouTube (which has long-form content of value even if the firehose of new content starts winding down)

It all just reeks of sour grapes. We were perfectly happy with China when they were a passive trading partner, a convenient "elsewhere" to offshore all that pesky polluting manufacturing to. But when they start to represent a real economic and political counterweight, producing a high-margin and culturally relevant product that's outcompeting our own offerings, we immediately start rattling sabres. I figure it's the same spiel as with Huawei and ZTE; if domestic products had been compelling enough to win on their own merits, there would be no meaningful market penetration and we'd never even be discussing a ban in the first place.

I wonder if the Vine people feel vindicated now, it feels like they could have been TikTok 10 years ago.

[macrolocal]

> And if that happens, the audience moves on.

For what it's worth, this idea that propaganda is noticeable is itself propaganda.

[hakfoo]

The issue isn't about propaganda itself, and more that it's hard for anyone to keep up with a fickle audience.

Even a "pure entertainment" product that doesn't need to do any particular ideological heavy lifting has a hard time. If you're taping an episode of a sitcom today, the language you use might have passed to "cringy" by the time it airs, and the trend you used as a plot device might have fizzled.

Social media's ability to stay relevant is managed by constantly eating its own-- people fall in and out of trend. That makes it harder to use as a means to inject a specific message; you'd need to be constantly generating new users and getting them into closed circle communities as the old ones wear out their usefulness. Note I don't say impossible, but it's an interesting set of challenges and probably pretty different from the ones the guys running Radio Havana face.

[macrolocal]

All they need to do is slightly bias their recommendation engine, maybe in different ways for different users. Not too hard using Monolith.