[hxegon]

It's honestly wild how many people in these comments are defending some vague, unsubstantiated, paper thin national security scare vs recognizing this as a clear suppression of free speech and active stoking of xenophobia.

I would genuinely rather drop ship the CCP my SSN/banking info than trust the US government to do something in favor of it's own people when there's lobbying money involved. Why are so many of you pro-government and anti competition only when it comes to tiktok specifically? It's completely the opposite on nearly every other topic from what I've seen.

[postcert]

The most disheartening part of this ban is that it’s just about the only thing the government can agree on. IMO Mitt Romney slipped the truth in saying: “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."

TikTok is the first and just about the only place I’ve seen content about corporate greed, the accelerating disappearance of the middle class and the real downstream effects of US foreign policy that hasn’t been whitewashed.

The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better (though I think magnitudes greater) returns than Russia’s recent social campaigns.

[theultdev]

> The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better

We can hope the CCP's consciousness grows and they shutdown their concentration camps, stop organ harvesting, and start having elections.

The ball is in their court.

We can talk TikTok being allowed after that.

[hxegon]

Maybe every other country should ban American imports until we stop bankrolling Israel if that's your position.

[theultdev]

Sure. Plenty of people to trade with who don't support terrorists like Hamas.

[hxegon]

This is like saying that people who are against civilian casualties in the wars in iraq and Afghanistan are all pro 9/11 and love al-qaeda. How does the boot taste?

[postcert]

What's the implication? That we as a society and/or government have a more just consciousness?

There are certainly are issues in China but are these "popular headline" talking points worse than the suffering we have here? And that's even after assuming they are factual.

We sell prison labor for pennies. We allow individuals to create epidemics and slap them on the wrist. We allow the future of our next generations to be squandered for today's profits. We allow our government to be just as captive to the desires of private parties in a way that's effectually reduced elections to a non-choice.

I don't think anyone with a conscious can say we're any better and that's without taking into account our worst contributions of genocides/wars/instability to the global community.

But in the end w/e, you have your freedom tinted glasses on (it must be nice) and the average american is screwed on our current trajectory.

[theultdev]

The difference between prison labor and Uyghur forced labor camps:

In the US those people lost their rights by committing criminal acts and were convicted by a jury of their peers.

In China, the Uyghurs were forced into camps because of their ethnicity.

No different than Nazi Germany. And yes those camps are real.

Btw the prison labor camp talking point is a common 50 cent army tactic. Not sure if you're doing it for free or...

[hxegon]

Let me genuinely ask you something because you seem to be all over this thread with a strong different opinion, and I'm not so arrogant as to believe it's impossible that I'm wrong.

Do you really think, in real world terms, that China could not accomplish the types of infiltrations / surveillance it would deem strategically important without tiktok? Considering that they already compromise government systems on a regular basis (which I can provide links for if you're curious)

Do you genuinely think that corruption / lobbying has nothing to do with this ban? What is your primary concern that makes you in favor of this?

Do you look at things like facebook and instagram and either not see the blatant propaganda on there or not see a problem with it?

I'm just wondering if we are disagreeing on the facts or if we have fundamentally incompatable values, I want to understand.

[theultdev]

Nice pivot. Don't want to talk about the Uyghur camps eh?

Respond to the prison labor vs concentration camps point, since you brought up prison labor in attempts to compare convicted criminals to an ethnic group being forced into labor.

[zzzeek]

if you trust the CCP (which to be clear refers to the government of China, not the actual people who live there, just like any country) to be more respectful and magnanimous to its citizens and human rights overall than the US, you might want to do some research on that (and not on Tiktok)

[hxegon]

This isn't how the about how the CCP treats it's own citizens, it's about how the US is currently treating it's citizens.

[theultdev]

Oh stop, it has nothing to do with xenophobia, the CCP has a terrible spying and human rights track record (organ harvesting, concentration camps, child labor, etc.).

Nothing to do with the Chinese people as a whole, and everything to do about their overlords.

Before you do some whataboutism, yes the US spies, even on it's own citizens. That is a separate issue we should make sure doesn't happen.

Two things can be bad and is not an excuse for more spying or letting foreign adversaries broadcast psyops.

[hxegon]

What psyops are you talking about? Is it a bunch of US citizens talking about how they don't like the US bankrolling a genocide? Why is it more important to protect tiktok users from a threat no one can actually point to versus preserving a place a lot of people feel like is very important to their day to day lives? Why are these lawmakers prioritizing this over actual threats like school shootings? Honestly the general opinion is that this is extremely obviously not about national security for anybody I've talked to about this and I can't possibly disagree.

[theultdev]

Yeah that's a good example.

Framing Gaza as the victims in this whole ordeal.

That's like the 3rd time you dropped Israel in this China topic.

Really trying to shoehorn that in eh?

[hxegon]

Do you have an actual counter-argument to this or do you just like pointing out that you don't think Palestinians have a right to live? Just because we disagree doesn't mean that I'm only against human rights violations and war crimes because China said they were bad. Is that how you live your life? Being a good little boy or girl and doing what uncle sam tells you to? If no, why do you assume other people aren't capable of thinking for themselves?

[theultdev]

You're terrible at this. Noone is defending the US, your whataboutism is just irrelevant.

I can be against Chinese spying and bad things the US does.

Israel is irrelevant in this thread...

Hopefully they aren't paying you the full 50c for these posts, get better.

[hxegon]

You are arguing that my only reason for being against a genocide is either that I've been brainwashed or paid for. Get better at having basic human empathy. Israel is extremely relevant in this thread as pro-Palestinian sentiment is arguably the reason it's being banned.

You proved my point. You claim to be a free thinker and then try to dismiss what I'm saying by claiming I'm paid for without any substance.

[scarecrowbob]

I feel the same.

I think there are two things in play.

First, folks on this site don't know what real propaganda looks like. Based on growing up in Texas, as far as I can tell you'd have to publish and mandate textbooks to make a meaningful impact on peoples' belief systems. I have seen it happen, and I've had the experience of often leaning that things I had thought were true (or some underlying assumption) was in fact false, and then been able to trace that to my early education. So propaganda feels likely, but it also doesn't seem like some easy magic that can happen at the behest of some autocrat somewhere.

Unfortunately the folks here don't really have much perspective to judge the ways in which their own assumptions about the world are shaped by the rhetoric of the systems that raised them.

Second, many people likely generally haven't had many positive and genuine experiences on social media, or at least not on contemporary short-form video social media. Having been on the net since usenet days, I believe that it's possible to learn how to have those kinds of experiences, just as it's possible to engage with trolls and have a bad day or whatever. I don't consider HN to be fundamentally different than other social media sites, but I also understand that is a marginal view.

However, since folks here have generally never used something like Tiktok in a way that has had a positive impact in their life, the folks using it look like they are addicted doom scrollers instead of people highly engaged in conversations with their community.

I've personally gotten a lot out of Tiktok- the quality of the discussions there is much higher and more diverse than HN. I've also interacted with a lot of folks there in ways that make me fairly certain that I am dealing with actual humans and not, like, a PRC Botnet or something.

It's tough for me to disregard my own experience:

TT doesn't feel any more propaganda-laden than any other media stream, and certainly not in ways that are driven more by the PRC than by the content creators themselves

Further, I feel a little fury at folks who are happy engaging in whatever crappy media they like: mass sports, bad sitcoms, poorly written TV news, etc and feeling like the hour they might spend with that is somehow better than the half hour I might spend listening to some lakota guy talk about some nuance of tribal politics, and then have the gall to tell me that I'm addicted.

However, at the same time those folks apparently have a lot of power- they can happily elect folks who will hake it harder for me to hear some conversations that I found useful. So I suppose it's important to understand that these sociopaths view me as just another addicted, over-propagandized NPC.

[hxegon]

I can see what you mean about a lack of positive experiences on social media, I think tiktok is the first one I see genuinely having a positive impact on myself and others. It's so frustrating seeing all these people who have clearly never been on there talk about it like it's the CCP selling us heroin.