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US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

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Re: US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

#71

Post by ketzu »

sudoaza wrote: post #55
_23sd wrote: post #15

The evidence that TikTok is a mouthpiece for China, according to NPR's account of the Commerce Department memo (I still need to read it myself): 1. Bytedance employs 130 Party members. 2. The party members had a rally with Communist salutes and pledges and such. 3. Bytedance's CEO once apologized over an app that the authorities shut down because, as far as I can tell, the memes were too dank. The first two are norma…

isn't like 10% of chinese population party members? How many employees has Bytedance in total?

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party) the CPC has 91,914,000 members in 2020. Which is around 6.5% of the population of the PRC or around 1.2% of the world population (assuming around 7.8 bil people).

Byte Dance has around 30k employees in total (world wide) according to https://craft.co/bytedance so by random sampling we would expect 350 employees to be CPC members.

So if they have 130, that would be less than you would expect from complete random sampling all over the world.

Of course that's a naive approach in many ways.

Re: US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

#73

Post by yorwba »

ericmay wrote: post #62
andrepd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is that that's not a problem specific to tiktok, it's a problem of social media in general...

Which is 100% true! But the key difference here is... we’re sitting here talking about regulating Facebook and Google, and I think you can safely say the vast majority of people working at those companies don’t want to see bad things happen to the United States.

> I think you can safely say the vast majority of people working at those companies don’t want to see bad things happen to the United States.

What makes this "the key difference"? I think you can safely say the same about Chinese tech companies. VPN usage is higher among tech-literate people for obvious reasons, and while having access to uncensored information doesn't necessarily instill love for the US, wanting "bad things to happen to the United States" is a pretty extreme level of nationalism.

I wouldn't be surprised if Chinese tech employees in China had a more positive attitude with respect to the US than Chinese tech employees in the US, due to "the grass is greener on the other side"-type effects.

Re: US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

#75

Post by whoevercares »

Udik wrote: post #35
tertiary wrote: post #14

The whole ban is so gross. It's clearly politically targeted to deplatform Trump critics all while firing people up about China. For those that aren't familiar. TikTok is pretty ubiquitous in the under 21 crowd while being practically unused by older people. It's sort of like when young people fled to Twitter and Instagram to get away from their parents on Facebook. It's basically the next Twitter for that age group.…

> "China is bad" is just the excuse here. Wait. "China is bad" is not necessarily an excuse, it might be an end in itself. Populism needs enemies and threats to find and maintain support. By demonizing China (as it did previously with immigrants, BLM protesters, Iran, etc.) Trump effectively injects fear in the political discourse and creates the need for a savior with a strong attitude. Which is himself, of course.…

HN readers are not so friendly to pro-China comments or even those thread that tells the reality in China that they don’t want to believe

Re: US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

#76

Post by koonsolo »

I find this quite strange and short sighted.

I see my kids look at TikTok all the time. I don't really see how you could spread propaganda through 5 second dances and jokes. Especially since peers are doing that.

I would think the Party influence on Hollywood and other entertainment such as Computer Games would be way more disturbing. Injecting propaganda into a real story seems way more effective. Especially when you fully control the medium.

Re: US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

#77

Post by throwawayforce »

koonsolo wrote: post #76

I find this quite strange and short sighted. I see my kids look at TikTok all the time. I don't really see how you could spread propaganda through 5 second dances and jokes. Especially since peers are doing that. I would think the Party influence on Hollywood and other entertainment such as Computer Games would be way more disturbing. Injecting propaganda into a real story seems way more effective. Especially when yo…

I don't mean to be hostile but I think you are clueless. A lot of what shows up on tiktok and gets promoted can have a massive influence on what it's users begin to deem ok. And as kids grow they are far more likely to form opinions based on their peers than parents.

Dances may have been tiktoks start but the shift to shortform videos on a specific topic in rapid succession meets the criteria of propaganda. Particularly if they are humorous or provide a dopamine response.

China much like twitter and facebook and youtube has complete control over what their supposedly "unbias" algorithms direct users to. It is trivial to push propaganda between dances and jokes. Swaying public opinion has never been easier than in the social media age.

Re: US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

#78

Post by OwlsParlay »

koonsolo wrote: post #76

I find this quite strange and short sighted. I see my kids look at TikTok all the time. I don't really see how you could spread propaganda through 5 second dances and jokes. Especially since peers are doing that. I would think the Party influence on Hollywood and other entertainment such as Computer Games would be way more disturbing. Injecting propaganda into a real story seems way more effective. Especially when yo…

I've been using TikTok on and off for the past six months, at first because I was interested in seeing what you can find on the site.

It's mostly teenager dancing stuff, yes. If you start liking political content you'll get political content too. I've found there's a lot of pro-China, both soft-power "look how pretty the countryside is" stuff and straight up Uyghur denial. There's also a decent amount of anti-China activism on there as well, though.

Re: US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

#79

Post by stjohnswarts »

Any insight as to why they would back up to some place like Singapore instead of just some other datacenter in the USA? Seems inefficient and likely a loophole for CCP to easily get access to it. Pull up a mobile datacenter and dump it on 18-wheeler-net and then ship that back on a slow boat to China

Re: US government accuses TikTok of being a mouthpiece for the Communist Party

#80

Post by newen »

DLay wrote: post #53

I’ve seen plenty of U.S. military personnel posting TikTok videos while browsing the app. Many of them are casually posting their experiences of reserve duty life but I’ve seen a couple taken from outposts in Syria. Why is this tolerated if the U.S. Gov has major concerns about the PRC’s having access to TikTok’s data?

Anyone being actually anti US military (as opposed to the modern, polite, war is bad guys, rhetoric) get completely railed on and abused in Tik Tok.
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