431–440 of 677 posts
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Ban all Chinese apps?
Yeah. I don’t buy this argument until they ban all Chinese apps. As far as I can tell, it’s just a way to cut off younger voter’s access to information that is critical of Trump. And that’s a generous reading.
It may be a bad idea to do it, but this isn't the reason.
Unlike some other commenters below, I don't believe that this is a privacy issue. Instead, I believe that it is a national security issue because TikTok is controllable by the CCP which is ideologically opposed to the United States. The next global conflict will likely be one between the east and the west, with control of information being advantageous to both sides in the conflict. China already blocks the western I…
How is the CCP ideologically opposed to the United States? Keep in mind that one is a political party, the other one is a country.
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TikTok is the generation that is most malleable to propaganda in a way that can undermine an entire generation. TikTok also has history of recording telemetry that’s extremely alarming. Look into what is mined. Look into how algorithms get optimized to influence behavior. See a recent paper on this with using social media to shut down a power plant. Memetic warfare is real and it’s been going on in cyberspace for a w…
> TikTok is the generation that is most malleable to propaganda in a way that can undermine an entire generation. You don't have to look far to know this hypothesis won't stand up to any scrutiny. Not only are TikTok users typically in the age range less likely to vote, but everyone is susceptible to propaganda and lies. There is a lot of US produced propaganda out there aimed at the older generations which is being…
But that’s less my point, it’s more about the methods and attack vectors being an increased surface area now than ever before.
See here on why more so with TikTok generation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24614815
Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_management
“Chinese military scholars argue that their nation has a long history of conducting "psychological operations", a phrase that connotes important aspects of strategic deception and, to a certain degree, what the US Department of Defense portrays as perception management. For example, several articles published by the PLA's Academy of Military Science (AMS) journal Zhongguo Junshi Kexue, examine psychological warfare and psychological operations mainly as a deception-oriented function of military strategy.”
China are extremely skilled at psyops.
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I don't think the problem is that if/when it happens, it will be "undetectable". The issue is that if we have a polarized party-over-country political environment (which we do currently have), there is absolutely no guarantee a) that there will be a consensus about that the problem is real, that it matters, and that it should be addressed, b) that the party in power doesn't stand to benefit from interference and ther…
It seems to me that democratic destabilization in US is already in full swing and has nothing to do with TikTok subtly changing youth opinions.
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> It's not a company. It's a division of a foreign government. Can you elaborate on this? As far as I can tell this is just not the case, and none of the people saying it are clarifying what they mean.
If you examine ByteDance's structure technically, you are correct that it does look like just a regular company. But just about everything runs differently in China. All major companies in China have CCP party members on their boards who not only influence corporate policy, but are actually _deferred to_ on anything remotely political.[2][3] At the end of the day the party has the final say in any matters that it car…
If I decided to start calling it PHTT (Protocol for Hyper-Text Transfer), I'd be rightly viewed as a complete idiot.
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Kettle, meet Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Reddit, HN.
And particularly Instagram, Snapchat for the younger generation.
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I don’t think they’re any less or any more other than the potential net vectors exposed. A boomer typically has traditional media as a source of information which shapes their world view. These channels have their own programming and narratives. The zoomers are entirely on internet platforms which has a higher degree of manipulation. Every single person is mined against. Every single person gets optimized against. Th…
>If the typical “hacker” can launch a botnet with GPT2 and automate conversation and thread demographics based on interactions putting a “group” into a human in loop pattern with a goal ... imagine what state actors are doing. It scares me everytime I think about it how little $$ you need in order to reach e.g Reddit's front page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SAkUs3urrg
It’s incredibly alarming what one can do with very little resources.
It’s downright horrifying or exciting when realizing what one can do with more than average resources.
In a way, that’s why I think the battleground is more “weird” than ever. It’s not just state actors, it’s factions of organized and convergent groups using memetic warfare. Some groups naturally converge towards each other. Take the anon’s, and various sects then overlay it with state actor and your smaller groups. Weird nameless stuff of massive influence and self organization.
Why does everyone here have a problem with referring to the Communist Party of China with its correct acronym: CPC. If I decided to start calling it PHTT (Protocol for Hyper-Text Transfer), I'd be rightly viewed as a complete idiot.