The TikTok Hearings Inspired Little Faith in Social Media or in Congress

From the bits I have seen, congress didn't do worse than usual and the ceo gave a lot of dodgy no-answers.

For example one congressman asks if titktok used wifi of users to track them and ceo replies something like "titktok needs wifi to work" which may have you go "oh look dumb congressman" but the congressman was asking about how tiktok scans devices in your wifi and collecte that information for tracking and who knows what else (he clarified as much afterwards).

He was also very dodgy and distanced himsef from bytedance which is a weird thing to do.

Some of the big chinese APT breaches are related to data about people. E.g. OPM hack or equifax credit information. This tells me they want information about americans so they can use it against americans. This means to manipulate social groups but more than that you can target people based on their habits and interesrs and turn them.

Even if they couldn't just order bytedance to do stuff you are a fool if you think hacking a company they have physical proximity to or implanting operatives there is difficult for them.

In other words, I am not concerned about teenagers being tracked or looking at some video but rather being made sympathetic to CCP propaganda and against their own country's interests. And it doesn't have to be brainwashing either, you can pick people based on psychological profiles and give them propaganda or just money and use them as assets like the CIA does except you have young people who will go into military and academia soon. And keep in mind, China doesn't care about the next few months they care about the next few decades.

Based on the reaction in support of tiktok I have seen, I believe if a conflict between China and Taiwan is developing it will become like vietnam with many americans protesting against a war and being anti-military. China will win the war before it even starts because even though they would lose a conventional war, the US cannot fight a war without the support of the people.

In crude terms, you will always have propaganda. The US military needs to win over americans using its own propaganda more than CCP, if anyone is going to brainwash you and turn you into an assett it should be your own government.

And to clarify, I mean no moral superiority here. China does what the US does and will do against Chinese citizens. But the fact if the matter is, China is the biggest enemy of the US right now, not russia or isis or whoever else. They have already succeeded in turning the global south against the US and are carefully watching the Ukraine conflict to time any move for Taiwan to be at the moment the US is most worn out with Ukraine and with whateve chaos the election season might bring. 2024 in my opinion would be the best time to invade Taiwan (Xi basically said that's a too priority for his new term).

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I can't help but wonder if other countries are watching these proceedings and wondering about their own national security. The US is concerned about misinformation, blackmail, and influence campaigns, but is the US using the data that FANG has access to do it to other countries? Are they just trying to keep a monopoly on that power?

We can see hints that the US is using these platforms to do that. Imagine the negotiating power the US has to go into a trade deal negotiations with another country. Run an influence campaign to sway the other country's population to accept a bad deal. Use democratic processes to get someone elected who will sign off on the bad deal. End up profiting enormously.

Having free access to show propaganda and misinformation to most of the world is an enormous power.

It will be far better having US as dominant power than having the axis countries like China, Russia, Iran.

I prefer democracy over dictatorship what about you?

The difference between relation of US companies and government vs Chinese companies and government, US companies often go head-to-head with the government on policies, or they will need "lobby" it, but for Chinese companies, Chinese government have communist party officials directly running the board, Chinese company can only obey the party, look at Jack Ma.

US companies take the data turn it into profit, but scary part of Chinese companies and Chinese government they took the data probably not for profit but for something else, political agenda? or maybe even more worse.

There seems to be a lot of pro-congress sentiment ITT right now, which is worrying to me.

TikTok is a capitalist social media company that certaily deserves a lot of scrutiny, especially considering ties to China.

But if you think Congress did a good job here...then I don't know how we live in such wildly different worlds. Asking that CEO "does TikTok access the home wifi network?" is such an incomplete question. Everyone of us would immediately ask a clarifying question: "do you mean: does tiktok access data on other devices in the network" or "does tiktok monitor traffic within the network". These are legitimate questions, but to ask a completely idiotic question and then not let the man clarify is just embarassing. Same thing with "Have you changed the source code?" WTF does this even mean?? It's as if I'd asked somebody "Have you eaten?", not have you eaten today, or have you ever eaten. Have you eaten. Yes the fucking source code has been changed. It's being changed all the time???

Please...Congress already had an opinion on this before the hearing ever started and congress made sure to ask deliberately unanswerable questions to hit the man with "Yes or no????" as soon as he opened his mouth.

I'm certainly not a fan of TikTok, but if you see this as anything other than the US congress trying to get a unprecedented ban of a foreign competitor, you are being naive. 150 million US americans use TikTok. They are too big, they can't be as easily controlled and most importantly: they make money that belongs to Meta, Google and all our other friendly data monsters.

Don't be silly, this is not about national security, the CCP or anything like that. It's about money, like always.