311–320 of 426 posts
Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stim…
TikTok Feeds Teens a Diet of Darkness
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This is pretty much Plato’s cave. But yeah, it seems to be absolutely true.
Not sure Plato’s cave applies here.
I doubt most people believe that TikTok is valuable to them but I'm sure many find it irresistible once they are hooked.
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This is not something new. History shows that when the government controls the media, it can control people's opinions and beliefs. The only difference is that now the control over TikTok users' minds is not in the hands of US Government and that's why they are unhappy.
The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis is a great doc on how this took shape in the early 20th century; its primary focus was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud who invented public relations and was a powerful political consultant for many US administrations. One of his main areas of research was using media as a tool for crowd control... he had a somewhat noble viewpoint about it, believing that large crowds by natu…
Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stim…
This is exactly what Russia did in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The Trump campaign gave voter polling data to Konstatin Kilimnik. Russia then proceeded to exploit Facebook to target swing voters, and Trump won because of 80k voters across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
See https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-sele...
See also https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
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When you hear something outrageous on FOX or CNN, you yell "bullshit" at the TV. When you read the same thing on Facebook and see 20 of your friends positively interacting with the news story and showing their approval, you remain quiet at best, join the lunacy at worst. What you don't see is the three shadowbanned accounts explaining why it's lunacy.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that a lot of people will not "yell bullshit at the TV".
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If you want dual citizens to be ineligible for congress then just do that, it doesn't have to be a crime...
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Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stim…
Correct. The other issue is to not develop pro-CCP rhetoric out of this false dichotomy too. It’s all just varying degrees of social pollution created by some propagandists.
Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stim…
Regarding your comment about behavioral management at scale. Carl Sagan once said: "If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." It would b…
There really is pain associated with acknowledging reality sometimes. I certainly know that from my personal life.
Wisdom comes from willingness to go through pain. Something our general culture ain't great at.
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Sam - we've been asking you for years not to break the site guidelines, let alone this badly. We've cut you as much slack as anyone in the history of this site. I don't want to ban you but the slack is definitely going to run out someday. No more, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Half of the comments in this thread sound like they were written by CCP propaganda chatbots. A dead giveaway is the failure to address the topic at hand and immediately deflect to "but the USA does XYZ too!" No one is disputing such a claim, but that's also not what we're talking about here.
You have to be aware, that many people here are not from USA, and their/our first thought is, that facebook and many others do that too. So for many of us, a foreign entity already has access to our conversations, content, and all the same data now china has from tiktok. For americans it might be different, since until now, it was only their three-letter agencies checking up on them (which technically is even worse,…
The issue is which country has access to our very personal data, not simply a "different country". There are many countries whose citizens would trust a foreign government ahead of their own.