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 stimuli with almost surgical precision, and completely unbeknownst to them. This is uncomfortable to recognize and discuss, so the conversation is sadly reduced to "China/AI is bad/evil" to further foment hate and division.
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 be interesting to know if this were true in that case.
> People are literally being programmed [...] by the specific triggers
I hate marketing/PR as much as the next person, but have become part of daily life. How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing?
Edit: Rereading your comment I realize you're talking about something else, but I guess the same applies nonetheless.
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.
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.
Just look at how people were programmed into believing that masks were bad. At best they could save lives, at worst they were an inconvenience. But some people acted like you had just punched them in the face if you asked them to wear one
And why? Because certain politicians and media outlets decided to randomly make it a political issue, and then suddenly you have people angrily spouting all kinds of crap rather than be slightly inconvenienced and have to smell their own breath
Furthermore you can target specific persons : heads of states, gov personnel, parliament representatives,... and their families, friends. You can get them "conditioned", you can drive them to commit errors for the purpose of black mailing them, etc...
Absolutely correct. Along with the usual reduction, there is also the, "Actually, it's too free speech that is bad we need censorship." Meanwhile, no issues with operant conditioning from the Skinner Box Phone.
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.
This is literally just the anti-China "brainwashing" propaganda warmed up for a new paranoid generation. I used to collect John Birch and anti-communist publications from the 50s for their histrionic historical value, but now I'm thinking I should start reprinting them and changing the dates. Both Democrats and Republicans would eat it up.
edit: somehow Cambridge Analytica's bullshit marketing material combined with The Manchurian Candidate in the boomer mind.
> “The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”
> The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured.
> [...]
> Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that “totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing.
If you’re an adult watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day that’s on you to fix. When I was at my “peak”, I was watching 2-3 hours a day and that felt like a lot.
If a kid is watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day, that’s on the parents to fix.
This is like the hot dog man meme. “Who’s responsible for this?” Ultimately you are in control of your eyeballs and your time. Stop watching!
Or not. TikTok is awesome. Watch it 8-10 hours a day if you want.
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, since chinese have a lot less access to those people if they start causing trouble than the local US agencies), and now it's someone else too.. but for "the rest of the world", it's just another country doing the same as has been done before by americans.
If you're bothered by social networks having access to a lot of very personal data, you're late to the game... if you're bothered because it's a different country, then welcome to the club.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
I know this feeling. It probably just means that you live in different reality than half the people commenting here. Maybe half the people commenting here are not americans ? It's still interesting and on subject, because social networks are probably what is causing this divide, because bubbles are isolated by design
And you are preemptively accusing without proof against users who are simply voicing their opinions like everyone is allowed to do here. Why are you attempting to act like an arbiter of legitimacy when you are clearly not one?
> Yu is a former engineering lead for ByteDance in the US who worked at the company between 2017 and 2018.
This seems like an outrage bait lawsuit. The facts in the case are five years out of date, ByteDance has been through the wringer in the ensuing years and there’s no evidence that this backdoor exists in the current app.
Im more curious what tiktok data amouts to and how it could be used by CCP. I’ve heard of bans of Tiktok use by politicians and army bases and such. Without sensitive location data to some specific users but solely the young sharing memes, I wounder how CCP could use that data… Not a Tiktok user myself, if anyone could illuminate me on this it’s be great. For example does tiktok have direct messages from users to users that could be spied on? My naive assumption is that Tiktok is a meme sharing platform and timesink
This seems sloppy. If I were to build an app that was popular in say Cuba or something I wouldn't leave myself technical gateways to access the data and manipulate things directly. That would leave a clear paper trail and open me up to some innocent engineer stumbling across what's happening.
Rather I would embed trusted people into the company at low to mid-level positions of power, like software engineers, content moderators, etc. where they could quietly use their influence on shape things in ways that are favorable to my goals. I would do this with every company I could get them hired at not just the one making my app.
If I really had a need to exert undue influence I would use a side-channel to communicate instructions to people at the company (potentially even the leadership) and rely on them to carry out the orders. Remoting in and changing things myself seems silly.
I would be extremely surprised if a state-actor like China couldn’t access most US company data at will. If you can invest several billions and have thousands of people working to create a breach, no company is safe, not even AWS or Microsoft.
In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected?
I’m much more concerned by the laziness of most western governments in understanding if this was a threat or not.
TikTok is allegedly staffed with dozens of ex-FBI, CIA, and US State Department officials who moderate content[1].
Somehow PRISM and the closed-doors FISA court hearings, Lavabit, etc seem to be collectively memory-holed by USians. Nowadays their anxiety about state surveillance is reserved for the "CCP".
When it comes to the CCP is it even a "backdoor"? They assert full LEGAL right to all data from companies in their jurisdiction. Everyone who operates in China, domestic or foreign, knows the costs of doing business.
Meanwhile, the CCP can just open their huge wallets and pay US-based data-brokers for all the private information of US citizens that they ever dreamed of ...
Oh dear. I won't be surprised to see this being true since TikTok is just a worse version of Facebook/Instagram who has already admitted and shown evidence of them violating the privacy of its users [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], and its defenders are just running out of excuses faster than a running tap at this point.
Before anyone says 'All social media companies do this', If large social networks like Facebook have been fined in the billions of dollars for such repeated privacy violations, then given the size of TikTok, you might as well agree that for TikTok to continue to operate in the US, it must to pay a multi-billion dollar fine for such repeat offenses and abuses of its user's privacy simply on the grounds of the size of the many users on the platform.
I'm starting to become fatigued by all this TikTok news. Either ban the app or don't. Causing anxiety over TikTok without any action is the worst of both worlds.
Even if they didn't have an official backdoor, they would have many backdoors by just placing people on staff (getting them hired in the normal way.) You can't stop state intelligence agencies from getting into any domestic data that they want, even with law (which they can just ignore.) Social media is full of 'ex-'state intelligence operatives, and objections to that situation are made out to be bizarre, or even banned from discussion on these same social networks.
As far as I can tell, what we're supposed to think is that managing a social network, or any communications service, is within the same field as covert intelligence and surveillance, so of course that would be the hiring pool.
Non-Chinese have little to fear from Chinese government monitoring of their activity on TikTok. Chinese people know their government (which openly censors, rather than laundering their censorship through covert means like the Five Eyes), and know how to act to keep safe.
There are two main problems with social media, as it exists today:
First, the company that operates the social media system, has access to data that exposes extremely personal information about the users, sometimes directly, and sometimes through inference based on user behavior. This naturally attracts parties that might benefit from this information, originally advertisers, but increasingly nation states. Personally, I think the solution to this involves both privacy legislation, and legislation that dramatically restricts what foreign entities can do in the United States, but I acknowledge this is very controversial.
Second, the algorithms that the social media site uses to decide what content to presented to users is extremely susceptible to manipulation and to causing undesirable side effects. Even if the site operator is benign, the algorithm might magnify, extreme or emotional content in order to maximize engagement. We have seen this for several years now. And, of course, the site operators may choose to amplify messaging that they like or suppress messaging that they don’t. This may seem great if your values align with the site operator, but remember that operators change, e.g., Twitter. And of course, the site operator might be hostile to your values, e.g., TikTok. I think that the solution to this problem is actually much easier than the solution to the first problem. The solution to algorithmic problems is to make the algorithm opt-in. For example, when you join a social media site, you initially might be presented with the option to use company, curated prioritization, or to use time and subscription-based prioritization. However, social media sites should be encouraged or perhaps forced to allow community curated, prioritization, and allow community members to opt into, a community feed versus the company curated feed. I think we would see a small number of users and communities who would quickly come up with their own curated feeds, that would be popular with like-minded individuals.
Of course the party committee can access data. That's how China works under Xi.[1][2] Party committees had less presence in private companies post-Mao and pre-2003, but now they're back. Most larger non-state owned companies now have one, so the party can keep an eye on the private sector from the inside. They have roughly board-level authority.
Nominally, the party committee represents the party members who work for the company. But they're not chosen by the employees; they're appointed by higher levels of the party.
[+] [-] 1101010010|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway038519|2 years ago|reply
It would be interesting to know if this were true in that case.
[+] [-] capableweb|2 years ago|reply
> control what they see
> People are literally being programmed [...] by the specific triggers
I hate marketing/PR as much as the next person, but have become part of daily life. How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing?
Edit: Rereading your comment I realize you're talking about something else, but I guess the same applies nonetheless.
[+] [-] codedokode|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slowhadoken|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hedora|2 years ago|reply
Is that terrible? Of course. However, US law is as bad or worse.
[+] [-] makach|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisRR|2 years ago|reply
And why? Because certain politicians and media outlets decided to randomly make it a political issue, and then suddenly you have people angrily spouting all kinds of crap rather than be slightly inconvenienced and have to smell their own breath
[+] [-] password4321|2 years ago|reply
TikTok Feeds Teens a Diet of Darkness
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932387
[+] [-] wslh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slim|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotnet00|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnarbarian|2 years ago|reply
the big innovation recently has been the ability to manage content of peer to peer communication as well through social media.
[+] [-] wmidwestranger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbluedots|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polyomino|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadcore|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikrl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] useEffect|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electrondood|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
edit: somehow Cambridge Analytica's bullshit marketing material combined with The Manchurian Candidate in the boomer mind.
-----
edit: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-brainwashi...
> “The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”
> The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured.
> [...]
> Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that “totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing.
[+] [-] throwaway4575|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcole|2 years ago|reply
If a kid is watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day, that’s on the parents to fix.
This is like the hot dog man meme. “Who’s responsible for this?” Ultimately you are in control of your eyeballs and your time. Stop watching!
Or not. TikTok is awesome. Watch it 8-10 hours a day if you want.
[+] [-] lopkeny12ko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|2 years ago|reply
If you're bothered by social networks having access to a lot of very personal data, you're late to the game... if you're bothered because it's a different country, then welcome to the club.
[+] [-] COGlory|2 years ago|reply
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] slim|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssnistfajen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bostonwalker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mullingitover|2 years ago|reply
This seems like an outrage bait lawsuit. The facts in the case are five years out of date, ByteDance has been through the wringer in the ensuing years and there’s no evidence that this backdoor exists in the current app.
[+] [-] grugagag|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CSMastermind|2 years ago|reply
Rather I would embed trusted people into the company at low to mid-level positions of power, like software engineers, content moderators, etc. where they could quietly use their influence on shape things in ways that are favorable to my goals. I would do this with every company I could get them hired at not just the one making my app.
If I really had a need to exert undue influence I would use a side-channel to communicate instructions to people at the company (potentially even the leadership) and rely on them to carry out the orders. Remoting in and changing things myself seems silly.
[+] [-] Lucasoato|2 years ago|reply
In this case, that’s even way easier, the company is Chinese, the CCP can have this access lawfully, is this something unexpected?
I’m much more concerned by the laziness of most western governments in understanding if this was a threat or not.
[+] [-] jchook|2 years ago|reply
Somehow PRISM and the closed-doors FISA court hearings, Lavabit, etc seem to be collectively memory-holed by USians. Nowadays their anxiety about state surveillance is reserved for the "CCP".
1. https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-ru...
[+] [-] paxys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|2 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/technology/tiktok-bytedan...
[+] [-] consumer451|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|2 years ago|reply
Before anyone says 'All social media companies do this', If large social networks like Facebook have been fined in the billions of dollars for such repeated privacy violations, then given the size of TikTok, you might as well agree that for TikTok to continue to operate in the US, it must to pay a multi-billion dollar fine for such repeat offenses and abuses of its user's privacy simply on the grounds of the size of the many users on the platform.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...
[1] https://www.scmagazine.com/news/privacy/uk-tiktok-16m-fine-c...
[2] https://fortune.com/2022/12/22/tiktok-data-privacy-blunder-c...
[3] https://futurism.com/tiktok-spy-locations-specific-americans
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65126056
[5] https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/05/08/tiktok-lgbtq/
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|2 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure that's based on my viewing habits, because I love cooking and memes, but it does make these serious claims humorous at times.
[+] [-] blueflow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tremere|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell, what we're supposed to think is that managing a social network, or any communications service, is within the same field as covert intelligence and surveillance, so of course that would be the hiring pool.
Non-Chinese have little to fear from Chinese government monitoring of their activity on TikTok. Chinese people know their government (which openly censors, rather than laundering their censorship through covert means like the Five Eyes), and know how to act to keep safe.
[+] [-] efitz|2 years ago|reply
First, the company that operates the social media system, has access to data that exposes extremely personal information about the users, sometimes directly, and sometimes through inference based on user behavior. This naturally attracts parties that might benefit from this information, originally advertisers, but increasingly nation states. Personally, I think the solution to this involves both privacy legislation, and legislation that dramatically restricts what foreign entities can do in the United States, but I acknowledge this is very controversial.
Second, the algorithms that the social media site uses to decide what content to presented to users is extremely susceptible to manipulation and to causing undesirable side effects. Even if the site operator is benign, the algorithm might magnify, extreme or emotional content in order to maximize engagement. We have seen this for several years now. And, of course, the site operators may choose to amplify messaging that they like or suppress messaging that they don’t. This may seem great if your values align with the site operator, but remember that operators change, e.g., Twitter. And of course, the site operator might be hostile to your values, e.g., TikTok. I think that the solution to this problem is actually much easier than the solution to the first problem. The solution to algorithmic problems is to make the algorithm opt-in. For example, when you join a social media site, you initially might be presented with the option to use company, curated prioritization, or to use time and subscription-based prioritization. However, social media sites should be encouraged or perhaps forced to allow community curated, prioritization, and allow community members to opt into, a community feed versus the company curated feed. I think we would see a small number of users and communities who would quickly come up with their own curated feeds, that would be popular with like-minded individuals.
[+] [-] m3kw9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
Nominally, the party committee represents the party members who work for the company. But they're not chosen by the employees; they're appointed by higher levels of the party.
[1] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...
[2] https://www.seafarerfunds.com/prevailing-winds/party-committ...
[+] [-] rglover|2 years ago|reply