The issue isn't surveillance, it's the ability for China to 'put their thumb on the scale' of the black box algorithm responsible for populating every user's feed to emphasize or de-emphasize topics/ideas that are strategically beneficial to China, and bad for us. This is not hypothetical, this is happening, and has been happening.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/briefing/tiktok-ban-bill-...
pizza|1 year ago
Does that mean we’re all going to sleepwalk into quoting from The Governance of China? Unless our congress sees us all as dangerously impressionable morons - which I actually seem to think is their opinion of us more and more.. - who lack critical thinking skills to such an extent that we basically shouldn’t even have the option to make up our own opinions in response to feed recommendations… well excuse me for thinking that that is more than a little patronizing.
Ultimately, who is the one most overtly putting their thumb on the scale here…?
- China, if for every 100 Hong Kong related posts on Instagram there are only 0.7 posts on TikTok, or
- USA: delete every single post about every topic.
Do you really actually have the opinion that China is the most censorious here? Really? The possibility that, just maybe, you might be served a video that would embarrass the CCP once in every 500 videos instead of every 100 videos… therefore you are not allowed to view the 499 other videos - no matter what they may have meant to you, or what value you might have derived from them, or what new connections or community you may have been building… well gee, thanks, I guess.
I have to say that when I came across this bit from that article:
“The move resembled a classic strategy of authoritarian governments: burying inconvenient information.”
the sheer lack of awareness of the irony had my eyes just about nearly rolling out of their sockets. If that’s the case then I can’t think of a single more authoritarian move Congress could make than just nuking TikTok outright since it poses an inconvenience for congress? Am I just taking crazy pills here??
Note: whether or not this all ends up being the right or wise move on the state, is not even the place I am really coming from here. It’s just that I haven’t heard a single justification for this ban that actually didn’t either just immediately fall apart under its own internal logical inconsistencies or otherwise just give the impression of a lazy half measure, or possibly blatant corruption, by being such a selective application of law.
In other words, yet more bad law by lawmakers who don’t care about getting it right. Nor will they be the ones to clean up their mess, if it ever does get cleaned up, by setting this precedent.
qvrjuec|1 year ago
I think it's easy to be insulted by this perspective if you spend too much of your time surrounded by people who fall more than one standard deviation to the right on the intelligence bell curve. 84% of people are to the left of that, and can vote.
> Ultimately, who is the one most overtly putting their thumb on the scale here
The expression "putting their thumb on the scale" means influencing subtly and deceitfully, so China. I chose this expression intentionally.
> Do you really actually have the opinion that China is the most censorious here
Nowhere did I mention censorship. Its not merely about suppressing perspectives, it's about influencing them. Hong Kong is too obvious-- what about amplifying anti-AI sentiment to increase regulation and hobble AI progress in the US, giving a decisive advantage to China in the AI arms race? Amplifying anti-nuclear energy sentiment, to erode US energy security and create economic advantages for the Chinese solar industry?
I do agree w.r.t. the messiness of precedent, though.