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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Tiktok is a national security threat in a way that X is not.

With Tiktok, Chinese intelligence gains a great deal of data about the U.S. military and intelligence, including the location of many or all of our secret bases and personal details about the people who work in them.

From a security standpoint, X isn't a threat because they are the least likely to share data with foreign governments. It's only a threat to those who wish to censor alternative viewpoints.

With Tiktok, Chinese intelligence gains a great deal of data about the U.S. military and intelligence, including the location of many or all of our secret bases and personal details about the people who work in them.

This seems like a fig leaf reason.

  • US personnel are a tiny minority of the population, banning it for everyone would be disproportionate. Just tell the soldiers that they can't bring their private phones to their bases and have to use phones which vetted software instead.
  • Most info you get from phone tracking in non-restricted spaces is actually not that valuable. You could probably get the same by using classical spy work, like just observing people or putting trackers on their cars. I mean, if it was the seventies, you could try to find a serviceman who frequents the local gay night club and try to blackmail him over that, but today he would just laugh at you. You would require something heinous to entice treason (perhaps being a serial killer or child abuser), which is highly non-trivial to figure out from location data.
  • Most of all, Tiktok is hardly the only avenue for getting location data. People have a shit-ton of apps installed, facebook, whatsup, tinder, candy crush, pokemon go, etc. Probably even some other apps controlled by the PRC either directly or through letterbox companies. As a general rule, all of these apps will gather all the data they can get their grubby little hands on, and store it somewhere in the cloud. If you think that the PRC can not get access to the location records of half the US smart phones, I would call you very optimistic.

The Tiktok ban is purely about controlling the flow of information between users on the platform, and what the algorithm could push.

You could probably get the same by using classical spy work

At some point, which they've long passed, making spying easier in effect grants the spies new capabilities, even though they "already could do that". (This applies to domestic spying too. The NSA could send out an agent to surveil any target that is caught up in Echelon, but surveilling everyone makes things so much easier that there's no comparison.)

you claim to care about free speech but isn't sending information about secret bases and military personnel to the CCP a form of speech? :thinking:

jk jk

isn't the Brazil judge making a similar national security argument though? not around secrets but around public order? X is fostering hate speech and supporting the return of the deplorable Bolsanaro elements, or whatever?

It seems to me there's a non-trivial distinction between shutting down a network to try to prevent influence and data gathering by a semi-hostile foreign government, and shutting down a network to try to silence domestic political speech.

I don't think you could openly do the latter in the US. Though if Harris is elected, I won't be shocked if Musk is indicted on some tenuous securities charge to try to force him out of his companies in favor of more accommodating leadership.

All the big social media companies almost certainly employ spies that are exfiltrating data.

If I were running Chinese intelligence I'd think it smart to Br'er Rabbit the Americans about banning Tik Tok. If they actually do it then maybe they'll rest on their laurels a bit thinking they've actually accomplished something. It also provides a blow to their supposed principled stance on free speech, and the debate itself is a good distraction from my lesser known methods of collecting data.

It seems to me there's a non-trivial distinction between shutting down a network to try to prevent influence and data gathering by a semi-hostile foreign government, and shutting down a network to try to silence domestic political speech.

I'm pro free speech, but the distinction seems pretty blurry. Twitter is also gathering data, for sure, and I'm pretty sure you could also portray what they're doing as "influence". I guess it all depends on your relationship to the United States.

I justify my anti-TokTok stance by it being an ADHD-inducing brainrot machine, not by any political influence it has.

But of course, any domestic political speech you don't like can always be easily painted as influence of a (semi-)hostile foreign government. What's more, any hostile foreign government worth their chops will try to influence your domestic political speech.

But of course, any domestic political speech you don't like can always be easily painted as influence of a (semi-)hostile foreign government.

Under US law, I think this would also be fairly distinct from the TikTok ban. Allegations of foreign influence don't get you past prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination here. The TikTok ban is (probably) legal only because it hinges on a structural fact about TikTok (foreign ownership) rather than targeting any particular viewpoint.

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