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I wish a little that it was about spying on users. I wish more that it was about how TikTok is the worst thing humans have ever created. Hypershortform content is gigafrying the developing brains of young people, and then there are the peculiarities of its content. TikTok text-to-speech, obnoxious subtitles on every video, five hundred thousand shitty clips to the same fucking 20 seconds of a song over and over and over, TikTok dances, splitscreen videos of Family Guy clips and Minecraft because attention spans have apparently become that bad. Adolescents are mainlining psychic polonium just from all of these, and that's before we consider the psychic demon core that is social media.
Spying on users would be a good enough reason. I don't know how people respond with "My government is spying on me." Yeah but it's our government. It's a different and in many ways a far grosser abuse of power but at least you can say there are legitimate reasons for the American government to keep data on American citizens. There is no conceivable above-board justification for the Chinese government creating-via-numerous-cyberattacks a general database of American citizens and its existence alone is grounds to ban them from all American telecommunications.
It was probably expedited to congress because of AIPAC but that was long after Trump tried to ban it and well after the Biden admin had it investigated and banned from government devices. It also must be said that however much congress and their AIPAC handlers get their hackles raised about Israel and JQ shit, the actual power in this country, the unelected bureaucracy, is clearly highly invested in righties wasting all their time posting about jews. Look no further than that preeminent JQ voice of Nick Fuentes being a fed.
Regardless of the actual motive, absolute justification for the ban is and has been the CCP having a tool to introduce political narratives in a social media platform used by a massive number of Americans. It's not Reddit or X where they have to work with shills and botting, it's not /pol/ where they spam slide threads and run psyops like they did at the onset of the coronavirus. It's a platform they control where they can push the figurative button and suddenly millions of people are seeing the exact content the CCP wants them to see. Google does that too, but I know their reasoning, why is 'based China' doing it? It's not because they're ideologically lockstep. It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics. I still don't get how this has been missed, after a year of seeing commentators on the right making incredible snipes of nefarious deeds being snuck by the masses, only Sam Hyde has voiced a fraction of the animosity we need to exhibit toward China, which begins with expelling every single Chinese national in this country, and even he softened that with using it to frame a joke about honeydicking.
Certainly, they've been trying, but I'm not sure they've been getting anywhere prior to TikTok. Certainly, Russia's had more total success (although Trump probably didn't ask for Russian help, it was given, and it was almost certainly given specifically because Putin wanted to stoke the fires of the culture war).
Speaking as a former reddit powerjanny, not that insider knowledge is necessary as the admins posted this publicly, the Reddit "Russian bot" story was a total fabrication.
Admins banned 61 accounts. It wasn't unusual for me to ban more spam accounts than that on multiple single days in any given month, and very often those accounts had already accumulated thousands of upvotes.
The American intelligence apparatus had highly politicized reasoning for depicting Russia as an adversary. They're also part of the true power in this country, so personally I just can't find credibility in their words. After all, I saw for myself the proliferation of the bot hoax on Reddit. I can't say with certainty China was or is shilling on the site, but I can say how I was on /pol/ more than anything else just after Wuhan was quarantined, and those coronavirus general threads had videos from China of things that never happened. If Chinese cyberwarfare finds value in sliding and psyopping /pol/ and fielding an army of "wolf warrior" bots on Twitter, it's fair to suspect them of doing the same on Reddit.
I'll also say, having been introduced to just a taste, Chinese meme culture is incredibly complex, brilliant, and funny, all this even passing through translation. Heavy state censorship in the information age is cleverness' perfect crucible and surely some number of those people take their talents to contribute them to the state. If they haven't been doing any of this and it's just all a series of unfortunate coincidences, I don't think it's because they're lacking citizens who know how to talk like Americans, argue like Americans, and truly so importantly, meme like Americans.
I'm not sure how this relates to my post. I was mostly talking about 2016 wrt Putin helping Trump (the DNC hack being Russian is TTBOMK uncontroversial).
As for propaganda, I'll just say that I've had a couple of instances over the years of mistaking RT for Western conservative thought, whereas this has never happened with Chinese media TTBOMK. And there are incidents that are frankly embarrassing like the Fourteen Demands.
Uncontroversial, as in fashionable opinion often repeated by talking heads, or uncontroversial, as in, proven with evidence beyond reasonable doubt?
Uncontroversial (this is the correct spelling, btw), as in "the Mueller report lays out exactly which Russian military units did it on which days".
The Mueller report does not allege that Trump asked for this.
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In defense of Russia, there are a lot of non-conspiracy reasons that Russian conservatives might sound like American conservatives.
First of all, Russia is, for Europe, a pretty conservative country, and therefore its views are going to match up. They have similar concerns, and similar beliefs and similar hopes for the future. Therefore when a Russian says something conservative, it’s going to sound like American conservatives because— they agree, more often than not.
Second, unlike China, Russia is a European, Christian country. Yes they’re orthodox Christian but they are Christians and therefore when they talk about their values it matches up with conservative Christian values. Both groups want Christianity to be more prominent in society and things like gay, trans, and abortion to be if not banned, at least harder to get. When they explain their reasoning, they’re appealing to Christianity and to the Bible and traditional family values derived from Christianity.
Given just how much the two groups share, it’s not really all that odd to find them sounding similar to each other. Heck we can probably find conservatives sounding like AfD, not because German trolls, but because they share a concern about immigration.
Uh, Russia has the world’s highest abortion rate and IIRC there is no mainstream political party which sees it as different from normal birth control. The American religious right by and large actually practices their Christianity; Russia has a church attendance rate which is lower end of average for Europe. It’s true that Russia is homophobic and transphobic, but a bunch of that is the probably-accurate view that LGBT advocacy groups are vectors of American influence.
I’m not going to claim Russia is progressive, but it’s not a based conservative country either. United Russia may have slightly more in common with the GOP than with the democrats, but at the end of the day this is a corrupt imperialist power giving special rights to minority groups to keep the peace and operating off extreme centralization, state owned companies, and militarism.
If you want to see actual social conservatism in europe, look at certain Celtic regions(Hebrides, northern Irish Protestant bastions), Georgia, and the byzantine Catholic belt in the Carpathians(mostly western Ukraine, but also parts of Poland and Slovakia).
It's not true and haven't been for a long time. Just look at the current data.
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Abortion isn't end all be all of being conservative. Plenty of prolifers argue on that basis that abortion "is racist because blacks have more if them", "is eugenics", "targets vurnerable women" and other such leftist pablum.
United Russia would take a strong pro-life stance if their ties to Orthodox Christianity(which has identical views about abortion to the RCC) were genuine; their rhetoric on race/ethnicity is 'woke' and they have enacted strong hate speech laws. This isn't some kind of consistently conservative country even before you get to commie nostalgia.
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I feel very differently. I don't like China's government and I would hate to live in China, but at the same time, I definitely view the US government spying on me as being more dangerous than China spying on me. After all, I am a US citizen, so it is very unlikely that China would do anything to me no matter what kind of information they had on me. The US government, on the other hand, could do all sorts of things to me.
I mean, there's the "how sure are you that you are immune to tailored propaganda" issue and there's the "how sure are you that they can't figure out something to blackmail you with" issue. But those aren't the big points. The big points are:
Chinese families are small due to low TFR and chinamen make good immigrants- it is trivial to grant visas to all the clan of chinamen in the west whose enemy agent status actually matters.
That only solves the problem if both they want to come and the CPC lets them come. Obviously, by the point of them being explicitly hostages, the CPC wouldn't let them emigrate.
‘Chinese expats or their children being granted a security clearance or background checked for sensitive work are asked to provide a list of relatives who will immediately be granted visas upon completion of the process’ seems to solve the process- presumably the CCP isn’t preemptively taking hostages. It’s just when they need something. And these kinds of security checks already ask to disclose ties to foreign nationals and discriminate in otherwise unconstitutional ways- it’s not a huge stretch.
In any case, orientals in general seem to love America even before you get to the ‘totalitarian polluted and poor’ aspect of red China; I have a hard time imagining grandma and brother in law are passing up an opportunity to move and massively increase their standard of living.
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Yes, I didn't articulate the point as well as I could. I think the best I could say is this: every bit of excess data collection by the US government is horrifying, as is all of that with regard to Five Eyes. Nominally about terrorism, maybe they've even stopped a fair bit, but I do often wonder if it's the NSA more and less behind the hacks of conservative websites and if it's also the NSA carrying out doxxes of certain individuals before laundering it through chosen contacts for parallel constructions.
Still, however dark the purposes are of our government as they collect such data, the severity is matched and multiplied when asking: but why does China want it?
It could be reciprocity, if the US government maintains a database of every single Chinese citizen. Do we? I think I would have heard that as a retort, "The US government is doing the same thing with Chinese citizens" is, to me, much stronger than mentioning USFG domestic surveillance. To the point I would consider it entirely exculpating if we did it first.
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Small point but I imagine that split-screen videos of Family Guy and Minecraft are ways to elude automated copywrite detection. At least, Youtube Family Guy clips have weird oddities like that for that purpose.
Fair point about specifically the Family Guy mashups, but I've come across videos of whatever bigbrain podcast audio overlaid on whatever game, and that I'm confident is about attention spans.
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By the way, it's "copyright", not "copywrite" because it's about who has the right to make copies of a work.
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I mean, I agree, but banning TikTok wouldn't do anything at this point. TikTok was the first, but once it proved that the thirty-second video + infinite scrolling model was much more popular and addictive than regular video, it didn't take long for other websites to copy it (YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc.). You need to ban the format, not just a single company.
Congress can't legislate video length and I don't think it's necessarily the format. Shortform itself is not fundamentally bad, comedy is perfect for clips, same for sports and video games. Where these degrade is the race to the bottom in algorithm-pleasing content, and AI customer retention could be legislated against. The scientific data on the destructive nature of social media piles by the day, so there's a compelling health interest, and a law that flatly prohibits AI customer retention wouldn't fall afoul of other constitutional freedoms, it's not what they're randomly pushing, it's that the content is being randomly pushed, and these are multinational corporations engaged in interstate commerce, so even a very scope-limited interpretation of the Commerce Clause would find some degree of congressional authority in regulating such practices.
From there, it's simple. No endless scrolling, the sites can't serve unsolicited content based on, for example, the notion a user might want to watch a video, and especially might thus want to keep watching videos. For YouTube Shorts and others this would mean a user could go to their subscriptions and watch all the new Shorts, but when they watched them all, that's it. For Instagram and others it would mean no generic "explore" pages. It can't show you something because it thinks you might like it. It could possibly serve content analyzed as objectively or justifiably similar. If I enjoyed an hour-long history of whatever, I could ask it for other hour-long histories of whatever, but it wouldn't be analyzing clicks, view-counts or retention in its pushes. It would just be "Here's 25 videos of measurably similar content." Same for searching, no more "related" no more "you might also like" no more "users also searched," literal searched text in the title or the video transcript, limited tagging to prevent abuse in the video descriptions, and nothing from the comments. Ideally it should be suddenly very easy to search YouTube and be so specific or maybe so wrong that it returns no results.
And of course, a categorical prohibition on minors using the internet. This law wouldn't be targeted at the minors exactly, nor their parents. It would be targeted at corporations with astronomic fines for violations. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is already anticipating exactly such a law and has at least the framework for DeepMind-powered age-based captchas, because the only question I have is if their analytics determine with >99.99% accuracy any given user's age, or age bracket.
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