I mean does it work? Other than profit making for the consulting companies?
Like someone else pointed out, if people are hiring them in order to provide cover for decision making, then maybe the whole thing being a charade is the point.
>There are a bunch and they are very easy to find.
Really? Because the U.S. government, in their own court filing, have openly admitted that there is no evidence of TikTok's wrong doing in terms of manipulating information.
I don't think it gets much more authoritative than U.S. government's own court filing.
The link you provided has been debunked over and over again. It was a paid-for study aimed to generate certain conclusion.
And its methodology is silly at best, insane at worst (uses U.S. social media company as a control group for neutrality on China lmao).
If you do understand First Amendment then you should also understand that foreign propaganda is protected speech, and is not treated as yelling fire in a crowded theater:
>It is illegal if it is paid for foreign state and undeclared.
Good. Because ByteDance has never tried to hide the fact that it's a Chinese company. So that argument wouldn't matter even if there are evidence of them pushing Chinese propaganda.
Except it is. The Supreme Court has actually ruled that the First Amendment rights for Americans to receive foreign propaganda, even during the Cold War:
I don't think you know what the First Amendment is. Not only does it guarantee freedom of expression, but also freedom to receive other's expression and speech.
The U.S. government is not allowed to ban any foreign books, movies, or even propaganda.
I really wish people like you do a little bit research before making such a confident statement like that.
There research is not credible because their only "evidence" is that when using certain keywords, Instagram and YT returned more "anti-China" content than TikTok.
So instead of arguing the U.S. social media has an anti-China bias, they argued that it's the evidence of TikTok being more pro-China.
Using American social media as the control group for neutrality on China is absolutely insane.
The most likely cause is that TikTok is just a lot less political and more international than YT and Instagram.
For rest of the world, people do not automatically associate words like "Xinjiang" to "Chinese government oppression", the fact that they expect that to be the top result can be argued that American media is the one manipulating information.
>Ticktock content is curated to fit CCP’s narrative not simply an algorithmic reflection of what its users care about.
If you can show evidence of that you should give it to the U.S. government, because it has repeatedly said there is no evidence of such and any threat remains hypothetical.
Except the whole reason for the TikTok bill is that information/speech will be under Chinese government control on TikTok and that can be weaponized.
So make up your mind, if you say TikTok is being banned for the possibility of "weaponized propaganda", then it is information being suppressed.
If you say it's not about information suppression, then you can't use the "Chinese propaganda" argument, which is used by pretty much all ban supporters.
>This isn't like China where the government bans any services they can't control, and directs the services that they can control to suppress any information they don't want people talking about.
>Deliberately misinforming people, especially under a foreign state payroll, is illegal.
First of all if you have any evidence of TikTok engaging in it, you should present it since even our government have said there is no such evidence and that possibility remains hypothetical.
Secondly no, it's not illegal to spread misinformation, no matter the motive. The First Amendment absolutely guarantees that right.
> Removing the platform entirely is not censorship. Especially when everyone will just shift to Instagram, Youtube etc.
It is, because politicians voted for the bill have openly admitted the Israel-Gaza content is what pushed them to vote for the ban. Instagram, YT, etc are under U.S. control and engage in sufficient self-censorship when it comes the Israel-Gaza conflict in order to make Israel look good.
>multitude of copy cat apps for their freedom of speech.
Except they can't. All of the other apps are under U.S. government control and have engaged in severe censorship on certain topics such as the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Even the politicians who voted for the bill have openly admitted that making Israel looking bad is the reason they are banning TikTok.
>A better example would be that reciprocity would say that if China mistreated our civilians then we should mistreat theirs.
Good example, and thank god that is unconstitutional.
For example China can arrest American citizens in China without dual process. But we cannot arrest Chinese citizens, or anyone here in the U.S. and just put them to prison without dual process.
Americans in China have no freedom of speech. Should we ban Chinese citizens in the U.S. from speaking freely as well? Again, that is unconstitutional. U.S. constitution protects anyone within the U.S. not just U.S. citizens. Otherwise we can just send someone with a green card to jail without trial.
So your example only serves the counter-argument, which is that reciprocity is not something you should aim for when it comes to human rights.
> which is in turn used to spread CCP propaganda.
Since not even the U.S. government has been able to provide any such evidence, and have admitted that the threat is hypothetical, if you have any such evidence you should present it.
This is why I think generative AI tech should either be banned or be completely open sourced. Mega tech corporations are plenty of things already, they don't need to be the morality police for our society too.
>If YouTube wants to remain viable, they just need to bite the bullet and hire a whole bunch of people.
I completely agree, but that's against everything Google wishes for, which is a world where everyone is 100% online 100% of the time with their data 100% in the cloud and decisions being made by AI 100% of the time.
Pushing for human intensive operation inside Google might as well be career suicide, this is why they would much rather keeping spending large amount of resource on "improving the algorithm" instead of just hire more humans and make more progress with a fraction of the cost.
> Would you rather have the Chinese regime oppressing the people with their current level of wealth, or the same regime oppressing a people with 1% of their current wealth (e.g. North Korea)?
You hit the nail on the head. Every time someone brings up "human rights" as a reason to stop trading with China is just hiding behind a pretentious facade, and an obvious one at that. It's totally understandable to feel threatened by the rise of China, it's totally understandable to feel competitive pressure from a country that deploys many unfair strategies, but it's not ok to pretend to care about the "human rights" of a country's citizen while being absolutely ok devastating an economy of 1.4 billion people.
Someone on Reddit literally said because CCP doesn't respect human rights, we should send the country back to the middle age and cut off them completely from the rest of the world.
You know what, I bet even if China were a completely democratic country, there would still be many who hold extremely hostile/defensive attitude towards the them, for a myriad of reasons that I'm not going to spell out.