China had the less sophisticated tools of groups like the Stasi in that era.. 3 weeks of terror was not much more in retrospect.

Americans who are currently protesting should consider if the apparatus will be subtly manipulating their environment not just in the next months or years but from now on with high quality data it will have perfectly categorized mined and will re-mine.

Radio Free Asia is USA funded propaganda.

That doesn't mean it should be ignored. That doesn't make it normal.

What China did to the Han Chinese makes them worse than ANY other modern country. The great leap forward and the cultural revolution have not comparison. Add in the chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 and 1979 invasion of Vietnam and they are butchers and imperialists.

In Portuguese we use the same word for ad and propaganda! In fact that word is just propaganda!

I think you're being sarcastic, but just in case you're not

> Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic manipulation of information—including facts, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion, attitudes, and behaviors toward a specific cause, ideology, or agenda.

I think most media is talking about the mess the US is in with ICE right now. For what’s worth I am in Europe and on X more than half of what I see is about American cops and ICE , most against ICE but some in support of it.

Nah, the writing is on the wall for a long time and they nearly got shut down several times. I can’t imagine that the permission to continue operations came without major concessions.

Nice subtle twisting of words.

There’s an enormous difference between driving slowly through a crowd of protestors with no injuries versus running over protesters with a tank.

You may wish to remove the ?si=… tracking string from your URL. It might also be worth editing in some context: right now, it's a bare YouTube link (which I don't particularly want to click on). Is this footage? A video essay? A pop song?

Things the US could also do if it unsanctioned them.

I threw my computer off the balcony. I look at a web design business. "No fair!" I think to myself, "if only I had a computer I could have a web design business too!"

I smash the web designer's computer out of spite.

The painful to answer question is whether the intention is to block the spreading of lies or the spreading of truth?

How about just letting the user choose, instead of foisting your own idea of 'right' on them.

If I was the US blessed feed, let me have it. If I wasn't the Chinese maintained one, why not.

Or, even better, let me make my own! Or use one from an open source that I, the user, trusts.

Hell, EXPOSE THE ALGORITHMS. The simple fact that we can't see the weights, or measure inputs to outputs, means we are in total control of whomever currently holds the reins, and they can literally play God behind the scenes if they have control over enough eyeballs.

They said "concrete evidence". Have we also considered that US consumers seek out brainrot, so the algorithm gives them what they want? How is that different from any other US-owned social media?

China has media laws that would make much of what appears on any sort of Western media platform illegal, so they're obviously going to get a very different experience in China. From anything that might violate social ethics, to clickbait titles - all illegal in China. They've even cracked down on overly effeminate men - 'girly guns' [1] and a million other things I'm not listing here. Basically Western style social media simply is impossible there.

In any case, entirely Western oriented platforms also push brainrot to Western viewers, so I don't think there's any conspiracy so much as just cultural differences.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niang_pao

>Turning Americans stupid might count.

Don't need tiktok for that. Besides, a certain party prefers it that way.

> Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.

It's less legitimate when you don't want a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see on their own platforms. The US for example shouldn't dictate what US users see when they visit www.bbc.co.uk

The just US got mad because a Chinese owned/operated social media platform got massively popular and they just wanted the ability to control and censor it.

How do you know that conclusion is not the product of brainwashing? MKULTRA is just what we know about with certainty.

Censorship is just a form of brainwashing.

America: does the usual American thing Americanly

Commentators: What are we, some kind of Asians?

I lived in China as an American a while back and had a similar take. Their ability to grow successfully and manage their populace definitely presented a new model to a lot of countries.

Oceania gets tech tips from Eastasia.

Oceania has always gotten tech tips from Eastasia.

I guess rest of the world should take notes and adjust the approach to China and those segments of Westerd society where totalitarianism got normalized.

Why blame China? This dire situation is not on foreign nations seeking to destroy US democracy, it's entirely on domestic robber barons capturing the State for their own gains. China has very little soft power among the general population, while Musk, Ellison and the other propagandists run the show.

> Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.

An interesting thought I read a couple days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/trump-carney-chin...:

> Finally, and most controversially, I suspect the same “if not America, then China” logic applies to political ordering as well. The United States under Trumpian conditions has allowed populism to come to power, bringing chaos and authoritarian behavior in its train. Recoil from that by all means — but recognize that it happened through democratic mechanisms, under freewheeling political conditions.

> Meanwhile, the modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.

If a large outside power is intent on screwing with your populace I think the only way to really stop it is with diplomacy or a crackdown on free speech.

Authoritarianism has been starting to become normalized because China and Russia are increasingly able to mess with our society in the same way our leaders always messed with theirs.

> This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights

Ignoring the magnitude to draw a false equivalence is a great way to discredit your position. Neither party is perfect but only one of them is denying the full personhood of over half the population, having armed men threaten the public with lethal violence over constitutionally-protected activities, or saying that the executive should be able to direct private industries for profit. Debates about things like how much the government should ask private companies to enforce their terms of service are valid but it’s like arguing over a hangnail while you’re having a heart attack.

Most of the country is genuinely committed to the bill of rights. The Trump administration is determined to ignore every single amendment, but even a lot of the Republican party I don't really think wants this. People are genuinely worried about Chinese media control. But Trump obviously wants to control the media and censor things. I hope the right turns around. Assuming that everyone in politics is working in bad faith is how we become an authoritarian country like China. It is hard when the leadership is obviously working in bad faith and the entire Republican party deliberately chooses bad faith and lies over any reasonable alternatives.

> All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles).

I don't consider user-directed upvotes/downvotes/flags to be in the same category as company or state decided censorship.

western arrogance is truly astounding. somehow people who consume 0 chinese media and cant speak a lick of the language somehow are intricately aware of not only chinese media, but chinese society.

but of course. the benchmark is minor influencer and HN darling naomi wu.

You're saying Chinese people are less informed than Americans about China?

[dead]

You could even say that many foreigners are better informed about the US than US citizens are about the US, but that's not a high bar... I mean, 38% still approve of the current administration so that's already over one in three who don't understand the basic functioning of government or the economy.

To be fair, they're not really allowed to show any evidence that they think otherwise...

Don't forget that the regular operation of Chinese policing is already much less free than what Americans are used to, plus the restrictions on internal freedom of migration (Hukou, less onerous than it used to be, plus the two SAR of Macao and HK). Mandatory state-issued ID, linked to your phone and bank account and so on.

As well as racial profiling. There's not that much immigration to China in the first place, legal or otherwise.

Then the GP statement is still correct.

"The forced US hosted tik-tok sale is all about hiding information from the US public that most people in the rest of the world have easy access to."

> I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good

I hope not because it’s bad and that’s really all that matters in this conversation. And nitpicking whether or not there are other avenues for information is completely besides the point. I don’t even really understand what point you’re trying to make. If you think this is bad, then say it’s bad and we shouldn’t be ok with it. Saying “I’m not saying it’s good” then muddying the waters reads like you’re trying to defend the action.

> I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of people who only use one social media platform and never check any other news source at all.

When it comes to the _younger generation_, I don't think it's an over-estimation; they don't read news sites at all.

Well isn't it interesting that at the same time that these social media platforms were getting off the ground, the VC class decided founder control was super important and now essentially all of the biggest companies in the world are in the sole control of men who do questionable activies on islands in the Caribbean.

Now you wonder what these companies are doing to shape events, and the answer is that Tim Cook is attending a private showing of a PR project for the wife of the president premiering on a competing streaming network whilst people hold vigils for the people that the regime has murdered.

Back in the late-90s, I was watching a panel on CNN discussing the new "information age". Everyone talked optimistically about how the internet was gonna benefit humanity because people would be better informed - only the best information would make its way to the top, all the crap would be filtered out. But there was one naysayer, and I'll never forget what he said: More information is not better information. Others on the panel couldn't believe his cynicism; said he didn't understand people. I think about that a lot these days.

Oh nice, what would the coup be about? Would it be for something closer to western interests or would it be about because theyre too far from marxism, like when the students at Tiananmen Square were trying to democratically vote in more marxism but the Americans only saw democratically

You must have heard about it from somewhere? Some reliable third party intermediary that is neither US nor China?

Can you share the supporting data?

Gordon Chang has been making this prediction for almost a quarter century. Will it happen before or after the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world??

To be fair, I don’t think it’s as much collapsing as it’s having an internal party power struggle where the more authoritarian faction seems to have violently quelled a rebellion by one or two other factions.

I think platforms like Bluesky are better suited towards this and that's what people should be using

It started out with the "China bad" narrative, but it only got bipartisan support and momentum when US people started seeing Palestinian videos on TikTok.

The law for a sale was passed after Gaza. The thing you talk about is data sharing with China on Americans, and some in the Trump govt were opposed to this. That part was resolved with Oracle handling their servers.

There's 2 orthogonal lanes:

1) A philosophical debate along the lines you've indicated here, how much is it worth to control the algorithm, and how much does that equate to controlling speech.

2) The allegation that current buyers bought it specifically to bring their ideology to the algorithm, however effective or valid you think that is (I think it just hastens TikTok becoming something for "old people").

OP said "buying TikTok was about hiding information from people", and the people who bought TikTok are trying to suppress certain information on TikTok.

Whether you or I think that's effective or not is up for debate, I also avoid social media, but OP made a statement about intentions.

(And, aside, the current intentions appear far more pointed and ideological than when it was owned by ByteDance as a lottery winner with a surprise overseas success, optimizing for youth engagement.)

The chinese government has never physically assaulted me or my neighbors, never used tear gas around the elementary school my family attends. The united states government has. It's interesting to me that you're so certain about your threat model here but I don't share it.

Bro, conservative talking points have existed since before Jan 2024.

Right now the Ellison family owns both CBS and the US version of TikTok, so sometimes the connection is kind of literal.

But this complaint is pretty old, I think of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. (Setting aside his Epstein connections for a moment) The way we do censorship is much less the methods of a traditional totalitarian state and more like the private sector policing what is acceptable discourse.

Goalpost moving, this one.

The post you were replying to stated:

> hiding information from the US public

They didn't say "Americans now don't have easy access to information" (your words). They said this sort of manipulation would be to hide information from the American public.

Many people in the American public only see news on TikTok. If information is suppressed within TikTok, it is hidden to them.

If TikTok stops showing content, can they find it some other way? Yes, if they know to look. It's not blocked or destroyed, but it's hidden.

Is that a problem? Yes. TikTok's dominance was and is a problem in and of itself. But that isn't an excuse to abuse its dominance for propaganda purposes.

As X has shown, these platforms are crucial to the information ecosystem, and their selective curation can warp the views of an entire population.

And it got a Streisand Effect from the attempted scuttling. That doesn't change what they were trying to do, it just means they're not always executing perfectly.

In the long run, they bought out some dying legacy media in CBS and social media has a short half-life. Nobody's saying they're geniuses but it's clear what they're trying to do.

It got delayed, didn't it? In the meantime the news cycle moved onto Trump's intervention in Venezuela and even greater ICE violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_CECOT#Broadcast_postpon...

Nice of you to delete their first sentence which includes "delay". Which is what happened if you read the wikipedia article instead of holding water for propagandists, e.g., Bari Weiss.

It’s January. My bad for not being as infallible as you are.

That’s not what Romney said. His - and the wider establishment’s - concern is that unsanctioned content is allowed to be treated the same as any other content.

Anyone knows that TikTok simply tailors your feed to your interests & interactions. But even this is not acceptable when it comes to topics the establishment doesn’t want disseminated.

And if they had undeniable proof that TikTok was boosting/manipulating such content, why haven’t they revealed it now that TikTok US is under US control?

But it’s okay to not be concerned. Just don’t come crying when the book burning starts.

Choose your alignment wisely! You can only serve the Good or the Evil!

Because the concept of limiting state power for when the other side takes power is not in the American political vocabulary.

If by "tools" you mean technology or physical infrastructure, I largely agree.

But I'm talking about political tools. Breaking down the norms about how power is supposed to be wielded. Concentrating more and more power in the executive because Congress would rather be powerless and blameless than have responsibility.

For example, giving the President the power to set tariffs was done with the understanding that the President would use this power wisely in an actual national emergency. That created a political tool. Now we have a deeply unwise President who declared a nonsense national emergency and is playing havoc with trade using this tool. If the tool hadn't been created then I don't think we'd have that problem. I doubt Congress would be willing to pass sweeping emergency powers in an environment where there is no emergency and no need for those powers. And there was never a need for those powers. Tariffs don't need to be enacted so rapidly that they can't wait for Congress to convene and pass a law.

In this case, we've created a political tool giving the President broad power to interfere in a specific private business. It's no surprise if that tool gets abused, and it was completely unnecessary to begin with.

So I'd phrase it as: "Good guys shouldn't make political tools that are far more powerful than they need to be assuming that they'll be used wisely, because bad guys will happily use the full power of those tools."

Maybe. I just find most “which administration really started XYZ” discussions are a way for people to feel better about their affiliations. Because ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are continuous and not an inherent property of things, it is always possible to construct a causal chain that happens to start wherever convenient for your rhetorical purposes.

I didn’t realize that TikTok retroactively wiped every young person’s brains of the content they watched over the past months as well!

The question isn't whether they've been successful in hiding information. It's whether their goal is to hide information (or I would say, to control the narrative), which it clearly is.

This is why the administration has gone out of its way to try to get Kimmel and Colbert off the air, why it has commandeered CBS and tried to kill 60 minutes pieces critical of the administration, why it violated the law in order to keep TikTok (already fervently pro-Trump) up and running, and why allies of the administration have been put in charge of TikTok after the transition. It's why Bezos is slowly strangling the Washington Post, why Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same to the LA Times, and why the administration is putting their thumb on the scale for Paramount, rather than Netflix, to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN). It's why Musk bought Twitter. It's why they blatantly lie in their press conferences and statements to the media about how the ICE killings happened.

If you walked into a Turning-Point USA meeting in a high school, do you think the kids attending that meeting could accurately tell you what ICE has been doing? I don't.

Surely you know how things work at scale.

If you introduce friction with something that millions or more use, a few % peeling off or missing things means tens of thousands of people are impacted. And tiktok has a hell of a lot more than a million users.

I still don’t get what you’re trying to say or why you’re downplaying this.