This also can explain bytedance's approach of support and reassurance towards the incoming administration. I bet they care more about their company and not having to choose between two loss scenarios than about politics/international relations, just like most of big corporations in the world.
Your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest. No matter how evil they are because they have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in autocratic China, for example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
It's the opposite: if they can block any alternative to the "hive mind" they can easily pursue any interest they like and make you believe that they align with your interests. And if you keep having doubts, they can easily label you as a dissident or a foreign agent, because no one will take your side, mostly for lack of tools and platforms to expose fabricated evidence.
It is definitely not the opposite. You have very recent cases where Russia has been caught financing US right-wing hate-speech "influencers" to spread extremist talking points fed by Russia's propaganda effort. Their purpose is to sow divisiveness and turn Americans on each other.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/01/russia-...
It was not the first time either. In 2016 Russia was caught actively trying to spark a race war in the US.
So what?
You also have the same kind of "influcence" from the US, on a total different level though, given the disproportion of available budgets between the two.
OTOH that wasn't my assumption, I simply said that single minded propaganda will harm free people more than those who are not free.
Russia or not Russia (it is honestly ridiculous to compare Russia to the USA at this point of history).
> In 2016 Russia was caught actively trying to spark a race war in the US.
And you don't know what the US has done exactly because they do not allow platforms to speak about it, the "fact checking" was simply state censorship disguised as "war on fake news".
No one can seriously believe that Russia can outsmart US intelligence or outmaneuver them, unless you don't really think that the US are collapsing and are no longer the more powerful country in the World, with the more powerful military, with the more powerful and pervasive intelligence.
Which is frankly not credible.
But there are still people out there that with a straight face will tell you that the US elections have been rigged by Russia (or at least they tried).
Which would put the US behind even some small country like Luxembourg or The Vatican.
If you can't or refuse to understand the danger of having totalitarian regimes destabilize your country, including calls for extreme violence against minorities, then no wonder you're trying to argue there is nothing wrong with having the likes of Russia and China screw you over.
I happen to be born in a country where the US have controlled every single elections for 50 years, at least.
I know what happens when you refuse to obey to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGHXjO8wHsA
My "so what" should be read as: does this really sounds new to you? haven't you heard about stuff like "operation condor"?
it's called innocent until prove guilty for a reason, it's the system working as intended.
And the US have exploited it too and are still doing it.
As an example, read the transcript of Victoria Nuland conversation about the future of Ukraine during the time President was someone NATO disliked for not being anti Russian enough.
Nuland: OK. He's now gotten both Serry and [UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, *Fuck the EU*.
Did Nuland pay for saying it? Of course not. On the contrary, she was awesomely compensated for her work.
Your example further reinforces my point that content matters less than who is saying this content. You quoted a phone call that was very likely to be have intercepted by Russian intelligence and quickly disseminated on Russian-owned media, yet you're freely posting this on an American website.
It is absolutely not!
It is surprising to me that people believe the USA are victims and not the greatest instigators of geopolitical unrest of the past 80 years (at least).
> You quoted a phone call that was very likely to be have intercepted by Russian intelligence
Nahhh
The Russian intelligence simply put it in the open, but who actually intercepted Nuland is unknown.
The point is we perfectly know that the USA are waging wars to also punish Europe, but it cannot be said, because platforms are all from the US and follow US directives.
That's why people also followed in love with tik tok, it was a breath of fresh air, finally few things that we all know are true (Nuland transcription just prove it) could finally be said (again: never used the platform, that's what people I know have said to me and I know a lot of regular people, white collars, regular jobs, kids and all the rest. They simply understand that American social networks and American propaganda have become so unbelievably false that it's baffling)
> yet you're freely posting this on an American website.
Am I?
Have you noticed my name is a generated random string?
Do you ever wonder why people like me do that?
That principle applies to laws, in order to minimize the chance of abuse when investigating criminal and civil charges.
This is not the same. This is about national security, and specifically enforcing national security policies. You do not need presumption of innocence to determine if you should embargo a country, expell a diplomat, and ban a suspicious supplier from your critical infrastructure.
Are you saying that US decision makers are the ones to blame here?
> and ban a suspicious supplier from your critical infrastructure.
I don't think China controls through tik tok what country the US should or should not embargo...
Similarly, all so called "far-right" parties that are supposedly financed by Russia in the EU ultimately are in favor of national interests.
Similarly, Ukrainian nationalists are in favor of Ukrainian interests.
If it came to a war between Russia and the EU, who would fight? Not the chicken hawks of the Green Party, but the "Deplorables" who vote "far-right".
The entire Russian influence narrative was concocted by the Neocons who had moved from the Bush era Republicans to the Democrat party. Now everyone realizes that perhaps China and Russia had financed culturally left organizations all along, which is entirely in line with the historic behavior of the Soviet Union. So everyone abandons ship now and pledges allegiance to Trump.
Regarding the division to the US population: That is in the interests of the established two parties, so no one looks too closely what is actually happening.
Post trump win people in elite circles started to realize and actually discuss (to my amazement) that maybe they should not have played all those games to derail Bernie Sanders. TikTok served as an interesting counterweight to the national narrative on many topics. What does not directly affect China negatively may also pose a threat to the US and that seemed to bubble to the top on TikTok from time to time.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-goes-dark-us-users...
Is it because he his a collaborator of the CCP or because the accusation against China where just a ruse to move the attention away from the Dem losing the elections on their own incompetence? (I am in no way a Trump supporter, but honestly the Dems did everything in their power tho lose the elections)
This is obviously false.
Go check TikTok to see what shows up in searches for Tiananmen square or Uighur genocide, or even anyone of the many small catastrophes that go against the CCP's narrative.
You're claiming that consuming propaganda from a totalitarian regime that actively engages against your security, stability, and best interests is somehow better than consuming hypothetical propaganda from your own democratically elected government. Make it make sense.
Foreign propaganda is much less dangerous than domestic propaganda because domestic propaganda is more likely to relate to issues that actually matter to citizens.
It's not about what you care or don't care. It's about using China's social media service to discuss the very topics that China wants to censor. Again, go to TikTok or whatever alternative service provided by China and try to refer to the Tiananmen massacre or Uighur genocide. See what your paragons of free speech treat that.
Since TikTok became massive, US gov & agencies lost that oligopoly/monopoly and now China (or any other country for that matter) could define the narrative, form and destroy opinions.
Simple Porter's Five Forces model of analysis. People despised censorship (I will not debate whether this 'content moderation' and/or 'censorship' was good or bad). The "New Entrants" took over. And since it is clear that TikTok cannot be defeated in the foreseeable future, and it cannot be purchased, then it must die.
(q.e.d.)