• GenEcon@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Its actually also a media problem. For example, the largest Tiktok account of a german politician belongs to Maximilian Krah, of the far right party AFD. Just yesterday it was revealed that his personal assistant is actually a Chinese spy. Krah himself voiced a lot of pro-Chinese opinions before, like being pro annexation of Taiwan and denying the genocide on the uigyurs.

    This begs the question if his Tiktok popularity is based on a non-biased algorithm or if the CCP made a deal with him, boosting his Tiktok popularity in exchange for being pro-China.

    • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      Yeah well, it’s not like it’s beneath the US government to do the same thing. Remember Cambridge analytica, or the Snowden leaks? My point being, as far as I’m concerned as a citizen, banning TikTok just transfers power to a more concentrated group of actors. That makes the problem worse.

      • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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        6 months ago

        Wan’t CA a Russian op though?

        That said, this new hybrid war era has nation states conduct disinformation campaigns against each other. Tiktok was a tool to conduct such a campaign, the US wants to defend itself. It’s not like China or Russia doesn’t do the same even harder to try and defend itself. It’s not a crime yet to accept Russian money as an NGO or politician in the US (as least not in itself), it is definitely a crime in Russia to do the same.

        Don’t get me wrong, it’s a move that will definitely consolidate control over opinions, and that’s not a good thing. It’s like a fever. We can’t have nice things because China would break them, so we need to put them away until China stops doing that.

        • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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          6 months ago

          The US would break them (and has always broken them) even if China wasn’t around.

          • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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            6 months ago

            How do you know? The US would be a different country if it wasn’t targeted by Russia during the 2016 election. Russia made Trump. Russia made Brexit. How do we know how the world would look like if that hasn’t happened?