Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard
Has to be seen in larger context of the Attention Wars. There is now more content then eyeballs by a massive margin. The UN report on the Attention Economy quotes a study that says less than 0.5% of content produced is being consumed by a human.
In such a abnormal state of surplus Content, how does anyone get noticed?
There are just 2 options -
1. Spend more on ads.
(This is something all politicians know cause the winner of every single American Presidential Election is the candidate who spent more on Ads on Broadcast Media. Atleast up until Trump+Zuckerbergs algos allowed a different path to Attention Capture. The algos were quickly rectified. See Twitter Files from Matt Taibbi. So when the elites talk about democracy and tell you to vote ask them to pay you instead of the lobbyists, politicians and zuck)
2. Control what the Platforms do. If the platforms dont bend make them. See Modi in India.
Bigger question than Tik Tok bans is why are we producing so much Content? If there are more producers than consumers. And the producers are causing every growing content growth, and all locked in an arms race for non growing attention what is the Purpose of such a system?
I guess his implication is that TikTok is intentionally distorting opinion. But how do we know public opinion on TikTok isn’t what the baseline would be, and the rest of US public opinion isn’t the one being intentionally influenced?
I am for the divestiture (US media should be controlled by Americans) but it does raise questions.
> I am for the divestiture (US media should be controlled by Americans) but it does raise questions.
Why? And is this universal? Should French media be controlled by the French? Chinese media by the Chinese? North Korean by the North Koreans?
That's a genuine question (and non-OP can give their own responses). I have rather complex opinions, not strongly held, and I'd love to hear from others.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that US media should be owned by Americans, but I do wonder if it makes sense to allow foreigners to have ownership if their own countries don’t allow the same kinds of rights as well. Bringing China up, I don’t really see why Chinese media should be allowed more access to American markets when they don’t reciprocate.
So the law would be that any country that has another country's media stations operating with in their country will then be allowed to have their media organizations operating in the first country? That sounds complicated and schizophrenic.
So every country has to maintain a list of countries that have some sort of quasi-official news regulation agency that says who's a news agency and not are not and where they're operating?
Yes, there typically has to be reciprocity; this is what closed off the world's media throughout the entire duration of the Cold War, and is the paradigm under which China (and Russia to an extent) still operate. It's why RFERL, originally a pro-American propaganda radio broadcast targeted at Eastern Bloc and communist countries, was created, and why you could go to jail for listening to it in the USSR. Actually, currently, you still can (in Russia under their wartime laws).
It wasn't and still isn't legal to run an unregulated foreign-owned news bureau in basically any country. Social media is enmeshed with current events / news so it falls under like jurisdiction.
"Schizo" applies here as there is a definite schism between countries in the world and always has been. Try operating a HAM radio around Florida/Cuba and you'll find the southern neighbor has jammed (I believe) most radio news coming from the US.
In general, reciprocity works well across a broad range of international relations, (visas, tariffs, mutual defence/non-aggression/..., and otherwise).
As an idea, it's not "too dumb to believe."
Indeed, it's one of the places the US' draconian visa policies often come back to bite it. If you're travelling to any developing country with reciprocity on a US passport, you can expect to be treated horribly.
It's a difficult problem to consider, given that everyone speaks freely in global forums, and you end up with cultural exchange on an individual level... but you also have to think geopolitically.
A country is free to drop bombs on itself (the US does this regularly at test ranges)
A country is _not_ free to drop bombs on other countries... that's war.
If your country is not in control of its territory, it is not a country. It's some other country, the one that's in control of the territory.
If your country is not in control of its own media, then some other country is. And that country will use that power to its advantage, including destroying your country.
You have to use military superiority (and of course diplomacy, but it's backed by force) to keep other countries from freely dropping bombs on your country whenever they like.
You use customs, surveillance and barricades to control the flow of goods, people, capital across your borders - and if you don't, you don't control your borders, someone else does. Are you really the government of this territory, or is it in fact your neighbour?
You use licensing, regulators, standards, media ownership rules, etc. to hold your own broadcasters accountable for what they transmit to people, and also to clamp down on propaganda broadcasts controlled by other countries. You _used_ to be able to see Russia Today (RT) on regular TV, but since it acted as the mouthpiece of Russia, insisting Russia's not at war with Ukraine, etc., it was banned. If it were to start being independent of Russia and start reporting the truth, it would have a chance of being unbanned.
The great difficulty of social media is that it's not even "a country" operating it, it's usually "a corporation" (in the case of TikTok, China exerts an oversized influence on the company running the service, much more than the US exerts on Twitter or Russia exerts on Telegram, so we're mostly back to "a country" is running TikTok specifically)... and while the individuals on social media networks are (to some extent) real people with individual opinions, the specific opinions _allowed_ on these networks are controlled by that corporation. And users of those networks really just want to see things they've subscribed to, in the order of posting, but instead those networks are flexing their power over the user and pushing recommendations at their eyeballs, ultimately making themselves arbiters of what's popular, what's spreading, what ideas are being pushed. And that's horrendous for any country, in the same way that letting another country control your media is horrendous. If Elon Musk were to say "let's all have a knife fight in the middle of your city, wouldn't that be cool!" and have that appear in every Twitter user's timeline... I suspect a non-zero number of knife fights would break out across the world. That's _power_, and it's power that nobody in your country has a say in.
We can't even necessarily _stop_ this cross-cultural contamination... in the UK we talk about idiots who want to "plead the fifth" (we're not the USA, we don't have a "fifth amendment", we have a right to silence), and one of our cringiest moments was British protestors chanting "don't shoot me" to unarmed British police. Those protestors were totally filled with USian brainworms. This is happening because one of our biggest problems is US cultural hegemony steamrollering over our own. Our citizens are engaging primarily with US media, US-owned services like Youtube, and US controlled social media networks (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.) and they're exposed to an outsized number of US-based English speakers with their US-centric opinions.
Your country has a problem if masses of its citizens are more au fait with another country's culture, laws and societal norms than they are with their own.
X media controlled by X doesn't mean other media is not accessible. I'm all for local media (of a significant size) not having foreign influence as long as you can have access to foreign media. It's actually awesome to hear about your country from something quite remote, like for example Al Jazeera. It puts things in perspective.
In the age of the internet, what's the difference between local media and foreign media?
If I live in Boise, Idaho, and there is a Japanese media company reporting on Boise, Idaho new under boise-idaho-news.com, for anyone interested in Boise, Idaho... you catch my drift.
Broadcast TV is going the way of the dinosaur.
Something like an effective TikTok ban would presume a centralized firewall or ISP filtering or similar.
As a footnote: A lot of my ideas here center on cash. I personally think of free speech as an individual right and not a corporate (or governmental / organizational) one. But I don't want to bias the discussion with my own ideas here.
"X media controlled by [private companies based in] X" has obvious antipatterns too, it creates oligarchs and tests how pure govts are abut enforcing competition legislation viz. takeovers and monopolies, also some markets have less $ than others. Consider Rupert Murdoch of Fox/Sky started out as a newspaper baron in Australia in the 1960s, bought US and UK titles, took over the UK tabloid industry in the 1980s (without becoming a UK citizen) and in return sold media favors to govts from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair, then became a US citizen in 1985 and expanded his empire to Fox/StarTV. Murdoch has been kingmaker for deciding who gets elected leader in multiple continents for 4+ decades now, also for selling the Iraq invasion to the US/UK/Australian publics.
This is why media ownership legislation has to put limits on both foreign ownership and monopolies. It's interesting to watch FB deny the blatant reality that it's a media company not just a technology company [0], since to admit the obvious would trigger oversight. US Congress is dancing around eventually having to legislate for that, on FB, YT, TikTok, Twitter/X et al.
TikTok is a black box and so it is not really possible for people on the outside to know what it does behind the scenes. The lack of transparency and the ties to the CCP are indeed a national security threat to other countries. I recall reading analysis that showed very skewed representation of different keywords on TikTok compared to other platforms. I have trouble believing that this is actually organic and balanced. I think it is much more likely that it is a result of manipulation - how TikTok increases or reduces certain views. China has a tool that’s perfect to create political chaos in rival countries - I doubt they would pass up the opportunity to abuse it. I also find it suspicious that ByteDance would rather shut down TikTok than allow its sale (https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-prefers-tiktok-...).
Let’s also not forget - China does not allow American social media to operate in their country. When trade is allowed, access to their market is highly controlled - for example Tesla being forced to use Baidu for mapping. TikTok can and should be banned on the grounds of this free trade issue, leaving aside privacy and national security problems.
The New York times is a black box. And this lack of transparency along with its connection to the US government are indeed a national security threat to other countries...
There still will be. I believe this narrative is part a more general effort to normalize the suspicion that all "leftist" or "progressive" ideology among American youth, especially any rejection of capitalism, religion, or American imperialism, is the result of communist propaganda and mind control. The end goal being the government exercising direct censorship and control over the American internet to preserve "free speech" from pernicious foreign influence.
I agree, but I would characterise it more generally than that. It's not specifically leftism, but any rejection of the theory that underpin the present power structure. For example, right wing populism which takes the form of isolationism (in America) or anti-Atlanticism (in Europe) must be Russian astroturfing.
25 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 66.9 ms ] threadHas to be seen in larger context of the Attention Wars. There is now more content then eyeballs by a massive margin. The UN report on the Attention Economy quotes a study that says less than 0.5% of content produced is being consumed by a human.
In such a abnormal state of surplus Content, how does anyone get noticed?
There are just 2 options -
1. Spend more on ads. (This is something all politicians know cause the winner of every single American Presidential Election is the candidate who spent more on Ads on Broadcast Media. Atleast up until Trump+Zuckerbergs algos allowed a different path to Attention Capture. The algos were quickly rectified. See Twitter Files from Matt Taibbi. So when the elites talk about democracy and tell you to vote ask them to pay you instead of the lobbyists, politicians and zuck)
2. Control what the Platforms do. If the platforms dont bend make them. See Modi in India.
Bigger question than Tik Tok bans is why are we producing so much Content? If there are more producers than consumers. And the producers are causing every growing content growth, and all locked in an arms race for non growing attention what is the Purpose of such a system?
It makes money, duh.
I am for the divestiture (US media should be controlled by Americans) but it does raise questions.
Why? And is this universal? Should French media be controlled by the French? Chinese media by the Chinese? North Korean by the North Koreans?
That's a genuine question (and non-OP can give their own responses). I have rather complex opinions, not strongly held, and I'd love to hear from others.
So every country has to maintain a list of countries that have some sort of quasi-official news regulation agency that says who's a news agency and not are not and where they're operating?
Just the idea sounds too dumb to believe.
It wasn't and still isn't legal to run an unregulated foreign-owned news bureau in basically any country. Social media is enmeshed with current events / news so it falls under like jurisdiction.
"Schizo" applies here as there is a definite schism between countries in the world and always has been. Try operating a HAM radio around Florida/Cuba and you'll find the southern neighbor has jammed (I believe) most radio news coming from the US.
As an idea, it's not "too dumb to believe."
Indeed, it's one of the places the US' draconian visa policies often come back to bite it. If you're travelling to any developing country with reciprocity on a US passport, you can expect to be treated horribly.
A country is free to drop bombs on itself (the US does this regularly at test ranges)
A country is _not_ free to drop bombs on other countries... that's war.
If your country is not in control of its territory, it is not a country. It's some other country, the one that's in control of the territory.
If your country is not in control of its own media, then some other country is. And that country will use that power to its advantage, including destroying your country.
You have to use military superiority (and of course diplomacy, but it's backed by force) to keep other countries from freely dropping bombs on your country whenever they like.
You use customs, surveillance and barricades to control the flow of goods, people, capital across your borders - and if you don't, you don't control your borders, someone else does. Are you really the government of this territory, or is it in fact your neighbour?
You use licensing, regulators, standards, media ownership rules, etc. to hold your own broadcasters accountable for what they transmit to people, and also to clamp down on propaganda broadcasts controlled by other countries. You _used_ to be able to see Russia Today (RT) on regular TV, but since it acted as the mouthpiece of Russia, insisting Russia's not at war with Ukraine, etc., it was banned. If it were to start being independent of Russia and start reporting the truth, it would have a chance of being unbanned.
The great difficulty of social media is that it's not even "a country" operating it, it's usually "a corporation" (in the case of TikTok, China exerts an oversized influence on the company running the service, much more than the US exerts on Twitter or Russia exerts on Telegram, so we're mostly back to "a country" is running TikTok specifically)... and while the individuals on social media networks are (to some extent) real people with individual opinions, the specific opinions _allowed_ on these networks are controlled by that corporation. And users of those networks really just want to see things they've subscribed to, in the order of posting, but instead those networks are flexing their power over the user and pushing recommendations at their eyeballs, ultimately making themselves arbiters of what's popular, what's spreading, what ideas are being pushed. And that's horrendous for any country, in the same way that letting another country control your media is horrendous. If Elon Musk were to say "let's all have a knife fight in the middle of your city, wouldn't that be cool!" and have that appear in every Twitter user's timeline... I suspect a non-zero number of knife fights would break out across the world. That's _power_, and it's power that nobody in your country has a say in.
We can't even necessarily _stop_ this cross-cultural contamination... in the UK we talk about idiots who want to "plead the fifth" (we're not the USA, we don't have a "fifth amendment", we have a right to silence), and one of our cringiest moments was British protestors chanting "don't shoot me" to unarmed British police. Those protestors were totally filled with USian brainworms. This is happening because one of our biggest problems is US cultural hegemony steamrollering over our own. Our citizens are engaging primarily with US media, US-owned services like Youtube, and US controlled social media networks (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.) and they're exposed to an outsized number of US-based English speakers with their US-centric opinions.
Your country has a problem if masses of its citizens are more au fait with another country's culture, laws and societal norms than they are with their own.
It&#x...
If I live in Boise, Idaho, and there is a Japanese media company reporting on Boise, Idaho new under boise-idaho-news.com, for anyone interested in Boise, Idaho... you catch my drift.
Broadcast TV is going the way of the dinosaur.
Something like an effective TikTok ban would presume a centralized firewall or ISP filtering or similar.
As a footnote: A lot of my ideas here center on cash. I personally think of free speech as an individual right and not a corporate (or governmental / organizational) one. But I don't want to bias the discussion with my own ideas here.
This is why media ownership legislation has to put limits on both foreign ownership and monopolies. It's interesting to watch FB deny the blatant reality that it's a media company not just a technology company [0], since to admit the obvious would trigger oversight. US Congress is dancing around eventually having to legislate for that, on FB, YT, TikTok, Twitter/X et al.
[0]: "Is Facebook a Media Company? That's Not Up to Mark Zuckerberg" https://www.fromdayone.co/stories/2020/6/26/is-facebook-a-me...
Let’s also not forget - China does not allow American social media to operate in their country. When trade is allowed, access to their market is highly controlled - for example Tesla being forced to use Baidu for mapping. TikTok can and should be banned on the grounds of this free trade issue, leaving aside privacy and national security problems.
Me thinks you picked the wrong point to build an argument