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The TikTok Flip-Flop

dudalb said:
I despise the CCP as much as anybody, but you are right; I doubt they depend on it much for intelligence gathering.
For the record the critcism from a lot of people was not so much about the intelligence gathering on Tik Tok but that it was being used for propaganda purposes by CHina. Like if Tik Tok is shut down, they csnnot use other services. they will just have to pay more.
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I have encountered exactly 0 propaganda from the CCP. I see ◊◊◊◊ from the right, ◊◊◊◊ from the left, and a bunch of ◊◊◊◊ from the US, but I've never seen anything even reference the CCP in my TikTok feed. Ever. My algorithm is stand up comedy, anime cuts, and dog videos. I see nothing other than that unless I go searching for it. Any implication that there is a bunch of CCP propaganda that is being force fed to users is absolute bull ◊◊◊◊. If you want to see that log on to X. X shoves right wing trolls in your feed all of the time, whether you want it or not.

Also, the CCP won't have to pay for anything for intelligence gathering. It's already built in to their budget and they know where the information is going to come from and it ain't TikTok. Anything they could get from TikTok, as I said, they can get from somewhere else and that somewhere else will probably be more detailed to their needs than a bunch of teen twerk videos.
 
plague311 said:
I'm going to ask this as straightforward as possible in hopes that someone here will be able to answer it. I've asked this a ******* thousand times and no one seems to be able to tell me.

What agenda is China pushing through TikTok? It's a series of videos. It's the same as youtube shorts, or instagram, or the old vines program. If the idea is that they're stealing\hording\selling\using data from my phone then tackle that problem, but I've watched dozens of hours of TikTok and I haven't seen an agenda outside of my own algorithm.

The "attention span" nonsense is the same bull **** we've been hearing since video games, and before. If you don't like it, then don't like it. It's seriously that easy, but the US government don't seem to give much of a **** about Google mining every possible piece of information, or Facebook, etc. Sure they pay lip service to it, but what is this Chinese company walking away with that I'm supposed to be scared of? Reminds of the "stick hoop" scene in A Million Ways to Die in the West.
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Did TikTok influence Romania's presidential election?​


The short video app TikTok is said to have played a role in the outcome. Calin Georgescu, the far-right and pro-Russian presidential candidate, was massively promoted via TikTok with the help of coordinated accounts, recommendation algorithms and paid advertising.

Georgescu, who was previously largely unknown, does not belong to any political party, polled extremely low in all preelection surveys and did not take part in any of the TV debates. Nevertheless, he won the first round of voting.
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www.dw.com

Did TikTok influence Romania's presidential election? – DW – 12/07/2024

In November, a little-known far-right radical took the most votes in the first round of Romania's presidential election. Now, amid reports TikTok played a role in the far-right win, the results have been annulled.
www.dw.com www.dw.com
 
Hercules Rockefeller said:

Did TikTok influence Romania's presidential election?​




www.dw.com

Did TikTok influence Romania's presidential election? – DW – 12/07/2024

In November, a little-known far-right radical took the most votes in the first round of Romania's presidential election. Now, amid reports TikTok played a role in the far-right win, the results have been annulled.
www.dw.com www.dw.com
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I'm not seeing anything in there that shows TikTok pushed any propaganda at all in any way. Per your source:

This was mainly due to his presence on social media, especially on TikTok.

Georgescu's channel has more than 520,000 followers and has garnered 5.7 million likes, and his campaign videos have been viewed on TikTok millions of times.
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He appeared to be popular on TikTok but I'm not seeing any evidence that TikTok *made* him popular or promoted his channel. Your source doesn't make that claim either. Your source doesn't appear to refute or contest anything I said. TikTok isn't pushing propaganda and I don't know how this guy would benefit the CCP in anyway. He was a huge Putin supporter.
 
plague311 said:
I'm not seeing anything in there that shows TikTok pushed any propaganda at all in any way. Per your source:



He appeared to be popular on TikTok but I'm not seeing any evidence that TikTok *made* him popular or promoted his channel. Your source doesn't make that claim either. Your source doesn't appear to refute or contest anything I said. TikTok isn't pushing propaganda and I don't know how this guy would benefit the CCP in anyway. He was a huge Putin supporter.
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Ok. I still think TikTok is a threat to democracy.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen weighed in on Tuesday: “Following serious indications that foreign actors interfered in the Romanian presidential elections by using TikTok, we are now thoroughly investigating whether TikTok has violated the Digital Services Act [DSA] by failing to tackle such risks,” she said, announcing a formal probe — a rare public comment from the EU chief on such an investigation.

The escalation comes after weeks of wrangling between European and Romanian officials and TikTok executives. At the heart of the saga are reports and research that Georgescu got a boost from a network of paid influencers and bots, and allegations that TikTok didn’t properly address these threats. Romanian authorities this month declassified a series of documents suggesting these campaigns were eerily similar to Russian influence operations in Ukraine and Moldova.
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www.politico.eu

EU opens investigation into TikTok and the Romanian election

TikTok presents a major test of how the EU polices foreign interference and election meddling.
www.politico.eu www.politico.eu
 
Hercules Rockefeller said:
Ok. I still think TikTok is a threat to democracy.
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You're absolutely entitled to that opinion. I don't have any desire to take that away from you. As ponderingturtle pointed out, I don't see it as any more of a threat to democracy than any other social media platform. Facebook, X, etc. have all been shown to have the same issues, if not worse in some cases. I don't have any desire to discuss the damage social media can have on elections. I'm saying people hyper focused on TikTok are only doing it because of China, which is stupid to me.
 
TragicMonkey said:
That's capitalism for ya. But take comfort in the fact that our capitalism infects them, too, and now they have billionaires and wealth inequality despite being communists. So...encouraging?
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You had rich and poor in the Soviet Union as well. The Party bosses lived like kings. THey just hid it better then the Chinese do.
And that is one of my problems with Communism: It has always failed to deliver on it;s probmises and always ends up with a Party elite in no way better then the ultra wealthy in this country. Orwell saw this early on with his "inner Party" in 1984.
 
plague311 said:
You're absolutely entitled to that opinion. I don't have any desire to take that away from you. As ponderingturtle pointed out, I don't see it as any more of a threat to democracy than any other social media platform. Facebook, X, etc. have all been shown to have the same issues, if not worse in some cases. I don't have any desire to discuss the damage social media can have on elections. I'm saying people hyper focused on TikTok are only doing it because of China, which is stupid to me.
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That's the problem, really: How do you control Social Media without throwing Free Speech out the window?
 
theprestige said:
I would love it if TikTok got sold to a PE firm. That's about as close to "kill it with fire" as you can get, in the business world.
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Will they finally get off your lawn?

While the entity you aren't in contact with goes away, the security concerns don't. The data collected is in the hands of people who are about as trustworthy and loyal to the US as the CCP.
 
Donal said:
Will they finally get off your lawn?

While the entity you aren't in contact with goes away, the security concerns don't. The data collected is in the hands of people who are about as trustworthy and loyal to the US as the CCP.
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And yet still somehow better than the CCP. Probably because they'd use TikTok to make money, rather than to wage socioeconomic war on the US. And of course they'd promptly run it into the ground, sell off the parts, and move on.
 
Thermal said:
In context, I thought jazz meaning stuff should have been fairly clear. No? "All that jazz"? No?
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Missed it completely; thought that maybe you'd deliberately picked something distinctly American and difficult to offshore.
 
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