TikTok is part of China’s cognitive warfare campaign | Nita Farahany
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/25/tik...
theguardian.comPosted Mar 25, 2023, 2:43 PM UTC
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theguardian.comThis article reads like an attempt at cognitive warfare at its amateurish worst, including the author having to reckon with having been caught out publicly.
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This article reads like an attempt at cognitive warfare at its amateurish worst.
How did you ever reach that conclusion? She's a university professor at Dukes.
" Nita A. Farahany is an author and distinguished professor and scholar on the ramifications of new technology on society, law, and ethics. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology".
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I think your experience with university professors is either extremely limited, or you are one.
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think your experience university professors is either extremely limited, or you are one.
Maybe you are just projecting, and, maybe I think you should think about that, instead of thinking about my experience or what is my profession.
This isn't about me. I was focusing on the info in the article, and if you wanna know more, buy her book, or don't .But, it has been received very well at goodreads.com, so those readers have no issues.
For now, most of us are (mostly ) free to think whatever we want, yet according to some trends, this is changing for the worst. So let's think about those implications and the effect for our "freedom of thinking " as well.
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Maybe you are just projecting, and, maybe I think you should think about that, instead of thinking about my experience or what is my profession.
Translation: If you call me out for some silly crap I linked, you're the problem. . .
"This isn't about me." Ha ha ha
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Let's leave it at this: It's Duke, not Dukes.
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How did you ever reach that conclusion? She's a university professor at Dukes.
i mean , that means nothing , a different university professor can say the exact oppiste
facebook, twitter and tick tok should all be banned due to their all basically the same thing , social media
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Isn't reddit social media too? Won't be much left if social media is all banned.
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That sounds exactly like the type of credentials attached to just about every russian mouthpiece of the day you can commonly see in italian talk shows, including the not so subtle self-promotion of a "critically acclaimed" book no one's ever heard of. She's obviously not working for Russia but it still screams professional propagandist from miles.
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Can someone explain how content on TicToc is politically different than content on other platforms? Or how TicToc uses/divulges/sells user information in some way that is different from, say, Facebook?
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It's Silicon Valley lobbying. Tiktok is eating their lunch by gaining popularity over their platforms and they don't like it.
Otherwise, Tiktok having access to my data gives no leverage to China over the West.
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I don't understand how this isn't super obvious to most people. I don't its an intelligence issue. All i can gather is that we're all living in very separate information silos.
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Does Tictok really have access to your data?
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I don't know. That's what the US gov't claims, but then don't they all have access to our data? (facebook, IG)?
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That’s what I thought.
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Barring the abuse of an hypotetical not yet discovered iOS/android exploit they have the same access to your data any other app with the same set of permissions would have, which is probably far more than they or any app should have becouse iOS is a colander and android is a sieve, but it's sadly also the norm.
In practical terms what they have is your cookies, the email & phone number associated to your google/apple account, your location data, your contact list, theoretical access to your camera/microphone (theoretical becouse that kind of data is basically impossible to reasonably process at large scale even for the likes of google and microsoft, nevermind tiktok so i very much doubt they actually store it) whatever you volunteered manually and again, it's definitely too much but it's also the standard for all social media apps.
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Thank you. Can the user elect to avoid the tracking and keep their contacts private?
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Can someone explain how content on TicToc
It's supposedly all about data leaks and safety measures with regard to national safety and a nefarious CCP's / PLA's (geopolitical)agenda.
Anyhow, US and EU have forbidden the use of tik tok on devices used by government officials.
For more info, check the web and a more recent source would the US Congressional hearing with Shou Zi Chew.
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They should do this for all social media products…
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Isn't Tik Tok building data storage centers in the US with Oracle in order to accommodate the fears regarding "data leakage"?
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Isn't Tik Tok building data storage centers in the US with Oracle
Yes, there are. It is called "project Texas". Oracle/US govt is going to manage all the data for North America users. Check the recent Congress hearings with TikTok CEO Chaw.
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Yes, but TikTok would still have access to it for obvious reasons, which means they will still be obligated to retrieve and hand those data over to the Chinese government if the Chinese government asks.
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Isn't therefore the partnership with Oracle, so that it is virtually impossible for them to do without informing the US side?
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TikTok's CEO stated user information is accessible by ByteDance employees in China during his congressional hearing.
Eventually they claim that will be the case, but with how often the CCP gets data from entities with no ties to China, it would be naive to assume the data could not be easily obtained even after project Texas.
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It's supposedly all about data leaks and safety measures with regard to national safety and a nefarious CCP's / PLA's (geopolitical)agenda.
i mean why cant facebook/twitter be banned to for this reason , especially in the EU Facebook/twitter is more a national safety issue than tick tok , if you think that tick tok is one
Anyhow, US and EU have forbidden the use of tik tok on devices used by government officials.
they should ban feacook/twitter to
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Obviously, it could, and that is what might happen if Facebook fails to comply with GDPR. What makes TikTok a bit unique in this scenario is the risk of the algorithm subtly censoring/de-prioritizing anti-china information.
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I can see not accessing social media on work/government devices. I thought the US Congressional hear were an embarrassment that showed a lot of the questioners were uninformed.
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because Tiktok has the eyes and ears of 150 million americans, around half of the United States total population and Tiktok is a brand of Bytedance which is a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing China
based on Chinese Law, China's communist party could force Bytedance's CEO to force Tiktok's CEO to make tiktok into China's national TV
To artificially boosts videos that promote Chinese propaganda in the United States, so Tiktok could be used by China to interfere with United States elections, or to brainwash americans into petitioning for something that could benefit China like an american protest or civil war for example
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so ignorant lol
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What is ignorant here !??
I really think that China could use Tiktok to re-elect Trump the worst US president in a while, its literally in Chinese law that company's in china need to oblige to the government
We are talking about someone that used military force to supress a peaceful protest(France is burning and still didn't use military force),we talking about someone who's constantly lying about election fraud which is like dictatorship 101, we talking about someone who hates the free press so much that he calls them "The enemy of the people" and we talking about someone who wanted to throw military parades and is like the number 1 fan of Vladimir Putin,Kim-jong-un and Rodrigo Duterte
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i am telling you that you have no Idea what are you talking about
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The issue is the algorithms. All platforms can easily decide what content is pushed to the audience. When one platform is owned by a party directly controlled by the CCP with clear political agenda, it causes problems.
From what I have heard, it has also been proven that tiktok pushes negative content to youths, while the Chinese counterpart with only their domestic population as the audience more heavily pushes positive content.
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From what I have heard, it has also been proven that tiktok pushes negative content to youths
This keeps getting repeated but there's no evidence for it. It was a rumor started by a comedian who later admitted he made it up. And he only admitted it because he was quoted numerous times by the media. It goes to show how something made up becomes truth for a lot of people once it's repeated enough, and much of the media doesn't care about facts but only clicks and views.
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Except for that all media here in China is controlled to paint an unrealistic picture, especially about China? I don't use tiktok or Douyin, being familiar with Chinese media I cannot imagine how the accusation cannot be true.
More troubling is when the Tiktok CEO after the testimony made a video urging the viewers to call their representatives to defend Tiktok. Of course it went viral, they just have to push a button. With it they proved that Tiktok, owned by a company controlled by CCP, can use their position to exert political pressure.
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Except for that all media here in China is controlled to paint an unrealistic picture, especially about China? I don't use tiktok or Douyin, being familiar with Chinese media I cannot imagine how the accusation cannot be true.
You're moving the goal post here. You said that tiktok has been proven to push negative content to youths, there's no evidence for that. It was made up, and people with confirmation bias (or little skepticism) repeated it. But repeating something over and over doesn't make it true. The media as well, but that's not because of ignorance, many media companies just have no integrity.
Now you're saying there's censorship in China. That's true, but doesn't prove what you said before. Why do you think tiktok is so popular? Not because it pushes negative content about the US, but because their algorithm works so well. Someone interested in fantasy books will get a lot of fantasy content. Someone interested in science can find science teachers/professors on there.
For example there's a huge book reading community on tiktok which has led to a rise in book sales. Dumbing down kids by making books more popular, am I right? This is what tiktok does, you get what you want. This is also why it's weird when some people say all tiktok has is dancing teens. It means that A: you don't use tiktok and you don't know what you're talking about, or B: that's what you watch..
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/tiktok-booktok-print-books-sales/
More troubling is when the Tiktok CEO after the testimony made a video urging the viewers to call their representatives to defend Tiktok. Of course it went viral, they just have to push a button. With it they proved that Tiktok, owned by a company controlled by CCP, can use their position to exert political pressure.
That doesn't prove that at all. You're jumping to conclusions. All it says is that tiktok doesn't want to get banned. Every social media company would use its reach to get support if they were in that situation. Zuckerberg used his reach to help put tiktok in this position by talking to (lobbying) US officials and lawmakers. This is worse than trying to not get banned, it's actively reaching out to the US government to get a competitor banned. Imagine if tiktok did this, the outrage there'd be. It's not like facebook suddenly cares about privacy lmao, they collect tons of data. Facebook even played a huge role in spreading disinformation during the US elections, which helped Trump win.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/
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If US users learn that the US government is trying to outlaw tic-toc, it seems appropriate for them to exert political pressure on the federal government to stop it. How else would it know how voters or potential voters perceive the situation. This seems especially true when the hearing showed that a lot of the legislators know even less than I do about tic-toc.
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Thanks for answering. Don’t users choose what they want to see?
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So is Reddit in case anyone didn't know.
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That's why I don't post my asshole on Reddit.
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Can we please stop it with the criti-hype? Or at least tone it down, there’s no evil mind control laser.
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Seriously. Just don't use TikTok if you don't want to.
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Easier said than done. Many children are literally addicted to it already. I saw children in my family crying because they didn’t have their daily dose.
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The same could be said about most social media. I agree with banning TikTok (and all social media) for government employee hardware but not personal use. Do you think Facebook, Google etc. is not also collecting massive amounts of data?
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Never said that. I also don’t think social media apps should be banned in general. As I argued elsewhere, better ways to tackle the issues associated with addiction and decreasing mental autonomy is education to digital tech. Too many parents are failing at this sadly.
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Won't someone please think of the children?!
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I swear some people won't be satisfied until kids go back to passing the time by punching each other, headbutting walls, holding their breath until they pass out or diving off those big rocks that jut of the water that the english language does not apparently have a specific word for lol.
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Rupert Murdock started this when he introduced electronic printing presses, fired all the typesetters, bought so many newspapers, fired all the journalists, destroyed news reporting, and finally became the Fox News we all know and love today.
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Tiktok is evil, but all other social media apps are angel right?
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Some of the questions US politicians were asking the CEO were beyond embarrassing.
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Surely its a little early for an April fool's day article isn't it?
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Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a China specialist at the Rand Corporation ( Red: Us thin -tank ) calls this nothing less than an “evolution in warfare, moving from the natural and material domains – land, maritime, air, and electromagnetic – into the realm of the human mind”. The PLA, he says, hopes to “shape or even control the enemy’s cognitive thinking and decision-making” abilities. From disinformation campaigns to modern weapons targeting the brain, “brain warfare” is rapidly becoming a reality.
So, TikTok is basically an "attack" that aims to dumb down the enemy by lowering their attention span and concentration?
Why are we only focusing on TikTok then and not also consider YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels to be the same thing, but from the "correct" people? Short form content in general is a disease, no need to limit it to chinese social media.
"We don't want them to spy on our citizens and violate their privacy, only we can do that!"
What tik/ tok is or isn't is not for me to decide, though i must confess I have never installed it. This is an opinion article, so it's food for discussion.
Actually, the article suggests its the other way around. There is a cognitive/neurological warfare going, and tik tok is a platform. In theory, if you follow the premisse, it's basically about States warring though propaganda/ brainwashing techniques. Although it may sound incredible, in general, people are easily influenced. How do we know this? Well, advertisements work, and so does propaganda. Also, the percentage of " swing voters" has been increasing the last decades.
Oh, and now you mentioned it, "lowering the attention span and concentration" of people is the perfect state of mind for reprogramming. That's how some black site"interrogation techniques " work.
It's kind of easy to understand.
If you view something, you get influenced by it. Even innocent discussion like this is the same. You are influenced to read the full thing, maybe to reply as well.
Only way to not get influenced yourself is to run a heavy filter layer between any social media and you, and instead focusing only sending out your message that affects others, from behind your digital shield.
There is no avoiding this. We started manipulating others with oral stories and public speaking, then came writing with propaganda pamphlets and books, then radio, television, internet and social media and now we're moving in a time of automated social influencing through things like chatbots.
If you aren't very mindful and use effective tools to auto-filter and curate the information that comes in, you'll be constantly under attack from all sorts of actors.
I grew up watching commercials and now I can't even
Massive fundamental difference. Americans use YouTube shorts and Instagram reels, China doesn’t allow usage of tiktok.
It's our right as democracies to focus on whoever we want, what business is it of yours?
If our own governments are spying or manipulating us, it's bad, but it's our business to sort out, it shouldn't concern others. But if it's external forces doing it on our citizens, especially if they are dictatorships with a vested interest to destroy democracies, it's 1000 times worse.
I'd rather the US government spy on me, even though I'm not American, than the Chinese one, and I have the right to have a preference, and it's not hypocritical. And you have no right to tell me otherwise.
This comment is so needlessly passive aggressive. Nobody told you you didn't have the right to an opinion. Personally I'd rather not get spied on by anyone.
What if it takes an international working class effort?
The emergence of the New Left has proved that the working class is not a homogenous signifier. In fact, it is so heterogenous, that trying to direct it towards some common goal is nearly impossible (or fails in its early infancy), which the history of 20th century shows quite well...
This the same Rand corporation that sold biological weapons materials to Saddam Hussein?