Tiktok
Out of context: Reply #38
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- monNom1
I think this just highlights how much power social media companies actually have. The US exports their social media platforms and gets /something/ back in return. Is it narrative control? real-time sentiment polling? emerging threat detection? Who knows, but it is something. And that something is important enough to consider a foreign platform as a national security threat.
I suspect that the ability to shape what people see, the information they come in contact with via suggestion algorithms, and censorship, might be way more powerful than we give it credit for.
It also occurs to me that strategic commenting (AI sock puppets?) might allow you to shift the narrative. IE. Say you've got an influencer that talks to a million people, and they get pushback from their tribe for talking one way about Xinjiang, then maybe they change their tune because they think they've got it wrong if so many of their fans are so angry about what they said, and now all those million people are getting the self-censored/adjusted opinion from this important communication node, and it's essentially the chinese propaganda, spread domestically.
I dunno if that's how it all works, but the Banning/forced sale of Tiktok certainly makes me suspect these platforms are much less benign than we think they are.