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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38042 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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While the USSR jammed the propaganda radio stations of the West, the West rarely jammed Radio Moscow. This included broadcasts that reached America.

This is a bad take. The number of hours spent by U.S citizens consuming TikTok is on the order of 1 million times greater than the hours spent listening to Radio Moscow. Not only that, the interactive nature of TikTok allows it to track your whereabouts and social network.

"Why are you against eating poop? You eat at restaurants. Don't you know that there are 5 parts per billion of poop in the average restaurant meal."

This included broadcasts that reached America.

"Reaching America" is subtly yet very different from "reaching 100 million Americans". Is your contention that Radio Moscow was ever this popular?

It's an analogy to TikTok, which has a 100+ million users, so the relevant metric in my post is audience - not that a signal allegedly touched CONUS. It is a very different thing to broadcast a signal that anyone could theoretically listen in on, and one that people do, manifestly, listen in on.

For that matter, there's a difference between radio and a social media site that is vastly better at snooping and manipulating the public in a granular fashion. But that just goes back to my original point: if it wouldn't fly then...

That's not really the right comparison, though. How much TikTok content is actual CCP propaganda? Even if it's a lot, it doesn't really seem to be having much influence on people's opinions toward China.

How would we know what the effect (or intended effect) is? Perhaps the CCP wants to sway the election left, and their only thumb on the scale will be spreading pro-D get-out-the-vote videos on election day. Or perhaps they want to sway the election right. Perhaps they just want to keep Chinese citizens abroad from hearing about corruption at home, and all it takes is a thumb on the scale to keep China out of the minds of TikTok users. Perhaps the goal is intelligence collection rather than propaganda, and anything viral is fair play, as long as it gets data from the highest number of devices. Or perhaps the goal is the disintegration of Western Society, and all the inane influencer trends that go viral are centrally programmed so that the most inane and least productive ideas enter the largest number of impressionable young brains. It is even possible that they want to swing the opinions of the American electorate to be anti-China, so that the anti-China US turns into a bogeyman to distract from a stagnating domestic economy.

My point is that we have no way of knowing what the CCP propaganda goal (at any moment in time) would be and the algorithm is a black box (with different output for every user), so it is entirely impossible to see the broader effect the algorithm is having, let alone whether that effect is intended. The result is that anyone concerned about epistemic safety would support banning the black box.

I concede that the same concerns apply to other media companies, too. While I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between TikTok and domestic social media companies in that the owner and programmers of Facebook at least in theory lives in the same society as me and share some of my values, the ability to cause a partisan shift in voting rates or voting direction - by say 10% - is too large of a power to entrust to any black box controlled by a single entity. As they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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