TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back.

I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about violence, the shills will always use the word "ISIS" somewhere in their message.

It's everywhere and we don't seem to be fighting back. I browse Chinese social media and while my Mandarin isn't great I'm not seeing any level of AstroTurfing at all. So am I just a crazy conspiracy person? Is the PRC astroturfing not a big deal? Maybe my concerns are valid but that doesn't justify further concern about the influx of PRC messaging vectors to the USA, i.e. tiktok?

When I worked in the PRC I got to see first hand the strong-arm of the Party. Every business involved in communication had a government official whose entire job was to ensure the company "protected the social wellbeing of the people of the PRC" or similar. I can only assume tiktok has the same and I can only assume it's a matter of time before the Party starts directing the company to leverage their access to a massive US audience in a way that benefits the "social wellbeing," i.e. by disseminating PRC propaganda.

I've spent countless hours looking at this problem in HN data, which admittedly may not be representative of the internet at large, but is the most relevant here. By far the overwhelming finding is that users are massively prone to leap to "astroturfing" (or "shill", "troll", "bot", or "spy") based solely on hearing something they dislike on a charged topic. This is plainly a psychological bias—probably one we all share—and it dominates all discussion on the topic by at least 99% if not 99.9. The phenomenon is so universal, and conforms so closely to what I see on other platforms even though I can't study their data, that I have to believe it's the same everywhere.

The parsimonious explanation for comments expressing strongly opposing points of view is that humans are the same on both sides of any divisive topic: emotionally charged and primed for reflexive, predictable responses. That's why these arguments are all the same (in the case of China v. US: "but imperialism", "but totalitarianism", etc.) and also why they are off topic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

This was the top subthread before I marked it off topic. That's mostly because of upvoters, but the reason we ask people not to post this sort of flamebait is that upvoters simply can't resist it. When it comes to indignation, upvotes are a statistical cloud of fruit flies showing up near a decaying banana.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I definitely wasn't trying to start a flamewar, let alone a nationalistic one - I do see an aggressive amount of pro-PRC posts (on other platforms), I have no proof that they're PRC agents other than the fact that they're posting things that one would consider "pro-PRC." I have no proof that similar isn't happening against the PRC on baidu, other than that I don't see it. So is the issue that my post was on too tenuous a thread, based on your data on HN? I certainly didn't mean to imply the presence of shills on HN - I almost never see pro-PRC posts. I specifically called out facebook, twitter, and reddit to avoid that implication.

Perhaps it would have been better to construct my post without mentioning shills at all? I am concerned about the PRC gov's role in communication applications and technology, and I am curious what others (HN crowd particularly because they're almost universally more knowledgeable than me) have to say on the subject.

If the answer to all my ramblings is "don't pin random conspiracy theory shit on the PRC here" that's totally acceptable as well.