The exact same post with the exact same title can either be completely ignored with no comments and no upvotes or be the top post with 500 upvotes and 300 comments.
Sometimes we re-up things for that reason (basically the second-chance pool mechanism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). I've done that with this one.
Or, the Org found them! It helps to kiss the ring.
I know what you will tell me: "but these people vote"... Hum, yes.
Plus, Ellison on surveillance tech: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,”
https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveill...
Why do they need to control the media?
We are truly looking at 1984 as a blueprint not a warning.
It already happens at border controls and TSA checks.
Guess when that "you can just not use TikTok" argument will expand to "you can just not use the internet" and effectively be punished monetarily or socially for not wanting to use it.
Larry's son buys Paramount (CBS) and promptly fires Stephen Colbert, a money making machine who was leading his timeslot as what was, in hindsight, a clear message to everyone that nobody is safe if they don't fall in line.
Larry now gets TikTok, which like it or not is the most influential social media platform among today's youth.
Both are Trump fanatics. This is the next stage in the Ailes playbook that has already gone too far in ruining the American experiment.
Unfortunately not: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/business/media/stephen-co...
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/07/20/wsj-late-night-...
(which has a clearer title that's not that much different than days ago news: U.S. Investors, Trump Close In on TikTok Deal With China)
However, TikTok is still a brain rot slop machine and we would be right to question Ellison's motivations.
As a reminder, TikTok forces staff to sign pledges to support China’s political system in order to work there and get stock awards:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
Too popular to ban. Political constraints.
>Will they be able to change the algorithms or censorship or amplification on TikTok?
"An Asia-based investor of ByteDance said the new US TikTok entity would use at least part of the Chinese algorithm but train it in the US on American user data."
________________
I'm not sure you're looking at this the right way though. This isn't some conclusion of a search for the optimal way to address the situation (which would probably be an actual digital privacy framework). The ban couldn't go through because the app was too popular and Trump liked the attention he was getting on it. So if the ban has to be backed out of, what's the second best option? A "deal" of course, from the world's best deal maker. It's no more complicated than that.
The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
The ban wasn't executed on digital privacy concerns. The intent of the original ban was on digital privacy concerns, and that was shot down.
>The Intel stake is the same - barely thought out. If you haven't noticed, this has been a common theme in many policy decisions lately.
The TikTok ban passed under Biden, and the ball was kicked to Trump so he would deal with the political fallout. But the reason the ban passed the second time around was because China would not censor content about the Gaza genocide. The ban had no legs until October 7th and TikTok frustrated the US/Israel message that Hamas was homicidal terrorist group that spawned from no where.
What seems obvious is that, yes, the new TikTok, will fall in line with other US owned social media companies when it comes to spreading US propoganda.
So while Chinese social networks have "What happened in tiananmen square?", US social networks will have "Is Israel committing a genocide?".
“America” is an abstraction. It gets the people who will own the new entity something, and its gets the government decisionmakers something, and that’s, in practice, more important than what it gets “America”.
A lot of high quality posts have 0 upvote and 0 comment.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) was _passed by a Republican House_.
Wouldn't it be better if these investors lose money on this investment?
American media is one of the most thightly controlled and censored in the world. They need to carefully control the media to maintain the ilusion of "moral superiority" that is used to justify foreign interventions.
The question is more about whether it is an intentional decision to go this route or a built-in, institutional decision. When faced with the foe of consumer data harvesting and tracking, right now it seems the US government has concluded the answer is that it is better to have an American company spy on people rather than a Chinese one.
The best answer would be to enact laws to stop the act of spying on people, but that’s anathema to US political culture right now!
They'll then rewrite TikTok in Java, and migrate to Oracle Database.
Both are not compatible with each other in any way, but they are in a great deal, one they can't say no to.
This is where either one fails or sometimes both.
Not to mention that this is all just a distraction from the very real destruction Trump 2.0 is doing to peoples' lives, safety, financial outlooks, rights, etc and flushing our country and planet down to the toilet for his benefit
*edited for clarity and fixed typos
10 Small Steps: Executing the Fascist Playbook [0]
The Fascists’ Playbook [1]
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/10-small-steps-executing-the-...
[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/05/08/the-fascists-playboo...
IIUC, Oracle has strong connections to the CIA, and Andreessen the person lately seems right-wing activist.
1. Under the current administration, maybe it doesn't much matter that there's a government monitor?
2. But if a more left-wing administration comes back into power, then a government appointee there could help moderate the other influences?
I don't know whether they'll be blocked on the web.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted. I already observed the brainrot similar apps caused to my parents, and for hell I won't allow my kid to touch it whenever I have control.
Whether you "learned" anything from it is irrelevant too -- you can always learn better with books, classes, and heck even YouTube videos are better sources of knowledge these days.
Given the complexity of forced platform migrations (user data transfer, algorithm preservation, creator monetization continuity), and the technical/legal hurdles involved, I suspect we're seeing opening moves in a broader negotiation rather than a final outcome.
Let's all be patient and wait to see how this plays out before assuming users will actually have to migrate to a completely new app with new ownership.
Example: Silver Lake. Many younger HNers may not be that familira with the story of Skype. To summarize, Skype was a big deal, the first real mass market caller-to-caller Internet voice messaging services. It was founded in 2003, bought by eBay (of all people) in 2005 for several billion dollars. There were plans to spin it out on an IPO but Silver Lake led a buyout for less than eBay paid for it I believe in 2009 (~$2.75 billion).
Now in 2011, Microsoft bought it for ~$8.5 billion. That was great for the employees, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. I believe the new company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands to make it difficult to sue, a bunch of executives were fired before the buyout to avoid paying them out and, most controversially, the options had a clawback option that allowed Silver Lake to forcibly purchase options at the original rather than the buyout price [1].
Larry Ellison is more well known in HN circles as comically evil. Pretty much everything he touches leaves a Grand Moff Tarkin level of stench of evil from his attack on public access to Carbon Beach through his massive property portfolio to his more well known attacks on open source (originally as a threat to Oracle's dominance).
He is a Trump loyalist and true Putinesque oligarch who will probably amass levels of media control well beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest dreams. You can bet your bottom dollar that every media property he touches will serve the administration and I'd be shocked if one or more of these deals doesn't directly enrich Trump and/or his family.
Welcome to the tleptocracy.
nice
The Constitution has the worth of toilet paper if the executive can just keep saying "I don't want to enforce this law because my buddy here has a financial interest in that not happening as its supposed to", which is exactly what is happening given how close Larry and Trump are.
That’s something you see in Russia, not America.
If everyone around your kids is brainrotted or subject to destructive propaganda, your kids suffer too.
Like, yeah, it does suck when everyone around you lazily envelops themselves in inane crap. Isn't that just the norm (sad as it is)? I mean, it's a bit worse now that everyone has a propaganda/influence factory in their pocket and they are incentivized to spend untold amounts of time on it, but the same counter-culture mindset that led me to disregard what society was attempting to coerce me into is a mindset that can surely be instilled/reinforced in kids today. I hope >_>
I don't know. I myself never sticked to a hobby even after trying a lot of them. Genetically speaking he is a lot like me -- lack of discipline, difficult to cool down, impatient, throw tantrums frequently, etc. The list is pretty long :/ Not many good things from this genetic pool TBH.
But… but… TokTok put full-page ads in all the big newspapers telling us that thanks to them, a yoga mom in Montana can now take her free-range artisanal oat milk candle-making side-hustle and turn it into a full-time job, paying just a little over minimum wage!
Isn't that worth destroying the minds of millions of American children?
I've never used it, but since YouTube introduced Shorts I've become victim to the addiction and subsequently blocked any trace of Shorts with a browser extension.
Of course it is bad for the international community that all nation's people aren't connected but since the US really wants to become isolationist may as well look on the bright side.
And personally I don't consider the world exluding the US as an echo chamber, even just the EU is far from an echo chamber, it is a continent of many unique countries, US concerns are heard over here in the EU a lot even if a whole lot of it doesn't matter over here and just causes polarization.
Social media is a far more “effective” technology than TV was, which was more effective than radio before it, and so on. It’s very important we figure out how to counteract these things because the trend is obviously in one direction, which is not the one that culminates in individuals having full, conscious agency over their lives and wellbeing.
[0] luckily EU seems to be doing a lot more in that direction, e.g. https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive...
1. New, US-specific TikTok App, separate from the main TikTok app in content and users.
2. 80% owned by a U.S. investor consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz, 20% by Bytedance.
3. Board will include one U.S. government–appointed director.
4. All U.S. user data would sit on Oracle infrastructure in the US.
5. Algorithm will be initially licensed, but has to be reengineered to comply with the law.
Not discussed - whether the US tiktok app is allowed to compete with TikTok outside of the US. My guess is NO.
They'll probably get what they really want, which is an admin console for the algorithm that has a 'political slant' slider that they can slide as far to the reich as they wish.
Before: we’re spying on you, but here’s a copy!
After: we’ve moved the spy machine to Ashburn VA, here are the keys.
Why?
The nominal reason for all this is that we didn't want a Chinese company controlling an important social media outlet. I don't love that reasoning, but fine, whatever.
So they're forcibly selling it to an American company. Which should solve the problem, right?
Are we going to be putting government-appointed directors on all social media companies? Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?
Is there something so overwhelmingly devious about the TikTok format in particular that the government has to supervise it?
Well, yes, for starters. I think there's a pretty strong consensus from people on all sides that there's no more addictive algorithm than the TikTok one.
It's the beneficiary of powerful network effects, it created those effects for itself with a superior app, but nevertheless it is a distinguishing feature. I also would say it's culturally positioned perhaps the best of any major social media app over the present and near term.
And in its current ownership it's required by statute to comply with Chinese national security data requests. And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
I'm not necessarily a fan of either... but to vastly different levels.
That wouldn't be a bad thing. How good has unchecked Zuckerberg been for us, really?
> Or just the one that used-to-be-Chinese?
Or the one where there's some level to force on them, like here. If Zuckerberg starts needing government cash to keep Facebook going, I'd expect a similar deal.
In other words, one's data will now be under the scrutiny of amoral radicals who have decided to target people for political speech.
Won't be long until all companies will be required to have a party office.
Legally required to use the services of a specific company, that's a sweet deal right there.
> The central feature of Project Texas is our work with Oracle to isolate the TikTok services serving U.S. users within Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment as an additional safeguard. Although gateways to the storage infrastructure are strictly monitored and controlled, U.S. users of the TikTok platform can still communicate and interact with global users for a cohesive global experience.
Also, I see creators, trying to create US based TikTok accounts because they believe that this way their content will be shown to Americans, which are better monetized. If that’s the case, I wonder if international creator will move to the American TikTok for the better payout.
It the international creators stay with the international TikTok IMHO that will be a huge win for China, practically displacing American culture for the younger demographic in the rest of the world.
Look at recent events: American government officials want to maintain the same level of toxic culture wars that foreign governments want. They just want to control them, not contain them.
If I were China I would do this deal and then ensure that the payout is better outside the US. Try to sway US content creators to use VPN's and post outside the US and essentially limit the impact of the deal.
Huh? Are you not aware of US social media companies?
Everything that's happening on TikTok is also happening on X, Facebook, Friendster, or whatever the kids are using these days. The only difference is that the TikTok algorithm promotes Chinese propaganda and ideology, and enriches the Chinese government and ByteDance. The US can't have that, hence this deal.
This won't affect the American downward spiral a single iota. That would require strong regulation of social media companies and adtech in general, and there would be a nationwide revolt if that were even proposed. This is far from being considered anyway, now that Big Tech is deeply entrenched in the government.
IMO this significantly impacts the value I would get from TikTok, as much of the content I consume on the app is from outside the US
I guess they are hoping the US market will be big enough so self sustain and even entice some foreigners to join the US only app?
I wonder where all the liberal content will go.
The government board director is one thing, but what exactly does this mean?
The licensing approach is a temporary solution to keep the app working from day 1. One of ByteDance's complaints during the lawsuit earlier this year was that is was going to be technically infeasible for engineers to rebuild something as complex and essential as the content algorithm in the short window of time they had before the law went into effect.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
"The term “qualified divestiture” means a divestiture or similar transaction that ... would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary; and ... precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between [the two apps/teams], including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing."
Just ban children from the internet, make it the responsibility of the parents. Its that simple. Make it illegal for kids to have access, especially to user generated content (incl chat), same level as firearms, pharma drugs, voting, entering into contracts etc. Internet is and was never a place for children to begin with.
Very interesting! The separate "in content" bit in particular. Sounds like US TikTok will now be one giant echo chamber. Users outside the US will miss some US content but tbh, I find TikTok content is actually quite localised anyway. Big benefits for users outside the US are:
1. US doesn't get my data.
2. Hopefully less US political BS to swipe past.
3. I am much less concerned with the sway China has on Western Europe than the sway the US has and am therefore much happier using a China-backed version of the app sans US content/users/control/propaganda. The extreme brain rot causing people outside the US to care about 'MAGA' or that recently assassinated man will hopefully start to recede. That can only be a good thing. We have plenty of our own polarising issues without importing irrelevant ones.
I'm from Europe so if I want to follow US content creators, I need to download separate US specific app?! Kinda silly.
This gives me vibes of a weird company takeover, a la the kinds of things that happened in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: government-driven benefits to large corporations and investors with friends in the right places, government involvement, forced licensure of a core aspect of the product (Rearden Metal?).
I’d like to learn more about: what are some other similar instances of such a thing?
tl;dr: the entire US media is now controlled by men who've bent the knee to Trump and have demonstrated that theyre willing to take an activist editorial role.
owned by canadian oligarchs, with one CBC appointed director
Last week's announcement that they have a 500 B deal with Open AI, and now this.
Elon really fucked up!
Why does the board of TikTok need a gov member? Is Meta going to get a gov chaperone too? And Oracle surely needs one as well.
Is the gov putting out a call for board member civil servants? Like where does this person even come from?
This means that the only people you will encounter in protocols will be privacy freak type nerds and “normal” people you might actually feel better interacting with or watching are on popular apps.
It makes me immediately suspicious when someone wants to reach _everbody_, that's never good and we shouldn't let them. Ideas will grow if they're good, if you have to spend money to make people listen, they're not.
Open AI, free speech platforms, save the planet, democratize information. At the end of the day, it’s always about power.
first Twitter, now Tiktok, both controlled by conservative interests?
Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]
This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
[2] - https://archive.is/20250916040811/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Ellison&old...
Though yeah, if they go the Yahoo-route it's going to be a huge waste. But it's really up to how the company handles the acquisition.
Yahoo missed big time by just trying to change the culture of the userbase way too quickly. They didn't like that people were posting porn on Tumblr when that was one of the most important aspects of the platform for the users. They bled way too many users and took way too long of a time to do anything about it.
I feel like Tumblr should have done their own patreon/OF type of push within the platform but they didn't have the vision. They literally had all the creators of that type of content at some point and they've now all moved to X/Twitter.
I hope (i mean, idgaf but you know it's a figure of speech) that Oracle has a better perspective about the issue so they don't commit another billion(s) dollar(s) crime.
Google had Google+ which was a massive failure.
Facebook tried releasing a product for workplace communication named Workplace/Facebook at Work and that is almost dead.
Microsoft has been eyeing a social media platform for years, and the only relevant product that I am aware of is Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) that is not very good in my opinion.
Oracle has never ever had any product that targets mainstream consumers. They always focused on enterprise products and don't understand consumers. Just like Microsoft never released a hardware product that matches iPhone's success, or Apple never has any enterprise product that remotely competes with Office. It's not in their gene. They'll be lucky enough if they don't run it into the ground.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/top-trump-ally-may-soon...
So it's just going to fade into obscurity then huh
We won't be so lucky.
If you're not successful you just wasted a ton of time and money.
If you are successful the newUSA will force you to divest what you've build against your will.
Doesn't sound like a country worth investing in anymore.
You still make money in that case. It isn't a bad deal for the chinese. The americans who now have yet another censored app controlled by the american government are the only losers here.
Besides what bluecalm said, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place.
Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile Chinese government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
This is the part I'm really curious about : what is the legal framework for mandating a privately-owned company to have a board member designated by the government ?
The closest thing I could imagine is "national" companies (totally or partially owned by the government.) We have plenty of that in France (once in a while the State would nationalize energy utilities, banks, car makers, etc... then make them private again, then buy x% of them, etc, etc...)
In this case I completely understand that the "State" wants their say in the board - they have money in the game.
But here, it does not seem like the US are part of the new ownership (or did I miss that ?)
So, what happens when the next government nominates a board member that Elison dislikes ? On which law would a judge rule ?
edit: Adjusted weapon to 'measure of control'. I accept people are a little too happy to overreact lately.
US users are today 21 of the 49 TikTok accounts with the most followers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...> (not including TikTok itself). When the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020,[1] Americans were 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue.
[1] And boy, do Democrats who shouted Orange Man Bad back then now wish they had supported the move
Sure, people didn't vote for Larry Ellison to take control. But something like this is what we wanted, right?
Unlike most nationalizations though in this case the company will be compensated: the new US entity will pay ByteDance licensing fees.
The U.S Steel deal included three board seats, but the Intel deal did not include any.
This is starting to look like the way China does things, with the central government having a financial stake in important companies.
Trump has essentially selected all of the board members. Its not a coincidence that Larry Ellison and Andreessen are big Trump supporters. The amazing corruption continues.
Also known as industrial policy. They are inseparable.
Chinese government won't prosecute me. US government might.
The State Department also said it would crack down on non-citizens who have made posts making light of the shooting.
“In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country. I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on Thursday. “Please feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.” [0][0]https://time.com/7316628/charlie-kirk-death-celebrations-soc...
It's arguments like this that reminds of the critique of libertarians as akin to house cats that seek to undermine the very systems that allow them to exist in the first place that wouldn't survive outside for minute. Or maybe it's just agitprop right here.
All it takes is a minor rebranding and half the country or more would immediately sign up for it. For all intents and purposes, socialism just means “the people we don’t like”. As long as people feel like they’ll get theirs, I seriously doubt they care what economic system they’re living under.
Oracle: "Your phone has 6-cores and our minimum plan is 64 cores. Additionally, we see you upgraded from an iPhone 16 to the 17. Licenses don't transfer, of course. You owe us 3 kidneys."
I'm hopeful. With any luck they'll ruin TikTok and it will die, a satisfying result.
An all-buzzwords compliant subscription based solution for enterprise and professional content creators.
if TikTok dies then one of the alternatives: instagram reels or youtube shorts would take its place.
the brainrot will be the same. I guess people think tiktok's algorithm is particularly pervasive over Google's or Meta's? But I don't see why.
It's bad everywhere, but I found TikTok to be the absolute worst. Not even just fake news political stuff where I can guess the motivation (still bad), but just basic everyday tips and tricks, local users describing news events. I've found it to be so much worse on tiktok.
Other platforms there seems to be "more" intent by creators to provide somewhat consistent / factual content. Tiktok often feels to me like content accuracy / quality isn't a concern for most creators.
YouTube shorts gets all the hate, but I find the content to consistently be the most sophisticated? PG rated? educational?
I don't understand how other people have this experience and I don't. I see targeted ads of course. And every once in a while it starts showing me content for things I don't follow, at which point I start mashing the button they provide to make it go away, and after a handful it pops up something asking if I want to remove all suggested content for a while. I always select yes.
Do other people actually *want* suggested comment? that's bizarre.
It cares about convincing people in general.
It would've been better for the mental health of our country if it had been banned (along with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts).
1. DOA app nobody wants
2. whocares
3. see 2
Good luck to the administration while trying to roll this out.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-fcc-cbs-ne...
They want their guy to make sure things go their way / people say the "right" things.
Kenneth Weinstein.
"Mr. Weinstein has had a long career in right-leaning and neoconservative public policy circles. He is a firm and vocal champion of Israel." (NyTimes)
In Brazil during the dictatorship it was common for newspapers to print cooking recipes in place of censored articles, now I'm waiting to see if media in the USA has the balls to play the malicious compliance game... I guess I won't see it since money is basically God in America.
They already got quite a few, post 2024 election.
https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/dana-white-john-elkann-cha...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/14/tech/robby-starbuck-meta-ai-a...
Washed-up music video director to professional Twitter poster to advisor at Facebook. What a display of the American meritocracy.
I believe the technical name is "Political Commissar."
Edit: Dana White, of MMA fame, now sits on Meta's board, though it is at Zuckerberg's request.
There are several ActivityPub services that are pretty good and even have decent UXes, but they aren't super active.
A major issue is it's confusing and the funds are limited.
This exists today, it has always existed, and you never needed technology to find the solution to it.
Im a huge fan of the film Rope, because it is just done well. Its also got a ton of coding in it for "homosexual" themes that were very much banned at the time of filming. Understanding these paints the film in a whole new way...
Shakespeare has a ton of contemporary satire coded into it. Unless you're aware of history or reading a version that illuminates the meta-context you would very much be unaware of its existence.
It happens in modern film: Paul Verhoeven is a master of it.
If you dont think there are coded communities on existing social platforms sharing information among in members I have news for you.
Therefore I’m only left to conclude this is an entirely unsubstantiated claim, as why wouldn’t it have already been apparent if they were working as shadow brokers of Israeli interests in all this, which the general timeline and verifiable information we know don’t line up with?
Edit: Not to mention universities. It’s crazy how quickly civil institutions are being consolidated by the right. They have gone all in and there appears to be insufficient appetite to stop them.
fixed that for you
The bill itself outlines specifically how and why it can be delayed. That was violated in the very first "delay".
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/20/914032065/tiktok-ban-averted-...
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramount-warner-bros-disco...
Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' online. So many that the net effect is that most of those sources lean one way or the other, and by and large people choose to listen mostly or only to those sources they agree with.
No wonder political opinions are so highly divided today. Almost no one ever hears anything from the other side.
That's not Larry Ellison, it's his nepo baby David Ellison.
Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison
Ok someone's going to come and say that "The Left" controlled the medium and disallowed "non-mainstream" messaging about Covid... I admit my bias and consider such messaging lunacy too..
Again? People should be talking about the hostile take-over currently in progress and how it is getting exponentially worse. But the billionaire mouthpieces gave everyone a shiny new inconsequential talking point and no one cares about anything that matters.
Maybe that's what they wanted all along.
Why fight a war against class, against oppression when we can sit on a chair and write a comment either defending or arguing against something as petty as religion.
It would be maybe the 3rd point worth discussing definitely after concentration of power & how they can influence our opinion of the masses.
But people made it the first.
There is no such thing as a moral billionaire imo, I saw a video like this and I sorta agree.
I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone owning this much amount of control.
Religion seems so petty to me yet it seems that the world is coming back to it. Fighting us vs them.
We have all forgotten what the people in 1970's esque dreamed of 2025 etc. (I am a genz but I have seen such videos of people thinking what)
And the funny thing is, is that we ourselves have forgotten how to dream of what will happen in 2100
Do we really want to grow old in society where even after 70-80 years, one of our children or grandchildren sees yet again some comment like this and writes something like this that I am writing?
I feel a little frustrated.
There are tiny pockets of this country that assume this is the singular issue that animates everybody, every day, and that it is impossible to believe in both Israel's right to exist and defend itself and the Palestinians' right to not be bombed because the Israeli PM doesn't want to go to jail.
Whenever we take a stance, We identify our ego with that stance. We shall die but die a pro X or pro Y
As such many debates happen in bad faith as well.
Of course everyone has their agenda but one has to understand that agenda is just a framework for understanding the world.
And we need to understand the world because it has no inherent meaning.
So like, if we really have to deduce meaning, if we really have to be pro something that we can die on a hill towards, I'd rather have it be a humanitarian thing.
I am not saying that palestine is good either but rather that in genocide/wars, the people fighting the war/military/families displaced suffer, not the old man causing the war.
I feel like I am a humanist. Wishing to understand the world, yet I feel like some people in this world have hurt me so much that sometimes I just wish the world to burn.
I am sure that people are gonna comment on something like "oh do you support a genocide etc."
But I am trying to make the point that the world should really be just anti suffering,accepting. Yes I am naive but surely with all of this technological improvements, we can improve the structure of society to not be fucking brewing with hate and bullying and resentment.
We can do so much better as a society without even trying much. Just small acts of kindness and basically creating a environment that rewards it and punishes bullying/hate speech etc. might be really nice if I am being honest.
Not sure why we can't be pro this instead of defining ourselves with the confict of two other foreign nations
Ellison read and responded to the political situation more skilfully than Elon.
He used Stargate to cement himself as a power broker in AI. He used that influence to provide antitrust assurances that gave his son a leg up for Paramount. Meanwhile he used that proximity to media to get a foot in the door with TikTok.
The root cause is the partisan politicisation of the economy. This is a project all the major Trump donors and high-level supporters contributed to. That Ellison is coming up as one of the new aristocrats is closer to a dice roll; that we have oligarchs, now, is very much by design.
In this case using the state to choose which business is viable, no doubt being businesses that play ball with the party.
-its why sectarian conflicts and power delegation is so high stakes in many parts of the world.
> The root cause is the partisan politicisation of the economy.
Through all of the perilous times since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home. In my mind, there is no greater honor than supporting some of the bravest people in the world, and I thank Friends of the IDF for allowing us to celebrate and support these soldiers year after year. We should do all we can to show these heroic soldiers that they are not alone.
...when you connect with Oracle you understand that we are committed to the U.S. and Israel. We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none. This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don't agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren't the right company for them. Larry (Ellison, co-founder of Oracle) and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country and no one should be surprised by that.
TikTok got significantly less interesting when the US blocked themselves earlier this year, if that happens permanently it'll probably hurt TikTok worldwide.
I think it's really that highly motivated individuals will power through garbage UX that regular users won't. Upsides like decentralization are abstract, UX is concrete. You need to get the UX right to give your real benefits a chance to shine.
But yeah if the normal people are where all the ads and spam and nazis are, I'm fine being a weirdo :)
I'm sure this deal is more complex than "ByteDance is not allowed to run an app called TikTok within the US". Politicians are morons so I could be wrong but I would hope it's much more liberal than that.
Ideas don't grow because they're good but because they push instinctive buttons, or save money, or give people what they want with minimal effort.
It goes without saying that anyone can opt out and ignore anyone beyond their personal circle.
I think there's another option, which is using screens in a more positive way.
It’s part of a larger trend of the buying platforms for obvious propaganda. It seems to be a successful strategy.
The government should be the government, and corporations should be corporations. Nothing good will come of having them bleed together.
Like church and state, you keep them separate for the good of both.
No, not for the good of both - for the good of the people. It is demonstrably beneficial for those in power in government and megacorps to conspire and consolidate that power, it enables them to further control and extract from the populace. It is the people that should be invested in keeping them separate.
> Like church and state, you keep them separate for the good of both.
I'm not convinced of that anymore. The problem is the government is so weak and slow: the corporations can implement some bad decision before the government has a chance to notice and regulate.
There needs to be more stakeholders with power at the corporate decision-making table than just the shareholders and their representatives. You need workers there, you needs someone to speak for the interests of the country as a whole, etc.
It starts as early as childhood cartoons/movies. You are/project yourself as the righteous character and they are the zombies, bad guys, evil wizard, etc. Things are never that simple, but that’s why people are trained into this format. It’s easier managing things when you’ve constrained people into a duality and even intentionally set them against each other to distract.
What is confusing to people is that things like TikTok is like ranchers battling over control of the cattle. Most don’t realize they are not ranchers, as they graze and consume what they are fed to think and engage with.
So it is common for Governments to cooperate with media to ensure they remain independent and not just push corporate propaganda, not just to push government propaganda.
I expect them to continue to do so, except that uncle Donald is the law now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s [3] https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveill... [4] https://financhill.com/blog/investing/larry-ellison-leadersh...
Looking at the performance of Facebook in the wake of Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter post purchase, or Reddit post blackout, platforms have a too big to fail quality to them. Even slashdot still gets a pile of comments every day. Yahoo and Myspace are still around. TikTok will never die. The next generation may find a new platform to be on (hopefully obe with the feature of going to the next video automatically) due to fuckery by the GOP, but it might be Truth Social but for videos. ORCL already popped, so it's no good getting in there now, but other than that, however TikTok 2.0 does doesn't really actually affect my life. I'll just end up on whichever app there's better content.
The value may well be in currying favor with the Trump regime, not in the actual deal for itself. If you can lose a few billion on becoming best friends with an increasingly authoritarian leadership, you may well get much more power and future opportunities from that.
Recently the Ellison clan dumped a large amount of money on the infamous genocidaire Bari Weiss and is pushing CBS to accept her as a senior member of their news organisation.
I'd say the anti-American comments outnumber the pro-American ones something like 10 to 1.
The US may not be preaching about freedom and rights. But it seems to be practicing it, at least in the narrow sense that anti-American content isn't being censored or suppressed.
Broadly speaking, I think you're probably right that the dynamics on tiktok already exist elsewhere in social media. But I do think a practical upshot of it could be a version of Tiktok where you can criticize the Hong Kong takeover or Xinxianj labor camps or harassment of expatriate dissidents or Taiwan indepence openly and not have it soft-deplatformed. Which could cause stronger domestic consciousness of those issues, and stronger solidarity with Europe and the rest of the Western world.
Source?
That's like asking why to people hate heroin a product so much. After all, most its users can't get enough! Must be good, eh?
Are we for sure the TikTok algorithm doesn’t bump towards or away from certain issues? The data on the cultural zeitgeist? The ability to promote political messaging?
Brainrot the same. Intentions, maybe not.
Start new accounts, swipe through the content and establish what kind of algorithm it is. The few attempts I've seen on youtube seem to indicate it's heavily based on your geographical area. They don't really care that much which side the apple falls onto.
I do acknowledge that there's a latent threat that could be activated. And I can see an argument being made on that front, I mean, China doesn't allow access to a lot of American social media for that reason. But I don't really buy the argument right now as I haven't seen a lot of evidence of Tiktok doing things that Meta/Google haven't done.
They can target any age range or demographics, any interests.
We had Uber hiding things from LEO almost a decade ago via geofencing and other tricks, I’m sure it’s a bit more sophisticated now.
You keep bringing Meta/Google into this. I don’t care if they do the same things. I mean, I wouldn’t like it either, but we have solutions available to us. We can pass laws or go to court and handle it internally. A foreign nation is not bound by that.
When did Americans lose that ability? I didn't hear about this happening.
> could be argued that the rise in pro-palestine awareness post Oct 7 is in part to TikTok. Thats likely going away now so Americans on the whole are left worse off.
The only thing that changed is that China can't choose what you get shown, do you think that the pro-palestine videos are only there due to Chinese influence?
The main problem is that allowing foreign propaganda from a political rival to influence your citizens, while giving them free reign to exploit user data, is undeniably a matter of national security. The issue is that taking over a single platform doesn't stop foreign influence and data mining, which is also happening on all other platforms, courtesy of the adtech machinery that powers all of them. We have concrete evidence of this from the Cambridge Analytica leak, which was just the tip of the iceberg of a multi-billion dollar industry.
So unless US companies are willing to take a severe hit on their revenue and drastically change their business models, which can only happen with regulation that in practice will never be enacted, none of this will change.
If you're a user of these platforms, stop worrying about what you can or cannot say, and start worrying about what you're being manipulated to think, say, and do.
The reverse also happens - Gaza being the main one. China couldn't give two shits about what happens in the middle east - it's not involved at all. So it lets footage be played sometimes. But the USA cares deeply about making sure young people don't see footage of Gaza and that's the sort of thing that motivates the US to ban this app.
Instead online discourse often revolves around this being an impossible task. Meanwhile on all the social media sites I use I have managed to keep algorithmic content to a minimum.
YouTube shorts was like this day 1. I didn't even use it, but it saw that my normal recs were music and started showing me music... performed by girls wearing skirts with the camera on the ground. Then I adblocked it.
On planet Floorp, carpets (organic bipedal tetrapods) use people (machines that suck air) to clean vacuums (woolen floor lining). How quaint - no, not really, that's exactly the same as on Earth but with different words.
There are good arguments to be made that the USA's government is corporations, and the entity we call "the US government" doesn't actually meet the definition of being the government of the US.
the only thing may indicate that trump is competing with china is how hard he's trying to please putin, but apparently he needs to work harder to get into the organ harvesting club.
Words tend to get watered down over time, if they were gassing Palestinians like Hitler gassed yews people would have a very different opinion on this matter, which is why I feel words shouldn't be watered down that much.
List stuff out for all to see and learn.
Self-professed "free speech absolutists" get really angry when left or anti right people speak or make the right uncomfortable.
Just in time for them to “finish the job”
EDIT: Found this: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/tiktok-ban-fueled-by-israe...
My knee-jerk reaction was to upvote the comment, but that’s how Ecco chambers get increasingly divorced from reality.
I don't even know if we can consider things to win if that means that childrens have to die in screams.
I don't want such victories to be celebrated.
I want peace to be celebrated.
I don't think that its highly unusual to have a functioning society that doesn't actively partake where the children/woman/helpless suffer.
We have failed as a society if we can't stop it/actively pick sides in it.
The only side that one should pick is peace.
Among the common ones I have are things like Palestine being like a lawless laboratory where industrialists are trying out new gadgets and systems on human populations, which is an important driver in civil as well as military state power towards both their own populations and foreign.
It's also one of the last surviving colonial projects and some old money dynasties stick by it for nostalgic or geopolitical reasons. Related to this is a common form of racism, where the state of Israel is perceived as a civilised western bulwark against the unshaven barbaric hordes of the east.
Then there are religious convictions, especially common among usians, who are often of the belief that there is a God that has a plan for the cosmos that involves first telling the jews about ethics and then replacing them with christians but keeping the jews around as the first line of defense in the ultimate war to end all wars and history itself. Usually this is expressed as a philosemitic form of antisemitism where they see themselves as kind of stewards of the jewish diaspora communities and take on themselves the purpose of moving all jews close to Jerusalem, where this final war is supposed to begin. It's not uncommon that these people perceive arab and persian muslims as basically an Antichrist entity that needs to be eradicated, either in the short term if they're uppity or kept in some form of economic or political bondage.
While there's a lot of conspiracist beliefs surrounding it I'm also convinced there is some truth to the view that israeli security services keeps a lot of kompromat and similar tools of power involving rich and powerful people. Open assassinations and the like have backfired sometimes, e.g. the Lillehammer scandal, and I suspect that this has pushed israeli security to try to adapt to more shadowy tactics.
And then you have people with Holocaust or related forms of shallowly antiracist anxieties, that have convinced themselves that the jews deserve Palestine due to historic attempts at extermination. This is somewhat related to christian zionist beliefs where jews are considered somehow special, 'a chosen people', which is why they are supposedly deserving of an atrocity-laden settler colonial project but e.g. the cirkassians are not and they don't care about the christians of Artsakh and so on.
Plus the economic opportunities due to huge free-money investments into corporations situated in Israel and more mundane imperial considerations like the geopolitical positioning as a destabilising force between Eurasia and Africa as well as on the edge of Eurasia itself. The Mediterranean is small but imagine if there was high-speed rail and a decent degree of social and economic integration all the way from South Africa and Mauritania up to Europe, that would make this a hugely important economic and political area and North America would look puny and useless beside it, due to being surrounded by oceans and so on. Israel also happens to be a base for nuclear weapons placed really close to some of the largest energy reserves on the planet, and largely dependent on states really far away that in turn are highly dependent on the exploitation of these energy reserves.
Also, some people are plain sadists. They feel pleasure and giddiness when they know there are other people on what they perceive as their team doing the worst of things, just the nastiest possible stuff, the most excruciating forms of hierarchy and power imbalance. Sometimes because that makes the power imbalances that keep them in place look relatively sane and tolerable.
You haven't heard about the government pressuring universities to prevent students protesting Israel? Or about anti-BDS laws?
It fell in between the razer thin "terms & conditions" of most American service providers and the the main point of this thread: controlling the algorithm to suppress these thoughts. I will concede that Americans can still set up their own online service and yell into an empty room.
>The only thing that changed is that China can't choose what you get shown, do you think that the pro-palestine videos are only there due to Chinese influence?
anything that China does not find offensive is there.
To be clear, I'm talking purely about being forced to see content from accounts you don't follow and not things like them choosing to show you content from one account more than another. Not all of them support my preference of pure chronological, so they will monkey with what I see amongst the things I follow. But all of them make it easy to quickly filter out and/or avoid any unwanted activity outside of sponsored ads.
It would take a minimum of two Republicans to retire, and be replaced by Democrats, to change the partisan balance. The oldest justice is Clarence Thomas, but the next two are both Democrats. Everybody else is under 70 and will not retire for a minimum of a decade.
This along with the consolidation of other US media assets under Zionist control, is very much about Israel and attempting to gain a monopoly on the media.
Conspiracy theory.
What do you think the push behind the new gerrymandered districts is for?
Why do you think they are assembling a national voter registration database that hasn't existed before? https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-doj-national-...
Why are they creating fake emergencies to justify inserting federal police and the national guard in major cities with big Democratic voting populations?
1. Gerrymandering is and always has been a thing, blue and red. Nothing has changed.
2. Government puts government data from multiple government places into one government place. More news at 11.
3. Because you get stabbed/shot for just existing in them? Because of the riots earlier this year?
Fascism = Something I don't like. Get a grip.
Except China doesn't actually serve its people. Things are way more cut-throat there, with much less safety net. The Chinese government sees workers as grist for the mill, not something to be cared for.
> And you used to not have to say this, but a culturally dominant app being leveraged by an authoritarian state goes in the not good colunm.
Agreed.
Or you can just get rid of this crap and stop lying to yourself about the value and they can rule over an empty kingdom.
Otherwise yes indeed the US will get a board seat and the Trump admin will make content demands and you will take it like a coward because you’re too addicted to give it up.
(Just a note I don’t mean you specifically - I don’t know if you’re addicted to social media or not)
I really have to disagree at this point. Meta has all the money in the world to throw at this, and inference isn't rocket surgery. I think Meta's algorithm caught up a couple years ago, if anything it's even more addictive. Tiktok is simply riding on first mover status, plus it's a Coke/Pepsi thing, a large segment finds Meta properties distasteful for all the obvious reasons.
Pretty much everyone I know consumes TikTok style content these days. I personally have blocked myself from this stuff via deleting the Insta, YouTube and I even wrote a TamperMonkey script to block myself from getting trapped down the rabbit hole.
Self shout out: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/534969-begone-youtube-shor...
At the rate the US is going this will be interesting for Europe and Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, in probably the near future.
Fediverse, in my actual experience, is overwhelmingly filled with hyper left leaning echo chamber content that I’m not interested in.
I think political scholars will debate on what the net effect of this is actually going to be. As in, are we better off with the GOP or the CCP controlling the algorithm? Certainly, the CCP has anti west incentives that the GOP does not, like trying to confuse us as to how we should feel about protecting Taiwan.
But in the past, the CCP has been interested in sewing discontent in the US and the method by which they have done that is by propping up the GOP. And many ways by which both the CCP and GOP would presumably manipulate the algorithm would be similar—owning libs, promoting radical right wing views, etc. But having the GOP control TikTok is a different thing entirely, they are much more incentivized to propagate their own flavor of politics to skew the nations narrative to their liking, in a much more controlled way than I think the CCP would. See twitter for prior art here.
At least if TikTok is owned in the US there might be some oversight into what’s going on. As bankrupt as Mark is as a person it doesn’t seem like hes pushing his own political views into instagrams algorithm, unlike the case at twitter. I think we have yet to see how Ellison will treat the great power of controlling the TikTok algorithm but I’m cynical.
The GOP wants to destroy the west even more than the CCP, yes.
Violent crime has been dropping for years in almost every major liberal city in America. Are there still random incidents? There always will be, but fun violence rates are actually higher in many rural and GOP led states than in major cities.
You need to get a grip and disconnect yourself from the propaganda the fascists are feeding you. The military does not belong in US cities.
i dont think thats a good guess
I think this is universal, but perhaps China indeed may be worse.
I am trying to make no judgement here, just explaining then 'motivational environment'
This math of course is in flux to a degree we haven't seen in maybe 1000+ years though right now.
Just because you have fewer full-body casts than someone who just got in a bad wreck, does not mean you are worse off.
The Chinese rural population still isn't eligible for local equivalent of social security in their old age (that's only for city folks), and IIRC there was a huge unwillingness to provide financial assistance to individuals during COVID.
I've been using mastodon for nearly 10 years. Fediverse, in my actual experience, is overwhelmingly a really good place to meet and chat with interesting, friendly people. Follow and engage with cool people and you'll have a good time. If you go looking for what you don't like, you'll find it, because it's there just like anywhere on the net. The difference is you don't have to see stuff you don't want to see, because the software and protocol have features that allow this. I'm on a pretty small server and we all are pretty much on the same page about what we expect our social interactions to be like. You know you can just filter out content, right? Your server can totally block or defederate from servers that have objectionable content, too (by whatever your collective definition of "objectionable" is). It works pretty well if you use it the way it's designed to be used.
Who could have predicted this.
You could make the case that this sale means the Trump admin actually didn’t break the rules here.
"The President can grant a one-time extension of up to 90 additional days when a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, there is evidence of 'significant' progress toward executing the divestiture, and there are legally binding agreements in place to enable the divestiture."
One could argue all day about whether or not there was an identified path or evidence of significant progress, but certainly there weren't legally binding agreements in place at any point, and the deadline has been extended far more than once.
Trump is ignoring the law. The DoJ has asserted that Trump can ignore the law because it would interfere with his duty to "take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States." It is unclear what, if any law, could not be ignored under this doctrine.
Idk about america, but there's definitely a sentiment echoing I feel like all across the world that there is a concentration of power and the divide between state and class is shrinking and we consider state to be itself (corrupt?) / not working to our wants.
That's my understanding of it. People have given up hope on...well having hope.
But hey lets define what is a woman first, that matters more than people sadly suiciding because they can't take this cruel petty world anymore.
We have induced our cruelness on earth, every animal,tree, air, even other humans. Who have we left?
Have we forgotten humanity? What does humanity even mean when we realize that people literally eat animals which scream to death from pain for the "taste" ?
I myself ate an egg yesterday for "protein" after a few years, I am skinny so I had to convince myself that I needed it but still my heart felt a bit bitter.
I am not judging you if you eat meat, that's not the point because I don't have a point/agenda. I am venting.You almost feel small when you think about it.
I really feel like the world can be a better place so there's hope tho.
What do you mean though by protection from “German nihilists”? Is that a satirical name you imagine the US government might use for the EU?
Or maybe just a direct reference to Strauss, I dunno.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes?item=qt0464759&r...
i find it worrisome that some are implying it’s new controllers are somehow less of a threat.
I live in Taiwan. I'm no fan of the CPC. But if you zoom out a bit, it's kinda hard to distinguish the two beyond Americans winning global cultural victory (CPC propaganda is still goofy and obvious).
Point at tiananmem square, an atrocious massacre of their own citizenry. The USA has done this - it has locked its citizens in concentration camps, supported their enslavement and recaptured the ones that managed to free themselves, bombed wealthy neighborhoods of the wrong race, had soldiers fire upon striking workers and peaceful protesters. America just has no Tank Man photo and much more subtle media relations - ostensibly free media but in reality controlled through the mutual interests of the billionaire owners of the media conglomerates and the multi millionaire politicians.
The CPC did a genocide in Xinjiang. They were very good at information control here, it's almost impossible to find even an image from the inside of one of their concentration camps. The USA funded a genocide in Palestine, but it can maintain a sort of non culpability. At any point in time the USA can turn on its Israeli allies, and my cynical expectation is that when the government becomes flagrantly fascist enough they'll just blame the Jews and call it done. But, until now, they've maintained an extraordinarily effective marketing campaign propping up Israel as a bastion of freedom and democracy in a demonic environment,values it's managed to market across the entire world that isn't the PRC or cuba or Venezuela, to where people in other countries will say "I can do what I want, it's a free country" even in countries where that really isn't the case e.g. for speech in the UK for example. In actuality it's a more racialized pitch - the Israelis are more credibly white, the Muslims are, well, Muslims. Or Brown. Whichever. But they have this massive marketing apparatus (decades of film and TV) smoothing over these racialized concepts into "freedom and democracy vs savagery and chaos," whereas the CPC with their racialized version just had Han and Normal vs Muslim and Kinda Weird (maybe dangerous!). A much more despicable pitch on the surface which is why they didn't get away with a televised genocide the way America and Israel got away with decades of apartheid against Palestine.
Anyway in summary if we take a look at all the bad the CPC vs the USA have done in their lifetimes, idk man at best the scales at balanced, worse case I think America has been worse for the world overall. I would be curious if people that disagree would be willing to do so with the context of American imperialism in mind - interfering in south America and the middle East for example. Is it still better than a country that has one imperialist action (Tibet) and a genocide under its belt?
https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-tract-su...
The freedoms in that instance are freedom of religion, and democracy. (Democracy, the franchise, was limited to about 10% of men, under rules that varied locally from "you have to own a house" to "you have to own the entire region".)
But here the concept is again in ancient times:
https://archive.org/details/BiblicalCollectionPrintedBetween...
This is (a translation of) Josephus, writing in the first century about a speech by a Roman senator from the time when Claudius was put on the throne, with lines like "our natural freedom", "breath of liberty", and "the Liberty of former Times, that was dead and gone before ever I came into the World ..." I can't work out what that freedom was all about - Claudius came after Caligula, though, so you can make a good guess - but evidently this kind of concept is much older than the United States.
I also found the phrase "it's a free country" in Uncle Tom's Cabin, where the freedom in question is the freedom to control slaves.
So the concept is:
• Not modern,
• Not well defined,
• But not meaningless, either.
I also don't think your assessment of the relative histories is reliable, but for our purposes here, that's all largely beside the point, because the degree of national security alignment of domestic companies in China compared to the United States are at completely different orders of magnitude, which is the pertinent issue when considering harm reduction here.
About media. For me, since Trump second term, I just can't watch Superhero movies (DC / Marvel). It just feels strange and wrong for me. Also movies like the Den of Thieves (1), the feel just plain wrong with a brutal police.
But what if AI surpasses human skill and now you have need for 0 educated workers. Not good for human citizens...
We're no where near experiencing the same political and cultural forces because the US and China are vastly different on many axes both in their structure and culture and importantly we're very very different economically.
What do you mean "doing well"?
https://asiatimes.com/2025/05/chinas-economy-on-cusp-of-a-de...
May 2025:
Tariffs are drying up international demand for Chinese goods, and in a bid to keep factories alive, Beijing is urging exporters to turn inward. However, that pivot is compounding the very problem it aims to solve.
Deflation isn’t an abstract threat in China anymore—it’s visible across the economy. After barely holding above zero for much of 2023 and 2024, consumer prices have now dropped for two straight months.
Producer prices have fallen for 29 consecutive months. March’s figures showed the sharpest drop in four months, and forecasts point to an even steeper decline in April.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Yes, I’m fully aware that’s starting so low because of horrible governments in the past and that the current government is far from great, but that’s still moving in the right direction at the time the United States is trying to speed run to a Russian-style oligarchy and most people under 50 think it’s getting worse.
In moral terms they are so far behind the West they are in a different team. (and don't throw in disingenous deflections like gaza and whatever, those are orders of magnitude less bad then China) The West is full of freedom and the pursuit of happiness and wealth. China isn't.
Nobody here is pro Russia or Iran, or even particularly pro India. So why is Communist China different?
I wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners. Like will we see massive social change in two or three generations hence as a rejection of the current hysteria? Will history books record the silliest parts that now seem quaint with a little distance, IE War on Christmas? Mission accomplished? WMDs that didn't exist? Etc etc.
So that’s where the name of that David sylvian / ryuichi sakamoto song came from.
I always thought it was just a throw away from the subject matter.
I loath partisanship and am more than willing to point out failures by the Dems, but this is different. Trump and Co have openly stated that they don't believe in democracy.
If you are not able to see this I'm not sure what I could say to open your eyes.
Bullying, yes. Competency, no.
Underestimate them at your own peril...
Eg. they are very stupid at winning lawsuitts, but he had 4 years of training on who and what to bully and another 4 years to prepare.
A lot of stupid people turned a democracy into an autocracy ( Orban, ... ). It's easy if no one protests and you can give money to the rich and powerful.
It's amazing that this guy/administration grifts so publicly and a lot of people in the US just keep following him blindly.
And it was like that all along, just a bit more hidden so that moderate right can pretend it is not happening all along.
The left en masse has been doing this for 10 years, and for far less that "authoritarian viewpoints".
People say all sorts of stuff, but if your consistently being told by a large cohort of individuals your shit stinks for a decade, it probably stinks.
My "anti-American" comment is due to the difference between what's preached and what's practiced. "Leader of the free world", "greatest country on earth" etc. I also wouldn't characterize my comment as anti-American so much as disappointed in America.
There is of course more freedom in the US than in say China. But I'm also not holding up China as a beacon of freedom. The US on the other hand, the land of the free, freedoms and rights are being eroded.
I don't see Americans referring to their country that way anymore. I think you're arguing with an interlocutor who peaked in the Reagan era and has been on a downtrend ever since.
Personally speaking, as an American, I don't want to lead the free world anymore. I don't want to be the "greatest country in the world" either. I'd rather the US just stick to solving its own problems, and let other countries solve theirs. The whole hero act has clearly been a mistake.
I saw a commenter the other day here claiming that in EU, there are lot of "anti-american" far left sentiments. They weren't able to elaborate, who exactly that is; as someone on the left, I don't see it.
For example, I live in EU, I support DiEM25, and I am against NATO, as well as stopping other military activities. I also agree with Chomsky. Is any of this anti-american? How is then yibg's comment anti-american?
I guess you can't have it both ways - the american soft power (you seem to miss) came with exceptionalism. I agree that Switzerland is nice, but they simply don't have that soft power.
Sticking to solve their own problems is how the Chinese declined into being the "sick man of Asia" hundreds of years ago.
This deal cuts the US off from worldwide content. Just like China does.
The US TikTok will literally be a bubble that the US gov controls. So it's not even pretending to practice 'freedom' here.
You can't criticize the US for taking an authoritarian turn while simultaneously doing more and more business with a totalitarian state.
this deal is a direct copy of the one China forced onto Microsoft MSN Messenger's China operation some 15 years ago. almost 100% the same.
And I mean, it's not like this is new. The past two years have seen intense crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech. Look at what happened to Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk.
> The US may not be preaching about freedom and rights. But it seems to be practicing it, at least in the narrow sense that anti-American content isn't being censored or suppressed.
Whiteness, like any race, is a purely cultural concept rooted in the shifting reality of day to day sociology.
A man with as-of-yet undefined politics was identified as the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk. Before he was found, a governor said, "I really hope he's not one of us." When it was discovered that he was a young white male from a Mormon MAGA family, the media machine that had been calling for the elimination of the opposition party in the USA (or various minorities such as LGBT people) went silent for about a day until it was discovered that perhaps the assassin's roommate may have been trans. Immediately he was othered. Calls for prayer for a lost young man turned again into calls for violence against trans people. I imagine Governor Cox breathing a sigh of relief. Whiteness revoked!
Especially since this is probably the only incident in the last couple of decades where the cancelation was a result of the government threatening consequences unless a specific individual was not canceled.
Is there anything that will make you interested in free speech itself, or is it just an attack towards those you disagree with? People don't want to waste time in an internet debate with someone who starts off with an assumption of the latter, and you've already concluded you were being sarcastic in asking. The lack of interest in responding to you about it will only help drive your belief "the other people" are the only ones who claim to care about free speech.
The Kimmel thing is indeed a stupid and dangerous attack on free speech, but you can't just wait until the speech under attack is about something you care for to declare that. It's already too late at that point, which is what many of the people you eagerly dismiss as just caring about right wing politics were trying to say.
Not legally, IIRC China has an internal passport system, and workers who migrate to the city from the countryside typically remain must registered in the countryside (and are therefore denied access to city benefits).
They are also surrounded by billionaires that want them to keep it going. Look at how Larry Ellison is buying up Paramount/CBS and soon, Tiktok. They just took Kimmel off the air.
Again, I know this sounds like histrionics on my part but what is happening now is not normal -- the fact that all "old school" republicans have left the GOP and it is now literally the Party of Trump. And they have millions of cult members who are itching to use their second amendment rights against "non-Americans".
I desperately want to be wrong, and would love credible evidence that could demonstrate this.
Paired with this administration’s assertion of impoundment powers and the pocket rescission, the Congress’s power of the purse is completely neutered in both directions. The executive can decline to spend whatever it doesn’t want to, and it can fund anything it does want.
Recklessly funding the government off of the Fed’s balance sheet will of course cause all sorts of nasty economic effects, but that’s exactly why you need to print money! So your massive immigration enforcement apparatus (newly full of ideological minions thanks to the current hiring surge) can go and assert powers of process-free expedited removal throughout the entire country (per DOJ memo from week 1).
So the economic consequences hardly matter: you simply deport whoever complains.
Dril said it best.
Oh, sweet summer child. It's as "grassroots" as the Cultural Revolution (party elites encouraging and directing mobilized workers and farmers to play out their power plays) was grassroot.
The FBI and others telling Twitter what to censor, the goverment agencies threating companies to comply, academics and prestigious news media on lockstep, nebulous NGOs and "think tanks" suggesting what's fake news and what's not, tech behemoths collaborating, even banks having a go at it.
In other words, it's as top down as the current Republican shit is.
I agree that the authoritarian left has very much tried to recreate the "no smoke without fire" pre-liberal "justice" system, but all it takes is organisational capture of media coupled with a lot of people without any critical thinking skills.
It doesn't make a difference. See this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/GDP_per_...
GDP growth stayed on the same trend both before and after the US tried to "lead the free world" post-WW2.
>military power projection
That's a cost for us, not a benefit. I don't want my tax dollars to be "projecting power". I want them helping me and my fellow citizens.
>pop culture has not only given the US clout
The internet is awash in anti-American comments. Trying to "lead the free world" has destroyed our soft power.
>Sticking to solve their own problems is how the Chinese declined into being the "sick man of Asia" hundreds of years ago.
My preferred model is Switzerland, not Qing China. I'm not anti-modernization. I'm anti-imperialism. We shouldn't involve ourselves in wars or military alliances on other continents.
> That's a cost for us, not a benefit.
If id get a cent for every US-american not understanding their hegemonial privilege...
(Sorry, shouldnt be an insult. Its just so prevalent and to me, a sign of lacking self criticism on a worringly massive scale.)
Eg:
https://business.columbia.edu/research-brief/dollars-dominan...
TLDR: The US military backs the dollar as international trade currency, which puts all other nations in a depending position to lend USD. This allowed the US to cheaply amass a gigantic debt that in turn allowed ridiculous (military) budgets.
Please dont answer something like "see, we are in debt for you", since the US got material stuff in return for a fiat currency that can they can devalue on demand but had been accepted on the basis of trust and stability.
Remember when "the market got the yippies" and trump chickened out of broad tarifs? It was also because of long term allies sending a signal by liquidating US bonds:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-bond-y...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/15/us-treasurys-selloff-what-ha...
A continuing drop of bond yields could mean a collapse of the US national budgets. Thats the benedit you enjoyed for decades. Something other nations cannot do.
I really don't think the US has any shortage of self-criticism. I am criticizing US policy at this very moment! It is you who defends current US policy and says it is good (for the US at least). I am the critic here.
But if you really believe what you're saying about self-criticism, that's evidence for my position that the US should not play world police. If we're incapable of self-criticism, we will do a bad job at world policing.
>TLDR: The US military backs the dollar as international trade currency, which puts all other nations in a depending position to lend USD. This allowed the US to cheaply amass a gigantic debt that in turn allowed ridiculous (military) budgets.
"There once was a fisherman relaxing on the beach, catching just enough fish to feed his family. A businessman told him he should work hard, hire employees, catch more fish, and grow a big company—then, after many years, he could retire and live a peaceful fisherman's life. The fisherman smiled and said, ‘But isn’t that what I’m doing right now?’"
Assuming you are right: We need the debt to fund our military. We need our military to borrow for our debt. Why are we playing this game, exactly? It's a cyclone of vice.
Personally, I think the USD would actually be a stronger reserve currency if we reduced international adventurism. This would reduce the incentive of other nations like Russia and Israel to interfere in our politics, and thus improve our institutional stability. Switzerland is very stable, and an attractive investment destination, because it is known to be neutral.
It's also not clear to me if reserve currency status is a good thing. It makes our exports less competitive, and increases our trade deficit. It's like eating cookies for every meal. Sure, you're getting a lot of calories. But it's not good for your health in the long term.
If you look at the GDP trendline, it's been the same regardless of USD reserve status. So I'm additionally just not sure this matters either way.
In any case, if you really believe what you are saying, you should be very happy about my advocacy, since it increases the chance that your nation's currency becomes the new reserve currency. Oh boy, your country might take on a ton of debt and become the new self-appointed world police, hated by all, with constant foreign interference in your politics! Isn't it grand?
I think we agree, since we're both against NATO. Not sure why you're trying to argue with me.
*The issue is in American politics, especially on right-wing, the term "anti-american" is typically implies presumed hatred against ordinary Americans or their way of life. In other words, its meaning is about ethnicity, not a political view.
>people abroad who criticize these things recognize that not every American agrees with these policies
Pretty common nowadays for all of the US to be blamed for Trump's election. See this discussion from the other day. No one outside the US said I shouldn't be blamed for the votes of my neighbors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45035046
In any case, the original discussion is related to freedom of speech. The US is usually criticized more for this, regardless of how other countries are doing. See e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/europe-fre... This represents an anti-American bias, which is due to our foreign policy.
>its meaning is about ethnicity
"American" is not an ethnicity.
He literally made a personal point out of it calling the swiss president things in public.
No, Trump started it in his first term, Biden just continued it, as did Trump continue what he started.
No, it didn't.
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
There is no lack of "equivalent left wing attack", just shifts on when it's okay to do based on how much the individual agrees with it. I've had this exact conversation with right wing folks but the other way around (where nothing conservative was unreasonable suppression but plenty left wing was unreasonable suppression). Because you agree with the views of whatever the Biden admin supported e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Boar... then you don't consider it a problem (and yes, the Biden administration likes to claim it was just building on something the Trump administration had started... which gets us nowhere in actually doing something positive for free speech instead of using it as a blame game). Because someone else agrees with Trump/Kirk they don't consider it a problem. As a result, there is nothing I can say that will make anyone agree when things are equivalent. The difference is not that I agree with a different agenda, nor do I need to find equivalence, it's that I'm not interested in weighing the speech itself.
I, obviously, don't like Russian misinformation (or human smugglers or whatever thing is obviously malintended), but I don't think trying to have a government body decide what is misinformation is a good way to solve the concerns. That's what a free speech absolutist is after all, not just a way to say only a certain party did something bad. I could go on and on about specific instances, but all that does is rile people up about "why would you put that in a list of bad things" or "that's obviously not as big a deal to worry about" whenever they see something they tend to agree with. Those not in support of free speech have no problem saying other transgressions on free speech are a bigger deal, just in agreeing what "other" is.
Supporting free speech is not about agreeing with the speech, it's about tackling any perceived bad speech with open means instead of power. I don't agree with either the Biden or Trump administrations on the ways either seek to suppress social media, regardless if you think some are justified and others aren't. You think it's okay to suppress things as long as they seem harmless or small to you, I don't. That's the only fair assumption of what a free speech absolutist is.
I will give credit that at least my original comment isn't already flagged dead for saying I'm really about free speech instead of the opposition, which has been the typical result the previous 4 years.
The point with Biden and Trump is whenever free speech is mentioned, people conclude the part of a political spectrum they identify with is being attacked by someone they perceive as being on a different part, with no belief there could ever be a person actually worried about free speech itself. It's not at all about whether I agree or disagree with where they perceive that threat to be from on the spectrum, it's just what such people like to claim. I've yet to see a normal political spectrum where 100% of folks agree with free speech absolutism, even when inconvenient.
To folks who actually care about free speech instead of partisan politics, the idea of debating where on a scale of 1 to 10 the source of the threat might be from is in itself absurdly irrelevant. To folks that don't care about free speech, it's convenient to perceive free speech claims as only ever having a hidden partisan agenda instead of allowing the possibility of a free speech absolutist. The only exception I can think to any of this is a political spectrum where one side is "free speech absolutism" itself.
