China is a global tech competitor and any major incident relating to espionage via its commercial devices would kill the golden goose. The CCP also know this. In fact they more and more follow the US model of approaching their tech firms in more roundabout legal ways in order to get their way. It turns out having market access to the US and EU is more useful than knowing whatever some NCO at Port Hadlock is babbling about at any given moment.
The fear appears to be that Chinese tech could become a security threat in the case of very high tensions or war. As for "free world", that's not a particularly meaningful term to me.
That's very interesting, are the security concerns warranted or just a "better safe than sorry" overcompensation? I recall when the Trump admin started their war on Huawei (for protectionist purposes), the US government suddenly treated all Huawei infrastructure near military sites as suspect despite okay'ing it during the Obama years.
A necessary comment like this would never make it in the awful Reddit version of this sub. This place feels like the real Reddit I used to use before 2016.
McCarthyism hasn't been exlusively about the Kremlin since... well since way before McCarthy even died. And it's a moot task for me to try to convince a paranoiac who eschews facts.
The article is about China and TikTok's behavior, not "the Kremlin", and the behavior described in the article is mundane ad-buying. You can quite literally sift through the TikTok ad library yourself to confirm this. Instead you rely on vagueries and call people secret Kremlin agents who are very invested in changing your perspective, like a schizophrenic.
When it comes to deadly "mistakes" in a military context there should be strong laws preventing "appeal to AI fuckery", so that militaries don't get comfortable making such "mistakes."
Anyone who uses Arabic-language social media has encountered this. They used to ban you for just making reference to "Al Aqsa" (Arabic name for Dome of the Rock) because their algorithm deemed it terror-related. They banned the word "shaheed" (martyr) too even though in Arabic it's commonly used to refer to loved ones who died an untimely death, even in accidents. It's also a name, which is hilarious because a member of their oversight board said in an interview that after they banned the word one of her coworkers named Shaheed had to explained that this was nonsense. Researchers did an experiment where they ran pages that used uncontroverdial Arabic keywords that would get censored, then do the same for Hebrew (including #death_to_arabs) which were left up and even gained traction.
You can blame Meta to some degree, but the chief issue are US federal institutions that use notices and scare stories aimed at making risk-averse firms shut down anything deemed anti-American (which essentially means anti-Israel.) Just recently they've been sending FBI agents to knock on journalists' doors if they publish the leaked Vance dossier and give them a "friendly reminder" that it may have been leaked by Iran. Even when the journalists mentioned it in their reports on the dossier.
That's always a rational and logical place to take the conversation - viscious McCarthyist paranoia! Who knows, I could even be Xi himself, trying to make you lower your guard so I can feed you an ad for my dastardly electric car companies while you scroll past memes and tits.
The case against them that most relates to what you're talking about is in Michigan. They're charged in accordance to a Michigan statute that bans deterring voters through "corrupt means or device", referring specifically to disinformation that the two individuals specifically engaged in and their stated goals. That's a world of difference from having a social media platform whose policies cultivate a userbase that seeks to get out the vote for a candidate and whose owner uses as a platform to advocate for that candidate. The case is actually going to the supreme court because the statute may be overly-broad.
You haven't provided any evidence or compelling argument that what they or Musk do falls outside of 1A protection. It seems to me that you're implying that media institutions with a slant towards a political actor or party during an election is violating campaign laws? Please clarify.
Invoking 20511 implies you believe pro-Trump disinfo on X posted by thousands of users constitutes "intimidation" of prospective voters. 30101 makes the "X support for Trump constitutes campaign finance fraud" argument look ridiculous:
(B) The term "expenditure" does **not include-
(i) any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, unless such facilities are owned or controlled by any political party, political committee, or candidate;
The articles simply describe Chinese media firms buying ads on Tiktok. You can literally search through the ad library and find media firms from basically every country that can afford it.
Big mistake tbh.