Technology

China can influence TikTok into giving them their data for free today.

Perhaps they could, but there’s no evidence that they as yet have. And of what use is your TikTok data to the Chinese state, anyway? Money is no object to them, and they can buy your data from other US companies as well. Anyone can.

The US government doesn’t care about protecting your data. They care about accessing it themselves and controlling narratives on social media in order to shape public opinion.

• Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to “Protect Democracy”
• Jessica Ashooh: The taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant tabbed to do it
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes

They’re after the fediverse now as well. Atlantic Council: Collective Security In a Federated World (PDF)

Centralized and decentralized platforms share a common set of threats from motivated malicious users—and require a common set of investments to ensure trustworthy, user-focused outcomes.

Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms that currently dominate the social media landscape: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and a handful of others. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services, like Mastodon and Bluesky, introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications. This annex offers an assessment of the trust and safety (T&S) capabilities of federated platforms—with a particular focus on their ability to address collective security risks like coordinated manipulation and disinformation.

Trust and safety my ass. This is about manufacturing consent. They’re failing to control young American’s impression of and reaction to the Gaza genocide that’s being done in their name, so they’re pulling out all the stops now. Not the Onion but the NYT last week: Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe: A surveillance law referred to as Section 702 is needed to protect us from foreign threats.