Whenever I see threads and comments about privacy-related or sensitive topics, I often see concerns about China in particular stealing all that data.
Why is China, a country across a vast ocean, is seen as a bigger threat in that regard than US itself? Unlike Chinese, the local government does have power over its residents and can actually use this information against you (and it does have a record for doing exactly that). The only places where Chinese espionage would be a concern (military, high-tech industry) lay way beyond what an everyday American faces regularly.
So, is it a new red scare, or is there a substance behind it that I fail to see?
Both. China is where most consumer tech comes from, and the rest often includes parts from China as well. Taiwan has TSMC which makes all the big CPUs, but honestly all the small stuff like consumer electronics comes mostly out of China. If they did want to integrate some sort of spying they would have the opportunity, and in the past individual threats to the state of many countries have had supply chain attacks carried out, so it is not an unfounded fear.
That all said, China is run by the CCP, an ostensibly Communist party, so red scare, not to mention Chinese, so racism, and Party, because Americans are against fun, or at least in government they seem to be. China also has an abysmal record on human rights, though coming from anyone in the west criticism is somewhat hypocritical given prison labour, proping up dictatorships, coups, exploiting slave labour, and so on. Nobody is doing a perfect job, nobody is saintly, but there are fair and unfair criticisms against China as a nation state and those do inform some of the fear of their potential for spying.
Now TikTok, Reddit, Meta, etc… There are the really scary tools with far too little attention.
Funny you mention TikTok
https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/tiktok-says-not-spreading-chinese-propaganda-us-says-real-risk-rcna171201
Yeah, the whole “China is doing propaganda using TikTok” line is kind of like saying Russia is using bots on YouTube. Like, yeah, maybe, sure, but focussing all your efforts on one single platform and ignoring the rest is silly. As the red team you would use as many different platforms as possible, make sure your disinformation output was broad and came from multiple, even opposing, ideological positions, and absolutely swamp the information space with junk. If nothing is reliable people don’t approach things carefully, they just check out. Once people check out it is a win.
Aren’t TikTok and Reddit both majority owned by the Chinese government?
Tencent owns 11% of Reddit. Reddit is primarily a US propaganda operation.
Tiktok is wholly owned by a Chinese company, but unlike the rest of the world, the US version is hosted and managed entirely within the US, this (along with hiring a bunch of spooks and killing controversial things in the algo like BLM) was done in response to the Trump administration trying to come up with excuses to ban it.
Yep, and the while thing is moot anyway because use of the systems does not require ownership, so while the owners can exert more pressure on the algorithm and change what shows up other actors can do the same a little less easily on each platform. Propaganda is alive and well, so maybe try to limit yourself somewhat to a smaller group of people you actually know in person and be critical of information coming in.
The atomic unit of propaganda isn’t lies, it’s emphasis. Most propaganda doesn’t take the form of false information, but true facts spun in a certain way to build/reinforce a specific worldview in the viewer.