I find the hysteria over TikTok from people who use Facebook services and/or Uber horrifying, to be honest. What is your threat model where it’s not okay for China to watch your teens’ dance video but it’s okay to let Facebook actually manipulate your emotions on a Chinese phone?

It’s a sign of how bad we are at threat modeling as a society and how Facebook will be allowed to get away with horrible stuff with slaps on the wrist like, forever.

As I said before and I’ll say again - I specialize in intrusion analysis by nation states. Chinese adversaries have legitimately made my life miserable for over a decade and I know what they’re capable of.

But this is short sighted.

I’m getting a lot of flak for this so let me restate this:

I’ve spent a lot of time looking to TikTok from a technical and geopolitical standpoint.

It absolutely silences and manipulates viewpoints and voices in opposition to the Chinese gov. It also collects private data.

TikTok deserves a very wary look and lots of threat modeling.

At the same time, massively popular US and EU social apps are collecting similar data, abusing it, and frequently are intentionally and unintentionally abused to suppress opposition voices and spread disinformation.

We need a unilateral technical, moderation, and legislative approach to data security, privacy, and user manipulation on social apps. We need to to have actual teeth, not repeatedly slap companies on the wrist.

The long term consequences of the data aggregation and mass idea propagation and suppression social media enables are almost unfathomable.

We should all probably quit every social network, today.

Unfortunately, they already hobbled traditional news and changed how we interact.

We have to have these discussions. They cannot just be shouting “CHINA!” a la 2010. The Chinese gov is too dangerous.

We have to look at the big picture, including the long games our adversaries are playing with national and international information and supply chains.

*fin*