Category Archives: Social Media

by

Daily Broadside | If Your Kids Are Using TikTok They Are Probably Exposed to Chinese Influence Operations

So you know that I strongly oppose any more aid to Ukraine and am deeply unhappy with the $95 billion slush fund that was just passed by the U.S. House on Saturday. If I had to find a silver lining it would be this:

After weeks of being bogged down, legislation that could lead to a ban on TikTok is being fast-tracked by Congress.

The US House on Saturday approved a bill that would require the popular social media platform’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell TikTok to a buyer deemed fit by US officials. The measure, which was attached to an aid package for Ukraine and Israel, now moves to the Senate.

While some oppose forcing a sale or an outright ban, there seems to be some evidence that the Chinese are using it for psychological warfare against the U.S., and particularly teens and young adults.

The bill is aimed at forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to a buyer that American officials are OK with, as well as guaranteeing that ByteDance no longer has access to US user data or control over the TikTok algorithm that decides what videos American users see. 

TikTok is the international version of Douyin, the short-form video platform introduced in 2016 and owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. More than 150 million Americans—almost half the U.S. population—use the app. But there’s evidence that TikTok (in particular, but part of the larger impact of social media) is having a corrosive effect on the mental state of younger generations.

Concerns about the hugely popular Chinese-owned video app have been bubbling for years. Besides its effects on young people’s mental health, lawmakers, security officials, and experts have sounded the alarm that the app’s data can be accessed by Beijing and that the communist regime could use the app to run influence campaigns and spread disinformation.

[…]

Geoffrey Cain, a journalist and technologist, said the mental health of Generation Z in the United States is suffering, and a great deal of that stems from an addiction to TikTok.

By comparing the content exposure of a fake 13-year-old with parental control settings across various social media platforms, his research discovered that such users had the easiest access to harmful content on TikTok.

However, his team’s tests showed that the same harmful content available to 13-year-old American TikTok users isn’t accessible by 13-year-olds who use Douyin, China’s version. Instead, Chinese users see a Ministry of Public Security warning of inappropriateness when they try to view the same videos.

“So, clearly, the Chinese government knows that this is extremely harmful content,” Mr. Cain told The Epoch Times. “Considering that they essentially control ByteDance, why do they allow TikTok to show this in America, whereas, in China, this same material is all banned?

“They know that it has a horrible effect on kids, yet they’re okay with it being shown here.”

No. I refuse to believe it! I shan’t! The same country that’s facilitating the U.S. fentanyl crisis is intentionally dumping psychologically damaging video content on Americans, too? Tell me it ain’t so!

At a Senate hearing earlier this year, FBI Director Christopher Wray affirmed that ByteDance owns TikTok’s algorithm and that the only way the algorithm could work is if ByteDance also has access to the data collected by TikTok.

TikTok has repeatedly maintained that it is independent from its Chinese parent company. According to TikTok, its U.S. customer data are stored in Virginia and backed up in Singapore, and it has never, and will never, share its U.S. data with the Chinese regime.

However, leaked audio of internal TikTok meetings held in September 2021 mentioned a Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” with access to all data, according to a BuzzFeed report. A recent article in Fortune said that a senior data scientist at TikTok reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing in 2022.

Oh. Never mind.

It seems that TikTok could actually be a nefarious influnce operation aimed at undermining our society.

In March 2023, the Chinese regime’s Ministry of Commerce spokesperson strongly objected to any sale, citing a technology export issue. Recently, Chinese authorities also signaled to ByteDance that Beijing would choose a ban in the United States over a forced sale, according to The Wall Street Journal. Reuters reported that the CCP took a similar stance in 2020.

All this suggests that the CCP treats the algorithm like a “state secret,” according to Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank.

“To me, that’s indicative of what their true interests are here. It’s not to provide a platform for commercial activity; it is to create a platform as an influence operation,” he recently told The Epoch Times.

Lots more at the link including a section on “Cognitive Warfare.”

Know what your kids are absorbing on social media because it’s possible it’s wrecking their minds.

by - 2 Comments

Daily Broadside | Musk Buys Twitter and the Left Melts Down

Daily Verse | 1 Chronicles 17:20
“There is no one like you, O Lord, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears.”

Tuesday’s Reading: 1 Chronicles 21-24

Happy Tuesday and for once we have a story that offers not only a glimmer of hope for our conservative sensibilities, but also some entertainment bordering on not just amusement, but hilarity.

Twitter shares popped over 5% on Monday after the company’s board unanimously accepted Tesla CEO Elon Musk‘s $44 billion offer to take the social media giant private.

Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, the last trading day before Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in the company.

So Musk buys out stockholders, who get a premium on their shares, and will take the company private.

Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist,” has been critical of the platform and its chief executive Parag Agrawal’s approach to free speech.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

Shareholders make money and Musk will make money, but the point of his takeover, he says, is that he sees Twitter as the “digital town square” where speech (opinions, fast takes, facts and news) needs the freedom to express itself without condition.

On the surface, that’s a good thing since Twitter is notorious for shutting down anything that goes against a Leftist narrative and for censoring a story (the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop) that should have had a measurable effect on the outcome of the 2020 election, i.e. 15 percent more votes for Trump.

Setting that aside, the best part is the meltdown happening with the Twitteratti and the Twitter-adjacent.

Those who are horrified that Musk now owns one of the most effective and popular means of mass communication in the world are worried that somehow, freedom of speech means that people on the fringe are going to get hurt.

Like, literally hurt.

Deborah Brown, whom Reuters describes as a “digital rights researcher and advocate” at Human Rights Watch, asserted: “Regardless of who owns Twitter, the company has human rights responsibilities to respect the rights of people around the world who rely on the platform. Changes to its policies, features, and algorithms, big and small, can have disproportionate and sometimes devastating impacts, including offline violence. Freedom of expression is not an absolute right, which is why Twitter needs to invest in efforts to keep its most vulnerable users safe on the platform.”

And who are these “most vulnerable users”?

But Michael Kleinman, director of technology and human rights at Amnesty International USA, sees trouble ahead: “The last thing we need is a Twitter that willfully turns a blind eye to violent and abusive speech against users, particularly those most disproportionately impacted, including women, non-binary persons, and others.”

Ah. The usual suspects.

Listen, I support banning users who use the platform to intimidate, bully, or threaten the welfare or life of other users, online or off. The problem is that the Left defines “intimidate, bully, or threaten” in terms that favor only its viewpoint and that often include speech that is simply anything they don’t like.

As usual, the Right can meme.

twittercries.jpg
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image

Good times.

It remains to be seen how many Lefties leave Twitter because Musk is now boss. I think it’ll be hard for them because they’re like crack addicts and need their daily fix of dunking on the Right in 180-character units.

And if they don’t like it, they can go build their own site.

by - 4 Comments

Why I Left Facebook (and Eventually Came Back)

On February 19, 2020, I reached my tenth anniversary on Facebook. The next day I logged out and deactivated my account. I didn’t have any grand plans. I didn’t know how long I would be gone. I just decided I needed a sabbatical and took one.

◦◦◦◦◦

I am a voracious consumer of news, particularly of political and cultural topics. I have deep concerns and strong opinions about where our country is headed and decided a long time ago that I needed wanted to add my voice to the chorus of those on Facebook.

Because I enjoy a good debate, I was determined be candid with my views, but to do so with clarity, charity and objectivity. I never wanted to be unkind, petty or spiteful, all of which run counter to my natural temperament and to the grain of my Christian faith.

That seemed to go well for a long time. I hold many counter-cultural convictions and am not afraid of saying so, but I always tried to strike a reasonable tone while holding a firm line with those who disagreed with me.

Earlier this year, however, I had a couple of trusted friends separately tell me they saw an increasing stridency and lack of charity in what I was writing. Both felt I had overstepped one of those invisible boundaries that we all know are there, but don’t always define.

Those tactful confrontations coincided with the approach of my ten-year anniversary on Facebook. Because anniversaries provide opportunities to pause and reflect on how we’ve invested our time, I decided to make a quiet break with Facebook and consider the totality of what I was doing with it.

(Pro tip: Anyone who has spent 10 years doing anything with their discretionary time would be wise to evaluate whether it’s still a good investment.)

I didn’t know what to expect when I quit Facebook. Would I have withdrawal symptoms? Would I experience cravings? Would I feel left out? Would anyone notice that I had left?

No. No. No. And (checks notes) yes.

But what I learned is that I didn’t miss it.

Facebook is like a beehive. A colony is comprised of some 60,000 – 80,000 bees. It’s literally humming with activity as worker bees crawl around and over one another to build, clean and repair the nest, tend to the queen, feed the larvae, dispose of the dead, defend against intruders, fly in and out to collect pollen and nectar, and kick the drones out when food gets scarce.

Except for a few hours each night, the hive never stops. Just like Facebook.

As a member of the hive, I contributed to the frenzy by posting and sharing and clicking and liking and commenting while my feed served up endless notifications from friends and pages I follow. I loved (almost) every minute of it. If you’re part of the hive, you participate in the life of the hive because being a drone on Facebook—a silent observer—misses the point of the entire experience.

(Parenthetically—and to acknowledge the obvious—you can participate on the platform as much or as little as you desire. Facebook is what you make of it and has long since evolved beyond its original intent as a way to stay connected with personal friends. After a couple of years of minimal involvement, I realized there was much more to it that piqued my interests, and I chose to dive in.)

It wasn’t until I stepped out of the hive that I realized how frenzied it was. How frenzied I was. I breathed a little easier without the pressure to prompt and respond and, while I hate to admit it, I felt less anxious.

What I did miss, however, were the online relationships I’d cultivated. I missed the insightful writing, the incisive intellect, the witty repartee, the verbal jousting and the plain vanilla personal posts that were shared for no other reason but to enjoy a #humblebrag.

So I’ve chosen to rejoin the hive, but I’m going to do it a bit differently.

◦◦◦◦◦

While I was gone, I started a public blog at DAVEOLSSON.COM. (Thanks for being here!) With several years of curating and commenting on the latest political and cultural news and building a small cadre of friends on Facebook, I’m ready to broaden my influence.

Facebook offers some great features, including restricting who can and cannot see your page or specific posts. That makes for a mostly safe, but small, audience. Because I feel so strongly about what I usually write, I realized that I would eventually want to go public. I need to be a voice in the wild.

DAVEOLSSON.COM will now be the primary outlet for my writing, with my Facebook page playing a supportive role. For my friends on Facebook, content will stay the same. I’ll still curate articles with an excerpt; I’ll still mark some as “must-reads”; I’ll still share things I find humorous.

What will be new are original thought pieces I write on topics I feel strongly about. And all of it will be hosted at DAVEOLSSON.COM and posted to Facebook.

I’ll also post content on Facebook that I don’t post to DAVEOLSSON.COM. Some things are just for the few of us, and I’ll figure out what those are along the way.

I want to develop the site into a thought leadership platform concerning faith, culture and politics. I wrote about it in my first post.

It will take some time to catch a rhythm and build an audience, but I’ve already established a feature called “Morning Links” that reflects my view on what is important or interesting to know each day. If you subscribe to DAVEOLSSON.COM, you’ll receive an email notification that will take you right to the new content.

I’m new to owning a site and am feeling my way along. I’m tinkering with features and experimenting with new ways of designing and sharing content. Any encouragement is appreciated. Please visit regularly and, if you like what you read, share with your network of friends.

Taking a break from Facebook was a worthwhile exercise. I learned that I can live without it, but I did miss the friends I’ve made. I’m glad to be back.