Your #1 reason is bobthepanda's #3 reason - exposes contrarian viewpoints. There isn't any reason in the abstract to think that Chinese propaganda is any worse than US propaganda. US propaganda is pretty stupid vis a vis promoting domestic prosperity.
What are the Chinese supposed to do here, influence the US to give up their manufacturing edge by outsourcing all the capital formation to Asia? Waste their economic surpluses on endless war? Promote political division by pretending that the president is an agent of a foreign country? The US political process throws up a startling number of own goals. The Chinese aren't savvy enough to outdo the US domestic efforts.
This is a naive view of propaganda: everyone always says "well, they're not trying to achieve <overtly obvious goal>" therefore there could be no benefit!
Propaganda aimed at your enemies isn't about achieving any specific goal, it is about obtaining potential advantage. It's an investment, the same as funding a startup but with much broader success criteria.
Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.
Well, no. It is good to listen to other people even if you think they don't have your best interests at heart. I can certainly see a security argument for restricting foreign media, but to get upset because literally one media source is owned by foreigners is too much.
The vague "obtaining potential advantage" is unreasonable. An advantage at what? China doesn't benefit from the US suffering, much like the US has actually benefited a huge amount from Chinese prosperity.
> Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.
Quite the contrary; We're supposed to be affected by what we listen to. But I'm not smart enough to figure out what the Chinese think without going and listening to and reading things written by Chinese people and pushed by people with Chinese perspectives. We're not psychic and the Western media are also unreliable. Listening to diverse news sources is important. Particularly since the truth is often the most effective form of propaganda.
yes, but I think by your logic Hollywood movies are "propaganda"...
by making the main characters of a movie American, and giving them positive traits, you're 'obtaining a potential advantage' for every American that travels abroad is associated with positively portrayed fictional characters, or in biopics, historical characters.
The US military directly sponsors or promotes Hollywood movies with the benefit of gaining fairly good control of the overall messaging surrounding the military in the film.
Zero Dark Thirty is perhaps the most egregious example of this, with the CIA consulting and the film depicting that the information leading to Osama Bin Laden's location was extracted under torture from an inmate (it was not).
Many American films are not even casually not propaganda. The way you think about the US military is shaped and influenced by the influence the US military gets from fronting money, consulting and equipment appearances to appear in Hollywood films (with sometimes some weird consequences - for example they refused to back The Avengers because they felt SHIELD undermined the portrayal of the US, but were happy to back The Winter Soldier because in that SHIELD isn't the US DoD and goes down).[1]
> Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.
I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem. The closest analogue would be the cold war, where US propaganda successfully got the USSR to switch to democracy (a move that, ultimately, was to the benefit of the people). The Soviet counter-propaganda was ultimately unconvincing and everyone agrees that Communism was a disaster - even the people who lived in communist communities as children.
It is too hard to come up with a 20- or 30-year propaganda campaign that has meaningful impacts, the results are fundamentally unclear because everyone will have different policies in 30 years. If anyone knew how to reliably change societies through propaganda we'd already be using that technique in the west to align everyone to capitalism instead of having the constant socialist regressions that keep cropping up.
Propaganda is effective for specific political decisions in the short term when targeted at adults. Over the longer term it has impacts that are hard to foresee and impossible to control, for good or ill.
> It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is worse than US propaganda.
It sounds important when you phrase it like that. Why listen to worse propaganda?
> > Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.
> I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem.
This is truly laughable.
We would have never let the German government own ABC in the 1930s, for obvious reasons. And the Chinese government would never let a US company own any of their influential media networks.
I always feel like this argument has a "doth protest too much" feel to it.
The decisions in the 1930s led to the most bloody and meaningless breakdown of communications in human history. One of the outcomes was the UN being set up by people saying, loosely speaking, "gee, we should listen to each others political stance more". I myself wouldn't cite the media policy in the decade prior to WWII as a success since it is hard to find a worse failure.
Besides; that has nothing to do with children. The Nazis didn't last an entire generation. They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.
> And the Chinese government would never let a US company own any of their influential media networks.
Again, Chinese media policy is an example of bad policy - I would advocate doing the opposite of them in that sphere. They're authoritarians. We want to intentionally copy their industrial policies after careful consideration.
Nations being unwilling to allow their rivals to own their domestic media has literally nothing to do with that. The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One has nothing to do with the other.
Also:
> They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.
I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
> The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One has nothing to do with the other.
If you don't believe state diplomacy is related to propaganda, then I think I should be even more insistent about asking what, exactly, do you feel the Chinese are supposed to do here? They're going to swoop in, "influence" everyone, and then it will have no impact on US-China relations. Maybe you believe it will have a huge impact on industrial policy?
(Possibly resulting in the US adopting a policy of outsourcing production to China? I might ask in a more mischievous mood).
> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today. bobthepanda's point still seems accurate - you haven't nailed down specific concerns, as far as I can see you've just identified that Nazis were foreign and China is untrustworthy [0] ergo the Chinese can't own a US media company. I'm not even convinced that is the wrong outcome, but the concern doesn't seem to be principled to much as you're just abstractly worried about foreign views without much reference to what they are or what impact they'll have.
[0] I see an irony here - the Nazis were implacably opposed to the Chinese communists on at least two ideological points - the Communism and the Chineseness.
You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.
>>> They weren't trying to propagandize children, they targeted adults.
>> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
> That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today.
They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth. Either you were unaware of that or you're arguing in bad faith.
Either way, I don't think you're a serious person.
> They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth.
The Hitler Youths weren't the result of foreign propaganda, they were Germans consuming German propaganda. I'm not sure why you think that is relevant. If you want to bring them in to the argument, note that they'd probably have done a lot better if they were exposed a bit more to foreign propaganda rather than a steady diet of home-grown muck that the Nazis were feeding them. The Nazis had a pretty serious groupthink problem that led to the eradication of their entire ideology and left Germany devastated for decades; they desperately needed persuasive external opinions in their society.
It would take a lot more than TikTok and some propaganda efforts to establish something equivalent to the Hitler Youth in the US; it was their equivalent of the Democrat/Republican party feeder systems - building a political machine. That takes on-the-ground work, many years and is extremely visible (not to mention quite delicate).
> You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.
You're probably in a state of cognitive dissonance. Unable to articulate why you worry about foreign propaganda your mind isn't latching on to a pretty basic challenge of articulating what you think the problem is. It'll pass, nothing wrong with being surprised and it doesn't make you a bad person.
Chinese propaganda efforts will look more like russian botnets astroturfing culture war bullshit (which is a major factor in politics now), only instead of crude sockpuppets parroting talking points at people, it will look more like "nudge each personality/demographic archtype towards the content that incites their flavor of distrust in government/society/the elite/immigrants etc"
No, the runner up country in the AI race with a vested interest in undermining the USA should not, as a matter of reasonable statecraft, have
mainline access to the algorithmic media feed of the nation's youth...
But I don't relate to any of the reasons you listed. I think TikTok is bad for two reasons:
1. It is controlled by the government of China, and I don't trust them to avoid influencing Americans with propaganda.
2. It is bad in the same ways as all other social media.