"Grey zone conflict" sounds a lot like our powers are upset they don't have the level of control over information that the adversary has. They want to be the ones to censor, suppress, and promote, rather than another country. The goal isn't more open access to information.
You make it sound like that's generally a negative thing, implying that the information being promoted by other countries is made equal and has some implicit right to be spread. But it's not, it's geopolitic information warfare.
So we get down to actual situation - TikTok is way too popular and not under reach nor control.
The hell will sooner freeze that me as an European will believe US government is not weaponizing data of all US companies it can get it hands on, and well, it can get hands on all data. That's decade old story at best.
For an European, this is really funny, fight for who can control general population more. Don't get me wrong, I consider all social networks a brain and societal cancer, but to claim one is weaponized and the other is not, pinky promise... Snowden, NSA, secret courts and rulings that can't be even made public, recording basically whole internet traffic for further analysis including this comment (maybe apart from youtube traffic). Discussion who is doing worse is then just an academic one, lets make an Excel spreadsheet and compare numbers.
I'm sure the US government is also weaponizing information. But the decision to ban TikTok while controlled by the CPP isn't done on moral grounds. It's based on pragmatism.
As a european, talking to any american, we notice you guys have levels of propaganda that are way way higher than what we get. And we do get propaganda.
The notion that without tiktok you'll now get anything "true" is laughable.
I think what you are saying could possibly be true, but is probably hard to quantify. Anecdotally, I have a friend living in the EU that claims the opposite of what you are, but I have no plans on taking a stance until I see some kind of proof.
Personally, I'm not too concerned with the propaganda factor, but of course I'm still affected whether I want to or not. I just don't feel it's a strong point.
What is really concerning though is the other points that a lot of commenters fail to bring up:
#1 - The ability for a foreign nation to streamline targeting an American with real time location data is one - for example, a high ranking official has the app or has an aide that uses the app. The high ranking official can then be targeted.
#2 - Another really good one is that China subsidizes TikTok content creators. This is a form of economic warfare against Americans and also a way to generate more growth and users, which ultimately strengthens the capabilities of #1.
There are more of course, but I have no intention on writing a dissertation. My point is that propaganda shouldn't be worried about as much as the risk to national security.
Lastly, I say all this having a great respect for people of China. They feel like one of the countries in the world that takes the "knowledge is power" saying seriously, rather than just using it as a punch line.
At the end of the day, either users are really in control for what they can or they cannot talk about or it's censored one way or another and thus not free.
Information war is complex and if we don't allow our foes to express their povs then all we're left is our own manipulated media. If we do allow it we might face a spread of a different kind of information.
I wish this was all solved by allowing everybody to spread whatever information and educating citizens since young age about raising a lot of doubt about anything they hear/see in the news/socials.
But again this is also complicated on a social media level especially with those auto feeder algorithms that will either push you controversial content because it makes views or just because you stumbled on few videos on the topic so it's gonna push you even further in the hole.
In any case there's no simple solution.
The issue with China is that our own information and misinformation cannot reach them either.
We allowed Russian state media for long on our platforms because they allowed our on theirs too. Reddit or YouTube or X were never banned there. But again 90% of Russians get informed by tv, and the minority that doesn't gets it on VK or other Russian social media.
This misunderstands the topic, it literally has nothing to do with information access.
The Chinese government invested a lot for decades in R&D around population-scale behavioral manipulation, including running a lot of experiments on their own population. It was an impressive research effort; other countries invest in this too but the Chinese commitment to mastery of it was next level. Not an issue.
These capabilities and techniques can make populations wired into it dance like predictable puppets in aggregate but they don’t work that effectively over generic undifferentiated communication channels because humans are too chaotic. It requires tight real-time feedback, control, and instrumentation of the information channels with sufficient critical mass population-wise to matter. Those kinds of tight feedback and control loops under direct control of government systems for constructive manipulation aren’t really a thing at most social media companies. You can spam propaganda but that is qualitatively inferior.
Divestiture of TikTok removes the access and control the Chinese government needs to effect outcomes with TikTok beyond typical propaganda and influence operations.
Most countries desire this capability but the technical implementation and requirement of sufficiently tight control of the channel has been a formidable barrier. China outright banned any vehicle that had the potential to allow foreign governments to do the same in their own country.
All of this has been known and discussed in national security settings for decades. The difficulty of implementation in the real world made it mostly a hypothetical risk at any non-trivial scale until TikTok.
The most insidious aspect is that sophisticated operational analytics has made it such that the manipulation may seem completely unrelated to the desired population-scale effect, it is not propaganda in a conventional sense. Done well, the individual never perceives it but the aggregate effect reliably emerges. The extent to which humans can be analytically manipulated in very indirect ways at scale is both fascinating and scary.
(Many years ago I used to work on problems related to population-scale operational behavioral analysis. China was on the cutting edge of this research even back then. None of the experimental theory is new, but apparently the tech finally caught up.)
“More open access to information” is not the adversary’s goal, either. Is that goal served by preserving the adversary’s control over the information environment?
I think it's more the other way round, that they don't want others to have the same powers they do?
If you control the "last mile" infrastructure, you have a
pretty good idea what's going on. If you control the mobile network, you can track everyone, and flash their baseband processor if you like.
(see also: concerns about Huawei equipment in our internet infrastructure)
The documents that Snowden released confirmed that this kind of thing was going on. To be honest, I don't think that really surprised anyone in the security community.
We just don't want China to have the same power to monitor our citizens as we have ourselves.
In the US we allow significantly more spying on foreigners than US citizens. That’s not as controversial as domestic spying.
Look at the backlash against the US government trying to clamp down on Covid misinformation with a national emergency declaration [1]. There’s exactly zero reason to expect the CCP has an incentive to behave differently, especially when there’s effectively no way for companies to push back in China.
And no that doesn’t excuse the nonsense some US administrations get up to. Like undermining the effectiveness of the Chinese covid vaccine [2].
There is already evidence of pressure being applied to ByteDance by the CCP for data on Hong Kong citizens [3].
So it would be silly to think that:
1) data for different TikTok users is more or less difficult for the CCP to access based on their specific locations (technically or practically)
And 2) the CCP has more respect for foreigners than Western governments do.
> This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters
Looks like you're just confirming what OP said
Might as well look up the definition of "5th column"
Why drop bombs on your adversary when you can use social media influence to achieve the same ends of reducing productivity? This is far cheaper and gives you plausible deniability.
Whether they want or not, they cannot. The democratic system, even deficient as one in US, still does its job and works against blatant information suppression.
It has absolutely made things more difficult not having distinct spheres of information with well defined boundaries. It's genuinely made things much more difficult to plan about. The global Internet absolutely has made a lot of people upset for a lot of reasons that make intuitive sense.
That's what growing conservative "anti globalist" movements backed by national security elements are really about. Not ultimately immigration or racism or tax cuts (that's how you get the tubes on board), but about how the inability to keep civilians out of information conflicts has made running countries incredibly difficult.
This is one area where China absolutely has the right approach and we need to wake up about what it means in the public rather than complain that we can't scroll silly waste of time videos all the time. The US public is incredibly uneducated about this concept and why it poses a threat, so the discussion needs to be had.
I think we should be far more critical of American internet companies as well and quite a few of them should probably be banned because they are creating the same sort of problem w.r.t how we can practically organize a functioning society. That's the unfortunate thing, is a bunch of libertarians in silicon valley a while back decided to invent a business model that could cause a global war.
