TikTok At the Paranoia Factory

Fear Is the Great Persuader

Dec 07, 2023

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear”, wrote the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke.

American society and culture has, since the turn of the millennium, become increasingly a chronicle of deliberately manufactured waves of terror, with the result that a population traumatized by decades of this has retreated, mentally and physically, into vast social communes that are almost comically easy to manipulate, if any should be so inclined to do so. And the manipulative tool of choice remains as it has always been: fear.

Machiavelli grappled with the issue when advising his “Prince,” and decided that it was better for a Prince to be feared than loved. Why?

“it is much safer to be feared than loved because…love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

Fear is so effective because it, more than any other emotion, goes directly to the survival instinct. Above all else, we fear death. It is the great unknown, and as a consequence, we fear lesser unknowns as well - the minds of others, the different skins, the invaders, the opposition…because any unknown could conceivably lead to death.

It’s an endless list, and, as some of the greatest manipulators understood, it is a list which can be expanded at will.

“Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship,” Goering reportedly told Gilbert in his cell on the evening of April 18, 1946.
Gilbert replied: “There is one difference(...) In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.”
To which Goering said: “Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
— Hermann Goering

In short, make them fear.

So how do you accomplish that, in terms of tailoring propaganda to that end, so as to “drag the people along?”

You use whatever mass broadcast organs you either control or influence to identify some fearful object over and over again. Repetition is the key.

Hitler's Basic Principles
These principles are abstracted from Jowett & O'Donnell.
Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions.
Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.
Give only one side of the argument.
Continuously criticize your opponents.
Pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification.

This is not to discount the others on this list. All have a role to play in an effective propaganda campaign. An interesting aspect of this information is that one can use it to decide whether something is propaganda designed to manipulate the recipient by seeing how many of the above boxes it checks. Take, for instance, the current campaign to demonize TikTok.

“Pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification.”

In this case, that “special enemy” is China. Here’s a sampling of recent news items:

Fact Check: Haley Says TikTok Makes Viewers More Antisemitic

Still, there is no shortage of anti-Israel and antisemitic content on TikTok, and it is ultimately a platform controlled by China

Despite Ruling Halting Montana’s TikTok Ban, Calls Persist To Regulate the App | The New York Sun

“On Xi’s ‘smokeless battlefield,’ TikTok is a perfect weapon, camouflaged in plain sight,” Mr. Gallagher added. “In the best-case scenario, TikTok is CCP spyware,” he says. “In the worst-case scenario, TikTok is perhaps the largest scale malign influence operation ever conducted.”

US Intel Worries TikTok-Connected Tech Firm Could Steal Americans’ Genetic Data – enVolve

United States intelligence officials are fearful that an Abu Dhabi technology firm could hand over Americans’ genetic data to China, The New York Times reported on Monday.
Its international investments include acquiring over $100 million worth of shares in ByteDance, the Beijing-based TikTok parent company, Bloomberg reported.

Clock is ticking for China's influencer, TikTok

TikTok recently came under fire for the rampant antisemitism plaguing the platform.

The message is quite obvious: The Communist Chinese government directly operates TikTok as a weapon of intel and influence aimed at harming the United States.

The campaign checks all of the boxes.

Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions. Everybody “knows” that anything connected to Communism, especially Chinese Communism, is purest evil.
Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases. Done.
Give only one side of the argument. Yep. Whether any safeguards exist to prevent the Chinese government from making such use of TikTok is rarely examined. Here is at least one countervailing view:

What to Know About the TikTok Security Concerns | Time

It’s impossible to say with certainty, because they are predictions about the future. But as well as there being little evidence (publicly available, at least,) that TikTok has engaged in narrative control on behalf of the CCP, there is also no evidence to show that TikTok has a clandestine connection to the Chinese state. “I’ve been trying for years to find any links to the Chinese state,” the journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, who has written a book about TikTok’s rise, wrote in BuzzFeed News this week. “I’ve spoken to scores of TikTok employees, past and present, in pursuit of such a connection. But I haven’t discovered it. I can’t say that link doesn’t exist … But none of us has found the smoking gun.”

There are others, but the average American hears very little about them. It’s just the mantra “Communist Chinese TikTok” repeated over and over again in every possible venue.

Continuously criticize your opponents. Since the ostensible opponents are the same “Communist Chinese” already mentioned, this goes without saying.
Pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Of further interest is the notion that the ChiCom government is somehow directly creating the sort of posts being done on the platform. There is little to no evidence this is the case.

Nobody who actually uses TikTok buys that argument, either, because they understand that millions of new posts are being created every day by individual creators, and these videos represent every conceivable viewpoint. Now, how popular and widespread certain viewpoints become is determined by the infamous “TikTok algorithm” which nobody likes, whether they buy the arguments and hate TikTok, or use the app and love it. More on that in a bit.

How TikTok Got You Addicted - The New York Times Chinese Network

A report this year by Toronto's cybersecurity regulator Citizen Lab suggests that these two concerns are latent at best: It found no indication that TikTok is censoring sensitive topics or transferring data to China.
Some U.S. analysts see TikTok as a huge threat; Others see it as an inexplicable panic, like parents in the United States, who are now about to enter middle age, warning their children that they will never find a job if they share details of their lives on social media. Many other products, from social networks to banks and credit cards, collect user data more precisely. If foreign security services want this data, they may try to buy it from data brokers in the underground industry."
The fear of being watched or censored by TikTok can distract people from larger issues that are much more important than a company or its Chinese ownership," said Sam Sachs, a cybersecurity policy researcher at New America, a research group. "Even if TikTok is owned by Americans, there are no laws or regulations preventing Beijing from buying its data on the open data intermediary market."
Writing this column reminds me of one thing: TikTok's threat to U.S. national security seems entirely hypothetical, and it depends on your analysis of the U.S.-China relationship and the future of technology and culture. But the fact that the algorithm has mastered what fascinates me – from tennis hitting tips, Turkish food videos, to other content I like to watch – really poses a clear and present threat to my ability to write this column.

I’ve been using TikTok for a couple of years now, and understand its algorithm well enough - intuitively, in large part - to tailor my For You Page to show me the things I’d like to see. (This understanding, by the way, leads to what you will hear inveterate users call “Straight TikTok,” or “Gay TikTok,” or “Cute Animals TikTok,” or “ADHD TikTok,” or, basically, a TikTok for just about any conceivable type of subject matter.

Here’s a sampling of what pops up on my FYP: