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144·2 days agoWhataboutery is never useful, but in such a context it is absolutely disgusting. It’s derailed in every sense.
[Edit typo.]
How are people falling for this in 2025?
There are people who are literally waiting for this. We can see this on Tiktok and all other platforms (including here on Lemmy). There is a community waiting for its propaganda and then just spreading it as long as it fits to certain narratives, no matter what bs this may be (“Ukraine started the war”, “Covid is a hoax”, “China is a democracy” - the list of these braindead claims is endless).
This is not a bug, but a feature. Tiktok operates on the behest of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
There’s much evidence for this. See, for example, a study by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University (pdf).
The report details how TikTok, owned by the Chinese-based ByteDance, amplifies and suppresses content based on whether it aligns with the geopolitical interest of the CCP.
The CCP’s interest is, among others, to destroy democracy. It is supporting Germany’s AfD -e.g., we saw several AfD staff arrested in Germany over suspicion of spying for China last year, and AfD head Alice Weidel has strong ties with China, she is fluent in Mandarin and lived in the country- as well as other right-wing politicians in Europe with Tiktok being a major tool for this.
As one report from July 2024 says:
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Germany’s huge TikTok market is vulnerable to extremists’ tactics, which have gained major traction with young voters. Our cross-border investigation proved that you can easily buy virality on social networks.
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In Romania, reporters showed that the social network was a key platform for emerging far-right political figures.
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Similarly, in Poland, the TikTok champions of the European Parliament elections were the far-right, who are now heading to Brussels.
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In Slovakia, TikTok served as a fertile ground for conspiracies about the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico.
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Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, reporters found that the platform’s algorithm was pushing users into a bubble of disinformation.
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Estonians were exposed to fear-mongering related to war that was propagated through TikTok.
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In Hungary, Russian narratives flow to TikTok via public media.
It’s time that Europe awakens. The Chinese government’s dictatorial policy isn’t good for the Chinese people, and neither for Europeans.
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It’s still censored even if you run it locally.
The first link in my comment (here again: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44870508) tells more or less the same story as the video, but I don’t know of a text version for the video unfortunately.
It would be a bad idea to follow China …
Addition - it’s more than three years old, but worth remembering now:
How Tim Cook Surrendered Apple to the Chinese Government (YouTube link)
Here is an alternative Invidious link – (12 min video)
Apple is making billions of dollars integrating into countries with authoritarian regimes. Even if it means helping to cement the power of the ruling elite or enabling egregious abuse of human rights. And there doesn’t seem to be anything Apple wouldn’t do for the sake of growth and expansion. Apple cites compliance with local laws as the reason for giving human rights abuse a go. But the actions of the most valuable company in the world go far beyond compliance with the law.
Please be careful when saying things like “half of Austria is a proxy of Russia”. We should not pigeonhole half a country.
[Regarding the Wirecard case: You might refer to the former Wirecard CFO Jan Marsalek, who was/is an alleged Russian spy and is now wanted by Western authorities. Former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun has been arrested in 2020 with court cases pending.]
I congratulate you, too :-)
As an addition:
Since 2018, evidence of forced labour of Uyghur and other Turkic and Muslim majority peoples has emerged in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Uyghur Region). […] Forced labour imposed by private actors is also reported, in addition to forced marriage and organ trafficking, with vulnerability primarily driven by discriminatory government practices. While China demonstrated some efforts to tackle modern slavery through sustained coordination at the national and regional levels – including by adopting a new national action plan for 2021 to 2030[…] – its overall response is critically undermined by the use of state-imposed forced labour.
No, it’s not open source. Only the model weights are open, the datasets and code used to train the model are not.
@Onno
No, it’s not entirely open source as the datasets and code used to train the model are not.
In addition to my comments, we can add that Wiz Research uncovered exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history.
TLDR: DeepSeek had left over a million lines of sensitive data exposed on the open internet, including digital software keys.
In related news:
Using algorithmic jailbreaking techniques, our team applied an automated attack methodology on DeepSeek R1 which tested it against 50 random prompts from the HarmBench dataset. These covered six categories of harmful behaviors including cybercrime, misinformation, illegal activities, and general harm.
The results were alarming: DeepSeek R1 exhibited a 100% attack success rate, meaning it failed to block a single harmful prompt. This contrasts starkly with other leading models, which demonstrated at least partial resistance.
CNBC reports that DeepSeek’s privacy policy “isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”
Seems to be a long way to go, but Hugging Face developers are in the process of building a fully open reproduction of DeepSeek-R1 as the AI is not Open Source as it claims.
Yes, it’s unblocked for a few weeks after a long investigation. The talian authorities fined OpenAI EUR 15m for GDPR violations. You can find a very detailed analysis about the issues here.
The new rules apply to Amazon and any mail-order businesses.