> 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?

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.