Microsoft and Bytedance Put TikTok Talks on Hold After Trump Signals Opposition
wsj.com
wsj.com
Ps: I side with Trump on this one. Just hate the fact that no Republican opposes him anymore.
In fairness, I guess people are like that as well. Maybe that sort of duplicity is simply endemic to being human?
Many do, few have the guts to admit it publicly. Politics is still a business after all.
As an example, The Lincoln Project is made by past and current republicans strongly opposing Trump. https://lincolnproject.us/
In this context any large foreign media outlet becomes a threat.
What do you propose? More government involvement to tell tech what they can do on their own platform? Isn’t it kind of hypocritical that the anti regulation party wants regulation when it suits them?
The idea of politicians discriminating against the ones they don't like is repugnant, but these platforms already are already used to control public opinion in ways that are against the public interest, and it's certainly reasonable to suspect that a platform such as TikTok (which is controlled by a competing empire) might be used to that empire's advantage.
If it is necessary to curtail what apps can collect, let's make it a law and apply it evenly to all companies.
All governments, including the US, have the legal right to ban companies and block mergers/acquisitions on national security grounds.
Each company has different issues hence why the idea of it not being discretionary doesn't make sense.
I'd most likely, if I get an offer, ask if they would wait to see how this plays out. Last thing I would want to do is join a company that's having these kind of issues.
It might be best to accept the job offer pronto. What's the worst that happens? You have to look for another job, which is the situation you're already in.
Viewpoint discrimination is against the first amendment. We know Trump wasn’t offended by the idea that foreign countries might be trying to help him get elected, and has repeatedly called it a “Russia hoax”, but now that a social media app has anti-Trump users it’s suddenly a national security threat without any evidence provided?
Huh? Where on Earth did you get that idea? From what I've read and observed, it seems like while they may not be self-identifying as "liberal" or Democratic on quite the same level as Millennials, they still seem to hold views which are far from what you'd traditionally call "very much to the right".
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/on-the-cusp-of-adultho...
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-changes-political-divi...
Marco Rubio asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, to review TikTok’s acquisition of rival app Musical.ly. The impetus seems to have been a Washington Post story that ran that September[1] that questioned the absence of Hong Kong protests on TikTok in contrast to other social media platforms.[2]
Also that same month Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton sought to have the US intelligence community assess the national security risks of TikTok(and other Chinese-owned platforms) sighting concern about election meddling and influence.[3]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/15/tiktoks...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20906971/tiktok-censorshi...
They talk about ‘freedom of speech’ in TikTok which first of all for its US operations, it doesn't apply to private companies like TikTok, FB and Twitter. However the censorship case is far much worse. Anyone who appeared ‘Ugly or Poor’ was censored [3], they ‘apologised’ for censoring BLM posts on the platform at the time calling it a so-called ‘Glitch’ [4] and still actively censor activists or anything against the CCP in order to comply with its censorship laws.
If anything, TikTok is far from being a platform to supporting this ‘freedom of speech’ if that ever ‘existed’ before it rose to prominence [5].
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/10/politics/dnc-warning-tikt...
[1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20200728_39/
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-02/tiktok-under-investig...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
[4] https://time.com/5863350/tiktok-black-creators/
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/tiktok-says-it-doesnt-censor...
And the President has the right to ban companies on national security grounds as well.
The legal basis for both is very well founded with plenty of precedent.
So more like "Microsoft will invest X billion for a Y% of TikTok and run its US operations".
You could satisfy the US government that Microsoft was guaranteeing the data would not be shipped to China.
The only way to make that arrangement work would be to give Microsoft access to the source and ability/responsibility to review the source/releases. Not exactly a great Setup for either party.
(The fact that this is illegal in the US and even for US companies to do abroad under FCPA will, I suspect, be rendered irrelevant)
Not really. RT and Al Jazeera has (rightfully) suffered much of the same scrutiny. There's a fundamental difference between something extremely partisan (think Breitbart or HuffPo) and something state-sponsored. Let's not bury our heads in the sand here.
Not really, free speech should apply even to hostile foreign propaganda.
1. China doesn’t play with the same rules, and it has been proven to be a malicious player
2. They don’t allow western companies to operate freely in their country, why should we let them to?
3. The US and to a lesser degree Europe, are in a de-facto new Cold War, and informational warefare is big part of it
You can view either on the reciprocity Point of view, or data-safety point Of view, the US would be foolish/dumb to allow TikTok to flourish in the US., while American companies just can’t in China.
Now, if the US was banning an app from another western country, that would be a true scandal.
In this case they are doing the right thinks
We have Checks & Balances for a reason.
Look up how Japanese companies are treated in late 80s and 90s.
When one felt under threat, all rules will be forgone.
See: Google, Facebook, etc. etc.
We are now witnessing the beginnings of the great social media struggle session.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
https://www.wsj.com/articles/get-ready-for-the-struggle-sess...
What comes to your mind when you think of China - Adam Smith or Karl Marx?
I'll reiterate my point from above-- if the US government wants to ban Chinese services, that's fine. I support that decision. What I do not support is doing this via executive order as that is not how laws are passed.
If the US were to ban Chinese companies, it should be a law passed through Congress, signed by the president, and approved by the USSC. It should have clear parameters as to what exactly is being banned. It should, again, not be an executive order banning TikTok explicitly as there is nothing inherently bad about being an app called TikTok.
tldr if the US government wants to play the "fight fire with fire" card, they should be fighting the whole fire, not just the one that upset the president.
The US president can say 'we're doing X' and if the relevant agencies' personnel are willing to listen to him, it'll be in effect the next day. We've seen this with travel bans and family separations.
Widely deployed apps that capture location data can and have been used to determine the location of military bases and assets.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/12/30/army-follows-...
Trump's move is pure theatre. He has no clue about real security and he's throwing his weight around like an attention-seeking child, because that's what he does.
This is an entirely orthogonal issue to something that's been missing in the West for decades - a coherent program of IT security and IoT and app standards which define exactly what products and apps can and can't do, and which enforces a testing and certification process to make sure products and services stay within the lines.
And also... mandated protections for user data - something the EU is moving towards, but which the US still seems to be having issues with.
Between IoT, IT infrastructure, poor corporate security, and unregulated data capture, there are much more serious security threats than the TikTok app.
And satellite photography can’t be used to extrapolate troop numbers, movements etc. Especially given that it can be done in real time.
Estimates can be made regarding troop capacity and capabilities based on the billeting and vehicles in the photos.
I don't like the Chinese approach to managing the public opinion by censoring valid information and opinions at all. But the opaque and uncontrollable pockets of power created by the US approach of misusing "national security" as an excuse for practically any action, most of them being more politically motivated than anything else, is equally disturbing and problematic. Both of these ways of governing lend themselves equally well to dictatorships, which I consider problematic, especially in modern democracies, which the US certainly claims to be (the Chinese government at least doesn't claim to be a democracy in the first place).
The US should respect it's own laws and deal with chinese companies fairly. The actions of the chinese government should have no bearing on this.
> 2. They don’t allow ..., why should we let them to?
Because, as you said in your first point, we play by different rules. Do you want everyone to start playing by China's rules instead?
American exceptionalism is based on the premise of taking the high road (free, open democracy, rule of law, basic freedoms, "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...", etc) and being a success because of that.
To now play by China's rules basically says America has been doing it wrong the last 100 years.
2. Tens of millions of Americans use Tiktok as a platform for speech.
3. Now Trump wants to prohibit the platform which enables the free exercise of political speech against him.
What's more important, geopolitical considerations or the Constitution?
Perhaps the administration could outline the new intel that has come to light in the last month that has made this such an urgent issue right now, as opposed to any other time in the past year.
Otherwise, as a layman, I might think that the humiliating "million ticket reservation" prank of the president's Tulsa, OK rally that adolescents orchestrated on TikTok is what triggered it.
In the future tech will bifurcate into two camps and we'll have a new cold war.
What does matter is that China is starting to become strong enough to be a regional power, which is a threat to American dominance in East Asia
Plus, what if elections are "postponed until a more appropriate time"? I mean, the environment would just be riddled with so much uncertainty that I'm not sure how an honest business would be able to engage in cogent decision making?
I've never been big on the government getting involved. In my view, big tech has no problem that the market won't work out.
The privacy problem, (well, I consider it a problem, others may not), happens when big government gets involved with big tech. We actually need less of that, not more.
A) used against a company that has at most 50% market share (Apple)
B) In the US always been focused on consumer harm and based on does a “monopoly” cause consumer prices to go up. Facebook/Google costs consumers nothing and no one can honestly claim that Amazon/Apple prices have increased because of anything they have done. (Disclaimer: I work for AWS)
C) The republicans were more worried about Facebook/Google’s “bias against conservatism” and in the case of Facebook, one Republican representative grilled Zuckerberg about Twitter’s policy that affected Don Jr. and the administration has repeatedly gone against Amazon because Bezos owns the Washington Post.
- Acquisition by Facebook is problematic given current scrutiny of their market position.
- Facebook has been Trump’s media ally since 2016.
- Trump is intervening clumsily to kill a rare Facebook competitor.
Circumstantial to be sure. But the pattern match is bonkers.