Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok
wsj.com
wsj.com
China has a restrictive internet where if you want to operate, you have to comply with a certain set of rules that are unsavory to say the least. Facebook, Google decided to not bother instead of complying to those rules, but they very well could have, Bing and Amazon is in China.
Tiktok's US branch did not violate any US law and its being prosecuted with administrative action, which is why your equivalence is false - The actual equivalence would be to make laws that enforces ownership for social media companies and make them store their content in location. And enforce those laws, like China did.
If you want to give an example of a US company that is doing much better in China, it's Apple, and the sole reason is that everybody who works for the Chinese government owns an iPhone.
BTW I was living in China when Facebook got banned, it was in 2008 when it started becoming popular outside of the US. Nobody saw it coming, and obviously there was no way for Facebook to go back into that market once the CCP decided against that.
At which point it doesn't make much sense to operate in China.
This is also precisely why TikTok is not available in mainland China, because it doesn't meet those standards.
Not only that, a large portion of iPhones are manufactured in China, which sustains enormous supply chains and jobs there.
Tech companies don't do well because they tend to be staffed by people who 1. rebel against authority and 2. think that the liberal / anarchist parts of Western culture are the best way of doing things. What Uber did pissed off people in San Francisco, so it's small wonder the authorities would come down hard on them in China.
The word on the street is that people in China thought Googlers (and American software engineers by extension) were a tad insufferable and arrogant. One ought to be warned, that being arrogant is a surefire way to get people to beat you at any cost. And to be clear, I fit in that category myself.
At some point, I got off the high horse as far as China-this, China-that. Why? Partly because it didn't really seem important anymore, and partly because a lot of things that you can criticize China about, the U.S. has done as bad, and I don't like being hypocritical to that degree. You know what politicians like to do when things aren't so great? Point fingers at someone who's "worse." So really, in my view of things, FB and GOOG not succeeding in China would be a small price to pay for actually paying attention to things not right in the U.S.
When the laws are written in such away you don't have to interpret it. Western companies that follows those laws like locals are fine - e.g. Apple. Apple Store/Cloud in China store all their info in Guizhou and presumably with agreed access for government on demand, just like all local businesses.
This is not true: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/24/17607992/facebook-allowed...
Facebook attempts to open an office in China, but gets shutdown one day later. Ofc, this is China so nobody knows the reason why.
Second, Chinese internet regulation is as opaque as its other operations, compliance with law is on the surface, they are tens of special government approved certificates to obtain if you want to actually operate there, like this one: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BD%91%E7%BB%9C%E8%A7%86%E5%..., which is approved case by case and notoriously hard to get, basically make it impossible for foreign company to operate in China.
So no, China's internet doesn't have only have a set of rules that once you comply you get a pass. It is mired in layers of regulations and bureaucracy that without guanxi, you can't crack it no matter how willing you are.
I'd assume facebook know? Also your link does not seem related quote(Facebook opens a subsidiary in China, a breakthrough for the banned social media platform)
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17612162/facebook-technol...
> The sudden rejection stems from a disagreement between Chinese authorities, the source told the Times. Local officials in Zhejiang, an eastern province that houses Alibaba’s headquarters, gave Facebook the initial permission, but the Cyberspace Administration of China, Beijing’s internet regulator, had not.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sentences-bookseller-gui-...
China abducts a Swedish citizen; recognizes and prosecutes him as citizen of China, denying Sweden access to the trial (note that China does not even have double citizenship); when concerns are raised over violations of Vienna treaty on consular relations—and hey, by this logic China can abduct anyone anywhere—China declares that (I am not joking) consular relations are on hold until COVID-19 is resolved.
How on Earth is anyone OK with this?
In the case of Isaak, people in sweden seem to think he was some kind of stockholm journalist when he was merely swabbing the floors of a swedish news agency. Not to discredit him of course, I was actually a cleaner myself at one point ... But to simply refer to him as an "abducted swedish journalist" very much leaves the full picture unpainted. More accurately he was a political refugee in sweden and oppositional activist in eritrea, and I think he wrote a newsletter there as well or some kind of newspaper.
In any case, hope they all go free soon, poor people.
A big difference between China and Eritrea is that one of those is a nuclear power, and it has just unilaterally declared consular relations as suspended when Sweden demanded access to its citizen. This is insane.
Global discourse about China mainland politics must be bias-corrected in a way that people with strong opinions and actual knowledge of how things work there will likely self-censor, unless they align with CCP.
If no one writes about some damning thing X in the US, there is a high likelihood that X doesn’t happen. If no one writes about damning thing Z in China, this tells us nothing. They could just fear for their lives—and it doesn’t matter where that person lives, which country’s citizen they are, whether they have been granted asylum, etc.
While any company's welfare can suffer when diplomatic relations between nations sour, as evidenced by TikTok, there really is no comparison between operating a business in China and operating in most other developed markets.
But you're not going to convince anyone on a western forum about this. Obviously I'm generalising but the process people have is loosely:
failure to understand how other people (ie 1.4 billion) operate -> their laws don't work like ours -> their laws are unfair and therefore must be corrupt
Of course they don't abstract the principles upwards ie that an important part of modern sense of liberty is letting people run the system they want. They feel there's no contradiction with that and trying to impose their system on others and using their own system as the only yardstick because they're saving these heathens from eternal damnation.
Alao a lot of those arguments I see in this thread could be applied to many other countries, but everyone just wants to blame China.
It is fair to ask whether the US should be engaging in these tactics (I don’t think we should), but the suggestion that the US is doing something on a level that China wouldn’t is just false.
>China has a restrictive internet where if you want to operate, you have to comply with a certain set of rules that are unsavory to say the least. Facebook, Google decided to not bother instead of complying to those rules, but they very well could have, Bing and Amazon is in China.
Is that an accurate portrayal of events? Google did attempt to get into China more than a decade ago, and more recently with Dragonfly[0] which was shut down after word got out.
As for Facebook, one cannot look at all the relationship strengthening between its CEO and Xi Jinping and not think there is nothing behind that.
The point is that to say that Facebook and Google voluntarily quit or didn't even bother because of the reasons cited in the comment surely could be improved for accuracy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)
Seriously? That was already in 2019:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-pay-5-7-millio...
It actually did attempt to do that, pretty hard. Zuck even learned quite a bit of Mandarin Chinese and spoke in it in China to students during a publicity tour. He's not stupid, he knows there's a lot of money in China. But Xi is also not stupid, so he's not going to let a US media company to have unimpeded access to almost all of his subjects, which it could then algorithmically brainwash. So it was not to be. Google didn't "voluntarily quit" either. It quit because it discovered it's being spied on and had its IP stolen - both of those things are a fact of life for any significant Western company operating in China. So yea, forgive me for not shedding a tear for TikTok.
The world is more complex than that. China is not "bad" because it is not a democracy. China is "bad" because it competes with the USA.
There are other countries that are not a democracy an that are allies with the USA, like Saudi Arabia. But they are "good", apparently.
And also, just remember that the USA only supports the democracies that are aligned with the way of thinking. Just do a bit of research and see what happened to South America in the 70s' and 80's... and more recently to Bolivia.
Also, most of the products that you use today were built, at least in part, in China.
China is bad because it is a horrific human rights abuser without democratic elections. You march to the beat of the CCP drum or you're removed. You're also severely disadvantaged if you aren't Han Chinese. The Uighurs are being systematically exterminated, and they're not the only ones that suffer.
The US isn't perfect. Our immigration laws and history of racism, sexism, and homophobia leave much to be desired. But we're not a dictatorship and we're a net force for good. I'd rather be a US citizen than a Chinese one.
Most of the world recognizes that China is becoming worrisomely powerful, and we've collectively decided that we need to put them back in check. Thankfully Xi is flexing all of China's muscles in an early show of strength, which has gotten the world's attention. Nobody wants totalitarian China to be the dominant superpower. Xi played his hand early, and now the walls are about to cave in.
As impressive as China's domestic capabilities look, they have an aging population with a huge gender imbalance that will bite them in a few short decades. If the world decouples manufacturing and supply chains from China over this same time period, China is going to have significant problems. They're not as self-sufficient as they look. They're an importer of energy and food, and without exports they won't be able to sustain their growth internally.
The world is trying to knee-cap China, and it makes sense.
I happen to think what we are doing is justified and an imperative to maintaining our way of life.
That is to say, it has very little to do with the arguments of the comment it replies to, or outright ignores them. It is good to engage people you reply to instead of talking at them.
Imagine 20 years from now Mars settlement has started to become reality. And most earthlings are still stuck at the primitive notions of dividing people and labeling things in overly generalised categories like the abstract notions of sovereign states.
I just hope when we have finally colonised Mars people who settle down in this otherworld are not as divided as we currently are.
Domers rule, ok?
Tunnels Tunnels #1! #1!
We use sols.
They use mars seconds.
But if
> China is bad because it is a horrific human rights abuser without democratic elections.
What about US where people have SIX times the chances of being shot and killed in the streets?
(1 every 100k VS 6 every 100k)
I mean: safety is a human right, especially in democratic western supposedly civilized countries
To find another country with such bad homicide stats you have to look at undeveloped countries run by criminal cartels or warlords
For once
>As impressive as China's domestic capabilities look, they have an aging population with a huge gender imbalance that will bite them in a few short decades.
Europe is in the same situation, it doesn't mean Europe will disappear
Japan is in a worse situation, but it's still the third economy in the World for GDP
> If the world decouples manufacturing and supply chains from China over this same time period, China is going to have significant problems.
You forgot (or you don't know) that China is practically colonizing Africa, which is gonna be the next big thing and has a lot of younger work force available, not considering that with 1.3 billion population is gonna be one of the largest markets in the World
USA has only 320 million citizen and only 80% of them are American born.
You also forgot that China is the United States' 3rd largest goods export market
It's also the third largest market for Apple devices.
China is also the largest supplier for USA, which means that on one side China get a lot of benefits trading on the US market, but also that USA without China goods is not gonna work the same way.
If you're telling me that neither this nation nor any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure, and that we have to fight unfairness with unfairness, you're telling me that my loyalty to America itself is misplaced.
Previously, it was believed that liberty contributed to economic output for a myriad of reasons that boil down to "free markets". There's an emerging, albeit more romantically framed, belief that diversity and too much liberty are actually handicaps because both can retard a government's ability to engage in realist policy while, at the same time, deminishing the homoginizing effects of nationalism which has its own independent benefits but which also acts as a lubricant for realist action. This is not to say all assumptions and observations about liberal policies have been wrong, it's more about re-assessing our understanding about the magnitude and utility of these effects.
Fairness, values, work on smaller scales. When you get to city/state/country scale, like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, China, US do - it’s not a good strategy because your opponents/peers have no alternative but to deal with you, and unless you are going on an all out war, it’s mostly slap and tickle regardless of what you actually do.
People/organizations/governments will do what they have the leverage and power to get away with. If you, or your organization, or your government, don't/doesn't agree with the direction, then leverage and power are your means to change the situation. Those that have the power to make/change the laws, make/change laws.
The decision should be based on what's best for the US and for the market as a whole; not what's best for Facebook.
I'd say Facebooks view is the difference is only temporary, much like China's view on the world
The U.S. rose to its current position by being a nation of values and principles--by sticking by them even through tough times, and encouraging their adoption elsewhere. That's the real long game. And right now we're losing it... actually no, this isn't something we can lose to someone else. We're forfeiting it. We're abandoning our best advantage.
We can't beat China by becoming China. And more to the point, China does not have to lose for the U.S. (or anyone else) to win.
My issue with this story (if it's indeed true) is that the motive for"stoking fears" was entirely self serving and has nothing to do with selflessly advising the government on some blind spot.
If you recall just a few years ago he was speaking at Chinese universities, getting photo ops in front of Tiananmen Square, and even asked Xi to name his unborn baby! He was all in on fawning over China when he thought there was a chance Facebook could "get in" and then took everything back as soon as he realized it was impossible.
TikTok pays its approved creators around $0.035 per 1,000 views. Maybe compete with that.
A few searches suggest YouTube pays at least an order of magnitude more, depending on geo and engagement.
You only get $35,000 but the hardware you need is in your pocket.
Of course, you need to be cool and be good at marketing- but still!
However I don't have a marketing team, and I'm not a hip hot girl.
Don't get me wrong, the website is popular and I've been on BBC, but I can tell my lower quality competitors are doing better.
Why not hire a marketing team?
I think I don't have the cool factor.
YT content length is very different. Also YT has substantially more drop offs than tiktok - it is lot harder to drop off in 15seconds .
Even if these were all equal bottom line is advertisers need to make money, i.e. how many people click on the ads and buy the product, some platforms just fundamentally have different demographics , App Store makes more money than Play Store for example, ads will be priced according to that.
Not the greatest comparison, but YT : TikTok :: TV ad industry (2019-$70B) : Print Magazine (2019-$15B)
[0] https://www.marketingcharts.com/advertising-trends-108995
It is incredibly common behavior for large businesses to raise the barrier of entry for new competitors. Almost every established business does this. It's why patents exist. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't participate in this activity to an abnormal amount.
I know the narrative (and majority of comments) like to hate on Zuck, so just adding another perspective for this particular situation.
https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/07/china-blocks-access-to-twi...
I don't like the idea of trusting the executive branch to arbitrarily ban apps. Would much prefer a clear policy as to when and why actions are taken, and what policy changes could be done to avoid them altogether.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gqXLxCU-fY
$10,262 [65th in the world] vs $65,111 [7th] (IMF, 2019)
Free trade only works if it goes both ways. Otherwise you're just screwing yourself to benefit your now opponent.
Or is it your view the American way deficient and we should learn from China?
However, if the business environment becomes unfair I believe the other party has the right to push back.
I don't believe the US is going about it the best way, but I believe it has the right to push. Would much rather have clear and consistent policies as to when actions are taken and how to rectify.
Luckily it’s only China that refuse to play by the rules, which means that you can easily remove them from the game without changing the game or adopting their policies.
have you be experiencing the pandemic in America?
Besides, open markets are not exclusive to America, and plenty of open and democratic countries have done a far better job than China (who’re 100% responsible for the pandemic) with regard to the Wuhan Virus.
While WhatsApp has not really changed all that much since the acquisition, there is very little that is the same between Instagram pre Facebook and now.
Were they worth the 1B and 19B price tag? yes totally, however both could have been done cheaper and earlier. There was lots of discussions with snap before whatsApp. The way occulus($3B) due diligence was handled also does not show give a lot of confidence. Facebook just got their way with sheer amount of money they could spend.
It didn't seem surprising at all at the time that Facebook bought both services, many people I knew were using them as much or more for social media than Facebook. Now, the values of course were a bit gawking but I'm sure experts crawled over a lot of their own internal figures and what they would expect out of both services. If any organization had enough social media data to evaluate these services marketability, it was FB.
Facebook paid a lot more than 12 billion:
>...When Facebook announced its plans to acquire WhatsApp in February 2014, WhatsApp's founders attached a purchase price of $16 billion: $4 billion in cash and $12 billion remaining in Facebook shares. This price tag is dwarfed by the actual price Facebook paid: $21.8 billion, or $55 per user.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whats...
You can easily buy Facebook account which have been old but might not have been active for a long time. To me being on Facebook since 2009 is not really a great indicator for trust.
I've been buying and selling stuff on Craigslist for years, never had a problem. If you're really paranoid about getting ripped off, do the transaction in the parking lot of your local police station.
Maybe to you, not to others?
BTW: I am sure we will see the end of facebook (and it's subsidies) in this decade. The power concentration is just too insane. If it does not implode itself, then even a weak government like the US will take action.
Oh, good grief. Just say "Facebook didn't stop Trump from being elected!!!!1!!!1!". It would be fewer words.
Facebook's actual product is its targeted advertising algorithms that advertisers pay handsomely to exploit. Facebook's advertising product has improved massively over the past two decades.
Indeed, Facebook's advertising algorithms are so good that Facebook should be regarded not as an advertising platform but rather as a rootkit and firmware upload tool for the human mind. Facebook's algorithms are quite capable of making a critical mass of the population believe utterly anything and, if if prompted, to act on those beliefs even in ways that go against their own interests.
What Facebook sells is the ability to control the course of society. That is their business, and they're doing very well with it.
Which is what everybody wants, right? Large demand - big business.
Can it turn religious people secular, Democrats into Republicans? Citation needed.
You were more on target when you praised the efficacy of FB's advertising products, bleepblorp. Unfortunately, FB doesn't offer any way to control the course of society except to hasten its decline by overwhelming users with crap.
Neil Postman anticipated this in 1985, when he explained that America had not succumbed to Orwell's dystopian 1984 vision, but rather, had become something more akin to Huxley's Brave New World:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with indulgences, trifles, and vanities."
That probably scared them a bit.
In my opinion Trump is driving this particular issue not at the behest of Zuckerberg. I dont think Trump sees eye to eye with other american social media companies. I think Trump just sees sensitive data about americans in foreign hands.
This EO action lacks complexity and is a somewhat, extremely messy way to do things. Trump's response does not react with the reality of the industry and that is all of our data is being scooped by everyone and banning a single company will do nothing. Hypothetically if he wanted to promote a culture change there needs to be more pointed discussion on this issue.
Additionally if Trump really really wanted to shove some regulation down data miners/brokers throats he would ban the sale of data (like ccpa but with actual teeth), and obliterate S.J.Res.34. GDPR is a farce and is like a cop making everything illegal but selectively enforcing the law.
This discussion on HN is somewhat helpful but few comments here are including the necessary complexity of this case.
In a private dinner at the White House in late October, Mr. Zuckerberg made the case to President Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook, some of the people said.
Mr. Zuckerberg discussed TikTok specifically in meetings with several senators, according to people familiar with the meetings. In late October, Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.)—who met with Mr. Zuckerberg in September—and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok. The government began a national-security review of the company soon after, and by the spring, Mr. Trump began threatening to ban the app entirely. This month he signed an executive order demanding that TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd., divest itself of its U.S. operations.But there are so many informed comments here on HN,I must be the only non-subscriber, yeah?
Can anyone post the article text?
That's not journalism; it's gossip. Or worse.
Kelli Ford, a spokeswoman for Sen. Hawley said the senator’s concerns about TikTok predated the meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg. “Facebook has recently been sounding the alarm about China-based tech as a PR tactic to boost its own reputation,” she said.
Only companies that do shitty things need to have that much "training". Think about that.
Toxic culture. Poorly designed performance reviews that lead to a competitive environment and people working towards getting a better assessment, not building better products.
Regarding the high trust in Zuck's management, the grape vine suggests you won't last long at Facebook if you do not perceive Zuck as a semi God, so that might well be a self selecting bias.