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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

> Instead, I believe that it is a national security issue

Are you uncomfortable adopting that belief with literally no concrete evidence that anything of the sort is actually occurring?

I don't know how you reconcile rule of law with such drastic interventions in the rights of companies without evidence of wrongdoing. If anything you can come up with in your most paranoid fantasies can be the basis of shutting down a company, pretty much anything can be done to anyone on the basis of anything, no?

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Any business with china is a national security issue. There's plenty of evidence to the level of dictatorship in China. It's your responsibility to look at its history and make reasonable conclusions from it. If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations.

It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.

Let’s not pretend this is anything other than just plain old geopolitics with TikTok caught in the middle.

Going by “national security” reasons most countries should ban Facebook and google, not to mention amazon, Microsoft, oracle, Cisco etc. since the us government has already shown willingness and ability to spy on anything they can get their hands on, including foreign heads of state. Allowing US controlled social media and other tech companies is a huge risk.

Of course power doesn’t balance that way so they don’t.

Many countries including China do block US companies on national security grounds. National security is very much a double edged sword.

Of course the US isn’t the only country that plays this game. The government also needs to justify it some how, and I don’t even blame them for that. But at least here we can stop pretending there is some sort of objective, consistently applied standard at play.

US companies operating in China need to follow Chinese laws, including those on censorship. Google etc are blocked because they are hosted outside China, and are not willing to cooperate in China.

What I find bizarre about the Tiktok ban is that they are being banned essentially on executive whim: as far as I can tell, there are no concrete allegations, much less evidence, that they're violating any US laws.

So, it's ok for China to ban Google because Google refuses to help with censorship and propaganda, and because Google doesn't want the Chinese govt to be able to spy on its citizens.

But it's not OK for the US to keep out spyware. Heck, retaliation for China's banning of Google etc would be sufficient justification for banning TikTok on its own.

You cannot say "A" is evil because it does "X", so we will also do "X" and then still claim "A" is evil without saying you are evil yourself.

What you are saying is that unless PRC becomes like the US, the US has to become like PRC. I'm amazed how this is not clear to anyone following this. The only way to go forward and not become what you are pointing fingers at is taking the high road. The US is clearly not doing so.

If we retaliate against every country that has disallowed something that is allowed in America, we're going to run out of imports very quickly.

Oh but it is ok, it's just that there's no good legal precedence for it yet.

Plus it goes against the US's low restrictions and limitations on doing business.

It’s obviously not okay for China to ban Google. That’s why China gets criticized for it constantly, by both the west and its own citizens.

If US wants to retaliate China by becoming more China, well, surely China isn’t the only one getting hurt.

Yes. It's the same situation as 'retaliating' to tariffs with tariffs of your own.

It's like butting your head against the wall to teach the other fellow not to but his own head against the wall.

Well yes it is ok for China to block Google, they’re allowed to block anyone they want.

The issue isn’t a tit-for-tat they block, we block issue, with the US and China acting like playground children.

The issue is whether or not the rule-of-law still means anything in the US. Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law.

If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so. Don’t let your executive do an end run around your democratic process.

And, of course, people are still free to voice their disapproval with actions of their government (whether by law or by executive fiat) they don't approve of.

That's independent of the rule of law being preferable to the alternative.

The rule of law itself doesn't put much of a constraint on what the government can do, it just requires proper form.

>> Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law ... If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so...

That's not how the rule-of-law works. The bill of attainder doesn't allow the US gov't to punish an entity (or a group of) arbitrarily by legislating.

The legislative and executive branches have already been briefed on privacy and/or security threat Tiktok poses to US. The US senate already passed a bill to ban federal employees from using Tiktok on gov't issued devices, which is exactly what the legislative is supposed to be doing without overreaching and impinging on Americans' civil liberty, and Trump in turn issued executive orders to deter national security/privacy threats from foreign entities. The judicial branch likewise appropriately exercised their power by delaying Trump's EO and challenging his authority.

That's precisely how the rule-of-law is supposed to work in the US -- there is nothing novel or arbitrary here.

>The issue is whether or not the rule-of-law still means anything in the US. Have the executive block things pretty much arbitrarily undermines the rule-of-law. If the US wants to block Chinese companies, then pass laws in congress to do so. Don’t let your executive do an end run around your democratic process.

The courts are doing exactly that, determining whether the executive has the authority to implement this. This is in fact the rule-of-law in action.

This is also the reason why the rule-of-law is lacking in China, the courts rarely if ever finds against the government in constitutional matters like these. Their system was designed for the CCP to retain power.

For that it has to be established that TikTok is some type of malicious spyware to the satisfaction of US courts and legal system, which hasn't been done.

You are equating the US government with China's. Those governments are supposed to work differently.

I read a bit about that. The claim that Google was blocked due to unwillingness to follow Chinese laws isn't true.

Be noted that China is not a country under rule of law.

When Google was blocked, there was no primary legislation stipulating that online content shall be censored in whatsoever way. There were vague administrative rules (secondary legislation) with questionable applicability. Today, there is only one piece of primary legislation with a section on online censorship in China, but this section targets ISPs only, not content providers.

EDIT2: corrections

Do you honestly believe that geopolitics don’t play a role in China banning US tech companies? You think China would allow Google if it censored search results?

Of course they play a role, and those same Chinese laws also dictate that any foreign IT company needs to have a local partner. But in the unlikely event of Google agreeing to a JV that cedes enough power to a local company, then sure, why not? That's how eg. AWS China operates: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/

FWIW, Google already has a substantial presence in China, but they don't target consumers there.

Google search is not available to consumers, but Google Ads are, and they definitely target any eyeballs they can. Of course most Chinese websites don't use Google for their ads, but when a Chinese user visits a foreign website that does, Google controls what they'll be seeing. And to be allowed to keep doing that, Google censors the ads they show: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-bans-vpn-ads-in-china/

That's not how the law works at all. The actual issue is data collection in China meaning data collected in China must be stored in China. Foreign tech companies just choose to have a local partner to avoid direct liability.

I work at a French software company in Shanghai (outside any pilot zone fwiw) and we don't have or need a local partner. Our software is on-prem so data storage is not an issue.

China allows Bing after it censored its content.

You know that Google used to operate in China until 2010 where it voluntarily* quit Chinese market?

* In a sense that Google didn't want to follow Chinese laws anymore.

>> ... being banned essentially on executive whim:

The US Senate unanimously approved a bill banning federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices last month. So there is some consensus among lawmakers that some sort of privacy and/or security threat exists -- it's hardly on "executive whim."

You're tautologically correct (TikTok is banned because TikTok is banned!), but that still doesn't answer the question. Put another way: if whatever Tiktok is doing represents a categorical privacy/security threat, then why aren't they banning all apps that engage in said activity, instead of just Tiktok?

I suspect the answer is that Tiktok is just doing the same as Facebook etc, and that's unacceptable only because the mined data might go to China.

It is quite likely the US will continue to look at companies on which CCP can have control over. I agree it is odd to not have made a more comprehensive list.

Those two examples are fundamentally different and it’s silly to conflate individual action with coercing the app stores to discontinue supporting the app.

The US could tailor laws that would have the same effect, but would that actually change the situation?

As an example, they could make it illegal for all video hosting companies operating in the US to censor videos on Taiwan, Tienanmen and Tibet.

> As an example, they could make it illegal for all video hosting companies operating in the US to censor videos on Taiwan, Tienanmen and Tibet.

Which would probably run afoul of the first amendment. Freedom of speech requires freedom to refrain from speech.

They could define it as discrimination against people from Taiwan and Tibet. It looks very similar to discrimination based on national origin, especially if the company does not recognize the nation sovereignty.

But even if that would fail, I am sure that a team full of lawyer could find something which would be incompatible with Chinese law.

If Bytedance was violating U.S. laws a “ban” would not be necessary to prevent them from continuing to do so. The executive order is based on a concrete factual assertion: “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States” [1]. The injunction we are discussing results from a challenge to that assertion.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

The immediate security issues are more with WeChat but TikTok gives them a social graph of Western youth documenting their foibles. These are all prospects for future moles when they get jobs in sensitive positions.

> Going by “national security” reasons most countries should ban Facebook and google, not to mention amazon, Microsoft, oracle, Cisco etc. since the us government has already shown willingness and ability to spy on anything they can get their hands on, including foreign heads of state. Allowing US controlled social media and other tech companies is a huge risk.

Yes.

As a European, I believe in Europe (and in the rest of the world) we should definitively ban most US tech be it for ethical reasons or national security. Same for China.

EU Politicians don't seem to understand the situation yet, but given the current technological cold war happening, I hope we'll wake up soon and switch either to open tech or at least to our own local tech.

I think this the key issue against National Security. The US has used its tech to spy on everybody else and and using Trump logic nobody should use it. Free trade is over

China's tech could also be used, but I am not a Trump supporter. I would be more afraid of Trump facist controlled NSA backdoors monitoring me than CCP seeing my dance moves

I guess at minimum I'd expect a non-partisan investigation to substantiate that, and then for it to be applied on an equal basis to all companies with similar issues. Some element of the first may have, but I have no awareness of the second part.

>It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.

Neither Bytedance nor TikTok are Chinese companies.

It's true that Bytedance has buildings in Beijing, and a Chinese app (Taotiao) that is a Chinese subsidiary, but Bytedance is a Cayman's Islands company and TikTok doesn't even have servers inside China.

For purposes of the Chinese National Intelligence Law compelling the company to share user information with the CCP, Apple shares way more user data than TikTok does.

>... Bytedance is a Cayman's Islands company...

Sure, it's incorporated in the Caymans, but we all know that that is just a technicality.

Like every other company operating from the Caymans; tax evasion.

If you keep everything legal, I think it's called tax optimisation.

Yet somehow the Chinese government can control the export of their technology and needs to approve any deal with a US company?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-unlikely-approve-ti...

Well, the US also controls lots of companies that are not American. Especially in finance. They were handing out American sanctions for European banks doing business with Iranian companies.

I was referring to laws literally called "export controls" which regulate goods and technology that originate in China, not stretching the word to make a metaphorical case for ownership.

If it does business in China, then it's beholden to Chinese law at the risk of no longer doing business in China.

By that rationale, Apple and Microsoft are Chinese companies.

Bytedance is a Chinese company. Look up VIE (variable interest entity) or "Sina Structure". Essentially the Cayman islands topco is a fudge that the Chinese government tolerates to facilitate non Chinese investment in Chinese companies, something which is not normally allowed. The structure is very common among Chinese tech companies. Instead of controlling the company by owning a majority of its shares, the "owners" of VIEs control their firms contractually. Paul Gilis' blog is very good on this https://www.chinaaccountingblog.com/weblog/explaining-vie-st...

VIEs are publicly trade (Bytedance is not) and that blogpost you linked is a decade old.

Ok, but how is Tik Tok a national security issue, but the fact that damn near every electronic device available on the market is manufactured in or out of components manufactured in China doesn't seem to be one?

It actually has been a problem before, in rather recent memory I may add [0]. China is, for all intents and purposes, a bad actor. They keep positioning themselves infinitely closer to "the line" without seemingly ever being able to cross it, even when they're caught red-handed undermining US security.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

This is a poor example because it wound up being more about Bloomberg's shoddy reporting https://www.servethehome.com/investigating-implausible-bloom...

The Big Hack is possible the worst example you could come up with : it is regarded as fabrication, there is no proof whatsoever.

There’s evidence online, I don’t have it handy but a quick search found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news...

seriously? A reddit comment?

By the way, they never provided any proof and even better, claimed that their laptop broke when pressed.

Yeah, sorry I was rushing and wasn’t thinking on how much time I had to investigate. Well it’s out there... Sucks but all I know is I’ve seen it. It could be buried heavily by now. There has been infosec evidence provided.

Edit: this too? Mob mentality here. Sad. Lol if this is being downvoted I have some words for you.

“ The Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party exert control over many forms of media in China, including newspapers and the Internet. All Chinese media, including newspapers, periodicals, news agencies, TV stations, broadcasting, the movie industry and art performances, are categorized and managed as "mouthpieces" of the Communist Party, used to manipulate public opinion and exercise "mind control" on its citizens.[70] "Mind control" includes "indoctrination from kindergarten to college through officially compiled textbooks, as all teachers are categorized as 'educators of CCP' (The Chinese Communist Party)". According to Qinglian He, a former Chinese government propagandist and now a senior researcher at Human Rights in China, by exercising "mind control", the Chinese government has misled the Chinese population about the values of human rights and democracy, and also about the truth.[71] The Propaganda and Information Leading Group is generally responsible for censorship and control of information. The unit is also one of the largest in the CCP leadership organ.[72]”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_management

Money. It would be way too costly that all countries manufactured their own devices.

A single laptop has likely hundreds of processing units, running unknown software, often with direct access to the memory buss. Building a secure devices however where every bit of code and every bit of hardware is designed domestically (and preferable in house) is so prohibitively expensive that no one do that. The hope is that if there is a security fault then someone else will find it and report it, and so a reputation system is the only economical viable method for hardware security in most consumer devices.

High end cpu's are banned from being produced overseas for exactly this reason iirc, so all of the latest tech are made in USA. China makes cheaper older gen components.

Edit: Quite a lot of high end cpu are now done in Taiwan TSMC, they caught up to US capabilities. But most of intels cpu's are still made in US.

Are the chips in your phone manufactured in the US?

> There's plenty of evidence to the level of dictatorship in China.

The political regime of the countries you deal with is not a national security issue in itself, that's not what national security means. Certainly, 'dictatorship' is not a national security issue. Some of the US's "best friends" were, and are, dictatorships.

I think Americans should be very, very careful about calling for 'smoking gun evidence' of state oppression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

It is highly duplicitous to be sabre rattling over perceived ideological differences, when America's own ideology is couched in immensely contradicting - nay, hypocritical - failures to conduct state affairs according to International law.

>It's a Chinese company, they have privledges, not rights.

This is also true of American companies, especially those with a trillion dollar profit motive in the military-industrial endless-war market.

Be very, very careful about what doors you open with statements such as this:

>If you want some sort of smoking gun evidence you're not going to find it, unless you somehow have a security clearance in China good enough to gain knowledge about their operations

We know all too well how tightly wrapped up in its deep state secrets America's own heinous crimes against humanity are .. and if you are so sure of your own states innocence that you feel warranted in calling for other states' downfall for similar reasons, you must surely be willing to discuss America's own human rights abuses in a similar light.

No? Then the moral authority you claim does not exist.

I don’t read OP has making claims about the US having a higher morale ground.

It is pretty accepted no government has the higher morale ground. You can dig enough in any past or present to find evil or good.

Any business with anyone is a national security issue. After all, wreckers, saboteurs, and enemies of the revolution are all around us.

Can you prove to me that any company, domestic or otherwise, operating in the US has its national security in mind over shareholder value?

> I don't know how you reconcile rule of law with such drastic interventions in the rights of companies without evidence of wrongdoing

How far reaching does the rule of law go? Like the US is governed by rule of law, but when you bring in international elements, can all parties operate under rule of law ?

It seems almost in this case that the argument made by the US is actually that TikTok is not governed under an agreed upon rule of laws. Such as it needing to share information with the CCP or having to comply to any other of their wishes.

Also, rule of laws just means the laws define the regulations which apply equally to everyone (which means everyone that bought into the society which honors those laws). So the question here is, do the laws give the president the ability to block a foreign company in such situation? If not, then this should be blocked, though laws could be made to block the company as well, just not exclusively enacted by the president.

> do the laws give the president the ability to block a foreign company in such situation?

Yes, Congress has given the President the power to “regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” [1], “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat” [2]. This is the power that Trump is purporting to exercise.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1702

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1701

Do you know then on what grounds the judge enacted this block for now? The article is low on details.

According to Ars Technica: “The majority of Nichols' order is currently sealed; both sides have until 11:00 Monday morning to tell the court if they think it can be unsealed.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/judge-will-rule-...

They also published Bytedance’s written complaint for injunctive relief, but it’s hard to know which arguments the judge accepted: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/tikto...

Read the replies from Chinese nationals on HN defending TikTok. Even they don't pretend you can say anything you want there. Their argument is "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP? Is it really worth losing contact with your friends or colleagues who use TikTok and WeChat?"

In my opinion, absolutely. Stop it now before it gets too powerful to ban. WeChat already has 19 million US users.

Are you pretending you can say anything you want on US owned social media? I still remember when Facebook censored an anti-wingsuit post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419313

There is a world of difference to the consequences here. One is content being taken down. The other is possible arrest, gulag, or dissapearance if you ever go to China.

Maybe if freedom of speech on social media platforms is an issue (it is, in my opinion), there should be laws regulating it that would apply to any businesses operating in the US, not just ad-hoc executive orders of dubious objectiveness.

That’s an excellent idea. The issue is there is also soft censorship through algorithm tweaking. A law like this should require third party auditing of the companies.

Personally I believe there should be a public alternative to most private internet services. An internet post office whose only rules are the laws of the United States. It's not going to happen, though. Google is too powerful.

As someone who has actually talked about the Tiananmen Square protests on WeChat and occasionally corrects misconceptions about how difficult that is, I don't think banning the app will help in any way, since the ban will just reduce the volume of such messages even more.

The status quo is that you only need some minor skill at language games to talk about forbidden topics without using any keywords that trigger censorship. With a ban in place, at least one of the participants additionally has to circumvent their country's firewall to reach the other side. Censoring censored media even more is not a good way to fight censorship.

I'm also not sure why you think "How much time would you really spend discussing Tiananmen or criticizing the CCP?" is talking about TikTok, since you can absolutely do that there https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmen

Generally I would agree that it is a bad step to ban the app. It can still normalize censorship and if it becomes a main market player, you might loose the ability to talk about it and other apps might follow just because of the success.

Ideally people would stop using it by choice. Perhaps too much to ask, but I know enough people that wouldn't use it precisely because of these issues.

Agreed that it is easy to play language games, but maybe your intention is to draw attention of a larger crowd that would be completely oblivious to it.

since the ban will just reduce the volume of such messages even more.

Trying to "win the hearts and minds" of the Chinese people is a lost cause. Either they agree with the CCP or they've adapted to its restrictions. All we can do is try to keep that ideology from spreading beyond their borders.

This whole shift to China as the new "enemy" is fascinating. Even though Trump is more or less mental, and is recognised as such, he has somehow managed to whip up this new cold war frenzy even among his opponents in the media. I can barely remember any focus on China before Trump. Not saying that there shouldn't be any but it's still interesting how this can spread to the entire country even if the author is an untrustworthy demagogue.

> I can barely remember any focus on China before Trump.

Maybe not in the mass media, but the new cold war preceded Trump as an issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_foreign_policy_of_t...

Sure, but now it's at a level where arbitrarily banning Chinese products barely meet resistence from the opposition and media.

Russia, Iran, and North Korea will be rotated back in again. The important thing is to maintain public support for increased defense expenditures.

Are you trying to imply that those countries aren't real enemies of the US and it's all just a war with Oceania?

You should probably break the news to them, given their continued behavior I'm not sure they're aware it's all a front.

For some value of "defense". Back when the US DOD was called Department of War, it had (at various times) flagged boots on the ground in china[1], north korea, and russia[2].

Iran, on the other hand, was a brit show up until Ajax (1953) or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–United_Kingdom_relations#... The US would not formally take the baton before ending Suez (1957).

[1] In the lost opportunities department, General Wedemeyer on "who lost china?" (emphasis mine):

> "If Uncle Sugar, Russia, and Britain united strongly in their endeavor to bring about a coalition of these two political parties [the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party] in China by coercing both sides to make realistic concessions, serious post-war disturbance may be averted and timely effective military employment of all Chinese may be obtained against the Japanese. I use the term coercion advisedly because it is my conviction that continued appeals to both sides couched in polite diplomatic terms will not accomplish unification."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Coady_Wedemeyer#China-B...

[2] thanks to burnaway's excellent search fu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24490540 I learned US propaganda in 1914-1918 had not only been officially going to russia, but also the then-white entities (where American Expeditionary Forces were operating) archangel and siberia.

I don't think you were paying attention.

I wasn't?

It makes sense according to the Sith Rule of Two.

Other countries historically accompanying the US in the top GDP pair included the soviet union and japan, so no surprise that today china would get the two minutes hate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_largest_h...

(right now I'd say india is too underdeveloped and too important a part of Oceania, but assuming the US remains in a position to believe it embodies power two or three decades from now, we'll see if india gets the hate, too.)

It's been happening since Obama's Pivot to Asia, it's just a lot more noticeable now since Trump has no subtlety.

> shutting down a company

It's not a company. It's a division of a foreign government. That was the point being made. If it was an independent company, none of this would be happening.

https://www.bytedance.com/en/#corporate-structure

ByteDance Ltd. (Cayman) -> TikTok Ltd. (Cayman) -> TikTok LLC. (US)

Legally it is indeed a company and not controlled by the CCP, but exactly how much of its US operations are conducted and directed by non-US citizens on non-US soil is unknown.

This post is going to be similar to my other two comments in this thread.

First, it being incorporated in the Caymans is a technicality. ByteDance's headquarters are in Beijing[1] and they don't speak of a Cayman Islands office. In addition...

> As with many Chinese companies, the company has an internal Chinese Communist Party committee serving the party members among the employees, with vice president Zhang Fuping serving as its Party Committee Secretary. It also has a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Public Security for the ministry's public relations efforts, and joint ventures with a state-run publisher in Beijing and media firm in Shanghai. ... It has garnered public attention over allegations that it worked with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and surveil content pertaining to Xinjiang re-education camps and other topics the Party deemed controversial. [2]

[1] https://www.inputmag.com/culture/tiktok-weirdly-tries-to-sug...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance

Why is this being downvoted?

Technically correct, but you're almost as guilty of being dishonest as the comment you're replying to saying it's "not a company".

A lot of companies are incorporated in the Cayman Islands, or in Ireland, or other tax havens, but we don't generally refer to them as Cayman companies or Irish companies.

Companies will regularly incorporate in low-tax jurisdictions, but that doesn't exactly make them headquartered in those areas, where they may actually do zero business. ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese multinational internet technology company headquartered in Beijing. It was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012. [1]

TikTok's parent company ByteDance has sought permission from the Chinese government to export technology, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. ByteDance filed a request with the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau asking for approval to export its technology under restrictions recently implemented by the Chinese government, according to Bloomberg. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/bytedance-seeks-china-govern...

Google and Facebook etc also have lots of unAmerican citizens and operations on unAmerican soil.

Just because it is registered elsewhere doesn't mean it is not a Chinese company. Seriously, how can anyone think this is a valid argument? Do you think DouYin and TikTok originated from different companies?

Bytedance is not owned by the Chinese government. It's an independent company, as is TikTok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance

Wikipedia is not a good source one way or the other.

You're not citing a better source either agreeing or opposing the argument made though.

Yes, for their TaoTiao subsidiary, not TikTok.

It says right there in your link that Bytedance is legally a Cayman's Islands company.

> It's not a company. It's a division of a foreign government.

Can you elaborate on this? As far as I can tell this is just not the case, and none of the people saying it are clarifying what they mean.

If you examine ByteDance's structure technically, you are correct that it does look like just a regular company. But just about everything runs differently in China. All major companies in China have CCP party members on their boards who not only influence corporate policy, but are actually _deferred to_ on anything remotely political.[2][3] At the end of the day the party has the final say in any matters that it cares about. There's actually a fundamental difference that many westerners don't understand about China, and it comes from an ignorance of the country's history in my opinion: there is no real rule of law, there is the current will of the party[1]. Obviously there's a ton of whataboutism that you can misdirect here about how the US or other western countries don't follow their constitutions or whatever, but it is fundamentally different, as the differences in the CCP run very deep down to the daily lives of basically every citizen ("show me a warrant" does NOT fly in China, ever).

TLDR; the CCP does whatever it wants whenever it wants, and is deeply ingrained in every major corporation at the highest levels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_People%27s...

[2] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...

[3] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3045053/c...

Source 3 is literally about state-owned companies, and would not apply at all...

There is evidence of WeChat being involved in building up PRC's censorship framework[1]. Comments from American citizens were used for this without their consent. It's not improbable that they are carrying out similar exercises on TikTok's data.

1. https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/

You think there isn't evidence that China is already participating in information warfare at an unprecedented scale?

US OpSec is terrible and it's still obvious.

In a country without any constraints on government behavior or rule of law beyond whatever the CCP decrees, Chinese entities have to be treated as organs of the Chinese Communist Party.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/05/huawei-would-have-to-give-da...

"Government", "administration", and "party" are all the same thing in China. So something like:

"Huawei would be forced to hand over 5G data to the Chinese government if it was asked for it, because of national security laws, experts told CNBC."

...is really no different from the US, is it?

And while China has lots of problems, citing a lack of "rule of law" in this context is rather brave. Also: if you believe everything called "communist party" is "communist", you definitely have to pay the beer at the next "RePUBlican Party" meeting.

> ...is really no different from the US, is it?

It is enormously different in that it is judicially reviewable (if not in need of an outright warrant) and the USA is a country where there are limits on government. This post, specifically the "judge temporarily blocks" is proof that the USA is a fundamentally different country.

> Also: if you believe everything called "communist party" is "communist", you definitely have to pay the beer at the next "RePUBlican Party" meeting.

I have not commented on communism as a general topic at all. I am specifically talking about the entity named the Chinese Communist Party.

Are there actually real limits on government in the US? If the Democrats and Republicans agreed that they wanted to do something, would anything stop them?

The US government is already unconstitutionally doing what you say that judicial review prevents, and the partisan (by design) Supreme Court simply refuses to take the case. So much for judicial review.

There is no check for power, only balances of power. And power in the US tends to agree on such things as much as power within the CCP.

Are you seriously equating the two govts? Consider that, because hackernews/YC is a US company, your post is read by everyone who cares to see it.

Consider what would happen if you decried the powers of the CCP on a China-based platform. Consider what would happen to you, personally, if you did so while living in China.

And what would happen, then ? Any specific examples of such things happening ?

Here's a very short list of pro-democracy or pro-human rights dissidents and what kinds of punishment we know happened to them as a result:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_dissidents

Here's some internet-specific examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#A...

Criticizing the government and the powers of the CCP are perfectly fair game - these kinds of over the top misinformed takes unfortunately plague HN.

Obviously, China silences dissenters. However, most of the comments in this thread probably wouldn't even be removed.

Take this study (cited 1600 times) from Harvard:

https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...

How does that have anything to do with my point that if the Democrats and Republicans agree on something unconstitutional it will happen anyways?

Both that can be true and it can also be true that the Chinese government is worse to their own citizens.

Would you feel different if Russia or North Korea controlled TikTok?

Uh, welcome to international politics?

Every country on Earth gives its executive some discretion when dealing with foreign powers. The idea that TikTok should have the same due process rights as American corporations is naive (putting it mildly).

You're just making that up.

"Rule of law" means you need to have a specific rule to govern government's action. The use of the catch-all "national security" justification here is in itself proof that nothing better exists in US law, or they would cite that.

Among the free countries, I'm most familiar with the EU's laws: there are some provisions limiting, for example, acquisitions of land, mergers, and military technology to countries like China. But there's no "we don't like them" power. Those powers belong to a king, not a president.

EU companies have explicit guarantees against discrimination in other EU countries, and most every trade agreement contains similar provision. I believe even WTO rules, which both China and the US are theoretically bound by, would exclude arbitrary bans.

Nobody's saying the Americans can't do it.

What I'm saying is it's largely hypocritical -- telling China they need to open up their markets to foreign businesses from America just the way Americans do for foreign entities, and then once a Chinese company becomes successful enough to garner the slightest bit of attention forcing a sale to an American company. It's exactly the thing America has been accusing China of doing for mandatory joint ventures.

They can do it, by all means, however it further erodes the brand value of America on the world stage as "open for business."

>open for business

With those who are open for business.

That's not really a compelling counterargument. The idea is that goods and services brought to market in the US are materially improving the lives of Americans. It doesn't matter really what the home state looks like. If it did, Americans would have never started importing Saudi oil. Or Rwandan tantalum for capacitors. Or Nestle chocolate, which is farmed by child slaves in the Ivory Coast. But don't worry, in 2019, they again, for about the 10th time, promised to stop using child slaves. [1]

This is basically America telling the world to accept American companies, no questions asked, no matter how big or manipulative. Criticizing other countries for their protectionist self-serving practices. And then literally the second a foreign product gets big and interesting enough forcing their sale to a US domestic entity. This is what America is complaining China does.

The worst part? Instead of trying to find some basis in law as one does in a rule-of-law jurisdiction, they just pulled out the national security™ ban-hammer, which cannot be challenged in a meaningful way. That's straight out of China's playbook. If rule of law is the china shop, national security justifications are the bull.

They just ceded the entirety of what was left of the high ground.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershe...

There are literally thousands of regulations limiting what we can import into the US, from drugs to protected wildlife to cuban cigars, including total embargos on particular companies and even countries. You're just cherry-picking of a few you want but don't see.

And by the way, the US govt certainly pushes for free trade, but that actually means implementation on a bilateral country-by-country basis (a couple dozen countries or so by now). The public is certainly never going to go for unilateral free trade with anyone who wants to sell anything. I'm sure that's true for almost every country.

Devils advocate - there is no evidence that it isn’t already occurring in subtle ways. Russia’s strategy is sowing discord, which would be fairly easy if one government controls the algorithm deciding what media the other country’s citizens sees.

Devils advocate - there is no evidence that it isn’t already occurring in subtle ways.

This isn’t playing the “devil’s advocate” (which-the devil here does not need any advocacy) this is a request to prove a potential negative.

Can we please retire the tactic of giving the devil representation in such a blatant and cavalier fashion?

Language adapts to common use, common use doesn’t adapt to linguistic rules. But I see your point.

so is just saying the words "national security" enough for you to believe that this is justified? should the US government be allowed to block any private company from doing business just by saying those magic words, with no further justification? or just any foreign-owned company? or just any chinese company - if it's china, what makes china special?

there's got to be some limitation on where you draw the line on the government exercising this absolute and arbitrary power, i'm curious where exactly it is. could they shut down twitter for national security reasons? what about shopify - they're canadian, and the government is already levying tariffs against canadian imports for national security reasons, so the national security threat is already justified. should they be able to ban shopify with no concrete justification beyond claiming it's a vague threat to national security?

I don’t really know where I stand on the issue, but it is fairly clear how this is a potentially serious threat to national security.

Maybe a better solution is allowing the us government unfettered access to source code, algorithms, data collection, etc.

Edit - it seems reasonable that if a private company is able to massively influence the countries politics they should be scrutinized more closely. IMO it’s like have 1 national newspaper, but it’s a social platform rather than newspaper.

"but it is fairly clear how this is a potentially serious threat to national security."

Yeah... the Chinese could, like, get the inside scoop on some serious teen drama.

They decide what content is viewed by millions of teens who will be voting in a few years. It’s not that far fetched to show them more violent content / mildly biased content / etc in order to move their political views a bit.

The KGB already did this in 2016 and the White House conveniently doesn't care and actually vehemently denies anything happened. Now, in the lead up to an election, suddenly they care about foreign intervention of elections? Or is it more likely that Donald Trump is just trying to tally as many "wins" as possible in the lead up an election like any politician would? The CCP already compromised our technology supply chain not even 2 years ago [1] did the White House do anything then?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

Minor nitpick, but the KGB didn't exist in 2016, that would be FSB. Unless you are referring to Belarus, which does have a KGB.

If they successfully do that then isn't that in fact the exact democracy working as it should? If you turn it around, you are endorsing the US government cutting off free speech specifically to manipulate people's voting opinions towards its own perception of what is "good". That seems almost exactly the opposite of the spirit of the constitution.

Perhaps an appropriate response here would be to detect this manipulation and highlight and educate people about it. Possibly create regulation to outlaw specific types of highly problematic aspects of it. But I find it hard to simultaneously accept that it's both so subtle as to be undetectable and unregulatable and yet so terrible it warrants arbitrary restraint of free speech.

I don't think the problem is that if/when it happens, it will be "undetectable". The issue is that if we have a polarized party-over-country political environment (which we do currently have), there is absolutely no guarantee a) that there will be a consensus about that the problem is real, that it matters, and that it should be addressed, b) that the party in power doesn't stand to benefit from interference and therefore takes no action, and c) we will have eyes looking at this seriously before it is "too late".

Protecting free speech of geopolitical competitors (China) and their economic agents (TikTok) is legitimate avenue for democratic destabilization.

It seems to me that democratic destabilization in US is already in full swing and has nothing to do with TikTok subtly changing youth opinions.

But it might have something to do with Facebook advertisement paid by whoever pays more.

The issue isn't whether TikTok is currently doing it or no, its whether this is a national security risk in the future, which is absolutely is. I think he's an idiot and he's using the issue to distract from Russian interference, but its a concern that if you only wait to address this _after_ its already a problem, it will already be unaddressable for the reasons enumerated in my comment.

Free speech is a right that applies to citizens, not foreign governments.

if it's a clear threat, the government should have no problem explaining what exactly the threat is. It seems plausible to me that there is a national security threat, but i'm bothered by the government being able to invoke national security as a set of magic words that excuse them from explaining anything further.

The thing is US has its own TikToks: if US bans TikTok, CCP will use its influence to undermine FB, WhatsApp, IG, Snapchat, etc. CCP is pretty much saying: "we know you're spying on the entire world and we want to do the same; if you torpedo our secret submarine, we'll do the same to yours."

They’ve already blocked those in China, Gmail, Google, FB etc. The insidious thing with WeChat is politically sensitive items are reviewed then blocked and use of the app trains their blocking heuristics.

CCP's influence doesn't end at China's borders.

The Matrix is all around us, in the food we eat, on the television, inside this very room...

> if it's a clear threat, the government should have no problem explaining what exactly the threat is. It seems plausible to me that there is a national security threat, but i'm bothered by the government being able to invoke national security as a set of magic words that excuse them from explaining anything further.

It's pretty obvious: TikTok could be a potent propaganda tool, and in a time of increasing geopolitical tensions, you don't hand an adversary nation potential weapons like that. Also, Chinese intelligence is interested in collecting information on Americans (and others) that an app like TikTok could provide. For instance:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/politics/trump-china-t...

> WASHINGTON — The cyberattack on the Marriott hotel chain that collected personal details of roughly 500 million guests was part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering effort that also hacked health insurers and the security clearance files of millions more Americans, according to two people briefed on the investigation....

> Such information is exactly what the Chinese use to root out spies, recruit intelligence agents and build a rich repository of Americans’ personal data for future targeting. With those details and more that were stolen from insurers like Anthem, the Marriott data adds another critical element to the intelligence profile: travel habits.

> James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, said the Chinese have collected “huge pots of data” to feed a Ministry of State Security database seeking to identify American spies — and the Chinese people talking to them.

> “Big data is the new wave for counterintelligence,” Mr. Lewis said.

Foreign controlled seems like a very clear dividing line that greatly limits abuse. It helps that unlike China, the United States has judicial review.

If you're saying that no company controlled by foreign nationals should be allowed to do business in the US, that is absolutely a sharp, consistent dividing line.

I don't think you're saying that, though.

The relevant legal powers are indeed confined to “property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest” and this judicial decision illustrates their limits – an irrational assertion that the use of emergency national security powers is warranted may be subject to judicial review. See my other comment for citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24615640

How do you exactly prove something isn’t occurring?

In court? By calling a credible witness, perhaps an expert, who says “X isn’t occurring.”

Yea but you can’t prove it’s not occurring. All you can show is lack of evidence that it is occurring.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but evidence of absence does exist. “Claiming that it is impossible to prove a negative is a pseudologic, because there are many proofs that substantiate negative claims”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence

>>Are you uncomfortable adopting that belief with literally no concrete evidence that anything of the sort is actually occurring? OK, I'll assume that you are right. That will change the minute China decides to, and no Chinese court can intervene.

Why does the government need to provide you with evidence? The government has access to intelligence that citizens do not have, and elected representatives must be trusted to manage that intelligence properly.

> with literally no concrete evidence

we don't need the evidence for TikTok's case when we already have the evidence of what Facebook is capable of (think about their A/B testing people without ethical considerations to whether they can be made depressed by showing them certain posts ... or the many other ways US social media giants are now critical to shaping the political discourse outside of the US from the UK to Myanmar to Hungary ...)

this isn't about hacking or 0days or even spying on Americans but about whether we allow them to control a machine that allows continuous manipulation of billions of people outside China.

Letting a non-ally control a social media platform and what content billions of people around the world are fed (or NOT fed) is too much of a risk for the US. Ofc the US does it too but their logic is that they're the "good guys".

National security is generally best when it is proactive, not reactive.

If you think the CCP having this data could be a problem, you can't wait until they collect it all and use it in order to stop them.

There is a reason laws like GDPR prevent even the mere collection of data, and don't wait until Google does something wrong with the data in order to stop them.

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