Meanwhile china bans 105 apps.
US tries to ban 1 app that is being used to spread propaganda, farm user data, and is considered a national security threat. And everyone loses their shit over it.
Microsoft Teams, Skype, FaceTime all work in China, to name a few.
> because they want to control the content that Chinese citizens see and remove anything that is negative towards the ccp, etc.
This is true. But that doesn't mean they ban all US social media apps. If you follow their Internet laws (like Microsoft and Apple do) then you are allowed to operate.
> US tries to ban 1 app that is being used to spread propaganda, farm user data, and is considered a national security threat.
This is an assumption. Proof please, because I haven't seen any.
Don't get me wrong. I am not against a ban on Tiktok. I'm against a discriminatory ban, based on unproven assumptions, solely targeting the origin of an app.
What would be much more fair would be to state: all foreign apps have to go through a security audit to certify that no data reaches any foreign governments. That way you don't have to prove wrongdoing first, and you aren't being discriminatory either.
If tiktok is a US app. And not a china app. Then any content negative towards china would not be removed. Which happens daily. Whole pro china and anti America content stays. That’s propaganda.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2020/11/09/tiktok-censors-a...
There's also plenty of anti-China content on TikTok.
https://www.tiktok.com/tag/freehongkong
Maybe that's your intention.
>Microsoft Teams, Skype, FaceTime all work in China, to name a few.
Calling them "social media apps" is a stretch. Microsoft Teams is designed to be used within an organization, so it's closer to a corporate mail server than facebook. Skype and FaceTime are public, but they don't have the defining features of other social media sites, such as a profile, UGC, or feeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
But why does the exact definition of social media matter here? Let's say that Facebook follows their Internet law and becomes allowed, would you then have a different opinion?
In fact, would you want the US to be more like China?
Yes. If there is determined to be harm, I see no reason to protect them.
> Would you want the US to be more like China?
Governments fulfill similar roles across time and space. It's unavoidable that there is overlap. Please clarify what you are trying to imply.
But should the US government, given the current developments, ban Twitter and/or Facebook? That is what I'm asking.
Because they are quite literally doing the same as TikTok. Now, is TikTok spying for China? Except for a few reports, there is no proof of it. In fact, the US government would not ban TikTok if they sell their business to US companies.
So either TikTok does not spy on their customers for China, or they do, and the US government wants to have control over data illegally harvested.
Either way, forcing TikTok hand is not a move made to protect US citizens.
Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China. Going from a philosophical question to a current policy question, the existing context has to be taken into account. There is no equivalent reason for banning the apps.
> Because they are quite literally doing the same as TikTok.
I think they (Facebook/Twitter) are doing very different things from Tik Tok right now. They are certainly a vector for the US states/feds to mine and use data (as has been admitted and demonstrated). In the way the data is available to a government, there is an equivalence with Tik Tok.
> Now, is TikTok spying for China?
I define spying narrowly. I don't think it's "spying" but the infrastructure of Tik Tok presents an information vulnerability to the USA, which represents a harm. This is the basis of my justification as I am making the distinction.
> Either way, forcing TikTok hand is not a move made to protect US citizens.
I think it is a move that protects US citizens. The official justification is paper thin Trump revenge tactics (not racism, imo). Given, I give no credence to most of what Trump says, I don't care about the justification anyway.
America has the image built. China doesn't. It's behind. China will open when their culture is at a similar standing to the US.
Of course the image built is breaking down now, but it's still ahead of the Chinese one.
Everyone loses their shit over it because it's a direct example of the US government potentially violating the first amendment. They may claim that the app is being used to spread propaganda, farm user data, and is a "national security threat", but they've done very little other than raise the specter of "China" to prove that. Their claims of justification have been met with significant push back and, as far as I'm aware, they haven't provided any meaningful proof of their claims.
So yes, it's well-worth it for people to get up in arms about the US government censoring and shutting down access of US customers to a phone app. That's a hugely dangerous precedent to set and one that shouldn't be done lightly.
If a bad government does a bad thing a lot, it doesn't justify our government doing that bad thing even once.
In the long run, the asymmetry of US and Chinese citizen's access to each other's culture and products will work in our favor. Liberalism always seems to win, eventually.
Have you ever actually used tiktok? How is it being used to spread propoganda?
>farm user data
LOL. Yeah, please tell me how they are doing anything different than the other billion apps you download on your phone and sign-in through google or whatever.
>and is considered a national security threat
Because of... why?
https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-parent-company-byteda...
That's from last year...
Have you typed 'propaganda on hackernews' or on facebook/twitter/reddit or any other social media?
Everything in the world is going to have some form of propaganda to some degree. And honestly, having used tiktok a small amount, it seems way less than most social media out here. You generally have to even work hard to find anything that is political, most of it is completely random shit that has zero agenda.
The SCOTUS noted that they may need to reign-in the scope of lower-court orders, and this just adds weight to the issue.
It's particularly important because there's a practical bias. Opponents of an executive action can district-shop, while it is difficult for the Executive to file a declaratory-judgment action in a (perceived to be) favorable jurisdiction. So we end up with nation-wide judgments which differ what what the other districts would have ruled... but the other districts never had an opportunity to rule. Then... since a ruling has been issued, they are largely blocked from ever ruling.
However, the SCOTUS is is a bit of a bind, because allowing nation-wide orders works very effectively in general civil / criminal litigation. The problem has seemed to arise mostly in politically-charged issues where the government is a party.
Unfortunately transparency is a problem, as they did not state more details about the ban.
I donno why there’s so many apologists on HN. :/
To say that they are discriminatory despite the above data, is an assumption. That assumption may be right (because the data is not mathematically solid evidence). On the other hand, it may be not. But I think accepting that assumption is in line with US propaganda.
And lots of western apps aren't accessible in China. Such as Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter.
Furthermore, did you know TikTok itself is banned in mainland China? No kidding, they have an different version of the app that's Chinese-only.
I think the implication that China's being the free-market player here is faulty, to say the least. There's an argument to be made about how censorship of foreign applications conflicts with the US's values, for sure, but the one-way street argument doesn't scan.
VPN use is ubiquitous in China, it's as simple as that.
From that same article: || But police have also issued fines, confiscated thousands of dollars earned through online activity, seized routers and ordered "the suspension of networking,” effectively cutting off users from the internet. In some cases, police have punished trading companies that were using VPN software to access the wider internet for the purposes of “international networking.” ||
> VPN use is ubiquitous in China, it's as simple as that.
|| Now, however, detailed records published online by Zhejiang province show authorities moving against the very act of accessing unapproved parts of the internet through VPNs that are not government-approved. ||
As for the second chunk - this alone makes the article suspicious, as, as I've mentioned, and like you'll hear from probably anyone who lives in China, VPN use is ubiquitous. (Might vary from province to province, though.)
The vast majority of them want to address the privacy issues raised by such apps and companies irrespective of whether it’s the US or China misappropriating our data.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveill...
As for the article - this all sounds like a subset of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_survei..., until you realize one crucial thing: in case of US, the preferred way of dealing with this kind of minorities is either AC-130, or JDAM. Any kind of surveillance and reeducation camps is better from ethics point of view.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Now, I have no idea whatsoever what it looks like in China, but... do you have any source? What I meant writing my previous comment was data protection laws, ie laws that control what various bodies (eg companies) can do with your personal data, and for how long.
The criticism of China lays squarely at CCP and their abuse of power. My original comment is pointing out how the CCP uses data to oppress minorities. The equivalent would be Trump forcing Facebook and Google to turn over their data so he can go after Blacks and Mexicans.
I agree that companies in the US has too much power in what they can do with personal data. This needs more scrutiny.
But okay. Let's say it's not a mathematically solid proof. Agreed.
On the other hand, there's no mathematical proof that they are being discriminatory, either.
Why is it apologetic to not assume the worst of China at every turn?
FYI, I'm Chinese.
Because they view those values as inherently good, and thus opposition to those values as inherently bad. If you view freedom of religion or speech as a fundamental human good or need, then naturally a government opposed to (or seen as greatly curtailing) those values will be seen as 'evil'.
On a more human and physical level, people see, say, the Xinjiang camps and view that as reflective of the values of that government, as evil, the same way they may see the immigrant child separation in the US as reflective of its government's values, and as evil. Actions speaking louder than words of intent.
I'm pretty anti CPP for the most part, but I feel like we're losing all nuance when we use broad stroke labels. I also don't think it's productive. As soon as we label something or someone "evil" then any avenue for dialog and improvement is gone. The only thing left is conflict and confrontation.
That said, there's a sharp cultural contrast between the responses to the Kent State massacre in the US and the Tienenman Square massacre in China. In the US, you can't say Kent State wasn't popularly condemned, didn't prompt change, or isn't burned into the nation's psyche to this day. In China, you can't say much about Tienenman Square, period.
"I first learned about the happening of the incident at school, in the Grade 8 “Morality and Politics” class. [..] At the chapter on constitution, our teacher briefly mentioned the "turbulence": basically, in 1989 students used to take the streets and things "ended up messy". But he didn't give much detail."
This matches other stuff I've read in the past - it's not heavily discussed, but I wouldn't call it suppressed either.
EDIT: There's another aspect to this: I have no idea how it looks like in schools in various western countries, but from what I remember from Poland, it's all about "government murdering protesters". It doesn't mention whatsoever that it was much more complicated and there victims on all sides.
I find it problematic that anything in support of China or against the US in the context of US vs China is labeled being an apologist or Chinese propaganda. It’s a good way to shut down all discussion, much like the whole “that’s heresy” from ages past.
Do you think any one of those apps is authorized to make API calls out of China?
API calls, not phone calls yorwba
I don't know where you're getting your information about those apps' source code from, but since you were wrong about the second part, I'm going to assume you just imagined a plausible story and claimed it as fact.
Regarding the source code thing: you’re either not paying attention or you’re a CCP propagandist.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/chinas-...
> The rules only apply to companies selling computer products to Chinese banks
Your original comment didn't read like you were talking about auditing in the financial sector.
Funny you bring up Skype because in China they get a special version that enables the CCP to surveil your "private" communications for dissent. I'm sure other communications apps are similar, or plain blocked. For example telegram is banned, although Signal is still allowed for now (maybe it's under the radar).
I thought it was 105 foreign or US apps that got banned.