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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

It’s incredible that the US allowed TikTok (which is by all measures a chinese spy tool) to become such a dominant social network.

India got it right from the beggining by banning TikTok. They saw the immense threat and didn’t hesitate.

China, by principle, has always banned all foreign information technology companies. What seemed hostile for us, it’s a reasonable play if you understand the unmeasurable power of massive information products such as Google or Facebook.

Meanwhile the US is just focused on attacking its own homegrown tech companies and diminishing their ability to compete in global contexts.

We are on a declining trajectory and we willingly paved that road. It’s sad.

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The fact that India would consider TikTok a threat but not Meta leads me to believe that it wasn't done on a purely espionage basis. The threat of TikTok, today, it still theoretical, while Facebook has done measurable harm to India's neighbors.

Tiktok is a far worse threat to India than Meta though.

Unlike China, US is not an adversary of India and US didn't kill Indian soldiers just two years back. So it makes sense they would go after Tiktok.

The harm is just not espionage, it is also manipulation of sentiment by propoganda.

Also, I am not really sure with all the equivalence to Meta in this thread. Sure, Meta has things to be criticized about but if one thinks West has threat from Meta on the same level as Tiktok, that seems delusional.

Is India the West now? This alone tells me that you aren’t coming this from a data pov and simply playing team sports.

My problem with this “analysis” is it stems from xenophobia rather than the actual problem with these social networks.

The idea that we must “act now” with TikTok when Meta has been a worse actor is just anti-Chinese; we are pretending that Meta wont just bend over to the CCP as well if given the chance - we already have several of our companies self-censoring on issues that might anger the CCP.

Banning TikTok won’t fix the underlying problem and if your concern is China collecting data on US citizens you should understand there are very little controls in place, today, to prevent that from happening with any foreign actor. I don’t think China would have to pull teeth to exfiltrate data from any of the other social networks.

>Also, I am not really sure with all the equivalence to Meta in this thread.

Which company is implicated in a genocide in India neighboring states? Again is your concern actually about people or is it just “China scary”.

Did you not read what I wrote?

> Unlike China, US is not an adversary of India and US didn't kill Indian soldiers just two years back. So it makes sense they would go after Tiktok.

> is just anti-Chinese

Anti- the ruthless mafioso that rule China with an iron fist, all too ready to harvest organs from its citizens for the benefit of the Party members and their friends.

Most any individual Chinese is probably just another joe trying to feed and love his family.

The Chinese government is a threat to Western Democracy, freedom, and human rights.

Do you not realize India is in an active territory dispute with China over which they've had repeated limited military conflicts (which thankfully never escalated). You know, the China currently expanding their military presence on the border to India, including airbases with their newest generation fighters?

China is a very real threat to India right now. Why wouldn't they ban TikTok?

WhatsApp has led to dozens of brutal deaths in India

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

That's an absurd claim. The rumors about thieves and child abductors could have just as easily been spread over Telegram or AOL Instant Messenger or SnapChat. The chosen platform is completely immaterial.

Meta's entrentched. While I agree with sibling poster about the different levels of information gathered, there's also a difference between what can be gotten away with politically. Banning a network very few of your citizens are on is much easier than banning one of the primary networks that nearly everyone uses and relies on.

By theoretical, do you mean TikTok doesn't collect data that is made available to the Chinese government? In my mind, that's the practical use of an espionage tool. If not that, then what else do you mean?

There was an allegation earlier this month, with what appears to be strong evidence to support it, that engineers in China have access to data from U.S. users: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...

Even if you ignore how suspicious that is, once the data is in China you have to assume it's made available to the government, since that's the official policy as far as I am aware.

> Although video-sharing app TikTok was developed by Chinese company Bytedance, it is not available in China. Instead users can download a twin app, Douyin, which was also developed by Bytedance. Douyin features restrictions such as blocks on international content and limits on children’s usage. The Chinese state owns a stake in the Bytedance subsidiary that controls its domestic Chinese social media and information platforms. [1]

So China deploys and app to the US market that China itself doesn't use. The app aggressively collects location and biometric information about the users while promoting copious amounts of destabilizing and divisive political content among other things. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's hard not to see this as a trojan horse and it's shocking that the powers that be in the US are not assessing this situation more seriously. The OP is right in that this seems like one of many troubling signs that the US is in a decline of sorts.

[1] https://time.com/6139988/countries-where-twitter-facebook-ti...

Douyin collects a fuck load data too, maybe less than TikTok one day once new PRC privacy rules come into effect. But that's somethign US doemstic politics have to sort out for their territory.

>promoting copious amounts of destabilizing and divisive political

Ant that's more fault of US political culture than TikTok being Chinese/PRC. IMO TikTok would like nothing better to ban politics from platform, but that's how you get the muh-free-speech types reeeing about PRC censorship. Large reason WHY TikTok/Douyin is successful is from lessons learned maturing in PRC/Chinese censorship enviroment - platforms are very good at censoring/filtering destablizing political content to focus on light hearted content that produce casual engagement and political serenity. Chinese social platforms are calibrated for stability, but when in rome... see all the western media campaigns trying to smear tiktok for censorship when it first gained popularity, of course now that TikTok as calibrated to political reality of US market, the "destablizing" narrative gets pushed.

As far as the populace is concerned, we'd rather be spied on by Chairman Xi than by our own government. Which one can more directly affect our lives? That said, it's surprising the governing class allowed TikTok in.

Trump tried to ban it in 2020 out of "national security concerns" similar to Huawei. The ACLU and media painted it as anti free speech and xenophobia and never gave the claims any serious scrutiny.

> On July 7, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the government was considering banning TikTok.[26] In response, experts[weasel words] suggested that Trump's proposed TikTok ban may threaten free speech and "set a very problematic precedent" for banning apps in the United States.[27] Patrick Jackson, chief technology officer of privacy company Disconnect, said the app sends an abnormal amount of data—mostly information about the phone—to its server, but there is limited evidence that TikTok is sharing these data with the Chinese government. He also noted that the amount of collected data was similar to that collected by American-originated social media platforms and was less than that collected by Facebook.[28]

> After Trump proposed to ban TikTok in the U.S on July 31, 2020, security researchers expressed their concern about limitations of freedom. In one article, PCMag quoted Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel who said that "banning an app that millions of Americans use to communicate with each other is a danger to free expression and is technologically impractical."[35]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_co...

Sort of a fruit of a poisoned well - if prior trade action hadn’t been transparently lying about a national security pretext warning about TikTok would have been received better.

Oh please. The people who complained didn't care about that. They didn't like Trump, and would complain about anything he did regardless of the merit. They are nakedly partisan.

The ACLU dislikes any restriction based on national security. I imagine they’d make the same arguments regardless of which party removed TikTok.

But the broader public, reporters, and experts absolutely base their decisions on how trustworthy they find rationales. National security arguments often boil down to “we are correct but can’t tell you why, trust us.”

Mixing trade wars into that certainly helps skepticism.

I didn't like Trump but that wasn't why I was opposed to the TikTok ban. I was opposed because it was pointless and stupid. If we want to ban Chinese businesses because of human rights abuses, fine, let's start banning imports -- hit 'em where it counts! Let's not waste people's limited time and money banning a silly mobile app.

Yes Trump would totally have banned TikTok but he didn't because he cares about criticism from the media and...the ACLU..

It definitely wasn't because he was worried about the backlash from young voters...

Trump had a sale lined up, Biden won the election, and then Biden promptly canceled the sale[0]. It's a shame that Trump doesn't get more appreciation for his politically unpopular yet noble moves. Nobody was talking about China before Trump but you can be sure they were content to make fun of Trump for doing so[1].

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/10/tiktok-sale-to-walmart-oracl...

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDrfE9I8_hs

If we're deciding the government has the ability to shut down social media apps for "national security", I want some seriously beefy protections in there to prevent abuse. That slope is genuinely for-real dangerously slippery, and scares me 100x more than the scary stuff TikTok is doing now.

The ban was right to be challenged--if Trump could legally justify it, let him do that in court. And if he couldn't, there's probably a damned good reason for that.

It's not a slippery slope to ban a foreign survelliance app made by an adversary. Freedom of speech in the US applies only to the US citizens.

Then there should be no problem getting this through the courts, right?

All I'm asking for here is some guarantee that this won't be used to shut down social networks that some government entity dislikes for personal reasons. Because I know for a fact that some people who have been in power wanted to do exactly that.

We should all be demanding this.

Ban TikTok, but do it narrowly with a lot of protections.

By not banning it they can legitimate a war with CCP, a parallel to the US letting Russia threat and attack the west first.

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