FCC commissioner says government should ban TikTok
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In fact statements like this typically mean the opinion given is not the overall direction of the FCC, because if it was a majority opinion they wouldn't need to be playing to the media and would just be enacting their will.
But this begs the question of if this point of view is based on oversight of the recommendation algorithm, is it limited to those developed by foreign owned platforms?
Do they vote along party lines too?
I know at the FTC under obama, anything BCP the GOP would oppose.
(It seemed extremely weird since up until that point the people who'd be the most civil had been the libertarians, an awkward alliance since the millenials have all known since middle school that money is just pieces of paper.)
It's a shame the French or whatever decriminalized espionage and renamed it "business intelligence" in the 90s, or we could just start threatening to execute these people for espionage or something when they get too ornery.
The real root cause is that presidents are often working hand in hand with Congress and who is really shut out is the people because Congress, regardless of the party in power, often does not reflect the will of the people.
Also, kinda odd you're daydreaming about lobbing people's heads off. Maybe don't do that.
I have no love for social media, but that ban starts at home AND if we accept the proposition that TikTok should be banned, we should be doing the same with FB and its derivatives. For the record, I am all for it ( as long as we apply this idiocy evenly and across the board ).
edit: added and across the board
An adversary. Different discussion. National security versus public health / competition. We don't need to justify enforcement on Tik Tok against our lenience with Facebook because they're separate conversations.
To my knowledge, regulators haven't raised anti-trust concerns with Tik Tok the way they have with Facebook. And nobody has taken the public-health mantel when it comes to social media.
No. Same exact discussion. Those are not separate conversations thanks at partially to globalism and our interconnectedness and interdependence.
<<To my knowledge, regulators haven't raised anti-trust concerns with Tik Tok the way they have with Facebook.
Yes, regulators also didn't raise any anti-trust concerns in general lately, where US economy is full of oligopolies, where individual companies have the resources, power and impact equal to some nation states and appetites to lock customers even further in their respective locked gardens. I am sorry, but I do not find this argument persuasive based on the reality on the ground alone. You can throw a rock at almost any industry in US and you will find several top dogs owning everything in it. And this is before we get to regulatory capture and revolving doors.
edit: To sum up, people like me would argue regulators are not doing their jobs.
<< We don't need to justify enforcement on Tik Tok against our lenience with Facebook because they're separate conversations.
Why not? Scratch that. Why are they separate conversations? It seems TikTok and FB are the same type of app. The only difference is that TikTok is housed in the wrong country.
<< And nobody has taken the public-health mantel when it comes to social media.
Could you elaborate a little? I think I know what you are trying to say, but I do not want to put words in your mouth.
what does national security mean to you? to me it means there is a threat to the safety of people living inside the borders of the united states. by that definition, how is china--let alone tiktok--a national security threat?
How China is or isn't a threat to America is a big question. That it's perceived as an adversary, almost universally, by not only the U.S. [1][2] but most of the West [3] and its neighbors, is pretty well documented. It's probably the crowning strategic failure of Xi's.
[1] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/29...
[2] https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-chin...
[3] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-slams-china-as-systemic-r...
If we used the logic you used above, then the FDA should not function as it does today and we should allow "snakeoil" and elixirs to be marketed because, you know, people can decide for themselves. [yes I understand the loophole of "herbal medicines"]
Let teenagers publish but don't trend the things that lead to unwitting self-harm.
It was known that these companies actively work with the CCP against US interests, which is the same thing happening with TikTok now.
> Carr highlighted concerns about U.S. data flowing back to China and the risk of a state actor using TikTok to covertly influence political processes in the United States.
Here's another article > On Sunday, May 19, 2019, Google publicly declared that it would be complying with Trump’s Huawei ban. Interpreting the language of the order, Google determined that the proper course of action would be to cut Huawei off from Google’s suite of digital products. [...] Not long after Google made its announcement, other US-based companies followed suit. This included Qualcomm, Intel, Arm, Microsoft, and many more.
https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-google-android-ban-9...
The last time this came up there was none [1]. Commissioner Carr's interview appears to be him asking the Congress for such statute.
> Carr highlighted concerns about U.S. data flowing back to China and the risk of a state actor using TikTok to covertly influence political processes in the United States.
US Political campaigns influence as a Service.
We solve the common pain point of foreign actors wanting to influence US politics and having to bootstrap all the data collection themselves.
visit our .io site and try the demo! it's that easy.
I'm not sure what data exactly tiktok collects, but i'm pretty sure it's not a lot more than what facebook does.
* still a lot
This issue is about a hostile foreign government being in a position to manipulate the internal communications and political debate in the US. So it's more in the realm of foreign policy and national security rather than US corporate law.
(Surprising to see this comment downvoted - why?)
That doesn't mean they can or should have power to ban any company, communication or program just because of a vague and weak phrase of national security.
By similar logic they should be able to just lock up foreign citizens because they might be doing something nefarious for their states. No --- this is what rights are for, and the rule of law still applies.
Well actually; Delegation of Legislative Power.
The government however could fit that description.
No reasonable adult (in any country) would go on the record to propose that a hostile foreign government should run any part of their internal communication infrastructure. It's well documented that all companies in China are beholden to the political whims of the Chinese Communist Party; when national security is at issue, Chinese companies and the Chinese government are one entity, sadly.
I'm squinting skeptically at all the comments here that are confused about this, especially the ones with extra helpings of carefully chosen rhetoric (whatabout-ism, free speech, free markets, etc). There are no "free speech" issues here, ByteDance is a foreign company, not a US person. This is a national security issue.
If you think it's cool to allow TikTok in Western countries, please explain why it would have been fine to allow the Nazis to run the Royal Mail, the US Postal Service, and one third of the broadcasting services in the 1930s. Would that have been a "free speech" or "free market" issue?
The Chinese government has a long way to go to earn the trust of other countries.
See this list of common Chinese propaganda themes to check if they may have already influenced you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_China#Common_CCP...
Tiktok is more like a foreign power owning playboy and mad magazine. People making dumb videos for a laugh isn’t critical communications infrastructure it’s entertainment. Banning ZTE and Huawei makes sense… but if your culture and infrastructure is so sensitive that Chinese ownership of dumb entertainment is a threat… you’ve really already lost.
If tiktok as foreign spyware is a problem, ban the mechanisms of surveillance, everyone does it and it’s not only a problem when China is in control of the data.
Strangely, TikTok makes up a large part of the "information diet" for a lot of people. It's tough to find a great analog from 1930, but I think the postal service analogy is in the ballpark.
That said, I could see the argument that what TT chooses to censor or uprank is a kind of soft power that could influence American attitudes over time. But I’m not sure this is any more significant than say, Chinese influence on what Disney chooses to include or not include in their films.
Consider the recent example of John Cena, an actor in the "Fast and Furious" franchise, apologizing to China for calling Taiwan a country. Is that apology good, bad, or irrelevant? Probably irrelevant by itself, I'd say.
But what about China's ability to coerce John Cena into making that apology? This is more akin to the problem you might see on TikTok. Influential people that others look up to parroting Chinese propaganda, wittingly or unwittingly.
It doesn't require much imagination to see the problem. If China secretly coerced 10 famous actors to say, "the US should leave Taiwan to China," and those videos had >100 million views in the US, that could be a very successful influence operation. TikTok could be a means of distribution for that kind of thing.
we can only hope.
frankly, calling tiktok internal communications infrastructure is idiotic.
Lots of responses about 'I only see funny comedians' or 'Tik Tok is only about dumb entertaining videos', etc.
This misses the forest through the trees. The dumb videos are the mechanism through which a foreign and often hostile world power is able to create a profile on millions of americans and learn everything about them.
All this data is fed back into other Chinese government groups and organizations which leverage it to determine how to best spread divisiveness, propaganda, misinformation and more through all the other platforms (FB, Twitter, News, etc).
The funny videos is the honey pot trap to collect all the data to create profiles, it may or may not be the primary way the Chinese government then uses that information to influence or nudge people but it informs and empowers all of that.
Also, TikTok's algorithm is specific and targeted. Just because your feed is only funny videos doesn't mean everyone else's are too. Even if everyone in your 'group' sees the same funny videos, there are many other groups that have entirely different feeds and many other variants.
This has nothing to do with free speech, no one is saying you can't say this but not that on TikTok. This is about the existence and allowance of it in the first place. Plenty of other forums for the speech.
I wonder how people would react to this issue if TikTok had come from Iran or North Korea rather than China.
So you're implying that their future influence operations could be enhanced and better targeted by using profile-level viewing history on TikTok, similar to how Cambridge Analytica used FB profile data to target political advertising?
What's valuable is all the information they can gather: contacts, age group, political affiliations, interest, geographic location, race, gender, interests.
Everything that happens in TikTok is monitored and tracked even the in app web viewer that shows when you click a link. All activity in that is tracked (the page, duration, links you visit etc).
These problems of security/privacy obviously exist for other foreign and domestic companies, TikTok is one of the most egregious and more threatening because the US has no recourse against it. At least if it were a US company, they could become subject to US laws requiring better data management, anonymization, require deletions on request etc.
Being a foreign owned and operated entity means it is subject to no existing US laws and will never be subject to future US laws.
Like, even before it really took off in the states you could read reports of this highly addictive, nefarious platform that the CCP had their fingers all over getting ready to be bottled up and shipped over to the US.
So now that it's here, we've poked and prodded enough to go "yep, that's a Trojan horse all right". But we still don't know what it's for.
Is it meant to push subtle CCP talking points and propaganda? Is this a ruse designed to find and track dissidents? Track rising nascent millennial trends? Lure in important officials to capture or intercept their media habits?
And it could just be a vanity project by high ranking CCP members - showing the West that they can develop technology.
What sorts of proof would convince you that this is an addictive app that is causing harm?
it reminds me of this event: https://www.nytimes.com/1950/08/15/archives/dock-workers-ref...
personally, i don't think there will be much success whipping up a new red scare. people are too checked out. though maybe i'm just hoping.
- If the FCC is concerned with how user data is handled, great! But instead of ad-hoc bans on specific companies, let's introduce some rules or laws which apply across the board. This both removes the appearance of a targeted and capricious ban on a Chinese company (which this seems like), and set clear rules of the road going forward.
- If the FCC is concerned with non-transparent manipulation of political speech or pushing perspectives preferred by foreign governments, that's great! It's a little weird and late to focus on China given that it seems we haven't really addressed the documented Russian interference, but sure. Again, let's have a somewhat more systematic approach than just 'ban TikTok', because of course there will be other avenues.
If you're interested in giving up America's commitment to either, that's fine, but I'd like to have some say in what other forms of speech and trade are silly to allow.
The United States should not be expected to have a dominating position in media export forever, though, and when its relevance outside the domestic market wanes, its media producers will be free[2] to edit their products with no regard for what the rest of the world thinks of them.
[1] Also, both Television and Hollywood codes were a thing for a very long time.
[2] They are currently free to do so, too, and they exercise that freedom. They just don't do it in a way that is consistent with your values. Since they aren't nationally owned companies, they aren't beholden to you in this respect.
your saying its fine? that western companies have to bow to the CCP in other to be able to have access to the Chinese market? while we allow them to profit from our free speech/ freedom we have here
You can then still sideload stuff, but you are immediately in a violation of OFAC. Naturally, I doubt even US government would be stupid enough to open that particular pandora's box.
The US issuing the equivalent of "do not honor checks from TikTok, LLC" would be enough to throttle them out of existence in the US.
If they're going to ban TikTok, why stop there? Just purge it from app/play stores globally and problem solved.
I don't think we should bow down to the lowest denominator and instead still appeal to what's best for all people.
To me it feels like your argument for banning TikTok is because they ban our applications, and so we should do the same kinds of things they do. My argument is more that we shouldn't measure ourselves against the things they do.
Jared: Jian Yang, are you copying all of those companies?
Jian Yang: Oh, no. <whiteboard behind him shows "New Reddit", "New Snapchat", "New Facebook" etc>
Twitter and Facebook are just an extension of the executive branch of the US government.
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
So is Tiktok in relation to the PRC.
In that sense none of these companies are "private, independent companies".