TikTok and the First Amendment
csis.org
csis.org
1. tiktok is banned in china. Potential product safety angle of 'don't ship us things that aren't legal where they're made'. (But would presumably need new regs here).
2. trade policy -- western social media is banned in china, let's at least not allow theirs to sell stuff here? Article says 'tiktok has not monetized so no point in banning transactions', I think they're oversimplifying the impact of saying 'no income at all'
3. stronger privacy laws generally -- rules about where data is domiciled (or at least honestly disclosing it), how it is used, real audits, and real penalties for violators. (this should apply to domestic cos too)
4. WTO subsidies / anti-dumping? But this probably applies to many tech companies + could escalate badly. Also not sure if tiktok is gov-subsidized -- I think an SOE has a minority stake
5. 'kicking them from app stores would have no impact bc of existing install base' feels naive
legit question bc I am not sure: is tiktok content available to douyin users? is the web version available?
The attention aspect is what will eventually cause the most harm. Attention feeds databases. The future of AGI is dependent on its utility to make decisions for us. The primary users of AGI as a personal decision maker will be those who are feeding the most information to these systems.
And those are all owned by one American corporation.
That said, we encourage you to block them all (don't forget Twitter!) in your country.
China, Iran and North Korea all ban Facebook under similar reasoning.
1. TikTok is foreign owned and the line between the CCP and Chinese businesses is blurred.
2. TikTok collects a lot of data from its[US] users.
3. ????
4. Bad stuff happens.
If you ask "well why aren't we concerned about Facebook doing the same to citizens of some other country(or even Americans)" - we are, but this is specifically about American government.
I'm not aware of any concrete threats from China currently, but seeing as a conflict is brewing slowly(over Taiwan) I understand why the American government wants to limit this specific activity.
It seems evidently clear that we exist an a mental ocean of teaming memetic competition. I wouldn't expect less of businesses, media, the US government, other governments, even here when discussing ideas with other people, I'm keenly aware of the fact that nearly all exchanges are an attempt to convince or be convinced of some idea. Am I skeptical, cynical, or hardened, or did people genuinely believe the marketplace of ideas represented a path toward an objective truth?
Yes I think the American government was somewhat surprised by the fact that another country can run such an effective media machine within their own country and it took a really long time to react to this. It's as if they woke up one day to discover that most Americans watch Al Jazeera as their main news source instead of a domestic channel that can be controlled or influenced more easily.
I suppose I'm having a hard time grasping at how letting the cat out of the bag could be contained to just China, but maybe I'm missing something. It feels like it's a perfectly logical conclusion to say, "The ability to control the narrative ideas stops at existential threats to the US government and it's economic hegemony." Doesn't that sort of seem like a totalitarian stance? Maybe that's more acceptable to people than I thought?
I've heard that bandied about, but banning an app over that seems... inefficient at the least. What exactly is it this app is capturing and how?
And why not fix this by limiting the permissions of the app?
Isn't this exactly what every single advertiser does? Isn't this what amazon does?
Can anybody describe a single credible threatening scenario, even hypothetically?
Or they can do the same but in a way more subtle way over months or years, they control the algorithm after all.
Or they can influence how people feel about Taiwan, Ukraine, military, religion or a million other topics - they have the audience. They do this already elsewhere too - see comparison between what tiktok shows you in Russia and what it shows you in Ukraine.
And yes Amazon Facebook and Google can do the same - but they are American corporations so the American government obviously isn't going to act against them..
Definitely bears thinking about as a hypothetical, but a ban would seem rather preemptive.
TikTok, for its many flaws and problems, is also a place where new culture really does happen. Just dismissing the entire thing as brain-rotting media makes everybody come across as the same "out of touch older generation" that was demanding that Mortal Kombat be made illegal.
Concerns about harm caused by TikTok need to be expressed in specific rather than in broad terms - or else what possible reason to we have to believe that this moral outrage is appropriate?
And is the culture generated on these platforms a good culture? Intellectually shallow, void of original thought, mob mentality. I'll pass.
Anyway, my concern is where it's leading us. From attention theft to decision theft.
I don't know what good culture is, but there is definitely interesting things happening on TikTok. Because the stitch feature makes mashups and remixing so easy there is a lot of interesting new kinds of content being made that we haven't seen on other platforms in the past. There's a lot of junk on TikTok, but "intellectually shallow, void of original thought, mob mentality" are absolutely complaints lobbed at TV but we also get shows like Breaking Bad or The Wire.
Why are you so sure they don't?
https://www.psychreg.org/political-speeches-simple-language/
> The research also showed that the reading level of the speeches changed significantly over the years. The analysis measured the Coleman-Liau readability index, which estimates the reading level of a certain text and associates it with the appropriate school grade. The analysis showed that the reading level of congressional speeches made by both Republican and Democratic legislators increased consistently from the eighth-grade reading level in the 19th century, to the 10th-grade level in the 1970s. But since 1976 the reading level of political speeches has been declining consistently, and as of the 21st century, it is below the ninth-grade reading level. The same trend was also observed with the vocabulary used by congressional members in speeches, which had been increasing consistently until the early 1970s, and then started to decline, and it is still declining, Shamir said.
> According to the study, the decline in reading level and vocabulary of the speeches can be related to the increasing presence of media – including live radio and TV coverage – in Congress beginning in the 1970s. Members of Congress started to gradually adjust their speech styles, addressing the public through the media rather than addressing their fellow legislators.
Anecdotally; television news today is much worse than television news in the 90s. And television news has always been low quality compared to newspaper reporting. Furthermore the rise of television news has a fair share of the blame for the decline of the newspaper industry.
I agree with social media eroding free will and being generally harmful to society no matter what country the social media comes from. Nothing would please me more than to see the dissolution of Facebook. But that doesn't refute the national security implications of communist Chinese social media particularly. Both of these are problems.
Response: "Nothing, I'd probably just watch more Netflix"
Also somewhat funny given that Twitter, the most influential social/poliitcal platform is now owned by a guy who praises China directly and is being favorably quoted on Russian state television, with the Saudis becoming the second largest investor. I'd be slightly more concerned about that one.
It seems to test the limit of "absolute free speech".
I'm not against free speech, but there are people arguing that the first amendment is part of the American culture and identity, but in this particular case, it doesn't seem to work very well.
So there is a fine line between "the market of ideas favors virtuous ideas" and "the value of ideas also depends on the ability of state actors to have influence on the market of ideas".
Huh? How can they do this? Just informal pressure on Apple/Google? The government can't just unilaterally direct these companies to ban any disfavored apps, I assume.. or at least I hope.
Go.
Unless we go from “money is speech” to “alcohol loosens lips, ergo it is speech”…
Porn restriction for minors is not controversial, legally. Your first amendment argument will go nowhere.
So then the question is, should something that harms young minds be restricted?
You can argue that TikTok doesn't, and that's a fair argument to make. But if your argument is "yes, but it's free speech" then I think you lose.
TikTok can distract you or direct opinions.
Or to put it another way, it wasn't social media that killed Avicci. It was drinking.
Inane, reductive comparison.
Huh, TIL.
Nothing really new here, economic controls are what the previous administration tried to implement, and are most likely to try and use if the government wants to try another round at blocking it.
Can't say I'm in favor of that, but then I like my huehuehuehue birb videos.
The mass surveillance done by more or less all popular social apps on phones (and beyond) is a problem, but that problem is everywhere. It would be good for all of us if tiktok was treated fairly, and by fairly i mean the FUD about surveillance and manipulation should apply everywhere and be regulated everywhere not just the Chinese state sponsored kind.
Enact data collection laws, local storage laws, etc. and apply them everywhere. Then better regulate and control the agents of foreign powers that overly influence business done in America.
We're already here.
> and be regulated everywhere
This is where we need to be.
It seems however we do it, blacklisting IPs associated with TikTok, messing with DNS, or pretty much any other actual enforcement mechanism sets a dangerous precedent. I then wonder what happens if we allow the government to start disallowing certain apps for "National Security" reasons, just like when we decided that the NSA should be able to listen to any electronic communication without a warrant to "stop terrorism".
Don't get me wrong I despise TikTok and the CCP and think it is bad for mental health and is a weapon of psychological warfare by the CCP, but I am worried about the precedent set by allowing the federal government to ban or make illegal an app and how that will be abused in the future.
I believe the gov should better govern advertising and algorithms than outright banning something completely.
Admittedly it’s a thorny issue.
Is it really appropriate to give the government the power to arbitrarily name certain companies to no longer exist or operate within the US because the government said so? How long before this power is used against Parler or some other company because people don't like it. Or WikiLeaks or other sources of inconvenience and upset to the those running things? Should 4chan be allowed to exist?
Absolutely. The mandate of the government is granted by the people. Congress acts with respect to specific businesses all the time. Especially to their benefit.
Thanks to Apple and Google having a stranglehold on the apps people can run on their phones, an effective ban on tiktok in America is much easier than any of that.
(Yeah you can sideload apps on android, and technically on iOS too, but I think we all know that being booted from both those app stores is a death sentence for any popular app.)
My stance is this, most of the big names coming out for a ban are either conservative leaning institutions or just plain conservative. FBI and Marco Rubio. (I'm old enough to remember a rogue FBI branch pressuring the FBI director to release a scathing report on Hilary Clinton just before the election)
I think TikTok is filling a void for Democrat messaging that Republicans/Conservatives have ie: Fox, conservative youtubers, breitbart, etc. The left is doesn't have this and TikTok has been useful for sharing concise information in a repetitive and engaging fashion. I have a hunch it's a large reason why we had such big youth turnout this midterm election cycle.
TL;DR: Ban TikTok when there's a good home grown replacement. Or Nationalize it's US/Western wing and spin it off as a separate entity
;)
Skype turned into Teams
MSN Messenger turned to Skype,
Discord will turn in to MSN
Ventrilo/Mumble morphed in to Discord.
TikTok will turn in to Discord
???? turns in to TikTokWhile in the US policy has for decades been intentionally designed to stifle worker gains[0], tacitly a re-education program to rebuild the “essential worker base” of our society, to remember we best keep propping up our civic traditions never mind they’re as sacrosanct in any real terms as religious catechism and routines of worship; not at all.
There are other geometric patterns human agency could conceptually “draw upon the globe”. But the agency wealth creation hive mind is familiar with are to be taken as immutable.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
> I think TikTok is filling a void for Democrat messaging that Republicans/Conservatives have ie: Fox, conservative youtubers, breitbart, etc. The left is doesn't have this
Fox/Breitbart -> The left has plenty of media outlets that pitch their side, like CNN.
Conservative Youtubers -> There's not a single liberal/democrat Youtuber? weird...
Not to mention that, up until it started imploding, Twitter (and Facebook to an extent) were both considered heavily left-leaning if not outright liberal. Saying that "the left doesn't have a way to get their message out" just feels outright dishonest to say.
*EDIT:* I had a long conversation with a good friend of mine about the distinctions between "liberal" and "left" here. I acknowledge that I was make an incorrect (and commonly dangerous) equivalence between the two of them, which makes the claim of "left" not having as much media outlet more true (though I would still argue that it's certainly not to the extreme extent suggested by the parent).