The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns
npr.org
npr.org
Shut it down, yesterday. Build a local clone so that people can get their fix or whatever. China sure as shit doesn’t allow its citizens to cough up their personal information for algorithmic consumption to Twitter et al.
It's only entertainment if you're completely blind.
They're using our tolerance as a weakness, while themselves having absolutely 0 tolerance for western bs/propaganda in their home country
This is next level "turning the other cheek"
The math might come to the risks being higher than the benefits but pretending people aren't entertained by it ironically suggests that you might be more radicalized or brainwashed than TikTok users supposedly are.
it's not obvious to me at all, in France it's used by islamist organisations to push for communitarianism and separatism, I don't call that entertainment
https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/de-youtube-a-tiktok...
https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/111122/ados-en-abaya...
https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/10/23/de-la-propa...
If you want to play on words we can do that all day long, the problem is that it doesn't change the reality, and the reality is that like any other medium it's used for nefarious things, the second problem is that modern technology enables a small amount of people to have an increasingly greater reach and larger audience with fewer and fewer restrictions
If you can't see the difference between a soviet era propaganda painting and a 24/7 tool behing used 45 to 90 minute every single day on average by millions of kids/teenagers in their formative years I just feel sad for you to be honest.
I can kill someone with a fork, I can kill someone with a 100mt nuke, will you argue they are the same ?
I think you're proving the point here. Yes media can be more than one thing or serve more than one purpose. A good question to ask is how much is it entertainment vs how much is it propaganda? I'd wager that there is a lot of content on TikTok that is mostly propaganda, even if it isn't produced by state actors. Social media has given rise to a new form of propaganda that is self-perpetuating, individuals can gain social clout by repeating the propaganda they hear and adding their own flavor to it (even if they don't add content). Maybe call it Performative Propaganda. Social media algorithms help match up the people producing to those who are susceptible to consuming it and provide a selection mechanism to promote the most effective content. This is all that's needed for "memes" (in the original sense) to behave like their namesake genes and undergo rapid reproduction and evolution.
Is any of this state controlled? Maybe a small amount but I would ask does it even need to be state controlled? There's enough folie à deux out there in the world, all you need to do is provide an easy way for it to spread and you could severely damage other cultures.
The recent conscription of Mr. Cruise to showcase air superiority is an insight tactically granted at the behest of American government as a reaction to international upheaval. A reminder. After the success of "Star Wars", Mr. Ford fulfilled a similar role in a film about infrastructure sabotage (hydroelectric dam and bridge - Force 10 from Navarone).
I always appreciated the Top Gun franchise because there are many scenes showing a large group of people enjoying each other's company.
"I don't like it so it should be banned"
That's such a low level engagement with the matter at hand, sadly these days is the level of discussion here in HN, sad to say that it seems astroturfed, but again, at this point what isn't, right?
Then they'll come crying because they don't understand why teenagers depression skyrocketed exactly at the same time as these types of social medias flourished
There are plenty of things people like which are banned, that's like the whole basis of living in organised societies....
That said, yes, the 1A implications are thorny.
Would the FCC allow a VoRussia or VoChina radio transmitter in the US whose sole purpose was to push Chinese or Russian propaganda?
Probably in a war declaration we could shut them down, but what about peacetime?
I'm sure they already do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_America was operating right up until the imposition of sanctions.
But that said, looks like all the Biden admin needs to do is set up some sanctions (for whatever reason) and put TT under that umbrella and voila!
Hell, look at something like The Economist. They're regarded as an excellent news source, which makes their efforts at pushing a certain economic and political POV far more successful than if they pushed it so hard that they weren't a good news source.
Speaking of Japan, it, from 1930 until about 1970, was a great example of protectionism. No foreign companies were allowed to operate in Japan until 1960, and even then it was only in uninmportant low-margin industries. Imports were completely controlled by the Japanese government, which imported _everything_ based on what they thought was needed: automobiles are something that were almost never imported, for example. China today is less protectionist than Japan at it's peak but still many factors more protectionist than the US. For example, one cannot directly open a foreign business in China. They must work with a domestic company that takes half their profits.
All this isn't to say that the US isn't protectionist, or that protectionism is even bad. But your claim that "The U.S. has a long, proud history of protectionism" really has no qualifying element, and in fact all the qualifiers seem to go in the opposite direct that they should.
The problem here being this time they can't insert themselves into the surveillance pipeline.
They're not better or worse (unless you're fine with your own Govt surveilling you but not another state), just not the status quo.
"The US government collects taxes on US citizens, why not let China collect taxes on US citizens? Its the same."
"The US government throws US citizens in jail, why not let Chine throw US citizens in jail? Its the same."
Yeah, it would be great if the Federal government turned down their surveillance. That doesn't make it okay for China to run psy-ops against us.
(and obviously if you're a US national in China you'll pay Chinese and US taxes, because of the weird extraterritorial taxation of the US)
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/30/chinese-communist-party...
Back to topic:
Applying critical thinking, you can be patriotic and a critical thinker.
You can love a country and still be a critical thinker. Just like you can love a person but be aware of their flaws.
Downloading and using TikTok is a personal choice and you’ve allowed it by doing so as an individual. I don’t think we should ban individual apps from other countries. If we want that, we need some larger more thoughtful policy. But to do so effectively, we essentially need to put up a firewall and ban the sharing of domestically collected data as well (amongst other things, like enforcing these bans.)
PSY-ops as mentioned sounds negative but I’d argue it’s what TikTok and social media consumers enjoy the most.
Not if it interferes with security of the country.
The same personal choice argument is what folks use to justify other choices that are bad (refusing well test vaccines, not paying taxes, etc.)
Banning one app at a time is not the way.
> Banning one app at a time is not the way.
True, let us ban *all* apps from countries that (1) ban US apps and (2) seek to influence US citizens.
My view is the "app" is just a client for information sharing. It would be like putting up a firewall or banning traffic from certain TLD's. Seems ironic that the solution is to mimic the problem.
Contrarianism runs rampant on HN and is easily weaponized by bad actors.
Its not just about being "fine" with one surveiling you and not the other.
It seems to always start from blanket statements or false dichotomies where "if your country does X why are you not ok with C country doing X?" and completely ignoring the nuances in between.
(thread locked after 1,397,957 comments)
A course of action so blatantly legal that a Supreme Court Justice used it as an example for what is clearly allowed, dislikeable though it may be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...
Tiktok is not China, Tiktok is owned by a private company
All the arguments that you are using can be successful leveraged against any Inqtel funded private company (of which there are plenty), so I'd recommend you to speak in a measured way
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/9/22525953/biden-tiktok-wech...
Oh, wait, one other thing I agreed with him on: leaving Afghanistan ASAP. The whiney push-back he got on that and the way the military managed to sand-bag the effort until well into Biden's term and still fuck it up, was straight-up embarrassing. Heads should have rolled.
If Tiktok the app is performing surveillance, ban surveillance by apps. All of them. Or make it technically impossible to escape its little sandbox, and let people have their entertainment.
if only
Suit you? Suits me.
My point is that the rules should target what it does rather than simply "China=Bad", since that offers a way back into compliance with the rules. However unlikely that actually is.
Nobody is calling for blanket bans of foreign apps. This is a straw man argument.
What about that is that the US congress allocated $500 m for anti-China propaganda in its last budget and all the free, knowledgeable Americans who are littering this thread with their McCarthyist Cold War comments are just taken in with the 'latest thing' from their government propaganda.
Nothing more different than how Saddam was the 'greatest threat to civilization' in 2003, or Gaddafi was in 2011 etc etc.
And the 'civilization' they are stanning for is the one that kills its people if they cant pay for healthcare. Without even touching how poor are starting to choose euthanasia in Canada instead of being homeless.
...
I see this as a way in which Angloamerican denizens direct their frustrations to external 'enemies' by taking their attention away from the problems at home, which they are powerless to fix. They vilify and demean chosen 'enemies', and direct all the criticism that should happen at home towards those enemies. This avoids both alienation from their own society and the pressure to address the problems at home.
Long story short, they just avoid cognitive dissonance.
This reminded me of the two-party system...
Yes, well spotted - the two party system definitely employs the same mechanic: all the evils are projected out to the 'enemy', and all the wrongs in their own group are ignored. This provides group cohesion and allows them to avoid cognitive dissonance and taking responsibility for the results of their own choices.
If there were more than two viable parties, or, god forbid 3-4 viable parties like in many European countries, this would be near impossible to make work. You cant vilify 2-3 other groups as the 'ultimate' evil at the same time...
So, no, that is not my response at all. There is no technology involved in kicking these corporations out of the civilized world, just political will.
> preventing Chinese IP addresses from accessing whatever they would like
is a technical thing that you can do with computers, and
> allowing Chinese corporations to profit from the West's liberty while denying it to their subjects.
is nationalistic nonsense that lacks any reference to anything material.
Which civilized world.
Is this racism because China is mostly made up of one race? Then, we should ask why that is the case. (E.g. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/30/chinese-communist-party...)
> because the US basically only sees nationality
Is China more generous here?
It is funny that any valid criticism of China is fought with claims of racism.
The risks are existential to ...? Again presumably you mean those who thrive under USA-centric capitalism? You think the CCP are planning a forced takeover of Western democracy?
Please don’t what-about the Uyghurs to Native American history because it’s disrespectful both ways, and minimizes their suffering. For all the conflict with Europeans, our historical experiences with them, painful as they may have been and remain, were much more nuanced and complicated than what is happening in China. I have also never met anyone native who thinks of our history as a genocide, and I’m involved in tribal politics.
Honestly even calling our history a genocide is a dramatic simplification that removes our agency (all too common in non-native takes). We fought back and won some things, lost others. That’s not something you can say about victims of genocide.
Lakota who?
A few thousand or ten thousand 'native americans' who are considered native american if they have 1/30 native american blood?
...
sheeeshhh...
Unless you are suggesting that because of some previous genocide we should ignore an ongoing one?
> If you know of any Native Americans currently being genocided, please do call someone about it.
it seemed to imply that the native american genocide was over. maybe not, I probably missed context earlier up thread. I was disagreeing with that statement.
yes of course I agree that the active sterilization / genocide / cleansing of Uighur Muslims in China exists and is a human rights violation and should be stopped. I'm not going to compare its magnitude to the native american one because one is centuries-old and ongoing and one has been going on for several years (maybe longer, I have not studied it) and both are bad. hope that answers your question.
This propaganda takes a kernel of truth (China began enforcing the 3-child policy on Uyghurs, who were previously exempt - the policy previously only applied to the Han majority), and distorts it beyond all recognition (China is sterilizing all the Uyghurs).
Given the public's utter lack of knowledge about China in the US and Europe, it's easy to sell this sort propaganda.
It would be so much easier to discuss the actual issues (such as China's harsh crackdown on separatism in Xinjiang) if the US government were not so shamelessly distorting them for political reasons. One almost finds oneself having to defend the Chinese government, because the US government has so little compunction about pushing big lies like the "Uyghur genocide." China did use heavy police measures and political indoctrination to go after people it suspects of supporting separatism. No, it's not trying to wipe out the Uyghurs (or to do anything even remotely like that).
The use of the term "genocide" in relation to the Uyghurs is transparently propaganda, which began with Mike Pompeo during the Trump administration. Even the US State Department said they had no evidence of genocide, but Pompeo went ahead anyways and officially labeled it "genocide."
You can very justly criticize China's crackdown on what it views as separatism in Xinjiang, but it's beyond the pale to label a situation "genocide" when nobody is being killed, and when life expectancy and income of the group supposedly being genocided is increasing.
That is a genocide. They are attempting to remove the Uyghur people.
The Chinese government has, by all appearances, carried out a harsh crackdown on what it views as separatism and religious extremism. It has forced large numbers of people to go through political indoctrination, based on suspicions of being sympathetic to the Uyghur separatist movement or of harboring fundamentalist religious beliefs.
The Chinese government has also begun imposing the 3-child policy on Uyghur families. The 1-child policy used to only apply to the Han majority. It has been relaxed to 3 children, but is being applied more broadly.
However, the Uyghur population continues to grow. The Uyghur language continues to be an official language in Xinjiang and it is one of the primary languages used to teach children in state schools. And as I said before, life expectancy and average incomes are increasing among Uyghurs.
The Chinese government doesn't intend to "remove" the Uyghur people. It is trying to stamp out separatism, both by implementing harsh police methods and by pumping money into the region to improve living standards.
This is not what a genocide looks like. That term is just propaganda in this case, meant to influence people who aren't at all familiar with the situation in Xinjiang.
...
100 year old atrocity propaganda. Nothing more different than how the British smeared the Germans by saying that they raped babies in Belgium.
Get out.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/middleeast/uyghur-arab-muslim...
I realize I'm inconvenient for you and your party line. I plan on continuing to be so.
Yeah, the same countries who extradite known terrorists to the country they committed their terrorist acts at. Much better than CIA's rendition flights that kidnapped whomever CIA wanted without even asking that country's government.
> I realize I'm inconvenient for you and your party line.
I should have apologized for disturbing your US State Dept. propaganda first...
And btw even if they were "terrorists" that doesn't legitimize genocide
This would be the first "genocide" in history in which the targeted group continued to grow in size, and in which it saw its life expectancy, income and educational levels increase.
> genocide
That genocide is as real as the Iraqi WMDs. Or democracy-loving Syrian 'freedom fighters'. Or the 'Libyan Opposition'.
Forced or otherwise, yes. This is the whole point of the "making the world safe for dictators" thing.
All they seem to want is make sure you dont talk to their own sheeps while you focus on yours lol
For some reason, the random schmuck on the street in the US or the random Little Englander in East End in the UK, think that they have something in common with their elite. As if the former has a few billion in stocks and the latter has graduated from a posh public school...
Let's have reciprocal rules. If country X bans US social media then why shouldn't the US do the same?
Because comparative advantage.
Because you don't jump off a bridge because Johnny jumped off a bridge.
Why not? Is 'below the bridge' a place we need to get to, and do we have a parachute?
Sorry, no, that analogy doesn't apply.
Here is a better one:
You invite Johnny to your home and he keeps hitting you and stealing from you (and you are banned from his house), you need to respond at some point.
Tell that to the Qing dynasty.
Unless you audit every foreign app's source code and sign its binaries, those laws are meaningless. And if you do that you're really just swapping foreign advertising for domestic wiretapping. shrug Lose-lose.
And then they are banned. Not because they are China or TikTok, but because they break specific rules we hold everyone to.
I'm no fan of the CCP, but I'd take Chinese propaganda over American censorship any day.
If we actually care about surveillance by App, we have to make rules that can prevent that including requiring levels of access and transparency to enforce those rules.
Of course, there is little appetite for making those rules... But that doesn't mean that such rules are impossible.
> A China-based team at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes.
Isn't that called "an app store"? Good luck getting non-signed binaries on an iPhone.
My point is that if TikTok is somehow able to escape its sandbox and perform surveillance, that's a fault in the sandbox, and there should be a general process for handling this otherwise you just have to deal with the next week's app "TokTik".
Man the FBI acts like tik tok is used in jet planes and nuclear power plants...
1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).
2. Train AI for analyzing and further manipulating foreign publics, or for providing strategic insight into political and election dynamics, making political and election interference operations more effective.
3. Collate data on individuals gained from TikTok with other sources like credit ratings agency breaches, OPM, etc. for their entire life, to create a continually growing lifetime data profile on every American, European, Asian, South American, African, etc. which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar. Think of it as "customer lifetime value" [2] for political purposes.
None of which we want an adversarial, totalitarian foreign power to be capable of doing to us.
[1]:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tristan-harris-social-media-pol...
It can't be more than a week ago that we discussed here on HN a way that MS Powerpoint can leak your entire presentation to microsoft. Lots of people in my country use the entire MS suite, and I don't think the CIA/FBI/ABCDEFG should have our data.
That said, yes if you use FB/etc you should assume your data could be used by US intel agencies for similar purposes. Just don't use those apps. Heck, I'm American and refuse to Facebook or any of their other services (Insta, Whatsapp, Meta). None of this stuff is actually necessary to live a happy healthy life, and often even detracts from it.
And that's precisely why there is a trade war in between the US and Eu since early 2005. Because the Eu started making up its own rules and standards. TTIP, ACTA, PIPA were all attempts by the US to bring the Eu to heel. All failed. And voila - there is a proxy war that deprives the Eu out of cheap oil and gas, leading to literal deindustrialization of the Eu.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-09/european-...
Its not an argument for what you are proposing. Its an argument against it.
CCP can do very little to impact me directly. The feds could ruin my life if they wanted to - just fabricate a few charges.
How the hell CIA rendition flights are a 'lesser problem'.
> Western companies subject to Western laws, which Western citizens have some say in
Western public has not been able to change neither the economic policy, nor forign policy, nor the surveillance state laws in the past 40 years. Also, the western laws are wantonly ignored in the west when western corporate or state interests are at stake. So no.
...
This is exceptionalism. You are applying to others the standards that you are not applying to your own side, where you have no means to do anything about the problem.
Its a coping mechanism that helps avoid cognitive dissonance by projecting 'worse' problems to outside, to external 'enemies'.
You mean China has regulations on how youths interact with the internet and the US prefers an on-going social experiment lead by sheer engagement numbers that will continue with or without TikTok?
That is happening, because the US audience is CHOOSING to interract with shtty content online. Actually, the majority of shtty content, from flat earth to Reagan being alive et al, come from the US.
> which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar
So Chinese government will coerce and pressure me to do what, exactly. Will it be any worse from the rendition flights of CIA.
...
This sounds like double standards.
That is the only information that should be protected?
But lets start by simply banning the most criminal organizations first. If the KGB, CCP, or any other group known for imprisoning and killing literally millions of people is running a social network we need to block it right away.
Bytedance has forced CCP members on their board and you can bet the government uses the user data, behavior data and biometrics to help squash dissent.
Then we can move on to blocking the networks sharing data with less dangerous groups.
NSA and cghq have tapped onto the global fiber optic systems on a global scale and see spying on every single person on the planet with dragnet systems alongside as you say biometrics, and that includes US citizen data.
Where does that fall into?
You climb a mountain one step at a time.
The only reasons not to include them are purely nationalistic.
Edit: Here's the summary of this thread so far:
1) Let's make a rule against it instead of just hitting companies based on their nationality
2) A rule would be great, but in the mean time let's target the worst actors
3) These US based spy agencies do a bunch of stuff that is similar, where are they on that list?
4) That's off topic whataboutism
5) Seems like the same topic, why is it different?
6) It just is, no explanation required
Using "whataboutism" to try to shut down discussions you don't like is not intellectually interesting or useful.
it always goes along the lines of your thread;
a: "hey, look at awful thing x <other country> is doing, we should do something about that"
b: "we do that too, and it is bad. we should fix it"
a: "that's whataboutism and it's off topic"
where x includes, but is not limited to: class-based legal asymmetry, extralegal incarceration, the existence of a ruling class, unprovoked invasions of sovereign territory, race-based murder by state actors, news suppression...
.. and mass surveillance with a political agenda.
Were I to Don my tinfoil chapeau, I'd say there's a taste of astroturfing to conversations like these. Abusive patterns of social interaction that certainly seem like they're in service of a national agenda. But lacking proof, I won't.
What it was being used to do was to support the argument that "instead of just banning one company, we should create rules that apply fairly."
That isn't deflection.
Notably, the first non-TikTok entities that were mentioned as needing to be reigned in were the KGB. Nobody complained that was off topic.
So while "whataboutism" and allegations of "whataboutism" can both be (edit: and frequently are) used to distract and deflect, that doesn't mean that every instance of either is doing that. You have to ACTUALLY READ what is being said and how it relates, not make snap judgments.
You can see throughout these comments, and everywhere else, every time this topic comes up, the "but also the USA" fallacious argument is brought out. It's really not relevant.
Neither KGB or CCP are 'known' for anything like that in 80% of the world. They aren't even 'known' for such things in majority of Europe. They are 'known' for that only in Angloamerica and sufficiently propagandized segments in its satellites.
There isnt ONE single country which the Angloamerican establishment did not smear in the past 60 years. That's why 80% of the world literally stopped heeding anything it says.
==>> How??? <<==
If the do operate in the US, they must comply with US laws.
Nobody is going to care about some App Store TOS agreement, when faced with the government monopoly on use of force.
It's not that China would try to convert Americans to communism, but I think we should be worried that they could attempt to sway election results via TikTok. TikTok is the most efficient algorithmic feed based website to date, it's ability to take a human and just pour bite sized information into their lives is unmatched in my opinion. It makes you feel like you're part of a group that doesn't even exist, get enough talking heads talking about a topic and you get grass roots cultural movements as people imagine extreme ideas are widespread when they're not.
If US social media, search, and other internet companies are banned in China, then similar Chinese companies should be banned in the US. If US companies can't operate in China except through a joint venture with a Chinese company, to which the US company must transfer its technology to, then same should apply to Chinese companies operating in the US. Etc.
It should be clear at this point that negotiations with China won't change anything internally in China. The only option is for the US to do what is in its power to within the US (and perhaps with fellow democratic allies). Aka reciprocity.
Reasons for banning Chinese social media particularly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33657429
Some foreign companies follow the rules and are allowed to operate in China, while others are unwilling to follow the rules, either because they have ethical qualms about the rules (which involve censorship), or more cynically, because implementing those rules would be bad for PR back in the US.
More broadly, American tech companies do a massive amount of business in China. Apple is the largest smartphone brand in China. China is the or one of the most important markets for Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and many other American tech companies.
> If US companies can't operate in China except through a joint venture with a Chinese company, to which the US company must transfer its technology to, then same should apply to Chinese companies operating in the US.
Your understanding of how things work in China is out of date by about a decade. China has continuously reduced joint-venture requirements over time. There is a select list of industries that require joint ventures, and that list shrinks every year. For example, automobile manufacturing was removed from the list a few years ago, which is why Tesla was able to build its own plant in Shanghai.
> It should be clear at this point that negotiations with China won't change anything internally in China.
China is actually willing to negotiate over many aspects of how foreign companies operate in China, trade barriers, intellectual property, etc. If the conflict with the US were only about regulations on American companies in China, it would be relatively easy to solve. The Chinese government is very pragmatic about those sorts of issues.
However, the conflict is about something much more fundamental: the US government believes that China will soon surpass the US in overall geopolitical power, and the US government desperately wants to prevent that from happening. The US views the high-tech sector as China's Achilles' heel, and believes that it can blunt China's economic development through sanctions (for example, on imports of high-end chips, or on companies like Huawei, SMIC and YMTC). There's no way for China to negotiate with the US over this issue, because China is never going to agree to not develop its economy.
That should be why Julian Assange is in British Guantanamo. And also why CIA rendition flights happened. And why women and children are being blown to bits in drone bombings. And definitely why the Occupy Movement was stomped down in a nation-wide raid in 30 American cities organized by the FBI.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/no...
And as of this very moment, the people who lied about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs in order to invade Iraq and murder 1 million Iraqis, are giving lectures about 'spotting misinformation'.
Save the 'values' nonsense. They don't exist where you claim them to exist.
Psy-ops effectively
Here's a segment by 60 Minutes explaining how they show their own citizens educational, beneficial content inspiring them to be better citizens, while the rest of the world gets the degenerative content we usually associate with ticktok.
And China could easily further adjust their ranking algorithm further to highlight the views it wants us to have. All social media has the power to do this, but China has both the most adversarial incentive and a demonstrated willingness to do so.
But in all honesty, I have noticed among fellow colleagues that this is the case. Even outside of the country, you can tell that people are afraid to speak about politics.
I would be too.
Nobody (in the US) wants this obviously.
Btw, the EU isn't anything better in this regard: We would like to forbid other countries to spy on us, but the EU authorities "need to have" the possibility "because terrorism, child abuse, and other 'harmful content' & 'disinformation'". (Just see the fresh Digital Services & Digital Markets acts).
Same surveillance everywhere. Only it's "OK" when done by "us", the "good ones", but not "the others", because they're the evil "bad ones"; of course.
That won't work because China will just follow the rules. How would that hurt China?
I bet China's going to be like "guys we can't do this anymore, they just updated their terms of service with this brand new rule so we can't proceed with the head-in-toilet challenge operation".
China is pretty smart, you trying to do the same thing in their country would be impossible. Guess why?
No way in hell this will happen, just saying
american social media should be shut down yesterday everywhere in the world then - including the US, lmao
there was a really good example really recently with japanese twiiter, where trends were dominated by the diarrhea of progressive politics, and then suddenly stopped when Musk had fired a ton of dead weight. now it's all anime and games. some journo even complained that the stories they submit no longer get promoted and wondered why
I don't think it's utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue. Even hearing these threats that China is possibly surveilling me - what do they get that other social media apps like Instagram get from me? From the FBI it sounds like the national security threat is that China may use it alter my feed to influence me or take over the control of my Apple phone? Has Apple warned users that TikTok will take control of their phone?
As far as I'm concerned, I'm just watching short 60 second videos and could not care less if China has my birthdate.
It's a way to capture data to use inference models to understand who you actually are, your tastes and personality.
Yes, Instagram/FB/Meta do the same, Google does the same, the difference is that Meta and Google are not the government or, worse, an adversarial government from your nation that could weaponise such data. Tailor-made suggestions and recommendations already work pretty well for adtech, tailored suggestions of content with aims to slowly shift cultures and perceptions is much more dangerous than serving compulsive consumption.
And yes, very likely the US government has some access to FB/Instagram/Meta/Google profiling data, I also believe that's dangerous (even more that I'm not an American citizen, nor live in the USA and still am probably surveilled by its government) but in a different degree and level than what TitTok and China might be able to.
I'm just failing to understand why China using whatever data TikTok has on me to understand my tastes and personality is a national security issue for the United States.
The fear seems to be that China could tweak a US citizen's feed, based on their profiling, to inject Chinese propaganda?
Yes, that's the assumption. And just to be clear, not feed you direct Chinese propaganda but drip-feed behaviour-changing content to make you more or less sensitive to some topics, and not necessarily you but maybe a different cohort they identify as being more easily manipulated. For example: teenagers or young adults (which are the majority of users on TikTok) that are still not mature enough to have developed critical thinking about what they are being fed.
It's exactly to avoid this kind of possible operation that the bells are ringing. Not necessarily because they are already exploiting it but because it's definitely a massive risk to allow such data to be vacuumed by an adversarial government.
1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).
2. Train AI that can be used for analyzing and further manipulating foreign publics, or for providing strategic insight into political and election dynamics, making political and election interference operations more effective.
3. Collate data on individuals gained from TikTok with other sources like credit ratings agency breaches, OPM, etc. for their entire life, to create a continually growing lifetime data profile on every American, European, Asian, South American, African, etc. which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar. Think of it as "customer lifetime value" [2] for political purposes.
None of which we want an adversarial, totalitarian foreign power to be doing to us.
[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33657429
[1]:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tristan-harris-social-media-pol...
The concern is China, the government, has chosen to make concerted efforts to influence the US culture through its businesses.
So would you let your kid watch a TV channel that's overtly NOT aligned with enjoying the US culture in a healthy manner?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections
Cambridge Analytica, while problematic, doesn't have control over FB/its algorithm, which makes your analogy extremely weak.
The less-obvious answer: TikTok is the local clone, in a sense. It’s a separate app from the Chinese Douyin app.
Personally, I’d suggest copying China’s own strategy here: tell ByteDance that if they want to operate in the US, it has to be through a contract with a non-owned US company staffed by US citizens. Essentially making TikTok into an American company that just happens to license some Chinese software IP.
There's no reason to switch now. Ban TikTok and people will switch.
Now compare the friction between wanting to see a Tiktok right now, versus trying to see one of whatever Snap's equivalent is, or Facebook and Instagram's.
Tiktok is absolute butter, on browser or app.
Maybe tiktok doesn't follow those to begin with...
Instagram has like a 3% success rate at suggesting content from people I don't follow. Tiktok is easily over 30%.
Calling instagram a competitor to tiktok is about as naive as thinking an infomercial will pull market share from a prime time drama: it'll catch a few, but its so much worse it has no hopes of cornering the market.
How do we cut the app off? Remove it from the app store? People will post apps disguising a Tiktok connection. Block connections to servers in China? Doing that means creating a great firewall controlling what sorts of connections are made to American clients. If we get there, China will have proved that their method of government is better than ours. They will have already won.
And the US has an extensive and well-documented record of doing exactly this to other nations (and far, far worse). If we start a new Cold War every between every two nations that try to undermine each other we'll quickly run out of trading partners, which isn't going to work out too well for a preeminent trading nation (or it's people).
Yes there might be targeted misinformation there, but it's up to individual Americans to decide if they want to consume that content, government should not be in the business of curating content.
Seems like the perfect startup and perfect timing for all the recently laid off Twitter folks.
Source: My job was to prevent that.
I’ve no doubt we do the same to the US.
CIA and its satellites have been doing that for decades, and on top of that it has a habit of kidnapping, jailing and torturing other countries' citizens. Even the episode of 'rendition flights' could totally delegitimize any complaint from the US, leave aside its cooperative satellites.
Projecting problems and criticism to outside, imagined or concocted enemies and veering the attention away from the plague inside their own society are things which prevent the Western public from addressing the enemy in their midst. That behavior pattern is why the West has been tumbling downhill for the last 40 years.
I do wonder if there’s any lobbying going on from Facebook or Google to help bolster their Reels and Shorts products, both of which seem to be garbage and miss the point of TikTok (the two way interaction).
TikTok gets to be the vector for this new scale of virality, America loses future economic competitiveness. Who is the winner in this scenario?
https://www.spieltimes.com/news/what-is-tiktoks-active-shoot... https://www.thedailybeast.com/tiktok-shooting-challenge-seen... https://wpde.com/news/local/rcsd-at-blythewood-high-school-a...
Is there a belief that China was slower at removing these videos that an American firm would be? Because that's the substantive question.
The opacity of the algorithm, plus the degree to which the content is auto-curated;
the asymmetrical content optimization in exported and domestic versions;
the time-limits imposed on domestic, but not international youth users;
the government-business-CCP nexus in china, partial government ownership of TT, and the human rights record of the CCP;
the refusal to allow western social media and news into China;
I dunno, not much?
That is an enormous national security threat.
Only figuratively in the hacker/gamer sense. TikTok is owned by ByteSense.
The "TikTok can be used to spy on americans" is much like "Russians interfered in our elections". Both are true, both are legitimately very concerning, but both are also things that the USA has been doing for decades with minimal domestic outcry.
So implicit in our attempts to reign in other countries behavior is that other countries should be attempting to reign in ours. If these are behaviors we think the world would be better off without, the best place to reign in that behavior is by starting with our own government.
Does China or Russia allow for those kinds of tools for holding government accountable? Not as far as I can tell.
Therein lies a massive difference in kind.
No, in the very literal sense that Bytedance has a board of directors, and on that board is a CCP member who has the real final say on everything the company does. When you are a business in China, you defacto work for the government.
China isn't America with a red flag, it's a fundamentally different system. Too many people think they know China because they understand America.
If Biden wants instagram showing people pictures of ponies, it simply isn't going to happen. If Xi wants tiktok to show people ponies, the next day every kid in america will be looking at ponies.
Would you say the same thing if they employed CIA and NSA people in executive positions, and had ex-generals and ex-spooks on the board?
Every company in China however answers directly to the part, and every board has a party member on it, who holds 100% of the voting power.
There really isn't a comparison to be made.
The board of directors of a company are not generally owners.
> and on that board is a CCP member who has the real final say on everything the company does
Which is why it's figuratively true in the "pwn" sense, but not literally true.
Wording matters, and so does getting the facts right.
There is no business autonomy with a court to settle differences. The party wants it, the party gets it. Full Stop.
>The board of directors of a company are not generally owners.
Like I said, China is not America. On Chinese Boards sits a party member who has absolute control. China doesn't care what function American boards typically serve.
Which still doesn't make it literally true that: "The Chinese government owns tiktok", (unless, in addition to using "own" figuratively you are also using "literal" in the now common sense that actually means "figurative").
I don't know how many times we have to go in this circle until we get through that dense skull. If you think you understand Chinese business because you understand western business - you don't.
Still, even if they are the best at removing videos, they are also the best at breeding new issues which go viral before they are even recognized as a threat and siloing that content so only people vulnerable are exposed. A second possibility is that they may be creating a forum of disruptive content on purpose to keep people distracted with local issues. Additionally there are foreign agents, trolls acting from patriotic intent or even those who are paid, seeking to encourage problem activity or create anti-government movements.
I have seen other destructive trends happen on TikTok too. I don't know if it is good the things people do to get more followers. The minimum age is 13. It seems like TikTok has a lot of unmoderated content, dangerous trends, and the path to gaining a lot of followers, seems morally grey too.
I can see how TikTok can shape society. Look at how college athletes can earn money on it and promote themselves. Imagine if universities began to recruit athletes with higher TikTok earnings potential and then modify the sport to appeal to that market more. Yes, I am being vague deliberately. It's probably worth asking what effects TikTok has on people.
You are wrong. Myspace works fine in China.
Ping tests are often misleading because datacenters have different connectivity than residential IPs.
btw, even 4chan is accessible in China. Imagine that.
here's the output of curl -sv https://linkedin.com > /dev/null
* Trying 2620:1ec:21::14...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to linkedin.com (2620:1ec:21::14) port 443 (#0)
< HTTP/1.1 302 Found
< Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2022 09:51:33 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
< Content-Language: en
< X-Li-Fabric: prod-lor1
< Location: https://www.linkedin.cn/incareer/hp/
The bottom of the page says:
ICP Filing Number: 14023203
ICP License Number: 150024
PSB Filing Number: 11030102010420
Human Resources Service License: 110401715069
Beijing LingYin Information Technology Co. Ltd
Room 817, Floor 8, Building 18, No.1 Disheng North Street, Yizhuang District
Customer Service Email: cs@lingying.com
Customer Service Hotline: 4000106277
Report Email: jubao@lingying.com
Microsoft forgot to shutdown "local version".
So technically it's still 100% working well with all bells and whistles in China.
So what's your argument this time?
> So what's your argument this time?
Your past couple of comments have been weirdly aggressive. I don't have an agenda.
Networks in China are crappy in general, if your friend has some bad VPN setup I can assure it will mess up something like DNS? Or even worse, if she is using the App, the Linkedin.cn would likely to break API stuff with forced redirects (that's why I call it abomination)
> been weirdly aggressive
Because something WRONG is on the Internet? LOL. IDK man. https://xkcd.com/386/ I hate "tech jornalism" like the BBC one because most of them are bad. In this Linkedin case it was sophistecated enough that people can get inaccurate conclusions based on problems on the surface. But for HN audience I hope people would verify by themselves more.
> we are going to sunset the localised version of LinkedIn in China later this year
Instead, there are substantial arguments about freedom of speech and accountability. Even though they are messy, they are what we need to apply here because they are a legally binding framework that we built over decades.
By the way, I found Levitski and Ziblatt's book "How Democracies Die" [1] a pretty good treatment of these issues of balancing freedom of expression and democratic resilience.
Trade is a 2 way street, if our companies can not compete there, then their companies should not be able to compete here.
Americans can invest and have minority ownership in china but can not just "operate" in china like you can in the US as a Foreign company.
Infact this was the regulation trump wanted to impose on ByteDance, they needed an American partner to operate in the US, i.e they were in talks with Oracle before Biden reversed the order
For protection of domestic civic society, culture and public opinion, trade agreements are irrelevant. That's how the french got to keep their quota for french-language music in broadcasting, for example.
Tit-for-tat is literally how agreements around the world works.
"Reciprocity treaty" if you want to make it fancy sounding, but it's just "tit-for-tat" for Taxes, Tariffs, Visitor visa & rules, etc.
We should just open up everything and hope everyone plays fair!
But to the opium war analogy, most of the world was not involved.
The creators know this and provide an alternate version called Douyin used domestically which optimizes for educational content and has additional rules/safeguards
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934
I don't want to harp on which country has which political motive, but it's pretty cut and dry to see that the service owners export something very different than what is presented domestically.
... Douyin is edited like that out of the goodness of Bytedance's hearts to reduce addiction or is it regulatory pressure?
Reading the article:
> Douyin, much like TikTok, is particularly popular with young audiences, and so China's top regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, has urged it to "create a good cyberspace environment for the healthy development of young people".
> Last month, under-18s in China were banned from playing video games during the week, and their play was restricted to just one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays.
It seems awfully like the China's version of the FTC decided that this ain't cool anymore, and Bytedance saw the hammer of legislation coming so they made changes..
The easiest answer here, is get the US government to not ban TikTok, but make it a rule that under-18s cannot access these applications, content must be educational, and limit screen time by banning these apps during school times, maybe only allowed for 2 hrs on the weekend etc.
However, I do remember hearing a lot that China is a facist dictatorship when these rules were made. I wonder if the same will be said for the US if they decide to make such rules.
Sure, TikTok having “coarse location” permissions seems like a very bad idea, give the fact it’s Chinese owned app. This is the obvious one and I personally absolutely cannot understand how this is allowed to happen. (And there is more… Russian owned family tracking apps for example)
But the larger and harder problem to solve is social media and their involvement in targeted advertising, potentially having a significant impact on election results. This applies equally to all platforms. Where do we draw the line? Should amount of money determine who gets elected? How do we know the money even comes from the parties and not from other governments? Or a new problem we have- should the richest person be able to own very influential social media? This is no longer a democracy.
I'm sure Canada would say that this isn't important..
The second is how the accusations are being made. Too much of it reeks of borderline racism and there seems to be an uptick in outright racism against Chinese people. Remember, it is acts of the Chinese government at issue here not the acts of people who have no ties to the Chinese government.
Maybe it's right to dislike China for ideological reasons. But even if that is the case, isn't banning Tiktok hypocritical? If you dislike China because they censor information coming from other countries, don't follow the will of their citizens, and regulate speech, it appears to me that urging an executive agency to ban Tiktok is doing those same things in the US.
I genuinely don't see much harm in Tiktok but plenty of people on HN seem to hate it just because it's from China and that doesn't seem like a valid reason to me.
The Chinese government technically owns TikTok - No doubt in my mind profile/algorithm data is being sent overseas for processing and manipulation by the Chinese government.
The Chinese government uses strategies that span _decades/centuries_ to influence countries. They can do that because they don't have to rip and replace governments/officials on regular election cycles - that's the way their government works and why some people consider Democracy to not be a great government structure - a separate tangent to go down.
The Chinese government creates/purchases a social media app that happens to attract easily influenced children/teenagers/adults, cater content directly for them to keep them on the platform for as long as possible, with the _very real_ potential for the Chinese government to influence people through algorithm manipulation, which app users don't even realize.
Don't get me wrong, it's equally as harmful when Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat does it - it's just that China studied this formula and has likely adapted it to be used as a form of cultural/government warfare against enemy countries - without even putting boots on their soil.
Distract as many minds as possible, feed them information that tells them the US/Canada/Europe isn't as "free as people say", deliberately promote key cultural "wedge" issues to emotionally enrage/depress people and eventually you have a population in 50-100 years that welcomes the Chinese government into their country because there is no cohesive American identity anymore able to stand against aggressive foreign influence/interference.
I'm not saying this is the sole purpose and goal of TikTok, and I'm not saying it's the _sole_ thing China is doing to "take over America!" - but it's a multi-faceted approach to foreign interference that nobody seems to even consider or think about. See - Belt and Road initiatives, foreign spies in high political positions influencing US politics, committing corporate espionage to steal trade secrets and technologies...
Yes, I'm also sure the USA does all of these things - personally, I'd rather have the USA doing these things instead of China, since I have more of a chance of influencing what the US is doing with our data rather than a country on the opposite side of the globe operating without recourse to western law.
1) How is TikTok worse than other social media apps? Both in terms of privacy and "the algorithm".
2) What another country's government does with my data is far less important to me than what my government is doing with my data. Am I wrong for thinking that?
---
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23129270-fb-portal
There are no privacy laws of consequence when the people running the show report to no one and have zero oversight, yet they want us to worry about tiktok and China instead of pay attention to the gross violation of our rights by our own government.
1) Do you believe social media algorithms can have large negative outcomes concerning human social behavior?
2) Does the entity controlling those algorithms then matter assuming 1 is true?
The people who are worried that 15-second videos on TikTok are somehow part of a long-term plan by the Chinese government to subtly change Americans' opinions are giving the Chinese government far too much credit.
Now, it likely wasn’t planned out this way, but the benefits to manipulation now are obvious.
TLDR:
It has nothing to do with "national security concerns", it's just they are great competition, and the US is lagging behind, so banning it would mean having a chance to catchup
Hence why they tried to lure them to move to their US based servers, so they could peek at the source code ;) ;)
Because US firms are lagging behind, some stagnating and are greedy, therefore no competitors is allowed to do better until they wake up
The plan is clear, another confession of defeat
a law and data collection problem is fixed
the problem is: it's a Chinese company, and they do better than US companies
it happened in the past with European companies and Japanese ones, also with Samsung and their chip
You say that, yet Instagram, Twitter(1), YouTube who have all tried so far have all failed.
(1): You're probably reading this and saying "What? not they haven't", well open a video on Twitter then swipe it up off the screen, you're now in TwitTok.
Youtube Shorts didn't fail, they're actually way better than TikTok and are doing well. Instagram Reels are basically a flop, but Shorts are freaking addictive. I tried using TikTok a while ago after all the praise on HN for its magical recommendation algorithm. After trying to get the algorithm to give me anything interesting for an hour, I gave up. Youtube Shorts on the other hand is like crack. It's way better than YT's "normal" recommendation algorithm.
I recommend it if you haven't tried
The administration hates TikTok because it is potentially destabilizing. The FBI's concern is not that it's foreign influence, but that it's allowing internal movements to gain traction. Just as the FBI suppressed internal movements throughout the 20th century they want to suppress this new medium that may threaten the status quo.
Now I don't want to see the US fall into chaos, but neither do I want to see a world where political change is stifled, which is what the FBI wants to do here.
According to Wikipedia, the prescription for destabilizing America is: "Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
You won't see people saying "I love Hitler" or something, but you will hear Nazi ideology rephrased.
It's important to remember that the US concept of "free speech" as an absolute right is very untypical, and that it also has limits due to being narrow in its scope.
Of course, banning a social network due to arbitrary or without reasons would be against democratic principles. But following democratic and legal principles to openly apply laws and procedures designed to safeguard the state - that's not undermining at all, to the contrary!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic...
The spying seems secondary to the influence they can wield by pushing certain stories while burying others.
For all democracy's failings, for the mess the US is in, and rise of populist parties in Europe, it is still freedom.
Citation needed. Last I heard it was mostly attributable to migration over the last couple decades.
[1] https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/23/cognitive-democracy/
This would be interesting if true. Do you have any sources for this or is it just an observation?
I have a fair number of friends/relatives living in China and at least from what I've seen this is a pretty laughable claim. Very curious where you heard this from?
TikTok in China is different than the US in that it is increasingly inundated with various "get rich quick" schemes. It's essentially turned into large scale social advertising platform where everyone is trying to pitch some angle to make a quick RBM.
I'm sure there exist some "vigorous / productive / pedagogical" accounts, but there are plenty of this in the US as well. There are a lot of accounts in the US that focus on learning, exercise, getting a software job etc.
Again, would love to hear your source of this information, especially if it's first hand experience, because based on the people I talk with in mainland China this comment sounds like a very off the mark hot take.
Have you ever seen the type of content that's popular on Instagram and Youtube? The CCP doesn't need some "insidious plan" to push that to the top.
The YT Algorithm is much more spammy when it comes to influencer content that I never click on.
Whereas my Tiktok is chock full of interesting art, design, music, and programming.
Yes surely none of this existed in western entertainment before TikTok and was all concocted by the the Chinese in a grand conspiracy to bring down the US. At this point I’m trying to figure out who’s better at contrived cartoon supervillain plans according to HN: Musk or China.
We’re doing that just fine on our own.
Can't it?
They simply cannot accept that TikTok is the biggest wonder in the history of apps, and it's not theirs.
We live in bizarre times.
America: XENOPHOBE!
Biden: TikTok is a national security threat.
America: SHUT IT DOWN!
This report is nothing new and it has been known for a long time.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-reverses-...
Do you have any source to back that claim?
- https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/7/23/21334871/tiktok-ban-...
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/10/banning-ti...
- https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/can-the-trump-admini...
- https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tiktok-drama-security-dist...
There's plenty more.
Look at previous threads about Trump wanting to ban TikTok on hackernews and reddit.
Source: Being online and/or watching TV for the past 4 years...
This investigation into TikTok happened before Trump wanted the ban. [0][1] But the media just brainwashed a narrative to people who don't research because it came from his mouth at the ridiculous height of 2020.
Just look at the TikTok fanatics back then defending and being in denial here after Trump wanted it banned on the same national security grounds [2]. Two years later under Biden, NOW is the time they also want to ban it?
Lots of people have just been manipulated by the media and the news again for political gain, as expected. I brought that up at the time and was immediately flagged.
Perhaps it's because it was true, against the herd.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-cfius-exclusive-id...
[1] https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-sch...
Some people are just so desperately trying to divert attention away from it and others are trying to hijack the movement to make it into some kind of constitutional level privacy reform.
Tiktok can die, everything will be fine, and then we can focus on our own issues here.
** Now multiply that by 50m daily users fed disinformation on whatever topic roils you and you have an idea of the scale of threat posed by TikTok. **
On New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees *as they were occurring* on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything and—naively, I soon realized—assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism.
(Cue "/pol/ was right" couplet)
I don't give a shit if it pisses off GenZ. GenZ's ability to share stupid videos of themselves dancing to crappy music is completely irrelevant to the wider geopolitical threats that China poses.
In full disclaimer: I helped build a service that was partially aimed at Chinese users, and had Tsinghua University as a client. When the trade wars started, our relationship was "ended" and Tsinghua took our idea & software and essentially cut us out of the equation completely. (Yes, their copycat version of our software and idea was completely useless and didn't work, but that's besides the point)
That's not the American way. The United States became the center of the modern global economy because it said "you can sell your goods here, and we're gonna push really hard to make you let us sell our goods there, too. But if you don't, fine, you can still sell your goods here".
It's basically the opposite approach of a trade war.
Remember, to the Chinese government, a Win-Win situation is not when both parties walk away happy, it's when the Chinese side wins twice.
No, they don't. That's an absurd statement. China has become a great power by virtue of engaging with the global trade system.
I've worked around Chinese people for a long time, have studied their culture extensively, and have done business with some of their top institutions, including tutoring students from Tsinghua, most of whom are the children of Party elite.