Yes, of course we should ban TikTok | Hacker News Reader

Yes, of course we should ban TikTok

noahpinion.substack.com

51 pointsjseliger54 comments

Just a reminder that China banned Facebook in 2009 when riots were happening in Xinjiang and Facebook refused to block activists from communicating with each other or reporting it to the Chinese government.

Similarly, Google was banned in 2010 following disputes over censorship of search queries, that the Chinese government wanted but Google refused to oblige by.

Yes. China is an authoritarian state and their policies should largely not be emulated.

You don’t think tit for tat is a good strategy in this situation?

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

And competitive brinksmanship, xenophobia, and walled isolation aren't useful unless you're running DPRK.

I'm sure it's fueled by xenophobia, but if we think of China / US as competing technology firms, the decision makes even more sense. What tech firm would want a one-sided relationship where their employees share information using a competitors platform, when you have no guarantee of privacy?

I don't think the walled isolation claim sticks - the US would not be seeking to isolate itself. Instead, it would be requiring both countries to operate on the same playing field. Why would anyone want to play a game when the other side won't agree to the same rules?

Seems to be a good strategy for some situations like the iterated prisoner's dilemma.

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

Retaliation is not emulation. If they did that domestically and the US also did that domestically it would be emulation. This is similar to tariff wars, if they impose a tariff on something then you retaliate proportionally.

We have an unequal trade with China where they ban western companies but their companies do what they want even while being state controlled under a hostile regime. This alone is a good reason to ban any Chinese social media company

Reaction in kind is emulation. Full stop.

State-level censorship of apps the public can use should not be entertained in a free and open society.

No, it is a response to a hostile act, it is not emulation because the scope is limited to that country.

> State-level censorship of apps the public can use should not be entertained in a free and open society.

Yes it should. The government is reponsible for regulating commerce, especially by foreigners. The whole point of the ban is that tiktok's owners are not in a free society and cannot take advantange of the benefits of a free society while escaping its responsibilities and their country being openly hostile/

Even within the US the government can block and ban facebook if facebook is in violation of any laws or is acting in aid of a foreign hostile government.

You don't understand free speech or liberty. They both come with responsibility and commerce is a regulated privilege. Tiktok can become a non-profit app and sniff all your data all it wants. In a free society, a hostile foreign government has exactly zero rights.

A free and open society gives people the choice to use whatever they want within sensible bounds. I don't think you appreciate the nuances between a totalitarian regime like China, a nanny state like the UK, and an open society like the US.

In an open society, people are free to use apps regardless of who may or may not be behind them. That's the price of freedom: bad actors, unpleasant words, unpopular views, and the freedom to be a jerk.

> and an open society like the US.

Surely you jest.

> A free and open society gives people the choice to use whatever they want within sensible bounds

Right. It's people not China and the CCP. Tiktok can still exist outside of the US and serve content to US visitors. ISPs will not block it. But the company itself which is operated by people associated with the CCP cannot operate and make profit in the US.

If you like tiktok you can still use it.

But even if ISPs banned tiktok, the restriction is intended to harm tiktok, you can't reasonably argue that the US is trying to prevent its people from accessing legitimate tiktok content. Matter of fact, tiktok's chinese owners have been advised to divest their stake in the US arm of tiktok so it can continue to operate in the US and you can enjoy tiktok.

The choice if it comes down to it is made by tiktok's chinese owners refusing divest their stakes with fair compensation (even above market some would say)

> In an open society, people are free to use apps regardless of who may or may not be behind them. That's the price of freedom: bad actors, unpleasant words, unpopular views, and the freedom to be a jerk.

No, free does not meen freedom to harm or harass others or as you probably know "yell fire in a crowd". There are no protections against malicious and provable intent in any society, free or not. It could be a speech or even your thought, if it can be proven that your intent was malice then you acted in abuse of the liberites granted to you and forfeited their protections. Moreover, you cannot argue that an act against a company (not a person with rights) is an act against its users without proving that the government was intending to restrict or harm the company's users.

In a free society, you do not have the freedom to access tiktok, you have the freedom to become tiktok or use many of the alternate competing services.

Companies are denied license to operate in the US all the time, a free society is free for people not random foreign corporations.

Corporations are not people.

It's silly for the same reason tariffs are. The benefit of the freedom and the cheap goods is with the consumer of them more than the producer.

You have unequal trade - china gives you stuff for free, to your benefit. It's nice that you're worried about the Chinese consumer getting to benefit from access to US social media, but the benefit of that access is to the Chinese customer

I agree, so stop letting TikTok advertise to young adults and reward certain views with attention.

Pushing a China-centric view on the populace and allowing the option for data gathering to influence TikTok rewards, can end up with a political outcome at the ballot box.

Facebook did sway votes in the 2010s. Let's not emulate China's authoritarian state policies and close the option for that to happen.

Laying the groundwork now to keep westerners separate from the social credit system, will likely be useful to prevent behavioural capture of economic activity.

Google was banned in 2010 from what I remember because they shut down their Chinese google site in protest of Chinese agents hacking gmail accounts in Hong Kong. So google.cn was redirected to google.hk until it was blocked. Fun times.

Twitter was blocked because the American embassy was tweeting accurate air quality numbers which was embarrassing the Chinese government (who up until that time refused to acknowledge that the air quality was really bad). Or so we all thought at the time.

I don't see a really good reason to ban tiktok in the USA, first we don't really ban things nor have the infrastructure for it. The best we can do is pollute some DNS records maybe, or maybe we can buy GFW technology from China to accomplish this? Second...tiktok is used mostly by teens, who will be all over anything that is officially banned by old people. We would just be making tiktok really popular, and there is no good infosec reason to do that.

US companies have been doing the same thing all over the world. Outside the west, everyone can see the hypocrisy. Ban it by all means, but you will become just like China: a state that censors information and speech from its citizens because the government is scared of it.

This isn’t a free speech issue.

This is an enemy foreign government collecting information on US citizens.

So to be consistent here, every country outside the US should ban all software originating in the US that collects user information.

If the answer is yes then by all means, but I think it makes for atrocious foreign policy relations.

Well, there's definitely a strong argument that none of the data of EU residents can be processed in China or under Chinese jurisdiction, based on previous court rulings.

The EU has GDPR.

The US has refused to consider similar legislation but that would be a way to keep TikTok and limit data collection on US citizens and require it stay in the USA.

That argument doesn’t make sense as it assumes the governments of the other countries are equally at odds as China is with the US.

Western Europe and US are generally wanting each other to succeed as friends and allies.

China wants the us market but also wants the US to be weaker and not pose an example as a democracy.

It also assumes a lot about level government control in each country that is highly dissimilar.

This is a short summary of the Schrems II decision, yes.

Then we should set strict laws about what kinds of data apps can harvest from their users and hold all of them responsible, not just the ones from scary china.

It targets all foreign adversaries.

It is not the data collection but where the data is sent and how it is used. You cannot enforce US laws in China but in the US you can. If it was an EU company, relations are good enough to where US companies are being fined and paying billions to the EU with the understanding that similar free trade regulations can happen unlike with hostile China

This is still regulations the US can put in. The data has to be sent from the US.

But can be sent to china or im a recent case accessed by china dictated employees where they tracked down a US journalist using tiktok collected data.

> enemy

seems like the characterization is doing all the work for you

Why are they our enemy? They are our most important trading partner.

Countries outside the US are free to ban US-owned platforms, and many countries do. It's not hypocrisy.

One of the CCP's goal is to destabilize the Western Liberal order. This is, of course, bad for the West. It's not unreasonable to take actions to prevent this.

I really don't think the west needs any help destabilizing itself. I wouldn't really worry even if we fuck ourselves politically, as long as the US military continues to playing in an entire other league and the ever-present threat of either side escalating to nuclear weapons out of desperation there's not a whole lot of realistic risk.

Which leads us to the very uncomfortable fact, we want to ban TikTok for the same reason they ban the likes of Facebook, Google etc - because governments (including ours) uses it for citizen data-mining and mass crowd control.

We know how dangerous TikTok is in their hands because we know how valuable Facebook, Google etc is in ours.

Except for the crucial fact that unlike China US law protects US companies from state interference.

The EU for example fines US tech companies left and right and enforced EU data privacy law and US companies pay up or comply. The dispute with China and US tech companies was never about privacy but about censorship (censoring what the state tells you to), there is no such dispute between tiktok and the US gov.

The NSA has proven repeatedly for decades that those laws are worth zero, they do not apply to the NSA. Edward Snowden proved that. All US tech companies give up their data on users willingly or unwillingly.

You're not wrong and if that is good enough to ban US companies in China then so be it, it is their right as is the US and tiktok. Are you expecting the US to allow tiktok to save face or something?

No I just hate the hypocrisy, that's all. I would much prefer the US Government just come right out and say we use social media to monitor our citizens and we don't want China to have access to that same data. Pretending like it's unique to them is silly and makes me not respect them.

You can make that false claim and make a liar out of your own self but the facts are it doesn't even matter if the US spies on its own people or not, it won't change the fact that americans don't want China to also have critical data that can be used against them as a country.

We really need a term for silly people that jealous-hate the US lol

False claim?

Somebody didn't listen to Edward Snowden..

The question is whether what you care about is the order's power or the order's values

If you care more about the values, it makes no sense to drop the values to retain the power

If you don't have the power to protect the values, what difference does it make?

Are you saying there is some speech allowed on tiktok but banned elsewhere?

Outside the US there are a lot of envious people that scream hypocrisy and act anti-US at every opportunity so what you're saying isn't surprising. Americans shouldn't care what "the world" thinks when it comes to trade policy.

Personally I couldn't care less if the US is like or not like China. Xi's regime is very anti-us and any state controlled companies can get bent.

The nerve on some people. They want you to apologize for banning a service controlled by the CCP which is talking about actual war against the US.

>US companies have been doing the same thing all over the world. Outside the west, everyone can see the hypocrisy

It is not necessarily hypocrisy. I haven't paid too much attention, but does the US say China banning Facebook or Google is anti free speech?

If not, then the US is not being hypocritical. Perhaps, double standards or something like that is more of what you were looking for?

>Ban it by all means, but you will become just like China

China builds roads. If the US builds roads it will become just like China.

>a state that censors information and speech from its citizens because the government is scared of it.

You think Europe is doing this when they banned RT, right?

> but you will become just like China: a state that censors information and speech from its citizens because the government is scared of it.

There are several legit arguments against banning, but this isn't one one of them. Banning Tiktok is not censoring information and speech, let alone doing it because of fear. If it were, then they'd also ban all of the numerous other methods by which people can talk to each other.

China bans platforms because they give access to information that embarrasses those in power. The US, here, is planning to ban a platform because it's a propaganda vector, and because its popularity has gotten to a point where we - as a society - at a serious risk of propaganda campaigns. All the information on TikTok is still available elsewhere - but we mitigate the opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party to mold what information is serviced to our constituents, and how that information is shaped.

I just don't think those two are the same.

Or pass meaningful regulation on what social media companies can do and what data they can harvest

Essentially they can "harvest" whatever you give them but the question is how are they going to use it as well as for how long they are going to store/archive it. I agree this things should be regulated; my thinking is something in the veins of banking industry akin to regulations regarding what banks can and can not do with your private information and for how long they should or should not store your transactions.

I believe this argument can be extended to Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc for other countries. And considering that; yes, let’s do it!

Ban google outside US! I’d love for each country to build their own

OK! Don't complain and scream free marker when other countries limit or ban American big tech.

As if they don't already? Banning Tiktok is like retaliation for what China has been doing to American companies for literally decades.

I said other countries, not only China.

... written by a conservative that borders on fascist beliefs. thanks

You’re going to have to be more specific. Noah’s posted here all the time and is fairly well received. What opinions did you find troublesome here?

Paranoid xenophobia

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