It's quite simple - the US and China don't get along.
It's never been about privacy nor internal (to the US) security. It's very openly about cross pacific adversaries. Only meta-tech commentators have tried to apply some weird narrative of privacy.
1. This is a way of getting memes to the masses that we (the US political establishment) can't fully control.
2. Meta and others are getting their asses kicked revenue-wise by Tik Tok. Like any business, they'd use anything they could to fight back. Turns out they can use China fear mongering, so they are.
3. (Added) Believe it or not, there's nationalistic pride here. There is a reluctance to admit that an app from "the other side" (China) is more appealing to the masses than _our_ social media apps. Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas, even though they're far superior to American cars (but at least they're made by Asians who are _allies_ I guess).
No matter that banning an app is completely against the principles we claim, such as freedom for individuals, competition in a free market, and freedom of information.
The amount of brainrot content that tiktok pushes is staggering. The other video platforms don’t come close.
Social media is the puts when it comes to moral bankruptcy... It is a casino based on popularity, and so many people are dumping money into it on a regular basis that it's really too late to do anything to stem the way it manipulates our world. Congressional action is far too late and futile to the maximum in encouraging any sort of ethics, they did nothing with all the damning evidence presented about Facebook, The only reason they'd ban TikTok is to satisfy the anti-competitive lobby of US competitors if you ask me.
TilTok is a corrupt platform nonetheless, and I really wouldn't be sad if it got banned, the basis of it has already infected everything else, including YouTube to the point of useless overload, so the entire ideal of going viral and getting paid on platforms is actually way past anything meaningful any more.
tiktok incentivizes teenagers to create content, and makes going viral extremely easy... as long as you can up the ante on current edgy activity
they hosted the videos and banned them as they were reported.
you can't even search the term anymore as it shows a get help button instead.
however i can go on youtube and watch all of the ripped tiktok that people downloaded before it was removed.
I am no conspiracy theorist, but at some point we need to accept the countless proof we keep reading about tech used maliciously once your app reaches a significant mass of users, especially if those users live in a country you are in a bona-fide economic war with.
Some degree of skepticism is healthy, but propaganda thrives any time a skeptic dismisses valid concerns.
That's for altruists, who rarely make it to Washington and don't last long when they do.
*laws that protect a negative externality for an involuntary transactor.
Frankly, it should get this treatment. Its executives have been consistently hostile toward government inquiries and in public statements about its users. The hubris it has shown in its treatment on political speech and disdain for paid advertisers is revolting. The stock structure of the company is a physical manifestation of everything wrong - we can treat the public and the law with disdain and you can't touch us.
So while I think it’s fair to ask for a reference, it is prudent to assume it’s happening, unless proven otherwise.
They don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2023/03/24/douyin-tiktok...
By whose standards? The United States has never been an ideologically cohesive nation outside some basic principles of representative democracy - and even those have been challenged at moments in our history. The moment you get beyond the basics of a unified military, postal service, weights and measures, and currency, you quickly get into the social issues that have plagued our cohesion since the founding of the nation. Is Uncle Tom's Cabin a seminal work in understanding US history, or subversive and dangerous? We can't even decide that as a nation at the moment, so "how much social media is good for our kids?" would be a very, very ugly discussion to have at a national level.
I don't have Tik Tok installed, my kids only get the "reruns" off YouTube, but frankly I find it a bit extremist that the US government wants to ban an app that looks to me like people doing funny dances in their living rooms.
TikTok has expanded to be the dominant short form video platform for every interest, niche, and micro niche you can imagine that exists, and even ones you can't imagine.
Please anyone reading this comment replace "TikTok = people dancing" with "TikTok = feed + discovery for short form video tailored to your specific interests no matter how niche". Yes this includes programming, science, education, dancing, gaming, cooking, acrobatics, painting, arguing, politics, news, weather, etc. basically anything you can imagine that isn't against their content policies.
1) TikTok is really good at what they do.
2) They are a Chinese-owned company.
It certainly feels like if it weren't for #2, they would be praised for their innovation and held up as a great American success story. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be skepticism in the name of national security, but of all the things threatening to destroy the planet on any given day, this feels low on the list.
YouTube videos are frequently 30-120 seconds of relevant content padded to 10-15 minutes. Most TikTok videos are close to just those 30-120 relevant seconds.
If Congress bans it, they'll probably lose the trust and interest of a massive percentage of Americans under the age of 30.
It is this and also that young people are especially malleable, so content that they see can cause long-term psychological and emotional damage, or--more pertinently to governments' interests--can introduce ideological change that they don't control.
There is a wide variety of content on TikTok. One category is (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people who watched the Congressional "democracy" theatre on the TikTok ban realizing that their so-called democracy is fake, a laughing stock, pick your pejorative. Millions of people who formerly had no clue, now realize absolutely that what is on the label does not match what is on the tin.
Of course, they could have realized this via other means since it has been the case for ages, but whether they would have is another story.
If I was running an illusory regime, I'd take out TikTok too, it's just old fashioned common sense.
Never mind that the policy here is actually not about protecting children at all, since its banning an app entirely where the vast majority of users are adults.
a) the Chinese goverment is right
and b) TikTok is notably worse than American social media.
I, for example, disagree with both. I think the Chinese government is wrong about a lot of things, including the right way to raise kids. And I think TikTok is no worse than Instagram.
The Chinese government is right in the sense that drug cartels generally avoid getting too high on their own supply.
Germany dropped bombs on the UK. The UK responded by dropping bombs on Germany. By responding in kind, was the UK therefore asserting that Germany was 'right' to drop bombs on the UK?
If the UK justified their actions solely on the basis that because the Germans did it it must be ok that'd be unreasonable. (This isn't the right forum to get into it, but the ethics of civilian saturation bombings are much more complicated and I'm not saying either was in the right, though of course in total Germany was far far worse).
This is a holdover from the US supporting the development of industry in Japan to keep them from turning communist (which was a real threat back in the 60's and 70's)
In what other trade context would this scenario be acceptable?
And how does giving access to an authoritarian regime, famous for controlling speech, promote free speech?
Besides, the problem is already solvable. People could simply stop using TikTok if they agreed that its disadvantages outweigh its benefits. No one is forcing them. This is a vote with your feet issue, plain and simple.
A democratically elected government banning something is the people deciding.
A lot of people choose meth.
And to also ensure that trade relationships are fair and equitable (which it currently isnt).
Besides, anytime we see the government intervene on matters like this, we're reminded how they make it worse.
And you didn't address my point with respect to young people's lack of life experience. Or that trade relationships should be fair and equitable.
The statement that trade relationships must be fair is some sort of neoliberal mumbo jumbo. I don't accept it as an assumption or a consequence. You can accept it as axiomatic if you want, but I don't see it as a consequence of any valid logical train of thought.
And what you describe as "neo-liberal mumbo-jumbo" I think for most people would be seen as simple commonsense.
Open markets mean what it says on the tin - markets without barrier. Saying, "We're barring actors for entering the market for reason X," means closed markets even is X is "treating people poorly."
What EU's social media companies? Exactly.
By US banning TikTok, US is acting against claimed values, turning out to be hypocrite. China, by banning US social media, doesn't. Might be seen unfair, but it is a dead end that US painted itself into.
For the sake of argument, _if_ we agree that banning is OK, EU should ban social media from both, and subsidize their own the same way as US subsidized theirs.
It is being true to what I claim that I'm, what my values are. If I start playing opportunist, how I'm better that the other guy?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
We do ban some import vehicles. Specifically light trucks.
Harley-Davidson famously tried to get Japanese V-Twins banned for not leaking oil. Er, I mean, for “stealing their signature exhaust noise”.
Both Honda and Toyota build a lot factories in the US, creating a lot of jobs for US Citizens that actually show up to vote. All while American brands move to Mexico, Canada etc.
TikTok might as well be the same as "BigTech" but with the bonus of being Chinese—that is something politicians can work with. I think the root of the problem, though, is we (humans) are easy to manipulate, but I dont even know how we can even begin to tackle that.
I’m finding the wording strange because the US arguably has more cross-Pacific allies than adversaries.
Pack it up, folks, as it turns out, there are some things that are too dangerous to let the public hear.
Free Speech comes and goes in the USA. We tend to lean towards the freer-side of things, but if we need to, we clamp down on it to meet our other goals.
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WW2 is hardly an outlier either. WW1 had Espionage Act of 1917, Civil War didn't even have a law, Censorship and seizure of printing presses was just so common. Pre-Civil War, the Postmaster General of slave states commonly censored pamphlets from abolitionists. I mean, the "Alien and Sedition Acts" were passed within a year or two of the Bill of Rights, allowing the President to arrest various members of the press in the 1780s. Etc. etc. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of the USA as a country.
Book burnings and other such events were also widespread in the USA throughout our history... and even have legal precedent like the Comstock laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
IMO, we've gone too far into the free-speech side of becoming absolutely idiots about the subject in recent years and all of us can benefit from researching the actual history of the USA.
Free Speech, both opening up, and restricting it, has its uses. And if you're a student of history, you'll be able to feel the ebbs and flows of this subject throughout time.
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Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.
How about the Red Scare or Huckleberry Finn? Problem with censorship as a tool is that it will be abused. What makes you so sure that the party censoring AP African American studies won't be back in power next?
Execution, jailings, regulations, etc. etc. Plenty of ways for the government to be abused. Its inevitable that we give the government power to do what is necessary in society, whatever it is. Censorship is just one more power that the US Government has toyed with from time to time over the centuries.
To prevent abuse, we need to elect the right people to be our leaders, and the ones who wield that power.
I believe in reciprocity. If someone treating you poorly, there's no reason you need to keep allowing them to walk over you.
Sucks for us Westerners to see our Internet firewalled, but that's what happens when you're in a war, whatever its nature. Everybody pays for it.
Moral high ground and fairness is the best strategy here. If it's illegal for all companies to capture this information, it makes enforcement easier and prevents foreign adversaries from merely infiltrating other companies.
There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.
I disagree. The most effective war strategy is playing dirtier than your opponent. Like, I don't know, throwing the two only atomic bombs ever unleashed on city centres.
I'm not saying that I approve it. I'm just saying that war is not an honourable endeavour. The one that goes further than the other ever dared tends to be the winner.
> There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.
Indeed. The only way to stop that is through draconian laws, so you can jail these people for "high treason", like I imagine China already does.
This is going to be one of those things Americans look back at, like the PATRIOT act, and wonder how the hell they allowed it to happen all because of one app/event.
The bill affects multiple countries, not just China.
In fact, it encompasses "any foreign government or regime, determined by the Secretary [to be]... significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons"
Depending on how much (or little) you trust the Secretary of Commerce, that's incredibly far-reaching and could easily be abused.
It's not that simple. The commitee can change the definition of "foreign adversary" under SEC. 2. (8) (B) at their will.
https://rollcall.com/2023/02/02/lawmakers-stumble-on-data-pr...
The politicians don't want to touch privacy or security laws since that would negatively impact their benefactors as opposed to actually doing their jobs for their constituents.
Its a power grab, hopefully it won't get passed because of the loose undefined wording that could apply to anything they so choose like in ways described in Ayn Rand.
I get that it is not appropriate on government phones in case they manage to leverage a zeroday but for the average Joe I'm not seeing the risk of TikTok being any greater than the rest of the social media world - the same info is shared/available.
One party is largely in favor of stronger privacy laws, but with enough dissenters that when that party is the majority party they still would need help from the other party.
The other party is largely against stronger privacy laws, without enough dissenters to overcome the more pro-privacy party dissenters when the more pro-privacy party has the majority.
So nothing passes.
"TikTok spy journalist" returns a lot of results in your favorite search engine
Facebook and TikTok are of similar sizes and have both violated the privacy of its users and since FB has paid a giant billion dollar fine to the FTC, it already makes sense to also fine TikTok on similar grounds including overseas access to US data by specifically targeting US journalists.