House committee votes 50-0 to force TikTok to divest from Chinese owner | Hacker News Reader

House committee votes 50-0 to force TikTok to divest from Chinese owner

arstechnica.com

63 pointsnotamy40 comments

I work at a biotech startup where the founder sold a previous company after being "encouraged" to do so by CFIUS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Foreign_Investmen...). That company had taken a large investment from a China-based investor. The concern was about sensitive health info of US citizens being in foreign hands.

More like all info(and therefore rent on it) needs to be in the hands of American rent collectors. Its a stupid, late and irrelevent bill because info is not the issue, when info is exploding and overflowing. Attention is the issue. Attention is scarce and finite. It has been so fully exploited it has lost its value entirely. As more things that need Attention dont receive it, systems auto unravel. No Chinese or Russians required. An architecture of Attention allocation is the real need of the hour.

I'm not a huge fan of TikTok (I think it's just silly and most of the content there is just not for me), but has anyone shown any credible Bad Thing that the app has been doing? It just seems like a vapid time waster that sucks up user data, just like other US-owned vapid time waster apps that suck up user data. Is this just "China Bad" from politicians, or have they actually done something wrong to users?

You might want to read on their takeover of… Newegg of all things.

Can you elaborate? There's nothing obviously nefarious in the first dozen Google results.

Supposedly they used that to start gaining information on actual spending habits, since they sell things directly via TikTok now, at very low prices. Although I’m actually thinking this might be too far fetched of theory.

Security firm Quokka has briefed Congress about its relative risk: https://www.quokka.io/blog/the-security-risks-inherent-in-th...

> insecure data storage, data leakage, and exposure to network based attacks

Huh... So this is about securing data, buffer overruns, and remote code execution. Seems like kind of small potatoes for Congress to get involved.

If these were issues that lead to banning, there are a lot of other consequential apps and services to ban too.

agreed, such as Equifax; after it was breached and our, coughs, "stolen data" was stolen from them.

TikTok should be banned until Facebook and Google are available in China.

Nope. Facebook and Google would be available in china if they agreed to chinese laws. Tiktok is following american laws.

Isn't this article about Congress changing US laws?

Good news: The law to force divestiture of TikTok is an American law.

We are somewhat agreed. It's insane that any country should allow foreign control over their media. And hopefully, china and the rest of the world will follow up with similar laws. Not sure why facebook, google, netflix, youtube, etc are allowed in most countries. All important companies should be run locally.

It's funny how the divestiture law is just 'nationalizing' foreign corporations. Something we shamed cuba, et al about. But I'm okay with it.

The law doesn't say Americans must buy it. Just that it can't be owned by a 'foreign adversary'.

I think the other poster is pointing out that China already did this, and this law itself is the "follow-up with similar laws" response to their actions.

> I think the other poster is pointing out that China already did this

No china didn't. That's my point. You and the poster's assertion is an outright propaganda lie that's been repeated ad nauseum. China has the same laws that the EU has and the US has. Where citizens' data is stored and controlled locally. Tiktok is storing american data within the US.

If china enacts similar 'tiktok' laws, then apple, microsoft and every tech company operating in china would have to sell its entire chinese operations to chinese entities.

I hope china, india, EU and the rest of the world takes the tiktok bill as a blueprint and enacts similar laws.

> Tiktok is storing american data within the US.

Even TikTok's employees say that is false.

> Video-sharing app says it has walled off American data, but employees say data is still sometimes shared with its China-based parent

https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pledged-to-protect-u-s-data-...

And the House committee is part of American law.

If TikTok is doing something bad then the bad thing should be illegal, not the platform or who owns it.

But banning bad things would require a well-thought-out bill that could inadvertently protect Americans from domestic tech companies that are also harvesting and selling our personal data and manipulating our attention. And that would be a problem (for politicians).

Easier to just blame China and kick the can down the road to the next generation to deal with the real problems.

> It just seems like a vapid time waster that sucks up user data, just like other US-owned vapid time waster apps that suck up user data. Is this just "China Bad" from politicians, or have they actually done something wrong to users

Well they do seem to push anti-us {anything} (not that there it isn't anything to complain about if you're a US voter) while simultaneously "hide" or "de-promote" anti-china or anti-eastern content.

They also push more us-crime content while they could push more for buddhist content and make more of a difference but it's obvious it's the CCP behind of it all...

Note that this is coming from someone that didn't grow up in the US and is anti-authoritarian (right or left) as they come... (I grew up in Venezuela, left authoritiaran system).

> Is this just "China Bad" from politicians, or have they actually done something wrong to users?

Honestly, banning Chinese apps in general seems fine to me, given how many Western apps/websites China bans.

Trade is good, but it should be reasonably two-sided.

It's weird to me that in these discussions people mostly ignore how many Western apps/services China bans. Isn't reciprocity entirely reasonable?

As much as I am for the free market, TikTok is a scary thing. Probably it would need to be banned even if it was a domestic product.

It's just a social media video app. It's no more scary than Youtube shorts, Facebook rolls, Vine back in the day. Sure it's vapid entertainment, but vapid entertainment shouldn't be illegal.

They should all be banned

Not in a free society, they shouldn't. And the US has, at least for the moment, a semblance of a free society.

The “this is a free country” argument is flawed and tired. You must be 21 to legally consume alcohol. You must have a license to drive a car. You can’t drive faster than the speed limit on a road. Meth and cocaine are illegal. Children must attend school. Abortions are illegal (after X weeks). Et al.

Study after study has made clear the harm social media brings not only to children, but all who use it. The psychological “gaming” that goes into every little detail of these apps should be enough to make the average person sick. “Bad faith” doesn’t begin to describe the MO of TikTok and others. We’re not even touching the harvesting and selling of people’s data that these platforms heavily rely upon for revenue.

Youtube shorts came out in response to TikTok. Illegal is one thing, but maybe off of watching Dune, maybe there should be a guiding hand to society so that vapid entertainment isn't promoted and we don't get a society of airheads. though my problem with TikTok is that my feed is serious stuff like trama therapy and I can't use it for long because I hey overwhelmed by things to work on. I realize that's not everyone's experience with TikTok tho

>Maybe there should be a guiding hand to society so that vapid entertainment isn't promoted and we don't get a society of airheads.

Vapid entertainment has been around since the beginning of time. Luckily, society doesn't work that way. Vapid entertainment doesn't create vapid people any more than violent videogames create violence. If there is to be a "guiding hand" in society it should be better education rather than censorship.

And at one time, for a long time, science fiction was considered degenerate and childish. In a world where vapid entertainment isn't promoted, everything Frank Herbert wrote probably gets burned in a big pile.

I'm glad we agree that there should be better education. It's up to the platform what it pushes, and while the banal evil implementation of the algorithm is optimized to sell more so we consume more, there's a very real effect on the zeitgeist that TikTok has above that. It's very much able to shape the nation's culture and politics, and that just should not be in the hands of a foreign power. We're already in World War III, and the big weapon in this war is information and ideas. China would love to divide the US and cause a civil war, and control of TikTok's algorithm is a weapon in such a war.

Show me all of the dangerous CCP propaganda on TikTok, because as far as I can tell, China's algorithm is just showing me girls dancing, memes and clips of Fortnite.

If I were to accept, for the sake of argument, the premise that China wanted to trigger a civil war in the US through some massive psyop, literally any social media platform other than TikTok would be better suited for the task. Facebook and Twitter are already radicalization machines. No one is getting radicalized by TikTok.

If you think the CCCP is creating propaganda videos and posting them to TikTok then you're misunderstanding the situation. What they have the power to do, is amplify divisive messages. If all you're getting on TikTok is Fortnite videos, then it seems the algorithm has selected you out of watching videos about acab or Jan 6th or such. if Facebook and Twitter are getting in on the fun, why wouldn't TikTok? does TikTok have some magic social media exception that Facebook and Twitter just can't seem to grasp?

> my feed is serious stuff

This is also obviously part of the plan in behalf of China to gain ground...

FWIW I'm anti-Tiktok and anti-Instagram, they both push agendas that are of no benefit to the common man...

Interesting that this relies on 'eventually' dropping the app from US controlled app stores. While in various courts are attempts to easily allow first class alternative app stores, not necessarily controlled by the US. I guess lawmakers are hoping for Tik-tok and others to blink first, rather than forcing them to legislate the Great Firewall of the USA.

It's not a ban on TikTok; they are proposing a restriction that will be applied to American companies in order to try and block American's access to an online web service.

I do not agree with such restrictions nor would I if the role was reversed; in my opinion, any politician that supports such an encroachment on our rights will never have my support or vote. I would additionally be open to boycotting their corporate and wealthy donors since they seem to only listen to money.

I do however, wholeheartedly support enacting legislation to protect our data, require security around it and to block the sale of it.

Nice to see congress doing their job. China kills many Americans via tainted products and general incompetence. For example the COVID pandemic was the CCP’s fault. Many products from CCP China are toxic, bad for the environment, literal spyware. People who want to foist more of that on American citizens are, thus may offend some people, literally traitors.

If I were in government, I’d vote this as well. Of course, only after I invest in the company expected to take over TikTok at a discount.

I wonder what would happen if Chinese lawmakers voted to force the sale of an American company?

Like reversing genders, things always look different when the roles are reversed.

“The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”

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