Furious Congress plows forward with TikTok bill after user revolt | Hacker News Reader

Furious Congress plows forward with TikTok bill after user revolt

axios.com

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> "So bad we turned phones off … Which means we could miss calls from constituents who actually need urgent help with something," a senior Democratic aide added.

That's certainly a choice they decided to make.

What I can't figure out is how DoS-ing congress helps them achieve their goal. This was an "inorganic" campaign and based on misinformation.

Seems like an excellent demonstration of the risks of having your citizens wired up to foreign controlled algorithmic feeds.

Yeah, if you wanted to demonstrate that TikTok needs to be banned, you couldn't have done it better.

Even beside the national security implications, the fact that TikTok just demonstrated enough influence that it might threaten Congressmen in elections ... ayup, that's gonna get the ban hammer tout suite from both sides.

We live in a democracy. It's not the job of these government agents to ignore their constituents, it's their job to listen to them. This is demonstrating that TikTok should not be banned.

Correct. We live in a democracy. TikTok just demonstrated it is an existential threat to that democracy by conducting a DDoS directly against Congress at the behest of a very non-democratic Chinese government.

TikTok should be shut down. Immediately.

TikTok did no such thing. Those people have free will, which in a democracy would be respected.

We all like to believe this, but practically it’s not always true. With enough resources you can make a significant part of the population act in your interests and against their own. Now I won’t get into the argument that each and every soul is able to reason and defend their interests at all times or whether if they did what you pushed them to do, it’s because your interests were in fact already aligned, there are countless examples to the contrary. So if you, as a foreign entity, can exert your will on a democracy this directly, yup, I’d ban you.

But that would violate the free will of all of the people who have no problem with China owning the app that they use. There's endless propaganda and advertising we are subjected to in the west. Second guessing people's free will because of influence destroys democracy.

or the free will to not use seat belts, to speed, to blast your loudspeakers to your neighbors, to walk around with a contagious disease because you're immune...in the end why do you live in a society where you rely on others if you should just be allowed to do every single thing you want to do regardless of how it affects said society? Perhaps the some situations need to be more carefully considered and agreed upon by the whole?

Censoring information is not in any way comparable to the items you list. It's also disingenuous to ignore the motivation behind this suggested ban. It came about from Zionists who are convinced that TikTok is the reason younger generations don't support Zionism. This only happened because of Oct 7th. It's a violation of the rights of US citizens.

I don't know enough about that to speculate. If what you say is true, then it should likely be addressed in another way, not by arguing that there should be no order in a society.

I don't think any website or app should be banned just because the owner is accused of having an agenda (foreign or domestic owned). That's not society having "no order", it's basic freedom of speech and personal liberty.

I don't disagree with you. It seem the difference here is that it's a foreign app/entity, and governments seem to have the authority to decide unilaterally on giving such entities access to it's people/economy/etc. This is done by every country, democratic or not. Think import controls, tariffs, and direct bans. The fact that people will lose access to said app is a consequence, but I'm not sure we can claim it's infringing on a freedom. Telling you not to use the app would be infringing. Banning the app is not really. Now, it'd be a different issue if they banned Facebook. The freedom infringed here would likely be facebook's and not yours.

The users who want to use that app, should get to use that app. If there's content on the app that breaks the law, that content can be addressed directly. This thankfully will be a very politically costly move if they pull it off. Millions of people will be pissed, and they will be right to be.

Only the finest domestic content slop for me, please.

American algorithmic feeds full of COVID nonsense and election misinformation sent Americans out into the streets armed and willing to commit violence. Why is this a bridge too far?

I agree all the socials are full of memetic hazards and nonsense. Data plane issue.

The platforms obviously bear major responsibility for this but to an extent their hands are tied by dispute about what constitutes "valid" speech.

My perspective is that if this had been an "organic" protest it would have been fine.

What TikTok demonstrated is that the platform is willing to directly spread misinformation to users through system messages with custom UX flows to magnify the impact. Devs at TikTok worked on this, they had meetings about it, they tracked progress until the work was done etc. That's a CONTROL PLANE issue.

What does "organic" even mean in this context?

Of course TikTok tried to get their userbase to protest Congress if Congress was trying to regulate them. That is entirely within their rights, and just about any American platform would have done the same, including distorting the message as much in their favor as possible. That's politics as it's meant to be played.

To me, "organic" means people organising via messaging within the data plane of the platform, exercising their rights to free speech and political organisation.

Can you name a prior instance where a social platform has added custom UX to "contact your congressman" or similar? (Bonus points if it is also about something actually untrue like "the service will be shut down").

I don't know, I haven't been keeping track of the specific UI of every social platform to correlate design changes with instances of attempted political action. Why is it relevant?

The protests against SOPA and PIPA.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA

TRUE! Acknowledged.

I have some weak arguments for why I feel that case was different but I agree you refuted my point.

That seems to be the committee's takeaway, too:

> “The fact that they used geo-location targeting to go after minor children to call congressional offices with misinformation about the bill caused so many members on the E&C Committee to vote in favor," [Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi] said.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-bytedance-bill-divest-...

The government has no business in dictating what apps we can use ... They are acting like any authoritarian, treating the public like kids ..

[dupe]

More discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39641428

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39635499

At risk of being accused of whataboutism, why is HN so preoccupied with disinformation and political interference from China when Russia has essentially bought off a large chunk of the GOP and has been super effective at sowing division and radicalizing the views of US citizens for a decade now?

China sucks balls at propaganda in the US. They're terrible at it. You can tell because so many here hate and are terrified of China. Whatever the CCP is trying to do, it isn't working. Yet, on HN, this is all I hear about.

Meanwhile, Putin, as it turns out, isn't really such a bad guy after all.

> Russia has essentially bought off a large chunk of the GOP

Source?

The Mueller report:

https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download

" The report concludes that the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities" "

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

Ah yes... The russiagate. To believe this you need to be ball deeps in democrats-leaning conspiracy theories. This has never been anywhere close to be proven.

Having common incentives, doesn't mean that you are conspiring and bought by Russia.

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