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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

The rest of the world should use this precedent to ban Instagram, Twitter and Facebook - they are no less harmful. Possibly YouTube and US based search engines, too. All of these services are not only prone to algorithmic manipulation, they actually are being manipulated to advance the preferred narratives, and suppress the "undesirable" ones. What is preferred and what is undesirable is decided in the US, sometimes with the "help" of US government (see e.g. the Twitter Files and other similar leaks).

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I call social media “tobacco companies of the mind.”

All of it is toxic. All of it is manipulative. It’s all designed to addict you (“maximizing engagement” is code for addiction) to feed you ads and propaganda.

It destroys relationships, ruins people’s attention spans, and eats people’s time. It’d also the main driver of political hyper-polarization because that’s what maximizes engagement.

In the end it leaves nothing to show for itself. Books, movies, even radio and TV leave behind a cultural legacy. Social media leaves nothing because there is nothing worth saving. It’s barely even worthy of being called media.

I’ve watched it evolve since MySpace and over time it has only become less intelligent, more polarizing, less actually social, and more addicting.

Burn it all down.

Edit: TikTok seems like it’s currently the pinnacle of hyper-addictive trash. I predict the next iteration beyond TikTok will drop the pretense of social entirely and just use AI to generate personalized streams of addictive filler. It’ll be the mental equivalent of the tub or “Flaturin” the idiots eat on Idiocracy. Just addictive vapor to act as a medium for ad delivery. YouTube is kinda already heading this way.

Well China set the precedent, they did ban Google etc in China. India banned TikTok too. Will have to see how all of this will pan out.

Balkanized social media networks.

It's a tragedy for sharing human knowledge. Say what you want about China, but there's a huge amount of amazing stuff there that the Western world just doesn't know about. Art, architecture, science, technology, etc.

Think about how much human knowledge in Discord servers is hidden from search engines --- in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.

> in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.

I wouldn't refer to highly censored information, disinformation, and discourse controlled by the CCP as "knowledge".

Similarly for western social media. While they're not directly controlled by governments, each platform has its own biases and algorithms that enforce their values and beliefs on the information hosted on their servers. These are not public squares that protect "freedom of speech", regardless of what they may claim.

The knowledge found on these sites is of minimal value, and most of it is drowned by the noise produced by the vast majority of their users and bots.

What??? there's tons of valid information there about all sorts of topics not even remotely related to political stuff that would get censored.

There's food, technology, science, whatever. I mean sure there's noise in the form of memes like all social media sites, but calling it "minimal value" is pretty extreme.

To take one example, I use Xiaohongshu to read about camera lenses. There's a lot of good information that's not available on Western platforms (optical simulations, anecdotes about rare lenses, etc).

Perhaps "minimal value" is wrongly phrased. After all, if you find great value in these sites, I can't contradict your experience.

My point is that most content posted on these platforms is heavily modified to game and appease the algorithms that drive engagement. So you never really know if something is factual and honest.

Add to that the fact that these platforms promote content that is actively harmful to its users, and to society as a whole, and I doubt whether whatever valuable information is on them is really worth searching for and consuming. Chances are that you would be able to find the same information elsewhere, without risking your sanity.

That said, I do have an extremely negative view of all social media, and actively avoid it, so I concede that I may be missing out. :)

A better example than dedicated social media apps is perhaps Baike, commonly described as China's Wikipedia. Except it isn't, because it's not a non-profit organization with a mission to provide free and unbiased information to the world, it's a locked-down product of Baidu, one of China's major tech companies who once upon a time (much like Google) owned domestic search and maps, who also run Tieba (something like Reddit) and so on. This is the biggest difference I find on the "chinanet" - all of the top sites are owned by one of the major tech companies, and all of these companies have an interest in trying to keep you inside their ecosystem.

Outside of the chinanet this also happens, where Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft all try to keep you inside their ecosystems (to say nothing of the traditional media companies like Disney, WBD etc), but outside the chinanet there remains a small but influential "information wants to be free" movement that is unaligned with any government or corporation. So we have Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap and the Internet Archive... It's not much, but it's something.

From my perspective if people really want to see a free and open internet, where information is never hidden in gated communities, the only choice is to support non-profits with aligned missions. Then people all over the world - including China - can contribute.

God I wish Wikipedia wasn't banned by the Great Firewall.

It's kinda sad that stuff like Caltrain electrification, for example, has a huge and well-researched article despite not even being in service yet, just because of the large amount of Wikipedians in the Bay Area where the Wikimedia Foundation is headquartered. In the meanwhile, entire operational train systems both in China and elsewhere in the world that have vastly greater ridership, longer length, more advanced technology, etc, get nary a mention. I have nothing against Caltrain electrification getting a great article since I'm an inclusionist but it is just sad how little of the cool things, especially in China, are on Wikipedia.

Even with the Great Firewall, Chinese Wikipedia is the eighth largest by number of edits, daily views, and active users: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table2

Chinese topics are usually well-covered on the Chinese Wikipedia, the lack of an English-language article is more likely to be attributable to a shortage of English-Chinese bilinguals translating that information.

Do you have some particular train system in mind?

Chinese Wikipedia is mostly made by Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese people so they often are not as comprehensive for recent developments in the mainland.

A lot of Chinese language content is hidden in domestic gated communities regardless of whether other countries ban access or not.

The original problem here is most Chinese tech companies behave exactly like Discord in order to entice people to use their apps and ecosystem exclusively. In fact, in my experience, trying to access information freely on the web is much more difficult in China than it is in many western countries, precisely because the companies are so aggressive about forcing people to install their apps.

How easy is the Indian TikTok ban to circumvent?

For an app that relies on network effect I'd imagine 'just hard enough'.

TikTok doesn’t exist in India essentially.

And no one misses it.

It’s as pointless and substitutable as any other social network today.

Replaced by Reels basically.

Instagram reels have completely replaced Tiktok. No one around me misses Tiktok.

> China set the precedent, they did ban Google etc in China. India banned TikTok too

And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country.

>And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country.

If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place.

> If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place

This bill makes that explicit. TikTok doesn't have to be sold to an American. It could be sold to any of the above, and it would comply with the proposed law.

To clarify, those were not bans. They were decisions by companies not to follow the laws that every other company in that country has to follow as well.

Wait, didn't that already happen during Trumps presidency.

No, China didn’t ban Google or Facebook… China wants these companies play its rules, and these companies choose to not play. It’s not a ban.

Look at many Europe companies and Microsoft.

How is that fundamentally different from a ban?

You could phrase it thus:

"Here are our rules we want you to follow. If you choose not to, you are banned from operating in our country"

"We cannot follow your rules because those rules are unacceptable to us / would undermine our business model / would compromise our position in other countries we care about more / insert other reason here"

"Then you are banned"

A ban means when you operate in a country, you violate their rule, or whatever they call rule, then you are banned.

In this case, you haven’t operated in this country, the government of this country tells you that if you want to operate, you have to follow rule a, rule b… Then you choose to not follow these rules, and quit.

These are different.

Another example is you are operating in a country and not violating any rule from the very beginning. One day when you are strong enough and the government of this country feels you’re threaten. Then they tells you that you have to sell your branch in their country, if not you will be banned.

Now you get it?

Right, which is why the US Congress is looking to pass a rule that says "don't be beholden to the Communist Party".

Then Chinese companies can either choose to play or leave.

No one is beholden to anyone in this war.

With this kind of situation, a "threaten" company has no choice but to take the less bad option. And people will not understand the real reason or what actually threatening.

The ridiculous is US was always the freedom symbol for everything. I wonder if such kind of freedom only exists when US is the strongest one and others are far behind? But it's understandable that the US election day is coming.

I’m not referring to China, that case was settled long time ago. I’m talking about Europe and the rest of Asia, South America, Canada. If you think about it, allowing a foreign state unfettered influence over public opinion (as well as near total internet surveillance) is an utterly insane thing to do.

MTG is bananas but she's right, why start at tiktok when there are battalions of military aged Chinese males crossing the border through Mexico, scores of Chinese tech companies operating in the US legally, and companies/politicians (like Microsoft and the Clintons) who sold America out to China decades ago. Tiktok ban is almost superficial

A nation state doesn't need precedent to ban Instagram, they could just do it. Problem is they would lose the next election because people will think it's stupid.

They do need precedent. Any other country if they did just ban US social media like that would probably find itself in a trade war.

Not even China or Russia just went ahead and banned US tech companies, at most they asked for equal oversight to domestic companies.

> Any other country if they did just ban US social media like that would probably find itself in a trade war

Probably not. There is enough frustration with the tech giants across the political spectrum that consolidating votes for a retaliation wouldn't happen.

> Not even China or Russia just went ahead and banned US tech companies

China banned Google and Facebook years ago.

And Russia? "In March 2022, Russia criminalized spreading 'misinformation' against its war with Ukraine. TikTok then banned any new uploads and only allowed old videos that were uploaded within Russia" [1].

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

Technically, the executive can retaliate, including through the WTO. No need for Congress, that would be only necessary once it escalates, and then it wouldn't be a big tech only issue anywhere. Beyond that, there would probably be retaliation next Congress anyways.

China did not ban Google and Facebook. They both had the opportunity to comply with extremely restrictive local laws and both decided not to bother (especially Facebook for which it would likely have been too expensive).It offered both to obey the same laws and controls as local companies, and they refused. Famously, Google had Project Dragonfly to make their own TikTok/Douyin split, until political and employee pressure stopped that.

This is very much precedented (and is done by many more countries for many more industries), in a way that banning TikTok just isn't.

> the executive can retaliate, including through the WTO

Trump tried this. It was blocked by the courts [1]. Retaliatory tariffs aren't something the executive can magic up.

> China did not ban Google and Facebook. They both had the opportunity to comply with extremely restrictive local laws

Restrictive and immoral. Even withint this framework, this bill's response is incredibly forgiving. Because, again, the point is not to ban TikTok. It's to rehome it.

> in a way that banning TikTok just isn't

If anything, banning TikTok (which, again, this bill doesn't aim to do) is deeply internationally precedented [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok_v._Trump

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok

> Trump tried this. It was blocked by the courts [1]. Retaliatory tariffs aren't something the executive can magic up.

The link you sent is not relevant to the claim - just because a specific kind of executive tarrif was found illegal doesn't mean that there aren't executive tarrifs. The executive has the right to impose tarrifs - the 1974 Trade Act allows the president to impose 15% tarrifs for 150 days for broad national security reasons and the 1962 Trade Expansion Act allows the president to direct the Department of Commerce to investigate and recommend any kind of tarrif or trade measures for broad reasons including general welfare. Both of these laws have been tested by the Trump administration and in most cases the tarrifs survived challenges (*1)

> Restrictive and immoral. Even withint this framework, this bill's response is incredibly forgiving. Because, again, the point is not to ban TikTok. It's to rehome it.

International trade doesn't work on the basis of freedom and morality. It works on the basis of reciprocity. The idea, and the norm, being that foreign businesses should be allowed to operate as a local business would. Restrictive and immoral laws are completely consistent with this so long as they are applied to local and foreign businesses alike. Forcing a sale to a domestic entity however is completely different and is not precedented.

> If anything, banning TikTok (which, again, this bill doesn't aim to do) is deeply internationally precedented [2].

Read the list carefully. Every one of those bans were either temporary (Bangladesh, first Indian ban, Indonesia, Jordan, Senegal, Pakistan) because TikTok chose not to comply with local laws (Iran, Russia, Afghanistan) or the result of a military conflict (Second Indian ban, Taiwan).

After this, 4 countries remain : Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nepal, and Kyrgyzstan. It turns out that, as of today, Tiktok is not banned in any of those countries. In Armenia and Azerbaijan, the ban turned out to be temporary after border flashpoints led to media suppression (*2). In Nepal, the ban is being challenged in court and meanwhile the ban is not implemented by many ISPs (*3). In Kyrgyzstan, there simply isn't actually a ban (*2)

That is to say, no, there is no precedent. Every other ban was either temporary, due to TikTok deciding local laws - applied to everyone - weren't worth compliance, or as a result of a direct military conflict with China. These are all fair, accepted, and preceded scenarios. A Tiktok ban purely based on foreign ownership just isn't precedented.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_tariffs?wprov=sfla1

2: https://explorer.ooni.org/chart/mat?probe_cc=AZ&since=2024-0...

3: https://www.lokmattimes.com/international/tiktok-still-opera...

Neither Google nor Facebook are banned in China. They could operate there if they follow the same laws as every other company in that country.

Just like some US newspapers don't show Europeans any content because they choose to not comply with European laws. These outlets are not banned in any way.

But none of that has to do with the reason it’s being banned, at least according to the article

Yea, China should ban US social media in retaliation...

What’s remaining? I think it’s all already banned..

Is HN banned in China yet? I used to spend a lot of time on HN on the taxi home from work when I was living in Beijing. I’m guessing now even Reddit is blocked, HN is possibly blocked, there wouldn’t be much to kill time on without a VPN.

There are plenty of sites to test this, and yes HN is blocked.

Biden isn't setting an international precedent here. He isn't even setting a US precedent.

* The US shut down Napster, and a large number of other web services over time.

* The new Utah age verification laws has essentially forced many websites to stop severing traffic to them.

* China has banned twitter, facebook, google, etc.

* India has banned tiktok

* Iran has banned Twitter and Facebook.

* North Korea operates on a whitelist of websites, and western social media isn't on the list.

Why stop there? Why don’t you suggest banning Google, WhatsApp, all news sites generally, and more?

afaict the reasoning for banning TikTok kinda makes sense for getting it off of the devices of government employees. The rest seems pretty overblown and silly to me.

Precisely what’s going to happen eventually. I mention that towards the end of my post.

Why do you think banning search engines would be a net positive for society?

I guess you haven’t been to China before.

This is why the US government pushing a national security angle to this is idiotic. They should have made a simple trade reciprocity argument: essentially every non-Chinese social network or communication app is blocked in China, and until that changes TikTok wouldn't be allowed to operate in the US. Simple, impossible to argue with, and doesn't blow back on any US companies.

When the concern is national security why would they push a trade reciprocity argument?

You do know that Biden cannot just lie and get away with it right? Unlike in authoritarian countries, nearly all American records will be unsealed within a single generation.

Further, the press usually gets the wind of stuff being hidden.

That doesn’t stop the government from trying to hide stuff and they often succeed, but why would they take a chance on something like this which gives them an extremely tiny benefit at best.

He literally lies nearly every time he speaks and doesn’t care if something will be “uncovered”, like any other US president before him. Bush lied about Afghanistan and Iraq. Zero consequences. Obama lied about Syria and Libya - zero consequences.

It’s absolutely not idiotic. What’s idiotic is that so few other countries do not see national security threats from US based social media companies

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