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Comment by rusty_venture | Hacker News Reader

What's your point? China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns? "The supreme art of war is to defeat the enemy without fighting", e.g. to undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions, to gain the ability to compromise our critical infrastructure, and to influence our politics. All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.

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> Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?

Because we are not China and our institutions are built on presumption of freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. If we start emulating China, we will become China. Our institutions are supposed to be robust enough to handle local and foreign propaganda and if they are not, then censorship is certainly not a solution that would be compatible with the liberal democratic values that we are supposed to hold.

US Citizens still have the same freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. Those rights don't extend to foreign adversaries. If you want to relay Chinese or Russian or Ukrainian or Israeli or Hamas propaganda, you are completely free to do it, without censorship. Limiting the ability of any of those countries to project it within the US is reasonable stance.

You're limiting the information US Citizens can get from the outside world - therefore you are limiting their freedom of thought and access to information.

I think it's a dangerous road to go down, the US is already extremely inwards facing and suffers from not knowing much about the outside world. I've had hundreds of US Citizens talk to me face to face who don't know what language we speak in Australia, don't know we use different money, not know the seasons are backwards, not know it's a 15 hour flight, not know we don't have a president, etc. etc. (this list is endless). US Citizens are not very well educated about how things work in other countries, clearly to their own detriment.

Just yesterday I was talking to a friend in the US saying my friend has 18 months fully paid maternity leave and he almost fell over. His wife got 10 weeks. Many countries do things better than the US, and it's dangerous to limit US Citizens learning about that, else they will have no notion things can be (and are) better elsewhere, and should be improved.

> limiting the information US Citizens can get from the outside world

Nothing is being censored. TikTok.com will still work. This bill limits TikTok’s distribution, not existence nor even access to Americans.

> This bill limits TikTok’s distribution, not existence nor even access to Americans.

Wait for it.

By that logic we shouldn’t have speed limits because it’s a slippery slope to banning cars.

Free trade should go both ways.

It's ridiculous to let Chinese apps and websites operate in the West when China blocks so many Western sites and apps: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...

Free trade generally does not mean you have to let foreign companies operating in your country do things that domestic companies are not allowed to do.

Most of those sites are not in China not because China says that they cannot operate there but rather because China say they would have to obey the same rules Chines companies do. That generally involves things like storing data on Chinese citizens only on servers in China, censoring things the government wants censored, and giving the government easy access to information including identifying information to unmask anonymous posters.

This is post hoc nonsense. China blocked US tech companies so that they could copy what the US companies do without any threat of superior competition.

The basic benefits of free trade (based on comparative advantage) do not require both parties to engage in it

They make a superior dancing video app, so then engineers in silicon valley can go work on something else instead

The point is that they get to access the Western market with their dancing video app, but Westerners aren't allowed to access their market with the apps they make. That gives those Chinese companies an unfair advantage in potential market reach.

And it turns out that that's irrelevant in terms of net benefit to the citizen of a country

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

Resources are reallocated elsewhere

A simplistic economic model that overlooks hundreds of important factors may provide a basic Econ 101 understanding but it does not reflect how the world truly operates and proves nothing.

Sure it's a simple model. But the burden of proof lies with the person claiming that free trade needs to be bilateral. That's not some inherent property of it, or something immediately obvious. A basic look at it past "It's not faaiiiiiir" actually shows quite the opposite

Where is freedom of speech involved with changing the ownership of a company?

That's nice, but you have to defend democracy from people who wish to overthrow it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

Is every heterodox narrative immediately "intolerance" in your view?

>> China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?

Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.

>> undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions

It seems like Americans did a pretty good job of this themselves at the last election cycle. A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result. How much worse can TikTok make things?

>> Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.

The paradox of tolerance.

>> A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result.

2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions, so yeah, prohibiting foreign-owned social media networks in advance of the upcoming election is definitely a step in the right direction.

>> 2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions

Why is nothing being done about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Truth Social, etc. etc? There are more users on Facebook alone.

The point is that the West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets. Going beyond, it claimed that (in the post Reagan/Thatcher era) that free markets are a prerequisite for being a rich country. Yet, the moment free markets became inconvenient, the west dropped that narrative and went full protectionist. As a result, China gets a propaganda victory in the eyes of non-Western nations.

All things considered, it's a minor problem for the US/West. Just looking like hypocrites. Compared to, say, the 2003 Iraq war it's a nothingburger.

It's not hypocrisy to expect free trade to go both ways.

China blocks many major Western websites and apps. Reciprocating is far from unfair: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...

West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets

China is not free, not a democracy, and not a free market, so there no hypocrisy. What was crazy was supporting the one sided relationship where we export our industry and production capacity to China while they block and steal from our businesses.

I'd support TikTok in the US if China gets rid of their firewall.

> looking like hypocrites

This is the paradox of tolerance [1]. It’s a worn discussion and far from hypocritical.

In any case, I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people and allies. More pointedly when the other side is a dictatorship.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

That's the exact argument e.g. Turkey used to ban Wikipedia/Youtube/Twitter etc.

Make of that what you will.

> the exact argument e.g. Turkey used to ban Wikipedia/Youtube/Twitter etc.

Which one(s)? (Genuinely curious.)

Also, was it a ban or divestment requirement? What wins me over on this bill is it isn’t a ban. It isn’t even a requirement to be controlled by an American. ByteDance could sell TikTok to a Korean or Hugarian or Middle Eastern country—even Turkey—and be in compliance with the law.

This one:

> I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people

Turkey's constitution also guarantees free speech etc. However, there are also laws that say you cannot insult people's religious sensibilities or serve sexually explicit content. The motivation for these laws is that this type of content degrades the moral fabric of society.

Politicians whipped up moral panics and judges (who were in many cases appointed by those very same politicians) issued rulings requiring these platforms to remove the offending content. The platforms refused, and were banned. When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country".

> When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country"

When the facts change our opinions should, too. I used to be a free-trade absolutist. It’s become clear that doesn’t work.

I remain a strong free-speech advocate. Which is why I was against Trump’s proposed TikTok ban. This, however, is different. There is an out in divestment—to an American or non-American. And even if ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok.com won’t be blocked. Moreover, the entire process is subject to judicial oversight. If ByteDance’s Constitutional rights are being abrogated, they have a forum in which to find relief.

Turkey’s tale is cautionary. We should be mindful when we find we were previously wrong. But I think this is different. Free trade (in its absolute sense) isn’t a core American value. Free speech is. The First Amendment protects ByteDance’s speech. It does not guarantee its distribution.

> All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.

Those campaigns mostly took part on platforms owned and operated by US companies.

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