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Comment by codekaze | Hacker News Reader

I think the primary argument for banning TikTok should be based on reciprocity rather than moral and/or security concerns. We can make similar arguments about the negative effects of Facebook, Instagram, and etc. even from the POVs of other countries, but the key issue here is that China heavily restricts foreign apps and services from operating in their market. If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?

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I don't think we should "lowest common denominator" to oppressive regimes. Our Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press. So it should be allowed under the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects pledging your allegiance to the Flag, just as it protects China saying "China is great, you should love us instead". The First Amendment makes no attempt to moderate content; you can say pretty much whatever you want. If China's use of TikTok for propaganda upsets you, then it's on you to make a compelling argument that is better than theirs. (I actually don't think that TikTok is much of a Chinese propaganda avenue. People are just mad that it's telling kids to eat tide pods and then they get sick. Who knew that underfunding public education for years would have consequences.)

At the end of the day, what this law is asking for is a Great Firewall around the US, that prohibits which websites its citizens can visit. I do not want that, even if China's market practices are unfair. The cure is worse than the disease.

How many times do we see the government trample on our rights behind “safety”?

I’m fully with you on this. If TikTok is harmful, spread the word and let people make that decision for themselves. If kids are too small to make that decision, that falls on the parents. Don’t take away my rights because others can’t vet companies and use their brains if they should use the apps these companies put out.

What rights is it taking away? TikTok will still exist, you will still be able to get to it on the internet. All this bill does is force a sale OR prevent American companies from platforming technology from adversarial nations (something every government does all the time... see the US and Huawei or limiting Nvidia exports to china etc).

You'll still be able to download the app from the internet (just not an App Store) or browse it on your phone on the internet. We aren't putting up a 'great firewall' or anything

My mistake then, but what’s the point then? Won’t they come for the website next if TikTok doesn’t sell? I don’t even use TikTok but I know this law will be precedence for other laws blocking outside websites.

Well for one, it could force the sale to a non adversarial nation. Two, if it doesn't it undercuts the companies ability to deliver it on American app platforms, both of which are a positive from the viewpoint of the US government.

That's the main loophole.

The only way to ban TikTok is with a network firewall. US can ban local web hosting and even DNS (see pirate media sites), which might be enough to destroy the "network effect" of the site's popularity. But has US ever banned an IP address or routing?

I hope you realize that your libertarian stances are a wet dream for a pysops team.

The idea of “rights” expands far beyond that which works well for you and people like you.

I don't think the founders could account for international influence in the age of the Internet and smart phones.

No one is asking for a great wall around the US. People are just asking that major influencers are not under the control of hostile governments.

Is international influence something that should be stopped? Like, I should check the citizenship of someone before I listen to their ideas? It just doesn't make sense to me. If someone tells me nonsense I can ignore the nonsense. It doesn't mean the government should smash their printing press.

It's annoying when people in other countries rile up people to change how they vote, but ultimately, that's a problem with democracy. It's the worst system out there, except for all the others. People not understanding their government is the deeper problem. Does banning TikTok fix this problem? It sounds like we're saying "only opinion columnists who work for The New York Times and Fox News should be able to tell you how to vote and what issues you care about". That's really not great either, is it?

It's really depressing watching the government strip away the rights of women and transgender people. We can't blame social media influence bots for that. It's elected officials that are doing it. TikTok is just a distraction from the true hardcore hatred that we've elected.

I'll try to weigh in. Democratic republics like the USA are heavily swayed by people, protests, etc. In the digital age, just-in-time censorship of social media like Facebook or Twitter have been extremely effective at preventing "good/bad" protests, and each government sets the rules for the social media in the country (read easy censorship). Additionally, there have been a number of international propaganda campaigns that were successful to disrupt regular elections in the USA recently. See evidence of certain protests getting huge right before and during the russo-ukrainian conflict and covid shutdowns. Tik tok the platform's users generally contribute and consume as a "community that generates content in good faith" (I use that definition loosely), but it is a arm of soft CCP power that could just-in-time promote something terrible (brainstorming here: cultivate civil-war-esque mindsets then trigger, convince the population to avoid polio vaccines, etc.) Elections are tumultuous enough without having each "town square" potentially weaponized by potentially hostile nations, so requiring that free press be free from foreign control (influence is okay under free speech) is what is being decided here.

> Is international influence something that should be stopped?

This should be a simple yes. External authoritarian governments (Russia's IRA, CCP via bytedance) should not have their thumb on the scale (trollfarms & the algorithm) for what is viewed in western democracies. I'm actually amazed that this view is controversial.

I agree with the rest of your premises, but the above should be a separate issue from them.

If American democracy goes down because of "foreign influencers" from platforms like TikTok then it means that it wasn't all that strong to begin with.

I don't think there's any country that can withstand someone having direct access to manipulate more than half of the population

I stand by my point, if half of the population can be ideologically "switched"/manipulated by a smartphone app then the original ideology (I would assume liberal-democracy in the case of US) wasn't that heavily implanted to begin with.

The US politicians should look into why that is so, why is that suddenly the US population so easy to "manipulate" away from an ideology it has strongly believed in for more than 200 years, but I guess that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).

What if the US and most other countries have always been sheepishly easy to manipulate -- but it wasn't noticeable, until modern tech like FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok appeared?

It seems to me that Xi in China agrees about this, in that they've blocked all those things (except for their own).

> that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).

How do you mean? That they too manipulate the population, and are part of a manipulation problem?

Tiktok isn't "some website", it is partially owned and controlled by the CCP, which influences what content gets shown to Americans. A majority of zoomers get most of their news and information primarily from this platform, which again is under the influence of a hostile foreign government. (TikTok also spies on US citizens for the CCP, but let's keep this restricted to the free speech argument about the ban).

We actually don't have to shrug and say "oh well, first amendment" with respect to propaganda outlets of foreign countries.

would the same argument apply to Fox News? If not, why not?

Of course not. He said "foreign countries". The propaganda outlets at home are harmless.

Whatever you think of our home-grown propaganda outlets, the US govt taking different approaches to foreign outlets should be uncontroversial. Unlike the CCP, US citizens have first amendment rights.

No, it's owned & controlled by an American family (from Australia), has its headquarters in New York City and is not beholden to any foreign governments.

> is not beholden to any foreign governments.

The reverse has occasionally been the case.

Fox News and MSNBC are propaganda for American political parties not foreign governments. They have a much stronger constitutional argument for 1st Amendment protection than Russia Today or China Central TV would.

It seems you are not looking to American history: CIA and dictatorships in Latin America?

What’s the argument here? Because the US does harm to others, they should permit others to harm them?

No, it is to talk apples vs. apples about the upper argument on USA having propaganda only internally.

The US government absolutely has its own government run media outlets such as Voice of America and foreign governments do ban them. For example, the Taliban has attempted to ban VOA in Afghanistan:

https://www.insidevoa.com/a/despite-taliban-s-censorship-voa...

FoxNews and MSNCB are directed internally. An example of American propaganda directed externally would be Voice of America.

I feel like the twitter files weren’t sufficiently long enough ago to make this one sided argument.

All governments have their hand in the cook jar.

The US government working with social media companies to censor Americans (and other people) on those platforms is also pretty bad, yes. My impression is that their influence is much weaker and more marginal than is the case with the CCP and tiktok, though. But I would be sympathetic to other countries banning US social media on the ground of US govt influence.

How can you acknowledge that the USG colludes with domestic platforms to censor Americans and not think that it is targeting foreign platforms because they make that censorship more difficult?

You know, the obvious explanation that doesn’t require an unseen CCP bogeyman.

On the one hand, leaving the potential for CCP propaganda to reach citizen's eyes can be a threat model for insurgency. On the other hand, leaving it monitoring the data coming in, then earmarking when there's an uptick in "flagged" packets or whatever could be a valuable heuristic. It all depends on the point of view.

If someone wants to subject themselves to CCP propaganda, why stop them? If they’re that lacking in critical thinking, then maybe they’re getting what they deserve. It’s not like anyone is forcing people to use TikTok.

The funny thing is there's not really that much propaganda on TikTok, much less pro-CCP. Sure there's the potential, but it's really not even much of a thing IRL.

Go make some videos about Taiwan, Tiananmen, or Tibet and see what the algo does to you.

https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tiananmensquare

https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1737948525340615118

It doesnt have to be pro CCP. All they have to do is slightly boost anti US or anti Israel or anti Ukraine and it is the same thing. Slowly boiling the frog by boosting fringe voices and promoting them as common views.

Yes and for this reason I support a similar ban in my country of large scale American owned social media. Given they are all guilty of the above claims.

What the American owned social networks have done to my countries populace, including its youth, is nothing short of a disaster. It’s induced complete brain rot.

We should ban it here too but they have too much money for that to happen unfortunately.

Promoting fringe voices is perfectly legitimate, both in terms of politics and free speech. That is literally how all social progress comes about. It's also how we elected our previous President. Like it or not, those are the rules of the game.

I take issue only with your use of the word 'progress'. 'Change' certainly.

Change in the firmament of free ideas and free association, surely that's better than the alternative

We absolutely do not have to allow our geopolitical enemies to do it on our soil to our citizens.

It doesn't even have to be anti-US, all it needs to do is make the factions inside the US fight each other even more. Push two sides that are both "pro-US". That is, after all, also how CIA overthrows governments...

This kind of argument can be used to censor anything deemed controversial.

Lots of people in the US are anti-Israel and anti-Ukraine spending. Many are also against the current US government's actions.

Are they "pro-CCP"? Honestly, you think anyone who disagrees with the regime are tankies?

> The funny thing is there's not really that much propaganda on TikTok

I recommend that you sit down in front of your computer with your beverage of choice and do a deep dive into psyops.

To address your comment, there are psyops actors in every significant (and some less significant) social media platform, even our own Hacker News. Whether you want to call their work “propaganda” or something else is mostly semantics — they are operating with an agenda, sometimes/often one that conflicts with the will and/or best interest of our nation (in my case, the US).

Indeed, we are so awash in propaganda it's often difficult to recognize it as such.

"What's water?"

We've had a lot of fun watching people make "I'm being gangstalked" videos over the last couple years. YT, not TikTok.

Fair enough... I consider that all propaganda. Anyone acting with an agenda, especially when they're trying to persuade without openly disclosing their agenda. Even more so, there's plenty of people who post stuff (like the fringe violence or whatever) who aren't necessarily psyops, but then the algo can promote it in a way that influences people. And I know this can all be done gradually and subtly.

But you should do a deep dive on tiktok if you aren't already on it! It's almost all fun/bizarre/educational videos. When you have so many people (lawmakers) critiquing it who don't use it regularly, it all just comes across as McCarthyism.

(edited to remove a sentence I started and didn't finish)

Because I'm not fancying getting what they deserve together with them. Some brainless zoomers might be casually destroying the West and causing our doom, but I don't want to suffer from their stupidity. I would rather limit their fun than my life.

Because they then vote, based on Putin's and Xi's propaganda. It's those two choosing the US president

Because insurgents

Doesn't first ammendment protect even that. Propaganda of other countries are legal under first ammendment.

Why should we be a nanny state that should dictate which apps one can or cannot use on one's device.

Also even at the hight of cold war, Soviet Life magazine was published and disseminated widely in the US.

A US citizen distributing foreign media themselves is quite different than what is effectively a directly controlled broadcast owned by a foreign government.

Listening to foreign radio stations on shortwave and listening their propaganda is also not illegal in the US.

I’m not usually a slippery slope person, but if we’re outlawing content based on who owns the creator or transmitter, things get ugly quick.

A rule that hostile nations can’t own communication platforms in your country isn’t a slippery slope.

The US is widely against even having its own government own communication platforms.

“On 4 September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own US television stations.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch#Activities_in...)

It's not even content per se, it's much more insidious than that.

The comment I originally replied to likened tiktok to a printing press, but that's not quite right.

Imagine a printing press owned by an enemy that would subtly manipulate the text of whatever you tried to print. Or maybe it would omit entire articles from certain recipients of the newspaper, or reorganize the page layout to emphasize different things than the editor intended.

We wouldn't allow this hypothetical printing press controlled by a hostile foreign government to be sold in the US, we would be crazy to.

Actually, yes, we would allow such a thing. Plenty of our news organizations are foreign – owned, and many of them are very elegant to your hypothetical printing press. The US simply doesn’t have the constitutional or legal framework to regulate content reproduction for ideological reasons.

The content is not what is being outlawed, only the distribution mechanism. ISIS wouldn't be allowed to own a publishing company in America; nobody thinks that somehow curtails freedom of speech. If somebody so chooses, they could distribute content from ISIS, and restrictions on that would indeed be a restriction on speech. But it wouldn't be a restriction to make it illegal to give money to ISIS.

that's because ISIS is a terrorist organization.

So if you want to make the same argument, you will have to declare china's CCP to be a terrorist organization - and all of the legal implications that entails.

That's not a constitutional requirement. There's no law that says the government can only do this to terrorists. In fact, even if somebody is a terrorist, if they're American, it would still be unconstitutional to deprive their freedom of speech. ByteDance, as a foreign entity, enjoys no such protection.

Is it? When you're saying that, I think you're imagining your neighbor, not your oligarch.

When one country tries to cause chaos in another, they use a two pronged approach. (1) they offer a country's aristocracy the ability to enrich themselves at the cost of their people. This could be things like cheap labor, gas pipelines, or being the guarantor of loans. (2) They tell a countries peasantry that the worlds problems are simple and that their government is their enemy and failing them. This is only empowered by having compromised their aristocracy, so their government is failing them.

Then they put their fingers on the scale by providing resources (weapons, funding, press, intelligence, etc.) to an aligned entity capable of promoting their interests.

It's worth considering that the great firewall of china exists explicitly because the Chinese government (rationally) thinks it's risky to subject people who were subsistence farming a generation ago to foreign influence.

The cost of freedom is responsibility, and if you have an irresponsible (read: poorly educated/non critical thinking) populace, then people will unwittingly surrender their freedom. Freedom means the freedom to do the wrong thing, but that can result in bending or breaking.

Rationally...I don't find that that is implied. China is doing that rationally from a completely self interested, in the animal sense, way. The point of freedom is freedom, it's an end unto itself, if people are fooled or liable to control given such freedom, let them be. Control hardly ever "works" (in the ultimate sense), maybe in children, but we're not talking about children. Children also grow old.

Well, we do that too: https://www.usagm.gov/2022/03/05/usagm-condemns-kremlins-inc...

Do foreign nationals have the same rights as Americans?

Foreign companies shouldn't have the same protections.

And in many countries, locally-operating subsidiaries are required to have majority ownership by citizens, partly to prevent foreign influence.

Foreign nationals in the US have the same rights (but not privileges) as American citizens.

Foreign nationals present on US soil only. This is why we Europeans have such a problem with having our data transferred to you, i.e. because we don't actually have any rights in the US.

I would characterise our lack of rights as complete. Some years ago Americans began torturing people who had been handed over to them on the promise that they would not be tortured already at Bromma airport, so here in Sweden, and this was presumably legal. I assume that if it had been done to me, it would have been legal as well.

The American constitution prohibits torture [1] so no one should be getting tortured by the government anywhere in the world. Of course, you could get around this by redefining what constitutes torture and getting a pliant attorney to sign off and away you go.

Data rights are not embedded in the constitution and so the US is currently in the process of creating a patchwork of (mostly state driven) legislation to define how user data can be treated. Hopefully, the Federal government will step in at some point and create some consistency and clarity with rules that are both practical and efficacious.

[1] Source: 8th Amendment

No, only Americans and US permanents residents are protected from torture outside of the US. Others have no constitutional protections whatsoever.

There is an inferred right to privacy though, and that is for this same reason not something applicable in cases of non-Americans and non-US residents when outside of the US.

There are already rules, there's the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, but it's implemented by an executive order, so there's nothing preventing there existing some other executive order secretly negating it.

Why should we be a nanny state that should dictate which bomber planes can or cannot enter our country?

Great point - flying a bomber plane over a country is protected speech.

Please indicate your sarcasm for I fear parent might take you literally

> Doesn't first ammendment protect even that.

Nope. The first amendment protects the speech of US citizens and only to a certain extent. This is why the US has a torture center in Guantanamo. To avoid issues of constitutional rights.

This is also, btw, what allows the CIA and NSA to spy on data you send overseas in violation of the 4th amendment.

US laws are geographically bound.

First Amendment also protects visitors, resident aliens, undocumented workers, and everyone else within the jurisdiction (with some nuance for prisoners, soldiers, etc).

What most of the posters in this thread don't realize is that US is effectively at war with China. China is working in front of the scenes to be the major funder of Russia's war [1] against Europe, which is US's ally amongst the coalition of democratic countries. China is working behind the scenes to stop the supply of artillery shells to Ukraine. [2]. and it is increasingly and more visibly supplying Russia with military supplies. [3]

People need to stop being so naive and realize that it's the aligned democratic countries (Ukraine, Europe, US, Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) fighting against the last survival of dictatorships (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea). If you wish the dictatorships to win, please by all means, move there.

[1] However, since 2022, China has amplified its purchase of cheaper Russian oil after the West hit Moscow with unprecedented sanctions https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/business/china-top-oil-suppli...

[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/02/world/politics/...

[3] https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/china-russia-alignment-co...

Even if that's true, if we suspend our constitutional rights to conduct a war, then what's the point in having them? I thought they were inalienable.

Imagine trying to suspend the 2nd amendment because of school shootings. The reason kinda doesn't matter when rights are on the line.

Many times constitution was suspended in US during wartime [1]. Also, school shooting has a very low likelihood of causing US to collapse. Losing an adversarial war against a rival of similar size with nuclear weapons and a brainwashing mechanism via TikTok will. I for one do not want to live in a world controlled by China, where the state can weld me inside my apartment [2], find random reasons to jail me then extract organs from me [3] or many of the atrocious things China does.

[1]https://www.military.com/history/6-times-martial-law-was-dec...

[2]https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818

[3] https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/analysis-killing-...

[3]

Sorry, but this just has an air of "My concerns are the only valid ones," that makes it hard to take seriously. I don't want to live in a world where my kids can get shot at school. I guess we just have different priorities, but I think it goes too far when we start saying, "Mine are right."

That's quite alright, I didn't expect to convince someone who believes that in a war for survival, an opposing dictatorship can freely operate the most powerful propaganda weapon humankind has known against the democracy. Just because you know, it's idealistic.

Can you walk me through the scenario you're envisioning? I'm having a hard time following the series of events that starts with the status quo of TikTok ownership and results in the Chinese state being able to harvest your organs. Can you paint me a picture of a timeline or a series of key turns that would lead to that outcome?

Anything's possible I guess, I mean, did anyone expect that China would allow the release of the man made covid virus from its Wuhan biolab (intentionally, or unintentionally) out to the world, killing millions in the process and giving long covid to millions more? And US and UK would be the ones that developed the vaccine successfully, and allowed the rest of the world to fully function after 2 years? And China would be the one that couldn't come up with its own vaccine, and just decided to release it into the wild in 2022 and bury any sort of mention of mass covid deaths [1]? I mean, if it were the other way around, and US and the rest of world was still shut down after 2 years while China was fully functional, TikTok could have been used by China to incite civil unrest in democratic countries, leading some to its downfall.

I mean, there's no way China would release a covid 2, right?

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/02/ch...

Ok, but can you be specific about the scenario you're envisioning that begins with China's current ownership of TikTok and ends with organ harvesting? It sounds like a specific concern you have and you've given it careful consideration.

i have to be honest here:

> can freely operate the most powerful propaganda weapon humankind has known against the democracy.

if we think is a true, accurate and non-hyperbolic description of tik-tok (and by extension social media) i don’t want anyone with power to operate them. whether it’s a billionaire from any country or any government.

it isn’t clear to me why we would treat a billionaire, a mega corporation, or a government any different with anything this powerful. again, if we were to agree this description is accurate no organization or person should have this kind of influence.

We have to start somewhere, and not having it under the control of a hostile foreign government is a good first step.

i agree, we have to start somewhere. and if we think it’s the most powerful propaganda weapon ever developed, the place to start is by regulating _all_ social media.

You are absolutely right. Turning the other cheek when facing an opponent which is pointing at you as an source of ultimate evil and acting like it is plainly stupid.

Just curious why the marketplace of ideas won't solve this? If people don't want to be influenced or want to avoid it, won't they? Or if a competitor wants to deliver a more engaging product, shouldn't consumer choice result in the best possible outcome?

This has a feeling of paternalism that rubs me the wrong way. I'd be happy to hear of a case where large scale paternalism worked out, but so far it seems like paternalism is a failed ideology whose proponents continue to not realize that, "just one more try; it will work."

What I'm hearing is an argument for cultural-Sakokuism and I have to remind the reader that it never works.

> Imagine trying to suspend the 2nd amendment because of school shootings.

2A is for well regulated militias, from an era when the government struggled to raise and maintain a standing army, and wasn't sure an army could even be trusted. 2A was antiquated long before schools started having to teach toddlers survival tactics.

China also continues to trade with the US despite Russian sanctions on the US.

Does this mean China is effectively at war with Russia too?

Current trading activities doesn't mean much by themselves. Europe also still trades with Russia. This is sort of missing the forest for the trees. You have to look at whether there are concerted efforts from Europe/US to REDUCE trade with Russia/China, which is yes. And whether US/Europe is restricting China's military capability, which is yes.

Doesn’t matter as far as the Constitution is concerned. It says “Congress shall make no law …”. Doesn’t add anything about “except in time of war” or “when it’s really inconvenient” or “when parents fail to monitor their child”.

Please don’t act like people who are against top down banning of apps in the usa are aligned with autocracy. That’s precisely the opposite of accurate.

They are definitely aligned with the desire of autocracies. They may not realize it, but doesn't mean it's not the case.

This would be like if someone were against the government suppressing leftist groups and barring radicals from hollywood and such during the red scare because of the violation of civil liberties, then you walked up and said they were pro russia. Completely reductive.

1. China was originally a significant importer of goods from Russia. Over the past two years, due to the lower oil prices from Russia, the import volume has increased by 30%. 2. The total purchasing amount from the European Union and India surpasses that of China, with no single entity making significant purchases of Russian energy. 3. Perhaps you should look into the historical records of energy procurement by India. In 2021, trade with Russia was essentially negligible, but it now constitutes 36%. The main financier behind the scenes should be clearer now.

US is not at war with China. We are in a period of escalating tension, but have broad and far reaching economic, political, and social ties. Despite our disagreements, we have in the past and continue to cooperate on mutually beneficial terms.

That said, the CCP is not hoping for the United States to suddenly become politically stabilized. They are not hoping for the US populace to embrace the current social and economic order which stands at odds to Chinese goals. The CCP is an extremely disciplined predator organization with a long-term outlook, and should be dealt with appropriately.

If the first amendment actually protects TikTok here, as may be the case, then the courts can strike this down.

On the other hand, perhaps the first amendment doesn't block this. In that case, that relevant consideration would seems to be rare broad bipartisan support (as evidenced by a very lopsided 352-65 vote, but we'll see what happens in the Senate) to limit the potential harm that can be done by the information warfare capabilities of a genocidal authoritarian regime with whom it is certainly plausible that the US will be at war with in the next decade.

It is really unclear, absent a successful constitutional challenge, why the free speech maximalism preferences of a throwaway account on HN should hold more weight than lopsided bipartisan vote by democratically elected legislators.

The law will have little impact except to reacquaint children with web browsers, VPNs and side loading.

You are drastically overestimating the capabilities and determination of tiktok users

"The U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact."

-Justice Roberth H. Jackson

Buddy if some meaningful proportion of your population is finding foreign propaganda convincing, your problem isn’t foreign propaganda.

USA in terminal decline and, in typical fashion, it flatly refuses to look at itself and wonder why. American power elite has no one to blame but itself.

That and political reasoning is impotent in the age of internet connectivity.

Yeah, we should only tolerate domestic propaganda outlets.

You jest, but personally I prefer democratic self-origin propaganda to foreign authoritarian state propaganda.

An interesting phenomenon is people in the US who already got manipulated, and then spread the manipulation from within the US, eagerly and voluntarily, as US citizens

Foreign money to "domestic" lobbyists blurs that boundary a lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association#Rus...

Like beer, consumers of propaganda should have a choice in foreign or domestic.

This made me giggle

A majority of right-wing Boomers get their news from sources controlled by corporation and politicians interested in overthrowing a legit government and could therefore be considered a threat to national security.

I could be convinced that banning both would be good.

It's a peeve of mine when people talk about the "CCP" like this, almost universally in a negative context--like they're trying to invoke the specter of communism in a scary way. Maybe you didn't mean it that way? Why say "CCP" rather than just "China"?

Maybe because not all of China supports the CCP's goals, means, and ideology? Substantial numbers of people disagree with some or all of those, and nobody gets to influence the CCP so it hardly represents anyone besides Party members. (And even some of those have serious disagreements.)

While you lost cred at “partially owned and controlled by the CCP”, I’ll bite. You seem to have knowledge that those at TikTok USDS (and TikTok Inc.) do not. Please share your data/sources on how the “CCP influences the content shown to American “zoomers””.

There’s a similar operational and data island for UK TikTok users as part of project Clover. Share your data on how the CCP is manipulating content shown to UK users while you’re at it.

At the end of the day, my opinion is that after all the changes made to segregate and protect US users this is now all political theater and posturing, and potentially setting a very dangerous precedent.

The CCP owns 1% of Bytedance and gets to appoint a board seat

https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinpings-subtle-strategy-to-...

Wrong, it owns 1% of a subsidiary of Bytedance that has nothing to do with TikTok

If you really care about who spies on who, check with AIPAC and similar groups that said that openly, and no one gave a dime.

TikTok is less censored compared to FB, Instagram, X.com etc.. Look how many Israel supporter funded this action (banning/buying Tiktok) Always look for the one with most interest in having Tiktok controlled, you will know who are are the lobbyistes behind. (Follow the money)

The US constitution is for the people in the US. Chinese companies don't apply. If you want to grant freedom of speech protection under the US constitution for TikTok, then TikTok must be owned by US people.

Your point is that freedom of speech is not freedom to read. I sincerely disagree.

You still have freedom to read. You will still be able to access TikTok if they choose not to sell. This is not a firewall block on TikTok, it is a business restriction on operating within the US. It simply bars US companies from hosting TikTok services or distributing the TikTok app.

The US Constitution guaranties US citizens rights not the general population of the Earth. Our government has no way to enforce or protect rights from entities outside of the US (other than force). If as you say it is just a "giant printing press" then ownership is irrelevant - change it and print away. If on the other hand the Chinese government has a vested interest in influencing what 136 million Americas consume as information - it will probably stay under a Chinese Government sphere of influence by order of the Party.

That's not quite true. The Constitution protects residents and arguably visitors.

TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press.

No, TikTok is essentially digital opium. And China itself has confirmed that reality by 1) restricting their citizens' daily access and 2) significantly filtering the content they can see on it:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...

It would only be fair of the US to follow China's example of protecting its citizens from numbing out on TikTok digital garbage. We should most certainly should follow suit with an equivalently restrictive measure.

If you honestly believed this to be true, you would be arguing for a ban on all social media, as like half of Instagram is just reposts of TikTok content and is otherwise mind-numbingly equivalent to the service.

False equivalence. You're essentially equating caffeine with cocaine.

Not being the target audience, you're likely naive to the extent of harm enabled by tiktok.

And you’ve lost all perspective by hopping on the bandwagon of a xenophobic moral panic. There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.

> And you’ve lost all perspective by hopping on the bandwagon of a xenophobic moral panic

In my experience the people who lead with this non-argument tend to be the most privileged. It's always nice talking down to other people of color, isn't it.

> There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.

Demonstrably false.

>> There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.

> Demonstrably false.

Ageeed.

I put Reels on the bottom of the short content platforms - TokTok, Shorts, then Reels.

If you haven't used these platforms a lot, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference. Reels is boring. Everything it shows me, no matter how much I use it, always sucks. I lose interest in minutes. Shorts is decent but mostly just marketing for a channels main brand, but still gets boring after a little use or I'm back in the main tab. TikTok - where did the time go?

TikTok Live is also quite unique, never before I have I experienced other peoples lives so up close and (politely) invasively. Such a strange feeling seeing some family in India making clay cups, or the (Eastern European?) tile guy grinding for hours, or the loading dock somewhere where people are sliding massive blocks of ice around, or the Australian DJ on his balcony - while I'm across the world laying in bed at 3am.

If only twitter didn't kill vine, that was and still is my favorite short form video platform

I'm kind of surprised musk hasn't ressurected it

> I'm kind of surprised musk hasn't ressurected it

He did state he was looking into it, but I doubt it ever happens. I think they lost the archives so it would be a fresh start.

these days instagram is much more used by older people than tiktok which has a large younger audience. Also scale wise, tiktok is crazy huge, so yes there is a difference between the two offerings

Nah, I'm just arguing that it's both reasonable and fair to do unto others. Here's some more evidence:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/china-wants-to-ri...

I'm sure it's not "xenophobic moral panic" when China does it though, right?

I believe it to be true and I'd like broad, heavy restriction of algorithmically targeted content but that would go against the interests of massive companies. Not gonna happen. I'll take the win in this instance though, where national security concerns and congress' desire to look like it's doing something align to make a small positive change.

How is this a win at all though? Especially now. Every kid I know says Reels is a perfectly good alternative now (it wasn't two years ago). It's making a statement about something, but it's not helping any of the problems you noted.

>If you honestly believed this to be true, you would be arguing for a ban on all social media

Your terms are acceptable.

"I'm going to smash all the printing presses because people are reading dumb books" is exactly why the first amendment exists.

both things spun the world as we knew it as humans into chaos in one way or another, but despite the metaphor floating around this thread the printing press and social media are not equivalents.

You don't seriously believe that social media is analogous to the printing press, do you? Because it's not, and it's so obviously not that I'm having trouble imagining what point you were trying to make relative to 1A. Because this isn't a 1A issue either, and it never has been.

If you must, this is like destroying foreign radio towers or something, where those radio towers have the ability to algorithmically predict what people want to listen to and then generate content tuned to affecting their state of mind, what they believe, and so on. So, yeah, blow 'em up.

TikTok gets people's ideas in front of other people. That's a printing press.

Cocaine has low calories, reduces appetite, and increases metabolic activity. That's a weight-loss supplement.

I unironically agree with both of you. William Randolf hearst was a thing, and the Catholic church definitely saw Martin Luther as a vile propagandist

Also cocaine and cigarettes definitely squelch your appetite and have historically been medically prescribed for such... It's just that we don't today

However, we are talking through a social media website.

FB, Insta, Twitter, Snapchat. All home-grown opium. Also, what if. AND I DO MEAN...WHAT IF...there was no CCP propaganda sent through TikTok?

Our Constitution also says, "The Congress shall have Power [...] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations."

Forcing a sale of TikTok so it's not foreign (with a punishment of banning if they don't), especially while making no such law for U.S. controlled competitors, is no more an infringement upon free speech than introducing a tariff or trade restriction on German-manufactured printing presses while leaving domestic models untouched.

What if EU forced american companies to sell off their stuff to european companies? It isnt that easy.

That would be great! Do Apple first.

This actually isn't too far fetched with the data privacy laws in the EU. It's not an explicit directive, though.

What is the difference in making the terms of operation impossible or forcing a sale really at the end of the day?

Why doesnt google or meta operate in China?

Then American companies would need to consider whether they wanted to pull out of the market, or spin off a European version of the company.

If they passed a law requiring US companies operating in Europe to divest their ownership in those subsidiaries or be banned from operating there then that would be their right as a government. Isn’t the EU rather famous at the moment for forcing foreign businesses to comply with their laws and regulations? e.g. GDPR

And thank God for the EU doing such as well

That said, so long as you don't have data centers in the country, what can they realistically do to stop you if you have a VPN?

There's nothing illegal w.r.t a private citizen trying to circumvent censorship afaik. If you're trying to use illegal content or services (hitmen, drugs, child porn, non us compliant crypto such as finance etc), then I can see the retribution, but unless you go full middle east/CCP people will still get access to and repost it

Or China! China has definitely prohibited American companies from reasonably operating in the US. Reciprocity there makes sense but it does seem that this sort of reciprocity is going further than China had, no?

EU is doing similar with anti-trust rules and rulings. It is their right to regulate commerce in their jurisdiction, even if that means fining Apple based on world revenue/profits rather than EU revenue/profits.

What if EU forced american companies to sell off their stuff to european companies?

That would likely be unwise, but it would be a legitimate use of authority.

> People are just mad that it's telling kids to eat tide pods and then they get sick.

I think it’s more accurate to say instead that “the oligarchs who run this place are just mad that it’s telling kids to support Palestine”.

But in general I agree with your point!

Algorithmic content is not free speech. The government can't make Facebook censor this message or that message, but they can certainly restrict the usage of algorithmic content feeds - that is not protected by the first amendment. I'm not just talking about Tiktok either, this is the issue they should be legislating on, and it should target all social media companies.

There is also legislation giving them to right to regulate foreign ownership of companies. It's scary how much of our stuff is owned by foreign governments. Seems like a national security risk.

How is "developing an algorithm" which selects content any different than editorial free speech? It selects content to show, and transmits that content to its users. Newspapers do this all the time, they pick the stories which get run.

Honestly curious of your take. The only difference that I see is that it can be done at scale, which doesn't necessarily mean it isn't free speech. They just have a bigger megaphone.

Algorithms aren't protected by the US Constitution, that's ridiculous. Point me to the single person who wrote the Facebook algorithm and I will change my opinion and protect its' speech. The press is explicitly protected by the first amendment. Beyond that, commercial speech is not broadly protected. Megaphones, in general, are not free speech.

And we know this. You cannot advertise cigarettes on TV, cities can ban billboards, and until recently, the law understood that donating millions of dollars to a politician is not a form a speech - it's a bribe (we'll have to work on that one).

The press has a protected right to report. Even the press that are really thinly-veiled propaganda outlets get this protection. You have a protected right to speak in public and petition the government for redress without fear of reprisal. Social media and content algorithms are neither the press nor individual citizens, and they are not covered by the language or spirit of the first amendment.

The Western world is in dire, dire need of education on geopolitics.

"Geopolitics" and "national security" is more or less a dog whistle for nationalist types larping Civ.

But ye, surely there is some need of education of the shenanigans these types are up to.

> I don't think we should "lowest common denominator" to oppressive regimes.

Chinese approval of their government is much higher than most Western regimes including the US. I think you are right about how we ought to apply the 1st amendment here, but I don't find that Chinese propaganda is any more insidious or pervasive than American. We just manage it differently: in China the state directly controls the media, while in the US business interests directly control the state and the media.

Approval is always higher when disapproval is a crime punishable by disappearance.

Okay well disapproval is still in the low double digits (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116013/china-trust-in-g...) so are you claiming that China has imprisoned / "disappeared" 15% of its population?

This is a common misunderstanding of what the first amendment means.

Speech and individual expression are individual rights and not institution rights. Perhaps you have some argument with "freedom of press" but that's a pretty hefty uphill battle for TikTok to prove that they are press and not just a random social media business.

Some of our oldest and most well supported laws revolve around limiting what a business can and can't say. For example, a supplement company can't advertise "This fish oil will cure your cancer!"

The interstate commerce law gives congress the power to make laws that regulate businesses (that operate over state boundaries). That power includes things like outright banning a business for pretty much any reason.

> Some of our oldest and most well supported laws revolve around limiting what a business can and can't say. For example, a supplement company can't advertise "This fish oil will cure your cancer!"

That's misunderstanding what law is. An individual can be tried for fraud just as a business. It doesn't have anything to do with freedom of speech.

You can restrict businesses from saying things beyond what individuals can say.

For example, the FCC prevents public broadcasters from saying "fuck" on the air. Yet you can yell "Fuck the police" over and over again and be protected by the first amendment. There are words and speeches that can't be aired on public TV.

There are other instances of this. A publicly traded business cannot, for example, has to be careful with public statements. There are things they can't say while the stock market is open (such as announcing a merger). Yet an individual has no such restrictions on their free speech. The closest analogy would be preventing individuals from inciting a riot or issuing calls for violence.

And that underlines that free speech in the US has limits (and always has). About the only speech that is pretty much fully protected is political speech, but as I said, even that falls a bit short as you can get in hot water if someone uses your political speech as inspiration for violence.

> Our Constitution says

That's a great start, but it's only as valid as an activist judicial branch says it is. If congress passes a law that goes against the reading of that old parchment, someone brings a case that works its way to SCOTUS, then they vote based on the vacation they are provided, then the law is declared valid. If they decide it is not, then it is not. It doesn't matter what some armchair critic of the law thinks. They can tweet and tweet, they can blog and blog, they can vent on forums, but unless they become POTUS in a term where you get to sit 1/3 of the bench, you've got no real shot at changing it. Doesn't matter if you lean left or right, a single POTUS sitting 3 judges is rare enough to not consider it a real possibility. So an activist bench can cause disruption for decades/generations.

> TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press.

Printing presses can't spy on the readers of the paper that goes through them[1]. I think there's a first amendment argument to be made here, but this is way too far out on the absolutist end of the spectrum, not least because this bill doesn't actually regulate TikTok's speech, only who's allowed to own it.

Commercial speech is regulated in thousands of ways already in ways much more effective than this bill. If you really believe in free speech absolutism[2] the fights to be had are elsewhere.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/us/politics/tik-tok-spyin...

[2] And no one does. Everyone starts censoring the second they get their hands on a lever.

>I actually don't think that TikTok is much of a Chinese propaganda avenue.

I don't disagree currently, but it certainly could be used for that. Due to the invisible hand of the algorithm, it would also be hard to know if a topic was trending naturally, or if TikTok was pushing a viewpoint. Setting aside the issue of whether or not TikTok should be banned, do you agree with the potential propaganda concerns?

I don't think the US Constitution gives the Chinese Communist Party Freedom of Speech. They're generally freedoms that apply to US citizens in the US, no?

“You have to be a pirate for the pirate’s code to apply”.

Those protections will apply when the platform is owned by American citizens.

The Constitution explicitly allows regulation of foreign commerce.

> At the end of the day, what this law is asking for is a Great Firewall around the US, that prohibits which websites its citizens can visit.

This law is asking for no such thing. Even if ByteDance refuses to sell TikTok, Americans would still be able to visit the site.

We have laws against foreign ownership of broadcast TV and radio. Our legal system already acknowledges that foreign ownership of the media is a bad thing that should be prevented. The problem is that these laws haven't been updated for the modern era. TikTok is not covered.

But this due to a failure of our politicians to respond to the modern era, not because the bill of rights enshrines or applies to foreign companies.

That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen in order to start FOX in the 80s. This then enabled him to build FOX News with the specific intent to become the media arm of the Republican party, by tapping Roger Ailes as the first and guiding CEO. Ailes had already worked on media campaigns for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, often credited as a major factor in their victories. So he got to run the day to day of the party's new media arm.

Murdoch himself was an international operator who wanted political power for the benefits rather than the ideology. This is demonstrated by the much more liberal leanings in Australia when that was the party willing to grant him power.

What could the impacts be today, if FOX News was owned by the CCP instead of an Aussie of negotiable political virtue?

The law in the US is that you can't make radio transmissions on TV / AM / FM frequencies without a license, because left unchecked, everyone doing what they want would make radio useless for everyone. The government has a clear reason to require licenses, and they have the power to restrict who can receive one.

The Internet doesn't work like that, though. No license is required to make a website or mobile app, because websites and mobile apps don't interfere with each other. The government wouldn't have a very strong argument to require websites to have a license, because they have no reason for doing that other than in moderating the content of the website, which is prohibited by the Constitution.

In the past, TV licenses were absolutely used to censor viewpoints the government didn't like, but now that is no longer possible, because nobody cares about TV or radio. You can bring in whatever content you want from anywhere in the world, thanks to the Internet. That is what the government is salty about; they are losing control because people don't care about TV anymore.

(I'll also point out that shortwave radio still exists. You can tune your radio to, say, 5910kHz and listen to CCP propaganda all day, and there is nothing the US government can do about it. On the flip side, we have Voice of America for a reason. We like broadcasting American propaganda into China just as much as China likes the reverse. Unfortunately, nobody listens to shortwave radio anymore. That's what the US is mad about; people like TikTok, but they don't have anything like it.)

I was referring to the section of the Telecommunication Act that limits foreign direct investment to a 20% ownership stake (which ups to 25% with FCC approval for anything more if a holding company is used).

I'm not sure I communicated my point clearly though, because I agree that the old laws do not apply because they haven't been updated to work with the internet era. I do know how the internet works, though, and that you can get data from 'anywhere'.

Nobody would really care about the issue, though, if there weren't ways to make it more difficult to operate. Banning from the app stores doesn't prevent people from watching TikTok, but it makes it more difficult. They'll get fewer users if they need to side-load a native app or use a PWA, and a significant revenue dip from blocked advertising from PWA or browser views. This gives competitors an artificial advantage that network effects can solidify in time.

But the point I was trying to make is, the US should address their failure to keep legislation up-to-date with national security objectives, rather than single out a single company.

Rather than stick-up jobs on random international corporations, eg 'Sell to our country, OR ELSE', they should have created legislation with privacy laws that apply Congress' concerns to all companies, perhaps with stricter rules for international companies. A review process and penalties could result in forced removal from the app store. This could have _prevented_ TikTok's data collection by defining a clear line they're not allowed to cross. And if they still crossed the line, their app could be removed without it clearly being biased.

Now, the stated concern (privacy violations and data transferred to China) are likely not the only problem. We would have to update the old laws and go beyond simply checking for foreign ownership. The law would need to directly address the same issue that the old law was written for (potential abuse by a foreign entity). The privacy laws would need to be there. But we'd need to also build a process enabling review of algorithmic behavior and manual processes around censorship and propaganda, when companies reach a certain size or market reach. We'd need safeguards to prevent abuse of the law (which will happen, considering the tendency for all of our institutions to come under regulatory capture at some point).

Frankly, I'd prefer if algorithmic ranking system were forced to be opened to the public in a scenario where they gain sufficient audience to cause a significant impact on public discourse, as long as we're rewriting the laws. Some might cringe and cry 'Oh no, what about the intellectual property of that dozen or so megacorps!' And no doubt these companies would also incur expense fighting the gamification of their algorithms. That's just the cost of being so impactful, and it will drive innovation if they can't keep up. And it's the best way to ensure abuses are discovered if we put regulation of censorship and algorithmic abuse in the hands of government organizations.

Basically, we need a framework to systemically address these issues. Not repeated contentious multi-year congressional fights that are triggered on a case-by-case basis. The current haphazard approach _might_ succeed against an occasional bad actor, but it's going to let dozens more through.

All they're doing now is generating talking points during an election year. It's political theatre, not problem-solving.

Why is foreign ownership of the media a bad thing. Put a different way: why should I only get filtered media from my geographic location?

Or is the worry our media will look more and more like propaganda?

> TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press. So it should be allowed under the First Amendment.

I don't think the First Amendment would allow you to use a printing press built out of embargoed components, or arsenic compounds.

The ban isn't on speech. It's on the platform/product, how it's built and distrbuted, and (correctly or not) perceived ways it harms society.

You can have a short-form vertical video app focused on an algorithmic recommendation feed, and you can say whatever you want on that service. But it seems Washington doesn't want it to be sending data and money overseas to the PRC.

> The First Amendment protects pledging your allegiance to the Flag, just as it protects China saying "China is great, you should love us instead".

The US constitution gives foreign governments the same rights that it gives its own citizens?

…Okay. It actually may or may not give US citizens the "Right to Receive Foreign Speech", without conferring any rights onto the foreign entities themselves, but that's still very much an open question. Here's 50 pages (that I haven't read) on the matter, if you're into it:

https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

You talk about lowest common denominator but that's kind of always been a core issue.

Imagine an enlightened and advanced technological culture that refuses to fight. For all their advancements and liberal policies they're still open to being obliterated by another culture that doesn't really care about the whole "war is bad" thing.

I think as society/morals/ethics/law advances, we still need protections in place for "how could somebody exploit this if they don't play by the same rules that we do".

We'll always, unfortunately, still need a person with a large stick and the threat of violence even in a peaceful society.

The word "reciprocity" cannot hide the fact that two wrongs doesn't make a right. We think it is wrong of China to censor Facebook and Twitter because that is what authoritarian regimes that don't give a shit about free speech do. For exactly the same reason it is wrong of the US to ban TikTok. And this bill has nothing to do with balancing international trade. It's stated purpose is to restrict China's ability to influence American youth.

China is not a US citizen.

Some animals are more equal than others?

The constitution is explicit when it carves out exemptions for citizens and non citizens. The first amendment is not one of them.

The constitution, or the bill of rights we appear to be talking about, or all the amendments? This seems wrong on the face of it.

The only mentions of citizenship I know of are for voting, juries, and elected positions.

By your argument Citizen's United wasn't just an abomination, but barred the congress from limiting foreign political donations, because money is speech? Interesting that's never been brought up.

I mean, I'm willing to listen to the ACLU, but the argument that forcing the sale of a corporation limits free speech is fairly weak, when commercial speech is routinely limited... as it should be. Do you think there is a corporate free speech right to sell personal information? What limits to profit on commercial speech can there be? If an unprofitable social media app were forced to close down, wouldn't laws allowing collection of debts be violations of the 1st amendment?

It also doesnt carve out children at school or yelling fire. Yet state employees are absolutely allowed to censor children in and on public property.

Case law does not protect non-citizens. People have been deported for being communists.

But Tiktok "is". At least Tiktok USA is registered in the US as a US corporation and therefore gets the same protections under US laws. Therefore constitutional protections apply.

You could say the owners of Tiktok don't necessarily get the same protections, but that's a different case. And in this case it is more similar to the Chinese Exclusion Act, but for business purposes rather than immigrational purposes, basically stating that Chinese people aren't allowed to own businesses that operate in the US, and must divest.

"Congress shall make no law" doesn't mean "Unless foreigners are involved"

China is not a "foreigner" it's a hostile foreign government.

Demanding fairness and reciprocity is not wrong. It's a basic moral position. Furthermore, imposing restriction on totalitarian regimes is perfectly legitimate as well. Letting them do as they please as you argue is, in fact, the morally reprehensible position.

What's wrong? The glorious right to investment profits? It's not even censorship.

The 1st amendment right to free speech is about US citizens. This isn't even a US corporation. No 1st amendment there so it looks legal. They probably wouldn't have done anything, if the manipulation and spying had been a bit less blatant. Even Telegram and Kaspersky still operate. This isn't even a WTO trade issue since almost every single tech or manufacturing company (except Tesla?) that wants to sell in China has to be a joint owned venture. It's classic mercantilism and there's no international obligation to buy stuff or allow it's import (see fentanyl). Even TikTok isn't allowed there, VPNs are not just banned, but considered tools of terrorism. Tit for tat is a thing, this has been coming for a decade (only slowed by corporate profits and cheap labor), and the slope isn't very slippery.

Still might not happen, if Kellyanne has anything to say to Trump about it.

I find the argument "Your criticism is invalid because the law doesn't violate the First amendment!" reductive and pointless. Decisions taken by the US government can be unethical, counterproductive, immoral, hypocritical, unfair, and stupid, while still being constitutional. It's not illegal for me to treat you worse because your username starts with the letter "k". Yet, many people would find it stupid and inconsistent. Here, the US government is doing the same thing, except the letter is "C".

> almost every single tech or manufacturing company (except Tesla?) that wants to sell in China has to be a joint owned venture

Apple, Oracle, Amazon, GE, Micron, Intel, Dell, Samsung, Kingston, LG, Seagate, Inventec ... Not a single one of these is a joint venture. They are all wholly foreign-owned enterprises (WFOEs) [1][2]

According to the Department of Commerce,

> A large majority of new foreign investments in China are WFOEs, rather than JVs. As Chinese legal entities, WFOEs experience greater independence than ROs, are allowed exclusive control over carrying out business activities while abiding by Chinese law and are granted intellectual and technological rights. (https://www.export.gov/apex/article2?id=China-Establishing-a...)

Also (https://arc-group.com/china-company-setup/):

> WFOE refers to a limited liability company that is 100% invested, owned by foreign investors, and independently operated. Almost 60% of foreign-owned companies are WFOEs, making it the most adopted business type. Famous multinational companies such as Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and General Electric are all examples of WFOEs.

[1] https://www.ydylcn.com/skwx_ydyl/competitiveReportDetail?Sit... (The link is pre-2020, when the new Foreign Investment Law abolished the category but reduced the need for JVs even more [3])

[2] https://www.uschina.org/sites/default/files/wfoe-fact-sheet-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Investment_Law_of_the_...

This is true economically, but the unelected authoritarian Chinese Communist Party still has control over content and communications in those companies and their products.

Specifically relevant. Chinese Communist Party allows content on TikTok in US that is not allowed on TikTok in China.

That's a matter of compliance with local censorship laws. American social media companies are obligated to do that when operating abroad, not just in China. YouTube just blocked a Canadian video at the request of the Indian government, for example.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/india-fifth-estate-video-stor...

> In an email to CBC on Wednesday, YouTube said it had received an order from India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to block access to the video of the story from its website.

> YouTube confirmed to CBC News Wednesday afternoon that "the content has now been blocked from view" on the India YouTube country site. While the content is restricted in India, the video is still available everywhere else on YouTube.

You're muddling issues. China restricts free speech in all contexts, and also separately puts onerous requirements on or outright bans various kinds of foreign businesses.

If TikTok is banned for geopolitical reasons, reciprocity reasons or whatever you want to call it, that doesn't change anything about free speech in America. It's not the unrestricted speech that was deemed a problem with TikTok, but rather the specific geopolitical risk (or whatever).

No, you are muddling the issues. This is about speech and not about anything trade-related. Banning TikTok is not equivalent to putting import tariffs on cheap Chinese electronic bikes or solar panels. It's not about whatever profits ByteDance makes from TikTok.

It's 100% about controlling the narrative. "Young Americans are turning against Israel — and you can thank TikTok" https://forward.com/opinion/574346/freepalestine-tiktok-isra... Can't have that happening in the US. The right to brainwash kids is a right reserved to the American billionaire class, their purchased politicians and lobbyists. You can talk about "geopolitical risks", "security issues", and "reciprocity" all you want but it doesn't hide this fact.

Its funny that the debate here is whether it is:

(1) trade protectionism that is about protecting the right to profit off of manipulation of American youth to favored actors, rather than disfavored foreign actors (whether disfavored because their country doesn’t allow American firms the same power in their countries, or for other reasons) or

(2) totally not trade related, but speech related, and about reserving the right to manipulate American youth to the exact same favored actors discussed in #1.

What's being censored here? The bill doesn't ban any speech at all - you can put any video tik tok allows on dozens of other video sharing platforms. This is a ban on certain foreign countries (er.. i mean "companies") doing some types of business in the US.

Chinese Communist Party is an authoritarian conquerer, not exactly a country or a company.

No, no, no. China and Russia are banning Facebook, Instagram and whatnot because they are evil dictatorships. The US is banning TikTok because China is evil dictatorship.

Nice try bro, but US symmetrically responds to the hostile actions of authoritarian governments. If those authoritarian governments wouldn't be desperately trying to destroy the free world, no one would care of their silly apps.

Facebook played its role in spreading of so called Arab spring in 2011 [0]. Now look how Middle East is doing now, more than 10 years later. That's some destruction for you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media%27s_role_in_the_A...

Was that intentional, or a function of less censorable communication and lots of people getting online. Addressing corruption.

This too is just letting flow?

I don't know, but you may have noticed that Facebook haven't been allowing free flow of information since a long time ago. Same for pre-Elon Twitter.

This is the wrong argument. This legislation doesn't censor TikTok like China censors social media/the internet at large. It simply requires the ownership of Tiktok to be American in the US. This is the same thing China does (You can't operate in China without a Chinese partner to run your operation in China.)

You can debate whether or not it is reasonable or important to for the US to impose similar ownership requirements for businesses operating in the US, but couching it in argument of censorship the way China does it is a real false equivalence. Congress doesn't want to censor your speech on Tiktok (Which isn't how the 1st amendment works anyways) they want China to divest itself of US operations.

> If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?

I understand what you're saying and I actually support the ban as tiktok can be used as a giant botnet at-will by Chinas government, but an eye for an eye doesn't end well and the US is supposed to be "free" so this part of the argument I wouldn't agree with.

How is it a botnet? Apple isn't going to allow botnet like behavior in any app it approves in the app store.

The humans it feeds content into are the botnet.

For example, it's alleged that Russia promoted competing rallies on both sides of the political divide in the US in hopes of sowing discord in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency#Ralli...

A human is not a bot. In addition to being dehumanizing, it removes agency to say that.

Pretending large groups of humans can't possibly be influenced to do things is lunacy.

We do weird things in crowds even without intentional propaganda at play. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add8091

That's not a "botnet" though, advertising does the same thing. We don't call the people buying things they've been marketed a "botnet".

It needn't be a perfect comparison to be a useful one.

It's not useful though. I actually think it's very cool that TikTok got a bunch of young people to contact their representatives. If this ban goes through, the political blowback is going to be extreme. It will be like the Streisand effect x100,000,000.

> I actually think it's very cool that TikTok got a bunch of young people to contact their representatives.

I don't think that's the concern.

> If this ban goes through, the political blowback is going to be extreme.

Its not a ban. Whats going to happen is that tiktok will divest.

Kids will continue to have their social media.

> What’s more, divestiture would require Beijing’s approval. Last year, the Chinese government said it opposed a forced sale.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/house-passes-tiktok-...

If tiktok wants to leave the US, that would be their decision.

Blame them for not following the law.

That's no different from anyone else deciding to just leave the app store, or the USA, because they don't want to pay taxes or something.

Companies stop doing business in certain countries for all sorts of reasons.

TikTok's users will know who to blame: the US government. There would have been no problem at all before this bill got pushed through (if passed).

Once again, laws effect companies all the time.

This isn't new or an out there thing.

Some companies leave because they don't want to pay high taxes, or for numerous other reasons.

All tiktok has to do is follow the law and they won't be banned.

But if they don't, well that's their decision as well.

People aren't fools. They know that TikTok is being put into this position by the US government. You can go on any social media platform right now and see how outraged TikTok users are. This is going to have incredible political blowback from the younger generations and there won't be any "lawyering" around that. Even if the ban doesn't go through, a lot of damage has already been done.

Yes I am sure some kids will cry on the internet.

The bill is overwhelmingly bipartisan though. There isn't anyone for some kids to go after, if it's almost a unanimous bi partisan effort.

Those kids lost. It's over.

And if people are this upset, then that is all the more reason to pull the trigger now, instead of giving our foreign adversaries more time to retaliate.

Anyway, tiktok almost divested the last time this happened. Unless they are OK will losing 10s of billions of dollars for nothing, well chances are they'll just divest, despite the current posturing they are doing.

There's definitely areas of advertising that are banned/controlled so that comparison seems more damning than beneficial (e.g. alcohol to minors, medication in any country other than the US

Just capitalism slaves :P

I'm a human, and I identify as a "bot," so there.

Didn't they already, in effect, DDOS the congress telephone system?

No, they did however increase engagement in democracy in a very dramatic fashion. More people making demands from their government is a good thing.

When they're deliberately coordinated by foreign states with malicious intent? When the demands become more and more extreme towards the opposing side?

Opposing this ban isn't "malicious intent" lots of people think it's an infringement upon their rights for the US government to decide what they can and cannot see.

What's being described isn't an eye for an eye, but tit for tat. And tit for tat is the norm for international relations and has been since time immemorial.

Usually it's relatively dull stuff, like if country A requires citizens of country B to have a visa to visit, country B will as a matter of course require citizens of country A to have visas to visit too.

So if China bans all American literature and news sources, the US should do the same? If China deports all Chinese Americans from their country, should the US do the same?

> So if China bans all American literature and news sources, the US should do the same?

At least their propaganda outlets, yes.

> If China deports all Chinese Americans from their country, should the US do the same?

No one is calling for a return to the ugly times of WW2 [1], but banning new immigration outside of asylum claims and especially banning investment into real estate certainly should be on the table.

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

I disagree but I understand where you're coming from. There's an aspect of being an idealist vs being a realist in the final result. Perhaps some sort of balanced strategy is the way to go. Just definitely don't give leeway for governments to do shitty things (to their people and others) just because others are doing it.

I used to be on the idealist side myself - after all, Germany has been the driving force behind the idea "change (towards democracy) by trade" - but as we've seen with Russia and China, all that did was make us completely dependent on them, and in the case of China the resulting loss of domestic production jobs led to massive issues with "left behind" areas and a loss of trust in democracy itself.

In Africa, it's a similar situation - we poured in boatloads of money and aid, in exchange for the demand of a bare minimum of human rights, and now a lot of the countries there are falling to the lure of Russia and China. My personal position is, drop them. Let Russia and China deal with the mess, fail at it, and keep an open invitation once they realize that Chinese imperialism is just as bad as historic Western imperialism.

As someone from Africa who's currently studying in Germany, it greatly saddens me that you view the situation this way. I hope you gain a better perspective on the issue and all the suffering there.

This isn’t a good analogy. This is about trade and not freedom or rights. The CCP, the owner of TikTok, is neither an individual nor a US citizen.

Interesting... "eye for an eye" has an almost identical meaning to "tit for tat" in my mind. Both of them effectively mean "retaliation in kind". One slight difference I guess is that "eye for an eye" often relates specifically to justice or just punishment.

"Tooth for a tooth" is maybe more about exactly the same thing than "tit for tat"?

> What’s being described isn’t an eye for an eye, but tit for tat.

Those are exact synonyms.

> And tit for tat is the norm for international relations

It’s commonly been a norm (not the norm), and its a norm that usually produces escalatory spirals, because actors tend to be more sensitive to harms to themselves from others policies and less sensitive those from other’s policy.

Eye for an eye connotes, if not denotes, proportionate justice. International relations, childish propaganda notwithstanding, is not at all about justice.

Tit for tat on the other hand is specifically a game theory term as used here, and it applies exactly to this sort of diplomatic strategic calculation.

> Eye for an eye connotes, if not denotes, proportionate justice.

No, the law of retribution is not about proportionate justice. It is about retribution.

It’s a association with justice is that it is seen as less unjust and a step toward justice and less socially disruptive than accepting deliberately-escalatory retribution for perceived wrongs as a norm.

Tit for tat makes sense in a situation where you expect to work out a deal, both sides agree to stop, and everyone is better off. E.g. allowing visa-free travel in both directions between A and B.

But for the Chinese government, social control is an existential issue, not something that can be negotiated away in a trade deal. They're always going to "tit", because allowing people to freely express themselves on the internet could end their rule overnight.

So the "tat" cannot be used as a bargaining chip, but needs to be weighed on its own merits. Does the US benefit from the ability to arbitrarily declare companies to be "foreign adversaries" and shut them down or force their owners to divest? Mightn't TikTok decide to relocate their US headquarters to Europe instead? And shouldn't Chinese founders in the US see the writing on the wall and contemplate a similar move? Is that good or bad for the US?

> But for the Chinese government, social control is an existential issue, not something that can be negotiated away in a trade deal. They're always going to "tit", because allowing people to freely express themselves on the internet could end their rule overnight.

Sounds like it’s bad idea to freely open the door to China.

> Mightn't TikTok decide to relocate their US headquarters to Europe instead?

The law says they can’t exist in China, Russia, NK, Iran so this is fine.

> And shouldn't Chinese founders in the US see the writing on the wall and contemplate a similar move?

If they leave China, and its influence, it sounds like a clear win for the US goals. If they’re already in the US then it’s a no-op and they shouldn’t be affected because why would they?

Drop "Chinese." Just..."Government." But I'm not even framing this as a malicious control thing. A society could just as easily break down if there's not some form of social...you used the word "control," I choose "framework." Paid on Friday, national holidays, do your taxes in April. You could frame these as a sort of control.
Also, a country not allowing citizens to pop off about committing terroristic acts against foreign entities would mitigate the potential for said country to be labelled an "enemy" by everyone else. Diplomacy is hard, but sometimes the rules are in place for a reason. I don't know though; I've never ran a country.

for the most part

Businesses/commerce/trade have never been “free”. I’m not sure why this keeps being used as a rebuttal. These topics are covered in basic macroeconomics classes in the United States.

>an eye for an eye doesn't end well

Actually in most games that are played repeatedly, the optimal strategy is to cooperate with cooperators and defect against defectors.

This simplification misses key nuances. Strategies like Tit-for-Tat (TFT) are context-sensitive and not universally "optimal." Effectiveness varies with game structure, communication clarity, and the presence of noise. Moreover, the "optimal" strategy adjusts in finite games (which you didn't clarify which type of game) due to the endgame effect.

Simple hole in your simplification: one simple misunderstanding could lead to an endless cycle of defection where everyone will defect on each other: game over.

Right, so usually the modification of TFT is that you forgive one or two missteps. We're well past that point with China trade.

>Strategies like Tit-for-Tat (TFT) are context-sensitive and not universally "optimal."

Of course. Hence why I didn't claim it to be universally optimal. All I'm saying is that your willingness to defect against defectors should always be non-zero, just to keep the players in line who start out with a higher predisposition towards defecting.

The noisiness of the real world should probably bias us more in the direction of cooperation, to avoid a cascade of defection as you mention, but a player who only cooperates will get taken advantage of regardless of the precise details of the game. Some amount of this dynamic can be seen currently in the relationship between western companies and the Chinese state, a relationship that is currently very different from the relationship between Chinese companies and the rest of the world.

It is also generally true that the longer the game, the more defectors suffer.

Not if there's a player for whom defecting is always better than cooperating, no matter what the other players do. And not if there's another player for whom cooperating is always better than defecting, no matter what the first player does. Then the first player should always defect and the second always cooperate.

US freedom applies only to citizens and residents and not foreign govts.

Totally. This is the main thing agaisnt the free speech argument. We have also passed this same law in radio and TV. It's about influence at a mass scale more than anything. I don't know why we would want a foreign ADVERSARY to have free reign.

This framing is all backwards. Americans go to TikTok for content of their own free will. This law effectively prevents Americans from using an information service they prefer.

Unless, of course, you want to admit that social media applications, through some combination of peer pressure, advertising, propaganda, manipulation, and deception subvert the free will of some portion of their users. In which case naturally they ought to be regulated in order to protect your citizens. Except... then the regulation drafted reads as "only American companies are allowed to subvert the free will of Americans", which comes off as pretty sinister.

> Except... then the regulation drafted reads as "only American companies are allowed to subvert the free will of Americans", which comes off as pretty sinister.

Sinister or not this framing makes a lot more sense than the alternative if you write it like this:

“Only companies [beholden to American interests] are allowed to [influence] Americans”.

The core premise is really rather dull. If the company poses a risk to Americans, then it should exist fully within reach of the US Gov regulations and completely out of the control of adversaries.

You’re talking one level too low in the process.

I’m not arguing if a us citizen should be allowed to use a property controlled by foreign adversary.

I’m arguing should a foreign adversary be able to control such a large US property in the first place?

In my opinion, having a direct line to > 100 million people where they can send push notifications that tell people to contact their government for a specific purpose is not so great. That’s leaving out the more subtle untraceable black box of deranking things their government doesn’t like.

Yes, and Americans should have the freedoms to receive whatever information they want, including whatever is on Tik Tok. This is covered by the first amendment.

It's not the information that's banned, it's TikTok. People don't seek to ban TikTok because they fear the content, they fear the power that an enemy nation has over their citizens. It's not a free speech issue.

Imagine if a company developed a new form of paper and published many books on it. If the paper turns out to be toxic and is banned, the company can't then say "oh, no, we're being censured". It has nothing to do with the message.

The courts can look at the effect of the ban, not just the intention. If the effect is that it ends up limiting Americans' access to information (which it would, unless ByteDance gave in and sold) then a court could find it unconstitutional.

IANAL, but this is my understanding.

Same holds true of your 2nd example, if it required Americans to turn in all the books they owned printed on that paper, for example.

Where on earth does it say that the government cannot limit access to information? If that were true then how on earth is book censorship legal?

For that matter, how was it legal to change to digital tv broadcasts? CCP tiktok can absolutely still operate a website that wont be blocked. The medium of delivery isnt protected speech.

> it ends up limiting Americans' access to information

it is not a right to have unlimited access to any and all information.

It is only a constitutional violation (by the gov't) to _prevent_ an american citizen from any speech. It would not be a violation to legislatively ban a company, unless that company was the only place you could make speeches, and thus resulting in the outcome where there's defacto speech repression.

However, such a company ban, if it werent due a violation, would erode the trust in the US financial system. Because if the US decides they can just divest you without you violating any current known laws, it will make foreign investment in the US more difficult.

"People don't seek to ban TikTok because they fear the content"

I'm not convinced about that. Open letter to congress from JFNA: https://cdn.fedweb.org/fed-1/1/Jewish%2520Federation%2520Let...

Yes, and Americans should have the freedoms to receive whatever information they want

And they do. This isn't a content-based ban. If a non-Chinese company acquires TikTok, they can continue to host exactly the same material without restrictions.

Can't tell if the new company would be able to host the same exact material. It's already come out that the White House pressured Google and Facebook to promote covid19 vaccine content. YouTube banning Russia-linked channels doesn't seem like their own decision either. The US doesn't control its media nearly the same way many other countries do, but there's still some control.

If you look at the rhetoric of lawmakers and lobbyists supporting the ban, a lot of it is about the content.

That’s part of what is being criticized. Human rights are supposed to be universal, and some countries actually handle them like that, applying them to citizens and foreigners alike.

What human right is being violated? This is about what types of business are allowed to domestic and foreign entities. I've never heard anyone declare "its a basic human right for institutions designed to do business behind a liability shield to do as they please anywhere and any time".

Which country gives the rest of the world the same rights as its citizens?

Human rights are just made up. It means nothing to talk about them. You can scream in a desert that water is a human right as much as you want, doesn't mean it is going to rain.

Out of touch comment. It's nice to know that sometimes, there's a mutual understanding that people are people.

Of course people are people. The person I was responding to misunderstood the US constitution as a list of human rights, as well as the enforcing mechanism for the US constitution, and who it applies to.

> but an eye for an eye doesn't end well and the US is supposed to be "free" so this part of the argument I wouldn't agree with.

"stay on the moral high ground" only works when the other side is roughly playing by the same rules as you are.

With authoritarian nations, with authoritarian leaders? They see any kind of even the slightest allowance as a weakness to exploit, an explicit allowance to move the Overton window. We should have kneecapped China years ago, when the first complaints about industrial espionage came in, and same for Russia after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine. We didn't, and now we're a bunch of lame ducks swimming in a pond of manure.

an eye for an eye doesn't end well because nobody gets their eyes back

China can change their policy easily with respect to reciprocity

> but an eye for an eye doesn't end well

This is the only thing that governs international relations. Look at visa reciprocity, trade agreements, etc. for examples.

"eye for an eye" is actually a retaliation limiter, not a call to arms. It means if someone pokes out your eye, then you are limited to a maximum retaliation of poking out their eye. You are not allowed to kill them.

For this China having TikTok spread propaganda or addiction in the USA does not then give the USA permission to nuke China as a consequence.

It's called reciprocity, and has been used since time immemorial for trade agreements, border control, ceasefire agreements, retaliatory strikes and a lot of other very high level geopolitics. "An eye for an eye" works perfectly well in such contexts.

You know what doesn't end well? Letting foreign adversaries walk all over your nation and citizens.

The issue is that China has banned facebook and google, etc. because they don't censor which is the law in China. If they decided to censor and follow the laws of China they would be allowed to operate there. Google tried to reenter the Chinese market but decided not to after an uproar from its own employees who didn't want to censor. Microsoft is allowed to provide hotmail and bing, etc. services there, because they decided to censor.

The problem is exactly what law has tiktok broken in the US? Is it simply that it's seen as a Chinese company, and therefore discrimination against a Chinese company or something else.

> Microsoft is allowed to provide hotmail and bing, etc. services there, because they decided to censor.

Sure, but in an act og completely understandable and justafiable reciprocality I guess we should soon see China passing laws to force Microsoft to divest from their American owners or be banned in China. And when that happens I’m sure the same people in this thread arguing that everything is peachy with USAs actions against TikTok will see it as perfectly acceptable and reasonable.

Plenty of American companies operate in Chinese consumer markets, Apple for example. One fifth of Apple's annual revenue comes from China, yet the country never retaliated with banning it while the US turned the whole world against Huawei.

Errr, are you sure China hasn't done anything against Apple / iPhone?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ban-apples-iphone-...

https://www.investopedia.com/china-nationalism-response-to-i...

https://fortune.com/2024/03/05/apples-iphone-sales-plummet-c...

That's not even remotely the same. That's more equivalent of banning the installation of tiktok on government phones, which should be considered normal for security reasons. Apple is still able to freely operate in China otherwise.

And your other articles don't have anything to do with Apple being banned, but rather that Huawei's new phone is now able to compete with Apple sales, despite US trying to destroy Huawei.

"Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China" https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

Apple is not a social media company.

> I think the primary argument for banning TikTok should be based on reciprocity rather than moral and/or security concerns.

Reciprocity of policies isn't really conceptually coherent.

There was some semi-recent news (really, not that recent) to the effect that Saudi Arabia would allow women to drive.

Now imagine our policy toward them before they made that change. We could ignore them because they have their own country. Or we could give up on that and try to impose some kind of penalty on them.

But one thing you're unlikely to see an argument for is reciprocity. "So, they don't let their women drive? How barbaric! We'll show them -- we won't let our women drive either!"

Reciprocity in this case is supposed to mean "We allow your companies in as long as they follow the local laws, and you will allow our companies in as long as they follow the local laws." TikTok is following American law, which is significantly more permissible in terms of speech than China.

American social media giants thought it was too damaging to follow Chinese law and voluntarily retreated (Google), played the game until they got burned (Facebook) or silently comply (Bing/Microsoft).

In the case of Facebook, they didn't want to share data on Uighur separatists, who organized protests on Facebook, which in turn left hundreds of people dead. Barring any kind of moral judgment, this obviously wouldn't fly in the US either.

No, at the core of this issue is the realisation that a social media giant has enormous influence on the minds of the next generation, and having this be in the hands of foreign powers is very dangerous. Of course, the US doesn't want to be super open about this, since 4/5 global players in social media are American, and they'd rather not have other regions get similar thoughts.

In the end, the reasoning is sound while the justification is hypocritical.

Google tried to follow the law, but how can they comply when CCP laws mercurial & vague which is the opposite of EU & US law? As for meta, why would our people and companies want to knowingly participate in the genocide (not cultural genocide but full on genocide) of the Uighurs in Xinjiang?

Well, fine. But now the American law TikTok needs to follow (assuming it is passed by the senate and signed by POTUS) is that the US TikTok needs to be sold, or become unavailable in app stores.

>If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?

Because there is value in holding the moral high ground.

This is the only part that makes me sorta in favor of the ban.

Because Chinese control American supplies of widgets. You can check out Tesla, Apple, Walmart where they get their goodies from. Or how about Ametican universities. If things are as simple as a tic for tac, the trade inbalance wouldnt be in 200B+ in China favor.

Maybe it would be more balanced if China allowed US software companies into their country the same way the rest of the world does. (Except Russia, Myanmar, North Korea, and a handful of other similar places.)

China does not specificly restrict foreign app, instead they audit every app no matter who developer is.

Because that is an unproductive foreign policy approach.

It’s an unproductive approach to any relationship in general.

I don't think the US would benefit from reciprocity becoming more a more common requirement in international politics.

It's a huge mistake to not put reciprocity in the title of the bill and to make the language not china specific.

Because economists would have to acknowledge that protected and restricted markets are better for developing local industry than open markets. Which of course is true. But then they would have to acknowledge the whole neo-liberal experiment of open global markets is bad for us. It would also pave the way for foreign markets to follow in our footsteps and restrict google, facebook, and others, further segregating our digital spaces.

> I think the primary argument for banning TikTok should be based on reciprocity rather than moral and/or security concerns.

The argument that CCP people make is that Facebook et al aren't banned, they just need to follow the law to be allowed. The law, of course, includes unacceptable things like complying with every communist request).

A better way to ban TikTok is to require social media companies to be based in countries which follow basic human rights and democracy.

> Facebook et al aren't banned, they just need to follow the law to be allowed

Yes, and by that logic, TikTok isn't banned, but rather foreign ownership of said app is.

Just "follow the law" and sell the rights.

Isn't that just whataboutism applied in the wrong direction?

Like two young siblings, "she hit me so I get to hit her back!"

The argument is that they are an enemy. No other argument is necessary. Not free speech, not reciprocity, not that they're an oppressive government.

If in 1939 Hitler had tried to buy the CBS radio network, FDR would have stopped him, or the Congress. If it had required a Constitutional amendment, that would have passed easily.

Yet we were not at war with Germany (yet).

We aren't at war with China either.

Yeah well, that's just a matter of time in the exact same way that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was predicted over a decade ahead, often by US senators.

E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/05/we-knew-putin-...

https://www.mccaininstitute.org/resources/in-the-news/icymi-...

Etc...

I'll bet that for every country in the world, a senator has predicted a war against them. And we still aren't at war with Russia, but you could call them an enemy for sure.

>If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?

Because we are the United States, and we are better than that. We are a society that promotes free trade, freedom of expression, and economic globalization to the ends of the earth.

It's kind of our whole thing.

> We promote free trade, freedom of expression, and economic globalization...

...as long as it benefits our mega-corps.

As soon as they can't compete in these spaces, we immediately turn to protectionism, ag-gag laws, etc.

The one sacred cow we have is profit, everything else is weighed on the axis of advancing it.

How many democratic governments have been overthrown with US assistance because it benefited oil or fruit companies?

Good point but it doesn't mean that US doesn't support those things the majority of the time.

The primary motivation of a firefighter doesn't change because they rescue a cat every once in a while.

Not the point, but firefighters actually respond to few fires (presumably better electrical codes or smokers falling asleep with a cigarette). Most of their work is now supplemental EMT, locked houses, cats in trees, etc.

This 2018 report (https://www.statista.com/statistics/376683/number-of-fire-de...) shows some 23 million medical emergencies to 1.5 million fire call responses.

Huh wow, I had no idea.

>How many democratic governments have been overthrown with US assistance because it benefited oil or fruit companies?

This century? None. The civilized world has progressed. Hopefully our Chinese and Russian friends can catch up some day.

How many democratic or non-democratic governments have been overthrown with Chinese assistance this century?

> How many democratic or non-democratic governments have been overthrown with Chinese assistance this century?

None, because we've stopped them (for now) at great personal cost. Unless you count that little tiff in Hong Kong. No biggy.

So do you think the US should also be fine with foreign nations running bot farms spreading fake news / propaganda?

> We can make similar arguments

Hey remember when Apple, Google & Amazon all colluded to ban Parler off the face of the planet within days, a purely political move, based on some shaky allegations of moderation?

Meanwhile TikTok is labelled as a "must have" app in the AppStore....

>Hey remember when Apple, Google & Amazon all colluded to ban Parler off the face of the planet within days, a purely political move,

I actually don't remember that. I do remember lots of terroristic and genocidal posts on Parler though.

It's easy to botspam a competitor with terroristic and genocidal posts if you only need a fig leaf to remove the platform - not a great precedent to align with.

Also, didn't a spokesperson for Harvard recently say some calls for genocide were acceptable on their platform (campus) depending on context? Why aren't the anti-1st amendment types trying to ban Harvard?

Edit: Not a rhetorical question for the downvoters.

Your comment seems to have spiraled out into... I don't even know where? Were you combining threads in your head?

>It's easy to botspam a competitor with terroristic and genocidal posts

I don't think it's necessary to employ conspiracy theory accessories when the stated moderation policy of the platform was "no moderation."

Not combining threads, but it was a rather obscure reference. The president of Harvard recently testified before congress that calls for genocide may not violate Harvard's code of conduct 'depending on context'. Which makes a widespread effort to censor Parler for hosting calls for genocide rather hypocritical IMHO. Hope that's clearer.

No not really.

OK, last try for clarity: If you think it's just to debank Parler for hosting genocidal speech and also think it's just NOT to debank Harvard for hosting genocidal speech, I think you're a hypocrite. And if that's not your position I'd be interested to hear how I've misinterpreted it.

> Parler off the face of the planet, a purely political move

Having a policy against hosting apps that host illegal content and taking no measures to remove it is a political move? There are plenty of active conservative communities on the internet, Parler just went the "free as in anarchy" speech route. Tumblr faced a ban on iOS for pornographic content and Reddit also has to sanitize their default experience to be on app stores, so it's not just Parler.

It's why BlueSky is interesting because they have moderation which will get them on app stores, but you can turn it off.

Many mass shootings in recent memory were live streamed on Facebook and Instagram. Removing those posts after the fact is a useless gesture. The evil already happened. Meta was never punished.

Selective enforcement of TOS is political and utter nonsense.

If TikTok were guilty of what they are accused of (being a foreign intelligence and propaganda tool), why is Congressional action necessary? Why wouldn't have private industry already quashed it as they did other apps? Those accusations seem a bit more serious than "mean posts with naughty words".

> Removing those posts after the fact is a useless gesture. The evil already happened. Meta was never punished.

I mean this sincerely and in good faith, what else can you do? We don't have the PreCrime division. The accusation isn't that Twitter/Facebook don't ever host illegal or objectionable content but that they have a procedure for addressing and removing it. Parler just said no, we don't have and will never have such a policy. If Tumblr say, despite having a moderation policy just stopped enforcing it they would find themselves staring down the banhammer again.

As to your second point the answer is in your own question, I don't think they actually buy that TikTok is either of those things. Hell, the NFL partnered with TikTok and they're basically cheerleaders for the US military.

For that matter, the most perplexing one for me is President Biden is creating and posting campaign videos on TikTok (not in an official capacity as POTUS but as a candidate). If one truly felt the content of this bill was true, as he has endorsed signing it, why would he even use the app in the first place? Are Zoomer voters that inaccessible otherwise?

his team is going to give a very politically correct answer, something like -

"we are not against tiktok, our presence on tiktok is the best proof. we just against the idea that 160 million American users including my team are being spied on by the Chinese government, we want you all to have a better & safer tiktok not owned by China".

Careful. What's the alternative to taking action post hoc? The only things that come to mind for me are Thought crime and minority report's precognition.

You can't preempt what people will live stream. And the banhammer only moves so quickly.

> Parler just went the "free as in anarchy" speech route.

This is no different than X nowadays. But the political landscape has shifted even further to the right, why now no action is taken nor desired [by the politics] to do anything about it.

For instance: There is only one Dutch moderator for the entire Netherlands/Flemish community.

Twitter is pretty heavily moderated if you don't align with the hive mind. The hive mind just shifted from the left to the right.

> I think the primary argument for banning TikTok should be based on reciprocity rather than moral and/or security concerns.

Your argument is lame at best. Using your logics above, Chinese should ban all US EVs, mobile phones and network equipment on reciprocity. Tesla has a huge factory here in Shanghai, local government even offered it free land, it is fully own by Tesla, Tesla cars are everywhere. When is the last time you see Chinese EVs on US roads? I can freely go to any CCP official and tell him/her that my US designed iPhone is good, he/she might tell me that he/she is a iPhone user as well (and then ask me to piss off). What is the likelyhood that any US officials are using Huawei phones now?

No US equivalent of TikTok is allowed in China.

>If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?

Because we are (used to be?) a country that believes in democracy and the will of our citizens. If people want to download a Chinese app and watch straight up Chinese news and propaganda (not even close to what TikTok actually is), they should be allowed to do so. That's the entire idea of the First Amendment...

Does that put us at a disadvantage to countries who don't have the same rules? Maybe. But that ideal and that principle is valuable and means something and IS the entire bedrock of American influence over the greater world.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

This level of censorship isn't good, it's very bad. It's also concerning the speed at which the government mobilized to do this. It's a rapid crackdown on free speech and individual freedom.

> censorship

Nothing is being censored. If ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok will be removed from App Stores and have to find new web hosting. TikTok.com will still resolve fine.

> Nothing is being censored. If ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok will be removed from App Stores

What if Google says no?

> What if Google says no?

Same as if Google says no to paying taxes. Law enforcement mediated by the courts.

The fines end up being in the billions of dollars - $5,000 per user per day. Even Google can't absorb that for long.

Could you help me understand how that isn't censorship, with more steps?

> Could you help me understand how that isn't censorship

Censorship bans the speech. If we were censoring Bytedance, we’d block TikTok.com.

This is more in the vein of “you can’t advertise your brothel at the elementary school.” You can still advertise your brothel. The distribution and amplification is just being regulated.

If we stretch your argument to absurd then we can say that putting a political prisoner in jail also doesn't limit his free speech: he is still able to write letters.

> putting a political prisoner in jail also doesn't limit his free speech: he is still able to write letters

Free speech is a big topic. I would argue that yes, that person’s speech has been curtailed, but depending on what they were jailed for (saying something offensive versus stabbery) it could be reasonable.

Unless they were jailed for their speech, what you describe would not amount to censorship.

Because it's not targeting the speech. If an American company acquires TikTok it can continue to provide exactly the same content.

Trump tried to do this 4 years ago, how is that a "concerning" level of speed? The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has been reviewing Tik Tok's Project Texas initiative to handle US data separately for 2 years. This was not an out of the blue move. The citation for those claims are in the linked article.

I'd wager that most Americans want fairness in relationships with other countries. And also want the government to protect them against hostile foreign governments that wish to do them harm.

Americans subject themselves to all kinds of restrictions in terms of what can be imported into the US. There's no contradiction of the freedoms protected by US Constitution in this.

There's certainly no information that Americans need deny themselves by insisting that apps like TikTok are not controlled by hostile foreign governments.

> If people want to download a Chinese app and watch straight up Chinese news and propaganda ... That's the entire idea of the First Amendment...

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Arguably it's not even one part of the 1st.

Freedom of speech includes not being prohibited from listening to other people's speech.

The first amendment in the bill of rights in the US constitution prevents the US government from restricting the speech of US citizens. It doesn’t say anything about foreign nationals with no status in the US. The government also has the authority to deport whomever it likes, impose tariffs and restrict imports.

Regardless of moral stance, that is the reality as I see it.

> The first amendment in the bill of rights in the US constitution prevents the US government from restricting the speech of US citizens.

It also applies to foreigners who are in the US legally.

I mentioned status of foreign nationals in the very next sentence, and it sounds like TikTok’s status is about to become “unwelcome.”

The first amendment prevents the US govt from restricting the speech of anyone in the US, not just citizens.

For example, the government cannot deport an immigrant simply because they criticized the government (they can deport for a variety of other reasons though).

The government can however bar entry into the US in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleindienst_v._Mandel

> courts will not look behind [the] decision [not to waive the statutory exclusion of an alien] or weigh it against the First Amendment interests of those who would personally communicate with the alien

Interesting. Yeah, I'm broadly not sure how the first amendment applies to this TikTok bill, if at all.

I think TikTok is a security risk, but it seems to me that if the govt can ban TikTok, it can legally ban any foreign media. Which doesn't seem ideal from a free speech perspective.

160 million US citizens post/watch those videos on tiktok, tiktok is their platform for expressing themselves, by banning tiktok, they can argue that the government is taking away their platform for expressing themselves.

it is all about the rights of US users.

If they ban the importation of a fruit or vegetable, there are others we can turn to for sustenance.

Nobody is stopping any US citizen from building our own TikTok.

Do you have case citations to prove that claim?

Even if you do, that's not what is happening here. At all.

Any suggestions for dealing with the paradox or tolerance [1]? Or an argument why it does not apply?

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

I agree with this in principal, but in practice it seems troubling to have every person (even beyond kids) hooked on a stream of info that is controlled by a foreign government who doesn't like us very much.

If your plan is that people should be strong enough to uninstall or smart enough to recognize subtle propaganda, that seems very likely to fail.

The premise of strong freedom of speech rights is that the government being smart enough to decide what is illegal propaganda may fail as well, sometimes more catastrophically.

Regarding GP's argument, I would argue it's less about freedom of speech and more about trade protection. Although software is not a physical good, letting another country restrict us and simultaneously flood our market is not good either.

This isn't a First Amendment issue, it's regulating commerce with a foreign nation.

What is the nature of that commerce? I don't think you can ablate the 1A concerns this easily.

(Note that I am sympathetic to the idea that TikTok is a source of foreign influence. But it's not clear to me what precedent allows the US congress to control their ownership without doing the same to every "US" corporation that's incorporated in Ireland.)

So if TikTok was not earning any profit from US (for example, if it was sponsored by the govt), there would be no commerce and it would not be banned? I do not believe that.

Profit is not the standard for the regulation of commerce in the United States though.

When the federal government set limits on crop production with the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause as its justification, Roscoe Filburn was simply growing wheat over the limit to feed his farm animals. That wheat was never sold, and it never crossed the property line to leave his farm, much less crossed state lines. The government still fined him and he lost his case in SCOTUS establishing precedent in Wickard v. Filburn, because it affected the market prices of wheat, despite the miniscule impact.

The same could be said of TikTok even if it doesn't earn a penny in profit.

That's interesting. Never thought that in a "free" country the govt can ban people from growing wheat.

I find it really interesting how being against a ban is the "freedom" argument when the person who is most responsible for championing this ban is the whole Palantir gang led by Keith Rabois's partner.

As other commenters have said, the GP's argument is not about free speech but about trade.

Banning TikTok is not impinging on free speech. People are still free to say whatever they want on so many (unrestricted) platforms. If someone makes a video of a TikTok video and shares it on Youtube/Whatsapp, that's legal. The actual content is legal, so it's not a free speech/censorship issue.

This is the equivalent of "We've put sanctions on China. You can write whatever you want, as long as you don't do it using Chinese pens and Chinese paper"

It's not at all unusual for countries (including the US) to restrict commerce with a country if they believe the other country isn't engaging in fair commerce.

Except this is not about commerce. US wants to ban TikTok for the same reason Russia has blocked BBC. Russia believes that information from BBC can harmfully influence people's mind.

I think it's more about Chinese harvesting data.

Funny, Telegraph readers also seem to believe that the BBC can harmfully influence people's minds.

I hope you are aware that Tiktok doesn't generate content by itself? A comparison with BBC is stupid.

> Banning TikTok is not impinging on free speech. People are still free to say whatever they want on so many (unrestricted) platforms.

Yes, it does impinge free speech. It's not about being able to say things, it's about freedom to hear speech. The first amendment and freedom of speech also covers that, and there is speech on Tik Tok that is not available elsewhere.

As I said, they are not banning listening to the speech on Tik Tok videos. If someone makes a mirror of all TikTok videos and posts it on Peertube, it is totally fine to listen to it.

They are banning one delivery mechanism. Not the content.

I don't think courts will see it that way, but if the ban happens I guess we'll see.

By this logic, when Howl was banned from publication, you could argue it wasn't a problem. If Ginsberg performed Howl in public it would be fine. They were just banning one delivery mechanism, his press

What I find troubling about this is the delta between the vox populi and the decision made.

Whether it's right or prudent or whatever, if you figure that people using the service don't want it shut down (~170M or roughly half of the population) then what's happening here is that our "representatives" are doing what they always do and totally ignoring their constituency.

Mind you, this isn't surprising in the least, but perhaps it's a good moment to step back and reflect a little on this snag in our governance.

Representatives are elected to do "what's right". If their constituents don't like it, they can elect them out.

Can they, though? I've been trying for about as long as I can remember without much luck...

> Can they, though? I've been trying for about as long as I can remember without much luck...

A sign that the constituents don't care about a given issue the way you do.

That's a gross oversimplification, and I think you know it. We're not idiots here.

On any given year in the last decade, about 1/3 (sometimes more, sometimes less) of voters have been registered independent. George Washington was the last independent president.

We take for granted that campaign promises are there to be reneged on. Even assuming legitimate alignment with a given candidate (that is, that they are genuine about representing you), this more or less means you're not getting what's on the label.

It's well known that unless you live in one of like 6 states your vote won't affect the outcome of a presidential race. Those states tend to have lower populations.

The system is broken, and it has been for a long time. The number of things that get between your vote and the implementation of policy are enough to ensure that your voice is unimportant - whether this is by accident or design is another conversation but I haven't yet seen a reasonable argument that what we have is even remotely functional. I'm open to hearing one if you have it.

I think a lot of this is the language used in reporting around it. It is presented as a Ban on Tiktok in headlines and people who regurgitate them when the purpose of the legislation is not to ban Tiktok but require them to sell their American operations to a domestic company. The penalty for non-compliance is to not allow them to operate in the US but the goal isn't to ban Tiktok.

>we are (used to be?) a country that believes in democracy and the will of our citizens

We either need to mass-educate everyone on the whole Edward Bernays subconscious manipulation thing (which we won't do because it would catastrophically break PR, advertising, political campaigns and more) or do it ourselves, do it thoroughly, and prevent others from accessing our citizens eyes/ears, which is what we're trying to do except for that last part.

We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.

>We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.

So instead we should let our better-educated governing betters and cultural/business elites decide opinion not just for themselves but for the rest of us? Because of course none of them are subject to any sort of self interest, terrible bias, corruption, mendacity or simply being ignorant due to their own cognitive failures?

The very core notion of democracy and free speech is that no one group can be fully trusted to hold the reins of control or opinion by their own decision and imposition on the rest.

Thus you introduce the largest plurality possible of rights for expression and governance to mitigate against the disasters that much more often occur with oligarchy. Far from perfect but your idea of giving any key group control of discourse for the sake of "fighting misinformation" (as if they themselves don't create shit barges of it of their own) is laughable.

Recall please (for example) that the NY Times, which spent the Trump years and beyond practically raving about the dangers of misinformation and foreign influence of opinions also happily played along with the vastly costly lies of the Iraq WMD scandal that was used to justify an invasion costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. And it did all this lying at the behest of completely domestic U.S. policy makers and leaders.

That's the sort of cozy opinion/policy leadership practices to which we should be pushing further? Fuck no.

That's a bad argument because western platforms are free to compete fairly in PRC market, provided they follow PRC laws like EVERY OTHER PRC PLATFORM. Facebook/Twitter only got banned after 2009 minority riots for abetting terrorism and not cracking down on posts calling for mutual retaliatory violence. It's more accurate to say most major western platforms at the time was simply incapable of of moderating PRC content. This was pre western human moderation push, unlike domestic PRC players who already had 10,000s of human moderators because that's what was needed. Western platforms didn't want to spend the money at the time and it wasn't after they scaled their own moderation efforts that FB/Google spung up (now defunct) projects to re-enter PRC market. The fundmental fact is western platforms didn't want to put in the work to comply with PRC laws at the time because it was expensive and looked bad optically (and still does, because are they going to handover dissident info to CCP?), and it would be unfair to allow them to operate in PRC without the same onerous moderation infra as domestic PRC platforms. There's a reason Bing still operates in PRC, see recent Bloomberg piece on Microsoft keeps Bing running in PRC by basically complying to mass censorship like domestic players. Like it's not PRC's problem if internal Google decent killed project dragonfly and whatever Zuckerberg tried to do in the mid 10s.

> That's a bad argument because western platforms are free to compete fairly in PRC market, provided they follow PRC laws like EVERY OTHER PRC PLATFORM.

Dude, Chinese national living in China here. I have 3 different vpns from 3 different vendors, that is how I manage to get here and talk to you. Care to shed some light on why they restrict my free & open access to the Internet that I dedicated my entire life to build?

> after 2009 minority riots

I strongly support CCP's policies in Xinjiang, it is anti-terrorism for sure. That being said, I wouldn't call those angry & brainwashed Tibetans "terrorists".

> It's more accurate to say most major western platforms at the time was simply incapable of of moderating PRC content.

I used to visit a local forum hosted here in China quite often. They carefully moderate the content, all users have to register with their legal names, the forum even had the curfew every night as their moderators need to sleep and they couldn't afford the risk of such human moderator free hours. Guess what, they still got shutdown last year for "regulation reasons".

> There's a reason Bing still operates in PRC, see recent Bloomberg piece on Microsoft keeps Bing running in PRC by basically complying to mass censorship like domestic players.

Because Bill Gates has very good personal relationship with the very top leadership. That is the really scary part.

Most insightful post on HN for a long time.

>shed some light

Digital sovereignty, it's not complicated. Every country who can be in charge of their domestic information ecosystem, should. If US wants embrace PRC model of a controlled media ecosystem where tiktok / US media platforms to ban non-US aligned content from adversary sources, Tiktok would be happy to oblige and scale moderation/compliance costs accordingly. If anything they'd be at competitive advantage being able to draw from douyin experiences in PRC.

You're good example, you're still posting here, via VPN. The friction between PRC info and western eco is VPN costs - it's cheap/trivially accessible for those who need it. People reverse VPN to access geofenced PRC content in the west. People jump region blocking to access geofenced media on western streaming platforms? VPN are everywhere for those who care.

As for why, there was stanford study a few years ago trying to measure PRC propaganda on western platforms only to find they were crowded out by western antiPRC propaganda, including likes of FLG. PRC doesn't want free mixture of foreign propaganda. Constitutionally, the US shouldn't care about reverse. But here we are with TikTok ban. IMO Some ideological / info ecosystems shouldn't naturally mix. See west crack down on RU media post war. Which is fine (for me), as long as there's methods for motivated people to cross the gap.

Regardless, this isn't about free access to information, it's about operating a business in different regions by following relevant regulations. The original argument is whining about why US platforms shouldn't follow PRC law and pay similar compliance costs as domestic competitors, and somehow think that's unfair.

>wouldn't call those angry & brainwashed Tibetans "terrorists"

Neither did I. I said abetting terrorists, and terroism/radicalism foreign influences, that exploded from abroad when these restive regions got connected to global info networks after 90s, including radical seperatist movements. Hence entire regions got caught up in crack down. Including innocents, but cracking down on minorities representing 1% of population responsible for hundreds of terror events that spread out to other provinces is just sensible political policy. Heavy handed, but politically sensible, considering terrorism stopped.

The real issue beyond terrorisms is symptom of aforementioned increase in seperatisms due to PRC's "generous" ethnic oblast policy that "allowed" these frontier regions to keep their cultures and not sinicize / smoothly integrate into broader PRC society. They were never "properly colonized", because frankly PRC was too poor to heavily assert influence on frontiers without expensive infra, now they can, and are against Tibetan/Uyghur will. Of course the oppressed are mad, rebelling, justifiably. But frankly it's politically absurd that their primary language isn't Mandarin, like every repressed minority speaks dominant local language in the west, who virtue signals how bad cultural genocide is while benefitting from it because basic language integration is essential domestic serenity/stability/security. There's no melting pot if some groups of people don't don't melt into the pot.

>they still got shutdown

Most of my PRC interest forums / BBS (milwatching) got shut down last few years because crackdown on discussion of PLA related subjects due to national security. Community goes abroad, on twitter, on telegram, get a VPN. Again, that's the compromise, it's annoying, but it works. I know people who got invited to drink tea, had wechat accounts banned and reinstated after promising to behave. Which is a hell lot more than I can say about people I know who got banned on western platforms and had not avenue to appeal. Communities everywhere get dismantled all the time. You find where it reconsolidates and move on. Just like people moved on from Vine, and likely, TikTok.

>very good personal relationship

Yes Gates know how to play the game and follow the rules. It's not scary, it's business.

> I strongly support CCP's policies in Xinjiang, it is anti-terrorism for sure. That being said, I wouldn't call those angry & brainwashed Tibetans "terrorists".

The weird thing is that the CCP is much more worried about Tibet than Xinjiang. As a foreigner, I can buy a plane ticket to Urumqi today, no restrictions on needing a guide to tour in most places. But Tibet...ugh...so much paper work just to visit Lhasa, and I need a minder if I ever leave Lhasa.

The biggest problem with the party is that they always put hardliners in charge of Tibet and Xinjiang (let's be clear, the party chair controls the autonomous regions, not the ceremonial local governer). They unnecessarily stir the pot to create tension, that then explodes every 10 or so years.

> Because Bill Gates has very good personal relationship with the very top leadership. That is the really scary part.

Microsoft has been in China for a long time, and it has a China-based leadership that is very in tune it is permitted to do or not. "These are the rules, written and unwritten, for keeping Bing in China" and they just roll with that. I don't think it is even Bill, he has been hands off for a decade or two, but there are people in Microsoft's chinese leadership who are well connected.

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