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Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

For once I disagree with the EFF. This is a national sovereignty issue masquerading as a freedom issue.

As a European that has been dealing with what US social media companies have been doing, I am enjoying how the US is loosing their absolute mind when an external company does the same they do to us.

Perhaps the EU might consider defending the sovereignty of its constituent states? That might even put a dent in Euroskepticism.

I will never understand your particular brand of whataboutism.

The people calling out "whataboutism" are the same people that constantly complain about other people's shit stinking when their own shit stinks just as bad.

Feel free to start your own platform.

VK has been the primary platform in the CIS for over a decade now at this point.

And even Signal was started in the US.

The difference is that if a European social media company wanted to operate in the US, it's welcome to. With China it's a different story - they can operate in our market but we can't operate in theirs.

You absolutely can operate in the Chinese market. There are Chinese regulations, and companies like Meta are unwilling to abide by them because the data they're harvesting is the only product.

As a Mexican, I find this actions from the US to try to maintain the "Pax Americana" Imperialism quite interesting. People in US centric forums like HN, Reddit, Slashdot, etc just cannot understand or see it, and it's OK; it is their country and their ideals. They are allowed to unequivocally take their country side.

But for uninterested 3rd parties, it's quite entertaining the bitchslap games that China and the US play with these sort of policies (Google ban, tiktok ban, etc).

I suspect the issue is much more petty than some grand ideological drive. Very recently Biden made a TikTok account and his team tried their best to create some sort of platform appropriate undoubtedly focus tested messaging. It went about as well as anybody would expect. [1] Now a few weeks later, the platform's getting banned.

We sure do always come up with great and grand sounding reasons for everything though, at least to an American ear. It's only once your cynicism hits ridiculous levels that everything starts to suddenly make so much more sense.

[1] - https://www.wired.com/story/joe-biden-tiktok-campaign-commen...

Can you clarify what it is that the US social media companies are doing to Europe?

For example are you saying that they are showing content to European youth to sow discord or something like that, or are you only talking about the data collection/mining?

The exact same thing the US is worried about with tiktok.

Data collection and the ability for the government to gain access to this data without a warent.

Also lack of transparency regarding the algorithms which are built to cause maximum reaction / interaction which leads to radicalism.

Facebook was famously implicated in the genocide against the Rohingya ethnic minority in Myanmar.

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

>does the same they do to us

So you're saying that the US ought to be on your country's equivalent of the US government's "foreign adversaries" list <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_adversar...>, which includes China, that the proposed bill specifically targets? That's fine. I guess you won't have any objections to the US leaving NATO since you wouldn't want your country/continent to be in a military alliance with such a country.

In what way does TikTok operating challenge U.S. sovereignty? This is 2003 all over again.

Just try imagining how, if you were the Chinese government, you might use Tik-Tok to influence and undermine American support for militarily defending Taiwan. This isn't hard it's obviously a powerful tool. Just how powerful remains to be seen.

I agree that the US has maybe a short-term self-interest in banning TikTok if the Chinese started to do this. But it violates the first amendment and the rights of US citizens to access speech from the rest of the world. That is very bad in the long run. The US didn't ban Mein Kampf during World War II.

In fact, I think the biggest threat to the US is the suspension of the first amendment because of the age old boogeyman of national security. Propaganda has always existed. The way to respond to bad speech is more speech. Banning it makes it forbidden and thus captivating, don't you know about the Streisand Effect?

If the transmission of media is a threat to national sovereignty, if the fate of the country can be undermined with memes, then we have already lost. The US should disconnect itself from the global internet.

The US had a censorship operation in WW2, the Nazis or the Empire of Japan didn't get to operate radio stations in the US during the war, and in the cold war the USSR didn't get TV and radio stations in the US either.

In what conflict was giving an adversary a full attack surface for propanda etc. deemed the right approach?

This is like the government telling Radio Shack and RCA that all shortwave radios sold must be programmed to tune out the frequencies of Japanese or USSR stations. Or that it is illegal to tune a shortwave radio to a Japanese station.

The US had more a massive propaganda effort of their own during WWII, but yes we literally rounded up every person of Japanese descent and put them in camps, which should never happen again. Yes, there was a lot of really terrible censorship later in the Cold War like McCarthyism, which is the danger I am worried about. The public became so xenophobic that you could kill an actor's career in Hollywood by telling an agent that they had a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Simply having copies of books written by authors from the wrong country automatically made you "unamerican" and a traitor.

This is the path I fear we are going down again. The government is saying it knows best about what media we cannot be trusted to consume.

I can't see why depriving a foreign corporation of access to the US market is a free speech issue.

Using a freedom of information argument for Americans is a stronger position, but that isn't guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

This is going further than I want to go from a civil rights perspective, but there is at least some precedent. Corporate sanctions and bans have been used very effectively, as Huawei experienced not so long ago.

I just don't think the government should be in the business of deciding on behalf of its citizens what media sources they are allowed to read. On that path lies danger.

I'm not a fan of corporate personhood, but so long as it remains a thing - it's relevant. Corporations have the same rights as individuals in the US. And any entity legally within the country, foreign or native, has 1st Amendment protections. And this company is clearly being targeted by the government for what they are saying, promoting, or allowing to be said - all of which would fall under 1st Amendment protections. If this passes, there's a real chance this will end up being yet another 9-0 'no this obviously is not constitutional you clowns' ruling in the Supreme Court.

It's an information distribution platform with direct ties to the Chinese government lol.

The same way Radio y Televisión Martí challenges Cuban sovereignty which is why the Cubans jam the transmissions.

edit: Decedent western rock and roll also challenged the ideological purity of the Soviet Union so record imports were banned for a very long time.

In principle I agree with you, in practice it seems the only reason TikTok legislation is passing the House is because Israel thinks everyone on TikTok hates them (reality - most people in the US disagree with genocide).

TikTok's change in ownership has been discussed for years.

The current action occured when TikTok pushed users to call Congressional Members through anti-patterns within the app [0]

Not everything is about Israel-Palestine smh.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/tiktok-phone-cal...

The TikTok ban issue dates back to at least 2020.

I vividly recall because I owned a ton of Fastly stock which cratered when the former administration was trying to ban TikTok, leading ByteDance to move away from Fastly as their CDN.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bytedance-pulls-most-tiktok-t...

Yep.

There are a lot of low effort commenters on HN now. If you take a look at most of the commenters talking about Israel or Palestine on this thread, their creation date appears to be around 2020-2022.

unfortunately this particular commenter seems to have joined in 2011. not saying you're wrong about low effort commenters.

Haha yea. Tbh I've grown tired of yelling to the wind.

Every single time I mention this change I get downvoted to oblivion, yet it is very clearly happening.

It happens everywhere. So many of my homes on the internet have turned to poop. Oh well, maybe I’ll read a book.

To be fair, most of the world (and not only most of Americans) want both sides to lose. Israel is just an invader nation that used power and money to take ownership of land that belonged to another group of people, less than 80 years ago. And now, 3 generations later, the former owners of this land have so much anger and resentment towards the acts of violence and tyranny they suffered on the hands of those invaders, that they themselves became a group of despicable psychopaths. Gen Z simply has new avenues to get informed and to form their own opinion than the legacy media of the 20th century, and now it's hard to impose a narrative that dismisses how much blame does Israel deserves on this subject.

>reality - most people in the US disagree with genocide

I'd like to see some sources for a majority of Americans even agreeing that it's a genocide in the first place.

You might be right, but...

If TikTok is a national sovereignty issue for the US, should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies?

(Since even GDPR only scratches the surface of the power they're handing over.)

> should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies

China already does for reasons similar to those that are in this bill.

Yes, if those countries believe US companies are using their platforms as a weapon against them or pose some other national threat.

Western countries are too dependent of the US and it is politically easier to ban China. As a result, the best approach would be set equal restrictions for data collection and privacy, including clear rules how algorithms can behave (or maybe drop them totally), to combat promoting specific content or censoring specific content.

Good philosophy in theory, but it seems you would need the equivalent of United Nations to have some sort of globally enforced policies like that.

Maybe technology is getting to a point where that needs to happen.

The US government generally doesn’t hold a stake in US tech companies, nor direct influence over how they operate abroad.

US intelligence greatly benefits from the US tech companies, because they are required by law to provide the information if asked, and they can't even tell about this in certain situations.

As a result, it is more beneficial to ban specific applications and allow US companies collect as much data as possible.

Rules for thee but not for me.

Sure if they want to. And then they have trade issues with the US, which is what that becomes: an economic conflict (which can easily become a military conflict).

The US economy is drastically larger than the EU economy at this point (soon to be double the size), we control the global reserve currency, and provide a very large military shield across the EU (currently keeping Russia from attacking numerous smaller European nations). The US can do a lot more damage to Europe than the other way around, if it's conflict that Europe seeks with the US (whether economic or military). The same is true with US allies in Asia (particularly Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia).

All the US has to do is look the other way and Russia and China will get to work destroying the status quo, which includes ripping apart Europe and Asia. The US can feed Asia to China anytime it wants to, that includes Australia + New Zealand; it obviously doesn't want to do that. I think US allies want to keep the US an ally for all the right reasons, both economically and militarily.

That kind of thinking is a good way to ensure that the US will lose influence globally as it assumes a weird lack of agency in others in the face of threats by what used to be an ally.

> If TikTok is a national sovereignty issue for the US, should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies?

Not only should they, but they do.

> If TikTok is a national sovereignty issue for the US, should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies?

NATO, Five Eyes, and close allies like Japan need not bother. Russia, China, Iran, and a few others should, and mostly do.

I thought TikTok’s CEO did a great job in the hearing defending themselves, but ByteDance ultimately owns them. We compel companies to provide data silently through court orders all the time in the U.S. and to think China isn’t capable of accessing whatever data they want, at any time, assumes major incompetence of their intelligence services.

I think it comes down to this line of thought.

China can, so they will, because when we can, we do. China no doubt knows many of our non-public exploits, as we do of theirs.

In a real way, this forced sale is a sign of respect.

> should a lot of other countries similarly be banning US tech companies

Sure, if there's evidence of the US exerting its influence over the content in a way that's harmful to the country.

We are already trying to ban Google Analytics in EU.

Neither you nor the government have any right to tell me what media to consume, and through which medium.

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