Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnovek | Hacker News Reader

I’m not comfortable with this.

I understand that TikTok may represent a national security concern but it’s also a platform that younger generations use for protected speech. What’s the message that we’re sending to this group?

View on HN

The message is that the us government does not want your protected speech moderated, curated, and amplified according to the whims of a hostile foreign nation

False. The message is the US government doesn’t want Americans to freely speak out against American foreign policy such as the current genocide against the Palestinians.

They want US citizens to communicate on US platforms where they do have influence and control so they can censor speech and continue the capitalist forever wars.

> They want US citizens to communicate on US platforms where they do have influence and control so they can censor speech and continue the capitalist forever wars.

No different to any other country. China does the same, as does Russia, Korea and Japan.

Is it a security concern compared to everything else we get from China, or are we just holding TikTok specifically to an unattainably high standard? We get so many products from China that could potentially be used for spying that we've never tried to ban due to security concerns. Who can say the ESP32 Wifi module doesn't have a hardware or software backdoor hidden in it?

AFAIK, there has never been any evidence or reason to suspect TikTok of sharing private data from Americans with the Chinese government. It seems like simply being from China is the crime the US government wants to ban TikTok for.

> AFAIK, there has never been any evidence or reason to suspect TikTok of sharing private data from Americans with the Chinese government. It seems like simply being from China is the crime the US government wants to ban TikTok for.

https://fortune.com/2024/04/15/tiktok-china-data-sharing-byt...

If you're going to argue that sending data to Bytedance in Beijing isn't sending it to the Chinese government, you're free to believe that but it would not be supported by the available evidence.

Do you have any such evidence? You linked a paywalled article saying that TikTok works with its parent company, which is hardly news. We're looking for evidence that TikTok/ByteDance shared private data from Americans with the Chinese government. US politicians would love to get such evidence.

> Who can say the ESP32 Wifi module doesn't have a hardware or software backdoor hidden in it?

That is why Huawei gear is not allowed in US telcos.

No. Huawei gear is not allowed in US telcos because American telco kit suppliers lobbied for such a ban.

American crusade against Huawei happened the same year Huawei broke the record for most phones sold, surpassing Apple.

I think the message is: "The government only wants your personal data harvested by American companies so they can monitor that data"

I think the message actually is

"The government only wants your personal data harvested by companies that aren't run by an enterprise operated by actors from a hostile foreign government which itself is hellbent on taking America's place in the global economic and soft power hierarchy"

So competition is suddenly a bad thing when you're losing? Okay

from the POV of the incumbent, yes, competition is a bad thing when you are losing.

The US government doesn't want a foreign country in control of the communication platform its youth are using. The Chinese government doesn't want that, either.

If it was about competition, a lot more things from China would be banned already.

That's the problem I have with this, that Congress is banning a company instead of the practice they're supposedly worried about. But how else is the FBI supposed to spy on us? I mean, besides the renewed and expanded FISA Section 702, and also illegally.

> Congress is banning a company

It gets banned if it refuses to divest. If China is unwilling to let go of TikTok, even at the cost of tens of billions of dollars, that sort of tells you it has non-economic value.

It seems especially sketchy that USG is forcing TikTok to store it's data with Oracle, a company with close ties to the CIA.

The timing of this move is also suspect. TikTok is the probably the #1 platform currently where users and creators are outspoken in opposition to U.S. foreign policy in Israel/Palestine. And now the government is forcing them to sell to new owners.

The message i got is "we dont want Us citizens to see first-hand results of American foreign policy.

What results of American foreign policy can you see on TikTok that you can't see on YouTube or Twitter?

There are other platforms. Further, I don’t see how this fundamentally changes young people’s access to protected speech.

If anything, I’d expect this to bring more oversight to how TikTok algorithmically chooses and presents the feed.

Speaking of other platforms, will the US ban Discord or force Tencent to divest from it ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com