House votes to ban TikTok in the U.S. if it's not sold
text.npr.org
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If China / TikTok hadn’t overplayed the hand, they wouldn’t lose this weapon. Now they likely will (good thing)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/7/24093308/tiktok-congress-b...
> "Most of these push notifications went to minor children, and these minor children were flooding our offices with phone calls," Krishnamoorthi told CBS News. "Basically they pick up the phone, call the office and say, 'What is a congressman? What is Congress?' They had no idea what was going on."
> The congressman said these concerns and the app's access to young children's data are driving factors creating the bipartisan support of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act," a bill he co-sponsored. The bill calls for ByteDance to divest from TikTok or the app will face restrictions.
> "This is exactly the reason why so many of our colleagues voted for the bill. They don't want a foreign adversary controlling social media apps using geolocation to target minor children to call members of Congress or interfere in our elections. This is exactly the reason why this particular legislation is necessary now," Krishnamoorthi said.
I mentioned something about a SCOTUS opinion and he was very surprised that the court published its opinions. We delved a bit further and he also didn't realize that you could read bills or laws or executive orders.
I have never been more alarmed or scared about the future of our democracy.
Like you I would classify most of these people as intelligent, and although literally qualified, (possession of university degrees at various levels), they are actually completely uneducated.
Between that and daily life being a grind for most people, it is very understandable for someone to not know that the SCOTUS does these things.
Honestly, while everyone (myself included) should be more aware and involved in government, this blissful ignorance is a testament to the stability and freedoms offered by our government.
The youth vote would skyrocket.
It was a fairly big story last month: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/tiktok-ban-congress-phone-c...
There are other chinese apps. This doesn’t ban them.
It’s also snuck into an aid bill. A completely reprehensible act if ever there was one.
> U.K. Moves to Bar Foreign State Ownership of Newspapers, a Blow to Telegraph Bid
> https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/business/media/jeff-zucker-telegraph-delay.html
as well as:
> https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/68072
(Of course, you might be thinking "Oh, social media is not newspaper or broadcast station"... well, the interpretation of law can be a spectrum sometimes. Also, now days people are reading (algorithmically recommended) news on those platforms instead of buying newspaper/radio)
It's quite funny. As a Chinese myself, I'm actually a little sympathetic towards TikTok in that IF they can survive outside the Communist Party umbrella, it will show the rest of Chinese entrepreneurs that pledging to the party is not essential. But, I guess apparently these entrepreneur needs to pick the right industry first.
The rep isn't going to listen to you specifically - you get a form letter back (sometimes years later), and the only thing that matters is the issue and whether you're yay or nay. But because so few people call in, it makes your opinion (on that issue, at least) weight much more highly than the average voter.
It's one of the ways they keep track of what their voters care about.
This was from a friend who interned there 20 years ago, things may have changed.
The dynamics are different with proportional representation. You care more about keeping your core supporters happy, because the random people opposing something loudly will probably vote someone else anyway.
I'm sure they were real annoyed receiving phone calls from normal people instead of just businesses trying to set up meetings for ~~bribes~~ campaign donations.
What a huge self-own.
It's not banned if they simply sell it.
Let's see if the same volume of users mobilize to call tiktok HQ to please sell it, because they want to keep using it
They could solve a lot of this in an instant; no one will propose limiting collection at the OS level.
The US is fine with SV domestic spying, and not OK with China collecting this amount of information and having a massive “suggestive” social media platform.
Sure, limit TikTok, whatever. I can see who really cares about what.
Yeah because at the end of the day SV is literally inside of the US and if e.g. a war started, we know what side they are going to be on.
It's really not that hard to figure out.
When the war starts, do we think Zuck and Tim Cook and the Google trio are going to defect to china?
Which is equally useless as NZ is aligned with the US and so will not avoid the consequence in case of a conflit with the 'axis of "evil" countries'.
How could this possibly be solved at an OS level, let alone in an instant?
Do you honestly believe that a disinformation source whose parent organization granted a board seat to a political apparatus that will jail you for holding up a blank sheet of paper during a protest is the same as Twitter?
Because I find that difficult to believe.
I suppose if Twitter integrated a serving senior White House official into whatever shit-sandwich is its current leadership structure, and it was the policy of the current administration to jail persons for holding up blank sheets of paper at a protest, I could understand.
People, and websites, are allowed to be terrible. You can't really stop that. Terrible people and websites under the control of despotic regimes that will jail you for holding up a blank sheet of paper during a protest are a different matter altogether.
Reciprocity is one of the fundamental pillars of trust in society.
We banned Huawei from communications infrastructure. Cuban and Iranian companies are basically not allowed to participate in the US economy, this is business as usual for any country.
But having non-democratic, adversarial nations controlling the algorithm that programs us is quite scary. At large scale, that does something.
That's not the same as having different standards for domestic and foreign companies.
Worse, they do have different standards for domestic and foreign products. TikTok, for example, is banned in China. The approved social media app carries state crafted propaganda. A year or so ago you'd see employment information for women on WeChat. Now you see advice for staying home and raising children, because the state decided that's what women should do in China.
Chinese companies are Chinese government entities. The government there fully understands that tools like WeChat and TikTok can be used to move public opinion or distract, degrade, and erode and they use them to do exactly that.
They don't allow foreign companies to operate in China at all. You must form a 51% / 49% partnership where the 51% is a Chinese-owned company.
In practice, the foreign company still exerts control (via contract with the 51% owner) and keeps the profits (via contract with the JV entity).
Worse, they do have different standards for domestic and foreign products.
A) Different standards based on the location of the provider?
B) Different standards based on the location of the consumer?
If you mean (A), then I'm not sure your example supports it, unless you consider Douyin to be a foreign supplier.
If you mean (B), then that's what I'm trying to say: China requires certain things of all companies (irrespective of the location of their controllers or beneficial owners).
You literally have to operate through a Chinese owned joint venture company.
Are you saying 100% of foreign-owned tech companies in China are operated via joint ventures?
If you look at what Google was doing with project dragonfly (before it was shut down), they opened a JV to operate it:
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/google-suppresses-memo-r...
This is generally true as well, though I do not have a source for the general law. But it obviously applies to Google
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40085214 "Apple deletes WhatsApp, Threads from China app store on orders from Beijing" (110 points, 1 day ago, 127 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092127 "Apple Pulls WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Threads from App Store in China" (7 points, 1 day ago, 6 comments)
Why does some US entity that probably contributed nothing to TikTok's success get to financially benefit from acquiring TikTok by force?
What good will having someone else operate TikTok (who might not be technically adept enough to do this) do to curb the propaganda concerns the US Gov is alleging? If the operator isn't a tech company that is comfortable with webscale, wouldn't propaganda accelerate?
I really dislike TikTok's social influence (despite its engineering and AI contributions being technical marvels), but if the US Gov is really concerned about national security, they should just ban it; no sales.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/younger-a...
If the rationale was solely tit for tat, "China does this to our tech companies, so we're simply doing the same," that would actually be significantly more palatable.
Leaving aside whether this is good or bad, I do foresee a world in which there is diversity in the number of social media sites, and their usage divided along country lines.
The vast majority of people making these posts didn’t care about Palestine last year and don’t really now.
It’s all culture war and sign on to the latest thing to prove you are part of the group.
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/33...
https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ceo-shou-zi-chew-security-...
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137155540/fbi-tiktok-nationa...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/18/business/tiktok-search-engine...
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/t...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/10/majority-...
This is strong bipartisan support.
In fact, I bet those 58 votes are now under investigation by more then the whips.
Tiktok is going to be banned. As it should be no doubt.
TikTok is a capitalist narcotic.
There are two parties in this country, the stupid one and the evil one. Whenever they eagerly get together and push "bipartisan" legislation, that's when I worry the most about whatever stupid, evil thing they are up to these days.
This is misinformation. The bill is about companies owned by a "foreign adversary" (literal wording of the bill, and enumerated examples in the bill itself).
So please explain how this can ever be used against American owned companies.
(1) CONTROLLED BY A FOREIGN ADVERSARY.— 8 The term ‘‘controlled by a foreign adversary’’ means, 9 with respect to a covered company or other entity, 10 that such company or other entity is— 11 (A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, 12 is headquartered in, has its principal place of 13 business in, or is organized under the laws of 14 a foreign adversary country; 15 (B) an entity with respect to which a for 16 eign person or combination of foreign persons 17 described in subparagraph (A) directly or indi18 rectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or 19 (C) a person subject to the direction or 20 control of a foreign person or entity described 21 in subparagraph (A) or (B).
I do not see how the hypothetical scenarios you posed could ever manifest under a reasonable interpretation of this law. If that happens, the government went full tyrant and we have much bigger problems
The US Federal government went full tyrant over 100 years ago and has never looked back since.
This has been a "much larger problem" for my entire life. The US federal government is the world's pre-eminent #1 purveyor of global terrorism, if you measure global terrorism as the threat of the use of force to compel other entities to take positions and actions that they would not take of their own free will.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/hr7521/text/rfs#l...
You're referring to section (g)(3)(A)(i) and (g)(3)(A)(ii). Those are two of the categories the bill applies to under (g)(3)(A), however, you've completely failed to mention the entirety of the (g)(3)(B) categories.
Categories the bill also applies to per (g)(3)(B) that you did not mention include:
(g)(3)(B)(i) - is controlled by a foreign adversary; and that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of— (g)(3)(B)(i)(I) - a public notice proposing such determination; and (g)(3)(B)(i)(II) - a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
Maybe Biden decides that Hackernoon has users who are Russian state actors spreading "disinformation" (true, real, factual information that you were not supposed to know, like the lab leak hypothesis, Hunter Biden's laptop containing evidence of his corruption alongside a bunch of victimless "crimes", Nancy Pelosi committing illegal insider trading, Hilary Clinton operating an unlawful email server, etc), and therefore HN constitutes a "significant threat to the national security of the United States".
That sounds unrealistic to you? How about that happening to a politically disfavored owner of a company that is already being routinely snubbed by the white house, like Musk/Twitter?
Hypothetical scenario: Twenty Chinese companies each take a 1% stake in your startup.
In that scenario, your company is now "controlled by a foreign adversary", and you, the non-foreign majority shareholder, can be forced to divest, under the current language of this bill.
You can call that possibility a far-fetched fever dream, you can resort to personal attacks against my character, but no matter what refutation you offer, my amygdala's response is "just give it a few years, let's wait and see". I don't mind admitting if I'm wrong and nothing like that ever happens. I'd hope for as much were I not so rationally pessimistic.