A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy
forbes.com
forbes.com
So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy.
I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like".
Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately.
And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.
The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-...
And there's more than enough US companies actively opposing what the US government want, most notably Google who went and encrypted all their internal traffic so that it couldn't be tapped any more.
That's exactly what I'm saying. TikTok needs to play ball (be sold in the US) or get banned.
It's one thing to fight against various regulations like Google did in your example, but when you're actively seeking to undermine the nation, that's a whole different ballgame.
It was the OPM breach [0] and the brutal eradication of the CIA network within China [1] that tipped the scales
Mutual US-China espionage has been common for decades, but these two actions were a step too far.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of...
There was a reluctantly growing recognition of this, but Trump finally forced the public recognition of the issue in his characteristic camera grabbing way. Whether his efforts and characterization of the issue where ultimately helpful or harmful… is quite debated. Likewise our current attempts at a response continues to be occasionally questionable.
If you are curious beyond more than this extremely barebones summary, there are a mile of books and days of videos on the topic, though I don’t have any personal recommendations offhand since that isn’t really my wheelhouse, just something I watched build up over the years and start effecting my industry (agriculture).
It’s similar to how Europe had increasingly considered Russia to be moving into their big umbrella despite the occasional murder here and there. Hence the oil pipelines and deals. It took until the second time that Putin made his move on Ukraine before the illusion that Russia was ever a geopolitical friend was finally shattered.
Not really, and I was there when all this happened in the Obama admin and am still friends with people who worked on this.
The reality is after the OPM hack there was bipartisan support at the policymaker level to tamp down on the Chinese government for major transgressions. Chinese officials began getting sanctioned and most of the policies Trump boasted about were written and passed before his time.
Presidents don't really do much regarding these topics - it's always career bureaucrats and policymakers who are actually setting the gears in motion for these kinds of changes.
For example, consider Brexit from the perspective or a remainer. It's quite reasonable to believe that the leave referendum would have failed if it wasn't done at a time when (sometimes a bit vague) frustration at the EU has escalated to the point that it had. It's not always "better late than never".
For a less political example, health interventions can be too late and not better late than never. Some cancer care that is long overdue is better to forego. The patient would suffer less and overall have a better quality of their remaining life with palliative care.
Business also follows this rule sometimes. If the right decision isn't made in time, it can later become throwing good money after bad and it's better to weather the consequences of the decision that wasn't made in time.
This is also explored in broken power laws. What is a good idea up to a certain point can turn into a bad idea very suddenly afterwards.
Realistically, this falls under the "solving a human problem with tech", which is to say, it's not going to work. What you need to do is to educate the users. The problem is, the USGOV is data mining US users, and, if they were to educate users on how to avoid CCP data mining, they'd also defacto be educating them on how to avoid domestic data mining as well. Of course, that would be a net-positive for society as a whole, it'll just never happen. They could also pass comprehensive user privacy protections, which, they won't do for similar reasons.
What you're really seeing play out here, is USGOV/CCP incentives matching, and the USGOV having a hard time navigating this legally because we do have at least some protection against massive unilateral government actions, whereas China has nothing of the sort.
You're free to think about data mining, narrative shaping, etc, any way you'd like. I know many think that it's nbd, many think that only the CCP doing it is bad because the USGOV is a force for good, many think that the CCP doing it is ok but the USGOV doing it is bad.
I really do think that if you think the CCP is bad, and tiktok is used by them somehow, directly going after tiktok is a very bad idea that'll likely result in a lost court case and tiktok being a permanent fixture, along with any other app in a similar situation, because calling China a foreign adversary is, well, extremely hard to prove in court, no matter how true it is. Doing nothing would be better, and, if something must be done, teaching people what they're dealing with is the best option, even at the expense of a loss of domestic capabilities.
There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.
Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of features that just don't exist on other platforms.
Ironically, TikTok is a good platform for learning about why people think the things they do, though it is also a very powerful tool for exacerbating the problem. Power of most any kind can be used for good or ill, and TikTok is certainly powerful. If I was in the controlling beliefs of the masses business, canceling TikTok is the first thing I would do also...and to make sure it gets done I would bundle it in with funding for Ukraine and Israel.
Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate.
That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.
> Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind.
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[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.homyt.thex
And any replacement would be US only, limiting its reach to some 10% of what it had before.
This is why most people view this as a ban. And IMO, rightfully so; it's not as if our congressmen and congresswomen are fumbling about in the dark. They've just bought.
The rest of the world will likely follow. Also most of the world has already accepted that US tech firms have all their data, but don’t want China to have it. If there’s a feasible alternative to TikTok then banning it in Indonesia or Poland or Brazil becomes much easier for the politicians.
They'll be willing to let Bytedance take the L on this. Bytedance can console themselves that TikTok can still operate elsewhere on the world, just making less money.
Until the CCP decides to allow a level playing field for US companies operating in China they can go pound sand as far as I’m concerned.
Divest completely, sell it to a US based company, or exit the company from US markets.
They are not our ally.
It might make sense if you have tons of profitable business options and you have to choose one, but that is rarely the situation.
There are billion dollar companies that run on AdWords, and the owners are far better off than if they refused to run a business with a single point failure, and worked at a coffee shop.
Hundreds of billions of dollars flow through AdWords to businesses that would NOT be better off without the revenue.
Beyond what the article says, something that is very hard to quantify is whether the promise of fame on TikTok causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would, even in excess of the income they actually receive from either TikTok or its effect on the promotion of their ventures. Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
The promise of fame is not exceptional. The type of person who on an implicit promise makes decisions that are damaging to their own lives possibly have a larger problem then the exact ownership specifics of one single media company.
> Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
What percentage of the working age population is actually using social media in this unhealthy way? Is there a better solution that doesn't involve outright taking decisions away from everyone else?
This is akin to saying "Mom and Shop Retail closes? who cares, the workers can go work at Walmart" "Coal Industry shut down? who cares, they can learn to code"
It's not easy for someone to easily rebuild audience from one platform to another or easily transfer the skills required from one platform to another.
Remember these are small businesses run by people with little technical skills. Many have toiled to be where they are.
The "HN and other Tech elitists" don't like social media because it's harmful to society. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant already brought forward the notion that it is immoral to use a rational human as means to an end. We have broadly accepted this philosophy in life. So when social media companies exploit human attention and cause significant harm to their mental health as means to achieve advertising income and towards mercenary surveillance (surveilling the public for the highest bidder), that is broadly considered questionable. And not only by HN, but by psychiatrists, psychologists, other health care workers, teachers, social sciences researchers, and so on.
There is a national security argument to be made for TikTok as well, which is why governments have taken an interest in it recently. So the ends may be more insidious than advertisement and mercenary surveillance like we see across all social media.
We know that the content on TikTok changed a lot the day Russian invaded Ukraine, there has been a flood of misleading information about the war, including a wave of glorifying the "Z" armed forces and the "special operation", not to mention the "denazifying" stuff. People are being used as means to information warfare ends, too. And by both sides of various conflicts. This is also, arguably, immoral. Although I doubt there's much of an argument to be had.
The mental health and the national security arguments are separate, but given their context, characterizing this as a hate for mom and pop shop closures in some way or form is inappropriate. I think this comparison is a bit of a low effort troll. It's clear you want to rile people up as I don't think anyone starts a serious discussion by calling the other party an elitist or any -ist. But still, above are the reasons why very many people dislike social media and TikTok.
The people who pinned their livelihoods to TikTok are casualties, if and only if TikTok doesn't sell. If the company just shuts down then we'll know two things:
1. The primary reason for its existence was not a profit motive (hence no reason to sell, if China can't get influence powers from it).
2. The commercial facades holding the bag were not the ones calling the shots.
If TikTok is sold to a "friendly" company, we'll know less, but it also means that none of those duped people whose livelihoods you're opining about will be touched.
The company which owns TikTok, ByteDance, has had employees speak about this. The VP and ByteDance's internal CPP committee secretary has stated that their intent is for ByteDance to "transmit the correct political direction, public opinion guidance and value orientation into every business and product line." While employees of a subsidiary company TopBuzz have spoken out about its intent to push CCP sympathizer content to foreign users.
ByteDance's history is mired by CCP interventions, it is a company heavily managed by the communist party, with multiple branches closed for non-compliance. It is allowed to exist by the CCP because, so it has been claimed very publicly, it toes the CCP's political line. That's how it measures success. Its success comes from this compliance.
TikTok may very well be a commercial flop in the West and still be in business, operating very well.
But do you have any counter-arguments? Like any claim that ByteDance isn't receiving existentially important benefits by being in CCP's good graces? Or does it just sound a certain way without much grounding in facts?
To me, all governments protect their own big industries. You don't think Meta has lobbyists behind the bill? You don't think Microsoft does - whom has made it clear that they're interesting in buying TikTok - as well?
Meta's war against Tiktok:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/meta-facebook-tiktok-p...
The Huawei ban hugely benefited Apple, Cisco, and Samsung. But the Huawei ban also fired up China. After 5 years, Huawei is now making a huge comeback but this time, without dependencies on crucial American technology. Look at the reports of Huawei sales and Apple's decline in sales in China in Q1 2024.
China will now compete against America's semiconductor industry - instead of being buyers. The world also sees lesser of the US because of the Huawei ban. Now even some European countries are weary of relying too much on America.
So while the Huawei ban did initially boost American companies, the damage is everlasting and America can't deny that it's now in a protectionist state. You can fool the public through propaganda (such as "China bad") but not governments around the world.
US startups don't have access to that kind of capital, and even if their algo is better than tiktok, users make or break it, so they can't really get off the ground.
I'd say the closest idea is snapchat, and, that was/is massively hampered by the semi-slimy reputation it has. Sure it's profitable, but, had it never been used to send lewd images among college kids, it could very well have been as big as tiktok.
Banning TikTok will cause an entire generation of Americans to lose all trust in their institutions. Whatever vanishingly small influence China may or may not have through TikTok---still completely unproven innuendo---pales compared to the absolute public relations coup that would win were it banned. If you think cynicism is bad now, there will be zero trust in the democratic process and the rules-based order were this to happen.
People can and will switch platforms, it's not that big of a deal...
It's one thing to ban menthol cigarettes, most people don't smoke. Most people use tiktok, it's probably similarly addicting, and they're going to cut them off cold-turkey. It's not going to go well, and they're going to burn what little good will the government has in the eyes of people under 40.
It'd be a completely different story if they were doing what should have been done a decade ago, and regulated data collection out of existence with this bill, which would actually be to the benefit of everyone that's not Meta/Snap/X/Alphabet.
There are many things that are massively popular. You mention tobacco products, but sugary drinks, alcohol, pesticides, gambling, endangered species products, over-powered home electronics, and similar have all enjoyed popularity and have been banned or severely regulated and restricted by governments in the world. I've yet to see any of these "not going well", so I think regulating a social media site will be okay. It seems to me like people are often grateful for this moderation after a period of adjustment.
But speaking of adjustment... There is far too much dopamine-bomb content to consume online for the time we have to consume it. So I don't think anyone's online diet would have to change at all, even if TikTok ceased to exist entirely.
The fallout from this WILL be a political and constitutional catastrophe that Washington will never likely recover from.
More or less, China could buy 20% of any qualifying company, and get it banned under this law.
What many of us who opposed this ban are frustrated about is that there are major underlying problems with all large social media companies, and the "foreign adversary" angle gives these companies cover to keep abusing their users just because they happen to be incorporated in the right country.
Most of the TikTok concerns could have been subsumed in a user-rights bill that prevented data from being shared with third parties and limited the scope of what an algo-feed could do under Section 230's safe harbor. Of course, this would have required some real legislating that would have upset some very large donors, so we get the "foreign adversary" bill instead.
Also illegal drug sales may taper off for a while but they'll find snap to be quite cozy again.
I’m always amazed at how many accounts openly sell drugs, I report them, meta says they are ok.
TikTok has also “weaponized” their users to spam senators and house reps [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/7/24093308/tiktok-congress-b...
TikTok is a scummy business
Something must be really really wrong.
I think the TikTook ban is stupid, but assigning TT this kind of importance in a generally fickle space is dumb.
A blow to creators, sure. A blow to businesses? Maybe but it would probably make their workforce less depressed and slack off less so I don’t think so. The economy?
How is pilfering off US dollars to China have TikTok addict them and ad-men brainwash them help the economy? This is before we even get into if the economy would be worth the sacrifice even if it did help the economy.
The only plausible negative consequence economically would be from Chinese retaliation and frankly they’ve been playing dirty for ages having long banned US social media and the US has broadly failed to go tit for tat with them due to a “free trade” doctrine that the US should simply not be provoked by or react to non-tariff trade barriers and instead act with the utmost naivety. So I don’t even think the threat of retaliation should scare anybody since it’s still game theoretically correct to retaliate.