Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest
theverge.com
theverge.com
It's surprising to me that this this pretty significant distinction has been glossed over both in media reporting and in general comments here on HN.
To be clear, I'm not supporting the law with this comment, just clarifying what the actual content of the law is.
If TikTok was banned in the sense that it had to shut down then the First Amendment argument could work. But if it's just a forced sale then it has no bearing on the freedom of speech of TokTok users.
Thats easy to answer.
The reason why is because they'd get paid 10s of billions of billions of dollars for it, and otherwise their investment would massively lose a large amount of value otherwise.
Also, bytedance wouldn't be competing with tiktok anymore in those markets as they'd have sold it off.
So the choice is either to make a bunch of money, or to instead have their investment become worthless.
The tiktok that you know about is the international app that already doesnt compete with the rest of bytedance.
The amusing thing looking at this from China perspective is that ByteDance has been hit by the government over and over again for appealing to the mainstream.
The first big success they had was a social media platform centered around memes/jokes, and because the CCP doesn't have a sense of humor they crushed this platform when it started getting too popular.
Their second big success was a news aggregator that focused on surfacing news people actually wanted to read instead of the news the CCP wanted people to read. Which is to say mostly lowbrow gossip and sensationalist storytelling instead of long and tedious treatises about how great the party is. The Xi administration crushed that too, mandating changes in the platform that made it just as sanitized as all the other Chinese "news" outlets.
TikTok getting popular overseas seems like the result of a very well-timed purchase of musical.ly. The small number of western Gen Z youth I'm in contact with say they came to TikTok through musical.ly. Either way, we all see how successful that has been. Once again, ByteDance figured out a product that gave the "low end population" exactly what they wanted, and once again the government is punishing them for it.
At this point you wonder if these guys should just throw their hands in the air and pivot into oil or pharmaceuticals or some other addiction industry that's totally in the government's pocket. I guess the suspicion of some in the US government is that that's already happened and that's why this fun app that everyone loves is actually a tool of the CCP.
It was not. It was only banned in 2009 after it was allegedly used to organise protests that escalated into deadly race riots in Xinjiang.
The organized protests[1] were just a convenient excuse. Race riots have occurred in many countries and you can link those back to various social media platforms which were used to organize protests.
[1] The protests as you describe them… there is a lot to unpack here and it’s not a good enough excuse to ban American social media companies. But if you think it is, then the US also gets to arbitrarily ban foreign social media companies.
Fuck this one particular subsidiary majority owned by a Chinese company rubs me the wrong way because China doesn't do this to us. As a general rule US companies can operate in China and US companies are allowed to own stake in Chinese companies.
To me this is an escalation of the fair-weather, "I don't like you, you don't like me but we can still be professionals when it comes to mutually beneficial trade" attitude we've had.
Unintentionally funny comment when positioned next to its sibling about this exact thing happening to FB in a targeted way back in '09
The CEO has mentioned that they will simply pull out of the US market.
Whoever they sell it to, if they end up doing that, is going to be more than willing to put in place their own addiction algorithm, in just the same way that American social media and other adjacent tech companies have implemented them.
I'm in no way a fan or user of TikTok, but thinking this will improve the app seems naive.
A Facebook or Twitter-esque addiction algorithm is WAY better than a CCP addiction algorithm since the latter tries to socially engineer unrest and disillusion, on purpose, as a targeted act of Nakatomi-esque cyberwarfare against a totalitarian regime's rivals. The former kind maybe does so as an inadvertent externality, and with every reason to wager to a far lesser degree.
Meta won't turn up the heat on antisemitism and down on something the CCP doesn't like. It might turn up the heat on, I don't know, trans rights, and down on neo Nazis, but it's much more benign dystopic info filtering than an actual "what will destabilize the US and fuel stochastic terrorism and civil war?" agenda (which is against Meta's best interest).
China might not even need to influence the west through tiktok, meta and friends seem to be doing plenty of it themselves. None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh
> None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh
The Nirvana Fallacy is when you reject the better of two outcomes because it's not good enough compared to some mythical optimum.
In this case, the optimum could be some social media service that "strengthens progress and unity" or it could be a total ban on social media altogether, both of which seem pretty mythical. :p
I believe organic, chaotic derangement is better than extrinsic, targeted derangement in magnitude and outcome.
Take some responsibility for Americans posting on social media to other Americans, for the love of god.
The highest ideal American SNS follow is profit. That will generate all kinds of externalities that might be bad for society. Still, at least so far, we've found it to be the least destructive optimization target in modern human history (vs. socialism).
The CCP is clearly tuning the algorithm in the SNS under its control to limit topics it deems undesirable in its goal of an ideal society. Whoever thinks this isn't so bad hasn't experienced an authoritarian state personally or at least highly underestimates the pain and suffering one can inflict.
Someone like Facebook wants the algorithm to show addictive content that generally isn't super offensive to the average person. Someone like the CCP wants the algorithm to show addictive content that idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.
I'm not convinced anything on TikTok is more divisive than any other social media platform. And Reddit seems to be filled with a lot more tankies than other platforms.
How is it worse than making disseminating disinformation illegal? The law as written lays bare the true motivation - it's not about fighting disinformation ("inauthentic user activity" has been detected across all social networks for the purposes of disinformation). It almost certainly is about protecting American companies from competitors with better AI algorithms. The legislature has telegraphed that the tech/potential for abuse are not problems by themselves - ownership by a Chinese company is what they take issue with.
I didn't say it was a bad thing - I said there's a better option that wasn't taken. IMO, protecting citizens from bad behavior by domestic and foreign companies is nobler than corporate protectionism. YMMV .
I don't see how people can say this with a straight face knowing that American adversaries operate almost in the open on Facebook. You don't need to control the platform to control the message. That's what social media companies sell!
There is no greater vehicle to deliver a hooking mechanism to target specific users for spyware upload than an app that is installed on a lot of platforms. Weechat is one other such tool btw. and that thing behaves strangely compared to e.g. Whatsapp if you install it.
Not according to his employees
They would have to be bribing the IRS. No way.
I don't like or use Facebook and I hope it dies a horrible death. But I'm also a realist.
>That's what social media companies sell!
In any case, without paid ads, their "friend me" campaigns didn't work. There's some research from the FBI on this.
Can't find the link right this second but I'll post back if I do.
To be fair having first past the post voting does wonders for division. No external enemy necessary.
For a US example you can simply count the minutes of coverage Fox News and CNN give to various stories for the same basic effect. How much coverage you gives the Russia- Ukraine war can be just as impactful as if you refer to it as a Russian invasion or not.
I don't use TikTok, but I use Facebook and Google's short video versions. I find just as many anti-CCP as pro-CCP content on it, and...I guess these are mostly TikTok videos because many of them still have TikTok watermarks.
I'm legitimately terrified to know what this means.
Let me not even get started on the deep fakes lurking on the platform.
The effect is less informed with higher certainty, and terrible combination for training citizens for actual civil discourse.
Same thing with propaganda used by social media.
This video illustrates the effects of it: https://youtu.be/pB7WzqUq4Nk?t=324
You're right, everyone I know now buys their glycine from Donghua Jinlong instead of using domestic manufacturers. This is clearly not because of the superior manufacturing capabilities of Donghua Jinlong, who are ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified, and whose glycine is industrial AND food grade, but because of an insidious campaign by the CCP to promote Chinese glycine across the entire industry, trying to crush American glycine manufacturing. I demand congressional hearings about what our elected politicians are doing about this threat to American-made glycine!
Readers might also be happy to know DHJL glycine is Halal, Kosher, and Reach certified, and more recently, FDA approved as well!
But they're very certain that it's bad!
Meanwhile, I'm scratching my head trying to understand how my watch history could have any value whatsoever. Cute kittens, shirtless guys chopping wood, sad hamster memes, Sanchez the sleepy racoon, Young Royals edits, some dude eating all kinds of cheese, A bunch of confused Americans in Europe and vice versa, PEDRO PEDRO PEDRO, guys promoting their onlyfans, schwapeepee, and of course Donghua Jinlong content, although it seems to have run its course now.
Do you have a single example of a successful Chinese media campaign, disinformation or information - just one?
Because I can name, off the top of my head, disinformation campaigns by Trump (election was stole) , by Israel (bunker under a hospital), by Isis (mass recruitment in western countries), by oil companies (heat pumps don’t work in Britain’s unique climate), by food companies, by Russia, by Greenpeace, by crazy people on 4chan but I cannot name a single message that came out of China and got major public resonance in the west.
China's 50-cent army buys social media accounts, or creates fake personas, to push narratives and abuses reporting/takedown mechanisms to suppress unfavorable posts and channels.
> Most DRAGONBRIDGE activity is low quality content without a political message, populated across many channels and blogs
If anything, this is a demonstration that their efforts are futile and incompetent, very much non-threat. I’ve seen even 4chan do better
We have multiple actors that push divisive misinformation through bots, much more successfully, and we do not apply any scrutiny to that.
Sounds like a skill issue. The Us has decades worth of a head start on the internet and social media. If "the enemy" can just waltz in and disrupt that in a matter of 5 years, I think we have bigger issues on hand.
> Someone like the CCP wants the algorithm to show addictive content that idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.
Yeah, America has a decade long headstart on that too. We blamed facebook in 2016, we're blaming Tiktok in 2024. How long are we going to deflect this to the internet?
I'm afraid that's not goign to happen in the US. Politicians never let a disaster go to waste: had the will been there to regulate social media in general, the hysteria around TikTok would have precipitated it. Instead, we got a law specifically targeting TikTok and ignoring other SM.
The mere fact that these social media CEOs are building vast bunkers and amassing billions of dollars highlights the issue that they are literally shoveling value out of these platforms into their own pockets, and those of their investors, while preying upon the instincts of all their users in a deeply psychological manner.
You mean like Facebook, YouTube, and Starbucks?
Riiiggghhhttt…
As a parent, I hate google a lot more than TikTok. I can already block TikTok, but I can't block youtube because the school district mandates it.
But ya, if a teen is otherwise cut off from devices besides the ones they get from school, then you could see that as a weak point, although I don't think that applies to a significant portion of families. For the ones that it does apply to, they probably have bigger problems to worry about than TikTok being banned.
Though, the saddest thing is that it seems like the U.S citizens, (i.e ANY of tiktoks 160 MILLION US users) have absolutely no say in the operations,a yet we actually interact with the app not these old people in Congress. The fact that Biden so swiftly signed the bill too makes me frustrated as I want to vote for him, but he keeps doing or okaying things that are counter to my values.
If ByteDance sells TikTok to US owners to satisfy the requirement, they give up control of a successful platform developed inside of China to a self-declared adversary that already controls most of the world's social media platforms, representing a significant loss to China as they attempt to compete online.
If ByteDance ignores the demand to sell, the US government has obligated itself to prevent its citizens from accessing one of the most popular social media apps in existence, something that the affected users will be extremely angry about, and will likely make claims of state censorship.
If I were China, and my goal was to leverage TikTok to do harm to America, I would choose the option that turns US citizens against the government over the option that transfers power from China to the US.
China is a communist country. State owned industry. The leash they give business "owners" might be long (long enough to fool westerns it's just another USA), but it is still a leash, and they are still under control of the party. No courts, no rights, no lawsuits. Party wants, party takes.
That's simply a lie. Douyin is full of the same trash as Tiktok.
Nope! He has said - TT is not going anywhere and vows to fight back legally. I was a bit shocked to find court put a hold on Trump’s ban of TT
Very big example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merck_%26_Co.
The US entity isn't beholden to the CCP and can decide to switch algorithm providers if they suddenly notice it's getting very propaganda-y, which provides a degree of independent oversight appeasing US concerns while not necessitating actually switching from the current systems.
"On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" by Tim Snyder, it's also is short and to the point (audiobook is 2 hours long) and teaches people what to look for to see when their country slides into authoritarianism and what to do to fight it.
The author also reads it on YouTube if you can't get a hold of it.
1) prior to bill passage, convincing the public that they will pull out is optimal as it helps argue against bill, regardless of whether it is at all true
2) but, after bill passage, the incentives are totally different. Pulling out means giving up a billion dollar market that could instead have been sold. The shareholders would be livid.
So I am very skeptical. I have heard CEOs say many things they later were found to clearly never have meant seriously, simply because it was what they needed to say at the time. Like, "we would never do outsourcing or layoffs, your division is totally safe"....
I would think thoughtful HN readers would be just a little less credulous
They were the first popular short-form algorithmic addictive feed app. Anyone can make one now (YT Shorts, Insta Reels, etc), there's no secret sauce anymore like there may have been years ago. But TikTok stays number one because they were number one -- network effects.
If they disappear, a new competitor takes over and is just as strong as they were. All the value is in the niche, not the occupant of the niche. It really would be like they're giving it away instead of at least collecting a few billion cash for it. It would be monumentally stupid. They'd get the future competitor just as much whether they sell or not.
Isn't this just another reason to conclude China views Tiktok as a national security asset?
It bans American companies from providing services that distribute, maintain or update any sufficiently popular apps substantially owned or controlled by foreign adversaries.
TikTok could host APKs from CCP headquarters if they want to.
Heck, they could post their IPA or source code if they wanted. This law isn't what prevents users from sideloading.
If you tune it right, there's a lot of good content on there, though.
Most other short-form content recommendation algorithms overfit like crazy (ahem Instagram ahem), and many users trying to bend it a certain way mess it up.
Why does everyone assume this is likely? The CCP has already said they would block a sale of TikTok. This happened a while ago - so the US saying TikTok must be sold is an effective ban. The misdirection of the wording of the ban is just dishonest.
Ban usually means you can't use it anymore. Take, for example, Google in mainland China. Banned without unusual circumvention. If TikTok refuses to sell to a non-Chinese owner, on the other hand, they get removed from app stores. Their website still works without any circumvention. Not banned. Even in the worst case.
2. I am looking forward to seeing the justifications that will be trotted around once the USG torpedoes net neutrality and bans the website
Where did I set a goal post? What does the goal even represent in this metaphor? What counts as a ban?
The United States is capable of banning stuff. When we take down pirate websites, we're enacting a ban: domain seizures, asset freezes, criminal penalties and possibly sanctions. We can even go lightweight: say it's illegal to provide services to Americans (or more draconian, which I must add lines up with China's approach, make it illegal to access them) and then leave enforcemnt to the executive.
What we're doing here is milquetoast: sell enough to non-Chinese owners so they no longer have a controlling stake or distribute this from non-American servers and via the internet and sideloaded apps. Calling this a ban is like saying someone was banned from a restaurant because they arrived after it closed.
It has gone from "not a ban" because they just have to sell, to "not a ban" because because the website is still available.
It's an effective ban because the CCP has already said they will not allow a TikTok sale. Congress knows there's no recourse for ByteDance. They aren't going to hand over the IP to a non-Chinese entity. If France said they were going to ban NVDA unless NVDA sells to a French national we would call it a ban.
>Calling this a ban is like saying someone was banned from a restaurant because they arrived after it closed.
The irony about this is that China has the same exact policy in the mainland, but no one argues whether or not Google is banned in China. Google used to be in China! China said Google had to censor some topics or they wouldn't be allowed to do business in China. Google opted to leave.
Nobody sits around pontificating that it technically wasn't a ban because all Google needed to do what follow Chinese law on censorship.
These are both true, though. Again, if you want to see a ban, look at how Facebook is treated by China.
But fair enough, people are using the term "ban" inconsistently. I wouldn't say anyone's moving the goalposts as much as we're using an ambiguous term interchangeably.
> If France said they were going to ban NVDA unless NVDA sells to a French national we would call it a ban
This is tautology. You literally said if Sally were to do X to Andy unless {}, then X = X.
> Nobody sits around pontificating that it technically wasn't a ban because all Google needed to do what follow Chinese law on censorship
You can't go to Google.com in China. You will be able to go to TikTok.com and access its content freely after it's been, per your definition, banned. From a free-speech perspective, that seems material.
I get your point from a free-trade perspective. This is obviously not a free-trade bill. Maybe that's where the discussion is losing traction...
I've never seen anyone argue that Google isn't technically banned in China. It's clearly a ban when China does it.
And what do companies do that don't want to comply to GDPR? They ban EU users. You can use the search bar here to find countless people talking about being banned. There's no ambiguity - there's only ambiguity when it comes to TikTok.
If I purchase a car with low gas mileage, and then the EPA requires cars to have minimum gas milage, that "bans" my car. Even though technically, I could figure out some way to rebuild it to comply.
That's because:
* Saying it'll get banned makes for a more sensational headline.
* Saying it'll get banned is accurate enough for most practical purposes.
* Saying it'll get banned is simpler than explaining the details of divestiture. Most Americans probably don't even know what "divest" means without pulling out a dictionary.
Speaking with some younger American co-workers in the past, their suspicion/hatred of their own country is astounding to see and it seems to have coincidentally begun after TikTok entered US market a few months before US elections.
So the worry seems to be that young American voters exposed to a foreign social platform will influence upcoming elections. I do not think this is far fetched as multiple countries have come out to expose various tactics by certain countries to influence perception.
Speaking as an American, our country was founded on the principles of being apprehensive of governments including our own. Being suspicious of our own government is a very American thing and should not be understood as surprising.
See our Declaration of Independence for further reading and context.
Instead, the TikTok CEO is invoking the First Amendment and "freedom" to emotionally manipulate people into thinking Congress did something wrong here.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-03-06...
Does yandex have an app or use cloudflare?
It is much, much broader than a 'tiktok ban', it applies to any company that fits that criteria. So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company. It's not just a ban, it simply won't exist on the internet for US users.
There are probably a bunch of companies that will be subject to this if it's upheld in court, and the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet. It'll also likely result in Chinese interests devesting down to >20% from US companies that they do not want banned, for much the same reasons.
Basically, this is the result of a bunch of tech-illiterate politicians who have no idea how any of this works, passing a law that looks good in news headlines without regard to the potential consequences. So business as usual on the hill.
Provided they have more than 1 million MAU (which they do, obviously). The president would also have to affirmatively ban it and report to Congress about the specific threat that company poses, and what assets need to be divested. TikTok is the only company written into the bill by Congress that doesn't require affirmative action by the president, or the report.
> the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet
Only if the president believes they should be banned.
Anything they sell just gives them more money to buy more ownership.
What the law absolutely does do is make "Chinese Ownership" an existential risk to companies with software products with large numbers of US users. Riot, Epic et. al. will be strongly incentivised to get their PRC shareholders to divest, and in the future other companies will be disincentivized from accepting that kind of investment.
And surely that's intentional.
Abuse of power in a nutshell.
It does not look good at all. It just shows that they have no trust in their own citizens. And maybe for a reason.
My prediction: China would absolutely throw away a few billion to enjoy the chaos that results from the country that preaches free speech painting itself into a corner and banning it. Enacting a ban on the most popular app among Gen Z would cause a huge uproar.
It would be like taking away terrestrial radio from boomers. It's that popular.
We can be skeptical, but not afraid of foreign owned media.
100% agree.
I would say this offers some insight into the real reason they want to ban TikTok.
It's addictive and they don't fully understand the dangers of CCP spyware and CCP controlled algorithm. It's like drugs addicts being passionate about drug use.
Or they just move over to FAANG competitors? I've never used TikTok before since it is an app, but I use YouTube shorts and whatever that Instagram short thing is Facebook is pushing into my feed (with...erm...a lot more addictive algorithms than YouTube). Ok, I'm not Gen Z, but it looks like content providers are already hedging their bets on platforms (they often don't even remove TikTok watermarks), I don't see why consumers wouldn't follow. Its not like YouTube or Facebook is blocked in the USA.
Currently the FAANG competitors are much worse; their recommendation engines are inferior. That's why consumers overwhelmingly prefer Tiktok currently.
https://manifold.markets/mint/conditional-on-the-tiktok-ban-...
Hmm I wonder why..
I think it's unlikely they will sell and it will instead be removed from US markets. China would prefer that we don't have another successful social networking platform, and they would like to keep their spyware for use in other countries.
I think either way this whole thing is a big W for CCP and L to US democracy that doesn't have the balls to actually expand regulation when it's clearly wanted and needed.
Because freedom of speech doesn't work in practice?
We’ll end up validating Chinese policies all these years if we claim this action has precedent.
If it doesn’t have precedent, then it’s even worse. It becomes a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them (or their practices).”
You could say the same thing about China complaining about this. Actually, that's what people would think of first when you mentioned "the teapot calling the kettle back". Frankly, I think people in China are surprised we kept our internet open for so long. Anyways, yes, American is now admitting that they will play by the same rules as China, rather than giving them a pass.
My whole second point about joining them is saying that it shouldn’t matter what China does or says. They are hypocrites so we can be too???
> I guess also if we really don't have any principles anymore, we'll have devolved back to survival of the fittest principles.
China has been very clear that the principle should be tit for tat. All of their economic and foreign policy is based on that, from the visas they issue to visitors, the tariffs we exchange on vehicle production, and the foreigners they throw in prison when one of their own is put on house arrest in Canada. This is just a very late counter-reaction to a policy China has held for awhile.
China is a government, so, just like our government, it must stfu.
This is a pretty straightforward protection of the people from government that's very much in line with American ideals.
China.
China is using TikTok to suppress free speech, so I don't see how your analogy relates here.
China: censors free speech in China then makes a US speech platform and censors American speech on the new platform. Blocks US platforms in China because they refuse to censor speech for the CCP.
US: blocks China from owning speech platforms because the US doesn't allow censorship and doesn't trust China to stop censoring speech on the platform.
Literally the opposite thing. How you've managed to conflate two completely opposite things is very interesting.
Are you a habitual TikTok user? Or do you work for the CCP?
I'm openly suspicious that you might be getting paid to conflate these very obviously opposite things.
Conversely America is holding to its core values of restricting governments from acting in the political field. That right is reserved for citizens, and is especially protected from government use. America is founded on restricting government so that free speech can exist.
This move firmly reestablishes America as a leader in free speech protection, as it protects citizens speech from influence by government, both domestic, and now, foreign.
It still wouldn't violate the Constitution. Rights are reserved for citizens. It's perfectly legal to tell TikTok what they can or can't say.
That's not what Congress has done, but it would be legal.
There should be no restrictions on who owns a website. There can be an unlimited number of websites, and every website's "reception range" is the entire planet.
Today's rulemaking pushes us one step closer to a Great Firewall. If ByteDance moves operations entirely to China, what measures will the government enact to prevent people in the US from using it? (It will probably be strong-arming app stores, but that will fail because they can just make it a web app. So the only option will be to have two Internets, one with everything except TikTok, and one with everything.)
It will be interesting if this extends to other apps. Will it be unamerican to play Genshin Impact?
Ex, ByteDance couldn't go to AWS and ask for capacity, nor could they go to Hurricane Electric and ask for Peering.
Freedom of speech is my right to be able to bitch about Biden or Trump without having to worry that I'll die in prison.
Freedom of speech is not a right of foreign entities sending me memes about them to manipulate who I will vote for in the election.
There's a law where foreign entities can't own TV or Radio in US. This might be controversial, but IMO it should be updated to also include social media as this is source where people get news from.
In other words "freedom of speech" means that Congress doesn't have the power to pass laws that suppress speech itself, regardless of where it comes from. It's not that the first amendment applies to some people (and certainly not that it doesn't apply to others), but that it applies to Congress and limits what laws they can pass without qualification.
Firstly, they didn't expand or alter the Constitution.
I'm not sure where you got that from. Reading back and I don't see it anywhere.
Stated again, hopefully more clearly; by exercising restrictions on China they've reestablished that China is not "the people" described in the Constitution. So, it's not protected from congressional acts.
And second, they didn't need to do that anyway. Foreign policy is a power reserved for Congress and the President. No amendment ever restricted that power.
See Article 1.
Further, the protection of free speech in the first amendment does not even refer to "the people", but simply prohibits Congress from abridging the freedom of speech per se, without qualification or any exception for who is doing the speaking. Congress cannot pass laws that abridge the freedom of speech as a matter of actual effect, regardless of whether they are doing so under the auspices of exercising other powers.
Foreign policy powers don't come into it -- if the act restricts free speech, it is unconstitutional, regardless of what end Congress was attempting to pursue.
These cases go back and forth.
I would argue that it wasn't necessary to spell out that constitutional rights apply to citizens because the law is presumed to defer to common practice in cases where no law exists. That is, laws go back to long before the Constitution and those laws are referred to as common law.
In that sense; the king has lordship of his subjects, and no obligation to subjects of other kingdoms. He collected taxes, and provided protection from foreign threat and justice for his subjects.
Likewise, citizens of China don't pay taxes to the US, they have not that obligation because they are not subjects of the US government. Neither do they have the rights that are afforded a subject thereof.
Congress has no need to clarify that. It's presumed to be the case. That they mention it in certain amendments is incidental, despite the creative interpretations I've read, mostly from immigration proponents. (Not that I'm opposed, I'm an immigrant.)
No doubt, lots of people prefer to interpret this differently, especially when it's a right they need for a specific reason. That's exactly what China is doing here.
They are arguing about why the law should be interpreted in their favor this time. And next time they will argue the other way, as they do against their subjects.
It's up to the judge what it means in each case, but as a generally accepted interpretation, applying US law and protections to a foreign nation without some kind of formal alliance specifying more directly what is provided, is an egregious stretch of the imagination. It's ridicule, at best.
But anyways, I like to hope that the US is better than China. If US citizens are abused while in China, I would be appalled to see Chinese citizens abused in the US as retribution.
We don’t need to overly moralize this and somehow find the US on a pedestal with impossible to reach and shifting standards of behavior that are only applicable to the US when it’s convenient for various bad actors and despotic regimes (Putin, Hamas, CCP, Iran, North Korea).
America can be “better” than China without having to accept disadvantages. Likewise China could allow American social media companies to show that it is sincere in being interested in free and fair business. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be regulations but there’s simply no good argument to allow a Chinese social media company to operate in the US without reciprocal activity and nothing, nothing is lost by banning Tik Tok.
I still believe in this, and if you look at America’s policies of sanctioning countries like Russia, blocking a business from operating in a country is actually a detriment to that country because they lose access to the benefit that that company provides. Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party.
I don’t fundamentally believe it’s about fair playing ground or advantages/disadvantages for equivalent US companies in China. The current consensus is really about national security, and having China be able to access data on US people. If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way.
Furthermore if it did become about fair playing ground for domestic companies then I think it fundamentally misunderstands the free market economic model. The free market would benefit domestic companies. It would strengthen domestic companies to have competition.
It was framed as a moral argument by suggesting the US should be “better”. At least that was my interpretation. I don’t think arguing from a market perspective really changes that interpretation but instead further weakens China’s lack of allowing American social media companies to operate in China with the same unfettered market access.
> If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way.
We kind of care and we have been caring more. The problem is that legally it has been difficult to say “go ahead and build or operate your business in the US except if you are China”. Likewise China just blanket applies the rules that it has to entities that want to operate in China.
> Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party.
So far from what I’ve seen these types of actions have been very specific and targeted. In the case of Tik Tok there isn’t any loss to citizens and letting it continue to operate with impunity in the US brings all sorts of negative externalities that the market isn’t equipped to solve.
It’s also important to remember that some things are more important than profit. The economy and market are just one aspect of a nation. Lowering cost and increasing competition are nice but they are not the point of civilization.
Of course in practice that's true, but we also tout free-er markets as something to strive for, especially when it comes to us imposing it on other countries in conflict with their sovereign rights to restrict their own markets.
> So far from what I’ve seen these types of actions have been very specific and targeted. In the case of Tik Tok there isn’t any loss to citizens and letting it continue to operate with impunity in the US brings all sorts of negative externalities that the market isn’t equipped to solve.
I think TikTok is a highly special case, and sort of brings to light the rationale why China decided to ban foreign mega tech corps, especially social media ones. We also saw a backlash when Facebook tried to influence India's elections and politics with a banner on their website. Social media is indeed a special case.
But I think this problem is also similar to the national security vs privacy/encryption battle. We are giving up some of our principles to make our short term lives (national security) easier. Yes, TikTok can be weaponized as an influence machine... however letting it run free could mean developing a more natural resistance to it in the American population (if possible). If we devolve to market manipulation we'll rely on it as a crutch. Why stop there? Why not engineer the whole economy.
> Why stop there? Why not engineer the whole economy.
Why go to extremes? You could just argue the opposite and argue why don’t we explicitly allow slave labor, bribery, and dumping?
As soon as you provide an argument against any of those things you can use that same rationale to argue to ban a company like Tik Tok.
I lost hope long ago.
The proper moral position is for trade to be governed by rational rules that apply consistently regardless of who is trading with whom or what country they are from.
And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.
"Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)."
We can say that Google and Facebook are "banned" or "censored" in China even though China would surely be happy to unban them if they sold their operations in China to a Chinese business. So it is consistent and fair to say that this bill "bans" or "censors" TikTok.
If TikTok wants to give up the revenue, they can continue to send propaganda to the US, and kids can continue to watch and make videos.
China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.
give a dog a bad name and it's as good as dead.
I bet you that would become a thing at school, getting the geekier kids to "install tiktok 4 me pls"
China does way more than that. China forces all companies that wish to do business in China to host their data in China in a way that ensures the CCP has complete access to it.
It boggles the mind how some anonymous accounts try to attack the US for interfering with a Chinese company doing business in the US, particularly one which is a notorious security hole, but leave out the fact that CCP's China goes well beyond as a matter of policy.
It would make more sense that Chinese customers would want to host their data in the US not vice versa, and in that case you would treat them the same as American customers in American data centers with the same security in place.
It's the cheaper solution, caters to all customer needs, and doesn't risk your customers' faith.
I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't separate them.
Do you have some reason to believe they aren't or are you just guessing that they wouldn't take precautions? Because in this case, the precautions are actually the easier topology to build, I think.
I'm absolutely not defending China's authoritarian regime and overall the U.S. isn't seems less bad, but at the same time it's a bit rich to pretend the U.S. doesn't do the same if it matters.
Also China does not stop companies to do business with Facebook and Google, if you look up numbers from Facebook and Google, a big chunk ad revenue would come from Chinese companies.
In the same sense, it's not Google that's banned in China. It's free speech. Google just can't operate without it so it decided to exit the market by refusing to allow CCP access to user data and to implement CCP firewalls.
You can conflate things to make them sound like the same thing. Words can have subjective and loose meaning.
But reality is very complex and very specific and doesn't have any loose meaning. And this is not remotely the same thing.
It's only improbable if the suspicion is true, and in that case: good riddance.
Also TikTok apparently isn't even allowed in China they have their own version.
Well that’s the crux, isn’t it.
If TikTok is just a business, like ByteDance insists, any business would rather get something than nothing. So ByteDance would sell.
If TikTok isn’t merely a business but rather an organ of soft power, and China blocks a sale, then the suspicions of the U.S. intelligence community are confirmed.
Using that logic, facebook, google, etc are not businesses either since they chose to be banned from china.
Google, Facebook etc don't have a "Chinese market" product at all, so there's nothing to sell off. If they did have a Chinese market product, worth many tens of billions of dollars, they would very likely sell it rather than spike it.
Essentially, you are asking everyone to assume that Bytdance does not really have a financial choice in the matter, and therefore financial irrationality is evidence of corruption.
When the reality is that the money may not mean as much to them as you are asking people to assume, and that in lieu of a payout they'd rather not reward a sale to the country that is strong-arming them. Which few with financial flexibility, and a healthy ego, would.
Journalists and your everyone else enjoys free speech, it must not be curtailed, neither must it be fostered.
While companies as a disembodied judicial entity cannot have speech in the same sense as people of flesh and blood, they can, simply based on their properties, act as an amplifier or muffler.
This requires at least some level of care which cannot be guaranteed if the business is run by a company headquartered in an unfriendly foreign nation which does not allow free speech at all and only allows businesses to conduct international business that is sanctioned.(We have had numerous reports about this now over the past years that foreign investors and companies operating in China are actually competing with the Chinese state there.)
If you don't agree, let's take out China in this argument and phrase it differently:
Would you think it would've been a good idea to have foreign investors from Nazi Germany run newspapers and radios in the states in the 1930s and leading up there? (I mean we had Nazi parties in the US around that time, BUT from today's perspective we would agree that such a scenario(the media-outlets) is a clear cut case with the US-government prohibiting it.)
What was better in the 1930's was that the newspaper industry was in the business for the news. They were a news-company. These days hedge-funds and for profits(not necessarily bad but it takes a turn when it is unadulterated greed by all means necessary( The Atlantic wrote a nice piece about this where Money swoops in buys a newspaper and runs it into the ground and that regularly and at scale, just cannot find the article)). So our position is a bit dire and we have Television and an industry that strives to captivate/capitalize all the attention it can get for a few pennies to deal with these days.
The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death).
Pair that with the New Silk Road initiative and the Dollar-Imperialism the Chinese government tries to run in the Pan-Pacific region and the picture becomes less welcoming.
Don't get me wrong, there is enough blame to go around for everybody, but I rather have it come from a non fascist entity. That being said, I can go into Washington and demonstrate peacefully(!) against Biden or Trump and I can ask questions about the past. Try doing that in Bejing with respect to Xi or Tienamen Square.(So while we can blame both sides there is still more to one argument than the other, so much for whataboutism) Considering that 'Grandpa' Xi enforced a personal cult around him starting with children's school books(not unlike Putin) and with what goes on with the Uyghur population in China's north, the attempts to strong arm Taiwan , the alignment of China with Russia, the broken promise made to Hong Kong and other items, I have to say that China is fascist and the CCP communist in name only.
The concept of Lebensraum is firmly on the agenda of global and, if you are unfortunate enough, also local politics again.
China and Russia only differ in the choice of their tooling, approach and starting positions.(China is less commercially insulated than Russia it appears. Propably one of the reasons China's is a bit softer trying to incorporate time.)
From an economic perspective I totally get that no company wants to have their business taken away, but I doubt Bytedance is just a company. This is just a change in ownership, nothing out of the ordinary. The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership. That framing, in the light of what I just wrote, becomes highly suspect. Almost vicious, bordering on the willingness to divide and incite. (Which reminds me: Totalitarian regimes like to be part of the regular government bodies but they also like to set up their own counterpart so that they, after having stopped the working of those other bodies (or if they are ousted), still have a viable alternative.)
That is why I welcome this, why I think it is high time, why I hope to see more of these actions globally,
This is deeply, deeply wrong - China and Russia are natural opponents, they are two autocracies that deeply distrust each other and do not understand each other’s culture. They will never be like USA and UK.
The alignment between then, is because they both face pressure from USA. It’s not natural and is a huge failure of US foreign policy.
Russia emulates Europe, it produces weapons using German machines, and bottles vodka on Italian production lines. Buying Chinese equipment gets local governors in trouble. They are happy selling natural resources and have no real desire to compete with US in iPhone production or car market. The main friction is around territory. They are kinda like brexiteers - they don’t really have their own vision of the future outside of a narrow. Specific issue.
China is totally different, they have a vision that is very different - it is not ‘be like the west but better’ - it’s be their own thing. they are getting off oil and plan to compete in high-tech industries. That’s not to say they are better, but the plan is totally different
Well Stalin and Hitler were like that too. Luckily for the world Hitler couldn't stay his hand reaching for Moscow, otherwise the Allies wouldn't have faced a Germany being engaged in a two front war. Also, considering that Putin and XI met during the Olympic Winter Games face to face and that the invasion of Ukraine commenced right after the games as to not affront Xi, depriving him of China's moment in the Limelight is telling non the less. So there must be some mutual understanding. Especially considering that Xi is slavering over Taiwan.
> The alignment between then, is because they both face pressure from USA. It’s not natural and is a huge failure of US foreign policy.
I wouldn't consider it failure. Opponent is Opponent no matter what.
>Russia emulates Europe, it produces weapons using German machines, and bottles vodka on Italian production lines. Buying Chinese equipment gets local governors in trouble. They are happy selling natural resources and have no real desire to compete with US in iPhone production or car market. The main friction is around territory. They are kinda like brexiteers - they don’t really have their own vision of the future outside of a narrow. Specific issue.
The whole world produces weapons. This is a red herring implying that Russia is just doing what Europe does. That is outright wrong. Europe does not try to forcefully move borders attempting to annihilate a sovereign nation by committing genocide. And I doubt they are bottling Vodka from Russian production in Italy, especially not since the sanctions. Vodka may have originated in Russia, BUT every company can distill and sell it. Same goes for weapons. I also doubt that it would get anyone in trouble buying Chinese, otherwise, Me thinks, a lot of people in Russia would be in trouble, especially way out East. The way you label the War in Ukraine is also ... euphemistically put... and no, they are not like the Brexiteers. Please don't take me or anyone else here a fool. Britain left the EU because of populism and now they are dealing with the fallout. They have no notion of reviving the British Empire. Putin wants to recreate the UdSSR. He himself declared the downfall of the Soviet Union the single most geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century. In short he is a Soviet still in mind and manner.
>China is totally different, they have a vision that is very different - it is not ‘be like the west but better’ - it’s be their own thing. they are getting off oil and plan to compete in high-tech industries. That’s not to say they are better, but the plan is totally different
Really? Ask the Philippines, Vietnam or in general countries around the South China Sea, read news articles not penned by the South China Morning Post or read accounts from fishermen there. I am sure that the picture you fine there is totally different. Territorial saber rattling, building of artificial islands trying to stake a claim. China always say they come in peace and that we all should be tolerant, but when you try to see if that sentiment is true, then it is only true for others, for all other situations China comes first. Their recent political statements have become a statement of whataboutism and we are the victims of the bad bad west and we did no wrong ever... To my mind their vision of the future is a Chinese one where everything non-Chinese is to be treated as second rate at best.
They are not like the west and definitely not better, otherwise the Chinese Government wouldn't have warned against the bad influences of Christmas some months back. Open minded, tolerant... with that message I don't think so. And you are right, their plan is different. Industrial espionage on a very very large scale. And please don't try to white-wash or absolve. They are creating new power plants burning coal at a rate higher than any other nation.
I must also add here that Xi, just like Putin, feels slighted by history. That China's fall from might, from national glory, is bad and that it must reclaim its 'rightful' place. Anyone seeing a parallel here. I might also add that it is quiet telling that no one mentions the great leap forward by Mao dark times ahead indeed.
Haha, haha, ha...
Have you ever been to China? They have made more progress in the last few decades than the whole western world combined. And the west in in a serious decline. If anything that statement should be backwards.
Before you reflexively dismiss this argument and go hit that downwards triangle: what you are saying is China had more glory during the Opium wars than it does now. Surely you can see how absurd this statement is.
> TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly
This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.
(example based on physical addiction) If I was a smoker, and Phillip Morris completely changed it's marketing near me, and sold completely different cigarettes in my local area that were wildly different than the market standard, just because there was a local smoker inhabiting the area, I'd be furious. Especially if they were "dumbed down" versions of what actual smokers got.
If a website serves me wildly different content, even if we search for the same terms, have the same interests, then that's a load of BS. And if I was in China, I'd also be vaguely annoyed at the nanny state behavior.
"Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, 'Essays on Mind and Matter'
Do you have proof of this? Either in the positive, or the negative (if Chinese kids search for garbage they will be given garbage?)
But the materials that are "acceptable" to give to you in the first place is mostly garbage on TikTok and highly curated on the Chinese version.
That's the point.
> This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.
Really? Then this investigation should be wrong, but they are a reputable source and I trust them, especially since that is not the only report or the only source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T_Lu1S0sII
> "Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, 'Essays on Mind and Matter'
That is THE MOST inhumane and humanity denying thing I have read today. It does not matter the color of your skin or the cultural background of your upbringing, we all bleed when stabbed and we all feel pain and fear. If that sentiment is still alive in the governing ranks of that country and wide spread we should all be very very careful and worried.
> (example based on physical addiction) If I was a smoker, and Phillip Morris completely changed it's marketing near me, and sold completely different cigarettes in my local area that were wildly different than the market standard, just because there was a local smoker inhabiting the area, I'd be furious. Especially if they were "dumbed down" versions of what actual smokers got.
A) you would have to notice to be upset B) that is not how services and the internet work. We could sit side by side and use the same app and visit the same website and could,depending on connection or identifying markers still see totally different content or sentiments being expressed. Considering that we are on HN, I fear you know and you played that card deliberately non the less.
> If a website serves me wildly different content, even if we search for the same terms, have the same interests, then that's a load of BS. And if I was in China, I'd also be vaguely annoyed at the nanny state behavior.
Search for Tienamen Square inside the GFW and outside and also add the word Massacre to it and observe. We also see a less politically colored version of this in general dubbed the Search Engine Bubble. Also, you are free to be annoyed, but if you speak up you might also be 'free' to receive a free political 'reeducation' or sanctions.
Also, it's nice to see a bipartisan bill in the national interest. There used to be a saying, "politics stops at the water's edge." Every so often we remember that.
Yes, I have heard that saying being quoted some time ago.
While I mostly exist on the other side of the water's edge... I am happy and hopeful that that is the case and hope it will continue to be that way and that the circus some politicians yonder the water's edge are putting on stops.
Some things do, and should transcend, political boundaries. e.g. while I, would I be eligible to vote in the US, would most likely not vote Republican(probably not aged enough yet :D ), I must say that I like this guy https://www.facebook.com/RepZachNunn/videos/this-isnt-a-horr... simply for trying to do the right thing there. Found it while I was prompted to do some more research due to busying myself with this thread.(and it is not the only report I found... See here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S160061352...) I always thought of it to be some boogie man story made up by Falun Gong or Falun Dafa hanging about the CBD to rope in support. Finding out that it is actually substancial... I think this is my seeing evil moment if I ever had one, and I am only in front of a computer screen in my PJs.
Good idea? No. But the world isn't exactly ran on good ideas. Instead of Nazi germany newspapers they went straight to american broadcast itself and seeped in like a poison.
And the sad part is I don't even blame them. People want to hear what they agree with. Some may be legitmately brainwashed, but I've seen enough examples of individuals shunning the truth to conclude that we're well into a post-truth era.
>The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death).
And would Tiktok be the fastest growing social media if it did the same? China can force their citizens to watch whatever they deem worthy. they have literal curfews for playing games implemented by the government. imposing that onto the west is just a bad business decision.
It goes back to the root issue, many westerners have long lost that disciplined to be an educated populace, to identify and defend against bias. to will themselves towards what they need to do as opposed to want. a single social media side won't change that.
>The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership.
They would if they pulled out of the US. I'd look forward to the fallout that ensues. Maybe it will get the you to understand the power of their vote.
Really? That is like saying that Russians are always good at chess or Chinese good at Kung Fu or Japanese good at Karate.
We had this type of rhetoric during the time of the Cold War as well.
Aside from it being profiling let's entertain this:
If what you say were true, then the populace of China(to borrow your verbage) wouldn't start laying flat. You wouldn't have to introduce a system of snitching and forced conformism via the social credit system(which is less technical than is made out to believe in the west, more like some dada and wify on the bench taking notes) and you wouldn't have dissidents or the need to 'shield/protect' the population from any foreign influence via the GFW.
And onto other parts: > And would Tiktok be the fastest growing social media if it did the same? China can force their citizens to watch whatever they deem worthy. they have literal curfews for playing games implemented by the government. imposing that onto the west is just a bad business decision.
Really? It is only a crime, bad if caught and now they have been caught and called out. Also, how do you measure growth? Over the past years commercial data from within China has been dubious. And what is the fastest growing anyways? Usershare? Tiktok enjoys an unfair advantage. China has a large population and western products are not allowed to participate and e.g. Weibo or tencent are de factor monopolies. I assume it to be similar with Tiktok. Also, things that are not good for you usually are the most fun. Think junk food. There is nothing wrong with that or endulging it it(every once in a while), but, once again, it is nefarious when there is malicious purpose behind it like with Tiktok. A foreign power trying to subvert values and a way of life. And to answer your question: Yes, given that the Chinese Government is footing the bill they have more clout than their competitors because of that.
> They would if they pulled out of the US. I'd look forward to the fallout that ensues. Maybe it will get the you to understand the power of their vote.
Well, then the ownership does not change. Their choice, it is their company. They may do with it as they please, but if they don't play by the rules they may conduct business elsewhere only. Why stop a parting guest?
It didn't have to go that way but that's the direction it went. And I see no initiative to change that.
>f what you say were true, then the populace of China(to borrow your verbage) wouldn't start laying flat.
In all honestly, most of my post has nothing to do with China at all. So I have no idea what you are deriving from my statement.
>so, how do you measure growth?
As a social media platform? Aquire more users, capture to market share, and increase profit margins. Asia isn't so different from NA/EU in that regard.
Then when expanding/globalizing you adjust your platform to the culture. China has theirs, the US has a different one. Facebook has to do this, Google has to do this, Even Apple has to do this. Nothing is really unique from a business perspective.
>Usershare? Tiktok enjoys an unfair advantage.
The US doesn't care about the Chinese userbase. And if the Chinese userbase could influence platforms, Weibo would be the Facebook of the world, instead of Facebook.
That's the quirk of growth that companies can forget when expanding. You don't just get a bunch of famous or masses of users and things become profitable nor even popular. Even companies as big as Amazon may pull out of a country if it can't properly understand this.
>but if they don't play by the rules they may conduct business elsewhere only. Why stop a parting guest?
Again, I don't really care about their fate. I'm looking at the fallout from a bunch of angry ticktok users. The last time we had a bunch of angry people on social media enraged by some trivial issue we got Trump.
Maybe I can't stop the second coming, but I sure as heck won't have the wool I've my eyes again and get caught up in the petty squabbles.
If that is so altruistic, I am sure a mom from that cultural background would forfeit the future of her child so that another family(maybe her sister's) has a better life ensuring the thriving of their offspring instead. I have known many a people of Asian decent. What you describe is pure idolism. A cliche, a stereotypical, unreflected, reflexive - dare I say romatizised - vision of the Eastern Culture. If it were true, why are so many people migrating then? Away I mean? And what about the wandering workers that are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth? Also, what you are framing as logical is human nature. It is not different based on culture. Only its hue changes. You also left out my point about the generation that lies flat and other remarks.
> In all honestly, most of my post has nothing to do with China at all. So I have no idea what you are deriving from my statement.
ByteDance is a Chinese company with Bejing's blessing. The whole debate, not just our little discussion here, is framed US-China or West-China.
> Then when expanding/globalizing you adjust your platform to the culture. China has theirs, the US has a different one. Facebook has to do this, Google has to do this, Even Apple has to do this. Nothing is really unique from a business perspective.
Really? Recall project Dragonfly of Google's ? Does any Chinese company operating in other jurisdictions require a minimum percentage of Chinese shareholders or similar shenanigans?
> The US doesn't care about the Chinese userbase. And if the Chinese userbase could influence platforms, Weibo would be the Facebook of the world, instead of Facebook.
See project Dragonfly again. A lot of companies are interested in the Chinese market. That is all Bloomberg ever raves about when it comes to the Chinese market opening and Earning calls being presented. So the statement that the US(or the west in general) is not caring about the userbase in China is outright wrong. A lot of consumers, biiiiig market. They are just not allowed to touch it or under hefty penalties with big handicaps. And weibo was beaten to the punch, Tiktok wants to become the youtube/whatsapp of the world. Don't try to misdirect here ;) .
> That's the quirk of growth that companies can forget when expanding. You don't just get a bunch of famous or masses of users and things become profitable nor even popular. Even companies as big as Amazon may pull out of a country if it can't properly understand this.
See my previous reply. I must also add, tongue in cheek, .... or is coerced to leave because of unfair competitive scewing. Amazon is the kingpin of online retail and must be checked in in general. Such a 800pound Gorilla knows what it is doing. So I doubt that would qualify for your argument to begin with.
> Again, I don't really care about their fate. I'm looking at the fallout from a bunch of angry ticktok users. The last time we had a bunch of angry people on social media enraged by some trivial issue we got Trump.
That is a discussion worthy of its own thread and I am not touching it in order to stay focused(nice try though). Let's just say that doing the right thing should be done regardless of the implications because it is worth doing. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be smart about it. And reigning in China's delusions of gradeur and Xi's pipedream of wanting a legacy as big as Mao's no matter the cost on the back of millions of people is the right thing. You can't let a bully step over you.
America did. Still does. And now it’s banning and regulating superior products off the market.
Where and when did America claim that?
The Biden admin has also been looking to halt BYD sales in the US, citing security threats [0]. BYD’s cars are often cheaper than Teslas and very well reviewed
0: https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/24087919/biden-tariff-c...
China did. Still does. And now it's begging and suing to keep those freedoms.
Although it is fun that it's totally fine for an American company to take the reins and continue on.
This could have been done with emphasis on the way China engineers TikTok/Douyin in each country and the effects on the end users - but that wouldn't make anyone with money or power very happy. The thing it does is fine - merely where the data goes and who pulls the levers is the concern.
The "ban" will change nothing in our society, thank God.
The important part should be understanding the whys and building access to a robust nonpunitive way out for those who want it.
But the profits of addiction are too important either way.
Every company that complies with the local laws can open any kind of company in China and they do.
The US has to do the same per WTO law as long as Tiktok obeys the US law. And it does. Hence the made up 'national security' horsesh*t to justify the ban - otherwise it would run afoul of WTO rules.
US news media is able to spin headlines to maximize drama and outrage for the chumbox sales while misinforming readers. The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world and so US mainstream news media doesn't have to seek excellence in evidence, integrity, accuracy, or precision.
>The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world
Objectively wrong. It's one of the most educated countries in the world, just mediocre compared to the rest of the OECD. They're more educated than China, no matter how well a small number of urban Chinese students do on international standardised tests.
a. Quantitatively
- Reading: Canada is 3rd, America is 24th
- Science: Canada is 7th, America is also 24th
- Math: Canada is 9th, America is 39th
^ There should be negligible differences between them given vast similarities.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/02/15/u-s-stude...
b. Qualitatively - Meet and talk to enough people from Asia (Japan, China, Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China) and Europe (Iberian and Eastern) & UK. And then talk to many Americans from anywhere other than from the coasts. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, MAGA, and QAnon are the mainstream norm rather than the exception. The difference is: they don't have government censorship, a totalitarian regime, or social credit habits as an excuse for their ignorance. There are billboards with borderline racist MAGA slogans in the South US.
One country has borderline racist MAGA slogans. The other has Han Chauvinism and forced propaganda for a totalitarian state. There's plenty of conspiracy theories and misinformation in both countries. Here's a study showing that 13.8% of people in China considered GMO foods as a form of bioterrorism targeted at China[1].
I'm not saying America doesn't have problems, but most of the criticisms you lobbed at America can just as easily be lobbed at China, and yet China seems to be economically expanding rather rapidly relative to America or most places. I'll also say being highly educated isn't all roses, every country with tertiary education levels as high or higher than Canada's has a well sub-replacement birthrate - the education levels you idealise aren't even independantly sustainable.
The likely outcome is that TikTok will stop operating in the US and continue in Europe and other places plus Douyin will continue in China.
1) Their algorithms (presumably video recommendations) are proprietary and used by their other Chinese apps
2) TikTok revenue isn't that significant for them
Maybe these reasons are bogus, but I'd not be surprised if they do refuse to sell.
The US and its allies got rid of Chinese telecom hardware from their networks for the very same reasons now it’s time to do the same with TikTok.
Would you let an enemy supply you with the very same kit you would use to fight them? No. Would you let that same adversary install an app on your most used device to watch and track you? Hah no.
A spin to a US company is not enough. It needs to cease operating in the US because there’s no surety that even with a spin data and sharing won’t get back to ByteDance China.
Parallel to this we need a federal national data privacy law that protects us but also cracks down on the huge industry of data brokers selling Americans’ data to anyone that has cash.
The US government is a far greater danger to the average American than the Chinese government is, and this bill just gives even more power to the US government to dominate its citizens.
The US government could, if it wanted to, slaughter the entire civilian population of the US right now and no one could stop them. I don’t believe for a second that China would be so restrained if it suddenly had that power over the USA. So, while it’s true that having the power that it does makes the US government a potential threat, it is nowhere near as much of an actual threat as China.
And you base that where exactly ?
What the fuck are you talking about???
As an aside, I always viewed TikTok as a real world analogue to the mind control subplot from Zoolander (Frankie says 'relax')...
Look: the Cold War is over. And communism is a red herring. The world has changed. For some reason Americas elites view TikTok as a threat, probably because they don’t have the kind of total access to their servers that they’re accustomed to with American firms. But that has little to do with regular Americans. And there’s no argument other than decades old red baiting tropes they can think of to try to get us to care.
Reading your comment, it's pretty obvious that we should do something about propaganda here in the EU. About US propaganda I mean.
To not see the coming conflict be it cold or otherwise or not see the CCP for what it is is just ludicrous to me.
They want to — and as they should — become to dominant world power and reshape things as they see fit.
They will take Taiwan by force and it is zero sum: either China and its allies become the world’s leading economy and lead on things or the US and it’s allies remain in “power” and the west continues. This is the threat.
Now I’ve nothing against the people of China. It’s the government that I don’t trust.
But on topic I still think the ban is still old men barking at cloud. Somehow embarrassing really.
That's a funny argument, given that the same piece of legislation with the TikTok "ban" also includes a(nother) $60.8 billion package for Ukraine [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/senate-aid-pa...
I feel like all these arguments just come down to “China bad, therefore anything that annoys China is good” which is silly and juvenile reasoning
This way the same thing happens and china did also make some money. I don't see the argument that china having your data is somehow better than your government.
If it's that China will know more about Americans through data ingestion, they can already do that. Americans willingly upload every little bit of their lives to YouTube, Twitch, and tons of other platforms. Not to mention that Temu is the most downloaded shopping app in the US. And what kind of attack can TikTok information provide that other publicly available online information scraped from other social media sites cannot?
If it's that China can show American citizens a curated list of topics and videos to make Americans think certain ways or vote certain ways, then I absolutely think that's a 1A problem. That's the exact same rhetoric tons of repressive Communist countries used and still use to deny people the freedom to read books from outside, watch movies from outside, read newspapers from outside, etc. And I'm never going to accept the idea that information (even full on lies) so dangerous that people shouldn't be allowed to see them.
The establishment wants and needs a monopoly in shaping the opinions and thoughts of its citizens.
I tend to come down with the same opinion as you though. It's all still essentially a first amendment issue and the negatives I listed aren't going to disappear if TikTok goes away.
Facial recognition database and tracking people at a global scale.
With advances in computing power and unsupervised machine learning, correlating a person with the person's surroundings is now largely or fully automated – what used to take forensic experts weeks, months or years to hunt down a person by poring over indirect clues in photographs or CCTV camera footage, is now almost instantenous.
Remember, TikTok is not just topless teenagers twerking on the camera, it is used by people to take short videos at random locations (and the locations are already easify to classify and account for), so if you happen to be a dissident (or a person of interest in general) hiding from the CCP, and you happened to have walked past a TikTok user shooting a short video and you got in the shot, your identity is matched up and your current location is revealed automatically, in near real time or with a short delay.
I have almost no doubt that people in TikTok videos are already digitised, and their faceprints are sunk into a gigantic database behind the Great Firewall. It is easy to project what other kinds of nefarious abuse are possible when such datasets are available.
I don't know of any system capable of doing what you describe. But if such a system existed it could just use publicly available videos from Facebook and Instagram. It wouldn't need its own social media platform to feed it data.
Having a direct feed of videos being uploaded from the user's device is also advantageous as the higher resolution of the original video will provide more details before it is recomompressed for long term storage in a smaller resolution. Most importantly, Instagram and Twitter won't allow uncontrolled access to the content they host whereas a Chinese company simply does not have a choice and has to serve the content up on its state demands.
Until proven otherwise, it is safer to project that such a system exists.
I don't think China are going to find their Dissident in TikTok videos any time soon. The false positive rate on even the best facial recognition is way too high for tracking individuals globally.
Everything you've pointed to can be done already by mining the publicly available treasure trove of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc. A pretty small team can scrape these sites and do what you're insinuating.
And lastly, I still don't see the danger of releasing this info? I mean, can't any foreigner travelling on a tourist visa record public vistas for 30 days and essentially do the same thing?
Not from US so I had to check the 1A:
"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"
"or of the press" sounds like it applies here but does 1A covers also foreign companies?
But this is communist era logic used in some countries to this day to ban "foreign" and "corrupting" materials. Forgive me if it smells like repression and tastes like repression, I think it is repression. Shaping the minds of youths is not the exclusive purview of the US political class. That's some 1984 logic...
Words matter, at the very least to avoid starting nationalistic flamewars here on HN.
US is in cold war with China because China might soon be economicaly getting upper hand.
The US considers all of LATAM as his own back yard. Why can’t China consider all of Asia as its own back yard?
This is what upsets people, the sheer size of hypocrisy.
That doesn't mean either side was right, or that one justifies the other. Only that the pot should into call the kettle black.
That is absolutely the implication here.
The commenter's focus on hypocrisy reads to me more like they take issue with the US calling China out for this rather then justifying what China is doing because they aren't the only ones.
The point is that the US has set a precedence on military power around the world. The US told the world that using military power for your own country's benefit is ok to do. So why can't China?
If they enter into a conflict where they are cordoned off, their export oriented economy would crash immediately.
A war between China and USA is impossible to win for either sides, due to both military size, budgets, interdependence, and nuclear weapons arsenal. And this is why it's a cold war.
I am not a geopolitician, but this looks like a little too simplistic perspective, doesn’t it? I mean China diversified its wallet, including by helping to create infrastructures in Africa where there is still a largely growing young population (in contrast to the general trend in the occidental countries, or even what the long standing single child policy led to in China).
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
Now let's explore the connotation of enemy. Playing Go against you calling you my enemy is outright wrong. However, if you were my enemy, I would not drink tea and have a laugh with you afterwards. I wouldn't even be playing a game of Go against you, but rather trying to do other not so nice things to you.
Such is the nature of connotation. Being erudite helps here ;) .
They're listed as adversaries and not enemies because aiding an enemy country suddenly unlocks a litany of other crimes.
Enemy is very specifically defined: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/2204
Adversary is very specifically defined: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
China wants to replace the US and the west as the global power. This will lead to upheaval and likely a war. When that finally comes to pass it behooves the west and the US to protect itself from anything that could undermine its own protection. In order to win a war you need hearts and minds. Not a populace that is being programmed to think despotic neo-communist-capitalist-when-it-suits-them rulers in China are somehow paper tigers.
Let’s compromise here: they are adversaries now but I think they are preparing to become enemies in every sense of the word. If they invade Taiwan, shed blood in the conflict over the breached rusting ship in the Phillipines, continue supporting Putin in his illegal attempt to annex Ukraine then yes they will eventually become enemies.
And now not only were these circumstances rare, but they were also inherently liminal. Technological and economic edges fade rapidly, especially in light of major population level differences. I see no reason to think China imagines they could or even wants to be anything like the US was 30 years ago. The world is returning to its more natural multipolar state, as it's more or less always been.
It’s by no means a given that a more even distribution of power leads to war or China ‘replacing the US’ as the only one. But an attitude where everyone thinks so, ironically, might.
Change any of those things in a significant way and I’m sure I would be a different person now. I love the idea that I am an autonomous agent of my own that exists self evidently outside of those bounds, I just don’t think it’s true.
The fact that you might be programmed to hate/dislike/fear China despite, I'm guessing having never been to China, is proof that America also programs you, just in another way.
Hint: Mostly through media.
> Words matter, at the very least to avoid starting nationalistic flamwars here on HN.
I agree!
Back in Arcade Machines time, when a player is busy playing a fighting game, Street Fighter, I guess, and another person inserts a coin to play against him, the game pauses and a message that reads "Here's come a new challenger" pops up, so I think challenger would serve the purpose somehow!
Not that this is relevant to anything, but if it were: no one was doing this.
Edit: improve grammar and wording
> Parallel to this we need a federal national data privacy law that protects us but also cracks down on the huge industry of data brokers selling Americans’ data to anyone that has cash.
And also dismantle the law where the US can request any data on any person, even abroad, if the company is US-based
I believe the underlying narrative of TikTok was with government control the algorithms would be purposefully tuned to promote disorder elsewhere which is a level of control the U.S. government does not have over U.S. companies and they were jealous (although with the level of information control during Desert Storm I am not 100% certain on that). However, I think this law was very premature and should have required evidence of tuning or actual war. While soldiers may have apps they should not the spies should know better.
The China side where they have banned encryption apps also seems to be war preparation. A digital iron curtain while depressing for the population behind it is not something that can be torn down from the outside. A per app legal war seems an unfeasible use of congressional time when many Chinese smart device control apps require location to function and are on many phones. This also appears to be an opening shot by congress for putting up a U.S. national firewall if TikTok just leaves all US offices and continues business through web based offerings.
Absolutely.
This is already in process in case of EU: https://noyb.eu/en/update-cnil-decides-eu-us-data-transfer-g...
Also, unlike the Bytedance and the Chinese Government, US companies do not run intelligence operations. They are in it solely for the money, otherwise the NSA wouldn't have had to snoop on Google in 2013(?).
and this point
> And also dismantle the law where the US can request any data on any person, even abroad, if the company is US-based
I find questionable. It is too blanketed. There are international criminals afoot after all. Red Letters do have their purpose as do international treaties for law enforcement to cooperate across borders in a bespoke manner in accordance with their and international laws.
Is this a joke?
There's a difference between "Hey, France, we would like this info on a known criminal" and "U.S.-based companies have to turn over all data on any person regardless of that data location or the nationality of the person in question".
That's basically the basis for both Schrems I and Schrems II.
Edit: See also CLOUD Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
--- start quote ---
The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil
--- end quote ---
This is crucial. Legal due process. Also
> ..... U.S.-based technology companies ....
Other jurisdictions have something similar, every company must adhere to the laws of the jurisdiction they want to operate in. You don't like it as a company, not a problem just don't incorporate in the US and live with the repercussion.
There is nothing that suggests that it is out of the ordinary or malicious.
Where it becomes interesting is access without a warrant, or with a muzzle attached, at large scale. That is the clandestine stuff. The purview of intelligence agencies.
That has been addressed by the EU with legislation; privacy shield was not really the hit, but guess what: MS complied. https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-roll-out-data-b... so spooks from the US will now have a harder time accessing user data at scale without a warrant.
That is entirely US-based and ignores any laws or regulations of other countries.
> Other jurisdictions have something similar, every company must adhere to the laws of the jurisdiction they want to operate in.
The key: operate. The US claims data from those companies even if the data and the operations happen in foreign countries.
> That has been addressed by the EU with legislation
EU legislation does not negate US laws. CLOUD Act is still there. And that is a huge issue for any country dealing with US companies.
Now coming to the subject of Facebook, Twitter etc, these apps pose the same threat to nations other than the US. As in, these apps serve US interests by pushing US propaganda onto the rest of the world and constantly monitors/tracks the individuals who have these apps installed.
So a better option is to ban any type of tracking - on all apps. But it is extremely unlikely that this will be made into law.
I sometimes get upset when I see that every privacy and safety law is written to protect only US citizens, when it is the US that creates and fuels those predatory companies. And I understand they basically don’t care if they destroy everyone if it benefits them. Great. But what are our governments doing?
Huh? Where did you get this idea? The GPDR in the EU isn't a US law, it's an EU law to protect EU citizens.
The US government really doesn't do much to protect the privacy of US citizens, certainly nothing at the level of the EU's laws.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
For example, US citizens are free to listen to chinese radio stations, or chinese TV channels, read chinese books. Why the government needs to restrict what US citizens have access to in this specific case?
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-eff-applaud-rul...
Much of the Patriot Act is probably unconstitutional but the government had 9/11 as a national security justification. No similar justification exists regarding TikTok.
The government getting into the business of banning companies, and more specifically banning online services, is very, very dangerous in my opinion. This one move effectively creates the need for our own great firewall, starting with a list of only one service but with the executive power to grow that list as more "national security threats" are named.
In this -- extreme case -- the exceptional case of banning the company I think is warranted.
Secondly, half the country voted for DJT. Some insignificant percentage believed his lies and doubted science and such during COVID. Mistakes were indeed made by governments and scientists and public trust in them was strained ... but it proved to me, at least, that the general US public is not educated enough or are just too hopped on their social media opium to care enough to really weigh the threat that TikTok plays. And in this case I defer to the intelligence community and those who operate in the area of national defense to handle this. Seems enough of congress and the senate agree with me.
I'm hesitant to assume people are uneducated because of who they vote for. Talking about Covid and the pandemic response, a vast majority of our politicians and health leaders were knowingly spouting off lies in the name of what they thought was best for us. Again, I can't pin that on any one person, even Fouci. The system broke down and that says nothing meaningful about the average voter.
That said, an educated populace is a fundamental need in a democracy and one that the US founders were well aware of. We don't have that today, whether by incompetence or malice our major societal systems reinforce obedience and subservience. We need more people following their curiosity wherever it leads, and we won't get there by continuing to further lean into a distrust of the general public or by making everyone's daily lives more and more complicated and stretched with less time to spend however each person wants to spend it.
When has the US forced a private corporation to sell up via Congressional decree in peacetime?
Seems to me that Congress is betting that Bytedance will capitulate instead of taking the case to the Supreme Court.
It's just protectionism, like banning the Huawei phones (not talking about the infrastructure, that's different) or banning DJI drones. It just sounds better to mention national security than to say "we don't want others to do to us what we do to them, and we don't want them to compete with us".
Radio and newspapers(including internet articles here in general) are a one way street. With Tiktok, you not only get access to the users device via the app, but it is also a two way street. Tiktok gets to choose what it feeds you.
And what you describe is also true in a lot of countries(I can choose my medium). However, with newspapers, radio and television what you feed the population is readily visible to anyone. I can turn on the telly to see what is being streamed. This is not the case with an app. Unless the government watches you 24/7 and I doubt that. The costs are prohibitive. The thing that does exist is metadata. If I were to visit terrorist.com or bombmanual.org.uk I would make a list. But watching TikTok all that is being seen is me communicating with content-servers(here the subject that needs to be watched also changes from the user(me) to the proprietor(the company)) from them and protocolling the content of everything watched, unless you break encryption at scale, and monitor everyone is also prohibitive. Not to mention analysis of the content. So Tiktok is the perfect vehicle for subversion of a foreign nation if I want to play for time.
This is the government grabbing the authority to ban online services that they deem a national risk. The bill would honestly have been much more benign if it was a few pages spelling out a specific ban on TokTok. Hell, I don't think they'd even need a law to have Google and Apple pull the app from the app stores.
The internet broadened that and introduced apps. So I would see this as a correction rather than anything else.
If doesn't work in many cases anyway, Government has no way to track who is tuning in and listening to hostile radio broadcasts.
Even it might be hostile propaganda, First ammendment protects both publishing and consuming content, without any "national security" considerations. But US lawmakers are now seemingly keen to introduce such conditions in the publishing and consuming of content.
During the cold war it was perfectly legal for the Soviet Life magazine to be published in the US and for people to buy and read it.
First ammendment really does say that "Congress shall make no law .." without any caveats for national security or even war-time exemptions.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the SCOTUS.
Basically all tech is clean and ok if comes from the good guys (the US and allies) and unclean if it comes from the bad guys (China, Russia ...).
IMHO a sad state of affairs. We would be at a healthier and less hypocritical place if our tech was secure by design, and suppliers and platforms were subject to open objective criteria and rule of law wrt. censorship and surveillance.
The one thing it would change though is that it would make the life a bit harder for cyber criminals(think downgrading tls connections).
And the criteria you talked about, they are open. Called capitalism, and regulations those companies operate under. Along the way that abomination of surveillance capitalism was born though.
Mentioning propaganda you choose the latter.
Pray tell what are those campaigns you talk about? If you are posing this question you must have at least some in mind and ready at hand to share.
Or all those action movies relying on leased military equipments under the condition they will never portray the US military in a bad manner?
Or Operation Mockingbird during the cold war?
Those are all examples of US propaganda.
There is much I left aside ofc, including anything related to the support of the ongoing "military operation" against the palestinian people.
But let's entertain those smokescreens even just to see where it leads:
The second Gulf war was outright wrong agreed. The hawks had their day and it was a dark one and all that followed because of it. A falling from grace. No argument there. But it is not an argument one should make when arguing over operations done by other countries especially since it is not related and long past and the current subject of discussion is happening right now.
The action movie thing... it is their equipment, they may provide it under any condition as they see fit. I wouldn't want to lend my neighbor a canister either if I knew he chooses to use it to write not so funny stuff in burning letters into my front lawn. I would not be surprised if other militaries would do the same thing if they were to lend their equipment at all.
>Or Operation Mockingbird during the cold war?
Was that even a real operation?
> There is much I left aside ofc, including anything related to the support of the ongoing "military operation" against the palestinian people.
That one is a doozy. The US made it clear that Israel should do more to shield civilians from harm. But let's be clear. Israel and the US are the wrong party to be mad at. If you want to be mad: be mad at Hamas, at Iran for supporting Hamas and at China and Russia for using it in a game of Geopolitical checkers in the UN security council. Without the scourge that is Hamas, who still continue to shoot missiles from South Gaza and who deny a sovereign nation the right to exist, non of this would've happened. Hamas uses the Palestinian people as shields, uses humanitarian institutions(e.g. hospitals) as hide outs and ammunition storages and subverts aide organizations created to help the people in the Gaza strip. They also slaughtered innocent civilians and kidnapped 100s a few months ago. And the people in Gaza should also be mad at their long ago elected inapt and impotent president and their dysfunctional governing bodies. And their inability to face down those terrorists hiding amongst them.(I cannot blame them though, it is a horrid and couraguous thing to do in any circumstance.)
And let's entertain the scenario that the US would step out.... well the entire Middle East would implode or explode like a powder keg. Trade would also suffer considering the shipping routes, oil and other things. And then Iran with Russia's and/or China's blessing would then do evil things... not a very comforting thought either, especially if you give a hoot about religion.
Oh, and a US company spaying foreign citizens in not only legal in the USA, but also required.
now that would be a bridge too far...
Thanks for being a spelling-nazi :)
And they already do -- neither China nor Russia allow Meta services in their countries. Nor do they allow most of Google's services.
I guess by "safer" you mean "less accessible by the US" and I suppose that is likely "true".
But would you rather be in China and send an anti-Chinese message to your friend via... some app that China allows? Or would you rather be in the US and send an anti-US message to a friend?
Both countries are going to try and snoop that data. Both are going to be successful.
But in which would you feel "safer" -- meaning in which one is the government likely to take action against you?
But since I live in the "west", I'd rather be spied by China and Russia, than by the USA or any of their allies and vassals.
That being said, I'd rather be spied on by the government, than by my wife, family, and friends.
People and organizations I don't have to deal with are less of a threat to me.
Yea that mind set sounds awful.
And the reach of one individual is just not the same as a nation state. I’m not sure I get your point.
Can we apply this logic to Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc?
I personally only support a ban of TikTok if we apply the logic universally. Such services are weapons, and weapons are sure to be weaponized.
All centrally mass collected, plaintext or effectively plaintext data will sooner or later be co-opted by state actors.
Best to ban the practice of bulk plaintext data storage entirely unless it can all be E2EE and anonymozed to the point of being useless to the companies storing it.
We can ostensibly anyway regulate the American social media companies whereas the Chinese ones are a black box even though they might operate here under an American entity. That’s why we are here. They claimed they didn’t share data but they do. And that’s how the whole algorithm and value works
Every step you do to isolate yourself from your enemy makes them even more your enemy.
At the end of this process is war. Completely unsurprising. Pretty much inevitable.
Alternatively you could accept that you are loosing competition in some fields without turning it into mortal conflict.
At this level of paranoia you may as well ban Facebook and other social media as there is no guarantee their data is not getting intercepted by China.
> The potential for abuse from the CCP on the minds of US users exists
The exact same way Facebook and other U.S. social networks abuse the minds of US users.[1]
> as does the tracking the app could do and every data point that is generated is stored and potentially useful for blackmail or otherwise on members of Congress or others.
Yep, and in a similar way every large US player hoards as much data about its users as it can get away with, even if it doesn't know what it'll do with it, and eventually loses said data in a giant breach, which can lead to blackmail, etc.[2]
And here we sit, either toothlessly regulating the U.S. actors or attempting to ban the foreign ones instead of teaching people how to actually use social media in a way that helps them instead of melting their brains and exposing their deepest secrets to malicious actors.
I'm not much of a capitalist or a social darwinist but I'd say the best thing to do is let people learn the hard way. We seem cool to do that with junk food,[3][4] and the similarities in social engineering between the social media and junk food are striking.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/08/11/waukegan-district-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
This is an absolute no-brainer. If you want Tik Tok in the US, lower your middle finger. Am I missing something?
I mean, sure, go with that. But it doesn't negate the irony.
That story worked out fine until US companies started sending all their IP over to China for manufacturing which resulted in 3 key outcomes that broke the initial strategy:
1. It funded and supported the buildout of China's manufacturing base. China now has the best manufacturing base in the world, and in some cases is the only place in the world certain things can be feasibly made.
2. It guaranteed an export market for Chinese goods which helped to drive their economic engine.
3. It allowed unfettered industrial espionage. There is a reason that nearly every product in existence has a Chinese clone/counterfeit available within a week of launch.
The strategy failed, because the Great Firewall only keeps information out of China that the government wants kept out of China, but any other information goes in, but it prevents pretty much all information from flowing out. Firewalls are not binary, they are tunable with policy, and the Chinese government has historically had a strong strategy and nuanced policy, which has allowed them to see great economic success despite reducing freedom of information. Fundamentally, it's economics that drives the rise and fall of governments.
That's how capitalism works. And it worked extremely well and to most everyone's benefit.
This is not the same thing as copying China's approach to the world
Reciprocation is rational and good
why do you believe so?
i see no reason why rationalism and political pragmatism are mutually exclusive with liberalism. in fact to me it seems they complement each other well
While that might arguably be compatible with liberalism within a society where there is a relatively benevolent monopoly of power imposing a certain number of rights and rules molding the self-interest of all in such a way as to be compatible with civilization, within the international system there is no monopoly of violence, and therefore norms and rights are contingent on countries not acting purely in their self-interest and therefore to maximize their power.
Since modern liberalism is inherently internationalist (arguably since Woodrow Wilson, some called his approach to diplomacy "idealpolitik"), modern liberalism does have to reject realism as a school of thought.
The debate between liberalism and realism as it pertains to international politics is the main topic of contention in international relations theory.
More generally, you can also argue that liberalism assumes the good faith of powerful people not to destroy the liberal system to maximize their own power, but this is far easier to argue against in the domestic setting than in the international setting.
It seems fairly clear to me why this is the case: complex, conflict-prone relationships often involve prisoner's dilemmas, and alignment on fundamental principles is an effective method for avoiding the worst-case outcome of a prisoner's dilemma. Abandoning principles for a purely situational approach to conflict makes the presumptive lose-lose outcome much more likely.
As far as prisoner's dilemmas, its a lot more complicated than that. A purely pragmatic approach can lead to win-win outcomes that would be impossible in a purely idealist framework - realist IR scholars would, for example, argue (and could back it up far better than the alternative) that if it wasn't for Bush and Cheney's idealism, the 2003 Iraq war would never have occurred.
The realist counterpoint to the prisoner's dilemma is that it's not just due to conflict prone relationships, but because it's impossible to know what the intentions of other actors are, which is not something that international liberalism can solve in practice. In theory, liberalists would argue that two liberal states can communicate their true intentions well because their intentions reflect the intentions of the population, but this has conclusively been proven to be untrue in the case of foreign policy (not very surprising due to the way intelligence has to be set up), and therefore the liberalist rebuttal to uncertainty of intentions seems much weaker now than it did originally.
As a result, realists argue that following realpolitik can actually reduce the likelihood of war, as agents will be careful to act in such a way as to avoid seeming as to pose a threat in the absence of knowledge of their intentions, while a liberal actor, acting according to their ideals, would act in a way such that an actor who is unsure of their true intentions would have to perceive as a threat.
This means that you just can't assert easily that realism is more likely to cause lose-lose outcomes. It's a complicated argument where this kind of ironclad certainty just isn't justifiable.
I do agree with you though that the capitalism=democracy experiment was a pretty obvious failure. You can have pretty free markets with or without democracy. The US emerged from the Cold Wa with ideological battle scars which prevent us from doing what’s best for the people because that might be communism. We are gradually finding out that concentrated corporate power is potentially an even greater threat.
Agree his policy might many of us not. But player great he is.
Yes: 155 D + 197 R
No: 50 D + 15 R
"We do not want to ban apps like TikTok. What we want – and what the
legislation we support would do – is ensure that TikTok becomes owned by an
American company so that our and our children's sensitive personal data stays
here instead of going to China and so that Americans' understandings and
views can't be manipulated by algorithms potentially controlled by the PRC."That's a sure sign the citizens are getting screwed.
AIPAC wants Tiktok gone because young people are getting objective information rather than the propaganda of mainstream "responsible" media. [1]
Tiktok is not a good thing for Genocide Joe either! He has been an Israeli puppet for decades. Thanks to Tiktok, being an Israeli puppet has become a political liability because Israel has lost its control over American minds.
[1] https://twitter.com/SweatieAngle/status/1725897178038595901
They are very busy trying to get Finkelstein banned from Youtube as a "terrorist sympathiser"[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=norman+finkelst...
You definitely can. International trade has never been a fair field, power balance will be the most impacting element in the deal you get.
I think that's a concept that is thorny enough to merit a word on what we mean by that. I personally don't know what it actually points at (is there any "free trade" ever happening in real life ?), or my naive interpretation would be trade with absolutely no rules, but I assume that's not what you're pointing at.
Many industries wouldn't be where they are without decades long government intervention, and govs will also apply extra scrutiny on who owns which company, and pick up the winners as needed for national interests.
China is the most transparent about it, but being transparent and being the most engaged in it are two different things.
To be clear, I think that's just the natural state of things. Real free markets are chaos and we want countries to actually think about where they're going.
As vague and imprecise as the term "most capitalist" is, it is a blatant ignorance of the way Chinese people (have to) live, especially in cities, to think that it isn't a consequence of an extreme form of capitalism: enormous gaps between the wealthy and the poor and materialism.
China is as much a communist country as Congo is a republic.
Edit: Reading the other comments, it seems like we might all value different aspects of the country to define whether it is capitalist.
Compare with the US where the capitalist class not only has a seat at the table: they are the table. And the chairs around the table, the room the table is in, the building the room is in, the property the building is on, the people who go in and out of the building, and the bullets that shoot anyone who tries to enter the building who isn't supposed to. The US is "more capitalist" in all the ways that count - what might be confusing you is that China has more sustainable and powerful relations of production which is why they're overtaking the US. But that doesn't make them capitalist.
It's a "communist country" in an aspirational sense, not in a descriptive sense. When we call countries "capitalist" by contrast, we usually mean that in a descriptive sense. This tends to lead to a lot of confusion: nothing that China does is "communism", it's at best something that is done with the justification of being part of the pursuit of communism. Whether or not the CCP is truthful or honest in its claims about its aspirations is a different question.
Reciprocity isn't the main reason. It's become a legitimate national security problem. We're no longer in the early 2000s where we could delude ourselves into thinking China wasn't a rival. They're clearly revisionist, with their aggressive approach to resolving border disputes and rhetoric about forceful reunification of Taiwan being on the table. They are bolstering strategic reserves of oil beyond normal peacetime levels, appointing Taiwan hawks to the Politburo, increasing PLA presence near Taiwan, running war games involving an embargo of Taiwan. They doubled their trade with Russia, filling in gaps left by sanctions. They are overtly hostile to the maritime sovereignty of a treaty ally of the US.
The world has changed a lot, and few here realize it because they're stuck in this weird libertarian bubble where everyone's interests are the same and foreign policy doesn't exist and it's cynical intentions all the way down. You are all in for a rude awakening to wake you up from your hypnosis just as Europe was back in 2022.
The US will legislate according to its interests, and that is what it's appropriately doing here.
What is the nature of the risk?
> You are all in for a rude awakening to wake you up from your hypnosis...
The risk is information warfare. It's difficult to know whether they've used it for that purpose yet, because there's a lack of transparency, which is actually part of the problem. But regardless, the risk is unacceptable, especially if the Taiwan or Philippines/Vietnam situations boil over. There's no historical precedent of a rival having such massive control over domestic consumption of information. The one thing we do know from the history of conflict is that all available tools will get used for that purpose (e.g. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C8197).
I don't disagree, but for clarity, you appreciate this is totally contrary to the (formerly) popular "free speech" meme that used to be a source of pride for Americans?
Isn't it a bit funny that America can't manage to educate[1] its citizens so they are resilient to propaganda? Do you think it is all that difficult to do, if the government set it as a priority"?
[1] It's worse: they can't even try to. To me, this is peak hilarity, doubly so when combined with the conversations in this thread...which themselves are a consequence of the root problem. Oh my, the layers of irony.
Since you imply it's not difficult to do, which country has educated their citizens to be resilient to propaganda?
Don't forget: to accomplish something, you (typically) must first try.
"Making citizens to be resilient to propaganda"?
While we should try to do our best, it's also not mutually exclusive to remove bad propaganda. Yet you make it sound like the 2 actions are mutually exclusive for some reason.
How many have tried, and what did they try?
Contrast this with the attention and funding the war machine gets, or the science machinery.
Regarding education, we should do that too. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
There might be flaws or other explanations. This is just tentative evidence that should push you in one direction more than the other.
China hasn't fought a war in 40 years. In recent years, there have been some border skirmishes with India between unarmed soldiers (it's not even clear which side initiated them) and some naval confrontations about a few islands with no shots fired, but that's about it. Meanwhile, the US has been fighting wars all around the world.
What would be US leadership would similar to what Ro Khanna is saying with data and personal information privacy standards like a nationwide US GDPR but with the teeth of something like HIPAA. Data brokers should be put out of business.
How about “make economic power and one of our main competitors” does it? Just because China is a totalitarian government didn’t mean they can do the “right” thing.
Peace.
Just search for "Uighur genocide" and see how many negative Tiktoks you find.
Now go on any western social media platform, search for any contentious topic, and notice what's banned. It's not stuff that's harmful to the government (eg. Gaza/Israel topics) it's stuff that advertisers think is harmful (racism, unlabeled porn, etc.).
Also, restraining from banning a platform because some people can't be arsed to also post to IG reels or other platforms is their own fault as entrepreneurs.
The prominence of the Chinese guy "denying" the cultural genocide was interesting - I wouldn't assume he's a plant (it's equally likely he's just a rabid nationalist) but the placement of the video does strike me as a little odd. It had 300 likes, but rates higher than the second video which had 5000 likes? Does smell a bit.
This is from Singapore, by the way. I assume geography makes a difference.
I search for "retro pc":
1st result 47k views, 4 months ago
2nd result 457k views, 2 years ago
3rd result 9k views, 1 year ago
4th result 133k views, 1 year ago
5th result 1k views, 5 months ago
Make it make sense!
[1] https://theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/04/how-tiktoks-a...
The fact that people have become dependent is no good argument for keeping the platform around.
And, with that said, if TikTok disappears - a new platform fill its void, as well as other platforms absorbing users. If there's a demand, someone will supply.
Sure you can. You follow the law or you are banned from doing business. This law just skipped the first part because the authors didn't want to write any actual regulations.
TikTok being owner by Bytedance means you don’t have who to prosecute for misdeeds, besides some fall guy.
It’s absurd to compare banning a Chinese-owned app to EU banning US apps.
Why wait until a homeless guy steals some bread to throw him in jail?
The foundation of the rule of law is that the law applies to everyone equally, not arbitrarily. That includes a presumption of no wrongdoing and due process.
It should be mentioned that TikTok already has its full US data and source code audited by Oracle, a level of scrutiny higher than any of the domestic tech companies. Combined with the FBI and NSA watching them like a hawk, if they were breaking the law, it would be old news by now.
It’s not about the data or the code. Data brokers exist everywhere, it’s about a platform with reach to the eyeballs of 170 million users controlled by an adversary state.
You can’t use “foundation of the rule of law” wrt an actor that blatantly disregards rule of law.
Relevant to context: whatasaas is an account with 10 karma and 9 total comments that has been mostly idle for its 14 month existence. Many of the trench fighters in the threads here are names I recognize.
Some of the stuff that really chipped at our privacy as our isps got to sell our dns pings to advertisers and social media. Have a good day citizen.
So if China has already made it clear it considers a TikTok sale illegal, this is a ban.
That being said, you don't get Nancy Pelosi and Marjorie Taylor Greene on the same side unless there is some serious fire behind all of the smoke. My guess is everyone who has seen the classified info agrees this ban is too critical to even play games with it.
All you need to convince American politicians of anything is jingling keys and cash. Plus MTG opposed the original TikTok bill, they only voted in favor when it was packed together with sending money for Israel.
TikTok can be undermining the US (and potentially be a growing problem) without it being currently capable of preventing itself being banned.
By your logic, nobody should go to hospital when sick, as if they can go to hospital then they must not be sick.
The bias is a feature. They just don't like the fact that they can't control the bias on TikTok so it spews Chinese propaganda instead of Western propaganda.
It is just sad that even US is susceptible to this.
That said I think some regulatory control is needed. There needs to be some sort of accountability e.g. for intentional propagation of fake news or censorship or defamation. This is no different than requirements for ethical behavior in other industries. Just like we regulate public companies in general we should be able to impose some requirements on any business that distributes media. Free speech for individuals but if you are a business or a media "provider" you need to meet a somewhat higher bar? I think we used to rely on journalistic standards or self regulation but with "new" media (and maybe even with old media) this seems to be not working that well any more. There's a fine line there for sure but seems like whether China owns some social media or someone with US citizenship we still want to have guards against harms this can cause. The amount of power these companies wield is scary.
...but seriously: The Chinese state pretends that Wikipedia is banned in China. Does anybody seriously think that Chinese people don't use Wikipedia, like every day?
Routing around a ban of this nature is so utterly trivial, and the primary audience of TikTok is strongly integrative of demographics which are digital natives accustomed to subverting such bans (heck, they got almost universal training in this area by having to jailbreak their school-issued tablets).
surprised as you may be, the vast majority certainly do not use Wikipedia
You'd be surprised how different some countries are in their Internet usage. Russians don't really use Facebook, and Google faced an uphill battle to be accepted there. Czechs apparently prefer homegrown map services (such as Seznam) to Google Maps.
These comments are very confusing to me. Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective?
Do y'all not have friends in China? Contacts who visit?
Do they suddenly drop off the face of the earth? Of course not, they install a VPN and carry on, and communicate with you via all the normal media.
The Great Firewall is really just a means of forcing people not to acknowledge what they know, and to only publicly speak about the censored version of history and politics.
But it's no more effective than any other internet censorship (which is to say, it is trivially bypassed).
It's extremely effective. Just because a very small fraction of the population 1) know how to use a VPN, 2) are willing to pay for it, and 3) bother to use it, doesn't mean the GFW is ineffective. The CCP doesn't need 99.99% efficiency rate, 95% is plenty to control their population.
Source: myself, many years living in China.
But you're saying that 95% of people refrain from reading resources that are not served by The Great Firewall?
That seems like a huge, huge stretch.
I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
Joking aside, that's not how statistics work. But I am reasonably confident that a random sampling of 1000 Chinese people drawn proportionally from where they live (meaning mostly in smaller cities, not Beijing, Shanghai, do not speak English, are not well off or highly educated, etc.), that only 50 of them would be using a VPN regularly. But I could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 and the point about control of the population still stands.
> I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
I know many as well, but there's major selection bias at work here, in that if you 1) met them abroad, 2) spoke to them in English about 3) a highly sensitive subject, they are highly likely to be one of the 5%.
Douyin is owned by the same company but not the same platform. It is subject to Chinese gov censorship (like all media in China), while Tiktok is not (therefore banned).
Regardless, TikTok isn't going away, it is just changing owners. How does that have any effect on freedom of the press?
TikTok can decide to not sell, in which case it's banned, or it can sell, in which case it's not.
At least the US is trying to protect the privacy of its citizens in this case. The CCP meanwhile required Apple to prevent Airdrop from functioning properly in China in order to stop the spread of information between protest groups.
This ban runs against both of those.
It is absolutely a strawman:
> A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.
Grandparent: Please, US doesn't need to prove anything w.r.t freedom vs. China.
Parent: So you're saying the USA is better and thus it never needs to be compared in any aspect related to 'freedom'?
Me: GP didn't say the USA never needs to be compared in any aspect related to freedom, they said _relative to China_ the US doesn't need to prove anything.
It's objectively a strawman.
That's separate from the issue of whether or not this infringes on the freedom of speech, but 1) freedom of speech in the US is not nor ever has been absolute with no limits and 2) this move absolutely deserves scrutiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices
Enjoy the data.
Propaganda is what advertising is. Should the courts restrict companies from their ability to advertise?
If China is indeed receiving data from TikTok, the future isn't going to be fun, especially with AI tech heating up.
Truth is, when China benefits, the Han Chinese people benefit. Every other ethnicity? Uncertain.
When the US benefits, a variety of ethnicities benefit. The US is now diverse enough where it must work in the interest of a variety of ethnicities in order to operate effectively.
So unless you're Han Chinese, you're more likely to benefit when the US wins.
I don’t understand the people coming out of the woodworks saying this is suppressing “freedom of the press” or speech.
Set up your own domain, get a VPS, upload your trash to VPS. There ya go, no more “censorship”.
Oh wait , you don’t want to do the work to set this up? Sounds like a personal problem.
I don't remember the First Amendment distinguishing between free speech that informs and that which entertains.
Most news on television is selected for its entertainment value. Does that give the government more power to regulate it?
Last time I checked China wasn't within US borders.
> Do they even operate in china?
If they were going to, they won't now.
Douyin, like all social media in China, is subject to government censorship. Tiktok, like Google, FB, IG, etc., are not and therefore banned in China.
That's why they are two completely separate platforms.
It’s understood that the US already does this with Facebook and other websites.
That aside, people do use shit like TikTok, Facebook, Google, and other social media and adtech bad actors' services because they don't fully understand what they're signing up for. To a certain extent, people do use them under duress -- completely checking out from them is going to have a pretty measurable impact on how people interact with you. You will be an afterthought to a lot of people in your life. People will think you not consuming those products is strange. Interacting with many institutions you have to deal with will be harder. Many (maybe even most) people can't handle that.
The economy is designed to get people to sign up for things they don't fully understand. Payday loans, sports gambling, margin trading. None of these are illegal, but they should all have strong public education campaigns so citizens know the risks. Social media should be treated the same.
The law is not about whether or not it's healthy for people. It's about whether or not it is an uncontrolled tool that an adversarial foreign government can use to sway public opinion in the US. No government with any urgent sense of self-preservation would let that fly.
That's like saying Facebook and Instagram are not separate platforms.
I personally don't think that exception should exist and I'm OK banning it solely on trade parity grounds.
Either technology has improved or they stopped trying as hard, which makes sense now that the local internet economy has matured.
"Every Han Chinese of a certain background" is the more accurate reference.
the vast majority of the population cannot easily use a VPN, especially not on their phone which many people use instead of a PC
Most/all apps aren't banned outright, but they require VPNs to access.
I wonder: Are there any Western apps which Chinese citizens would lose social credit or are officially prohibited from using?
For Westerners, could they get GFOC-excluded commercial PoP internet connections or wireless carriers?
Perhaps in the near future, China's middle- and upper-class will insist on specific changes in policy like unfettered internet access as a bargain for not demanding democracy. With all of the advances in economic mobility and details of life outside the GFOC, there will be more asks.
So long as the CCP delivers on economic prosperity this won't happen; people will not risk it. Those who can't handle it, and have the means, emigrate or have a plan B (i.e., their kids at a US university who can continue their career abroad; many Chinese would come to the US just to have a baby to ensure their kid had US citizenship--the US has clamped down on that). This is why the CCP's survival depends on economics.
I think the era of hockey-stick growth and development China is more or less over now, growth will continue but slow to a drip, and will face 3 threats: rising economic inequality, drying up of external joint ventures, and male-female ratio demographics imbalance. It has BRI going for it but external investments can't address domestic structural socioeconomic concerns. Xi will be blamed first because he rode economics to the top of the mountain. I'm concerned that starting a war, a common political tactic for any government system, maybe used to distract from domestic economic woes.
I am suspicious that BRI might be more hot air than substance. That or world journalism is oblivious to what is supposedly the largest international infrastructure program in the world. Or Google doesn't index it.
China's housing market is its biggest problem. Most people invested their savings in second/third/etc. apartments as the stock market was notoriously unreliable (and investing abroad was very difficult). That means that a tremendous amount of middle-to-upper-class wealth is tied up in property values, creating a tremendous bubble. But the gov cannot let the bubble pop (see Evergrande, others before), as Japan did in the 90s, as that is the one thing that (in my opinion) could actually bring the CCP down.
I remember that era fondly as the golden era of unfettered torrenting.
That might be to do with going to a Digital Ocean IP, but if you can use an innocent IP, anything works. So what benefit is Outline supposedly offering?
That's not how it works. The apps are not officially banned, they are just unavailable or don't work. If they're not on the China iOS store (separate than US) then you can't install them, and if you went abroad and managed to install them, they just can't connect to the IG or whatever servers once you're back in China. Same for Android.
But that overt request was unusual. Most apps are simply removed as part of Apple's "compliance with local regulations".
That's because roaming phone traffic is routed through your home carrier, through whatever telephone traffic peering agreement the phone companies have.
If a Chinese person roams to the US using a Chinese cell phone plan, it works in the other direction. So their phone is still behind the great firewall even though they're physically outside of China.
I guess this last part is the loophole they will drive a truck through in hindsight. They will make up some nonsense or maybe even find a legitimate scam and ban Facebook based on that?
But really once they ban Facebook, we should be able to reciprocate and ban tick tack.
All the talk of a digital services trade war/import ban ignores that US tech companies were facing a de facto export ban from the US side by being prohibited from complying with Chinese regulations.
They are yet same thing. You know, if it looks like a duck.
This is standard operating procedure for the communist party. They rarely say any kind of topics or activities are banned outright. It’s just that if you say the wrong things in the wrong place, a bunch of plainclothes police will come to your home in the middle of the night.
The laws in question are becoming a subsidiary of the state, of course.
One side note, the United States Embassy has free Wi-Fi if you're close enough to it. You can get access to everything through it.
Yes, you can't use these services in China. But unlike the US's TikTok ban, China will not officially tell everyone what they banned. It just suddenly stops working.
They banned, allowed and banned again GitHub. Without any explanation. Your parent comment is correct.
There are these Kiosks where you get Wi-Fi Access. You scan your passport, and it gives you a username and password. It specifically states accessing prohibited internet sites is a crime.
Then you click the link, and Facebook, Twitter, Google, ... are all on the list. They're pretty in your face about it.
There are some odd things though. You can access Steam in some areas, but not in others. Internet Cafe's have signs saying Steam Games allowed, while others don't. Some will say New York Times available.
Leaving the country was much harder than entering now. We missed several flights and were in the Airport for almost 2 days before they allowed us to leave.
This last trip in February, I made the mistake of buying an Unicom SIM card. So get this, I go through US Customs, they point me over to a desk with a curtain, a guy reads my declaration document again, then walks me over to do a door, and opens it. In side is a little waiting area. I sit down, and about 10 minutes later a woman slides the glass window open and asks me for the SIM card. They already knew I had bought it when I arrived. There is no SIM card declaration on the form.
She told me I should probably destroy the phone. I don't think any of us have any idea what is going on.
I won't be returning to China. They have made it very clear they're not interested in Americans investing or visiting.
None of those services need apps, I never used apps to access them.
The China's own social media is full of posts ridiculing people like me who have believed in the American ideology, espoused the virtues of freedom of speech and rallied against the GFW. They call us naive and credulous. And I can't refute them.
When I was young, I was taught in China that China lost its superpower status after it chose to isolate itself from the rest of the world. And then it isolated itself. I was taught by the US the importance of freedom of speech. Then it ditched it. My education was a lie.
Plus, freedom of speech is about protecting American Citizens from being censored by American Government. Banning an ungovernable, foreign owned business does not stop you from freely expressing yourself on the internet.
Your education was not a lie, but you should still get a refund on your failed education. You clearly did not learn to think critically.
I just don't see how this law will affect your ability to converse with others on Chinese social media.
This is very different from the GFW, and many orders of magnitude less restrictive.
This issue isn't about speech and censorship, but media ownership. These rules has always been in place in many Western countries precisely because of the impact it has on society (even beyond geopolitics).
That's true, but when I had a hard time convincing them when the US were the *perfect* model of no speech restrictions, it's much harder when US is just less restrictive. They will just dismiss such difference in quantity as cultural difference, rather than different principles when China and US had qualitative differences.
This is what most people don't know, that TikTok itself is banned in China.
The real reason you can't "espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China" is because they will arrest you. Let's not mince words here. The Chinese government would shoot their citizens before they would let them protest or speak their mind freely.
After those happened, they still think that the government intervention of speech is a good idea. The only problem is that a small group of officials not handling the regulating power correctly. But if they were to adopt the American model, how could they be protected from the evil influence of foreign adversaries? You know, like me, an agent of US propaganda. Or Tencent, whose major shareholders are actually not Chinese.
I really can't maintain a straight face hearing Americans repeating that same argument.
Freedom of speech applies to humans living within US borders not to entities controlled by a foreign government.
(Unless China is within US borders, freedom of speech argument doesn't stand).
We want freedom of speech because we can never know that our opinions are the ultimate Truth, so we need to ensure that everyone can speak their mind, and so can the real Truth be propagated and preserved. And that everyone includes foreigners and foreign governments.
Every time China's governments (including the past ones, like the Qing Dynasty) rejects the idea of freedom and democracy, it demonizes them by painting them as plots of foreign governments trying to overthrow and destablize China. So you can see why I am so wary of the argument that it is OK to silence the words if those come from a foreign government.
Smart philosophers have studied this. You may not like the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> we can never know that our opinions are the ultimate Truth
Oh yeah, but we can easily spot propaganda/bias from CCP from miles away.
For the principle of freedom of speech to survive, it can never be absolute.
The same way how the Chinese people can smell the propaganda of capitalist reactionaries.
I'm being sarcastic. You share the same school of thought with CCP.
Also, TikTok has never intolerant. CCP is quite intolerant of its own people's views, but it strictly segregates TikTok and Douyin to avoid trampling on the toes of non-Chinese. Therefore the argument of "tolerance of intolerance" isn't applicable.
As far as I know, tiktok's services are deployed on Oracle servers in the United States and are subject to supervision. It was banned just because it comes from China. Look how many times the CEO of Singapore was questioned if he is Chinese. Maybe the Congressman thinks Singapore is also a part of China.
74% of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese. The Congressman's questions are not unreasonable in questioning if the CEO has some ties with mainland China.
I read both Chinese and English, and I read both the opinions of within GFW and without. If anything, I've critically analyzed every idea from both sides. I can't fathom the hubris of someone who has ever lived on one side yet believes his truth is the ultimate truth and anyone disagreeing must not be thinking critically.
It's ignoring international laws with neighbors, instead of using weapons, it's using water cannons against fishers and Philippines coast guard.
China is a "friend without limits" of Russia, who started a war on European soil lately.
I think it's safe to say that the west is decoupling from China.
It has nothing to do with "freedom of speech", most voters agree with that decoupling.
I have never heard of a pro China argument before from a politician party and it seems that most democracies nearby China think the same, even with the BRI initiative.
( Note: I'm not from the US)
My deeply held belief is that we should allow speech from even the most hostile foreign countries. Do you know that every administration of China, starting from Qing Dynasty, resisted the idea of freedom and democracy by painting them as plots of foreign governments to destabilize China?
I am being called a sock puppet of China here, and I have been accused of being agents of US propaganda in China. That is how the future holds. Every thought deviating from mainstream is labelled as propaganda from a foreign government, ergo not subject to the protections of freedom of speech.
The tracking/propaganda dangers of TikTok are unrelated to freedom of speech, as banning TikTok doesn't affect freedom of speech.
People can spread their opinion on any other app.
Note : I'm responding and sharing my opinion for the following you mentioned:
> The China's own social media is full of posts ridiculing people like me who have believed in the American ideology, espoused the virtues of freedom of speech and rallied against the GFW. They call us naive and credulous. And I can't refute them.
Influence operations aren't about "winning" or even convincing anyone anymore. It's about flooding peoples screens with untold amounts of toxic garbage.
My biggest problem is that it’s too narrowly targeted.
I have worked for several US businesses with global footprints and working with China (and some other countries) required whole or part ownership of the business by entities within that nation. So we partnered with businesses in China to set up and operate our infra, and had to manage everything through contracts.
Further, Chinese government officials would show up unannounced and plug shit into our networks, and required access to our encryption keys and accounts databases and employee & customer lists etc. We had to build independent systems just for China to prevent sharing information about non-China based customers and employees. Where we couldn’t do that, we had to build filtered replication “diodes” to prevent data leakage.
China and other countries do far worse to us than just requiring local ownership of businesses; and if they feel that is in their national interest, why can’t we return the favor when we feel it’s in our interest?
This is bigger than China for a lot of people. TikTok has given an alternative voice to groups typically marginalized on pro-Western platforms. We typically see hypocrisy from the West when it comes to Israel and current times are no different. Tiktok has allowed nearly more access to whatever footage is capable of sneaking out of the warzone whereas Meta platforms tend to suppress. (ex: they recently auto-defaulted a restriction on political content without informing their users).
A society's strength comes from its unity of will and resolve. Social media can be used to attack that unity... and has, not just by China.
So just like the other platforms, but for China instead of the US? (aka: "It's bad when you do it, not when we do it").
All social media with attention management may be weaponized and has generally proven to be unhealthy for society. TikTok happens to be actively worse for a number of reasons, one of them being that it is designed to be so.
If Xi wants to show you ponies, you'll see them all over tiktok tomorow.
One exmaple of many. If Biden doesn't want you seeing something, the white house will put pressure on social media companies to censor it.
Also: The 5th Circuit panel found that the White House coerced the platforms through “intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences” and commandeered the decision-making processes of social media companies, particularly in handling pandemic-related and 2020 election posts.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/09/08/biden-adminis...
To say they were free to refuse is disingeneous.
If a cartel member comes up to you and tells you to give him your wallet or there might be "consequences", do you think you are free to refuse him?
However, this is contrary to China, who has never really pressured any Chinese organization to do anything. This is because they don't need to use pressure. They can just do it. Because there is no concept of "private organization" in China. The state has all the power.
It's so tellingly naive when people try to equivocate the US to China.
About one half (!) of all UNGA emergency special sessions are about its conflicts, for crying out loud. :) This nothingcountry of <10 million people entertains the whole UN for the last 80 years or so almost constantly.
The world has grown by 4 billion people during that time, lol. Most of that time social media did not even exist.
The level of direct control the US Government has over US Social Media platforms pales in comparison to the control China has over TikTok.
This has to be substantiated, because it seems blatantly absurd on its face. Are you saying TikTok is an anti-western platform? That, in and of itself, justifies the divestment, considering the owner, no? Furthermore, what "pro-western" platforms are you talking about? I haven't seen anything from TikTok that wouldn't fly on discord or reddit, for example.
[1]:https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
As I have mentioned above and in other replies. Meta platforms has quietly introduced a filter for certain political topics that was pushed to their user base with no notification.
[2]:https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/meta-limit-some-fa...
You only need to compare TikTok to it's US rival Reels. A majority of the pro-palestine is suppressed on Reels. The loss of TikTok is the destruction of Americans to access content that isn't filtered through US hegemony.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Meta's arcane moderation decisions apply to other platforms than their own? Go to reddit, to youtube, or to twitter, and you can find the most vile, unfiltered opinions on Israel and Palestine known to man.
Americans aren't missing out on any content at all. The only thing that will be destroyed is China's fast lane to American eyes.
My feed is repeatedly missing these things. And then i have to manually revisit them. It starts up again. And then ceases.
So far, China doesn’t control the feed algo. They control what content is uploaded. Imagine putting work into a video yet it never seeing the light because it was shadow banned. Now imagine it not allowed to be seen. The former is the western world. The latter is china.
That said, my point isn't that "I can't watch pro-palestine content". TikTok presents the first major news platform used by Americans that wasn't created for Americans. For all the whining about how $social_media_platform doesn't offer diverse view points, that goes out the window when the owner isn't American.
I don't believe that China is better than America. I personally don't think it's a good thing that the US can just decide ban any content platform that isn't controlled by a US interest. I don't think it's good for the country and I think the security issues are overblown - any realistic security issue you can have with foreign interference, Meta has already committed and any legislation that does not address this just means the legislation doesn't really give a shit about security.
I don't think any Chinese viewpoint is inherently good, but the fact that millions of Americans cannot view content from a diversity of platforms is a problem.
This happens in the US too and has been happening for a very long time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) only when it happens to US companies they get gag orders and/or paid off. (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/ve... and https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/report-att-cooperated-... and https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit)
The content on tiktok is a problem, but there's nothing on tiktok that isn't also on facebook/reddit/twitter/youtube. The difference is that when the servers are in China the US government can't get that kind of access/cooperation.
I can't say that about China, certainly not to me as a United States Citizen, and not even really to Chinese Citizens either - which is why it's another thing entirely when a foreign government is doing this level of monitoring on United States Soil.
China is welcome to monitor its own citizens on its own soil to the extent it desires - and monitor communications in and out of China - they're however not welcome to do that level of monitoring on United States Soil on anyone who resides here - at least not without the explicit consent of the United States Government.
On the other hand it's our own ostensibly accountable government that we have to worry about violating our freedoms, abusing and misinterpreting this data, targeting innocent people, etc. If China has this kind of data they still have no power to throw me in prison (provided that I stay out of China) and very little impact on my day to day life. I'm still not happy about them collecting my data, but I have much less to fear from it.
Except https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/china-is-using-tikt...
Not sure why you're discounting the potential for foreign influence campaigns from reducing the accountability your government has to you.
> and very little impact on my day to day life
It doesn't until it does at which point it would be too late & you're dealing with damage instead of preventing harm.
I don't discount that potential. I'm certain it exists. I'm also certain that it exists on youtube and facebook and twitter and reddit and will continue to influence US politics long into the future. Yet the US government has never once spoken about banning facebook and youtube or any other platform doing exactly the same things as TikTok, they're focused only the threat of the one Chinese platform while allowing China, Russia and anyone else to influence Americans though US owned platforms. They're even fine with letting China influence Americans using TikTok as long as TikTok is owned by a US company.
I'm just not buying the argument that TikTok represents a threat to our democracy any greater than the threat posed by youtube or twitter. I don't see how taking away our freedom to access/use a Chinese platform that isn't violating any US law and isn't doing anything different than similar US platforms are doing is really helping to protect us here. Congress telling Americans what software we can have installed on our own devices, and preventing us from accessing platforms in other countries seems much more likely to lead us down a slippery slope than one Chinese owned social media platform being allowed to do what all the US owned platforms are doing.
-For example, try saying something critical about China or something in defense of Taiwan. If the post gains traction, your account will get banned.
-Observe the amplification of r/latestatecapitalism type of content. https://www.businessinsider.com/capitalism-tiktok-america-pr...
-Whitewashing of life in China and China's accomplishments. https://apnews.com/article/china-tiktok-facebook-influencers...
I often see people online extol the virtues of China's progress, it's technological advancement, it's focus on the climate and equality for people, etc. I say this as someone who has lived in China, and I even like China, but people buy into the bullshit. China isn't some utopia. There are many good things about it, but there are a multitude of odious aspects that get glossed over.
This is about sowing dissent and creating doubt in our values.
I don't think you have any business making so many comments in this thread when you have no idea what is going on.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMMbYJYmU/
I looooove TikTok, but if I was running a regime, taking it down would be Job #1.
But a foreign one that’s directly controlled by an adversary is certainly one we can tackle immediately and it’s easier to muster the political will. They don’t need to be connected. Of course it’s hard to trust the government when they have a history of lying, but there’s every reason to believe the threat they’ve been communicating out as real in the wake of the attacks the Russians launched on us in 2016 and given it’s an election year. It’s like all those people who didn’t trust when Biden said Putin was gearing to attack Ukraine imminently.
On the other hand, there is reason to be skeptical of that claim since the tiktok ban won’t happen until well after the 2020 election. So maybe it is the US trying to kill a major tech adversary that’s managed to dethrone our own oligopoly in the space. But that’s the starting point of the argument - is it really going to be used by the Chinese governments for election meddling or is it protectionism to hide the rot within the US regulatory framework that’s simply entrenched interests.
People often bring up this point, and yet if China poured every resource they had available into spreading chaos and disinformation, it would not touch what domestically-sourced influence campaigns are currently achieving.
You might say that, nonetheless, it's a step in the right direction. But when disinformation and manipulation is as ubiquitous as it is now, the real effect of this law will simply be to protect informal alliances between legislators, media companies, and intelligence agencies. There's a handful of things they all agree on (which may not be in your best interest), and this law helps make sure conversations about those things never gain traction.
American social media is motivated by money. Chinese social media is motivated by state power.
The same can be said of every single website hosted in China, but they aren't (yet) banning all Chinese websites or all content hosted in any other countries. Why not?
The vast majority of the content US citizens view on TikTok was created by other US citizens and that content is no different than the content available on youtube or any other social media platform. Certainly China can influence what types of content people see (and they've done a lot of messed up stuff in the past like filtering out "ugly, poor, and disabled" people's videos) but it isn't as if they can flip a switch and start only showing children dancing to "The East Is Red" and expect to keep their popularity. There seems to be no evidence that TikTok is any more manipulative or dangerous than any other social media platform. Youtube is just as happy to push extremist content to increase engagement but nobody is talking about banning them.
I imagine the US audience for tiktok is larger than all chinese websites combined.
If it turns out that maybe "good speech" simply can't counter "bad speech" when the latter is applied with the resources of nation states behind it, that doesn't feel like an argument the government can win (because of 1A).
Ironically, the data collection angle is still critically important for US businesses and limiting the access and use of citizen data would be great for everyone, but it seems very clear that is not on the table for the same reasons.
The US government won’t be able to do the same thing with the two party systems and with more checks and balances.
Russian did use facebook and other social media to influence voters. It was rather effective.
But it is totally different from Chinese government compelling tiktok using full access of its internal data to do their bidding in secret. The effectiveness will likely be much higher.
It's also strange that Americans are uniquely afforded this privilege and many consider it a natural right, but don't consider that their relationship with TikTok is same relationship the rest of world has with Meta. French citizens, despite the GDPR, have no recourse for accountability when it comes the US government.
Just watch Al Jazeera on Youtube if you want the Palestinian side.
I think people that have this view are pretty new to the internet in general. It's no surprise it's a popular belief with Gen-Z, thinking somehow their "filter bubble" is unique in any way or that they have escaped the filter bubble and stumbled upon "the truth." Complete nonsense. You're hooked into whatever algorithm makes you engage more, that's the whole point of this. To make money from you. You think you're special because you got on a pro-Palestine feed on Tiktok? Hilariously naive.
Aka how confident are you that the information you are getting today is honest, accurate and not influenced in any way? That you get the full picture, the good and the bad?
While I do feel like my personal views are more aligned with the US / west. I’m not convinced im getting balanced information. Its a little naive to suggest that only our enemies are doing propaganda.
That is not what anyone is concerned about. The US tried to get Tiktok to suppress pro-palestine information against israel. Tiktok effectively said they are not doing any manipulation of promoted info, even in favor of israel.
congress resurrected a ban for it. The recent uni protests helped in doing that.
Except that TikTok’s data, or the main copy of it at least, resides in the US, so the evil US govt theoretically already has access to it. That’s not the motivation for this bill.
Since I'm not it the USA, maybe I will be able to use the global TikTok that I love. Hopefully.
But this is not my main concern, my main concern is that you people act like everything is about business and the users are just cattle.
0 regards about the fact that lots and lots of people love this app. I'm one of them because its the last place on the internet where it feels like I'm not supposed to be outraged or spending money all the time. It feels like the old internet for me.
Also, if the American users are lost, I will loose a lot of great content.
I'm appalled that people here on HN have no ability to realize that they deal with real people and not only numbers in the analytics and the bank.
It almost feels like there's no sense of identity here, no sese of persons who must have freedom to use and consume whatever they want.
The argument goes "The Chinese are banning our social media companies, why would we do the same?". Why don't you rephrase it as "The Chinese communist part controls what apps and media the Chinese citizens can consume, why we don't control what Americans consume?".
Can you really not see that taking away a product that people use is not only about companies? Are you really that blind to see that you can't claim being "the free world" by imitating China?
Chinese government is not the ideal form of governance, please stop trying to be like China. Have some sense of personal freedoms.
I get your concerns over loss of something you enjoy - but the content is steerable enough by algorithm and addictive enough that a little twiddle of the knob, and suddenly a bunch of people believe some very harmful and hard to eliminate untruths.
Can we please stop admiring China, Russia, DPRK and other similar countries where having the "wrong opinions" is considered radicalisation?
Without making any judgments on the alt-right label, it was absolutely a real thing. Many documented cases showing how a fresh account could go from “Sesame Street, cooking videos, and CNN” on the default feed - and, within ~10 relatively innocuous clicks down the suggested video rabbit hole, the home feed would be full of Alex Jones tier stuff.
TikTok is heavily reminiscent of the old YouTube. Just taking a few steps down the Free Palestine recommendation road will get you into “Happy Birthday, Uncle Adolf” videos (hyperbolic, but only slightly).
I don’t blame certain parties for getting rather nervous over that. But I wish we could have some honesty from elected officials about why TikTok is suddenly such a pressing issue again.
Whatever happens, I hope they’ve learned from YouTube’s earlier mistakes. In trying to break the alt-right pipeline, they ended up breaking the entire recommendation engine for years (tbf it’s a lot better now).
That said I otherwise agree with you 100% - I saw folks get sucked down you YouTube pipeline then, and I've watched people get sucked down the TikTok one now, I got one person in my life to switch to FB reels, because I would correct the purported facts in each video and they found that annoying.
Agree (even if it is hyperbolic) on the yellow brick road model of radicalization.
QAnon, birthed in 4chan and largely disseminated to Boomers through Facebook isolated people and convinced a large number of people to stage a coup on the US government. I can't tell if you missed the QAnon craze, or you are intentionally being ignorant. I can't think of a single TikTok trend that comes close to the level of radicalization of QAnon.
There seems to still be a large conspiratorial rabbit hole on TikTok that still leads to QAnon influencers (using more generalized hashtags and catch all conspiracies).
Given the demographics of those most heavily influenced by QAnon, it's ridiculous to imply that Tiktok had even a 10th of the influence of Facebook wrt to QAnon.
It's really not. ByteDance isn't being sanctioned. TikTok.com will remain accessible to everyone in America. This is simply saying if it can't be sold to an American (EDIT: non-Chinese) buyer within a year, it gets removed from U.S. hosting and U.S. app stores.
> you can't claim being "the free world" by imitating China
Good thing we're not.
Or else be removed from French app stores yet remain available online? Without being sanctioned or blocked?
ByteDance's CEO perjured himself in front of the Congress [1]. Meanwhile, you can't Google the 1989 Tianamen Square massacre in China because (a) Google is blocked, as in actually blocked, and (b) the very term is blocked.
There are reasonable objections to this bill. Claiming we're stooping to China's level is not one of them.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/05/30/tikt...
Oddly, the articles I've seen don't feel the need to specify there. Seems like a big difference to me, and requiring sale to specifically US buyer seems rather more of a takeover.
No, you are correct. Thank you. It must simply be no longer controlled by a foreign adversary [1]. (And yes, the term foreign adversary is defined in law [2].)
An EU, Gulf or Indian buyer would be totally fine if done in good faith, i.e. without being a front for Chinese interests.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521... § 2(g)(6)
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
Among the more liberal-minded Russians like me and most people I know back home, support for the Ukrainians had collapsed after two years of interacting with them online. It's become so bad, some people I met on the net have actually gone from opposing the war to volunteering to join the Russian army. And as for the Ukrainian side, their opinion of the common people of Russia is no better.
Anyway, we had way more of the "small links" you mentioned than you guys will ever have with the Chinese. A lot of us have family on the other side, even more had good friends across the border. The war destroyed most of these connections, and in case the West and China fall into a war, I don't see any reason whatsoever for you to do any better.
But still, I'm not sure that whatever we know about interacting with the other group will hold true during wartime.
This two-year period - you mean starting from the Feb 24th invasion (so the "collapse" as up until about two months ago)?
And what kinds of experiences with Ukrainians did they say they were having?
And as for the Ukrainian side, their opinion of the common people of Russia is no better.
Surprise, surprise. They have their physical survival to be concerned about now. And no longer have the attention or empathy resources to ponder the mystries the Russian soul.
There's also the compelling argument I hear them make: that anyone in Russia who understands what's up with Putin and Ukraine, has the financial means to flee (and no compelling reason, such as an elderly family member, to stay) -- should have done so long ago by now.
What else do you honestly expect after what's been happening since 2014/2022?
I'm not saying you were, and you're not answering my questions either.
So looks like there's no need to keep at this, and we can both move on.
By the looks of it, it seems like you want the US to be more like the CCP than the other way around. Imitating authoritarian governments harms America's global reputation for "freedom and democracy", if that reputation even still exists.
Realistically, what we needed is comprehensive user privacy legislation, which would prevent anyone from spying on us, including our own government. Likely the reason that did not happen is because our government enjoys access to our user data for various things.
There's a wild difference between unfettered access to a company's assets, systems, networks, data, etc. vs policywork to simply require that companies be owned at the very least by a country that isn't either Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran.
Yes, I did read the bill. They did specifically single out ByteDance presumably to make sure there wasn't a way ByteDance could claim they weren't under Chinese influence. But they made a point of calling out Foreign Adversary Countries and pointed to https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/4872 in doing so.
Bill raw text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/...
I’d expect the takeaway to be “That’s bad, so we shouldn’t do it” instead of “Hold my beer and let me show you how we can follow their example.”
I always thought that the point was to not be like authoritarian countries.
Nothing about this is following their example. It's saying, "if you do the bad thing we won't let you operate here."
No, the point is to not give authoritarian countries a free pass.
This is like saying we shouldn't put people in jail for murder because it's effectively kidnapping and that would make us like them.
I also wonder if the KSA should be forced to divest from X/Twitter. Prior to owning part of X/Twitter, they did this [0], which led to to the worst of what one could imagine. What is happening now?
But my main question is, are there any other examples of forced divestiture, aside from Firefly Aerospace? [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter#...
[1] https://spacenews.com/firefly-halts-launch-preparations-afte...
There is no equivalence. The KSA has no ability or ambition to shape the world. The royal family just wants to keep their kingdom business running, and even for that they're dependent on the US.
This seems obviously false. They host conferences talking about how they want to shape the world. KSA has interests, and they will want to use any power they have to further their interests.
However, as a friend of human liberty, I cannot forget the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. [0]
While I would like to agree that KSA doesn't care about the rest of the world, and each culture should have their own space, the bone-saw story does prove that there are human factors which bind us all together. We all do live on one small rock, after all.
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20190110153304/https://www.washin...
Jamal Khashoggi is just one man. Tragedy it may be, but insignificant in the larger context.
There is an alternative, and that is that we will win, as we always do.
When a simple, predictable man like Putin, or Xi, make themselves emperor for life, they prove the fragility of their system. Their system cannot survive beyond them. It is the final call. Just as it was in Germany, France, Portugal, Spain... all of the imperial powers had to lose their final war. Soon, you will lose yours. Finally your people will become "Western," aka peaceful. All it takes is losing the final imperial ambition. I welcome you to the future.
My family has lived through these idiotic ambitions for many generations. This is why I am still here, speaking to you. We will live through it again, until we are all at peace.
Cheers.
I am old enough to remember the cold war times. The Soviet Union disintegrated because they never built an economy. Until Gorbachev, the communists did maintain their grip. If they had an economy like China has, the Soviet Union might have still been around.
Also Xi is not Putin, and the CCP (and generally Communist Parties) are not United Russia.
> There is an alternative, and that is that we will win, as we always do.
Sure. But maintain the highest level of deterrence.
Neither the Nazis, nor the their Soviet allies could destroy my family. [0]
They could not destroy Europe as much as they tried. We are still here.
Ukraine, is a rising democracy and is still here. Please my brother, just as each European country had to lose their empires, to finally win our own independence from the specter of imperialist thought. So must you.
The Russian people deserve this more than anyone. It's about effing time my brother.
Play this loud my friend!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d1AmMt6A9s
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Man! At what cost? Someone who used to work with me with sent me a pic - writing code from a bomb shelter.
Add:
> Neither the Nazis, nor the their Soviet allies could destroy my family.
They may not have destroyed yours, but they did destroy millions of other families.
Fine, have a different alphabet, have orthodox, the Greeks are part of Europe and they have this. Why can't Moscow just stop killing us???
And they kill Russians more than anyone!!! Please, just stop! Fuck!
I am curious, what do you think my ideology is? I just wanted to understand how I came across.
Did this infiltration happen before they owned part of Twitter?
Yes, absolutely, if we all agree upon the direction of the arrow of time.
Saudi Arabia was in Twitter when it was private
In 2022 when it went private they didn't add any additional money
I also wonder if this goes through, does this set a precedent for enforcing similar divestment expectations for any companies operating in China. Is this isolated to social media platform, or could this also eventually extend in to other industries like manufacturing?
The only difference is scale and user base — and this time around it was even included in a bill.
The Government has a long history of interfering with foreign businesses in the name of national security. Feds have blocked sale of infrastructure like ports many times
They get a free pass to use licensed music because it’s a huge marketing channel for the labels. Lose America and that goes away.
They could also tell TikTok users to install a VPN and access the servers in China directly.
I actually see this as a silver lining. I want young people to realize the government effects them and can directly ruin things they enjoy. I want young people to be more involved in politics and to vote.
Would you also consider it a win if young people realize the dangers of social media apps owned by geopolitical competitors able to alter the mindset of the population?
I want people to be more involved in politics and I want more people to vote. Wanting more people to vote is a safe side of history to be on I think.
I also want people to be able to access the content and information they choose. If that is the content and information on TikTok, who am I to deny them? I believe in free speech, morally (I say morally because, yes, I know the 1st Amendment doesn't apply everywhere, morally).
This is going to be a hilarious statement in 20-50 years.
It's funny because on HN of all places, where all wildly successful companies are ran as absolute monarchies, and all the devices we type on are produced by companies ran as absolute monarchies, there's this undeserved reverence for "democracy" as if it's some sacred church or something.
If the voting population is so easily swayed by a video scrolling app, maybe, just maybe democracy isn't such a good idea? Would you work for a company where the CEO makes important decisions based on the amalgamation of 30 second videos that happen to come across his/her feed? I wouldn't. I don't think I want to participate in a country ran like that either. I'd expect the decisions to appear schizophrenic, which quite frankly describes our current political situation in the US.
Like, we have 100K+ fentanyl overdoses a year in the US, and I don't see any TikToks "informing voters" about that. No one cares. In fact, I don't even expect normal people to care about it---in a healthy society they shouldn't even be aware of it. It would take a special person, who is egoically invested in the health of his population to change that. Someone like a startup CEO, ala Washington, Jobs, etc.
So no, you're not on the "safe side of history" by advocating for something that's politically fashionable at the moment. History is written (and re-written) by the winners, and I wouldn't put my money on "democracy".
You can amass more reach and influence than many of the biggest TV stations / newspapers of the previous generation with nothing more than an internet connection.
And who holds the levers to that reach? The social media companies. If they want that account’s posts and I be less visible to users they’ll be able to do it in a heartbeat (and have!)
My whole point is that there are literally billions of entities (everyone on Earth with an internet connection) who also have the ability to alter public discourse at scale. Hence why it's a vague boogeyman... the phrase "alter the mindset of a population" could be used to describe anything from a Orwellian propaganda machine to a Mr. Beast video.
In the 1990's, you could've claimed "Tetris is a software product developed by a geopolitical competitor (Russia) that has the capability to alter the mindset of the population" and you would've been right, but it would've been a silly thing to get worked up over.
It is an absolute firehose of data on users and in aggregate, that is incredibly powerful. "Oh look, more people than usual have been working in office building 12 at Lockheed Martin this week" etc.
As you say, another possible purpose is that TikTok is used as a source of data and intel. I suppose it is a fine source for that, but also, if that's all China really wants, they can probably just buy most of that data on the shadowy data markets. The US Government shows no signs of stopping our personal data from being sold.
Hopefully the scars from Gaza remain with them and they take a different stance with Israel. A TikTok ban killing off one of the most desired career paths of this generation (TikTok influencer) will have a lasting impact on them when they take the reigns.
This is economically irrational to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. If Beijing truly does this, it somewhat cements the argument that TikTok was a CCP policy tool.
To what end? It isn't going to placate the hawks in America. And it's likely to inflame them elsewhere, e.g. in Europe. The only way you can position it as a win is within China's domestic politics, where it would save face for Xi and his acolytes. (Hence, the inefficiency of dictatorship.)
do not discount the importance of this; much of CCP's actions revolve around its survival
Every European country /and/or EU/ECC as a block, as well as every other nation or block, should follow this up as soon as permitted to have all social media apps operated by a foreign country be subject to the same legislation.
TikTok will have to sel to the US, Netherlands, France, Germany, Turkey, Gabon, Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Egypt etc etc etc.
That will of course also go for all other social networks as well. The threats this bill highlights are universal to all social media operated outside the control and ownership,
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, WhatsApp, will either have to stop operating outside of the Unites States or they will need to be sold to every country they wish to operate in.
Certainly, a small state has the same rights and the same cause to protect their citizens from the surveillance and manipulation from foreign owned social networks.
From a geek perspective this would be great. We would get smaller entities that would need to interact with each other in so far as that would be possible or attainable.
TikTok can sell to a French, Hungarian, Indian, Brazilian or even Iraqi person and be in compliance with this bill's terms. It doesn't require American ownership, it forbids control by a foreign adversary.
If the EU and U.S. passed legislation subjecting all tech companies to these rules, the only ones who would have to do anything are those owned and controlled by a foreign adversary state.
* China
* North Korea
* Iran
* Cuba
* Russia
* Venezuela
Could sell it to Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Belarus, etc.
The more interesting question is Taiwan, for which the US has taken no official position on sovereignty.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/07/17/2020-15...
I oppose this bill because it doesn't seem to do anything to address the actual threats posed by social media. After all, foreign adversaries openly operate on Facebook. Why isn't Zuckerberg being forced to divest? Either all social media is a threat, and that threat needs to be addressed, or this is all theater meant to satisfy the population without tackling the actual issues (if we are honest, the same politicians pushing for this bill benefit from social media influence) .
What stops the puppets from ignoring the previous owners?
A big paycheck.
Most readers on HN would happily pledge loyalty to the CCP if it meant $1M+ TC.
In fact, many American and European businesses do exactly this.
You think I pledged loyalty to various employers, even? I mean I told them I did, but I was lying.
So what happens after they’ve received the big paycheque?
I think you’d have a hard time aligning the amount of the paycheques such that the puppets couldn’t get bigger expected future paycheques by doing what they wanted with tiktok.
Presumably the puppets wouldn't have access to the tiktok platform (its code including AI algorithms, data, employees, etc), they'd just be a middle-man that would take the finished product (e.g. the APK) and publish it to distribution platforms (Google and Apple's app stores)?
Consider the sanctions against Russia, for example. Some European companies continued doing business in Russia. Everything they did was perfectly legal, and they complied with the sanctions to the letter. But because some officials considered those companies were aiding the Russian war effort, the next round of US sanctions targeted those companies specifically. Then they had to stop all business indefinitely, because no bank was willing to deal with them anymore.
At least this vindicates the choice all the countries that consider the US an adversary and have blocked US social media. While the US has always characterised the block as the hallmark of illiberal regimes.
Dangerous? I would definitely argue yes.
I assume you're talking about the latter because that seems to be what is talked about with TikTok. Again, it seems weird to me to decide, after however many decades of globalism and exploiting China's manufacturing prowess for cheap goods, that this is suddenly dangerous but then proceed to do absolutely nothing about it, except stifle TikTok.
Diversifying supply chains is a good idea - and the US is doing that already, though it seems to be much more in response to the first definition of "danger" than the second. Because if it was the national security aspect, we'd be seeing it happen with much more alacrity and urgency, and not some hand-wringing about TikTok.
China is unambiguously a foreign adversary of the USA, as well as many/all Western democracies.
The discussion about data and privacy seems totally disingenuous. This seems like a free speech issue being hidden being a weird angle.
A quick legal hack to get TikTok off the table does little to address the underlying systemic issues here - broad, uncontrolled data collection, and mass media distribution platforms that can be weaponised by nation states.
We already know US companies are impacted by both these issues. They need to be addressed at a lower level and not by cherry picking up the individual examples on grounds that are inconsistent with the rest of the state's behaviour.
Because it's easy and cheap. It's a way for our representatives to claim they're doing something about the threat that may be posed by the Chinese government, without actually jeopardizing the interests of our industries.
> A quick legal hack to get TikTok off the table does little to address the underlying systemic issues here - broad, uncontrolled data collection, and mass media distribution platforms that can be weaponised by nation states.
I have no love for FANNG, but there's a huge difference between a domestic companies invading privacy and possibly being soft targets for foreign adversaries, and a literal foreign adversary surveilling and shaping discourse.
So sure, if there is another bill that would curtail privacy invasion by domestic companies, I would be in huge support. But I fail to see how that stops blocking another privacy-invading app, run by a foreign adversary no less, is a bad thing.
There is this whataboutism in every comment on HN regarding the US and China that drives me nutty. A US company being bad does not cancel out a Chinese company being bad. A patchwork law is better than no law.
Citizen these social media sites and these news sources are safe. We have curated this list for your safety and that of the community at large.
Geez things have gotten bad in a hurry :(
This is a nice fantasy but it fails to a number of intractible social problems. Children aren't taught skepticism because parents don't want their children to be taught skepticism. You would need to use force that you do not have access to in order to even attempt the solution you are proposing.
Second, implicit in your argument is that people would be responsible for thinking critically about every fact that they believe. This is just too much work, the human strategy requires trust, and we have massive incentive structures called societies whose main job is to facilitate that trust through the establishment of systems of incentives. This complicated system of incentives has been demolished, wholesale, by social media, and we're not going to adapt fast enough to avoid serious damage.
Say huh? Where on earth did you pull this “factoid” from?
Source: I ran which quite a few of that sort as a kid.
It could also be true of other religious groups (it definitely is with the even nuttier end of Protestants) like Catholics and Muslims or what have you, but that’s the part I have experience with, and that’s a lot of people. They don’t live in San Francisco or New York or Boston or Seattle, mostly, but they exist in numbers.
Politicians will commit seppuku the minute it happens in their country. Independently thinking populace is their worst nightmare.
Luckily for them most people do not do that.
This is what sovereignty looks like to you? It looks like totalitarianism to me.
Also, you have to understand that it's never about "control" of the population or restricting freedom of speech (which, also ironically, is protected in the Chinese Constitution, yeah, really, look it up). Absolutely not. It's always about "public safety".
I wouldn't particularly blame Gabon or Vietnam if they wanted their primary media outlets operated by nations that are at least vaguely friendly to their values. They are free to attempt to force a sale and ban it when those apps inevitably do not comply.
Next up, we could migrate government systems away from foreign IT software and services. The FOSS world has plenty of capable offerings, and it's not as if the choices were made on technical merit in the first place. I'd love to see Free Software and open standards being taught in schools, and being used in government.
This concern is similar to what is cited as the reason for the Huawei sanctions in the US.
Of course, it's not like FOSS magically eliminates all threat. If FOSS was commonly utilized by governments, I think we would see more "XZ Utils backdoor" type of attacks, as it were a juicier target. I firmly believe though that using FOSS would be a step in the right direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_sanctions_agains...
Perhaps the EU should do something similar to Facebook, X etc.?
There was a guy who received a lifetime ban from Safeway for driving through their garden displays and breaking windows in their stores.
The US does ban people from using banks. See also: list of specially designated nationals, etc.
Regardless free speech for Americans is already dead. Remember when they took away rights from groups you didn't care about? Now it's your turn.
What are the code standards for American social media anyway? It’s not like Twitter has to meet any criteria on being free of Bias, they could suppress all bad news about China tomorrow and they wouldn’t be breaking any laws
I think it’s plain as day, this is simply a trade war, along with noises about China dumping cars and what not. All the stuff about security is just a cover story.
At least get something good in return. Even if Tiktok decides to leave US, there are a whole lot of other short video apps that can fill in the blank.
That's why there's been no movement on data privacy legislation in 15+ years: because it would hobble a heavily US-centric profitable industry (with the side benefit that the data can be mined by US law enforcement and intelligence - which is directly the problem the US government has with TikTok / China)
Seriously though, this decision just feels unsubstantiated and rushed. There are so many claims of manipulation and our data being used by China via TikTok but I can't help but feel a company like Instagram does the exact same thing but it's not a Chinese company so we are just... okay with that?
with a ban being the fall back outcome
There are plenty of scenarios where TikTok ends up under non-American control. Only four countries (China, Iran, North Korea, Russia) are foreign adversary countries. [2]
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038...
Abstract: The premise that constituents hold representatives accountable for their legislative decisions undergirds political theories of democracy and legal theories of statutory interpretation. But studies of this at the individual level are rare, examine only a handful of issues, and arrive at mixed results. We provide an extensive assessment of issue accountability at the individual level. We trace the congressional roll-call votes on 44 bills across seven Congresses (2006–18), and link them to constituent’s perceptions of their representative’s votes and their evaluation of their representative. Correlational, instrumental variables, and experimental approaches all show that constituents hold representatives accountable. A onestandard deviation increase in a constituent’s perceived issue agreement with their representative can improve net approval by 35 percentage points. Congressional districts, however, are heterogeneous. Consequently, the effect of issue agreement on vote is much smaller at the district level, resolving an apparent discrepancy between micro and macro studies.
Control-F: "In what follows, we uncover a picture of the electorate that, although not hyperinformed and hyperrational, is one in which constituents are sufficiently attentive that the majority can and does hold their representatives accountable for the decisions that they make on important pieces of legislation."
https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/files/cces/files/AnsolabehereKu...
Verification Materials: The materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QOVWMM
AFAIK china requirements are mostly about censorship and using chinese datacenters
> China has been doing that for years
China has been doing many things I would like the US to not start doing... Let's say that the US could find better role models
It's not about what's being done, it's about who's doing it.
A more interesting question; why doesn't the source matter to you?
“The case for harm has not been made” Do you think the American government would say publicly “we know China is exploiting this data because that’s exactly what we do and China is even worse than us.
The Snowden leaks were bad because they showed Americans spied on without warrants. This is about users who for better or worse install the app intentionally.
I'm glad you agree that the US government has not actually made the case for harm.
The Snowden leaks were bad because they exposed a lot of 100% legal, directly part of their charter activity by the NSA, like monitoring the communications of foreign leaders and other non-US persons.
"n a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act"
I get that we aren't best buds with china but they are also a huge trade partner with the US. Bigger than many countries which we have friendlier feelings towards.
The most recent one I can think of is responding with tariffs against the US after we put tariffs on their solar exports.
Beyond that... the Korean war I think was the last time we were any sort of direct/semi direct conflict with them. And Taiwan is the touchiest aspect we have with them.
You can't use 'direct conflict' as a measure in this type of game. Russia has done damning harm to american politics, but its not clear how to measure that effect.
This is a solid point. What most people don't get is that despite the enormous investment the CIA, NSA, and DoD Sigint have made into their offensive security teams, most of their budget is dedicated to Friday team-building activities, Bowling Nights, and Foosball tables. The US definitely does not hack anybody.
"Everyone but FVEY are the super evil hackerz" is a childish, head-in-the-sand position to hold in the modern geopolitical climate. Everyone is hacking everyone, and China is not some sort of unique Bad Guy in this regard.
US and China choose to act this way, but they could stop harassing each other without affecting their own power bases.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/apt31-chine...
The fact is the accurately attributing expert cybercrime is extremely difficult and anyone that implies otherwise is making a fool out of you.
Just look at the situation in the Philippines at Second Thomas Shoal. They're actively baiting the US.
How about we don't take the "bait" in the South CHINA Sea that is thousands of miles away from even the furthest abroad US territory (Guam)?
Very little of the South China See is owned by China. China doesn't own it any more than Japan owns the Sea of Japan.
I can't imagine what else we would call them. Also, turnabout is fair play. You can't run a company in China without giving up ownership and abiding by a number of, often draconian, rules. This isn't a "ban", it's a "You can't be owned by China" law. Given what China requires I find that completely reasonable.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
Yes, they are officially recognized as a foreign adversary. They're the first country listed:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
https://www.sandboxx.us/news/the-man-who-stole-americas-stea...
Further, the escalation of NATO/Russian tensions, the war in Ukraine, and resurgent Gaza conflict, have all contributed to a specific window of opportunity for China to act as these each spread US readiness thinner than at quieter times.
This has all unequivocally and openly set China as an adversary to the US until that "sphere of influence" conflict is resolved. They're not hiding it, the US is not hiding it. There's no question about this except among people who just happened not to be paying attention to what's going on in the region.
We can hope (perhaps too optimistically) for a gradual diplomatic reorganization or deescalation without hot trade or military conflict, but the whole world is preparing -- on many fronts -- for more confrontational scenarios.
Only in election years.
Except that china never controlled media in the US, they just offered one option out of many. The fact that the option China offered was widely preferred over those made by US companies seems to be the problem. I'd rather have an open internet where we can get access to information from companies in other countries. We shouldn't be blocked from accessing Chinese Youtube anymore than we should be blocked from Chinese websites or the media at bbc.com or abc.net.au
Nonsense. If you want to make a movie that actually makes money you have to cut it for the Chinese censors on set.
Arguments or statements like this only serve to piss people off. It probably does benefit Meta but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the bill should be passed.
Correct. US company data on citizens is most likely made available to the US government via fiber splicing and backdoor agreements. Separately, China is in a position to exercise way too much manipulative control over wide swaths of the US populace. That's generally agreed upon as "not a good thing".
Will Meta benefit with their massive network of boomers who can't tell generative AI from real life? I dunno, I doubt it. I think we'll see something else entirely replace Tiktok.
If the product wasn't something that people truly loved, would the callers have had that level of commitment to follow through?
Seeing the lack of political action in this country, I'd presume the answer to be NO.
This is not a factual statement. It is a statement that contains something resembling a fact, however it is still just your subjective opinion.
The Chinese government and the US government exert their influence over companies in the same way -- regulation, backdoor conversations asking them to kill/mute stories, and NSL type requests. There's not some government propagandist sitting at a switchboard. In fact it's the "West" that goes above and beyond with an entire technical apparatus to real-time mass censor social media to "protect democracy." If you don't consider every US company to be a direct arm of the US government but do for China then it's because your feeling about China than your feelings about social media manipulation.
It is in China's interest to avoid divestment because TikTok is a successful company making China money. And now it's in their interest to avoid divestment to not get bullied by the US gov't. If TikTok had the power you and others in this thread ascribe to them they would be more successful at swaying public opinion.
I do. I live in the EU, and our laws arguably don't allow sharing data with US companies for that exact reason (Schrems II judgement)
It doesn't matter why TikTok does anything. They have shown they can influence their users en masse, and they're legally obligated to do it if the Chinese authorities demand it.
This could be interpreted as CCP manipulation, but what else did you expect them to do?
No, in this case it was OVERT manipulation, not covert. The important word, however, is: manipulation.
I am so floored by comments in this thread either denying or not caring about literal brainwashing by a foreign adversary of the US.
Do you really believe this?
Wonder what their next concern will be?
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/03/14/tikt...
You might believe that the next thing will be, "let China take over the Senkaku islands", but if so, you have not been around children in several decades.
People talk about data collection. I am sure that is happening, but the far bigger issue is having a regime who wishes you harm in change of what your young people are and are not seeing for hours every day. There is a lot of propaganda, a deluge of videos pushing of divisive extremism and misinformation. The people pushing this are also using western platforms, but they're doing it more effectively on TikTok. This cannot end soon enough.
Why doesn't this apply to websites hosted overseas generally, or for other countries besides china. I can access media at www.abc.net.au just fine.
But anyway, my point was that the concern over foreign influence is not a new idea and has been something people were worried about even over a century ago.
It's very strange that our government doesn't care that our phones are made in China, that damn near everything for sale on Amazon comes from China, that we're constantly getting Chinese products that are low quality, covered in heavy metals, and/or drenched in formaldehyde, yet a Chinese owned app goes too far?
We don't write and pass the laws, and what we're "okay with" doesn't really matter to the decision-makers. Hopefully though, the passage of this bill will catalyze a more widespread discussion about the hypocrisy of the US Government. They can at least be clear about the motivation: "Only _our_ state surveillance apparatus should have such direct access to this psychic imprint of the American people."
What I'm curious about is whether the new ownership will be sufficiently savvy to sniff out any automated data sharing.
The difference is that Mark Zuckerberg will put on a suit and go and get yelled at by members of Congress for a few hours.
And the channel itself is pretty great.
So I do apologise for not getting a list of factual examples supporting the OP's statement, but your argument was not barely enough to make me disagree with the OP. On the contrary, I do agree with the OP very much.
Even if there were efforts to ban TikTok before that time, this obviously escalated it.
What are the other 2nd and 3rd order effects of this?
Covered countries are here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
In theory, this could be used more broadly. Not a lawyer, but there's a reading that it would give a president the ability to unilaterally force divestiture in companies that have as little as a "choose your username for your online account" functionality. It's unlikely to affect B2B supply chains, though. Presidents have many existing tools at their disposal anyways if they want to disrupt those.
This is a totally bunk argument. If you want an argument that does work against the constitution, SCOTUS' "empty shell" or Lysander Spooner's "Constitution of no authority" are of far more weight, but have more disturbing implications (e.g. You can disregard it completely; our system is precisely the "odious arbitrariness" the founders denounced).
While this bill does refer to a specific organization, it doesn't punish them for past actions, but rather constrains US companies in the future. That is perfectly ok as shown in cases like Huawei v. United States or Kaspersky Lab, Inc. v. DHS. Like Kaspersky, it's "prophylactic, not punitive."
But the bigger question is the literal one you've asked: how the federal government can just ban TikTok?
What makes the government think that they can stop packets at some arbitrary line in the sand, when every indication in the history of the internet shows the opposite?
They were unable to stop drug cartels. And drug cartels need a highly centralized and sophisticated organization, and need to ship a physical product across a border.
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes; "
Whether right or wrong, whether politically motivated or not, it has gone through the house, senate and president which is not a small thing.
I'm guessing Congress justifies its authority here based on national security. The bill refers to "foreign adversary controlled applications".
Internet service by one company is not trivial to address in a "ban". Unlike, for example, a chemical molecule. At least they have the experience in specifying and addressing that.
They have to store the data somewhere and it much more likely that they will sell than engage in value killing whack-a-mole with federal agencies
I think we might be able to manage to identify a company with hundreds of millions of users trying to mask themselves by... changing their name.
It's not like we're going to firewall them off. The bill bans distribution of the app in the US app stores and US companies from offering any kind of internet hosting services related to the app.
The same way that the government addresses most issues. They tell people not to do something, and if they refuse then they get fined, their assets frozen and confiscated, and eventually people are arrested.
Bytedance would have to withdraw all its assets and employees from anywhere in the west to escape the consequences.
This is also overwhelmingly likely to go unchallenged by the court system due to the provision being passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
Requiring TikTok to sell is an overreach by the state. It will leads us on a path where companies will be strictly regional.
Not a fan.
So just install it like a normal application instead of using an "app store". But does this mean if I host the .apk or whatever on my personal website I would be breaking the law?
Yes, provided you are doing it in a way "through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application" [1]. (It would be perfectly legal to go to TikTok.com, however.)
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521... § 2(a)(1)(A)
The bill itself says:
> The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated...
So the website is explicitly included in that
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
Why such a long timeline? It leaves open the door for Trump getting into office and immediately rolling it back such that they don't have to.
There is a brewing (cold for now) conflict with China and the US and it just makes 1000% sense to me that TikTok not be in the US. It poses to severe a potential national security threat from it being on phones of members of the military, or Congress, to being able to subtly influence elections or shape the minds of the next generation with tweaks to the algorithm.
The algorithm for tailoring content to the user is just so very good the POTENTIAL is there for abuse that an outright ban needs to happen. (I know they’re trying to allow it to be spun but I’m more hardline here and think it just needs to be removed from the US.)
Why would the US or any power allow a social network with such a powerful algorithm to learn so much about every user when US or other social networks can’t or don’t operate in China? China censors content a la the thought police of Orwell’s 1984. Yet democracies largely allow speech to be free and accessible which is why the most popular podcast host in the world often hosts crazy people like Alex Jones and that’s okay — it’s not illegal to have insane opinions or conversations.
So China is exporting a social network that COULD be used to control, shape, etc — otherwise emit propaganda on US users, it could spy on those same users be it location data or otherwise (imagine the dirt it probably has on members of Congress) and yet US social networks don’t get to operate in China to the same extent.
The US government is under no obligation to this US voter, at least, to share some bombshell investigation because the potential is there and it shouldn’t be.
This is not different than removing ZTE and Huwawei hardware and software from sensitive US networks and such. In the event of a conflict do we really want companies who have members of the CCP in their upper mgmt or who are otherwise expected to do as told to be in sensitive areas like military or power generation or telecommunications? Of course not.
But on the whole I’m in favor of any and all laws undermining the mind cancer that is “social media”, irrespective of who controls it, worldwide.
Plus, foreign social media are blocked altogether unless they submit to Chinese government censorship.
So there's not much that can backfire.
Why does this sound like “famous last words”?
Not just tiktok either, this will wind up applying to many companies.
Wrong. Read it again very carefully.
It places substantial fines on American companies who provide services that distribute, maintain or update any sufficiently popular apps where a company is headquartered in, or has more than a 20% ownership share of the company held, in a country that has been determined to be a foreign adversary.
So sure, it's not "banned', it's just that they're made completely inaccessible to US users because nobody is going to be ok with paying substantial fines in order to allow it on their networks/servers/app stores.
You do realize that, in english, we often use shortcuts to refer to things right? If something is "effectively" a ban, we just call it a ban and move on, because our language provides many, many facilities to improve efficiency. You being pedantic is, remarkably, unpleasant, and speaks poorly of your overall level of social adjustment, specifically because you are using the very language you speak incorrectly as you do so.
We need open ecosystems and access to full root-level control of our devices by default. Accept no substitutes.
No, you'd just go to the website.
X spinning a pro X narrative is problematic, just as it is bad Facebook hid their problem with teenage mental health, etc... all these types of things are problematic and can often harm people and society.
The reason TikTok is a greater concern is that TikTok is fully controlled by China, and that hence it is not just pro TikTok narratives that might be amplified but any narrative China wants to amplify. The risks are greater, and the existing mitigations are weaker as the company isn't US owned.
If you ask me, the US in recent history has had incredibly anemic corporate regulation, and there should be a lot more intervention to prevent companies acting nefariously.
So just install it like a normal application instead of using an "app store". But does this mean if I host the .apk or whatever on my personal website I would be breaking the law?
- ByteDance will challenge the ruling in court (>95%), but they will lose (80%)
- They then will succeed in selling TikTok US to a US company, despite what ByteDance execs and China are saying (75%)
- The sale will be for $30-50B (CI 50%), it won't include important ByteDance IP that will have to be recreated by a US-based company, likely Snap or X.
- Walmart and Oracle won’t compete to buy it this time. Microsoft or Amazon are the top contenders, also quite likely is a consortium led by someone like Steven Mnuchin.
Why replicate it? Can't ByteDance license the IP to the US company?
What a petty move. I understand the theoretical security concerns, but this feels like total overkill.
If your neighbor kept borrowing cups of sugar from you, but never lends you any sugar, would you keep giving him sugar?
Tiktok has been the only place to see videos about police brutality and one of the main places to see the movement supporting the Palestinian cause.
I feel so much shame as an American that my country did this.
hmmm....
I don't think there is anything scary/bad about Americans seeing content that humanizes people who have been dehumanized by the US media for as long as I can remember.
You’re ashamed that TikTok can continue to operate here so long as it’s divested of CCP control?
I'd rather have the US foster innovation and let the best company win. TikTok is more entertaining and is growing because it has better/smarter feed algorithms and content creation tools, plan and simple.
Meta was an early innovator in this area but has stagnated due to revenue pressures leading to the over-promotion of low quality content. Netflix has failed to adapt.
Also Tiktok is directly owned by the CCP. It’s barely a private company, so national security concerns are justified.
As you may recall from the Snowden revelations, the US government has high bandwidth data intercept stations installed at major datacenters that are expressly for the purpose of ingesting massive amounts of data. There is no need for "ownership" when this level of cooperation with government exists.
> As you may recall from the Snowden revelations,
That’s a non sequitur, and it doesn’t change the fact that TikTok is owned and operated by a hostile foreign government.
Perhaps, but this is simply logic: Country A imposes tariffs that harm consumers and producers in country A and country B. That is the case before retaliatory tariffs. Once country B imposes its own, now the producers and consumers in both countries have yet more tariffs to deal with.
The leap of logic that is hard for people to grasp is that countries have producers and consumers and many that occupy both roles. A friend of mine had his 3D printing business fail after US retaliatory trade restrictions prvented him from importing 5% of parts for his printers that are mainly available from China. Meanwhile competitors in the US resold 100% China-manufactured printers and still beat him in price in spite of the tariffs. Such an embarrassing example of policy having effects far different from its intentions.
> That’s a non sequitur...
Governments can get control of companies in consequential (privacy, etc.) ways by a variety of means, and it happens everywhere. The Snowden revelations are highly relevant only because you make the claim that the paper ownership or other irrelevant nuance of how China has control over Chinese companies is somehow relevant. It absolutely is not since the end result is exactly the same.
There are many, many accounts of government using soft power to influence American firms to behave in ways that do the bidding of the state,... it is precisely analogous to what China would do with its own firms, regardless of the details.
I think this is the absolute best way to address this. It forces people to realize and acknowledge that even China's CCP is well aware that companies like TikTok are a major security threat which justifies this type of action.
I wonder why we have anonymous accounts spreading this nonsense that this is a mere trade issue, as if the problem is a company that generates well below $5B in revenue, and not the data harvesting operation and propaganda arm that it is designed to be.
We really should have a way of judging if any data being captured by an app is in good faith or if it is being done in a clearly fraudulent or malicious manner and then punish or shutdown the malicious operators. Tiktok has been proven to be manipulative and also as an arm of the CCP.
However, what about other apps which seem to capture data that makes no sense to them?
For example, if your note taking app is secretly uploading data from your contact list - that should be clearly seen as malicious in comparison to say your e-commerce app storing details about your purchase history made on that app to determine what may be going on with you.
Even the second part is a bit shady but at least you can make a case that it may be just a way to sell more things.
But many apps capture data that cannot make any business sense to the company behind that app other than being something quite malicious - like for example:
- Uber secretly recording your screen on iphone EVEN WHILE the app was NOT EVEN BEING USED using API which Apple conveniently did not disclose to anyone else other than Uber and perhaps other shady operators!
- Chrome caught secretly sending audio transcripts back to the Google servers. Why would a browser need to send audio transcripts by secretly tapping into the microphone?
- Nest using microphones which were only revealed much later. Why would a smoke alarm need audio?
- Why do apps like Whatsapp - even in the web version, secretly take the data from the clipboard (copy buffer)? Why would an app need the data in the clipboard before it is even pasted into it?
Any company capturing or using such data should be required to provide evidence that this data was captured for a legitimate reason - and be punished if they are not able to provide this data with the principals of the company being treated like organized crime operators. Anything else is just pointless.
What does this mean for the INSANE number of Chinese-owned IoT companies that sell products in the US that store some data in China?
Across various threads there's a lot of info on how large & what a revenue source the US is for TikTok, and an assumption that that goes away. But do people think the ban would be 100% effective, that no one would workaround? Would TikTok accept the ban or try to help people work around it?
I kind of want to see an example of the US trying to control things at out. It's probably not enough for ByteDance, but if they could retain 20% of the US in spite of the ban, that'd be a pretty big cultural victory, would be an impressive way to show up congress.
Correct me if I am wrong but Didn't Epic also get removed from the Android and Apple stores? They are still going somehow though.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then ..."
We regulate cigarettes and heroin this is a much bigger problem than people give it credit for.
It's an even worse problem if a bad actor is using it subtlety to influence a population.
It doesn't matter if ByteDance or FB are doing this they should both burn to the ground for the damage they have done to the Internet and society.
Could TikTok just revert to fully Chinese hosting (or more likely a third country) and operate as a totally foreign company? You can already access many Chinese sites like Baidu Maps or Zhihu or Xiaohongshu from the US.
It only counts if "the President determines, through an interagency process, would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary" [1].
So presumably if a pair of Hungarian millionaires show up and place a bid, there would be additional questions.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521... 2(g)(6)*
No. Whomever is elected executive.
Nerds have always had some of the worst political stances, not because they're dumb but because they bend in face of the slightest pressure of losing social capital - in the current climate, this usually means submitting to the most psychotic leftist interpretation that is physically proximate to them.
Explains the politics of places like SF quite well.
Rhetoric aside, it will be done through blocking commercial activity on US soil. The US government can seize tiktok.com for example.
They don’t host videos for fun, they host videos so you will watch ads. If they can’t sell ads for US$ then they won’t host videos either.
Bytedance does not have to divest because it's against the law for the U.S government to prevent Americans from reading, viewing or saying what they want. Will be struck down by SCOTUS.
Does this comply with HN's site guidelines?
There's existing laws about the citizenship of property owners (broadcase media for example).
But even if that doesn't happen, and the US state starts to regard TikTok as banned, what makes anyone think people will stop using it?
Many western resources are banned in China, and it seems that the primary effect of this is simply the proliferation of tools to subvert the ban.
One thing I don't understand, at a high level: how, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, can anyone believe that the internet will shape itself around the whims of legacy states on anything but very short timescales?
There is no case of successful censorship of this nature, let alone with such a large and popular resource. Conversely, there are many, many cases of failed attempts at censorship, even by the largest and most powerful states and corporations in the world.
Is there some reason to believe that this trend will very suddenly reverse?
If the ban is on new downloads, it will mean that the ban doesn't hit particularly hard, except for there will be no more platform growth, which would mean that the company sees all of the issue with it, but the users do not which would stagnate the platform and lead to its eventual death. Frogs in a pot of water turned up to a boil, instead of dropped in at a rolling boil kind of thing.
If it is banded in ISP level, there is essentially no real chance that anybody will put any effort to get around it. I see big statements all the time about how people slightly younger than me don't even know what command prompt is, which is frankly a wild statement because even people I know my age that are not techy. Like I am still know how to do almost all of the basic commuter commands and know how to download a VPN and similar. We are either going to see a Renaissance of tech people opened up because of the ban on tick tock and them learning about technology to try and circumvent it, or we are going to see the total death of the platform because most people don't really know how to do anything technical on a phone or computer anymore.
Either way, it's going to cause some fairly large shifts until something is done, and if nothing is done, maybe the main shift will be just to a different platform rather than a different societal state of mind.
I'd prefer if we focused on why the app is dangerous and maybe pass some comprehensive privacy or anti-monopoly legislation that removes the danger rather than playing whack-a-mole with whatever company has attracted the most attention at the time.
We do. TikTok.com won't be blocked here the way Facebook and Google are in China.
Let's see, it will be interesting to look back on these comments in a decade.
Sure, yes, it can always get worse. The point is it isn't, and we're nowhere close to false comparisons with the CCP.
Good for the goose…
No it wouldn't, as that precedent is already set. And, not only do they choose winners, but individual members of Congress freely profit off those choices.
Very few countries across the world do that. Govts usually own a chunk of the largest firms in strategic sectors and have seats on the board. Look at Boeing/Airbus ownership and the outcomes. Its just easier to influence large corps when you own them. If you don't own them then Boeing is the latest example in a long line up of large corps, showing everyone how they skirt whatever law and regulation the govt passes.
I think it's pretty clear that the establishment doesn't like the content on tiktok and that's a large reason for the ban.
Content is really unrelated.
The part that's hard for me to ignore is the fairly overt statements from reps that they don't like the content: https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1782920301052911713
It's possible for something to be providing valuable news and perspective and also be controlled/manipulated by an adversary. Sorta like a broken clock being right twice a day.
They’ll move to whatever platform users move to
> The company has an initial nine months to sort out a deal, though the president could extend that another three months if he sees progress.
But I do hope to see improvements in the next 5 years. I'd like to see less trends around destructive behavior: eating tide pods, destroying/defacing property, harassing others.
The algorithm should not be unbiased. We must take manual intervention to hinder the destructive tendencies in human behavior
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/05/30/tikt...
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/17/china-lobbying-tikt...
Like I'm ready to get out the pitchforks but this is just weird FUD.
Yes, lying under oath is called perjury.
> your link is saying that China wants TikTok to remain owned by a Chinese firm
Say a foreign country were considering banning Lockheed Martin. And the U.S. ambassador picked up the phone--not to fellow diplomats, but individual legislators--to argue against it. Do you not see how the fact that this rose to the level of state-level mediation concedes there are non-economic factors at play?
> US would resist huge chunks of our own hugely profitable companies being sold off
It's been happening in Russia for the past two years. The cases where it rises to diplomatic incident are not strongly correlated with value as much as strategic worth.
You mean the exact thing that happened with Facebook during the transatlantic data sharing agreement dispute because of the CLOUD act? Do you assume it's because the US is secretly manipulating EU citizens with pro-America propaganda? Even worse it was because Facebook said it was technically impossible for them to not store some data on EU citizens in the US.
> It's been happening in Russia for the past two years
Yes, because of the US imposed sanctions on Russia. It's not at all the same thing when we chose to force our own businesses to pull out or sell. Do we not remember the time when Github (along with every other company) couldn't do business in Iran?
No, but there absolutely were IC concerns, as well as trade-integration ones between allies. Non-economic, politically-relevant factors. In that case, not necessarily all adversarial.
> because of the US imposed sanctions on Russia
We sanctioned certain Russian entities. Russia responded by seizing American and European assets. There were no U.S. sanctions on e.g. Danish beer made in Russia [1].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/31/business/carlsberg-russia-bus...
Ambassadors and diplomatic missions routinely intervene (including contacting legislators) to protect the perceived economic interests of their country’s large corporations and strategic industries.
I’m absolutely certain that if an important market for an important firm (eg: Lockheed) were to threaten to stop buying, top State Department staff would absolutely “pick up the phone” to legislators at a bare minimum.
But most will slowly migrate to other platforms due to uncertainty (users and advertisers), though it remains to be seen exactly to where.
Maybe Snap? YT Shorts is bad, as are most other “shorts as a feature” platforms where discovery UX is terrible.
Just speculation for the time being as we need to see what ByteDance decides to do. Can’t recall the exact article but I think they do plan to fight this decision.
There's a lot more leftist/anticapitalist content (and political content in general) on tiktok compared to youtube shorts and instagram reels.
I and every friend I've talked to about tiktok has seen much more political content on tiktok than other short video apps.
Really?
Who owns the damn thing anyway?
Oh right. Communists.
>The Supreme Court has previously held that Congress can’t ban foreign propaganda, including propaganda from China. In Lamont vs. Postmaster General, the court considered a law that required the postmaster general to detain “communist political propaganda” sent through the mail. The Post Office was then required to send the addressee a card asking whether they wanted the propaganda to be delivered, in what the court ultimately ruled had an unconstitutional chilling effect on speech.
https://www.platformer.news/tiktok-ban-bill-senate-legal-cha...
In particular TikTok is not being “banned” based on content, so it’s likely strict scrutiny will not apply.
It's less true now, starting from when the mafia used this freedom to threaten judges and jury (Basically, when 80% of people think "full freedom of speech is stupid in this particular case", the US government will effectively suppress it).
I've talked with someone who argued that it effectively never truly existed, and gave me a lot of pre-prohibition examples i can't remember, and even a few from pre-civil war era, that targeted white people (which was surprising because most of the other did not), but i don't know if i trust him, and don't really know US history well, so if you're interested, you should research it yourself and not trust what i just wrote (which is basically, "Yes, No, It's complicated and i don't really know". I'm such a helpful person :/)
[edit] Not saying if it's good or bad btw, extreme freedoms are a cultural foundation of the US, and in my opinion define the country.
If she is so zombified by TikTok, won't she just continue to use it? Why would she comply with the ban?
Moreover, even if she does, there are many other nearly identical sources of zombification. Won't she use fall prey to those instead?
They'll take 20 seconds to install one app to route around the ban, and then forget about it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fszq_PSWIAUwaWw?format=jpg&name=...
the average age of a congress person (house and senate) has gone up by one year, per year, for roughly 20 years.
that tells you that the "normal" organic churn of the past simply stopped dead in its tracks. we have been ruled over by nearly the exact same set of 50 somethings as they have slowly turned into 70 somethings. one very narrow cohort has held onto power so long they personally turned us into a gerontocracy.
this is why the tiktok ban is such a priority despite the fact that it has no constituency at all in the electorate. they don't really represent today's electorate, they represent 20 years ago's electorate that's finally had enough of this internet bullshit.
congress is supposed to be a lagging indicator of popular will by design, its just that for the last 20 years we've been increasing the incremental amount of lag by roughly one year per year, so we've been effectively in stasis.
...yet they turn a blind eye to the fact that GM not only collected driving data on their users, apparently in some cases without consent, but they sold it to others, including auto insurers, who used the information to increase the insurance rates of those who were spied on.
There is no difference between what GM did and what any social media company does. At least with GM selling driving data, there is significant public benefit to making bad driver pay for their poor driving instead of the rest of us having to pay for it.
China is never a country with free market. The hypocrisy is glaring when one claiming as a free market while passing a law that outright rob a company in the day light, under the name of "national security". American people should be embarrassed by this. The government is using to the same tactics as a so-called authoritarian communist country, if not worse.
Isn't that what the bill actually does. The tiktok part is just legal distraction as it punts the tiktok issue to the next administration.
The bill actually does multiple things, and it's okay to talk about the components in isolation.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-renews-fisa...
Microsoft/Meta/A conglomerate of record labels(?) will buy TikTok and it’ll continue to exist just as it does today.
No, actually we dont. There is no divine mandate that requires us to do that, especially in a scenario where the geopolitical rival is using our credulity to their advantage.
Unfortunately that leaves Instagram, which is in many ways worse. Maybe Elon Musk can buy that one and destroy it next. He already did us a solid by ruining Twitter.
Some key facts:
1. Tiktok isn’t allowed to sell because their AI models and algorithms are trained on Chinese citizenry data. These items have been marked as non-exports for some time now, and this is a well known fact by the people pushing for the bill.
2. The bill was only passed since it was shafted into a bundle of other more urgent bills that have to pass.
3. Not all American media companies are banned in China. Some refuse to comply with local laws and pulled out. For example, Apple and Microsoft complied. However the competition in China is immense and not every business can survive the capitalistic competition.
4. While there were talks about the ban, it was not until the overwhelming amount of Pro Palestinian content that led to the heavy push for the ban.
5. The US is a relatively tiny market for tiktok, so tiktok is likely to just pull out.
What I think:
1. The date set for the sale is highly political, and IMO its meant to weaponise Gen Z against the democrats.
2. Pro Palestinian content is highly searchable on tiktok, and that made a lot of people unhappy and uncomfortable.
Would be insanely easy to identify swing counties/demographics and slightly tweak their algorithm to influence votes. You can be sure some chinese data scientist has already run the numbers on this (if not already experimented on it at a state/local level). I don't really feel comfortable with the CCP having that level of control.
> Pro Palestinian content is highly searchable on tiktok, and that made a lot of people unhappy and uncomfortable.
Not saying that the popularity of pro palestinian content is a psyop. But if it were, how would you even know? Maybe it's not a psyop today but they pulled the right levels to make it go viral, and now it's an organically driven flywheel? Maybe it's all organic and I'm fearmongering. The point is there is no way to know, or ever find out. Chinese datacenters can't be subpoenaed.
I think it's better to have freedom. As an American I should be able to view any media from any country I like as long as that media doesn't violate US law. Americans should have the freedom to use any software written in any country they like. In this case, we lost freedom to censorship and Democracy did nothing to stop it.
Not a very good argument. This post is literally about the signing of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act".
The loophole which is being closed is allowing foreign adversaries to control your social media apps.
It will be in violation if it doesn't sell.
Is this sarcastic ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
China has been doing this for a very long time, to keep US apps out of the Chinese market (or forced IP transfers to Chinese companies) so that Chinese apps can thrive. There's no room for them to retaliate because they've already gone as far as they possibly could.
Watch every republican and jump on this (even though they support it).
Congratulations, you've played yourselves back to back.
They didn't need to - William Hearst - the Murdoch of the era - signed a $500,000/year contract with the Nazi Government and did that propaganda on their behalf.
It was worse after the US entered the war - legions of US companies kept trading with Nazis and even provided technology to them - like the technology that was used in developing half trucks. The oil, equipment and technology that the US companies were still selling to the Nazis through intermediary countries were killing American soldiers.
Did anything happen to them? No - they were persecuted for 'trading with the enemy' and got off with a slap on the wrist and KEPT TRADING with Nazis until the end of the war.
...
So no, your example does not hold any weight. The only reason the US is trying to ban Tiktok is because it cant compete and it doesn't own a big piece of it.
Its anti competitive behavior and its not new - despite yammering about 'free trade', the US applies trade quotas even to the allies it has 'free trade' agreements with. 'Free trade' is in quotes, because the 'free trade' always happens on the US side - if the other side starts doing too much 'free trade', the US does what it is doing to Tiktok - ban them.
This is despicable as hell. It will gimp the position of the US in world trade A LOT.
(TikTok is banned in China though, so it'd be fair if they were banned.)
Anyway, Chinese communism doesn't ban competitors.
That and after Congress had already concluded it was being run in a way bad for teens' mental health, TikTok put up a dialog on launch saying they'd get banned unless all their users called in about it, so all the teenagers with bad mental health called in and said they'd kill themselves without TikTok.
What Does Free Speech Mean? https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-re...
/s
My point is that it's impossible to prove what the commenter was asking for.
For anyone who uses TikTok regularly, it's evident there frequently political content that outright contradict's China's positions, spreading unfettered through the platform.
The same govt that screwed the entire world with Covid-19 will use tiktok for nefarious purposes. This isn’t a stretch.
https://www.amazon.com/Unrestricted-Warfare-Chinese-Wang-Xia...
How does someone do data collection on how the Chinese government weaponizes a social media platform? That would almost certainly involve Tailored Access Operations (or whatever they are calling offensive cyber warfare these days), not only of questionable legality but definitely compromising the sort of Tactics/Techniques/Procedures you REALLY don't want made public.
Also, who said we're going to firewall them?
The Tik Tok ban is years late and I don't know why any US citizen could not understand why it's the right thing to do, unless on the payroll of the Chinese government.
If TikTok were breaking US laws and refused to comply that'd be one thing, but that's not the case. They say their just worried about "influence" which is beyond hypocritical and not really grounds for censorship. Should they ban websites hosted in other countries next?
Like it or not, your freedom to access whatever software you wish is only really possible because you have a state that is capable of resisting foreign pressure to allow you to do so. This move is very much part of that removing leverage from an explicitly illiberal group. Paradox of Intolerance and so forth. You can pridefully choose to reject that, but I don't think your freedoms will last very long then.
I don't think that having access to websites and media in China, alongside all the websites and media from everywhere else on Earth, will result in us electing congressmen who are secretly working for China. There is zero evidence that TikTok is making that happen. There's no evil on TikTok that isn't on facebook and youtube. What good is it for us to voluntarily give up our freedoms in order to keep the China boogeyman from taking them from us?
Apple has LGBT+ and BLM wallpapers on the phone by default. TikTok only reaches everyone with TikTok installed (and even then, only those that actually uses the app). Apple reaches everyone with an iPhone with its propaganda.
I actually truly believe we should do this- a GDPR style bill for the US that protects people's right to privacy and limits corporations ability to influence our governments. The fact that we know how easy it is for companies to do this but are just upset that a specific company is doing it tells me we're approaching this in the wrong way.
I’m not against such a privacy law but I think it’s orthogonal to the TikTok issue.
It's not a red scare if it is true. And it's not a red scare because China isn't being targeted here because they are Communist - they are being targeted because they are a geopolitical adversary. Russia would be treated in the same manner if some killer app came out of there, and they aren't Communist.
You can't miss that if you're even half smart or don't have an agenda.
So if they know it’s harmful, they have an interest on showing low quality content to the western audience and possibly psychologically and intellectually affect an entire generation.
This is pure conspiracy theory. You think the nation that produces and loves Grand Theft Auto needs a relatively puritan foreign country, where certain depictions of death are restricted in media, weed and porn are totally illegal, to push such debauchery on the American people?
Vine hit the American streets long before TikTok before it was killed by mismanagement.
TikTok curated content without the need for a user to do anything else than scroll. You can have a remarkably well personalized TikTok experience without liking, following, or saving any content.
This seems to me to be one of things we probably should not have done.
Not true taken literally, obviously; not true if taken as saying "only JVs are allowed" either. According to the Department of Commerce (https://www.export.gov/apex/article2?id=China-Establishing-a...):
> A large majority of new foreign investments in China are WFOEs [wholly foreign owned enterprises], 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.
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.
Small note: Many US companies do operate in China with large margins (Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD, NVidia, etc). There's been a Wikipedia article cited a through times throughout this thread with a complete list of blocked domains! Just a minor nitpick, thanks for the thoughts still.
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
An alternate conclusion is that Instagram is censoring topics that don't align with the "Consensus" in Washington and artificially boosting content that does. Why is there literally no content on Instagram about the Gaza war, yet I get up-to-date news and reports on TikTok?
https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/network-contagion-rese...
Both the US government and TikTok/ByteDance are unable to prove their claims, and likely, neither one ever could. Even if TikTok showed 100% evidence that they've never done that, the US government would know that there's nothing stopping TikTok from doing it at a later date.
This legislation is the US government deciding that the risks are too great, and so they're willing to take the gamble and shut down a company that's potentially done nothing wrong. "Innocent until proven guilty" is typically reserved for the judicial system, but this is a legislative decision; it'll be an interesting court case to determine if the US legislators are able to make these sorts of decisions outside of the judiciary.
Ex-ByteDance Exec Claims TikTok Gave Communist Party 'God User' Status https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-political-china-communist-god-use...
American TikTok user data stored in China, video app admits https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/23/american-tik...
If this amount of effort is going into protect us from TikTok, then why not protect us from every other Social Media company that is tracking us.
You are wrong, and linked articles from US intel community have been available for years.
Maybe you mean something like this “study” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tiktok-data-suggests-al... which concludes with “kinda maybe looks like they could possibly favor Chinese interest”. Doing a study and putting out a headline is all it takes to poison the public opinion and exactly what I would expect from the social media companies foaming at the mouth losing market share.
The wording I have seen is congress had a internal meeting about the potential security concerns that could be involved (very likely with every app).
Very easy example to find: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/12/30/army-follows-...
One of many, hence not linking.
Every TikTok fan is demanding proof that was provided several years ago and they ignored.
I don't believe that the lurch to the Right we've seen--Brexit, Trump, etc.--are happening naturally.
Regardless of your opinions on TikTok, this type of thing is incredibly frustrating and routine practice in American politics. Can't actually get support for the legislation you want? Just add it on to some other completely unrelated piece of legislation that is more popular.
The process does get abused and I get frustration over those instance. For this one in particular, there are thematic similarities that can reasonably fall under "national security concerns".
That isn't a defense of the quality of the practice. Something can have a bad "design from the beginning".
Whose position on this bill, in the House or Senate, do you think is unclear?
In the House, these bills were individually voted on. (In TikTok's case, twice.) In the Senate, pretty much everyone has made their views known on at least Ukraine, Israel and TikTok. (Taiwan hasn't been particularly contentious.)
There is a reason I used the word "accountability". There is difference between talk and action and accountability is about making sure the two align. "Made their views known" by itself is just talk that can easily be obfuscated. A voting record is an action and we shouldn't allow politicians to distance themselves from that action with a simple "it was part of a larger bill".
Again, we have an actual case on hand. Who is distancing themselves from anything? Whose position—in talk and votes—on each of these issues isn’t abundantly clear?
Which is the disconnect here. I criticized a general practice of which this is an example while you are focusing exclusively on that one example.
But it’s an example that clearly disproves the point. The accountability you describe is a communication, not vote structuring, problem.
But secondly, I don't actually mind this aspect of the US political process. It's part of compromise and negotiations which are indispensable in an environment where not everyone is on the same page about what's important.
This bill was individually voted on by the House and sent to the Senate in March [1]. There it was deliberated in committee and re-drafted [2]. The House, on Saturday, passed it separately from the Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan votes [3] (alongside Russian asset forfeiture and restrictions on Chinese financial institutions that do business with Iran). It was then bundled in the Senate for an up-and-down vote.
This was absoloutely not an omnibus slip-in.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-house-vote-force-byted...
[2] https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/03/14/congress/ca...
[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index....
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies...
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11562433/Facebook-r...
Should the world ban Swift, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube? Where is CISCO, CISCO?!
And finally, should the world ditch the USD?
Reciprocity, at what price? :)
I say yes.
The US government suddenly can find common grounds to do something and it's to restrict US? no thanks.
First, I can't find a reason why anyone would laud banning this app. It seems like it's done A LOT for the creator economy, more than Snapchat or Instagram did for anyone before TikTok took off.
Second, I'm surprised at the amount of China-hate I'm seeing in here, and elsewhere, over this app. So far, they don't appear to have actually committed any crimes, it's a lot of posturing about what they could do. Meanwhile, things that were actually a threat (the "weather balloons" over DoD installations) were hand-waved away by TPTB and allowed to traverse pretty much the whole country before any action was taken.
Huh??
Anyway, this bothers me so much. It wouldn't take that much time before every country adopts the China/North Korea model once the USA leads the way, because you know, other countries also have national security concerns. Maybe the Spanish or Irish will want to protect their citizens being indexed by the US for their support for Palestine? Who know, banning apps is a thing now. Maybe soon all country-to-country communications will need to go through monitored cables with keys provided for inspection(maybe businesses can get an exception with acquiring a license?).
We are progressively sliding in a segregated world and it is a scary world because the tech to control all the communications is in place.
I wish the USA took the EU model where its free but regulated.
The desire for control over communications and the support by the people disgusts me. You will end up finding out that the Chinese/North Korean way of doing things is not going to provide you with security or prosperity.
Very sad day.
The EU is inching closer to effectively banning US social media companies with their prohibitions on ads anyway. We may see region-specific social media at some point.
EU isn't banning American social media, its banning certain practices and if the American social media companies want to do business they simply don't do these things and they will be fine. Unless, you know, forcing Meta to sell to Luxotica or something.
Similarly, other regulations may become so onerous as to result in de facto bans. There’s not really a sharp distinction.
On the other hand, US is regulating Tiktok AND pretty much only Tiktok, which is breaking no laws except now this new one where part of its ownership is Chinese. This wouldn't look as farcical if the US forced facebook, twitter, etc. to comply with privacy issues, etc.
It will be especially interesting when Trump admin starts getting its way next year. The USA fucked up badly by pivoting into being fake China.
This is an incredibly bad-faith comparison. People of Chinese descent aren't being discriminated in any way by this bill. In the same way China blocking Google isn't an act of racism, this is putting restrictions on a foreign state which is acting belligerentlyt towards us.
We required American companies to stop doing business with the Nazis when we went to war with them. (Though not a moment sooner.) That wasn't racism, it was strategic sense.
We aren't at war with China, nor are we close yet. Although it seems like people do want to move closer to a war and seem to hype China as some existential threat to the USA, and therefore try to justify such ideas. This is despite the fact that historically China has pretty much never used its navy to try to attack another nation except for basically (Japan), and that was when the Mongols had seized control of the nation about 800 years ago. China has throughout history basically repudiated the Mongols' methods and violence, and the Mongol ruled dynasty was considered one of the shortest in Chinese history because of this. Moreover one of the reasons why the Mongols did not succeed in conquering Japan was because the Chinese did not give the Mongols seafaring ships, and the keels were too flat to be stable in the ocean, despite the fact that China did have the technology for stable ships. This meant that the Chinese ships that were sent to Japan to attack easily capsized and the Mongol soldiers on them drown.
China blocking Google isn't China blocking Google because it is a US company. China is blocking due to the fact that Google doesn't censor. When Google tried to reenter the Chinese market, it was blocked and criticized from TWO different sources (1) Various US government officials and congressmen; (2) Google's own employees. Google acceded to pressure from the US, not China.
The issue is the Chinese state's involvement. (TikTok's CEO perjuring himself about this didn't help [1].)
> We aren't at war with China
They are, under U.S. law, a foreign adversary [2].
If we were at war with China, we'd be talking about sanctioning ByteDance. Not merely removing it from app stores if it can't find a non-Chinese buyer.
> historically China has pretty much never used its navy to try to attack another nation except for basically (Japan)
Historically America has never used its space force to attack anyone. Meanwhile, China literally invaded and annexed Tibet in 1951 [3] and continues to use no uncertain terms about its intentions in respect of Taiwan [4].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/05/30/tikt...
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-drops-peaceful-reu...
(2) Taiwan and Tibet are different cases and could not be considered clear and cut cases of invasion and annexation.
(3) Tibet and Taiwan was never internationally recognized as independent and were/are considered a part of Qing, later Republic of China and later by most nations as a part of a "China" whether now the PRC or previously ROC. They tried to secede, similarly like what happens during a civil war. Therefore they did/do not have what people call Westphalian sovereignty. We similarly e.g. also don't talk about the South during the Civil War as being a separate internationally recognized state. And therefore we also do not talk about the Union invading a different nation, the Confederacy, but simply a civil war within a nation. Nor do we say that the Union annex the Confederacy.
Taiwan has the same constitution, national anthem, flag, etc. as the Republic of China under Sun Yatsen. It still regards all of China, which includes all of the mainland territories as part of its territory, and Taiwan is a mere province, which is considered "Free China". It was the previous Chinese government before the PRC took control during a civil war in 1949. That civil war in a sense never ended. And throughout Chinese history there has been many cases where essentially civil wars took e.g. a 100+ years to settle, but there was sometimes periods of relatively peace between parties, even a trading relationship. A famous one is e.g. the Three Kingdoms period.
What? No. We’re talking about Xi invading Taiwan. That causes war between China and the U.S., U.K., Australia, Japan and India.
> Taiwan and Tibet are different cases and could not be considered clear and cut cases of invasion and annexation
Oookay buddy.
> Tibet and Taiwan was never internationally recognized as independent and were/are considered a part of Qing
A lot of Western China wasn’t historically China. Hence why Beijing has to commit crimes against humanity to integrate it [1]. We can play this game endlessly for any piece of territory.
> That civil war in a sense never ended
Just so it’s clear to the thread, the pro-TikTok’er here is an avid advocate of China invading Taiwan, and thus war between America and China. This is why we need to dismember TikTok from ByteDance or remove it from app stores.
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countrie...
In any case, it's just tit for tat, pretty much all western social media platforms are banned in China, why should Chinese social media platforms be treated differently in the western world?
This is so out of touch that its hard to comprehend. Is it maybe because the supposedly fee people should have the freedom to choose what to use? Unlike you know, the Chinese or North Koreans? Fuck Chinese government, its not something that the "free" world implements. Stop copying the Chinese government.
Is "freedom" only about businesses in the USA? What happen people's freedoms?
And this isn't some greyweb torrent site with a thousand heads. Without access to US advertisers there's no reason why Tiktok should even want to have US users.
Actions speak louder than words.
The law permits the President to similarly designate any entity that meets the law's thresholds for a covered company [1] controlled by a foreign adversary [2].
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521... § 2(g)(2)
[2] Id. § 2(g)(1)
So I suspect the state department would say something like, "the state department recommends banning TikTok."
But the U.S. banning Tik-Tok? Why that's just good ol' democracy at work!
If they refuse to divest it’ll be even more obvious it’s the ccp tool we suspect it is.
Also the TikTok ceo lied about this under oath in Congress: https://www.rubio.senate.gov/rubio-calls-for-doj-investigati...
Stratechery also had a good write up on this issue from a while back: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/
Nice to see some bipartisan support on something.
I don't write this in defense of TikTok or China. I'm just sad for the United States.
I imagine a scene where a wagon train of poor pilgrims is surrounded on all sides and all the poor children are crouching behind anything they can find. As the camera angle widens out you see a U.S. Cavalry officer order a rescue team to single out attackers and pull them out of their perches. They go around inspecting attackers one at a time, checking their footwear. Anybody in mocassins is pulled off the line and sent packing. Anybody wearing boots is left in place and encouraged to keep shooting. Especially if they are wearing a cavalry uniform. Just before the scene ends you see somebody in mocassins run back to their horse and pull out a pair of boots, hurrying to get back into the action.
> India banned TikTok
I don’t know much about India and I’m talking about the US, but I know India has a law to control the contents of social media and requires these companies to hire local employees that will be held as “hostages” if the content in question is not removed, something Elon mentioned few times too about twitter in India.
> before the current conflict in Gaza.
The war on Gaza has been going for more than 16years and the Palestinians issue for more than 70years. You can read more about the issue here (1) Additionally, when the senators invited TikTok CEO last year, several senators (and I remember Ted Cruz specifically) mentioned the anti-israel contents back then, which you can also look it up, it’s just you don’t pay attention or lack the ability to connect the dots.
* They have no control over US-based companies with identical short-form video products, so banning TikTok doesn't actually affect Gaza coverage.
* Gaza is being covered breathlessly as a humanitarian disaster across all major media outlets. If they're trying to suppress coverage, they're doing a terrible job. So what's the point of going after TikTok?
* Other, unrelated countries have also enacted a TikTok ban because of distrust of China. This is the common thread.
You personally think the current conflict in Gaza is the center of the world, so you're "connecting dots" no matter how far apart they are. Everything must be related to it somehow. But the US ban on TikTok is rooted in distrust of China that has been building for decades, and is much, much larger than Gaza.