Fun fact: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma..., tiktok.com has been blocked in mainland China since 2020.
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.
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.
...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).