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> 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

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.

Is it weird then that China is a "foreign adversary" that is otherwise allowed to sell the US the vast, overwhelming majority of consumer goods and participate in the economy in many other ways?

There's a current trade war in which the USA is trying to "friend-shore" manufacturing and has imposed massive trade tariffs on China.

China is unambiguously a foreign adversary of the USA, as well as many/all Western democracies.

Just seems weird that this "foreign adversary" is also a critical "trading partner". Why is TikTok being singled out?

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.

> Just seems weird that this "foreign adversary" is also a critical "trading partner". Why is TikTok being singled out?

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.

Yup. And I'm sure it's a completely unintended side effect that this massively helps US social media companies, who have been struggling to compete! Whoops!

You're talking like this TikTok bill is literally the only salvo in this trade war. Just ask the Huawai folks if they think that's the case.

> 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.

Weird? Arguably. I would argue no. That's normal capitalism.

Dangerous? I would definitely argue yes.

There are different types of danger and I'm not sure which one you're referring to - there's the general economic danger of relying too heavily on one trading partner (if China decides to put export tariff on anything to the US, for example), or literal danger, like national security stuff.

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.

Correct. Any other country on earth, other than:

* China

* North Korea

* Iran

* Cuba

* Russia

* Venezuela

Could sell it to Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Belarus, etc.

Honest question: what's stopping them from being transferred to a Belizean shell company owned by a company in Delaware with a board full of puppets who blindly do the bidding of the previous owners? Do the CxOs need to be replaced? Are Chinese senior staff members being replaced? Low level staff? What concrete changes are going to be made that will change their behavior?

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's stopping them from being transferred to a Belizean shell company owned by a company in Delaware with a board full of puppets who blindly do the bidding of the previous owners?

What stops the puppets from ignoring the previous owners?

> 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.

> A big paycheck.

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.

> 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)?

Doing business is not necessarily pledging loyalty.

You think I pledged loyalty to various employers, even? I mean I told them I did, but I was lying.

When it comes to major national security interests, the spirit of the law can be more important than the letter. The law can always be changed, and the eventual outcome will often be worse after each rewrite.

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.

probably nothing beside more scrutiny at point of sale of the buyers

I was about to ask how "foreign adversary" is defined, thanks. Nice to have it official.

What about Hong Kong?

That’s very much China.

As of the executive order on Hong Kong Normalization [1], there is no policy distinction between Hong Kong and China.

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...

> it forbids control by a foreign adversary.

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.

Hmm not sure I agree. It can be helpful to have access to social media that contains perspectives outside of the control of the country you live in. Sure will it be slanted or even outright propaganda ? Yes but this is still okay as we can teach people to critically think and make their own decisions. The idea that our “government” will curate content and sanctify what is true is simply dystopian.

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 still okay as we can teach people to critically think and make their own decisions.

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.

We solved this by disallowing children from voting. Kids these days eventually learn not to trust anything they read on the Internet.

hard to see that we "solved" this, regardless of who's allowed to vote

> Children aren't taught skepticism because parents don't want their children to be taught skepticism.

Say huh? Where on earth did you pull this “factoid” from?

This is 100% true in a scary-large proportion of Protestant religious households. I don’t even mean the nuttier end like the Quiverfull folks or whatever, but much more common somewhat-more-religious-than-median-Protestant sorts, attending relatively normal churches.

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.

>" Yes but this is still okay as we can teach people to critically think and make their own decisions."

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.

IMO the issue isn't that content should be censored and we shouldn't see ideas from other countries. It's perfectly fine to have an official CCP account post CCP positions anywhere. It's less fine when the CCP account claims to be Jeff from Iowa and it's even less fine when the platform is controlled by the CCP and certain topics or opinions hey amplified by the platform's algorithms. I'm not sure the latter happened, but we cannot even know and have to trust an actively hostile actor.

Ironically, this sort of internet sovereignty is exactly what China has been preaching for years (though its so-called World Internet Conference), and of course has the most advanced state of the art implementation (aka Great Firewall) to ensure it. It likely didn't envision that this philosophy might one day come back to bite one of their own :)

> Great Firewall

This is what sovereignty looks like to you? It looks like totalitarianism to me.

I agree with you. But it's the brand of sovereignty that China has pushed for years. The more other countries adopt it and do the same, the more it validates their own totalitarian approach.

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 think that was the point being made. ;)

Sovereignty is really just a fancy word for "do whatever the hell we want" made to sound noble.

Not wrong, but arguably, the entire basis for our civilisation since the dawn of time - it's why we've had societies forming from groups of like-minded people, evolving into city states and then nation states.

Both are more close to each other than you think. Just different semantics but speaking of the same

The US allows nearly everything and is now blocking one thing. China is almost exactly the opposite. They aren't the same.

Regarding social media, US allows nearly everything because nearly everything is made there. Or might I say "allowed"? China is the same: they allow everybody in, as long as they play by their rules. The main difference is US being responsible for many massacres worldwide, and China being chill. Worth mentioning the incarceration data comparison aswell..

China's rules are so far fromthe US's that I feel like your comment is distracting from the main point. China doesn't "let everything in," they let nearly nothing in. They are extremely insular. Maybe many companies made most of the the social media sites as you mentioned but that also maybe a direct result of China's extreme grip on the allowed sites there. You can't just pop up a new social media site there without extreme scrutiny from the Chinese government. That's why there aren't that many social media platforms there.

China is only smart. Third-world countries around the world should follow suit. Why allow for foreign companies that only have profit in mind without any regards to real life to operate freely? Why leave so much cash and data on the table? "Free market" and "free press" and "free speech" are only fantasies used when they are interesting.. The "american dream" is clearly only designed for americans and american companies.

"Leaving cash and data on the table" just indicates that you think any of this should be bought and sold. It's a social network, not a "sell people's private data network". I want to socialize online without forking over all my private data to the highest bidder. As an American, I don't think anyone associates The American Dream with data privacy. It's about having a standard notion of a desired family and house and pet and job. I think you are conflating many ideas we have. Just because all those ideas haven't been achieved or aren't implemented well in the modern tech world doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for them. An authoritarian state that dictates what is allowed and hords and sells data is certainly not the answer.

USA in the most authoritarian state in the world, mate. Also the most belligerent and disrespectful of sovereignty. The american dream is only a propaganda piece.

You can get disappeared in China, even billionaires like Jack Ma. Go talk crap about politics there and see how long you last. They harvest organs and decided to crush the Hong Kong people. The USA has many problems but very objectively speaking, the USA is far less authoritarian than China.

Huawei would like a word.

>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.

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.

All FOSS developers may be foreigners for a project. Is it ok to use that then?

I think that's okay. I'm not opposed to foreigners at all. What I find a bit strange is that (proprietary) tech provides a backdoor to the user - I think this is something that a reasonable govt would oppose, but of course they have other things on their plates too, and they are corrupt as well.

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

Yes and while we’re at it, we should simply relinquish control of these companies to the government. Perhaps any company remotely journalistic in nature. For safety of course.

De-facto international antitrust, I like it.

I believe this would be de jure, not de facto.

It wouldn't be explicitly anti-trust, but that would be the practical effect.

No, small states do not have the same rights as large ones. You may disagree with this but I don't see any point in pretending it's untrue. Large countries have more sway and matter more to everyone, including but not limited to operators of social platforms. Losing half your userbase hurts much more than losing a hundredth. I also doubt that the U.S. would force a sale of a social app based in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Turkey, Gabon, Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Egypt etc etc etc.

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.

I think you are conflating "incomebase" and userbase. There are no "hard facts" on this but everyone seems to agree that the US is not even remotely close to 50% userbase for TikTok which makes sense (inverse Pigeonhole principle) if TikTok really has 1b+ active users. However, the US might be a bigger share of the "incomebase" because ads for US users are more valuable.

I'd argue that for european users, handing over a huge amount of data to american social networks with their lack of privacy protection is also highly problematic.

Perhaps the EU should do something similar to Facebook, X etc.?