Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Trudeau government bans TikTok from operating in Canada

cbc.ca

747 pointsempressplay453 comments

Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X. What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices. The Chinese can buy all of the information they want on Americans and Canadians from ad brokers, who will happily sell them everything they need to track individuals' locations.

Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.

It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

That can be a threat, but a billionaire American or South African with similar power and motivation is also a threat.

A billionaire American lives in America and generally benefits if America benefits. A foreign country is not aligned to America’s interests and may be outright hostile to them.

This right here is incredibly stupid. One of the stupidest takes and a rampid and dangerous misconception among mostly young men I see as of late. Elon avoids taxes not because he likes this country, but because he benefits from it. Anything that maximizes his personal wealth could very well be hostile to the well being of the country. You should see how he treated his own children. Incredibly naive. Many rich men end up giving back to the communities that made them (Gates and others for instance). Elon, a child of parents that cashed in on apartheid, is certainly an exception.

Many rick men are giving back for the soft power (i.e. the politics play). Or indirectly investing into their new ventures (like giving money to buy vaccines and also making the vaccines by their other company). Plus some interesting tax write-offs.

So, thanks for the charity, but I would rather prefer them to pay that as taxes.

Elon has literally paid billions of dollars in taxes.

Yes, he "avoids" taxes by using every legal strategy available to him, as does every single person who pays taxes. This is called "paying the correct amount of taxes you legally owe".

> Anything that maximizes his personal wealth could very well be hostile to the well being of the country.

Let's look at the things that have maximized his personal wealth:

Paypal - made online payments popular and safe. Enabled millions of people to start online business.

Tesla - made electric cars popular. Reduced C02 emissions. Gave thousands of Americans good jobs. Made many employees and investors rich.

SpaceX - re-ignited space exploration. pioneered re-usable rockets. Dramatically reduced the cost of launching satellites.

Starlink - brought Internet access to rural areas.

Please tell me, which of these personal wealth maximizing activities has been hostile to the US?

All of them because now he's using those funds to help Trump.

This is a post about Canada.

Canada is America, literally but also figuratively

Canada is in North America. It is not America. Yes the two countries are adjacent and the US has a strong influence on Canada, but you cannot equate one with the other figuratively or literally. Despite the influence they are very much distinct in many regards.

This is a needlessly antagonistic thing to say.

And also the guy who bought a bankrupt radio network, right? Or is that one okay?

What about that African weirdo who bought the #1 political announcements channel on the internet? /s

China's motivation, as a geopolitical adversary to the US, is to tilt the geopolitical power balance in its favor.

Our local billionaires goals are not in the same category.

It's extremely telling that so many Americans in this thread are comfortably talking about "our local" companies and adversaries to the US, when the article is about a ban in...Canada.

The US and Canada are two of the closest allies in the world, and have been for a very long time. To many Americans, Canadians are also part of "us", at least when discussing global issues or adversaries.

Not even comparable.

It’s your people who decide to see it, not a foreign govt. Chinese media like cnn and nyt exist, no need to imagine either that or the situation where China buys cnn and nyt and gosh now you have to watch their propaganda.

The essence is, by denying agency of your country’s users, you deny the whole set of ideas it bases on. If that’s a natural vulnerability of the ideology, addressing it by banning media is a patch over a bleeding wound.

Canadian teens will simply learn about VPN, like they always do in other countries which ban internet resources. Not a single one of them will leave tiktok.

You might reasonably be describing the current TikTok algorithm, but companies often modify algorithms over time.

Sure, so ban when they change the algorithm. But for some political powers even a current algorithm is a threat, because they cannot control it (like they could do with the local media).

But how would the gov't know they changed the algorithm? It's not like TikTok sends newsletters to the House of Commons.

They could request an audit (and ban if tiktok refuses). They could monitor the results they are getting in the recommendations based on specific list of criteria. They could propose moderation rules tiktok would have to follow (kinda similar to how it operates in China - they have a different algorithm there). They could request tiktok servers to be in Canada.

I think you're misreading my comment. I find the threat real and probably already in action. My key point is that hard-banning a popular resource in a country without a DPI-like firewall is just a national security theater with no effect.

Take an example from Russia - instead of banning youtube, they just make it crawl and stutter, so fully controlled rutube/dzen/etc start to seem more viable, but it's not too bad to decide to go full VPN. Non-technical people don't even realize that it happens and write it off as some youtube-related network issues.

Of course that is an awful attack on freedom, but you can get real or get rekt.

>It’s your people who decide to see it, not a foreign govt

The threat is that it silently engages in manipulation, rather than something like RT or New York Times where the bias is well known ahead of time.

Chinese political bias is well-known ahead of time.

But it's manipulation by showing Americans stuff other Americans are saying. If Americans want to see that, they can. If they didn't want to, it wouldn't be popular. And why is the government allowed to restrict popular narrative sharing between Americans?

"But it's manipulation by showing Americans stuff other Americans are saying. "

I do not consume TikTok, but I believe it works international?

Also I don't see the point, because there are americans saying, we should be friends with communist china and become like them. By giving those ideas more room - whenever they want, they can shape the discourse. Shape what people think what the majority thinks. (Most don't actually think much themself, but try to figure out, how to think like the group - they are the targets and their vote counts the same)

> Also I don't see the point, because there are americans saying, we should be friends with communist china and become like them. By giving those ideas more room - whenever they want, they can shape the discourse.

That's called free speech. Horrible, terrible ideas are given room, and we trust people to figure it out. Hell, many many Americans became vaccine skeptics because they were drawn into RFK talking points. That's dangerous too, but free speech is more important than forcing everyone to be good or have good, safe opinions

No, free speech is when everyone in the same room has the same right to speak.

This is creating the illusion of a free speech, where people think they can listen to the other opinions, but in reality they only get to see a distorted part of it. But if you like that, I won't support banning that.

But what you are describing is basically a magazine. There are editors who decide what is and isn't published. It's still free speech to be able to edit and publish a magazine full of whatever you want, and to present it as providing diverse opinions even if it does not

It is - and I think if the Chinese government would have a magazine with the same dominant market position amd reach, we would have the same discussion.

No, we wouldn't. In America, foreign-controlled news and media are allowed to be consumed by the public. It's a fundamental aspect of the right to free speech

Free speech by your definition does not exist anywhere. The editors of New York Times, CNN etc do not have the "same" right to speak as an average citizen. So the free speech you have experienced so far is nothing more than an illusion.

Nobody has the full view of reality. It's always projected through a lens colored by feelings, emotions, upbringing, education, environment etc. When you hate something, it's not always because have a fully rational motive to hate, but often the things your have experienced, you have read and heard, leads you into that trajectory without you even realizing it. Same goes for love. You hate TikTok and millions of your fellow Americans love TikTok, does that mean you are in a higher position of enlightenment and more holistic view of the universe? I don't think so.

It's also pure nonsense that TikTok is somehow "misleading" the American youth. It's basically a recommendation engine. And what's the job of a recommendation engine? To give you whatever content you might be interested in. Just go to youtube and start clicking all the garbage content (if they are not censored already), you will end up with a lot of garbage in your feed. Because if you spend a lot of time watching garbage, the algorithm will think you like garbage and will push garbage onto your frontpage.

As opposed to the domestic government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Well, yeah actually. If anyone is going to control it, it's best to be us controlling our own messaging.

As a citizen of a country, as much as I would love to believe in free exchange of information, it's better to limit what enemies are able to broadcast directly to our phones. that's a commons with a lot of tragedies in it.

That's fair, as long as you (as in country) won't cry foul when somebody blocks your outlet because they want to control your messaging.

If you're going to cry foul, maybe you shouldn't block the other party in the first place.

This sounds good in theory but as a Canadian I often wonder how much our government's actions are on behalf of us the people as opposed to well financed or politically powerful special interests. It looks to me like many Canadians other are wondering that as well.

However, that said, I do agree with your broader point. I'm suspicious of Tik Tok and the Chinese government's intentions and I think banning it was a good move.

I am afraid that banning tiktok would make facebook a monopoly in this area. And facebook has a long story of disregarding privacy, mental health and rights of their users.

Facebook should also be regulated by western governments as they see fit

Facebook/youtube imposes enough censorship, more than any democratic government can possibly ask for, without looking too weird to the voters. So, gov does not see the reason to regulate, if platforms already proactively implemented all their most wild dreams.

Important to note that they didn’t ban TikTok in Canada.

They booted TikTok corporate from the country as a threat to national security.

Given how China operates globally and especially in Canada, I’m completely fine with them getting told to beat it

> it's better to limit what enemies are able to broadcast directly to our phones

Unrelated question: How many enemy-manufactured products do you use daily? How many enemy products are in your home?

>> it's better to limit what enemies are able to broadcast directly to our phones

> Unrelated question: How many enemy-manufactured products do you use daily? How many enemy products are in your home?

Ah, it's perfect, the enemy of the good. Greetings!

If you live in a democracy you have a vote and a voice to bring to the table. It’s wild to me that on this topic people seem to see their own governments as largely equivalent to an outwardly adversarial if not explicitly hostile foreign power.

I think it has been so long since the Pax-Americana West has dealt with an overtly hostile major power that we’ve collectively lost the concept that there can be real enemies with goals that run explicitly counter to our own.

"It’s wild to me that on this topic people seem to see their own governments as largely equivalent to an outwardly adversarial if not explicitly hostile foreign power".

Because governments are adversarial to their general population in many cases. People live in reality, not in imagination land where the salt-of-the-earth type of people's voices are at all considered.

> If you live in a democracy you have a vote and a voice to bring to the table.

In a theoretical direct democracy that would be true. But we’re talking about Canada and the US here.

But what is out there on TikTok that's so dangerous to the state? Dance videos?

The clearest way to look at this is through the lens of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus(ISK). Media is one of the arms of the ISK. It's not necessarily that TikTok is foreign owned, it's that China's dominant ideology is incompatible with the western hegemony. The western ISK sees alternative ideologies as a threat and control over the arm of mass media is a concrete form of that threat. The ISK must have control over dominant forms of media in order to maintain ideological hegemony.

Making a whole generation unfit for qualified work is a serious threat for every nation.

Many of the Tiktok generation live in a world where reading for 3 minutes is a heavy effort they are unwilling to do. All information is supposed to be presented in short entertaining video clips.

In China online time for the youth has been strictly regulated years ago. But harming other nations is only in their interest.

How is that fundamentally different from Reels and Shorts and whatever Facebook has cooking?

Meta is not fundamentally better than Bytedance. Their business model is addiction combined with accumulating and misusing user data.

Facebook only started cooking those after they saw what tiktok posts were doing and how popular they were.

Doe it make FB any better? The asshole is an asshole.

That's is an interesting question.

Actually, there is a lot more. About 30% people (of USA) use TT, ~60% under 30. You guess it, they don't to look only at dance videos. Social media had become a huge source of information for a big chunk of the population.

On TT, and on most social media (SM), what you watch is mainly determined by the recommendation algorithm. This algo can hide subjects the SM can't put ad on but also subjects the they don't like and boost the one they do (shadow ban). That how you politicize SM. That about, the first thing Musk did with Twitter (after firing people).

When it's a state controlled SM, it's more like foreign interference. There is a lot of books about that. It's documented, not a secret of something. Uyghurs for example, have been a subject of ban on TikTok, shadowing it heavily.

But it's not foreign interference, it's foreign media. Foreign media is permissible for Americans to choose to consume and guess what, young people lap it up. That's their right

It could have been if ByteDance wasn't totally state controlled. Also, since TikTok is banned on China, it's not like it exists in China as a media (the Chinese version is called Douyin and basically it's the same as TikTok but with contents from within China only, to not interfere with the Great Firewall).

Also, the concept of "choose to consume" is blurring with algorithm recommendation and optimizing dopamine reward to maximize screen time.

The CCP didn't control of ByteDance to interference with other countries but to be able to control what happens inside China. But now, it's different.

But none of that changes the fact that Americans have the right to consume foreign controlled media. Totally state controlled media is legal to consume and spread and even become super popular in the US. I really dislike the idea that if some content is popular in the US and the government thinks the content is bad, they can just ban it. "Algorithmic manipulation" is a red herring. If people like it, they can watch it. If they don't they don't have to. Doesn't matter who makes it or for what reason

I think I understand your point. Actually, it's a good point.I may have missed it before.

Nobody said that consuming foreign controlled media is prohibited. And banning TT isn't about that. It's about Foreigner Interference.

You said that it's foreigner media not interference. The difference is that media are verifiable and can be checked by anybody and everybody has the same information. That is not the case for social media.

The problem is for another country to be able to do mass manipulation. Like the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica manipulation scandal, where they push some "ideas" to a very specific population because the data they collected show that you will act or think in a certain way. Since when you consume media you don't know they do it AND nobody can prove they do it, it's now manipulative and so interference (can also be done over a long period, such as several months or years, to gradually modify your point of view and be less detectable).

If there was a message saying “We recommend this video because we think you'll react like XXX”, I might consider that ethical (there are other problems too, but that's a theoretical example).

You might say that people in the US (or any other country) still have the right to consume foreign-controlled social media because they know they can be manipulated. Even if I agree, I think it's normal that the state make it difficult to do so. I won't blame people who use opium but I will definitively blame the USA people (or state from any country, here it's USA) for facilitating opium use.

You might say also that the manipulation can be from within the USA (like with Cambridge Analytica), it's true. That is definitively a good point. And to defend the ban of TT, I will say that I don't have a perfect solution. I don't like the ban of TT either, but it was necessary because of the risk of mass manipulation. We have to come up with a better solution (that we don't have now). Because it may happen soon on X or Youtube and we can't ban every social media we suspect will do mass manipulation on the sly.

I hope you get my point because I think that is necessary for us to do so to come up with a better solution. One that will integrate your POV because it's entirely justifiable.

> The difference is that media are verifiable and can be checked by anybody and everybody has the same information. That is not the case for social media.

They can both be checked by everyone and verified. Just like any kind of social media, even Tweets that get quickly deleted by the creators, they still persist online and get analyzed and debated. Traditional media can also take down articles and videos quickly. I don't see the difference, and don't believe there is a legal difference.

> where they push some "ideas" to a very specific population because the data they collected show that you will act or think in a certain way

This is allowed, and attempts by the government to disallow it are against free speech. If a country has several state owned TV channels with differing views, and it advertises them online selectively using a platform like Facebook which connects the different channels to different likely to click audiences, and it's doing so with malicious intent, then thats basically another form of what you call "interference" but it's Americans' right to consume whatever media they want however they came across it.

Again, the intent of the publishers does not matter. The intent of the editors does not matter. Once we agree the government can ban media platforms because of what they push, free speech is seriously eroded.

> gradually modify your point of view and be less detectable

The trick is that you are saying "modify ones point of view" and pretending that it isn't the right of an American to form whatever view they want from whatever content they want. All content is designed to modify your view. Adding new information to your life will modify your view of the world. You are just using a feature of content to argue it should be banned.

> I think it's normal that the state make it difficult to do so. I won't blame people who use opium but I will definitively blame the USA people (or state from any country, here it's USA) for facilitating opium use

But content is not opium, and free speech is sacrosanct because it is the only lever to allow a free society. When you restrict content because you disapprove of the speaker or the message, you create a world where free speech dies. Banning opium doesn't have those consequences.

> I hope you get my point because I think that is necessary for us to do so to come up with a better solution.

I get your point, but I am fundamentally against anything whose goal is to avoid "mass manipulation" that is essentially saying we should ban things that get popular which we don't like. And that's not for the government to decide for me or anyone else. Thanks for hearing me out though. I appreciate that

> They can both be checked by everyone and verified.

No, that not what I mean. What you can't check is that they push something to someone specifically to make that person react in a certain way. That is not verifiable. Regardless of whether the content is true or false (that doesn't matter actually, or should I say it's less important whether it's true or not, obviously fake news are a problem but less important than that).

> Adding new information to your life will modify your view of the world.

Yes. And you should be able to choose what you add to your life, what you watch freely. Not a recommended algorithm that nobody understand how it works.

> You are just using a feature of content to argue it should be banned.

I'm sorry ? I don't understand what you are saying here. I read it many times, but I just don't understand what you mean.

> But content is not opium

It's debatable. Nearly 100% of TikTok traffic is recommended (it's an estimation) and as or some years ago(2015 ?), about 70% of Youtube was recommended (given by youtube). That mean people do not expressly choose what they watch and particularly, most of the traffic is compulsive. But it's debatable, you are right "content is not opium" but sometime it's consumed as if it were so how to deal with it ?

> and free speech is sacrosanct

Once again, yes. It's not about the content that is on TikTok, sorry if didn't make it clear. It's not about free speech. You can still say what ever you want. It's again too much power of TikTok.

> I am fundamentally against anything whose goal is to avoid "mass manipulation" that is essentially saying we should ban things that get popular which we don't like

That absolutely NOT my point. Effectively, my point promote to be against "mass manipulation" but absolutely not "we should ban things that get popular which we don't like". Remember that I also regret the ban. I think it was justified but I don't think it's a solution.

As a French, I learn early in life « Je ne suis pas d’accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je me battrai jusqu’au bout pour que vous puissiez le dire. ». Which can be translated "I don't agree with what you say, but I'll fight for you to be able to say it.". We both agree on that and as I learned, our definitions of free speech are slightly different but the differences are not relevant here I think.

For example and to finish, a "not so good solution" but something that could have been done to not ban TT is to switch the recommendation algorithm to the one of (the old) Twitter (or the current one of Mastodon), where people could have followers and tweets were shown on a timeline from they followers.

Now, I will again take twitter as example. The fact that Twitter (the new one, X) have an Open-source recommendation algorithm make it not ban-able for example.

Not really, twitter/the-algorithm isn't up-to-date and the models must be shared along with the source code but it's an example. What I say is twitter doesn't have a lot to do to make it any ban unjustified, If someone say "there is too much power from the platform (twitter) and there is manipulation from it", Twitter just have to update the source code (and the models) and it's verifiable (with hard work, but not impossible). That the algorithm is biased is not the point, you have the right to consult media you know the algorithm is biased. The point is that the algorithm must be verifiable.

Thank you for the debate. If I don't respond quickly enough, please send me an e-mail at "ache-hn at ache.one".

For example, islamistic propaganda. It's a serious problem, at least here in Europe. You literally see 10-year-olds watching videos of beheadings in the subway.

Oh, and I wouldn't say that FB is much better. The EU should probably ban both.

TikTok is packed full of political propaganda. Controlling which narratives people think are popular is super powerful. It’s called manufacturing consent.

So is the Canadian government, especially under Trudeau, which indirectly controls the media organizations through funding.

All mainstream articles about the trucker protests were horrific lies (except for the honking, which was indeed disruptive and stupid).

I don't care about TikTok, since there is nothing of value there. But will Canada also ban globaltimes.cn now?

(The value of the Global Times is to find out what the party in China thinks, not that it is unbiased.)

Both the Canadian media and globaltimes.cn don’t have nearly the screentime or intimate targeting TikTok has.

It’s like billboard on the highway vs someone whispering things to you for 2 hours every day.

From a Canadian perspective, the CBC should have a social media equivalent that is publicly run, and all social media companies should be regulated under the CRTC

I don't think having a state run equivalent is much better from a users perspective. The ability to snoop without warrants would be too great.

My gut reaction, also as a Canadian, is quite negative to this idea. Are you interested in expanding on the idea? I'm always looking for new perspectives and to understand how my fellow Canadians are looking at issues like this.

One of your fellow Canadians really dislikes the idea of control. I also do dislike media being owned by few rich bastards.

In a lot of ways I think the CRTC is fundamentally ensuring that the "media being owned by a few rich bastards" remains true?

Social media is already regulated by the CRTC.

https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2024/2024-121.htm https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/industr/info.htm

If you're pro C-11, you really don't realize how bad this would be to give the government to determine what is "hate speech" and command companies to take it down.

I think most people in western society trust their own government to care for their welfare way more that they trust the Chinese government.

'Government' can't care. It's just an agreed upon idea, not a thing with feelings. It is a form of anthropomorphising to say it cares. 'Government' is the idea of a structure that many people believe and act as if it is true. This belief and consequent effort by so many allows it to take a material expression in our lives. Like a group of software engineers might envisage a game or solution, so for government - except way more people are involved. Neither government nor software cares though - they're not that type.

"'Government' can't care. It's just an agreed upon idea, not a thing with feelings."

But it consists of people with feelings - and they can have feelings of care towards the governed, or just feelings of care for themself.

Yes, people can care, like software developers can care, in my example. But the thing that is created (government, software) does not.

Arguably the American government has killed more Americans than the Chinese government...

Imagine if Russia owned Fox News. Oh wait

Now you know what the rest of the world (not all of it obviously) feels about Radio Liberty and friends.

Let's take this one step further, then, and ask why we should allow private media ownership if it's this important. Why should some malevolent billionaire be able to own CNN or NYT and decide what stories they could publish? Does it matter if the billionaire has a US passport or not?

This is one of the main reasons we're seeing the legacy media lose legitimacy. People want to hear authentic voices and go to where the new ideas are.

"authentic" voices are sometimes not so authentic. And sometimes they start out authentic and end up being paid by foreign interests (some high profile cases of this earlier this year - "we didn't know the $100,000/week was coming from Russia")

Sure, but at least you have options and get to choose.

Long form content, unrestricted by executives telling people how to run their show, all that makes a big difference. There is no need for corporate bureaucrats to try to run things.

I'm an old-ish person (61). I started watching the news when I was about 12. I think we were better off as a society when there were basically 3 TV/radio networks (ABC,CBS and NBC) each dispensing basically the same dull, boring (by today's standards) newscast. There were newspapers, of course, and they tended to be where you'd find the more opinionated stuff, but there were limits on how many newspapers an entity could own in any particular market. The fairness doctrine reigned over broadcast news, so you wouldn't have stuff like Fox news and probably not even a lot of what's on MSNBC. It just feels to me like we had a more cohesive national vision and weren't nearly as divided as we are now. I'm sure this will be unpopular here, but I'm not sure more options has helped us in terms of being able to live together. So many families can't even meet for Thanksgiving dinner anymore, for example, because of the arguments that break out. People are living in completely different truth bubbles now which makes it almost impossible to communicate.

I'm don't want to be completely pollyannish about the past - there were probably things we weren't hearing about from those fewer outlets. But I'm also not sure how we move forward as a society in a situation where there are so many different shattered views of what is true.

I respectfully disagree. That state of affairs made people more “united” - perhaps, but it was at the expense of knowledge about the true nature of our reality.

We are “divided” now because we are basically in a battle for what is consensus reality, and the only way to have a satisfying answer to that question is to have unfettered access to the underlying facts and knowledge of who is who.

> We are “divided” now because we are basically in a battle for what is consensus reality

I'm concerned we're going to get to the point where people are willing to kill each other over what they consider to be their view of "consensus reality". That's happened often at other points in history. In many cases it was due to religious differences over what constituted "reality". I'm not so sure that many of these current squabbles over what constitutes "consensus reality" aren't religious in nature. Social media already seems to be pushing the limits of human nature in some destructive directions such that politics now is like holy war.

I think we need to focus more on the "consensus" part (including peacemaking and bridge building) instead of the "battle" part. I'm not seeing a lot of that happening. That requires a lot of humility as in we're all like blind people groping our way to figure out reality and none of us has the complete picture. Until we're ready to take on that kind of humility on a societal level, I think this "battle" you refer to can be a very dangerous endeavor.

In guess it comes down to: on what terms?

It wasn’t long ago that we regularly witnessed rhetoric hinting at putting people into camps and denying them access to food because they didn’t buy into the official narrative about vaccines.

Is that a better option? I don’t think so.

I do agree that there is a basis for building bridges and finding common ground but this is better done at the local level between people vs. trying to force it from on high. And definitely, in my opinion, not via some controlled medium.

> It wasn’t long ago that we regularly witnessed rhetoric hinting at putting people into camps and denying them access to food because they didn’t buy into the official narrative about vaccines.

And where was that rhetoric happening? On social media. Outside of China (and maybe some similar regimes), I don't recall any government official suggesting anything about camps or limiting access to food (even China delivered food to the people they welded into their apartments, so not even there), certainly not in the US.

Everybody's favorite "anarchist" himself, Noam Chomsky, promoted just such an idea.

(Proving that he's not really an anarchist.)

Of course, he couched it terms of plausible deniability but anybody with the ability to read between the lines knew exactly what he was saying.

This was during the environment in which small and family-owned businesses were being destroyed (yes, in America) and people were losing their jobs as well. It happened to a number of personal friends.

There were far worse excesses in other Western nations too, not just in China. The only reason things didn't go further in the US here is because Americans have fewer vulnerabilities than citizens in other countries do in the face of this sort of oppression.

And it was all cheered on by those who believed themselves to be on the right side of the establishment at that time. It was a regular thing to see and hear people fantasizing about the idea of forced injections, online and in real life.

And we learned about all this on, yes, social media (which was heavily censored at the time too).

The legacy media outlets were not telling the truth.

All this was only three years ago.

Things are a little different now, I'm sure you will find in many cases that forgiveness is possible in light of true apologies, but there will not be a forgetting.

And these things need to be honestly discussed if we are ever to achieve anything resembling national cohesion again.

Nor can we forget this:

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...

Or this: https://web.archive.org/web/20200728203549/https://www.cdc.g...

I really don't see why there's this cognitive dissonance. Limiting enemy states' government broadcasting power inside your territory is pretty low on the controversial things a gov can do.

What's an "enemy state"? We're not at war with China.

They're conducting active cyberattacks on our infrastructure and allying themselves with states (Russia, North Korea) that are actively at war with our friends.

We're not "at war" but that doesn't mean much.

So you want the capacity to ban state-owned, or even partially state-owned, media from any country who has "allied" with a country actively at war with "our friends"? All of BRICS, anyone part of the BRI, just as the tip of the iceberg?

When was the last time Brazil or India did something comparable to what's currently going on in the South China Sea.

China is known to be actively spying and meddling in Canadian domestic politics in ways that are not legal or the normal diplomatic channels.

Describing them as an enemy might be too far, but you certainly wouldn’t describe China as a friend.

All fair complaints, but are those the standards you want to set for "banning any state-owned media from that country"? We're not enemies but I wouldn't call them our friends?

Canada didn’t ban non state-owned media. It didn’t even ban any media. TikTok is still allowed, RT is still accessible, private news sources, foreign annd domestic, exist at all levels through Canada.

We banned a single corporate entity from operating offices inside the country in response to credible intelligence that those offices pose a national security threat. That corporate entity is directly linked with an adversarial government with active election subversion campaigns.

Is there some reason you are twisting the actual circumstances around this?

When I read comments like yours I can't but think that we are being brainwashed.

The biggest foreign meddler and spy in Canada is the southern neighbor.

We know for a fact through leaks that US has put all Canadians under mass surveillance both in communication and movement (like the wifi hacking at airports leaked by Snowden) since more than a decade, or the 2023 Pentagon leaks that were quickly scolded as "but they were trying to find Russian activity in Canada", and don't forget the AT&T whistleblower which also exposed mass surveillance on Canadians by US intelligence.

And yet..nobody cares..even though we know for a fact it happens, we don't care let alone call the US an enemy.

So, what is the difference? The media and politicians calling 24/7 China your enemy (something nobody would've done before 2018/2017), but ignoring or pretending that the real spy of all spies which hacks and spies on all of its allies, even the personal phone of the German chancellor is cool.

I find those double standards not only mind blowing, but dangerous.

We're letting the White House to dictate globally who can play by the rules and who is an exception.

<< When I read comments like yours I can't but think that we are being brainwashed.

Sadly, and I think I called that out few years ago, there was a notable turn in US foreign policy. In effect, it means establishment expects actual confrontation with China. This, naturally, means uptick in anti-China propaganda. It is a difficult position to take now in a pragmatic way given events in Ukraine and Israel, but that is clearly the direction. Hence, comments like those of OP.

I didn’t say a thing about the US, nor did I imply support for it. I don’t like what the US is doing.

On the other hand pretending that the CCP and the US are meddling at the same level or with the same consequences, or that the CSIS isn’t in on half of what the US is doing is also silly.

I can condemn China and recognize that they pose a serious threat, while also condemning the US and recognizing that the threat is different.

> China is known to be actively spying and meddling in Canadian domestic politics

Using this definition other enemies or certainly not friends of Canada include; Russia, Mexico, UK, Europe and USA.

We’re not at war with Russia or Iran either. That’s a pointless line in the sand to draw

Yes, as long as the same government doesn't bully other countries when their own propo^H^H^H^H^H social media platforms are blocked on the same grounds.

Since when is China my enemy?

If there is a major nation on this planet that has never done anything bad to mine in its history I can think of is China.

I can remember American, British, French troops raping and humiliating that country, I can't remember a single time the opposite happened.

While China does not always play fair and there's plenty of despicable things they do I don't like, I just don't see them as my enemy and see no valid reason to do so.

You reminded me of a fun fact.

When the Elkann family (which owns majority stake in Stellantis, Juventus, Ferrari and many others) got pissed off by the largest newspaper in Italy reporting on them (despite their businesses impacting the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Italians) they simply bought the newspaper and the major critical voice of them disappeared.

What’s crazy is few people even talk about who currently owns major US news networks and what their motives might be. People don’t like Musk owning Twitter/X, that’s a start - but start reading about who owns the rest (especially traditional media).

I would argue that has been a persistent topic of conversation for my entire life!

I'd love to hear what you have to say about this discussion

The book is pretty dated so some of the specific examples might be boring, but this is a good book on this topic:

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

You could probably get by with the cliff notes version.

To be fair, as it relates to this topic there isn't really a need to discuss because foreign entities have been banned from owning controlling stakes in TV and radio networks without approval. A Chinese organization would never be allowed to control a news network in the way they control TikTok.

But the news networks are on the way out, and tiktoks are in. Do you remember the joyous declarations from 1990s that meatspace state borders do not apply to cyberspace? That was not entirely wishful thinking. The same properties that allow information from "free world" to make way into the "world of oppression" work for different definitions of "free" (democratic, communist, fundamentalist, etc) and "oppressed" (communist brainwashed, capitalist exploitative, sinful and godless, etc). A very similar situation enmeshes cryptography.

Well, China has the great firewall, so information flows less freely from the "free world" to the "world of oppression" than the other way around.

This is so. But places like Turkyie, Russia, or even Iran have much weaker blocks; same applies to much of the authoritarian African regimes.

Basically, to enforce border controls on the internet, you have to break the internet.

Murdoch bought himself an American citizenship, problem solved. We've had that foreigner's propaganda dominante our politics for several decades now.

How many are owned by dual citizens?

> What’s crazy is few people even talk about who currently owns major US news networks and what their motives might be.

People talk about Rupert Murdock and Jeff Bezos all the time. Who else do you feel we should talk about? There is that one conservative owner of most radio stations in the US.

> People don’t like Musk owning Twitter/X, that’s a start

After Elon took over, he deleted my Twitter account. Still not sure why, but it happened around the time reporters who retweeted #Elonjet had their accounts deleted. And I did retweet it.

Media consolidation is an issue, but Musk with Twitter is so petty, racist, and blatantly self serving. I refuse to be associated with it.

> but start reading about who owns the rest (especially traditional media).

traditional media != social media. The potential for manipulation is much greater with social media.

Murdock has been American for decades now, it doesn't matter where he was born.

They seem like a random collection of people I’ve never heard of before.

> Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

It is happening on our local platforms here. Meta, based in the US, is systematically censoring Palestinian content that would otherwise be available here in Canada.

Details:

* https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

* https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

For a very recent example, one of the few remaining prominent Palestinian journalists, with a following of over 1M on Meta, was banned today:

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/11/7/al-jaze...

Moot point because Trudeau basically banned all news from being shared on Facebook

> Moot point because Trudeau basically banned all news from being shared on Facebook

You can still follow individual reporters posting their own content. For example I can access both https://www.instagram.com/wizard_bisan1/ or https://www.instagram.com/clarissawardcnn/, etc.

But I can not access the organization pages like https://www.instagram.com/cnn/

Trudeau didn't ban news on FB, FB banned news posted to Canada because they don't want to pay publishers.

Surrounded by scandals, Trudeau passed a law that had an oh-so-unintentional side-effect of hiding news from many people’s primary news source.

It’s hard to not be cynical about it.

I can't say I miss it; Facebook is actually usable now and shouldn't be anyone's primary news source.

The dude lurches from one sound bite to another with policy so shallow it barely looks at first order effects.

I'm sure the impact was fully unintentional. Very welcome after the fact. But still unintentional

Expecting Facebook or Google to pay publishers is like going back in time to 1970 and saying that a newsstand should be paying newspaper publishers for the privilege of selling their papers.

Google agreed to the terms. They're paying $100 million per year to the Canadian Journalism Collective.

No. Canada passed a law requiring Facebook to pay news media for links. Meta said no, we aren't going to do that and banned news instead.

You can argue that this was a predictable response by Meta or that it was a stupid law, but it was not a ban.

The majority of Canadians share the majority of Americans' view of the Middle East.

The majority of Canadians share the majority of Americans' view of China.

Which gives us a cyclical problem. Do they share those views because American media has so much influence in Canada? Or does American media have influence in Canada because they Americans and Canadians have shared views?

Neighbors in Asia and Europe often have completely unaligned political politics due to a language and media barrier. Even the US and everything south of Texas don't align as much as the US and Canada.

No. US and Canada share a language and have historically intermingled their populations significantly. We're the same because we have largely similar daily lives as individuals, we have similar problems, and we're populated by people of similar origins. If, for example, conditions caused our paths to diverge, an extreme example would be the split between East and West Germany, then you would expect differing views. Even prior to modern media we were very similar peoples.

Une partie du Canada ne parle pas Anglais.

Yes ~9% of the Canadian population is unable to hold a conversation in English. We are talking about the other 90%.

Which has nothing to do with censorship on social media. Censorship is okay if it matches what people want to see? Sounds like China justifications...

some amount of censorship is unavoidable. when nation state A is in control of the censorship, and designs that censorship to intentionally hurt nation state B, then nation state B has every right to ban the platform that nation state A is using to push it's agenda.

What matters is the people of the nation state, and censorship by their own government depriving them of information is absolutely hurting them. Government only censors people when uncensored information would cause their interests to conflict with those of the people in power.

No information is being deprived, you can read up all you want in more detail than in TikTok. Rather it's the argument to lazily consume 2 minute bites as a replacement for in-depth study.

> No information is being deprived

It seems censorship is indeed being conducted, as described here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42072050

youre ignoring my point to such a degree that it seems intentional. ill have to assume that you either work for a nation state, or you have a third grade education level.

I actually replied to someone else, not you. I'm not aware of any point you have because I haven't read anything you've posted. Given your attitude here, it seems like that's for the best. Perhaps you meant to reply to someone else, too?

sorry, its been a long couple of days. my apologies

Censorship is fascism. If you want bad ideas to die, let them be examined and discussion to proceed. When you censor ideas you don't like, you give them a safe environment to foster.

No it doesn't. When the citizens of nation state B have the right to freedom of speech and freedom to consume foreign-controlled media, then nation state B does not have the rights you outlined over its people.

> The majority of Canadians share the majority of Americans' view of the Middle East.

Almost 50% of Canadians believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza: https://www.readthemaple.com/polls-show-gap-between-canadian...

IIRC similar polling in the US led to similar results so the claim is not wrong even if the implication was likely that the majority of Americans support Israel.

Source? And what are these consensus opinions? (Honest questions)

a non-zero amount of censorship is unavoidable in a social media platform. when nation state A is in control of the censorship of social media platform Z, and designs the censorship of that platform to intentionally hurt nation state B by causing division amongst the citizens of nation state B, then nation state B has every right to ban social media platform Z.

>designs the censorship of that platform to intentionally hurt nation state B by causing division amongst the citizens of nation state B

If the division is a result of the platform exposing people in that nation to information that they previously didn't have access to, due to the government censoring it, then it's absolutely a good thing for the people of the nation. The government of the nation state can get fucked when its interests go against the interests of its people. A divided people is a much better thing than a people united by ignorance and belief in falsehood.

but thats not what nation state A is doing - differing amounts of information is selectively made available to different groups of citizens in nation state B, purely to sow discord when those two groups of citizens interact.

But it doesn't matter what the intent is. The intent behind many types of publishing and media can be malicious. The ability to publish that media and the ability of Americans to consume that media is protected free speech

So if the censorship on Facebook is designed to hurt China, they have every right to ban facebook?

I mean, China has banned Facebook. It may or may not be due to that stated reason, but it's nevertheless banned.

yes, of course

Apparently they do, so yes:

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

But that’s not why they banned it. They banned it because FB refused to submit to the CPC’s censorship.

can i have a dataset containing articles that were censored? these articles may be misinformation or openly sympathetic to terrorist organizations.

i'm quite happy with Meta handling the moderation on the conflict.

Being openly sympathetic to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians is bad, so if your rule is being followed, we should expect to see an equally low amount of information from both sides of the conflict: the Israeli side and the Palestinian side.

While one is certainly entitled to disagree with Meta's moderation policies, I feel like this muddies the issue.

Specifically what happened in Canada is:

* A national security review found Tiktok's operations in Canada to be a risk to national security

* Tiktok's operations in Canada are being closed down but Canadians are still able to use and post on Tiktok

* This type of review is pretty opaque by nature so more details are probably unavailable at this stage

If Canadians are still able to use and post on Tiktok I'm not sure there is a speech/censorship issue here. Maybe Tiktok Canada was harboring spies or something, or maybe this is a roundabout way to push Tiktok out of the country later, but I don't think we have any solid public info.

> If Canadians are still able to use and post on Tiktok I'm not sure there is a speech/censorship issue here. Maybe Tiktok Canada was harboring spies or something,

If tiktok is allowed to do business in the country, then they can buy allegiance via the creator fund which makes it harder to get citizens to realize (and leave it) once they start deploying active measures.

> I feel like this muddies the issue.

"instead of focusing on China, we should limit the issue as a whole"

"It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see"

"it's not only China - we do it to ourselves to. Instead of focusing on China, we should limit the issue as a whole"

"this muddies the issue"

you know what? instead of focusing on China, we should limit the issue as a whole

here in the UK, Facebook can't seem to get enough of assisting hamas in their propaganda war.

For sure US companies do it too. But from a _national security perspective_ the US/Canada don’t care about local companies as much as foreign companies _controlled by a foreign (and in this case hostile) government_.

Canadian users can still access Tiktok and are still subject to Tiktok's algorithms. They're also still subject to Meta's algorithms that, unlike Tiktok, have already helped cause at least one genocide[1].

Tiktok's Canada-based offices must have been up to some other form of skulduggery for them to have been shuttered while leaving Canadian use of the platform completely status quo.

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

We have foreign born billionaires that own mainstream media outlets in the US so not sure it’s that much different

Yes, better to let american corporations to propahandize americans

The difficulty here is that it has long been US policy to promote the exports of its intellectual property (such as its movies) and communications networks (such as the internet). Trade policy is almost always a two way street, particularly in the modern era in which arrangements like the "unequal treaties" that choked the Qing dynasty are highly unusual. So banning Tiktok necessarily results in reciprocal bans. Canada does not have similar concerns as the US does because it is our little gas station whose pretensions to independence we humor and they do not export IP or communications technologies at the same scale as we do.

American social networks are already banned in China and have been for a long time. Even TikTok doesn't operate in China because they have a different message they want for their own citizens. Douyin - the Chinese version of Tiktok - promotes learning about science and technology, shuts down at night, and limits how much children are allowed to use it.

That first part about Douyin, sounds exactly like what the internet should be, a public resource for learning about hard things.

The second part, well, I guess I can read a book, and maybe children should, too.

Maybe there's child accounts that has those limits, but normal accounts don't match that description. I've watched my girlfriend use Douyin and the content was lower brow than what e.g. Instagram shows her. It was mostly dumb skits and people doing silly dances. Due to time zones, I have no clue if it shut down at night, but it never seemed to be an issue.

We get a lot of propaganda about Chinese social media apps that's just wrong. I was told Xiaohongshu is a propaganda app that sends quotes from Mao's little red book, and it's Chinese Instagram.

> It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Well, this is Canada we are talking about. All of the countries in OP's list are foreign.

Canada is a member of Five Eyes so they might as well be the US as far as data control and intelligence goes.

As a Canadian, the US already controls Canada in almost every way. We get US media, technology, gas, trade, etc. If the US wanted Canada to do something, they wouldn't have to use subtle techniques to do it, they could just demand it.

I don't think the US tries to control Canada like a vassal. It's an unfair portrayal of their common history. Canada is basically the parts of British interest in North America that that revolutionary war failed to reach or aquire in post war negotiations. Benedict Arnold, following Washingtons plan, was defeated in Quebec after all. The US influences Canada more than Canada influences the US because its population is 10x. If the situation were reversed and Canada had all the northern states of the US their relationship would be the same.

Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

Not foreign, but we already have that problem with Sinclair and local TV affiliate stations.

I know this is shocking, but people don't have to look at TikToc or CNN no matter who owns it. Personally, I welcome the stat of Iran purchasing CNN and Putin buying TikToc. If the public doesn't like the apps/network they can use something different.

This sounds reasonable but I feel just like OP, its still missing the forest from the trees

Its not about who has the data, although that is important. Its not about subversion of a population by a foreign state, although that is important too.

The crux of the issue is reciprocity.

China does not let any CAN or US companies into China markets, without first demanding local factories, forcing local production, requiring equity control and even IP. And if you dont share it, bohoo they will steal it anyway. And, there's no recourse.

The chinese govt has abused free trade for so long. Its time to demand fairness.

They dont give us access into their markets? OK! We close our markets to their corporations.

Its as simple as that. The golden rule.

What are you talking about? You can import stuff to China right now, most stuff import tax is 10%, much lower than USA's tariff on Chinese goods at 25%. Apple has been selling made in India iphone in China, Nike selling made in Vietnam shoes in China. Apple, Tesla have very large market share in China. Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Amazon sell software, networking equipment, Cloud computing, databases, the stuff that is security sensitive to China and Chinese government. Where is the reciprocal access for Chinese companies to US market? Can BYD, Huawei sell to US? Can companies like Wuxi apptec, CATL, Gotion, DJI do business with US partners without absurd political witch hunting, discrimination, bans, sanctions? Mind you these companies are wanted by US companies, and they hire American workers with American offices. Tiktok pays a lot to US employees right? China also hosted a lot of trade shows year around and American companies can freely participate in them, sell and importing stuff to China. Where is the non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese firms? China imported $2.8 trillion of goods in 2023, 2nd highest in the world, China has 0% tariffs with many countries as part of free trade agreement, what is this? Isn't this not market access? What are you talking about. Apple, Tesla, Nike, GE, cisco all get non-biased if not halo marketing in China. Please proof where Chinese government is attacking them like US government is attacking Huawei, Wuxi apptec, DJI, and huge number of Chinese companies too long to list.

The fish dies by the mouth..... Every entity you cite manufactures in china, for precisely the reasons stated in my argument.

Apple [2], Nike [1], Tesla [3] , Intel [4], MS [5], Cisco [6] etc

[1] https://shoeeffect.com/where-are-nike-shoes-made-in-china/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wikhttps://insideevs.com/news/71542...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/deandebiase/2024/08/30/why-comp...

[6] https://community.cisco.com/t5/routing/where-are-cisco-route...

Oops.

It's about the western gov'ts NOT being able to control the feed, what evidence is there that Chinese gov't is actively involved in curating the TikTok feed?

> Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish

Okay. Now imagine CNN and NYTimes and Fox News being coerced into publishing or not publishing info because a US gov agency demands it. Or how about the US gov pressuring Meta and Twitter to change their algos around very specific topics? You don't need to imagine it actually.

So why is that less of a concern than China controlling a media delivery service?

From the US government's perspective? Because they are the ones in control of those US-based scenarios.

No, from yours/commenters' perspectives. What about US-governed control is functionally better for consumers?

This can't be a serious question.

US Government likes US Government control because it's themselves.

They don't want an adversary to have control. Is the distinction not obvious??

I'm very serious.

> US Government likes US Government control because it's themselves.

I know. That doesn't tell me why China controlling a social media algorithm is inherently any worse from yours or my perspective.

> They don't want an adversary to have control.

Is the "adversary" claim not undermined by them being a primary trade partner?

> Is the "adversary" claim not undermined by them being a primary trade partner?

No, because there's more nuance in the world than you seem to suggest.

>>> So why is that less of a concern than China controlling a media delivery service?

>> US Government likes US Government control because it's themselves.

> I know. That doesn't tell me why China controlling a social media algorithm is inherently any worse from yours or my perspective.

Why is it less of a concern to you if you control your bank account than if I do?

If we're not making obvious distinctions today, you should give me your bank account credentials, since we're all the same.

>> They don't want an adversary to have control.

> Is the "adversary" claim not undermined by them being a primary trade partner?

It is not. I have difficulty imagining your question is not founded on feigned ignorance.

China is an adversary of the US. Some optimistic and naive Western politicians in the 90s thought making them a "primary trade partner" would cause political changes that would eliminate the rivalry. They were wrong, and weakened their countries in the process. That's been clear for like ten years. Now their mistake needs to be dealt with.

> you should give me your bank account credentials, since we're all the same.

How is this comparable to the media you're consuming?

> How is this comparable to the media you're consuming?

If you can't see the point without tedious hand-holding, I can't help you.

I wonder if once any post goes up that is relevant China's interests, an email goes out from some department in the CCP govt, then hordes of Chinese advocates descend on the comments section, arguing, diverting, obsfucating, and muddying the waters so much that no sensible conclusion can ever be made.

I've been here for years, I just constantly see a lot of talk of harms but no details of what the harms are and it's tiring.

The harms are so obvious I am wondering why I am even discussing it. Obviously giving your primary geo-strategic competitor (with a history of propaganda) access at massive scale to shape opinion, promote discord, polarisation etc etc in the next generation of youth is a bad thing. Not to mention the harvesting of personal data at massive scale and who knows how that might be used in the context of an AI-driven future. You'd have to be ridiculously naive not to see that.

> to shape opinion, promote discord, polarisation etc etc in the next generation of youth is a bad thing

I remain unconvinced that people aren't shaping their own opinions by continuing to pursue similar content to what they typically agree with already. And as we all know, at this current time TikTok's algo is indistinguishable from US competitors in the obvious way it buckets people into like-minded feeds + comments.

At minimum we should be consistent in what we claim is the bad behavior. If the algo is really the problem, start regulating all of them and do it now. To do otherwise is hypocrisy.

> who knows how that might be used in the context of an AI-driven future

I'm not sure we want to legislate and set rules based on a "who knows". If the outcome is bad you need to define that bad outcome.

"I remain unconvinced that people aren't shaping their own opinions by continuing to pursue similar content to what they typically agree with already. And as we all know, at this current time TikTok's algo is indistinguishable from US competitors in the obvious way it buckets people into like-minded feeds + comments..."

You have not the slightest clue whether this is true or not.

Why does China block all foreign social media access within its own borders?

Wouldnt it be wonderful if we in the West could advocate for our own interests inside China the way the Chinese can participate in our conversations.

You haven't made a point that I can see! I'm actually being genuine here, I don't know where this went off the rails for you exactly, but I would like my questions to be answered.

I'll just copypaste what I said in another thread to be as direct as possible:

I am being told that it's a "concern" but without an explanation. What are the material, concrete harms that can come from China directing the content algo?

Large-scale, targeted psychological manipulations of the crowd into liking tyranny, hating democracy and/or each other and so on?

I'm not sure why I'm being quietly downvoted. Here are some links showing the corresponding slippery slope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098132, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38256810, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304735, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610829

> You haven't made a point that I can see!

I made a pretty simple and straightforward analogy, which you didn't get. Maybe you don't get the geopolitical relevance of media control, but I'd really hope you'd understand bank account control. You = the US polity, Me = China, Bank account = something an adversary could harm you by controlling.

> I'm actually being genuine here...but I would like my questions to be answered....

> I am being told that it's a "concern" but without an explanation. What are the material, concrete harms that can come from China directing the content algo?

If you're being truthful, I think you might be at the point where you have to do some basic reading first, because you seem to need more hand-holding and explanation than it's reasonable to expect. You may also have some conceptual deficits that are so basic they come off as feigned.

> I think you might be at the point where you have to do some basic reading first

You are making the claim, you should be able to back the claim up. You're actually writing very many words to avoid a direct explanation, which is even more confusing.

>Is the "adversary" claim not undermined by them being a primary trade partner?

Absolutely not. Japan was a primary trade partner going into WW2. The US is actively preparing for wars over Taiwan.

The gov doesn’t care about your perspective.

trade partner does not exclude adversary. Look at US-Japan trade in the 30s up until just before WW2 when the US decision to embargo exports to Japan (to try to force Japan to stop its occupation of China) led to WW2. It was a pretty quick flip from major trading partner to war.

It's less of a concern because it hasn't happened, and -- assuming Trump doesn't "suspend the constitution" -- can't constitutionally happen. If it does happen, then yes, I will be incredibly concerned about it, more than whatever China is doing.

But right now, today, we have a media delivery service, controlled by China, that millions of Americans use. That's a real, present concern.

Since it's a hot button conspiracy theorist topic, I need to preface that I don't actually care about the Hunter Biden laptop drama nor the contents of the laptop, but Twitter and Meta actually were told to suppress sharing and discussion of the topic, and they followed orders. It happened. And that's just a recent time that we happen to know about.

> But right now, today, we have a media delivery service, controlled by China, that millions of Americans use. That's a real, present concern.

Again, I am being told that it's a "concern" but without an explanation. What are the material, concrete harms that can come from China directing the content algo?

They might make an echo chamber that causes a given party to think they will win and thus less people show to the polls.

Do people think China wants Trump? Because everyone on tiktok apparently thought this was going to be a Harris landslide victory.

We must have different tiktok feeds. Because everyone on tiktok apparently thought this was going to be a Trump landslide victory

Yeah, that's kinda how all social media algos work. You get bucketed in with the content you engage with and watch the most ie the stuff you likely (but not necessarily!) agree with the most already. It's almost as if TikTok's algo isn't any different than FB or IG or X.

What about other cases in which domestic companies are fully bending to the will of China and other hostile governments?

Or simpler, domestic companies having foreign workers developing and implementing the algorithm itself???

I don't see how a foreign government or any foreign interest is worse than domestic interests (or governments).

The us is already one of the most propagandized nations on earth and our own government only benefits from this, despite ostensibly being criticized from sanitized angles.

I don't know what life is like in canada, but what i surmise from friends is that the experience is similar.

In theory, you can vote to influence your own government, but not the foreign interest.

Ok, but none of the domestic interests are (theoretically) controlled by the government and yet all are (evidently) at least as malicious.

I suppose this would be easier to rationalize if domestic interests were democratically controllable.... but they're not. And they certainly aren't by canadians, which makes this action doubly confusing.

People throughout this thread seem to disagree with your first point.

Hence the "(theoretically)" hedge. The theory for how control is maintained has been well-established for at least three decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Nonetheless, this underlines the hypocrisy of punishing TikTok but not western corporations. By any standard (except for foreign control, which is of dubious merit when domestic control is equally harmful) Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc are equally of deserving of restriction as TikTok is.

Data protection regulation addresses the abuses of reading information from databases.

An analog to address the abuses of controlling how users read information from databases would be anti-trust regulation that unbundles client software from hosted services. "The algorithm" should be under control of the client software, for which there should be a competitive market, based on well-documented APIs for communication between the two. Then everyone can choose what "algorithm" they want, rather than having one singular one pushed on them by the service provider abusing its captive audience.

I tried TikTok out earlier this year. It was enjoyable but at least once a day when I was using the app heavily I would be served a video that was mildly pro China. Like a clearly western person living there showing off how great it is.

It wasn’t offensive or even off the mark but it felt like I was being served low grade propaganda.

Realistically speaking, it'd probably be no different than $random_billionare pushing for whatever makes them the most profit.

But foreign news media are legal for people to consume in the US, at least. If every American wanted to read and watch Al Jazeera and put it on in every store and bar and restaurant, that wouldn't justify banning it

SO THIS! it's not about data protection, it's about the platform allowing misinformation and hate speech to thrive there. i've reported hundreds of videos, comments, and accounts - TikTok said they don't violate the community standards. the worst was yesterday - someone commented he was sad Hitler failed on a TikTok video about the Israeli hostages held by Hamas - and TikTok, after 30 minutes, said this doesn't violate community standards.

before anyone says "free speech" - views or comments that are not aligned with the CCP and its allies get taken down when reported. several of mine were taken down.

i owe the rising antisemitism among young people to TikTok and its lack of action towards misinformation and hate speech.

Then they would be restricting the app, not just shutting down the Canadian offices.

Only foreign? Zuck during elections, Musk during elections. etc. Living in the EU, if I am gullible, when I open X, I have to believe that all Americans are mentally challenged. Being raised as a kid or gullible reading all that crap every day cannot be good for you right? Without foreign influence that is.

So other countries should ban facebook, twitter/x and other US-based social media for the same reason?

I love how this is not censorship but when non-western countries do it, then it is.

For most of the world, that "foreign government" is the US that pushes its propaganda via facebook, twitter and also by buying up local tv/news stations, newspapers, etc.

I know this is a US-centric site, but globally, you're a minority that pushes the most propaganda around.

...especially since the article is about canada, so US is a foreign government, and meta/x are foreign companies.

> Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

I don't know about others but to me the NYT and CNN are quite the propaganda machines already.

There's nothing resembling actual journalism ongoing at these places.

how did we get from PhpBB to algorithms that influence whole societies

One of the big controversies is that Chinese "tiktok" runs a much less socially disruptive algorithm.

You know, China hit a lot of these problems before we did and the ir platforms are "nicer" because they are more regulated.

Rather than ban tiktok and suffer the same problems with meta's Reels, what if we borrowed some of thier regulation?

> It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm

The right way to stop bad behavior is to write a specific description of the bad actions and the penalty for doing them into the code of law. The wrong way is to declare specific entities guilty of bad behavior you can only vaguely describe.

There is a very good reason the US constitution bans bills of attainder: they become a way of going after individuals for reasons that if properly articulated could not withstand public scrutiny. Canada would do well to uphold the same taboo.

Note that I'm not registering a position on TikTok itself. It could be run by turbosatan for all I care. I object to the lawless mechanism through which western governments are trying to go after TikTok in particular.

>It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Adam Curry opined that this was the excuse and it's really about protecting domestic (or at least Western in the case of Canada) social media companies. Seems plausible.

I don't use TikTok so I'm not sure what the feed looks like, but it seems like a bunch of people doing silly stuff and mugging for the camera.

You were so close and nearly got there. It's not about fear of China controlling the narrative, it's about not being able to control the narrative on Tiktok like they are doing on other (American) platforms.

Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris from the New York Times causing the resignations of many within the organization and a similar situation occurred with Bezos and the Washington Post . We have internal issues as well. I agree with what you are saying though. I don’t know what can remedy the apparent degraded integrity of social platforms and major news outlets, but I’m all ears. Federated platforms are compelling but no holy grail and such things founded on ideological extremes like Lemmy (developed by self professed Leninist Marxists) and the stigma around decentralized technologies make them less attractive.

And yet if some other country bans US-controlled social media exactly for the same reasons, this works as a data point to label them as "lacking freedom of speech", "axis of evil", "undemocratic", etc.

But I do appreciate the honesty of at least admitting the hypocrisy.

Safe to assume China already bought most of what’s available, but why give them additional video tokens / training data

I think his argument holds. We should apply the same standards to Meta. Zuckerberg has explicitly harmed our democracy. Let's treat all companies that are hostile and run by those that despise America with deep hostility (look no further than his private practices in Hawaii for examples). That's my personal opinion. The same standard is the most democratic path

I''m curious. Do you think it makes sense to treat an American company - one of the biggest btw, that pays taxes and creates jobs - the same way as a foreign company?

I am not sure I understand the question. All companies should be subject to the basic rules and requirements under the law. It absolutely holds that one company should not be specifically targeted, just because it upsets current political ecosystem. If the rules allow it to exist, then the same end result is perfectly possible with other participants.

But what is happening here is different. We are saying: we don't Z company so we are going to treat them differently from the other companies in the same space.

And I am saying this as a person with minimal social media footprint.

How can the US actually enforce laws against Bytedance? Are they going to allow us to audit their operations?

By banning them from operating in the US. The implementation really isn’t complicated - it’s a simple statute outlawing the company on national security grounds, and all the tech companies (viz Apple and Google) will have to abide by it or face huge fines and criminal sanctions.

If US suspects they are breaking the law they can convince judge to sign warrant to get that information or start lawsuit and go through discovery. If they refuse the judge can hold them in contempt of court. I assume next they could just get judgement against them (assuming they are breaking the law) and that could be e.g. require seizing assets and dissolution of the US company.

You'd be surprised how many companies or individuals won't exchange money with you if doing so puts them in criminal or civil legal jeopardy. No need for even a Great Firewall.

This isn’t about data. This is about pubescent brain rot and foreign influence and misinformation and attention spans and depression and anti-sociality and suicide.

Wouldn’t they ban other apps like Instagram or Facebook if that was true?

Banning (on national security grounds) a Chinese company from operating in the United States is much easier than doing the same to a US company.

So, no.

No because the US is happy of having those giants data, sometimes without even needing a warrant. We already have multiple evidence in courts and news and congress hearings that all of those and Apple gave to various US agencies for years.

But since Bytedance doesn't dance at NSA's tune, different rules apply.

The platforms like that also provide interesting aggregates. Like hidden trends and the political mood... Interesting correlations. And having this information is pretty beneficial for any agent (for ads or to know your population better). There could be a lot of research done based on having platform like tiktok (like what kind of fake news would work the best in the specific situation). Ah, big data.

Could someone in the ads world give an estimate of how this would work? What volume of data would need to be purchased, how one individual person could be de-anonymized from that volume of data, how much it would cost to do, etc.

I've always been terrified to think about how much of my data is out there, but I don't understand enough about how it can be used, and the potential risks.

America is heading away from any person based protections

> Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X.

The law should be against general bad behavior by social media companies, but it isn't because the unsaid reasoning is too impolite to speak: we can compromise with Western companies' spying, manipulation, and exploitation of us, but it's unacceptable if a Chinese company does the same.

These sorts of movements gain a life of their own at some point, but the cynical side of me suspects the TikTok ban animus started with big tech lobbyists, not a grassroots movement from concerned citizenry.

Its easy to get the point across to politicians.

Ask them to check how much their own Ad spend is increasing every year.

And ask them to check how much New Content they need to produce everyday. And how much that has increased over the last year.

Basically Politicians, instead of being on the ground dealing with people issues, are turning into Content Factories and Fund raising machines to keep the content factories running.

Human Attention is finite. If its not treated as such, we trap everyone in an Attention Capture arms race to nowhere.

Platform profit, content factories profit, fund raising machines profit - https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/digital-ad-market-boom-big-...

> What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices

I've always found the EU and India’s data regulations somewhat superficial. Sure, it’s a start that my data is stored in the EU, but how does that really help if the CCP can just call a ByteDance executive and ask them to run a SQL query on demand?

I am not saying those laws shouldn't exist, but don't protect against the threat model of other side being China

Perhaps not2b could "legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament" in order to "get anti-regulation politicians on board". He could then present "real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple and X."

It is not about protecting data. It is about unfeatered access to your data and control of who can an who can't talk.

> What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices.

Also, what some people dismissed at the time is that from a European perspective it makes perfect sense to consider any foreign power a potential future threat. That seemed less plausible a few days ago but with the person running the site formerly known as Twitter now likely becoming part of the US government and the foreign policy/trade course the president elect has been advertising throughout his campaign, European leaders seem to be waking up to the possibility that US vendors should no longer simply be considered neutral by default.

Keep in mind European intelligence services have literally watched American intelligence happily infiltrate friendly governments (e.g. the German-American joint venture operating from Switzerland selling fraudulent encryption that Germany abandoned when they saw the US selling to allies, ostensibly to avoid raising suspicions from the real targets) and even wiretap heads of state (cf. Snowden revelations), you'd think people would have wisened up to this earlier but as a German I'm just happy to see any progress at all.

If the west is serious about its "universal values", that would the approach to take. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Yes, China banned Facebook, X etc for national security reasons, too. The Chinese government wants Chinese data to stay in China, and all of these social media platform would have to comply with Chinese law, including some requirements regarding censorship. Now it becomes more and more obvious that the west is not that different from China, the country it keeps bitching about on a daily basis. Censorship has been there for a long time, and now you have outright banning of a social network because it has roots in China.

You can accept one of these two things but not both:

A. National security is above freedom of speech B. Freedom of speech is a fundamental value of an open society and should in no scenario be given up

If you accept A, you have to be honest and admit that the banning of Facebook etc in China is completely justified. If you accept B, you have to just let TikTok operate normally as any other social network.

> "Most people can say, 'Why is it a big deal for a teenager now to have their data [on TikTok]?' Well in five years, in 10 years, that teenager will be a young adult, will be engaged in different activities around the world,"

I’m technically Gen-Z (but just barely) and this is something that really worries me. It’s become increasingly normal in recent times to share absolutely everything online but I’ve got a pretty grim feeling that this isn’t gonna end well. People don’t realize that the AI’s being trained on your data today will act as an internet history that you can never delete.

Full circle from early Facebook and Twitter over sharing.

As someone who actually didn't participate in the facebook generation (I was a straight edge Millenial who started college at the tail of the Gen X generation), I do not envy anyone trying to live in modern western society without their generation's social media of choice. The few of us 'counterflow' cannot win against the tides as long as we remain part of the larger society. At best we eke out livings generally disadvantaged compared to our brethren with social media presences and all the drama that goes with it. A few of us may get opportunities from those rare outliers in positions to make a call or introduce you to a friend of a friend. But make of the rest of us simply become one of the unspoken masses, just like say the people in Slab City, or those old rock hounds who used to live in Quartzite, AZ (now some weird mass of RV park and bedroom community for Phoenix, as I understand it.)

My point, winding as it may seem, is that this generations kids are bound to their social mediums just like the radio and then television generations were to theirs, for mainstream culture, and like the Beatniks, Hippies, Progressives(I'm not sure of the proper term here, but the non-internet groups of the 80s-00s, LGBTQA movement, the BDSM movement, etc) for the outliers. There are plenty of other subcultures out there that have waxed and waned as well, some of them crossing other boundaries, like the religious or politcal gaps in this country.

But for many of us that leaves us as the odd person out. Not being into the right hobbies or social activities or just having the wrong values and you soon find yourself distanced from those around you. The internet can give that back to you or help take it away, but in the long term the dossiers on each of us that being online produce is far less damaging than the lack of in-person connections many of us(not I) gain from social networks even as we give up our privacy and our opportunities for future dissent against the status quo, something that Eastern and Western societies alike are rapidly barreling towards an ultimatum on.

Assuming you're not YOLOing it, what will you give up for your life now, versus the lives you want to leave you to your descendants, or if you're not planning on your own and not a selfish jerk, for other people's descendants?

Footnote: This comment was written from an American point of view, although much of it still applies to our Canadian cousins and European/Australian brethren.

I think you are significantly over-valuing what you are hypothetically missing out on.

Try telling that to a teenager.

In my (very rural) area, you literally will not attract clients unless you are on Facebook or have a personal connection. This includes basic services like well service, septic service, tree service, etc. I had to have my wife use her account to find these companies. Apparently nobody has a real website. This is in the US.

Why is the other child comment of this one - the one saying they can't imagine growing up while boycotting social media - deleted?

"As ye sow, so ye shall reap"! errm, soz for the Biblical ref.

If everyone is spewing (sorry ... sharing) pics on TikTok, X and co then you won't stand out from the crowd. Unless those pics involve something too controversial.

I have an internet history that stretches back to Compuserve and I've always used my real name, which may or may not have been a good idea. Many years ago I decided not to give myself a silly pseudonym because I thought it would be futile and counter productive.

  Cheers
  wonky231

> If everyone is spewing (sorry ... sharing) pics on TikTok, X and co then you won't stand out from the crowd

You’re assuming people are consistent. You may have been photographed doing the same thing as all your peers, the fact that your photo can be highlighted unfavourable is ample ammo for proven lines of character attacks.

People can attack character over anything.

Just saying that I have seen zero evidence over the last 10 years of anyone getting more tolerant of others being, in their opinion, stupid online.

"You’re assuming people are consistent."

People are consistent but the media is not and the audience is far bigger than anyone can imagine. This is the Brave New World. We all know things are changing rather fast. Back in the day, I'd write a letter to someone - yes pen and ink (obviously being modern, I had a cartridge pen). Nowadays I pick up the phone and shout at the little twit who tries to hide behind email. OK we had phones back in the day but a call to say Australia (I'm in the UK) had a 2 second latency and a price in the £ per minute range. I remember the handover of pulse to tone dialing.

Nowadays we have an embarrassing array of communication methods and forums to chat and shout in and be heard all around the world (should anyone care to listen).

Yes you can be picked out and I suggest you be a little careful there but this is the world that we find ourselves within.

I was forced to read 1984 in 1984 when I was a lad. We also had Animal Farm and Brave New World on the reading and discussion list at school that year.

My doorbell looks at you (1)

  Cheers
  Noddy871

  (1) It is on a VLAN that can't see the internet and Home Assistant looks at my doorbell

So which of these is your real name?

Gerdesj? Or Wonky231?

My real name is knobbly223

One of my g-g-g-g-grandads was called Joz Gerder. His boy was originally called Johann Henrich Gerder. I am obviously an immigrant!

Joz rocked up to the UK from Germany and married someone - records unavailable for birth and death dates, let alone anything else. John Henry (as he became) has dates: ca 1819-1851 (possibly 32 years old). It is thought that he died from "lacerated wounds" after punching a window and injuring his hand during a drunken brawl.

I can go back 14 generations on some branches (thickets really, not a tree!) of the family. I'm not only a German immigrant but also Cornish, Devonian, Cumbrian, various flavours of Scottish and obviously Irish (both Northern and the Republic).

Anyway, that should give you a clue as to my real name!

I wouldn't worry about it the truth is the internet forgets quickly. Important popular things disappear quicker than you expect. User data and logs exponentially becomes less valuable as time goes out. Know you are at McDonalds now is much more valuable then that you visited 10 years ago and being able to connect this data becomes difficult when devices switch. Video from 2005's is generally not easily consumable because of format changes and quality from a few years ago makes older video painful to watch. Even facebook starts forgetting data you upload.. stops being searchable after a few years.

But the fact that you prefer McDonald’s will not forgotten and will be part of some data profile on you , sold and resold by data brokers.

and saved into weights.

Sorry, but who cares?

This is the fascinating question, because people who would normally respond on 'who cares' question, are also the ones, who know full well that even participation in an online forum is effectively builds up their profile. I am beyond redemption so I am their avatar.

> I am beyond redemption so I am their avatar.

I have no idea what that sentence means.

I also have no idea why I should care that someone knows I like to go to McDonald’s.

Well, when the transplant committee uses it (your data) to triage your new heart or whatever

I’d be more worried if that was how it worked. But it isn’t — at least not where I live.

Yet. All signs point to its inevitability.

I waited a while to reply to see if anyone else had anything to say about this. What jurisdiction doesn't triage heart transplants? Someone who eats $3,000/yr at mcdonalds vs someone who eats $50/yr at mcdonalds would be information pertinent to triage, wouldn't it? Even if you suppose that all human life is equal, then the amount of time a life is extended with a transplant matters, and the $50/yr person will probably (in the statistical sense) live longer than the other, all other things equal.

Maybe the committees don't "action" on this information because they don't have it, but it would be very silly to not use this information. I'd be curious what sort of triage wouldn't use this information. First-come first-serve?

if your goal is to maximize the length of human lives, that is, to put donor hearts to the maximum use for value, you'd have to use information like this!

What jurisdiction does? Seriously, can you name one? Is that how it works in the US?

I am not a doctor, but if the test is whether your diet could become a factor then you do not have to look further than heart transplant waiting list criteria[1][2]. For example, please note that 'morbid obesity' is noted as a relative contraindication. McD enjoyers are not known for being fit ( I should know ).

I personally think you are asking the wrong question here.

[1]https://www.upmc.com/services/transplant/heart/process/waiti... [2]https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/transplant/referring-physici...

What about 10 years from now, it came out that some politician liked (or "engaged with) a bunch of racist videos when he was a kid?

That would make the politician 25 or younger. Easy to pivot. Now 20 years would put the person at 35. You could survive a crack addition in your teens 20 years later if that came out.

But evidence starts disappearing. 20 bad articles about you in 5 years 10 might survive in 10 years maybe 2 might survive.

What if this year it came out that a politician falsified business records and was criminally convicted for it? Why you'd make him President, of course!

There was certainly a fad when social media was new to get all worked up about finding out about something someone did in the past, where people were even losing their shit over something that would normally be innocuous like a photo of a teacher enjoying a beer at a party. But, I think we're kind of over it at this point. Fashion trends don't last forever.

JD Vance had college pictures of him plastered on the news, so i am not sure what your yardstick's for measuring how "over it" we are as a society.

Certainly once the elderly (those who follow the news) start to latch onto a fashion trend, it is definitely over.

The news cycle at that level churns on anything and everything will come out. Are you comfortable with them interviewing old neighbors or people who went to the same school but didn't know you? At that level online activities are my least concern, old girlfriends or work colleagues or ex friends can spread the most impactful dirt. When material doesn't exist they just throw dirt to see what sticks.

You wouldn't have that problem. Try looking someone up these days in Google and you soon discover everything lives in walled in gardens like Facebook or instagram or iCloud or Snapchat or telegram.

I think the exact opposite. It's becoming easier and easier to crunch all that data. Let the AIs build up a perfect model of each individual human. No one needs to sit through and watch all that video content. And video formats are very much a non-issue, even if it's a pixelated mess, GenAI is very good at making sense of that.

The more data there is on you, the easier it'll be to fingerprint you in the future. Google photos can recognize me as a baby. Even I can't tell myself apart from my brother.

One possible saving grace for Z is that, due to how expensive it is to keep around, video will probably disappear much more readily than text and photos.

> It’s become increasingly normal in recent times to share absolutely everything online

It certainly feels that way when you pull up a social media feed

However, the majority of people I interact with (all ages) don't post frequently or at all.

It's 10% of the users posting 90% of the content, including over-sharing. It only looks normal because they're so dominant in the feed that you don't realize who's missing.

I'm worried about the 1 or 2 posts where I said something stupid, but someone tied everything to everything else I've ever said, and it comes back to bite me. It doesn't take much to ruin a person.

We are lucky who live in America with free speech. I read an article the other day where a woman in Israel was kicked out of school, arrested and imprisoned for months without charge, and basically had her entire career and life ruined for social media posts because that country doesn't have the freedom of speech we often take for granted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/magazine/israel-free-spee...

- How 4 Instagram posts ruined her life

I am scared by this article and decide keep remain silent on social media.

To be clear, they're not banning the app, they're banning ByteDance from having offices in Canada

But what's the point? It's more common for a government to force companies to have an office in the country to exercise political or legal control (see for example recent news about Twitter's Brazil office). Why banning them from having one?

What is the strategy here? Why does banning ByteDance from having offices in Canada do anything?

Could it be the start of a series of legislation to make it impossible to operate the app which would be more palatable to the public than a ban?

1: Ban presence in the country

2: Add data provision requirements that personal information be stored in the country.

3: TikTok can’t meet requirements? Well that’s on them, guess they can’t operate here.

What if ByteDance operating outside of Canada stores the data in ca-central-1?

> What is the strategy here

1. Show the current government is doing something after the CSE said the Canadian government has been breached by China's MSS [0]

2. A response to China for breaching Canada's systems.

3. A way to get a quick win to make bipartisan China hawks across the border in the US happy.

[0] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cse-cyber-threats-china-1.7...

Isn't it all rather self-defeating, then?

ByteDance will keep no data in Canada, will not employ any Canadians, will not report any information to Canadian authorities, and will have no reason to comply with Canadian warrants or court orders. (Or even judgments.) At the same time, all Canadians can continue to use the app.

On balance, this seems bad for Canada and great for ByteDance.

> On balance, this seems bad for Canada and great for ByteDance.

It's hard to balance anything until they explain why they did it. So far they claim they aren't at liberty to share but claim it was bad enough to make a very unprecedented move like this.

It goes both ways.

... and Bytedance will not have any recourse if Canada bans the app.

"We came to the conclusion that these activities that were conducted in Canada by TikTok and their offices would be injurious to national security,"

Really not saying anything, but that's the line they are going with.

Speaks volumes about perceived power balance between governments and corporations. You'd think that forcing a foreign company to operate through a national subsidiary would be beneficial to the government in terms of intelligence/counterintelligence, but apparently they worry it would be more beneficial to the company and/or its home country.

What do they think is happening inside TikTok offices? It's not like they're embassies filled with spies.

Why couldn't it be?

Canada has an extremely generous, massively exploited foreign worker program (it is actually one of the reasons this government is profoundly unpopular). ByteDance, like every other company, can unilaterally declare that they need to bring in an entirely foreign staff and get it rubber stamped. Given the company's alleged closeness with the party, using it as an easy vehicle to drop loads of intelligence workers of various sorts in Canada would be logical. Similarly China has a thing with running intimidation tactics against Chinese ex-pats living in Western countries.

It's not impossible, but you'd think they come up with a better front company than bytedance, of all companies. It's like China accusing that McDonalds is a spy front.

Perhaps, but China really doesn't have a lot of companies with offices in the West. When China tries to buy Western countries they are often blocked for the same national security reasons, as has happened several times in Canada.

A nondescript consumer appliance or clothing "sales office" is infinitely better than bytedance, a company that has received significant flak in the media. The Biden administration's policy of "small yard, high fence" means that unless you're trying to import chips, AI tech, drones, or battery tech, you're probably fine. Nobody is going to blink an eye at some Chinese company trying to sell rice cookers.

yes, Chinese ppl are Chinese spies. This is Western values. Chinese ppl also breathed the same air, you want ban that too? It is national security risk, you are breathing the same air a commie just breathed. I find it really interesting how ppl can just think "could", I feel you watch too much war movies. Talk to real people more, I think you will find that ppl are more the same than different, and we all want peace, good life, that is it.

Oh all Chinese are spies. China can turn cars into killing machines, Westerners really watch too much science fiction and cold war movies. This never crossed our minds this could be a thing and no one is this boring and morally bad to do this. But seems Westerners really like to entertain these ideas.

Didn't notice this comment previously as it happened days after.

However since the government has revealed that ByteDance employees in Canada -- Chinese nationals -- have acted against the national security of Canada. And just to be clear, this has happened again, and again, and again, and again. This is a countless line of Chinese nationals and their organizations operating as fronts for the Chinese government.

>Oh all Chinese are spies.

Nope, but enough are that it's a recurring problem.

The only reason I think they would do this is because of espionage, so you want to remove the offices but keep the app. But there is no proof provided within the article.

Presumably the only espionage asset ByteDance has is the data it keeps on Canadian users. (Which probably includes information on arctic military installations, etc.)

TikTok is still going to collect that data, and it will be kept in China, far beyond Canada's reach. To remove concern over the data, I reckon you'd go about it backwards: Get rid of the app, which is up to no good. Keep the offices, so that they can be spied on or forced into transparency via the courts.

Intelligence agencies aren't known for their history of providing proof to the public. This review has been in process for over a year though.

Sunlight and transparency are great disinfectants for evil. Good only triumphs over evil if evil is exposed but evil wins if it’s allowed to remain in the shadows forever. Almost no one believes what they’re doing is evil — nearly everyone believes they’re a good person (even terrorists who have killed and taken hostages, as hostage negotiators recall in their books) but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If the intel agencies can’t even convincingly share with congress reasons with enough merit that can stand up to scrutiny, then fuck em. Do what’s right instead. No one voted for any agency, intel or not, or any deep state to make all of the decisions of the democratic republic. America has 3 branches of government. No 4th branch for good reason. Transparency and sunlight are great disinfectants and there should be more of both. Transparency is needed to make the best decisions.

As far as I can find, Bytedance is one of only three companies ordered to shutter their Canadian operations. The other two are both involved in the drone detection space.

This makes the most sense if Canada expects (or has) Canadian troops secretly deployed somewhere. And that is one sobering thought.

ByteDance can't sell advertising in Canada. They can't make money off of Canadian customers, that has to hurt, although it is small potatoes compared to being banned in California, let alone the whole of the USA.

That means that users can’t be advertised to?

It means Canadian companies can't buy ads from ByteDance. Canadian content creators can't receive money from ByteDance. That is not a win for ByteDance, who I assume wants (a) content from Canadian tiktokers and (b) wants ad money from Canadian companies.

> ByteDance can't sell advertising in Canada.

I'm not sure I follow (maybe there's other details you know about that aren't in the article, or I missed it). I don't think there's anything preventing a Canadian company from paying a foreign company for ads? In theory I'd have to self-assess PST maybe but I order stuff (both physical and digital) from foreign companies with no Canadian presence on a pretty regular basis.

Small credit cards transactions fly under the radar. But a big business with a big budget won't be able to advertise on Tiktok. That's why companies establish these offices. They are essentially import/export offices that allow the flow of money out of said country.

> great for ByteDance

If it were that great for them, they wouldn't be present in Canada in the first place.

Can .ca App Store still offer the app legally if no biz entity operating in Canada? If no, then it's the same as ban the app

Most app developers don't have legal entities in all the countries their app is distributed. Apple is the merchant of record for apps sold and distributed through its app store.

I believe there is a legal concept at play here. If a company has an office - a physical presence - within the country, then it has what is called “mind and management” in the country. The mind and management doctrine gives the company certain rights within Canada that presumably the security folks don’t want them to have.

The public will probably never find out the scope of ByteDance’s operations in Canada for the Chinese government, but if it follows the same arc as other Chinese operations in Canada, I expect it is far more pervasive and frightening than one might expect. This isn’t about the app. This is about the offices.

Not sure about Canada, but in USA the FBI and NYPD have been cracking-down on these Chinese government outpost offices

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1170571626/fbi-arrests-2-on-c...

Yes, there have also been Chinese "police stations" in Canada. In its November 2023 Interim Report of the Special Committee on the Canada–People’s Republic of China Relationship for Canada's parliament [1], investigators detailed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has established unauthorized "police service stations" in major Canadian cities - at least 3 in Greater Toronto, 2 in Vancouver, and potentially 2 more in Montreal/Brossard. While branded as administrative service centers, these stations are reportedly part of a broader transnational repression apparatus.

What makes this particularly concerning is their alleged connection to the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the CCP's primary foreign interference arm. Most operators are local residents with established community connections and long-term involvement in influence operations, making them more effective than parachuted-in agents.

The RCMP has launched investigations and taken some interesting tactical approaches - including deliberately visible patrols with marked cars to encourage reporting and show community members they're taking action. However, investigations are described as "lengthy" and no arrests have been made yet.

The parliamentary committee seems to view this as part of a broader pattern of increasing transnational repression under Xi Jinping. According to Safeguard Defenders' testimony, there were at least 11,000 "successful persuasion to return" operations globally between 2014-2022, with at least 3 confirmed cases in Canada.

What's particularly striking is that these stations operate quite brazenly in G7 countries. It's a remarkable example of how authoritarian states are becoming increasingly bold in projecting power within democratic societies. The Canadian government has formally demanded the PRC cease these activities as violations of diplomatic conventions, but enforcement remains challenging.

The report suggests several countermeasures, including a foreign agent registry (currently defined in Bill C-70 [2]) and modernizing the 1984 CSIS Act, but the most interesting recommendation might be the call for coordinated frameworks among democratic allies to address transnational repression more systematically.

[1] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CACN/Reports...

[2] https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-70/first-r...

> The public will probably never find out the scope of ByteDance’s operations in Canada for the Chinese government, but if it follows the same arc as other Chinese operations in Canada, I expect it is far more pervasive and frightening than one might expect. This isn’t about the app. This is about the offices.

Man wait until you find out what the canadian government is up to within canada. I hear they're praising nazis!

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal

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

If there are actual "national security concerns", they should rule that TikTok data of Canadian citizens needs to be stored within Canadian borders and can only be accessed by Canadian employees. This ban (removing the company's presence from the country while keeping the app active) ensures the exact opposite.

They're angry that TikTok made people aware of the atrocities their governments are supporting across the world.

This has also been the catalyst behind the ban of TikTok in the US.

> This has also been the catalyst behind the ban of TikTok in the US

No it hasn’t. The war in Gaza is a foreign policy issue, which means most Americans tuned out from the start, and one that was a top issue for a very, very narrow slice of the electorate.

The sad truth is we’re aware of atrocities; we simply aren’t too bothered by them. (If you’re honest about yourself, you aren’t either. Nobody sane could be. There are too many of them, and they’re all burning furiously and it has been this was for a long time.) TikTok is about China, not the Middle East.

Canadian citizens can still be brainwashed even if their data is stored within Canada.

So then why aren't they banning the app?

If any app is brainwashing people it's the zombie of twitter. Not tik tok.

If a picture is a thousand words, then surely video is several orders of magnitude more powerful for brainwashing, especially in short form.

The point is that from a disinformation dissemination perspective, it doesn't matter where the data was stored, but the government could have possibly had more control if the data was stored in Canada. Forcing the data to be removed from Canada doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything positive for the Canadian government or people.

Oh give it a rest with the nationalist fear mongering. This isn't about 'national security concerns'. That's the smoke and mirrors to get the populist support necessary to ban it. Meta and Google are feeling threatened that their dominance on North America is being tested and they are flexing their lobbying muscles.

Brainwashed with what. All I can see is people are brainwashed to believe Chinese ppl bad, Chinese ppl are spies, a tiktok office is an evil spy outpost. The evil commmies from China are going to spread the red scare everywhere. We need to drop the iron curtain now!

Can anyone confirm the following?

I remember when Trump had Canada re-ratify Nafta that Canada had to waive the right to require Canadian data stay in Canada.

I know Canada signed the agreement but I am not sure if that requirement was ever put in legislation or whether the requirement was universal or just for US-based companies.

Looking forward to Ireland following suit, and then logically following through and also banning Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, Facebook, Pornhub, Netflix, Disney, Spotify, etc.

For too long these foreign companies have been "shaping public opinion" - to quote a sibling comment here, who I think accurately sums up at least some of the reasoning behind this kind of development.

In case there's some ambiguity here - I am being sarcastic. I hope Ireland doesn't do that. I have strong issues with some of the above platforms and companies, but governments getting involved like this is nothing to be cheered.

To play devils advocate - your are not wrong. We have see the rise of right-wing Trumpist style politics turn up in Australia, NZ, UK, etc. thanks in part to social media platforms algorithmically presenting it to those people.

This kills a bunch of software engineering jobs in Vancouver for like what?

Now the company can continue to operate. Canada has no hold on them. Canadian jobs lost. What is the gain?

The appearance of “tough against foreign interests”

This is quite possibly the stupidest ban I've ever heard.

They should insist that the data doesn't leave their borders; this is the opposite of a ban. They're insisting on having all their user data leave.

Government being stupid. Imagine that.

I have nothing but disdain for TikTok and the CCP but this seems like a very misguided approach.

Being open and willing to accept foreign media (even when it's of low quality or propagandistic) is an advantage of genuinely open societies.

Bad speech can be countered with more speech, and media from western countries can easily be seen on VPNs in countries with heavy censorship. Bans only play to more repressive societies who can claim equivalence.

A better approach is to monitor the activity and narratives promoted and counter them. Chinese propaganda is usually ham handed and low quality anyway.

I agree with you conceptually, in a world where everyone is genuinely seeking the truth and sceptically fact checking. But the reality is the general public don't have the time or attention span to read beyond a headline let alone wait for a retorting explanation.

That combined with peoples propensity to be attracted to rage-bait and outrageous content in my opinion leaves a loop of scroll, get outraged, move onto next topic.

We saw that in the US election cycle that just passed. One side makes outrageous in-factual claim, voter base gets riled up, other side attempts to set the record straight, other side is already riled up on a completely different in-factual claim.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Banning TikTok probably isn't it.

Not going to lie, I find it amusing the double standard where we all know through multiple whistleblowers and courts that the US government spies on virtually every person on this planet (including world leaders like Angela Merkel) yet it's such a concern that the Chinese government allegedly spies on random Joes dancing in their bedroom.

As an European those double standards and American exceptionalism (the idea that common laws and rules do not apply to US) will never cease to bother and annoy me.

What does Canada booting a Chinese company have to do with US companies in Europe?

You do know that Canada is not the US, and most Canadians do not identify or want to be seen as American.

In any case, the solution here is glaringly obvious. If you think that American companies pose a national security threat, or that they serve as unofficial tools of an adversarial government remove them from the country using legal means, just like Canada did.

The double standard is in calling China an enemy when China has never done jack shit to Canada for allegedly spying through tik tok, but scolding off the southern neighbor which we have multiple proofs has put all Canadians under mass surveillance (from communication to movement) for which we have proofs and leaks by whistleblowers like Snowden or the AT&T guy.

That's what worries me, the easiness with which we label one as enemy, and assume the other one being normal.

China proveably opened illegal police stations in Canada. China arrested two Canadians and threw them in prison in pure retaliation when Canada detained a Chinese CEO in her mansion in Vancouver.

The issue here is that TikTok was allowing its offices to act on behalf of the CCP in opposition to Canadian interests. If we discover Google is running anti Canadian CIA ops we would have an issue with that as well.

The difference is presumably that Canada is happy to have google collect data since google is happy to cooperate with CSIS.

You're deaf aren't you.

What you're pointing out is peanuts (in practice, and overblown in news) compared to your southern neighbour spying and meddling, so why are things that would be very minor such a huge issue?

Peanuts become a real problem when the country throwing them is a totalitarian dictatorship, and spying becomes tolerable when the country doing it is a democracy.

How many people are forgetting those basics will never cease to surprise me.

First of all, when intelligence services are concerned, it doesn't seem like it matters much whether it's a democracy or not, since everything is done in secret. So voters (even in a two-party system) couldn't really make informed voting decisions on anything related, unless of course whistleblowers inform us about the secretive stuff. But even then, not much seems to differ between a republican and a democract president / government.

So, effectively, it seems like US voters have the same amount of influence on their intelligence services' spying, both domestic and international, than citizens of China do.

Long story short, "spying becomes tolerable when the country doing it is a democracy" is definitely not something I agree with, at least not in the democractic setups we see in the west (and that includes Europe, to be clear).

I'm not deaf, but please don't use a disability as a slur for ignorance.

I'm not defending what the US has done, but compromising elected officials in the House of Parliament is not 'peanuts' by any measure, and it is something that China has done, and the US hasn't.

I also have never said that what the US is doing is acceptable.

If Google opened offices that were a CIA front posing a national security risk, I would expect them to be shown the door as well. From what I understand, the reason Bytedance had their offices shut down was because they were acting as a front for the CCP.

There is just a lot of really dumb people we live with.

Imagine believing there would be something as powerful as Tiktok and it wouldn't be used for propaganda purposes.

It is just boring agreeing with these morons at this point. Let them live in their dream world as they pretend to be smart. Sheep are easy to herd.

You're projecting.

The only naivety I see is assuming this is any different in our media (legacy or web based), especially when we have multiple evidence of the contrary on our own platforms.

Canada and China are absolutely not on good terms diplomatically. There is a lot of recent history of disagreeable behavior by the Chinese involving Canada and Canadians.

This might be related to CANCON rules. If TikTok can’t have Canadian offices then they can’t qualify for Canadian content.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

They are banning offices, not the actual app though

I think that the idea is that once they ban the offices, then they might have stronger legal justification to ban the app.

If related then media from all other countries but Canada should be banned from distributing in Canada?

There's a mandatory ratio for public broadcasting. It does ensure that the (same five) Canadian bands get radio airplay (35% must be Canadian), that broadcast television airs Canadian produced shows (50% annually), and so on. So, in a sense, yes?

Everybody needs to read Manufacturing Consent [1].

A big part of that is how the media is used to push a particular narrative. Every US tech company plays ball with the US government and moves in lockstep with US foreign policy.

The threat of Tiktok (to Western governments) is that allows users to see things that other platforms bury, downrank, outright block or otherwise censor.

A big example of this was the train derailment in East Palestine, OH [2] last year. I reember for at least a week seeing things about the chemical spill, the evacuations and the smoke from the burn (which was visible from space) and I saw absolutely nothing on mainstream media.

You see this in the last year where what's happening on the Middle East manages to get out on Tiktok in a way it really doesn't on IG, Youtube or Facebook [3]. Information simply cannot be tolerated to move as freely as this, hence the scare campaign about Chinese control of Tiktok.

That's why you don't see any effort to, say, have a data protection regime. The goal is to control what you're allowed to see.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/east-palestine-ohio-train-derail...

[3]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

CNN did an hour-long town hall on the East Palestine disaster two weeks later, which doesn't really fit your narrative. They did a few stories on it at the time and reported it on-air, but didn't focus on the story immediately.

The opposing take is that the chinese government has a special interest in pushing the palestine narrative, which otherwise wouldn't be popular/of interest in the US. I personally don't give a shit about it, and I bet the same is true of most people. Naturally it wouldn't get very far on a normal social media without special effort directed towards promoting it.

> ... which otherwise wouldn't be popular/of interest in the US

I don't accept the premise that you can completely manufacture interest in something that people aren't interested in. The majority of people don't actually want US bombs being dropped on women and children and China didn't make them feel this way.

> I personally don't give a shit about it

That's a position of incredible privilege (and lack of empathy) because it doesn't affect you. Not everyone is unaffected. Not everyone lacks empathy.

> I bet the same is true of most people

You'd be wrong. Two thirds of Americans strongly or somewhat support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza [1]. Enough people cared about this to start a grassroots protest in the Democratic Primary, most notably the Michigan "Uncommitted" movement, which scared Democratic power brokers enough to get Biden to not seek reelection. And Gaza lost Michigan for Kamala Harris yesterday.

Be careful throwing out statements like "the same is true for most people" because where are you getting that from? You, like everyone, live in a bubble to some degree. The people around you are more likely to be similar to you. They're also a small sample and not entirely random. You need some empirical evidence or sound statistical sampling before you can start drawing conclusions.

[1]: https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/2/27/voters-suppor...

Canadian here. Disappointed by the lack of transparency. First, no corporation should be unilaterally shut down without a clear explanation provided, including facts & evidence (which would normally come to light during due process).

Second, if the company is as dangerous as they say, they are doing a huge disservice to citizens by withholding that information and handicapping our ability to make an informed choice about using the app.

Pushing their operations out of Canada also reduces their accountability footprint to subsequent lawsuits or legislation.

This is a weird half-measure and I have trouble making sense of it.

> Citing national security concerns, the federal government has ordered TikTok to shutter its Canadian operations — but [Canadian] users will still be able to access the popular video app.

> "It is important for Canadians to adopt good cyber security practices and assess the possible risks of using social media platforms and applications, including how their information is likely to be protected, managed, used and shared by foreign actors, as well as to be aware of which country's laws apply."

I am sure that Canadians will totally do this.

TikTok does to the Canadian people what the rulers of Canada do to its people. That's why the govs are mad at TikTok: they can't ban its methods, for it's the same methods the govs use to fool their peoples. TikTok simply identifies your fears, likes and dislikes, and plays on them. It can divide the populace into two sample groups and run an A/B test on them.

However that's not the endgame. I believe the current phase is simply gathering data and creating personal profiles accurate enough to imitate humans. With a bit of progress in AI those imitations will be used to create videos on the fly, tailored to each user. Those videos won't be limited by laws of physics or common sense, and this will give them an impressive insidious power.

“Bans ByteDance” might be better wording.

Not a single mention of the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act"?

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

Interesting timing on that one...

"Your starting date is April 24, 2024 so that means that 270 days later would be January 19, 2025."

Anything to read into the timing?

what timing? I have no idea what you are referring

He waited a year after receiving the intel? He is being roasted for foriegn interference at the moment? He is about to call an election? Salt Typhoon just broke? And Trump is about to light things up on the Foriegn Affairs file?

I actually have no idea either.

Perhpas a response to Canadian government network being hacked by Chinese intelligence:

https://therecord.media/canada-20-government-agencies-hacked...

Doesn't hurt to proactively appease the next leader of the US. Especially an ornery one looking to settle some scores.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this news broke a day after trump's election.

Where is China …which could demand access to the data of TikTok's U.S. consumers through Chinese national security laws… different to the USA in that context?

If you're wondering how bad the situation is regarding young men perception of reality, take a look at genz reddit and at the hottest post of SubredditDrama (the one that talks about genz reddit). On one hand, we should do something at a societal level to prevent young guys go into the red pill rabbit hole. On the other hand, TikTok being banned is a big deal, and I can't say whether it will pay off or not, but sure as hell I hope it does

Edit

On a second read (it's been a long day) they're closing offices but not banning the app, my comment is worthless. But feel free to check out the genz subreddit and get appalled but what's being said there

An interesting perception of Reddit is to analyze how many subreddits/threads contain hate/anger inducing topics or replies, and of how many accounts with 1m+ karma post inconsequential or random information constantly and consistently get thousands of upvotes per post.

I always try to keep a neutral understanding of topics, and I find that once my research involves exploring what others have found on reddit, it becomes weirdly easy to get sucked into addictive pits fueled by emotion. Certainly unfortunate since the name Reddit as a name translates to "read it", suggesting idea sharing of some sort.

I try to limit addictive features by disabling things like thumbnails, recommendations, or some cookies, but Reddit is the only social media platform where I've seriously considering just blocking it entirely.

Edit: typo

I use reddit mainly for the same 5 niche subreddits I visit often

>we should do something at a societal level to prevent young guys go into the red pill rabbit hole

People like you who think others should be banned from accessing information that might cause them to develop certain political views are a big part of why so many people are being radicalised. That's the reason Joe Rogan gave for endorsing Trump for US president, that Kamala Harris had explicitly threatened to censor social media.

I was talking more about preventing they get into those rabbit holes, such as Idk, emotional education at school or something like that, I don't know what could work. But anyway, do you know who's the guy that has banned some accounts on his platform just because and that doesn't ban accounts spewing huge lies? It's not kamala, it's musk

Title should be "Canadian government": it doesn't matter who is in which seat, if the government does something, that's the government doing something..

2dough needed legislative click bait to get it he sanctioned a tiny sub entity of ticktock,rather than say the Canadians protesting his natzi loving ass it worked,sort off kind of like tumpy getting ellected the day before,which was only out of frustration from not bieng able to vote for Kim Dong Bong,or putin the actual sentiment,as demonsrtated on capitol hill's in a country near you is too rip the whole mess out and start over

> "in wake of national security review of popular social media app"

Where is the outrage then?

The outrage is probably posted on TikTok.

so it's a problem already solved from the legal government's standpoint?

Exactly.

It's prudent for any country to ban products that are not legal in the country that controls their design and production.

TikTok is blocked in China because it's deemed to be harmful to their citizens.

A quick google search shows that China uses a censored version of TikTok; they are not using the international version.

This seems like political theatre. Recently, Trudeau claimed that he has direct evidence against members of the opposition party engaged in "foreign interference" with China[1] There are also allegations by others that members of his own party have also been implicated. And yet he refuses to release the names, or elaborate on any of these allegations for the public.

Essentially, he's using China to distract from his own policy failings at home.

[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/trudeau-says-he-has-list-of-...

> he's using China to distract from his own policy failings at home.

It’s not at all clear that that is even plausible. Also, the CSIS appears to be making very unequivocal statements in support of the policy approach.

> It’s not at all clear that that is even plausible.

Given this latest news about Tik Tok, i'd say it's more than likely, since this is hardly the biggest threat from China, especially if they've compromised members of the government.

You would think it would be an all out 5-alarm fire, and dealt with in the most expedient (and hopefully transparent) way possible. So that the public know they can trust all their government representatives.

> Also, the CSIS appears to be making very unequivocal statements in support of the policy approach.

The government has investigated itself, and found itself innocent, and following a divine path.

> The government has investigated itself, and found itself innocent, and following a divine path.

You do know that "the government" is 1) actually made up of independent branches, and; 2) its various organizations largely operate at arms' length... Right?

It was the same with the assasination of the Khalistan movement leader in Canada. Trudeau was quick to blame the Indian state without any proof or details. Just “trust me bro, CSIS/CSEC says so”.

That kind of accusation needs some evidence.

This is a poor take because he can't release more information than he already did.

Sorry, yours is the poor take. If the government has the right to seize the bank accounts of Canadians, without due process, then the government also has the power to release any information they want.

Just because they invent reasons to keep it secret, doesn't mean that's what's right, or most healthy for an honest and functioning democracy.

Those don't correlate at all. You're bonkers.

You don't have a clue what you're talking about. You don't provide any evidence about their inability to disseminate the information, you just assert it as fact because you seem to support government overreach.

So is Tucows stuck paying the rest of the lease?

step.1 Close their branch offices. step.2, So the app would stores Canadians' information abroad. step,3 Banned app,end.

They should do Xitter and Reddit next.

From the article:

"I'm not at liberty to go into much detail, but I know Canadians would understand when you're saying the government of Canada is taking measures to protect national security, that's serious."

In other words, Canadian government saying, "Just trust us, bro".

Ban Trudeau

If they only had remote workers this wouldn't be a big deal. Shame on you tiktok for making everyone return to the office.

As a Canadian I’m just left wondering what scandal the Liberals are trying to cover up now.

should ban X too - it’s a rats nest of disinformation bots and brainwashed idiots.

Why all the handwringing about TikTok, but not about X?

Nobody seems to talk about the whale in the room which is the concept of short videos, aka digital crack cocaine and the ad business model, aka good old brain washing.

People worry about 'data exfiltration', but that is exactly what these products are - collect data about the users and sell it to advertisers.

Where the servers are located is of very little consequence in my opinion.

Yeah, I mind that 'my data' (whatever that might be) is stored on a communist hard drive and there's a brain washed data scientist running ideological queries through it.. The issue is not the ideology, but the fact that someone is running queries through my data collected while I'm using the digital drug to later manipulate me.

Hell yeah, screw TikTok and the horse it rode in on.

(Canadian founder in unrelated domain)

The CIA controls TikTok's censorship. Trudeau is doing this since Trump may change the US gov's censorship to no longer push a left agenda. Then political right Canadians that get censored in 2024 won't get censored in 2025 and beyond.

Therefore, surprise, surprise, Trudeau censors it now the day after the US election.

There is no censorship - the application is still available in Canada. The order is to close offices in Vancouver and Toronto.

In May of this year, the Canadian government ordered two drone detection companies (Pegauni and Bluvec) to shut down using almost the exact same wording.

For comparison (this is actually quite interesting), here is the ByteDance release:

https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...

And here is the Bluvec/Pegauni release:

https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...

So, there’s no censorship but the releases are extremely similar to drone detection companies.

Do you have any proof to support these conspiracy theories?

Yes, this data is for American and Canadian companies to collect and sell!

What data does china allow American and Canadian companies to collect and sell regarding Chinese citizens?

The citizens should be making that choice, not the government. You speak of them like serfs.

If it walks like a duck

Who do you think elects the govt in Canada?

China is a communist country, the US and Canada are liberal economies and benefit a lot from that. Should the US and Canada be allowed to behave like that, why would Europe, Asia and other countries of the Americas still allow US Big Tech to do as they please?

> why would Europe, Asia and other countries of the Americas still allow US Big Tech

Well I guess if they want access to what those tech companies offer, then that is why.

But maybe they don't want access to the benefits of US tech companies. Thats understandable.

Just like I am perfectly fine with us not getting the "benefits" of tiktok.

The problem is solved in my book if there is a decoupling of these tech industries. Personally, I think the US tech industry is better and will provide the most benefits. But if other countries don't want that, thats fine by me as well.

I wish you were the president then, nobody in the white house agree with you

China hasn't been communist since Deng Xiaoping. It's not liberal, though, it's a tightly controlled economy.

Doesn’t Europe and a lot of Asia rely on US for defense?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...

The Canadian government needs to gain control over the internet before the internet outcompetes the Canadian government...But every effort to impose totalitarianism will be mocked, resisted, & rejected. The Canadian government is cooked.

Canada is a part of FIVE-EYES, so through extension you can very easily argue that they already control the internet with complete impunity.

Same goes for the U.S, if citizens are banned from using an app you don't live in a democracy.

Democracy means having the ability to cast a preference, and citizens have voted twice for a guy saying he would ban TikTok, not sure what's more democratic than that

but ordered society also means "elections change nothing, there are rules"

so then, under this premise, what changes things? a vote in congress

He explicitly said he wouldn't ban TikTok during his second campaign.

social media platforms are an arm of state. as much as i distrust this government and its motives, there is every reason to treat the company as a front for CCP policy.

that said, banning their operations appears to remove any legal leverage the govt might have with the company while still dealing with the app being installed everywhere, which seems clumsy. with less than a year left in office the govt probably doesn't have any remaining runway for strategy, so this may just be posturing. there are a lot of ways to look at it.

cynically I might speculate there could be a domestic surveillance/interception rationale for making them close their operations, as the app is a full communications platform and if it backhauls to a domestic regional data centre, the federal agencies need warrants to do interception and would have to give their monitoring tech to the chinese company on their premises, whereas if the traffic is international, they can do mass interception using their existing mandates.

The problem with this type of banning is that from the Chinese perspective it is equivalent to slapping on tariffs for cars. It sends a signal to them that Western countries can't compete on a fair playing ground.

Now I am not dismissing they are using algorithm to manipulate what users see, but doesn't our social networks do the same thing? Yes, China also bans our social networks. But I can't help but see we are no better.

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