US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19 | Hacker News Reader

US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19

reuters.com

326 pointsthunderbong733 comments

I really hate how people are arguing that it should be banned because of the content being inappropriate in one way or another when the content you see is based on how you interact with the app. We don't all see the same stuff. So yeah China may have more educational content but that's probably just becuase the people there are interested in that stuff. When I travel to the mountains, I get more outdoorsy/hiking videos. When I'm in my hometown, I get things relevant to our community. It's really a beautiful algorithm once you get to know it. And its so sad that the most ignorant in our society feels like they can make decisions like this for the rest of us. This sort of issue shouldn't even be state or municipal issue, it should be a household one.

Are you aware of what happened in Romania with Tiktok?

A candidate got funded by foreign agents, paid for influencers, and sprinkled with Russian bot accounts it was enough to make a pro-Russian candidate get 20% of votes when he was an unknown political figure.[0]

The app allows this. You can try to distract everyone from an app that enables illegal foreign interference by hiding under the guise of "oh, this is just what people want to hear; the problem isn't Russia but Romanian politicians." - that's a very dangerous stance and a threat to free & fair elections.

[0]https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/romania-tiktok-pr...

And that's why X/Twitter should be banned too... ;-)

And Facebook too !! :-D

(obviously kidding but... well... not so much after seing https://www.france.tv/documentaires/documentaires-societe/67... )

Not so much, which is precisely why China does ban Twitter and Facebook. I’d love to have a detente where every country has a permissive policy towards social media apps and accepts some degree of soft power from it, but that’s not where we’re at.

So the US wants to be like China???

The US wants to be much more like a wartime US, in the face of its most intense completion since WWII. I think most Americans have no conception of what WWII era US censorship and propaganda looked like, but it looked a lot like modern peacetime China. TikTok is being treated more gently than Tokyo Rose.

Of course things will not go that far domestically... unless the shooting starts.

X is a fine example of a platform tuned to push propaganda, which helped get Trump elected. I wouldn't be shocked if X gets banned on EU for example, hopefully, they will set the example.

And HN! And GitHub!

But is the issue really the app itself? Or that not a symptom of a larger problem, or even multiple problems, we face, seemingly now more than ever before? I don’t want to say „banning TikTok is wrong“, I honestly do not know. But I don’t think it it solves any of the underlying problems. It may make it harder to hit these vulnerable demographics directly in the short term, but it won’t solve media literacy, corruption, or any of the other issues involved.

Taxing social media companies and using the tax proceeds to fund transparency initiatives would be interesting. E.g. grants to researchers and civil society labs

Make them pay to monitor the problem they potentially create.

The solution to this is to change the way elections work to make it harder to pull off this kind of short term influence pumping. The problem is that it’s possible to flood the zone with shit before people have a chance to have discourse on it.

I’ve heard a number of ideas including multiple round elections with averaged results. That way if someone pops in round one the discourse can focus a spotlight on them and if people don’t like what they see on closer inspection they can push the other way in round two.

The other problem though is that establishment politicians are so unpopular in so many places around the world that a rando with a simple catchy meme-worthy message can run in from nowhere and upset things. If the establishment were more responsive to the people it would be harder to do this.

All social media is a fertile ground for propaganda and manipulation by bots. The only way forward is to ban politics in all social media.

You can't ban politics. Everything is politics.

If everything is politics then nothing is.

Exactly, and that's why it's so pointless to ban politics. Whatever you include in or exclude from that ban is in itself a political decision.

1. TikTok isn't being banned in Romania

2. Meta has a far worse track record here.

If your argument is social media allows the subversion of free and fair elections there is no reason for TikTok to be singled out. In fact you could argue that WhatsApp groups should be banned as well.

So how do we ensure that Tiktok doesn't covertly alter the algorithm to subtly include propaganda tailored to China's geopolitical interests that are detrimental to the US? Or even just propaganda tailored to enhance internal strife to weaken the country?

this is the exact same question being asked around the global - how could you be sure that American made LLMs are not altered in a way to maximize US interests at the costs of everyone else's.

Or like, movies?

> The agreement was seen as a way to "spread the American way of life" though a war-torn France (and Europe at large)

> To further the cultural propagation effect of the Blum–Byrnes agreements, the informational Media Guaranty Program was established in 1948 as part of the Economic Cooperation Administration to "guarantee that the US government would convert certain foreign currencies into dollars at attractive rates, provided the information materials earning the moneys reflected appropriate elements of American life".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreemen...

There's also the agreement where movie studies can use real war machines as props, provided they agree to make the US military forces appear heroic, noble and victorious.

Simple - no one asked you to use American LLMs. The same way no one asked you to rely on America to power your defence forces.

You cannot. But in US you have elections every 4 years wheres in Russia or China both Putin and Xi are "elected" for their lifetime. Does it tell you anything ?

> But in US you have elections every 4 years

That is why populism is always the winner.

I don't like Xi, I won't support anyone to be in power for life. That being said, I'd pick Xi over losers and criminals like Trump at any day.

How do you know that Xi is not criminal ? His decisions "affected" (read: killed or thrown in jail) thousands or tens of thousands people (more ?).

Xi is just Trump without the idiocy.

Chinese national living in China, I am openly anti-CCP, I don't like Xi. I can write a thesis on this, but let's just cut to the bones -

12 years in power, Xi led China to become the largest industrialised nation on earth with its industrial output larger than the G7 combined, Xi led China to be in leading roles in ALL emerging sectors, e.g. mobile internet, renewable energy, Evs, AI etc when the entire EU and Japan just gave up.

What that 6 times bankruptcy Trump managed to achieve? Trump should be nice to Xi, as Xi is the only statesman of Trump's time, Trump is just a reality show host getting into a renewed season of his show.

Xi accomplished a lot when he felt some restraints internally and externally- as those restraints have fallen away and he's been unleashed to do as he will, his 'touch' has faded alongside.

Stopped reporting real economic numbers as they've gotten bad, losing influence in his neighborhood as he's tried to steal control over the surrounding ocean, state owned/controlled enterprises being unfairly promoted extinguishing vital home-grown entrepreneurial sprit and a variety of other avoidable ills.

Unconstrained power will always expose one's weaknesses and unearned verities. Trump's second term will be an interesting pushback to see if any of these exposed Xi weaknesses cause a real crisis inside China.

And both parties are almost exactly the same with foreign policy.

The "two-party system" in the U.S. is perhaps broken beyond repair, and presents an illusion of choice in many ways rather than an actual choice.

I was referring to "how could you be sure that American made LLMs are not altered in a way to maximize US interests at the costs of everyone else's."

But your answer intelligently redirecs focus to different topic. Is it on purpose ?

May you precise your thoughts? I genuinely didn’t get the supposedly evident message before “Does it tell you anything ?”

The bipartisan system in the US show that free and regular elections isn’t enough to prevent some dictatorship drawbacks, like when policies are made to serve a party and not the population interest. They don’t often coincide.

To come back to LLM that could be an alteration to favor one party or another, or even both by occulting what people don’t like in the party system.

At the end it might be "good for US” with US as an organisation which want to preserve itself. But not "good for US” as US a group of citizen wanting a system that serve their interest.

I wasn't responding to any upthread point you might have made about LLMs, I was responding to your suggestion that U.S. is more democratic than China. I don't see much of a difference, and if anything there's a very real possibility the two-party system allows people in charge of policy to distract from many issues with partisan politics.

Both parties are the same with how they cater to the wealthy and the capitalist class. Compared to China where there is one party, sure, but elected officials arguably work more directly for the working class.

Spoken like someone with absolutely no experience of living in China. Peak HN.

The world doesn’t elect US presidents. We are referring to the relationship of non-US citizen to US elected officials. The intra US selection of officials doesn’t matter in this context of who sits on a higher moral horse.

it's the same in the USA as it is elsewhere. you just have the illusion of picking someone here.

And they'll have the same choice to make. That they can make this choice shouldn't alter whether the US makes the choice on it's own merits.

What’s funny is nothing could be worse for our country than post war US foreign policy. Check out the wikipedia article on US foreign interventions. We don’t need China to fuck us up by subtly sending messages, we have our entire political establishment overtly doing it every day in DC.

"U.S. bad so just ignore outside influence". Can you imagine a world where both should be taken seriously? Or are you just here to minimize?

Our official policy is to bankrupt our country by medaling in the affairs of everyone else, how could their “influence” possibly be any worse?

You don't see how subordinating a country to another's goals could be worse than policy you disagree with?

I don’t see how some nebulous speculation about the influence of ideas that could then potentially lead to a bad outcome is a relevant conversation when we’re actively perpetually destroying ourselves from within on a daily basis no.

so in answer to my question - no you can't even imagine both could be bad. Your talking points sound very tankie so I guess nuance isn't to be expected.

Do you really think TikTok has more power in the US than the local oligarchs and warlords? Short-form video does more to "internal strife" than the lack of basic government services, widespread substance abuse and state violence?

Littering is against the law despite murders going unsolved ~50% of the time.

TikTok doesn't have to be the greatest threat of all time to be subject to regulation around its ownership or behavior. Other problems can be addressed too. It's not like the entire country can only do one thing at a time.

Why are you changing the subject?

They directly addressed your question.

No, they went on a tangent about whether regulating something necessarily means you can't regulate something unrelated.

I asked whether the person I responded to actually have the beliefs they expressed, i.e. that the threat of internal strife in the US is in the future and comes from services like TikTok. Some people say things like that to practice loyalty to the tyranny they suffer under, while other people do it because they believe in it. To clear it up matters, because such reasons indicate whether someone is reachable through reasonable discourse or not.

I don’t know who specifically you mean by “local oligarchs and warlords”. Do I think TikTok has more power and influence in the US than the average Fortune 500 CEO? Without a doubt.

Why do you bring up "Fortune 500" CEO:s? They only administrate businesses, they don't own them, unlike oligarchs.

When you read that quote, you can't think of anyone that would fit? You don't come to think of the Kochs, Clintons, Trumps, Musks, Obamas, Sacklers, Murdochs, Bidens and so on?

No, and even with those names listed out I don't really understand what category you're pointing at. Your list includes the sitting president and president-elect of the country, who do of course have quite a lot of power. Do I think that TikTok has more power than Rupert Murdoch? Probably not, Murdoch owns a wider variety of media even if he doesn't have any single dominant app. More power than Richard Sackler or Bill Clinton? Again, yes, without a doubt.

As a myth- and truth-maker I'm sure Bill Clinton outweighs TikTok by a huge margin. Compare speaking out against his recent theocratic and genocidal outbursts with speaking out against some stuff on TikTok, one can get you fired from middle class positions of authority, like teaching at universities, the other is perfectly safe unless it also goes against US elites.

I don't know what "theocratic and genocidal outbursts" you're referring to, but it's completely untrue that criticizing Bill Clinton can get you fired from teaching at a university. I'm not sure where you could have gotten the idea that it's rare or dangerous to criticize politicians in the US.

You should listen to his campaign speech in Dearborn, and later he went to a conference and basically said that the palestinians deserve to be exterminated because Arafat left the Camp David talks.

Over the last year many US academics and students have been abused because they openly dissent with or protest against the warlords in charge.

And basically said that the palestinians deserve to be exterminated

By "basically said" you mean that this is your hyperbolic/moralistic interpretation of what he said.

But not what he actually said.

“All [young people in America] know that a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from".

Extremely callous and nasty.

Interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZtuF_etO4o

Here you can hear an expert comment on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr1qrbMg1tA

But not "Palestinians deserve to be exterminated".

That's just a weird, semantic distortion.

Traditional media is dead in the US. Joe Rogan dwarfs media midgets like CNN, in both ratings and shear influence. Most of this new media is still using platforms based in the US or friendly nations, but that balance of power could shift very quickly. The rapid rise of TikTok shows that the dominance of American platforms cannot be taken for granted, and so the government is reacting in a bipartisan manner to this threat.

CNN has billions of dollars in yearly revenue, as does NYT. Has Rogan ever had more than fifty million in a year?

His show is not revolutionary or dissident in the least, he isn't at all politically or socially motivated.

How about this: maybe the restrictions and threat of ban on TikTok is about the CLOUD Act and unfettered, secret access to personal data?

As a European I have to ask the very same questions about US apps and European interests.

Even though I personally do not harbour strong suspicions towards the US, it's not a given that the US will always act favourably towards the EU, Europe as a whole, or any one particular EU country in the future. Especially in light of recent elections.

Europe should ban American social media companies. They'd be doing themselves a favor, and a favor to most Americans as well (who, shareholders excepted, do not personally benifit from these tech corps being so massive.)

I think every country should develop their own social media. It would be best if it was federated-like services that smaller countries could just run the plain open source version of.

Any democratic country that has a large portion of their population using american social media is essentially a modern US colony.

> I think every country should develop their own social media.

There is Mastodon already, which is federated. EU already set up their own servers.

It is federated and it has benefits but the UX is garbage for average people and the actual protocol isn't one that'll scale.

You don't need an A+ protocol to get great if your product is good enough / dead simple to use but neither of those things apply to Mastodon, as much as I'd like them to.

I don't see how Mastodon's UX is worse than the one of Twitter, which is good enough, judging by the number of users.

That would result in a domino effect that would inevitably result in the internet being segregated by nationality.

The walled gardens would be. On the other hand it would likely drive interoperability.

Add Tiktok to those as well. In fact it should be the first one banned along with Meta.

Joe Biden cannot call up facebook and tell them to show everyone on Instagram ponies tomorrow.

However, if Xi Jinping calls up Bytedance and tells them to show everyone ponies tomorrow, your tiktok feed will infact be all ponies tomorrow.

The revelations from the twitter files show that this is true. Social media works in tandem with US Federal Agencies to review what people see or don't.

and checks and balances allowed it to eventually come out, even though i think facebook knew they could fight it in court. In China that is not an option, Xi and his circle say is what happens with no recourse other than a straight up rebellion by the people of China.

You'd be surprised on how much government has their hands in US big tech companies.

Via various incentives and regulation, they kind of can

Which can be openly discussed, critiqued, etc. Or in the case of X, bought up by a private citizen and turned into a completely different animal. There's important and significant similarities, but they are worlds apart.

Good observation and argument. US politicians might be in for a rude surprise, if this effort to ban boomerangs on them, in the form of other countries making the same arguments and wanting to ban popular American made and controlled software.

I think this is a positive. We should be happy other countries reducing the tentacle lengths of US social media vorps (or Chinese social media like tiktok)

As a US citizen I would support your right to limit facebook/twitter/etc exposure to your citizens, especially with the incoming administration. That's why I think it's also appropriate for the US to oppose a adversarial government injecting propaganda here, especially to our most vulnerable to it.

Then create a bill that targets this specifically. Does this same concern not exist for Yandex? Alibaba?

You honestly sound paranoid.

So if you can't control something, ban it for everyone. Got it.

I guess you're someone familiar with programming and algorithms begin this is HN, so you must be able to understand that it would be trivial for TikTok to serve different kinds of content to people based on their geographical location and other attributes?

They do. Like I know for a fact that I get different content in different cities. But it's algorithmic. I don't think anyone at TikTok is saying let's manipulate specific locations. They don't need to and it would be too risky and not worth the tech debt tbh. Besides, you can do it as a third party with bots.

So like whatever replaces it will get manipulated just the same. Facebook has had this problem for over a decade now and nobody's solved it. Let's just admit that national governments are stupid.

The thing is, if they wanted to influence an election they could easily do it. They could start to feed you content which is bias towards "their" candidate, and there is no way you could probe they did that intentionally because "it's just an algorithm".

They don't need to and it would be too risky and not worth the tech debt tbh.

lol, a targeted propaganda machine would be worth every bit of a tech debt for an authoritarian regime.

>This sort of issue shouldn't even be state or municipal issue, it should be a household one.

And I guess you believe that every consumer product and service should be treated strictly as household issue.

For absolutely everything - even the most dangerous, toxic and antisocial ones, I can find one good use case credible enough to ask other to behave themselves. And I'm no David Hahn.

No dude. Just for software.

This is really naive. These algorithms can be and are tuned to manipulate the audience.

That being said, it’s not fair to single out TikTok. They all do it. The only unique danger with TikTok is that it could be controlled by a foreign adversary, or at least could be more easily than the others.

> That being said, it’s not fair to single out TikTok.

> The only unique danger with TikTok is that it could be controlled by a foreign adversary, or at least could be more easily than the others.

Isn't that the entire reason given for why they are singling them out? You say it's not fair then give the exact reason why it seems to be.

I think they mean that those should also be banned, but this ban isn't about addictive technology, it's about China owning the addictive technology and being able to exert control over it if they wanted. I also am of the opinion that this addictive technology should be regulated, including domestic.

At least they should be clear it's about control.

The danger with TikTok is that some already used it to influence elections (recently in Romania) so it is proven to be working.

It's important to differentiate worries here.

Issue #1: The platform owner itself uses the platform algorithm(s) to manipulate public opinion

Issue #2: Third parties use the platform to manipulate public opinion (e.g. Romania)

#1 could be solved by algorithmic transparency.

#2 could be solved by more realtime transparency into content.

People not associated with the app developer publishing material on TikTok to influence elections works just as well on YouTube Shorts and Reels.

It is fair to isolate TikTok becaues it is controlled by an adversarial world power. That's a lot different than facebook/instagram/etc pumping out addictive engagement tripe, which I think should have some serious limits on age availability using them, but that is an adjacent topic and not on the same level as a foreign power using the same techniques. The US government is giving them an out, which is to sell to a friendly foreign nation's company or to a US company, if TikTok won't take them up on it then it's time to cut them off.

You don't know how it works, you think you know how it works. The algo is proprietary and secret.

Exactly. The real fix here would be to require algorithmic transparency for any social media entity with a userbase greater than some threshold.

Transparent to the degree that if there were a centrally managed influence campaign, researchers would be able to detect it in near real-time.

China and the US are in a deepening cold war. Our political systems are fundamentally opposed so conflict is inevitable (given there is no higher authority to manage our relations). If you are looking for some specific justification for a ban, you're missing the forest for the trees.

> Our political systems

The rift has nothing to do with the political system (e.g. the US is freely and openly allied with Saudi Arabia despite radically different political systems), and everything to do with the competition for power and influence in the world. SA is not a real contender there, China is. From here the rift and inevitable conflict.

> If you are looking for some specific justification for a ban, you're missing the forest for the trees

Every reason for the ban comes from the above competition for power and influence in the world. Whether it's not having an adversary financially profit from your own citizens or influence their decisions, or it's to eliminate foreign competition and fill the gap with local companies, it's all abut power and money and the political system couldn't matter less.

> power and influence

good observation but it's probably both. The EU is a significant center of power and influence but so far the US hasn't started banning bidets.

The EU is neither willing nor capable of challenging US supremacy economically or politically any time soon (not even mentioning the military). And as it stands with the current war in Ukraine the EU was further shot in the foot. Today the EU is a good ally to further bolster US' claim for supremacy.

China on the other hand has all but openly challenged the US for that title. On the surface at least they are skyrocketing in every area (won't go into how or why). They had the same "incompatible" political system for decades but they stood as manufacturing partner for many of those decades until Western leaders noticed a trend with a dangerous slope. And as it sank in that inaction means ceding the top spot, here is some action. CIA trying to overturn a regime is a tall order with China so the more handy ways were economic: tariffs and bans.

> so far the US hasn't started banning bidets.

Not really, but it looks like it will impose tariffs on other goods from the EU. [0]

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-warned-to-prepare-for-ear...

You forgot it's mostly about Chinese Communist Party influence (or eventual influence) if they get firmly entrenched in the public mindset of the USA. No nation political apparatus should have such a large direct (actual or potential) influence into the minds of the US public. It's a national security risk of the highest priority. Not every security risk is saber-rattling or direct cybersecurity threats. it's one thing if citizens look up and pursue the CCP's philosophies, but this is about stopping the direct injection of said propaganda straight into our toddlers, teens, and tweens brain. They shouldn't have to suffer because of some absolutists take on the first amendment, when we have various limits for the public good all over the place.

> direct injection of said propaganda straight into our toddlers, teens, and tweens brain

by that same logic, shouldn't we then ban ig/facebook/threads/twitter/etc.? but since its our propaganda, we can classify as 'news' or some other thing?

i very much get what you're saying in principle (re: CCP); however, i don't see the difference in potentially, negatively affecting children's brains.

EDIT: corrected word

Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you feel there should be some higher, ideal-based reason for the ban. But this is happening in the anarchic environment of international relations. The USA’s goal is to reduce the potential for its citizens to be engaged by enemy propaganda. Yes, they are more worried about the influence of Chinese propaganda than domestic propaganda, why shouldn’t they be? This isn’t about ideals, it’s about power. And probably also lots of lobbying from X and Meta.

It's not the same logic at all. One is foreign and the other is domestic and can be regulated and controlled to an extent. Don't you see that?

Fuck your forest. I like my tree.

Yeah, is nothing to do with that, it's "reds under the beds"-level fear of China.

It was fine when it was US companies...

For real. Fear based decision making. Yikes.

Engagement driven algorithms do not necessarily show what users are consciously interested in, but what they subconsciously can't turn away from. You are probably a well-regulated, internet-savvy adult who easily recognizes engagement bait and knows to swipe away form it quickly to train the algorithm to stop showing it to you. People arguing for a ban are probably concerned about how it affects those who are not so regulated using logic similar to arguments for banning drugs.

I do not share that position, but I'm inclined to support some weakening of platform immunity for services that use an individualized recommendation algorithm to maximize engagement.

I did not quickly find an authoritative source, but it is widely reported that Douyin, the Chinese domestic market equivalent of TikTok deliberately favors educational content, especially for children. Here's one news report claiming that: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...

Thanks for sharing that article.

> the distinctions largely owe to stiff regulations in China centered on youth social media use and political dissent.

> The differences between the two apps highlight a comparatively permissive legal environment for social media in the U.S., protecting free expression but also leaving some users -- especially young ones -- vulnerable to addictive behavior, the experts said.

> That same year, Douyin imposed a 40-minute daily limit for users under 14. Last year, Chinese regulators introduced a rule that would limit children under age 18 to two hours of smartphone screen time each day.

It is important for context that the above poster seems to be of the opinion that government rarely if ever can be useful for citizens. So when they say "government shouldn't get involved", it doesn't seem to be a statement of their opinion on social media or tiktok, it is about government in general.

> it would "not directly prohibit the continued use of TikTok" by Apple or Google users who have already downloaded TikTok. But it conceded the prohibitions on providing support "will eventually be to render the application unworkable."

I have a technical question with regards to this.

Typically, censorship* investigation efforts (from academia or elsewhere, such as OONI, Apernet etc.) have tended to focus on non-American countries to map their firewalling infrastructure used to this end.

Since the US was never brought up in these investigations, as an outsider, I got the distinct impression that TLS packets were never interfered with, and the US mostly relied on either seizing the domain and its associated resources (such as in the various piracy cases, the raidforums/breachforums investigation etc.)

Does this mean that a second-order effect of this directive would be asking the ISPs to block requests based on SNI, and in that case would it be a first in the US?

* For the purposes of this discussion, let us step aside the discussion about "censorship" and simply use that term to mean any kind of network filtering used by ISPs.

Would killing .ipa/.apk distribution not suffice? PWA still sucks, no one knows how to deal with .apk let alone invalid signed .ipa, I think it'll effectively prevent any app from going mainstream. Which is crazy but I suppose okay just this one time?

PWA also offer some advantages that apps don’t. As a personal anecdote, I’m often using a 8yo iPhone and as you might guess many apps don’t work anymore. Not because OS incompatibility (still updated thanks to Apple) but because they laaaaag and crash. Local gumtree (Leboncoin, if some dev here) systematically crash at the first in-app add load. Conter-intuitively, many PWA seems to be way more performant on the field. I know this is not the tech itself but bad dev, but that’s my experience so far.

Ah yes, the good old "this one time". Maybe throw a "temporary" into the mix for maximum assurance.

If tiktok popularizes PWA install it will be a great tradeoff

Americans can’t invest directly in Chinese companies and shouldn’t be obligated to host Chinese companies in their markets or be surprised when political whims ban them, since the lack of shared investment is political too. People clearly enjoy the content on there so the outcome is sad but it’s a complicated economic dynamic that is hard to grasp

60% of Bytedance is owned by American investors https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/technology/tiktok-investo...

> Susquehanna, a global trading firm, first invested in ByteDance in 2012 and now owns roughly 15 percent of the company, a person familiar with the investment said. The Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in ByteDance in 2014 when it was valued at $500 million. Sequoia’s U.S.-based growth fund later followed suit.

> General Atlantic, a private equity firm, invested in ByteDance in 2017 at a $20 billion valuation. Bill Ford, General Atlantic’s chief executive, has a seat on ByteDance’s board of directors. The company’s other notable U.S. investors include the private equity firms KKR and the Carlyle Group, as well as the hedge fund Coatue Management.

Literally does not matter. ByteDance is a Chinese company and beholden to the CCP.

Just like US companies are beholden to national security letters that can compel them to spy on non-US persons who may be users of their product?

If other countries ban US websites for specifically that reason, I applaud them.

Especially if they do it without being hypocritical.

China will not only ban American companies or services next, Xi will probably ban the US dollar.

That won’t happen. China would be more angry if the USA all of a sudden didn’t let them participate in treasury auctions.

You know there's a rumor saying Trump/Xi would trade Taiwan with US treasury bonds.

The funny thing is. China can talk about removing the U.S. dollar and trade when Yen. But they need a stable currency to convert between and so conversion is still done with the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar won’t be removed from trade in our life time.

China doesn’t let the RMB float freely, so trade still happens in dollars. Also, the American government buys a lot of treasuries, so it’s easy to save a few billion quickly when you need to, which isn’t really supported by any other currency…saving money by lending it to the USG conversely prevents it from re-entering your own economy and stoking inflation (China isn’t the only country to use the USA like that, Japan buys more treasuries than China usually).

No, not like that.

Yes, it's exactly like that.

Are you suggesting that only a "perfect" government gets to counter the Chinese government's attacks?

It's name in English is the Communist Part of China, CPC not CCP.

This shit winds me up no end.

It feels almost like propaganda in itself, to evoke CCCP connotations.

It would be like if I just decided to start unilaterally referring to a "Language to Markup Hyper-Text" (LMHT) instead of its correct name.

tbf though, even the BBC can't get it right : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg68vyz9lgo

Exactly. I've never heard someone use 'CPC' before. It's quite obvious why the alternative isn't liked.

Apparently, the official CPC is pro-stablishment, unsurprisingly, while the common CCP is anti-stablisment

https://chinamediaproject.org/2023/03/30/ccp-or-cpc-a-china-...

I have been assuming that the ownership is in the Cayman company and it is analogous to the situation with VIEs.

The ownership would have no votes on controlling the company but only ownership for hypothetical dividends on profit from the cayman shell. If anybody knows otherwise please elucidate us.

Oddly enough Snapchat IPOd with stocks with zero control as well.

Americans can definitely invest into most Chinese tech companies- the exception is direct investments into non-tech, licensed companies, that require a VIE structure, which enables Americans to still invest.

This is what I meant by direct investment. Owning true controlling shares versus the cayman economic proxy

    > Americans can’t invest directly in Chinese companies

This is not true. You can trade onshore Mainland China stocks through the Hongkong Stock Exchange. There is a special programmed called "Northbound" and "Southbound" in the broker-dealer industry. (This also allows investors from Mainland China to trades Hongkong stocks.) Any big brokerage should offer access to the Hongkong Stock Exchange. There is even a weird special currency called "CNH" that is the Chinese RMB that is allowed to settled in Hongkong, so you don't need a brokerage account in Mainland China to trade.

That’s a good clarification as not all companies are tech related and there are companies eligible for trading. However northbound trading still follows all applicable laws and there’s no access to direct ownership in some amazing companies

    > there’s no access to direct ownership in some amazing companies

Can you provide some examples?

Americans are selling iPhones into China and are getting exorbital profits from this though. Doesn't look fair to me.

They have Xiaomi - they are free to ban iPhones if they so choose.

Reciprocity is key. Google and Facebook and most Western web services are blocked in China.

If that is the case, then there should be no complaint with blocking Bytedance/other Chinese apps in the West.

They are blocked because they don’t censor content. If they did agree to, they would be allowed - just like Microsoft, Bing, Apple, and a handful of other digital products are not blocked in China.

Edit: for those downvoting me, Google literally shut down their China operations because they were unwilling to comply with censorship requirements. Conversely, Google and other US companies seem completely willing to comply with national security letters that compel them to spy on non-US persons, which should make other countries where US companies operate equally uneasy.

> They are blocked because they don’t censor content.

These platforms certainly do censor content. They have large teams globally that do just that.

I agree, but they have clearly not met the standard for what China needs. I mean Zuck literally was jogging around Beijing 10 years ago trying to build goodwill to get in, and it was Google that made the decision to exit the market.

> They have large teams globally that do just that.

You are spreading the misinformation. Google can't keep up with the censorship shit and gave up as stated in their official blog

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...

> a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results

> We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn

People seem to forget Google had a notorious record a terrible customer service. And China always demand more.

Google did everything right in terms of local execution to get all the required licensure and top talent, and then Sergey threw it away.

Both founders having grown up in communist block countries supposedly had something to do with their aversion. At least that’s what I heard (was working for MS china back then).

And the worst part of a Communism is "planned economy", e.g. the state decides which app/service is good or not.

There was the PLA hacking gmail accounts in Hong Kong also, which supposedly was why Google stopped playing nice in the first place.

It's a rogue state after all.

Surely planned economy was the worst part and not repressions and millions dead under red boot.

the reason behind millions of death because the grain rationing system leaving little to none food for peasants in the 1960s, yeah it's still economical issue.

Bad things happen when the state controls everything.

The US banning a foreign-owned service from operating on its soil (when that foreign country bans many US-based services from operating on their soil) is not a "planned economy". Please don't use low-effort, bad-faith arguments.

Larry grew up in Michigan... a communist country?

(As I heard it, the legend is mostly attributed to Sergey pushing for it, and every time I've heard Eric talk about it it felt there was some disdain there, so I would agree with you that Larry was probably convinced also, otherwise Sergey alone wouldn't have pulled it off.)

In China. They obviously run censorship globally in every country that demands it, it's just that China's demands were worse than everyone else's and they decided it's not worth the effort.

"Doesn't censor content" is probably not describing the situation correctly; while some companies like Google have typically resisted such in the aughts, they regularly take requests from other countries of this sort, and it'd be very simple for them to reenter the China market by having a stance similar to what they have for other countries.

The issue here is probably caused by the requirement for an ICP recordal which requires removal of violating user-generated content within 15 minutes, which is probably a very tight deadline, probably coupled with a strong false positive rate which is why said companies are also hesitant to introduce automation.

It could also be argued that Tiktok is not completely value-aligned with US interests, although this has not been provably shown and whatever we have thus far is speculative.

> ICP recordal which requires removal of violating user-generated content

And the reason behind that? Copy from other comments, "So China can't spy on Americans and astroturf propaganda", swap China/America

> Copy from other comments, "So China can't spy on Americans and astroturf propaganda"

The Chinese versions of these services are walled off from the rest of the world (otherwise the ICP license probably ends up applying to the worldwide service), so this is not even a plausible explanation.

Further, asserting that the requirements imposed by the ICP recordal as being equivalent to following laws in other democracies is laughable; since most democracies make considerations towards good faith motives towards following a law even though there might be misses otherwise, not to mention the kind of content being censored.

this is why I don't like online political arguments, it always come down to faith and infidels

Google tried to, but failed due to employee revolt:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

Microsoft Bing has been merrily operating in China for a very long time: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-03-07/microsoft...

and it is the top1 desktop search engine in China, way ahead of baidu.com.

Try releasing a mobile news app in the US and see how it goes.

Even one that just scrapes Yahoo or something.

This is such a stupid argument. This is about censorship to American citizens and a conversation about losing their rights as an authoritarian state's victims.

American citizens can use the multitude of copy cat apps for their freedom of speech.

If it was about freedom of speech the gov would have requested all the apps to censor the topics, not banning one app.

It is about freedom of speech, the freedom of China's speech within USA.

Part of what constitutes freedom of speech is freedom to hear what someone has to state which is constitutionally protected. The fact that there might be other venues where someone can produce speech, does not mean that the right to hear what someone has to say has not been denied.

Yes, it absolutely does mean that, in this case.

Sure, if finding and joining another platform was a difficult thing, that would be a problem. If no other platforms will host your speech, that's a problem. If your audience is significantly reduced in size, then that's a problem.

But none of that will be the case if TikTok is banned.

They don’t have enough bandwidth to compete with TikTok. There’s a network effect, like YouTube, iMessage, etc.

>multitude of copy cat apps for their freedom of speech.

Except they can't. All of the other apps are under U.S. government control and have engaged in severe censorship on certain topics such as the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Even the politicians who voted for the bill have openly admitted that making Israel looking bad is the reason they are banning TikTok.

This ban effort regained momentum after October 7th, 2023: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/tiktok-ban-israel-...

You believe the famously pro-Israel 4chan /pol/ is under US Government control?

> have engaged in severe censorship on certain topics such as the Israel-Gaza conflict

Then how are you posting it here ? Isn't this a social media network as well.

If TikTok is the only place you can speak and there aren’t equivalent services then it sounds like it needs to be broken up on the basis of being a monopoly.

As there are other services and the only thing being targeted is foreign ownership by members of a country that blocks our services, then no, I don’t think it’s about censorship.

This wasn’t even a ban on TikTok, bytedance could have sold to an American owner but have refused.

You’ll find most of TikTok content on YouTube shorts or on Facebook. Content provider often don’t even bother getting rid of the TikTok watermark.

> This wasn’t even a ban on TikTok, bytedance could have sold to an American owner but have refused.

So, you mean this wasn't even a ban, it was just robbery?

I legitimately believe that classifying this as robbery is a lot closer to the truth than classifying it as censorship.

Not that I’d fully agree with that vis a vis how international relations between China and the USA work, but it’s definitely a more accurate description

a) Using TikTok is not a right.

b) Removing the platform entirely is not censorship. Especially when everyone will just shift to Instagram, Youtube etc.

c) This was a decision made by the US Congress. It is by definition not authoritarian.

> This was a decision made by the US Congress. It is by definition not authoritarian.

Clearly the US Congress represents the will of the majority...

Not how US “democracy” works. The majority in Congress represent a minority of the population.

Montana has one member of the house per 540,000 people. Delaware has one per 990,000 people. Source: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/2020/data...

The US Congress is not supposed to represent the will of the majority. It is supposed to represent "the will of the people," which is distinct, by design. The actual implementation might have imperfections but tries to reflect the "will of the people" as the framers interpreted it.

Either way, there is a large spectrum between whatever it is and "authoritarian."

The house represents the people. The Senate represents the powers that be in each state.

Thanks for clarifying, i understand my phrasing have hit a distinction in the american government bodies which I was not aware and willing to step on.

The essence of my sentence was to be ironinc about any government institution not really doing what is best for the people but what is best for buisness and power.

> Removing the platform entirely is not censorship. Especially when everyone will just shift to Instagram, Youtube etc.

It is, because politicians voted for the bill have openly admitted the Israel-Gaza content is what pushed them to vote for the ban. Instagram, YT, etc are under U.S. control and engage in sufficient self-censorship when it comes the Israel-Gaza conflict in order to make Israel look good.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/tiktok-ban-israel-...

For anyone that has had even moderate experience with TikTok comment moderation, it becomes clear very quickly there's an incredible bias that seemingly disfavours Western interests. This includes calls towards extreme violence that should be banned per their own content policy. I don't think you need to have access to any secret documents to have a good deal of suspicion this platform is being used by foreign actors either directly or indirectly to shape attitudes in the West. If freedom of speech is at stake, protecting TikTok may actually be harmful to that cause.

I don't get why people keep asking for evidence of Chinese government-run influence campaigns on TikTok. It should be obvious that the Chinese government is using TikTok to influence the culture and politics of citizens of other countries. If they are not doing this, then they are wildly foolish and incompetent.

No American will be censored if TikTok is banned. They will simply use (or go back to using) one of the many other non-TikTok alternatives to talk about the same things.

If TikTok were the only game in town, sure, banning it would be censorship. But that's not the case, by a long shot.

This is clearly about censorship, as anyone living outside of the United States can see. It's actually pretty obvious that they're banning the one platform where US oligarchs have no say over what goes viral and what doesn't.

And instead you can get all the spoonfed Chinese propaganda, like all the pro-Hamas content...

So… if China mistreats their citizens, reciprocity says we must mistreat ours?

You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.

As soon as you find yourself arguing that you have no choice but to engage in the same behaviors you claim to dislike, you have literally become the enemy.

> You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.

Can you explain this better without the assumption that it is self-evident?

Sure. If censorship is wrong, then it is wrong. If censorship is just fine, the n it is just fine. It is the height of hypocrisy to engage in censorship in the name of stamping out censorship.

It feels like a tautology because the opposing viewpoint is a very simple hypocrisy. If you don’t like something, don’t do it.

But, it's not really censorship, per se. It's "your company, which is of <this country> cannot do business in our country; because we want to give that a company in our country". And, in that light, doing the reverse (not allowing the company from that country to do business in ours) doesn't seem unreasonable.

I'm not a fan of it, but I can understand the argument for it.

It’s not a censorship issue. It’s about market access. This is a commercial dispute not a freedom of expression one.

There is plenty of other platforms where you will still be able to say whatever you want.

Not Twitter or Truth Social though.

The world isn't black and white. It's very very gray.

Adding Chinese censorship to the mix doesnt improve freedom of speech. At some point we have to stop being naive and operating in the realm of frictionless theory.

Your argument is predicated on the idea that banning TikTok is censorship. It's not. No speech or information is being suppressed; any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms.

This isn't like China where the government bans any services they can't control, and directs the services that they can control to suppress any information they don't want people talking about.

Who says the US isn't controlling the narrative on US social media?

Sure are alot of people insinuating they are

Half of US social media (and more than half of Twitter) is saying US controls the narrative on US social media and something should be done about it. describe logical knots required to explain why that is the narrative if US controls the narrative?

As a Russian people from the West saying how it's total censorship and totalitarianism amuse me.

And I see how totalitarian and censored regimes are using of the lack of censorship with great success.

> any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms

That wholly depends on what are the other platforms. Meta's platforms for example are pretty heavy handed in their censorship:

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

And Youtube is not that much better.

To be fair, some of the same voices that get censored on US platforms are also getting censored on TikTok (though I currently cannot find the posts or articles that highlighted the issue)

> Your argument is predicated on the idea that banning TikTok is censorship. It's not.

My take is that the elite was shocked the American youth is vaning in their Israel support and that they want algorithmic feeds that are sionist. Simple as that.

Well thankfully that ship has sailed. Tiktok has nothing to do with it either, America's youth by in large cast off the zionist evangelical brand of Christianity the babyboomers love so much. This has been going on for decades, tiktok isn't responsible for it.

Anyway, I don't think this is the reason for the tiktok ban. The zionists have lost control of the narrative on American platforms too, they know it, and they have no actionable plan for getting it back. I think the tiktok ban is instead motivated by concerns for what a PRC controlled tiktok could do to military recruitment. Military recruitment hinges on appealing to teenagers, making tiktok a particular threat to the American government. Sending teenagers videos of drones dropping grenades on helpless wounded soldiers can't be canceled out by flying cool military jets over sportsball games.

Any evidence potentially supporting that?

To me it seems that every time a congress critter gets briefed behind closed doors they come out resolved to ban TikTok. Therefore, most likely, the Chinese probably have some insidious goal like profiling every American to ever post online.

I really need to coin the phenomenon of when people attribute the reasoning for something happening as being due to the current thing they care about. I see it so often. Some sort of specific confirmation bias.

Are you refering to me or 'the elite'?

I think some sort of 'bias' is the term. Narrative bias? Opportunity bias?

'China' was the main reason but Gaza tipped the scale, I would say.

>any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms.

That's the arguments right wingers make about why flag burning should be a crime as there are other ways to express displeasure with the country it represents. IIRC, Robert Bork was a proponent of this line of thinking.

"any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms"

Tiktok is not banning certain topics, as other platforms do

The elephant in the room, is that content on Tiktok is served algorithmicaly, so if majority of population prefer to watch brainwash content, it's due to their choice, not algorithm's

It was intentionally designed to have 15 second clips competing for attention, which is the path to brain rot. The’ve slowly increased video length, which will impact what’s on the platform over time.

Also, Ticktock content is curated to fit CCP’s narrative not simply an algorithmic reflection of what its users care about.

>Ticktock content is curated to fit CCP’s narrative not simply an algorithmic reflection of what its users care about.

If you can show evidence of that you should give it to the U.S. government, because it has repeatedly said there is no evidence of such and any threat remains hypothetical.

I’ve read it in a few places ex:

https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Report_-...

Not sure how creditable their research is, but I’d place it above random news articles.

There research is not credible because their only "evidence" is that when using certain keywords, Instagram and YT returned more "anti-China" content than TikTok.

So instead of arguing the U.S. social media has an anti-China bias, they argued that it's the evidence of TikTok being more pro-China.

Using American social media as the control group for neutrality on China is absolutely insane.

The most likely cause is that TikTok is just a lot less political and more international than YT and Instagram.

For rest of the world, people do not automatically associate words like "Xinjiang" to "Chinese government oppression", the fact that they expect that to be the top result can be argued that American media is the one manipulating information.

The damming bits were 100% on Ticktock, no need for comparison.

On TickTock, views to likes ratio for anti China content was 87% lower despite higher upvotes on TickTock anti China content. Read page 4 suppression on anti China content.

That alone shows the algorithmic alone isn’t selecting results and they are instead engaging in propaganda. The credibility question in my mind is in regards to how they are classifying videos and other bits you don’t see, but that’s a deeper question than the methodology.

> If you can show evidence of that you should give it to the U.S. government

Tens of millions of teenage Americans are addicted to it is the evidence. Chinese don't allow their kids to waste all day long on stupid douyin, Americans don't have such luxuries, as tons of red necks are going to jump up and label it as anti free speech if you want something similar. As a result, you see Chinese kids spend time on STEM subjects, building toy robots and learning how to code AI stuff while American kids are all dreaming to be the most popular influencer on social media.

The whole system is an algorithm carefully designed. Let's just be honest. btw, Chinese national posting from China here, you'd be seeing me protesting in the Tiananmen Square if some American social media apps manage to waste Chinese teens time while being carefully restricted in the US for their own kids. It is just shocking to see it takes almost a decade for the US to actually start doing something concrete.

> Tens of millions of teenage Americans are addicted to it is the evidence. Chinese don't allow their kids to waste all day long on stupid douyin, Americans don't have such luxuries, as tons of red necks are going to jump up and label it as anti free speech if you want something similar. As a result, you see Chinese kids spend time on STEM subjects, building toy robots and learning how to code AI stuff while American kids are all dreaming to be the most popular influencer on social media.

So it's Chinas fault that the US doesn't have the same laws restricting social media content and screentime for children? Or, if it is the red necks fault, then how does 'TikTok is spreading CCP propaganda' follow from 'US red necks oppose laws that are anti free speech'? It seems you're skipping some steps to get to that conclusion.

Of course there is difference between institutionalized censorship and making social bubble by our preferences.

Did you ever saw on TikTok videos about Tiananmen Square, pro-democracy protest before covid or generally videos from handicapped people?

> Tiktok is not banning certain topics, as other platforms do Great point

> content on Tiktok is served algorithmicaly, ... due to their choice, not algorithm's Mixed, no production algorithm is without fingers on the scale.

Isn't the point that "choice" as you're defining it is a conscious, system-2 process, but the algo-served content is targeting much deeper, system-1 responses? If so can we say that people "prefer" to watch it, or that they've been conditioned to consume it? The question (to which I don't know the answer) is where does free will start?

> Tiktok is not banning certain topics, as other platforms do

Oh but they do, or at the very least carefully steer what you see by demoting certain subjects; don't forget that only in 2020 their internal moderator policies were leaked, telling them to suppress posts by ugly, poor and disabled people [0], or suppress streams that "harmed national order" or "defamed civil servants". Sure, this was the Chinese branch of tiktok, and the US / EU based version has distanced themselves from it - already mostly being its own platform. But this is where they came from barely four years ago.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

The specific topic in question is Gaza. TikTok has been accused of spreading pro-Hamas content and leading the young population to support Hamas, whereas YouTube and Facebook ban it on sight.

Tiktok algorithms could be considered a form of editorial position(be it foreign government influenced one, or just the type of content they elevate / not remove), and in this sense it is similar to banning a newspaper(which would obviously be censorship) -- journalists could publish in other newspapers. Therefore banning TikTok absolutely is censorship.

>This isn't like China where the government bans any services they can't control

This is literally like this, and done precisely due to the lack of control due to the illegality of overt/direct speech regulation, and the fears that China would elevate content that isn't in the interest of the US in the broadest sense, but that is still legal according to the 1st amendment. The US Government has tremendously more influence on the local/western platforms, and on people who work there. (There is already an appeals court decision about Biden administration overstepping in communicating with online platforms about what content they don't like). The logic goes "We can't regulate speech like we want to, order what we like and what we don't like, but at least we can remove/censor individual owner-editors that we suspect might harbor some harmful intentions. That means no owners from 'evil' countries". That's about it.

This is a pretty short, but significant list.

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

It's censorship and also import controls and also turning off one propaganda faucet.

> On December 6, 2024, a panel of judges on the U.S. District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the company's claims about the constitutionality of the law and upheld it.

Let's see whether SCOTUS barks at it.

>Your argument is predicated on the idea that banning TikTok is censorship. It's not. No speech or information is being suppressed; any speech being made on TikTok can instead be made on other platforms.

Not really, which is the whole point of censoring TikTok.

The Free Palestine movement has grown on TikTok in ways it hasn't on American-owned platforms because it's so heavily censored on American apps. It is the censoring of genocides across the world that TikTok bypasses. Why this is doesn't matter. The end result is populations being kept in the dark about what their governments are complicit in or actively contributing to.

>No speech or information is being suppressed;

Except the whole reason for the TikTok bill is that information/speech will be under Chinese government control on TikTok and that can be weaponized.

So make up your mind, if you say TikTok is being banned for the possibility of "weaponized propaganda", then it is information being suppressed.

If you say it's not about information suppression, then you can't use the "Chinese propaganda" argument, which is used by pretty much all ban supporters.

>This isn't like China where the government bans any services they can't control, and directs the services that they can control to suppress any information they don't want people talking about.

That's exactly what it is.

> … if you say TikTok is being banned for the possibility of "weaponized propaganda", then it is information being suppressed

Eliminating weaponized propaganda is not even a little bit close to suppressing freedom of speech. Your argument falls apart there, like completely.

Except it is. The Supreme Court has actually ruled that the First Amendment rights for Americans to receive foreign propaganda, even during the Cold War:

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/lamont-v-postmaster-...

I don't think you know what the First Amendment is. Not only does it guarantee freedom of expression, but also freedom to receive other's expression and speech.

The U.S. government is not allowed to ban any foreign books, movies, or even propaganda.

I really wish people like you do a little bit research before making such a confident statement like that.

They may not legally be allowed to ban it, but that doesn't mean it has to be easy to access it. This is probably also why banning Tiktok was / is such a challenge and couldn't just be done with Trump's exective order after Zucc whispered it in his ear in 2019, and why they can't just block it, but have to subpoena the app stores to delist it.

By that logic if you are attacked you would no nothing because violence is wrong. Then you die.

Censorship is the suppression/prohibition of speech. Therefore, removing TikTok from app stores is not censorship, because it's the platform itself that's being targeted, not particular speech that's on it.

Either you knew that already and you're making a bad faith argument, or you don't understand the concept of censorship.

Your argument implies that banning was the only option… it wasn’t. They could’ve continued operating just the same had they sold the company.

>If censorship is wrong, then it is wrong. If censorship is just fine, the n it is just fine.

This is it, and it's so laughably simple that anyone who doesn't get it should check CO levels in their home before arguing.

This way of thinking has been debated for a long time. It's not clear or self-evident doing it the way you describe is the best way to handle things. Sure, it's more self-righteous and sounds good on paper, but does it really hold? https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Openness?

Sure, but how are you gonna enforce it? Proprietary codebases usually stay...proprietary. Even Telegrams open client doesn't prove shit when it comes to server-side decryption keys and logs. And this, from a black box systems perspective, is a hard thing to make transparent.

Given the history of cryptography we can't even rely on that anymore and have to assume a compromise in the future due to how those elliptic curves (and their seeds) are created.

Even just assuming that Qualcomm doesn't track you with their two GPS domains that are constantly pinged is very naive. And we've also uncovered a history of abuse in CPU backdoors (looking at you, Intel).

So where does transparency have to start? My theory is that without solving capitalism as the bug of democracy we can't have transparency. As long as there is financial incentives, there will be no transparency.

> So… if China mistreats their citizens, reciprocity says we must mistreat ours?

This is such a silly strawman. A better example would be that reciprocity would say that if China mistreated our civilians then we should mistreat theirs. Reciprocity doesn't mean "we do whatever China does".

> You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.

It's not censorship so this also doesn't make sense. They are being forced to be sold. TikTok can exist just fine, just not under control of ByteDance which is de facto under control of the CCP. The basic point here is that the CCP will not be allowed to control a major media arm in the US which is in turn used to spread CCP propaganda. If you want to prevent CCP from owning a major media channel which can freely spread CCP propaganda, this is a completely rational means of doing that stands up perfectly to "cursory thought".

> As soon as you find yourself arguing that you have no choice but to engage in the same behaviors you claim to dislike, you have literally become the enemy.

I hate violence but sometimes violence is required (see WWII). I don't think we (the US) became the enemy in WWII for engaging in violence.

>A better example would be that reciprocity would say that if China mistreated our civilians then we should mistreat theirs.

Good example, and thank god that is unconstitutional.

For example China can arrest American citizens in China without dual process. But we cannot arrest Chinese citizens, or anyone here in the U.S. and just put them to prison without dual process.

Americans in China have no freedom of speech. Should we ban Chinese citizens in the U.S. from speaking freely as well? Again, that is unconstitutional. U.S. constitution protects anyone within the U.S. not just U.S. citizens. Otherwise we can just send someone with a green card to jail without trial.

So your example only serves the counter-argument, which is that reciprocity is not something you should aim for when it comes to human rights.

> which is in turn used to spread CCP propaganda.

Since not even the U.S. government has been able to provide any such evidence, and have admitted that the threat is hypothetical, if you have any such evidence you should present it.

China soft invades minds of Western people under disguise of “freedom of speech”.

Well if that's the problem, then maybe address that, perhaps by teaching people critical thinking skills?

But teaching people to ask critical questions risks unraveling the fabric of American capitalism ("Hey why is it that the government spends more on healthcare per capita than any other OECD country but with markedly worse outcomes?", "How can we call ourselves the greatest nation on Earth when we are simultaneously the wealthiest nation on the planet and still have such poor health, education and quality of life indicators?"), so we can't have that can we?

> But teaching people to ask critical questions risks

How long will it take to do it on a meaningful scale, all while “free-thinkers” (read Chinese and Russian bots) beat the drum of “they’re brainwashing you”?

About five years, for Finland's critical thinking curriculum. (First results, to latest.)

However, that requires an education system that can be easily updated, and widely rolled out, without being shotgunned by anyone who has already lost their critical thinking ability, who may be in a position in government.

Yeah, i'd imagine one cycle of high school oughtta get everyone through at least one class, with the new life experience to have actually used and explored it. Teach it in homeroom where you teach the other mostly bs but sometimes valuable things, make em do 2-3 weeks on it and for gods sake have the curriculum written by experts and NOT BY POLITICIANS. I can't think of anything worse than a "bipartisan effort to design curriculum though congressional committee"

To be fair, everyone I disagree with is a Russian bot or a <anti-Chinese slur removed>.

Whatever lets you sleep at night.

> Well if that's the problem, then maybe address that, perhaps by teaching people critical thinking skills?

We should do that, but reforming our education system will take years or decades. And in any event, any solution that requires everyone to learn or do something or act in a particular way is doomed to fail. Humans just don't work like that.

And even with robust critical thinking skills, people are still susceptible to psychological manipulation. That's never going to change.

I'm sick of this being repeated over and over until it becomes true.

We have had multiple studies at this point and not a single one concluded that there's any kind of particular manipulation on Tik Tok. Not one. They all conclude that the bias is not different from other platforms.

HBO run a segment on the ban and goes a bit more in depth:

https://youtu.be/5CZNlaeZAtw?si=-4f7Pyww-nazCrSM

The biggest manipulation seems to be people thinking that TikTok is brainwashing the youths.

When I see people looking at Tiktok videos in the bus, they usually look like possessed by something, a few seconds of gaze with glassy eyes, flip, flip, flip. It is so weird, I feel a bit sick in my stomach when I see it. Regardless of its potential as a brainwashing and manipulation vector, I personally completely banned it in my household (facebook/ instagram was always banned).

Same feeling for me about people watching TV, playing video games, gambling, listening to talk radio, attending sporting events, going to church, etc.

I don't think it's brainwashing, at least obviously (could be covert operations behind the scenes and we'd never know, like anything), but i will say it has pioneered a form of 'brain rot' that is simply leagues above all else. Not the freedom of expression, the dopamine dependance and impulsion of the infinite scroll. I'd much prefer we outlaw that specific technology, i think the world would be better for it. Stop the autoplay too. It almost feels sometimes like my eyes are being held open ala clockwork orange. People see so much shit in there that they don't remember ingesting that i can believe there's brainwashing experiments going on. You could do anything with that feed and no one would notice, but they would still see it. There's already discussions online about how "is everyone else getting these kind of videos now?", i see it about every 2 weeks. Some popular personality (to me) goes on and says, "have you seen this crazy looking homeless guy?" And everyone in the audience says "omg yes, he showed out of nowhere for me to and i can't stop seeing his vids". I've seen this play out around a dozen times now with thousands and thousands of people in agreement. So, i mean, no one controls their own algorithm. Maybe that's what we need. Let me see the code, let me alter it if i so choose, but let me see if you're changing my weights or pushing specific things to me. They'll never do that though unless it's an American company that can be forced to do so.

I think there are pretty strong traces of pro-china manipulation on Tiktok.

See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/briefing/tiktok-ban-bill-...

Content about something like Hong-Kong protests or the Tiananmen square are suppressed.

There isn't even a clear methodology explained (where/when/how where the accounts created, etc) on that NCRI "study".

Even the data is often self contradicting.

All we see is that there's much less political discourse on TikTok than ig.

If there's manipulation, the only thing that this study shows is that the manipulation goes towards avoiding politics in general.

Not only that, but the study itself may show the reverse to be true: that IG pushes some narratives more than others.

There is no evidence whatsoever presented in that paid for NCRI study.

In fact, the same result can be used to interpret as "strong traces of anti-China manipulation on American social medias".

The US has soft invaded Europe's minds for a hundred years too, under disguise of "entertainment" and "news". Doesn't make it right, but just to compare.

The reciprocity is between you and me. If you do something bad to me, I can do something bad to you. Is not that if you do something bad to yourself I need to do something bad for myself.

"Mistreat" is a bit unnecessarily dramatic. People in the US were fine (possibly even better off) before TikTok, and they'll be just fine if it goes away.

China's level of internet control and censorship does seem to rise to the level of mistreatment (in that they control and shape access to information, in ways that further the interests of state propaganda), but denying Chinese companies (and the Chinese government) market access to American consumers in some spheres seems fine. It's never been a two-way street with China, and I think we should be engaging in a bit of protectionism when it comes to allowing or not allowing Chinese companies to operate here.

If the US government were suppressing particular views or discussion of some topics (as the Chinese government does to their own citizens), then I would be alarmed. But that's not what's happening here; if the TikTok ban goes through, US citizens' free speech rights will not be meaningfully impacted, as there are other platforms that can and will carry the same content.

Banning a foreign company from doing business in your country isn't automatically censorship. There's nuance.

(And beyond all this, I do worry about the Chinese government using TikTok as a platform to influence Western citizens' thought, culture, and politics, for their own purposes. If they're not doing it already, I'd be astonished.)

> If the US government were suppressing particular views or discussion of some topics (as the Chinese government does to their own citizens), then I would be alarmed.

As someone mentioned above, several officials openly admittted the "ban" is related to palestine-related matirials on TikTok's platform, as opposed to some other platforms.

How the mighty have fallen. I remember the Arab Spring and all the excitement about media being in people's hands, safe from censorship... So finally, non-Arab people got the same opportunity too. And now, apparently, there's nuance.

The mask has fallen and the emperor is totally naked. This is a grab on Tiktok with national security justifications. Some gangoon politicians have already expressed interest to buy the thing.

Or, you know, the Arab Spring was actually a monumental failure in the vast majority of cases? And it turned out that yes, nascent technologies can be used by people to coordinate, at least until government fingers are thoroughly grown into the new system. All that optimism was wrong.

How many popular revolutions happened during Arab spring that long term lead to more democratic societies? Saudi Arabia learned to just get government employees hired to moderate twitter, and then had their wealth fund help Musk buy it outright.

There's been a lot of change since 2012 in fact.

> You fight censorship with openness.

because TikTok is the epitome of openness? Has never censored any opinion?

I don't understand this position. It's not censorship, it's security. It's protecting USA from China. Why should we allow China to have access to all contacts, media, location, etc for half of all Americans? Would you agree on a limited ban for military or government employees?

If I had to pick between sharing my data with the Chinese government or US corporations I would pick China every single time.

As an American or someone who is interested in US security, this is illogical. China bans US software to protect itself and we should do the same. We should also ban most computer hardware as it's not possible to regulate. As Israel has shown with the pagers, supply chain attacks are pretty serious.

>You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.

There is literally no basis for this belief. Do you have a realistic solution to the gish gallop? Have internet comments proven to follow the most well reasoned with it's own uncertainties or the most rhetorically convincing?

> So… if China mistreats their citizens, reciprocity says we must mistreat ours?

Reciprocity means that we are not required to allow Chinese propaganda into our children's bedrooms.

We are at war with China and Russia, and we are fighting it with both hands tied behind our backs.

Censorship... zzzZZZzz

They're banning app/news delivery app managed by enemy government

It is not like they're blocking internet, wikipedia

they're banning stupid, memes/brainrot app

- they're banning stupid, memes/brainrot app

Imagine same rhetoric by CCP adressing Facebook or YouTube.

Is 4chan banned here?

You can imagine it. But they'd be wrong. Facebook and YouTube aren't directly controlled by an enemy government, and likely aren't intending as part of their raison d'être to sow discord and chaos in China.

So it's about ownership? Just a business? There is no issues with censorship or data harvesting?

> likely aren't intending as part of their raison d'être to sow discord and chaos in China.

This is so revisionist that it's funny. I vividly recall Facebook management celebrating their role in toppling regimes around the world for example the "Arab Spring": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media%27s_role_in_the_A... https://www.thewrap.com/facebooks-sheryl-sandberg-finding-jo...

I dare you find direct evidence of such quality that Tiktok is trying to do the same in the US.

US government wasn't very supportive of the Arab Spring. Also, what FB does may at times may be in line with its government interests but that doesn't mean they are being compelled, just they are like-minded.

There is some influence of course but it's not like their existence is at the blessing of the President.

Then why did all these sites comply with government directives on covid 'misinformation' or gaza? if they say "how high?" when the government says jump who cares what the official on paper corporate structures are?

FB or YouTube comply with enemy government like CCP?

Holy shit do you actually work for the U.S. State Department?

Reuter reported this: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

U.S. social media absolutely are controlled by the U.S. government, and we can, and have been able to get any user data we want from them.

Here is the dividing line rarely discussed openly. I and many other Americans truly believe the United States government and it's oligarchs are their greatest threat to American citizens. Not China, Russia, Iran etc. The latter are certainly threats but they don't have anywhere near the capacity nor desire to limit my rights like the United States does.

Yet, most still play voting game.

- enemy government

I’m using the phrase because it was used in the thread above.

I'd love to see it tbh, there's a lot of brainrot on those platforms too, to the point where the 2016 elections were in part swayed by stuff being mindlessly shared on facebook. They had to come up with new laws, regulations, and measures against "fake news" and everything, root out foreign influences, increase rules on political advertising, etc.

Thinks that China is an enemy government when the USA and China do 500 billion dollars worth of trade each year.

Which friendly governments steal secrets about premier weapon systems like F-22, F-35, etc?

Literally all of them. That's what happens when you build the best weapons.

Almost all?

Of course one has to differentiate between "friendly" and subordinate semi-protectorates.

This friendly government?

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-spy-agency-tapped-g...

every single one. please examine where you got the idea that everything china does is bad and if it's a useful belief for you to hold (and if not, who is it useful for?)

Airbus famously has stolen reams of Boeing secrets.

Ukraine and Russia also continues to trade gas.

Countries pay Gazprom and Ukraine charges Gazprom for transit.

Life is not black and white.

Yeah it's the lack of black and whiteness that makes me so confused as to why you would brand the government of a 1 billion person nation as an enemy rather than say, a competitor or even an ally that behaves in occasionally intolerable ways. Kind of like how a lot of nations continue to be allies with a nation that goes around invading other nations and deposing legitimately elected governments in the interest of ore and fossil fuel companies.

I think the useful model for this is that currently there's a competition between the naval powers and the land powers, which is rapidly heating up. (Due to the last decades of very high rate of economic growth of China.)

https://youtu.be/YcVSgYz5SJ8?t=7765

Maritime order (basically a trade alliance, if you join you have more chance to influence it, win-win) and the continental order (buffer zone, extractive/authoritarian, negative-sum).

Of course as the competition is getting fierce one seems to borrow from the other. (Russia is funding itself and its war from trade. And China sold market access in exchange for technology.) And the US is now transitioning from soft-power to pay up or you are out. (Balance of trade, NATO contributions, etc.)

Name one single other country that we trade with that has an official policy that it owns another country we trade with, and insists that if we say out loud the other country is a country it means immediate war?

> has an official policy that it owns another country we trade with, and insists that if we say out loud the other country is a country it means immediate war?

there is a cost for maintaining the US hegemony, Taiwan is being used as an excuse to maximize such cost for the US - China gets to choose when and how to increase tensions, the US has to react accordingly and spend more and more borrowed resources as responses. that is the official policy, a smart one.

Wouldn’t being a nice neighbor that people want to get along with be more effective at undermining US hegemony? This just seems like a convoluted rationale to avoid taking the Chinese government’s statements at face value: they think Taiwan is their property, intend to take and integrate it when they get a good opportunity to do so, and consider anything that might make this harder or undermine support for it to be a grievous national security threat.

Taiwan has an official policy that it owns the mainland

This is hilariously a result of China's view. China's claim is that Taiwan is part of the still civil warring China, and should be re-integrated. Part of that strategy is an insistence that OTHER countries need to parrot this claim, including countries like the US that recognize Taiwan as an independent entity. The "oneness" of China is vitally important.

The claimed story is that Taiwan is worried if they abandon the "one warring China" policy and openly state they are Independent, that will aggravate China and cause them to push their claim harder, and maybe lead to war.

Taiwan having such a policy is directly because that's the policy China wants everyone else to claim. Notably, Taiwan has taken zero effort to produce a military capable of doing any over-water invasions, which would be absolutely necessary if they actually wanted to do that. Unless you think Taiwan would rely on the USA to invade China for it, which I do not think the US ever wants to do. Our explicit strategy is to own all the islands around China (including Taiwan) and basically blockade China in all but name.

China meanwhile DOES build a military to take over Taiwan, explicitly, including systems designed to sink our carriers and practice targets in the desert. Strictly speaking I'm not concerned about China wanting a viable means to sink our Navy, as China doesn't want to starve to death if we could blockade them, but the buildup around the capability to take Taiwan betrays that it is not a defensive posture.

> This is hilariously a result of China's view

No it really isn't, and it's certainly not hilarious. Taiwan's position is historic. The government of Taiwan literally used to be the government of the mainland.

The point is that Taiwan is forced to maintain this position.

Chinese Tiktok is forcibly wholesome (by Chinese standards). They do not believe in absolute freedom of speech. Now Americans have just conceded that they don't believe in it either. It's good that we're all on the same page now.

why does nobody know what freedom of speech is anymore...

I have the freedom to read what I want. You're telling me I don't. If you support making it impossible for me to access Tik Tok. This isn't about freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of access to information though (idk if that's in any laws). That said, the basis of freedom of speech and information is that you will not get in trouble for accessing tiktok and co; it does not mean the US government or whoever has to make it easy for you. "Not illegal" does not mean "accessible". For example, a court ruled that it's legal to sell and trade digital purchases like games on Steam, but that does not mean Steam has to make it possible to transfer games to other people.

Anyway, there's ways and means around getting tiktok from the app stores - especially thanks to efforts in European law that force both Apple and Android to open up their platforms so that consumers can do what they want with their devices.

> I have the freedom to read what I want. You're telling me I don't

You don't. This is not a legally protected right in any US jurisdiction. Period.

> This isn't about freedom of speech

Correct, because this isn't speech and "freedom of speech" does not mean what you think it does. The right to freedom of speech enumerated in the US constitution is generally interpreted to mean that the government cannot punish its citizens for speaking out against the government. That's really all you're guaranteed. This has nothing to do with censorship, and in fact censorship in general is quite accepted in US law. You quite plainly do not have the right to unrestricted access to any information you want. No law even suggests that. Just for starters, we regularly ban books at the state level. In some places, you can be arrested for possessing certain materials. Perfectly constitutional.

Freedom of speech does not mean you can say or print anything with no consequences. See libel.

Freedom of speech does not mean you can read or posses any information you want. See classified materials, state secrets, illegal materials such as CSAM.

Freedom of speech means that the government can't put three generations of your family in a concentration camp because you tweeted once that the president sucks.

> The right to freedom of speech enumerated in the US constitution

The problem is people switch between this definition of freedom of speech and the the more general version found in "on liberty" and other philosophical works. If youre talking about what the government is allowed to do sure use the first definition but this conversation started by talking about the second. By subtlety switching from "is this something that is good to do" to "is this something the government is allowed to do" youve derailed the conversation.

Philosophical freedom of speech is much more than what is enumerated in the constitution.

The general rule is in fact that you can read anything you can get your hands on, which is one reason people like Prince Harry who come from different legal traditions consider the First Amendment to be nuts.

"Just for starters, we regularly ban books at the state level."

We really do not. We sometimes ban them from public school libraries, more usually at the local than state level. A bookstore can sell you any book you care to read including those with written depictions of child sexual abuse, with the limited exception that a locality might try to declare things obscene as being contrary to local standards of decency (but in practice in modern America rarely does).

"See libel."

Libel of public figures requires knowing falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth and even then is a civil offense. There are vestigial criminal libel laws but it's doubtful they're constitutional and no one gets convicted. You can't go to jail for it and no one gets in trouble for reading it.

"See classified materials"

Unless you have a security clearance, you can read all the classified material you want if it's published. You can be punished for disclosing it if you have legal access to it, but not in practice for publishing it in peacetime (see the Pentagon Papers) and you cannot be restrained from publishing it before the fact unless doing so presents a clear and present danger to American public, a standard almost impossible to meet in peacetime.

"illegal materials such as CSAM"

In general you can read all the CSAM you want. You can't look at pictures or video.

They just read the title, not the article, then confabluate an entire world view from three words that are entirely untethered from the actual constitutional meaning.

Chinese citizens cannot express political opinions contrary to the whims of the CCP.

Do not equate whatever perceived limits the US has with China's limits on free expression.

Let's see what else becomes a matter of 'national security'.

If we were all on the same page the US would have reciprocally banned TikTok as soon as China banned Facebook, i.e., before it even existed, and would also ignore its constitutional guarantee of free speech (which the Chinese, like the Soviets, also have believe it or not) and control content on domestic social networks.

If we were even more on the same page generally, then the US would put its undesirable ethnic minorities in reeducation camps.

If your timeline is brainrot it's because the algorithm has determined that is what you like.

It goes beyond the algorithm. Have you seen the garbage that shows up in trending lists?

Have you seen the kind of politicians voters elect?

No government is not your friend. The do not care about you. Whether that is US or China or EU, they do not have your best interest at heart. As soon as they no longer need you, you will understand.

In general true, but some governments are better than others. For example, would you prefer to live in Xinjang (being Uigur) in China, or let's say in Europe?

Also a government of a country can change. Being raised in a communist Poland I was quite used to all government officials treating you quite famously badly. This was still pretty much in full swing around 2004 (many years after the all of Communism) when I emigrated to the UK. Then I went back, full time around 2019. Imagine my surprise when I had one of my first dealings with a tax office (I was registering my company for Vat online and I put in a wrong start date) and it wasn't through registered mail requesting I attend in person at so and so time (to wait 3 hours) and be told I'll be getting a fine. Nope, they rang me, on my phone, and asked if I can please amend it. So I thought, wow, they must have employed a new person who hasn't learned how to put people down properly yet. But then in the course of my business I dealt with social services and such and the same pattern repeated. Now, it is not all dancing cats and roses, the juidiciary is still pretty bad I'm told, but it's not so much about corruption these days, more about ineptitude, slowness and doing their own interpretation of the laws, which they aren't allowed to do in non-precedents system(they can continue mainly because of their independence - can't force people to actually obey the law if they are the law without turning it into a dictatorship, so waiting for them to retire seems to be the only option). So things are bit more nuanced than "all government is equally bad".

I'm not saying this like it's some huge deal but i think this comment illustrates my general frustration with discussion on China. Why would you compare the most marginalized group of one society with a normal person in another? Do you think that's fair? If we wanted to do comparisons wouldn't we need to pick the most marginalized groups of people in the West to compare Uigur in Xinjang?

Not saying this like China is perfect, i just don't understand why people who seemingly aren't professional propagandists seem to have this "everything china does is bad" narrative in their heads. Like any great country, many horrible _and_ wonderful things have been done there but in the US we only talk about the horrible things and it warps everyone's view

>They're banning app/news delivery app managed by enemy government

The hypocrisy is pretending it was all for "openess" and pointing fingers when other countries did exactly the same for their apps/social media.

"I don't like this so I must prevent others from enjoying it"

They should ban domestic stupid memes and brainrot, too.

You put zzzzzzzz like this is a nothing burger but the United States has never legally prohibited citizens from viewing news, books and information from foreign countries. It's actually new.

> legally prohibited citizens from viewing news, books and information from foreign countries.

Sorry can you point out where they are doing this? because banning tiktok certainly is not doing those things.

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

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

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

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

I mean that last one doesn't mention any "legally prohibited" whatnots, but if you were suspected of being a commie because of for example being known to read the wrong thing by the House Un-American Activities Committee you'd be in trouble. Definitely chilling effects.

If that were the reason for this legislation, Meta (Instagram Reels) and Google (Youtube Shorts) should be very concerned. It’s the same content.

Content is similar, but the control is in the hands of US, so not the "enemy gov".

censorship schmensorship. This is more banal than that. China bans US companies from doing business in China. This is quid pro quo. Chinese companies, of the same industry, are getting banned in US.

Microsoft, Apple, Tesla are doing extremely well in China making hundreds of billions. Tesla even got free land and loans, aka Chinese government subsides.

Name a few Chinese tech companies doing the same in the US? Maybe you are suggesting that Chinese should ban Tesla, Apple and Microsoft as well?

Yes, but under China's strict rules about doing business there; government oversight, Chinese senior management, party representative, etc.

I mean if Tiktok did the same thing in the US there probably would be less of an issue, but they are unwilling to allow the same restrictions / oversight as the US companies are subjecting themselves to in China.

probably because China is a larger market? for example, how many cars are sold in the US? it is a relatively small market compared to the Chinese market.

Think often-mentioned tarifs. It's per sector. In this case, facebook, google, twitter/x are banned, thus tiktok gets banned too. That's how gvt operates; steel for steel, cars for cars, social media for social media... Aside examples of how its actually to own and operate a business in china vastly different than US (local partner with a significant share, board control, oversight..).

> This is quid pro quo

do you mean "tit for tat" or something similar?

This is a case of China mistreating western citizens with misinformation.

Targeted addictive misinformation.

Blocking that source of misinformation is the only logical response.

I think a ban that prohibits the distribution of a product is fine.

My understanding is that private citizens are still legally allowed to use TikTok if they want, but TikTok isn't allowed to market their product directly to US consumers via App stores. That seems pretty reasonable given China's position on US internet products.

Free trade and openness only works if all parties agree on the rules. If one party is open while the other exploits that openness by selectively opening up only when it benefits them then undermines the principles you believe in.

If we want China to be more open we have to ensure they're playing by the rules and they're not going to do that if we continue to allow them to exploit us.

That's a straw man argument and kind of a different thing entirely (moral / ethics / human rights vs corporations / entertainment) though.

Anyway while I do agree with your statement about censorship vs openness, I do think in the broader sense things need to be done about social media - that is, Tiktok is specifically singled out for being Chinese, but its target audience, addictiveness, usefulness as a propaganda tool, is very much not unique on the market. It was only after Zuckerberg and presumably the SV tech lobbyists raised the issue of Tiktok with Trump and the government that they pulled on the brakes.

But this is where the reciprocity argument comes in; US based services in China are under strict regulations and requirements, to the point where at best they can have a subsidiary in China under Chinese management. But while it's not trivial as a foreign entity to have a presence in the US either (e.g. you need to have or be a US company to be able to sell your software there), it seems more accessible and less restrictive than operating in China; in a sense this move levels the playing field.

I would argue they already do mistreat their citizens...

Yes. Plenty of Teslas on the street in China but no Chinese cars on the street in the US.

Lets see what the next chapter is; as you said reciprocity is key ...

If you want to use that analogy, a big reason Chinese cars aren't in the US is because the Chinese government heavily subsidizes their car production, which would lead to unfair price competition with other carmakers.

If you want true reciprocity there, China would either need to stop subsidizing their carmakers, or the US would need to add heavy tariffs to their cars to level the playing field.

You realize the US bailed out their auto companies and heavily subsidize EVs right? it's like you're using "reciprocity" to mean US win China lose or something

so, you are telling me that democracy doesn't mean anything nowadays. you don't want to be better than china.

their barbarous censorship vs our blessed national security

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...

If China develops a medical technique better than ours and ban ours, will we ban that technique here? We must do what is right for our nation. If TikTok harms us we must ban it, reciprocal or not. If it does not harm or does benefit us, we must not ban it, reciprocal or not. The question is only whether it harms or benefits our people.

"...there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."

Geroge Orwell - Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Isn't fair trade the key?

Man you're cutting off communication for 300 million people. These governments can shove it, they have no business censoring this many families. The government shouldn't have the right to backdoor every piece of software in the country. We've officially lost our collective minds here. I thought you Americans loved freedom of speech. Especially Elon. Or I suppose that was only marketting for his world takeover scheme. Huh

Search for the “paradox of tolerance”.

Nothing in this world is black and white.

The better analogy is to when China wanted to block opium.

The videos dividing America are being shot and filmed right here at home, and cross-posted to Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.

The better analogy would be disrupting the Taliban's opium supply routes, but allowing allied warlords to continue selling it freely to finance their operations.

100%, we allow China to have a backdoor into our society but we don't have one into theirs.

Where does the law say anything about reciprocity? This is censorship under the guise of 'national security'. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have done more to undermine American institutions and openly divide the population than anything the CCP could dream up.

1) Excellent way to teach millions of people about sideloading overnight. This could be a big win for Android (where sideloading is easy) vs. iPhone were sideloading is impossible (? or only possible only with an annual dev license?)

2) Will this affect apps like CapCut and Lemon8 too?

TikTok could just release a web app

They already do, all they gotta do is take out the redirect to App popup and voila.

It's not amazing, just like most web apps from big tech.

It's not amazing by choice. Web apps for internet video playing would work fine, companies just make their mobile websites hostile as possible to push you towards their mobile app where you can get the same experience but with significantly more data collection on the app's part.

I wonder what kind of impact this would have on their ability to actually provide good ML recommendations. Based on reporting that would be a lot of data to give up

The reporting I've seen is extremely dramatic about the data being collected. The most useful thing to the recommendation algorithm is interactions: number of loops before scroll, like, comment, share, etc.

Which they have but that can just be blocked as well. Sure you will be able to access it with workarounds but most people won’t.

This was the original vision for iPhone, if I’m not mistaken

Hot take:

TikToks appeal is that it's digital heroin. People aren't going there because it's genuinely amazing stuff. People are going there because it's a dopamine hit. When you make it harder to view like having a web app that you have to refresh or click or have less smooth touch interactions, it'll get less engagement.

Edit: it will be more difficult to track user behavior and location with a web app.

Tiktok servers will be banned at the T1 carrier level, probably.

Do you have a source that the act is being interpreted by the government to include prohibiting network operators from serving traffic? That definitely seems like it would be a stretch given the text of the act

The act prohibits

> (A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.

> (B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.

With the following relevant definition

> (5) Internet hosting service.—The term “internet hosting service” means a service through which storage and computing resources are provided to an individual or organization for the accommodation and maintenance of 1 or more websites or online services, and which may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting.

Which I've basically read as "it will be removed from app stores and not be allowed to host content on US servers". Which as a matter of policy seems more than sufficient to reduce the reach of tiktok to a tiny fraction of it's current US user base.

The "and not be allowed to host content on US servers" is kinda funny as a requirement in context. Prior to the law being passed IIUC TikTok had already put in a bunch of work to make sure American data was stored in the US, with a US cloud vendor, with access controls, which were to demonstrate that this data was not accessible to the Chinese. Serving in the US, with big US cloud partner was meant to be a way to create confidence. If TikTok ends up being a webapp for US users, with our data definitely not in the US ... isn't that worse?

I bet if it comes to that, a DNS pollution alone will drive down 80% of traffic.

> Serving in the US, with big US cloud partner was meant to be a way to create confidence.

Huawei tried a similar confidence building tactic by paying UK cyber spooks to scour their code to show they don't have backdoors. The so called Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre. Didn't work out for them either.

Here is my question

If TikTok is no longer allowed to be hosted in US, how could they continue the service without transferring the data outside of US? It is going to be a bigger breach if they transfer US user data outside of US, right?

that requires a firewall at the border.

iOS has alternative appstores now -in Europe.

> 2) Will this affect apps like CapCut and Lemon8 too?

Both, the bill lists any "website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly" by ByteDance, which controls CapCut and Lemon8.

TikTok is popular primarily because it's easy to get to. You're expecting normal people to learn how to sideload applications and that's simply not going to happen at a scale large enough to keep TikTok at critical mass in the US.

Sideloading doesn't work if an extremely popular app can't handle transactions in a proper way. Creators won't get paid, the ecosystem will fall. I bet US government would ban Tiktok from banks and billing systems.

All that would do is drive off the "blue checkmark" class of uploaders, good riddance. That's not what people are on TikTok to view. Note that the TikTok influencers have never made it as big as the Youtube era of influencers, and that's a good thing for society.

Yeah tiktok is a drop in the ocean for the critical mass needed for people to abandon iPhone. It is already highly censored in the US and no one said let's use Android.

Sounds like the “Year of Linux” fantasies 20-30 years ago. No, people won’t learn about side-loading much like they didn’t care to try out linux instead of windows. They will simply use a competitor app.

Sideloading is not Linux, it's Napster (or maybe Fortnite). Switching to Linux requires a level of ideological commitment that is not necessary for accessing something like TikTok.

On Android, there is no work associated with sideloading besides checking a toggle letting you install an app outside the App Store.

The better comparison would be people buying gaming PC when Apple declared war on NVidia and shunned PC gaming in general.

Did Windows and linux PC sales rise ? Well yes, to some decent extent:

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/2023-pc-games-revenu...

That article discusses videogame sales, nothing about hardware. Mac game sales would be included in the "PC game sales" statistic. I'm also not sure when "Apple declared war on NVidia and shunned PC gaming in general"? If anything they've been getting more friendly to gaming recently.

Steam sales are abysmal on Mac, so it's a decentproxy I think. I couldn't find a nice cut report on gaming PC sales vs standard desktops, whichi is unfortunate as the PC market in general is on a downtrend while my hunch is gaming is probably flat or rising.

On Apple and gaming...they've been on the cold with Steam, basically refusing any improvement that would help. They've Epic at their throat. They've faught Microsoft over the XBox streaming issues tooth and nails. Sony and Nintendo are the only big players that don't actively fight them. I wouldn't call the situation great.

On Apple and Nvidia, it's a long story. They were in good terms, until the Metal transition where they cut ties in a very messy way, and we're all assuming there was a lot going on behind the curtain.

> macOS 10.14 Mojave required metal-compatible GPUs. At some point, during the macOS Mojave beta, Apple pulled Nvidia's ability to sign its code, which ended Nvidia's support for macOS in one spiteful, anti-competitive move. In order for GPUs to be Metal compatible, they needed drivers, and Nvidia wasn't able to release drivers.

> Nvidia publicly announced that it had working metal drivers on its forum, but Apple had revoked its developer license leaving the blame squarely at Apple's feet. Nvidia even called out apple on his support page but has now since modified it.

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...

Finally, those uppity blue-bubble iToddlers get their comeuppance!

Too many elections are being influenced by the free exchange of ideas on TikTok -- best to shut it down if the U.S. corrupt government cannot control it. Who cares what the people think!?

It's not the free exchange of ideas if the CCP can put its thumb on the scale.

Right on, it's only a free exchange of ideas if US alphabet agencies can exclusively put their thumb on the scale.

The CCP's "influence" here is just letting content exist that would normally be suppressed on other platforms. Which, obviously, the US government doesn't like - do not intersperse the pro-US military content with anticapitalist rhetoric!!!

It's there any sources to support your claim that TikTok is allowing content that is being suppressed in other platforms? I find that hard to believe.

Yes I saw a recording of a congressman literally saying that the reason they were losing influence on the Israel Palestine conflict is because of TikTok.

That's not a source for the claim, it's just someone else repeating the same claim.

It's a counterweight to the US glow agencies putting their thumbs on the scale for domestic propaganda platforms.

The CCP is a scourge on humanity, predominately in their own country; whereas the US establishment* is also a scourge, but its evils are off-shored. US and China also have powerful propaganda models that control information. Silencing opposition inside of the country is not the way to win a war -- educating people about it and letting them make up their own mind is the only way out of furthering a "censorship industrial complex".

1 - neoliberals, neoconservatives, fundamentalist zionists, other "factions" composing the majority of those who largely want the warfare/welfare state

Either you are being sarcastic or you forgot about the Cambridge Analytica incident. Elections can be influenced via the latest prevalent platform in a region. If it’s not TikTok, it’ll be Facebook / Instagram / YouTube.

Sure, but consider that we actually found out about Cambridge Analytica, Facebook got egg on its face, and made changes in how they share data as a result. (We can argue over how meaningful those changes were, of course.)

And on the other side, we have a company owned in part by entities that are beholden to every whim of the Chinese government. That's by design, and they can't change that, and have no motivation to change that.

I’d argue FB getting egg on its face has done nothing. Bytedance has also made changes to how data is stored and shared as well, which may or may not be meaningful. It seems to me that it’s ok for US agencies to exploit and data mine the crap of US citizens, but if it’s another country doing it then we go “wait not like that”.

Either way, China will get the data through whatever data broker the predominant US social media company is. And if it pushes hard in one direction, then people will sour and leave the platform, look at Twitter.

It’s very evident that this is a power play by the media empire to squash competition, now that Musk is in cabinet and Zuck is more than happy to grease Trumps hand.

So the US could require transparency from everybody, not ban whoever they dislike or fear

Exactly. Even with Twitter bought and paid for it was to close to Elons and Trumps liking, so the platform has to go, or bend the knee and start running rightwing propaganda.

My guess is that TikTok is about to get the Huawei treatment.

Like it happened to Huawei, the US State Department will campaign against it in various foreign countries and seek a similar ban. And like it happened to Meng Wanzhou, the US will use its legal system to pursue key figures in ByteDance, many of whom reside in Singapore, a country which has an extradition treaty with the US.

(If you think I am exaggerating, hear this week's edition of the All In podcast.)

Maybe.

Meng Wanzhou got caught because she was in Canada, and she was (apparently) a Chinese national. But I cannot imagine Singapore just handing over their own nationals to the US as a political prisoner...

Founder Zhang Yiming lives in Singapore today.

It's not in the US strategic interests for China to control the most popular social media (aka propaganda) site, so from a realpolitik perspective this makes a ton of sense. Reliance on a foreign power for things that are so prevalent is a risk, and it's not like the US is incapable on a technical level of producing a TikTok alternative - it's "only" popular because of network effects.

FWIW I mostly agree that your take seemed to be a likely outcome if Harris had been elected, but I literally have no idea what the new administration will do.

I'm not sure how exactly the First Amendment works, so someone please correct me, but does banning a platform constitute a violation if individuals can choose other platforms?

"It depends" (like every legal question).

It's possible to violate free speech rights by banning a platform even when their are alternatives. Most relevantly to this situation, the platform itself is most likely engaging in speech of its own by choosing what to repeat of what other people have said (i.e. it's choice of algorithm). If the platform was being banned for that speech (and that speech didn't happen to fall under an exception) that would be problematic.

It's also clearly possible to ban a platform under other circumstances. For instance banning a platform that was used by various parties for (protected!) speech, but was also being used for money laundering...

TikTok is a complicated case. It is on the edge of banning a platform for protected speech in so much as it is concerned with a US corporations (relevant because speech by non-americans from outside of the US is not protected) choice of recommendation algorithm, except the algorithm is really dictated by a Chinese corporation under the direct influence of the CPP. There are also however very compelling legitimate concerns the government has, such as the CPP's espionage interests, and the CPP's (not-protected, as a foreign government!) influence over TikTok's speech.

It's also notable in this case that the platform is being banned only so long as the foreign adversary refuses to divest. TikTok is free to continue operating in the US, so long as it isn't under China's (an entity without free speech rights) control.

I'd encourage you to read the appeals court ruling for a much more nuanced, and authoritative, take then mine: https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2024/12/24-111...

Thanks for the pointer - I'll definitely read it

I’m not aware of any other platforms that have been banned, without also having criminal cases opened. Are there any?

What does that have to do with it? The mechanism doesn't really matter, as long as it's legal, which courts have so far ruled it is.

Typically we expect people or companies who commit crimes to be subject to different levels of oversight than those that don’t.

So, Enron commits a ton of crimes and gets rightfully destroyed. I would be less enthusiastic about Congress passing a law to do the same thing to Ernst and Young despite no criminal proceedings.

I’m surprised that’s surprising.

The answer is no, it does not violate the 1st amendment, as proven by the fact that the courts are allowing this ban to go into place.

The government makes laws that effects platforms all the time. And Tiktok is perfectly capable of also following the law by doing what the courts have ordered (divest from its ownership basically).

The real answer is that it depends on what the Supreme Court says.

There's a valid legal argument to be made here either way; that the government has some amount of leeway to censor foreign propaganda, or that the first amendment prevents it from doing so at all.

We'll really just have to wait and see how they rule on it, because the issue will definitely make its way there at some point in the near future.

It's also likely that the verdict won't have a neat and tidy partisan breakdown, so the final result will be hard to predict.

Americans discovering the constitution is interpreted and reinterpreted whenever it needs to be is the best thing on the internet. B-bu-but muh free speech!

TikTok divestment law upheld by federal appeals court

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42340959

As grating as this is to freedom of expression, I’ve been annoyed enough times by ‘tok’ers doing crap like I dunno, licking ice cream buckets in supermarkets, I’m also looking forward to that going away for a few months till the next thing replaces it.

Unfortunately, this is pretty bad precedent. While I love my country, these sorts of decisions are as federal level are pretty scary and I question whether the government should wield this power.

Counter point, how is letting the primary adversarial power (which happens to be an authoritarian regime) massively influence the political views of the future generation a good idea? It sounds to me like the federal government is doing its job here.

I really don't understand why you are being downvoted.

I'm baffled at folks wanting to overlook that a Chinese-controlled brainworm is even more dangerous than a US-operated brainworm.

Yes, we should steer clear of all brainworms, but we should be exterminating the brainworms run by adversaries ASAP.

Who’s the adversary? China? China is not my adversary even if the United States government thinks so. I believe many Americans would agree with that.

To me it seems China made a superior app that the American youth wanted to use and the American social media apparatus was jealous so lobbied to have it banned.

China was supporting russian bot accounts in the recent us election. Sounds pretty adversarial to me

Any evidence and/or links for this? My Google search didn't result in anything substantial.

> China is not my adversary even if the United States government thinks so. I believe many Americans would agree with that.

I (a US citizen) do think of the Chinese government as an adversary. I believe many Americans would agree with me. (See, I can make the same assertion without evidence.)

> To me it seems China made a superior app that the American youth wanted to use and the American social media apparatus was jealous so lobbied to have it banned.

Sure, that's certainly part of it. It's economic protectionism. Which, honestly, when it's protectionism against a nation with a fairly closed market, where US companies and capital have much less access (and access comes with strict restrictions and censorship requirements) than Chinese companies (and their government), I'm having a hard time getting all up in arms about it.

China is not my enemy hence everything china does is good and everything my government does against any chinese action is bad

Sheesh, I'll never understand people smart enough to see their local government as bad but dumb enough to idolise every other foreign power

I don’t idolize any government national or foreign, that would be silly.

That's funny

- There's a Chinese-controlled brainworm which is more harmful than a US-operated brainworm - How you know this - The US-operated brainworm told me

* and why use '-controlled' vs '-operated', I'm not a native English speeker and I'm very curious about it

I'm so tired of arguments like this. They seem ill-informed at best, actively bad-faith at worst.

The US government has faults. A lot of them. And I (a US citizen) can't claim to be perfectly objective and unbiased. But I don't think you're going to be able to convince me that I should prefer Chinese propaganda and election interference over US propaganda. Or that US propaganda is as effective and all-encompassing within US borders as Chinese propaganda is within Chinese borders.

I can tell you something about Chinese propaganda:

1. How it works

a) Chinese propaganda within borders, is mostly about: "We serve the people, and we're doing it good", "We are on the road to greatness", with content cencorship and State medias, it's not quite efficient, since everyone are aware about it for example, if you question the CPC's leadership, you'll be censored

This part is handled by Publicity Department and Cyberspace Administration.

b) Chinese propaganda in the US, is by 'sponsored' influencers and some official accounts, you can identify them easily. and, these influencers are not sponsored with cashes directly, it's like if you have influence, and you show kindness to China, certain people may come to you, to award you with some titles, to invite you to attend some meetings and write articles in newspaper whichi nobody reads

This part is handled mostly by 'united front work department', MOFA, and Publicity Department, you can see how chaos it is by its organization

2. What it does

a) see 1.a

b) Chinese propaganda abroad is mostly defensive, it has a guideline, "Tell the Chinese story well", it's quite descriptively, for example, there're some topics with most efforts: 'Taiwan', 'Xinjiang', 'South China Sea', 'China threats', 'commodity dumping', and, 'election interference' The US/West set the agenda, CPC dispute it One topic is the exception, '89/64', there's some disciplines about it so that they never mention it, so if you saw someone defend CPC about this, it's 100% not an official behavior

c) It never describes the US as an enemy, both at home and abroad, and it never exaggerates threats from the US, on the contrary, it downplays these threats. - which may come as a surprise to some people.

For everyone who think CPC is good at propagandizing, or CPC has some super power of propaganda, you overestimate it, it's just positive about propaganda

I don't know how the US propaganda works, I think that's the most impressive part 99% Chinese know CPC blocks Google is about censorship, but many Americans will say the Tiktok ban is different, it's about national security and children protection, it's justice of the procedure, it's part of democracy, blah blah

> Or that US propaganda is as effective and all-encompassing within US borders as Chinese propaganda is within Chinese borders.

Totally right! Now let me log off to catch the nightly 6 hour programming block of CIA/FBI/military dramas. It helps me forget about all those scary Chinese drones flying around. Oh and did you see the trailer for the latest Alex Garland movie about our brave soldiers in Iraq? True heroes!

I guess because there will always be avenues for powers to influence people - rather than slapping a bandaid over the problem, we should address the root cause - a credulous population that refuses to think critically about the media it consumes.

That’s a project that would take generations, and meanwhile, the federal Department of Education that could coordinate such a project is on the chopping block.

Being authoritarian is the excuse though the only real reason is that it's threat to US economic and political supremacy in the world.

The West was throwing all shorts of shades at political powers here in Eastern Europe back in the day for not letting the free flow of information do its thing. So, saying that the US is doing the right thing now to ban TikTok based on ideological grounds is saying that it was right sending people to prison back then for listening to Radio Free Europe and similar.

I keep seeing this style of argument, but it's completely irrelevant and ignores nuance and the specific circumstances.

Banning TikTok is not going to impact the free flow of information. That traffic will just move (back?) to other social media platforms.

"Back in the day", the Soviets didn't want their people to know what life was like outside the USSR. Banning TikTok will not reduce anyone's knowledge about what's going on outside the US.

As a US citizen, I am absolutely fine with my government taking steps to prevent a totalitarian foreign adversary from influencing political thought in my country. The US is far (far!) from perfect, but moves like this don't affect freedom of speech or access to different viewpoints.

What nuance is there?

> Banning TikTok is not going to impact the free flow of information. That traffic will just move (back?) to other social media platforms.

It's like saying people should have switched back to reading Pravda, instead of listening to Radio Free Europe.

oh wait do you think this is because the youth on tiktok is (correctly) against the US's role in the genocide in palestine?

I totally understand that point too actually.

The problem is probably not what videos the platform hosts itself (as long as those are legal themselves), but having the recommendation algorithm controlled by a foreign power.

Maybe taking over the recommendations algorithm (or banning any kind of algorithmic feed other than chronogical) would have sparked less concerns. But changing the algorithm to make it less addictive would probably effectively kill the platform through loss of user interest.

> Maybe taking over the recommendations algorithm (or banning any kind of algorithmic feed other than chronogical) would have sparked less concerns.

Literally all they had to do was sell the CCPs stake in the company to anybody not in the CCP and they were unwilling to do that, opting to burn the whole company down instead.

If they did that one thing all this would be avoided.

I find your phrasing funny, the ‘they’ in ‘all they had to do was sell the CCPs stake’ is the CCP (under the operative theory that the CCP completely controls ByteDance). So it seems rather odd to say that the CCP was unwilling to sell their ‘stake’. Obviously the CCP is not going to willing give up their massively influential, culture destroying app (I don’t support this version of reality, but it is how politicians are trying to sell this move), if the CCP can not gain use from the app what point would there be in keeping it alive? If ByteDance is just a tool for Chinese propaganda, disguised as a tech company, there was never any possibility that the company could disengage from its CCP control and all of this was just theater to make it look like there was some way to avoid the ban.

You say you don't "support this version of reality", and yet you've put up a compelling argument for it.

If the Chinese government benefits from TikTok's ability to influence Western minds, then right, they may prefer the company dies than lose that capability.

If they aren't running influence campaigns on TikTok that targets Americans, then they should be fine with a sale to a fully-non-Chinese owner. Sure, they lose future revenue, but I'm sure they could sell it for a pretty nice sum.

(Honestly, if the Chinese government is not using TikTok to spread propaganda to the West, they are wildly incompetent to pass up such a fantastic opportunity.)

China’s potential usage of the app for influence campaigns (propaganda, if you will) is a near certainty. I just do not agree with characterizing these operations as culture destroying to the US, or to the West. I have no qualms about suspecting the CCP of using TikTok’s massive cultural reach to push/suppress narratives they find beneficial/hurtful, I am just skeptical of how much cultural eradication can occur. Both major political parties claim the same regarding their narratives (push/suppress) by the American owned tech companies but they are both still here and both conservatives and liberals, in the American context, are still using Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google.

tl;dr - Sure the CCP is probably doing ‘the thing’, but it is not going to lead to the downfall of the mythical ‘West’

I'm fairly certain the CCP is already doing this pushing topics that affect traditional national interests while making it magically seem "viral", and successfully mobilizing their user base to vehemently _defend_ the platform with the addiction of an alcoholic. If I name the issues here, I'll trigger said users, but it's not hard to see it as a non-consumer of the platform.

> I’ve been annoyed enough times by ‘tok’ers doing crap like I dunno, licking ice cream buckets in supermarkets,

Did you ever see that in person? I feel like this is just typical outrage about something that maybe a total of 5 people did, so basically irrelevant.

No but I see entire generations change their whole personality and become ridiculously manicured and conformist to be more social media friendly

Radio, television, the internet, same as it ever was.

How many people originally done it is irrelevant, the platform gave them opportunity to reach millions of people.

But the latest fad platform will get the blame.

Facebook and YouTube have each had their share of stupid shit reaching millions. Ongoing.

What is the mechanism to avoid this? Beyond using the web version. I'm not keen on the government telling me what apps I can and cannot use. I would like to continue using the app, I don't care about what the law says.

You can download the APK/IPA file from TikTok’s website, I suppose.

They’re just removing the app from the respective app store. The domain and its underlying IP address aren’t blocked.

Maybe they will make the Tiktok website better now? Also Apple may be in an unpleasant position if Tiktok starts to aggressively push Android for sideloading. Children asking for Androids might be really bad for them, Apple needs them young.

Will it be available in the EU appstore?

Is it legally possible for Tiktok to provide a "takeout" function, and user uploads the data to a non-bytedance app that happens to work exact the same way as Tiktok do?

If so, this whac-a-mole could go on for ever. Feds would practically establish an office dedicated for app approval

Its possible but unlikely if that data happens to corroborate the suspicions of lawmakers

if their execs want to get arrested the moment they step out of China, sure

Apple and Google control exactly what data apps can possibly harvest, via their OS permissions. There are millions of apps on their app stores. If apps are acting like spyware then the government should pressure Apple and Google to fix the issue at the OS level. Otherwise it's just whack-a-mole.

Apple and Google can only control the data shared via the operating system. They can’t control what user behaviors that applications record on the server.

Yeah, it doesn't matter that much if people are voluntarily giving away as many data as possible to an adversarial authoritarian regime. Still, it is disingenuous of Apple to justify its iron grip on iOS apps as a privacy protection measure when it leaves open widely abused API's for years that its users have no way of opting out.

> If apps are acting like spyware then the government should pressure Apple and Google to fix the issue at the OS level.

If you think that's the issue, you're mistaken or confused.

Most people are confused by this legislation. It's specifically going to keep allowing tiktok via mobile browser, which is essentially the same experience and tracking of user interactions, therefore the legislation is specifically about the extra data the apps are able to record.

Apps are not acting like spyware on iOS or else you're as clueless as the Reuters "journalist" who wrote this propaganda piece and never probably seen Swift code or looked into how incredibly well app sandboxing works.

To be clear, I am not a US legislator. I actually think app stores do a good job. Read the word "if" in my prior comment the socratic question way, like "if space aliens keep abducting your cat, maybe just keep the cat inside". Although, perhaps I should have read the "you're" in your comment the same way. Ha.

It has never been about that. This is about Facebook, Google and Twitter not wanting competition for for their ad markets.

“Free market”. Such a thing doesn’t really exist.

Which is a good thing. 19th century England is not something to emulate.

Sure, I don't think it ever has, and that's fine. I'm of the opinion that truly free markets end in massive consolidation, monopolistic behaviors, and rent-seeking.

We've been seeing some of this already in recent decades. The current administration in the US was starting to really think about what to do about that, but I expect the next one will allow businesses to do whatever they please.

It never has, that's just what they tell you in school so you believe in meritocracy and the american dream

Bizarre, in the land of free speech the government is suppressing it.

Ironic how the EU comes out on top for acknowledging sideloading as a fundamental feature of smartphones. It will take the "it's a series of tubes" guys quite some time to figure that one out.

I think the main problem will be TikTok to conduct business in America, charge for ads to target American users and pay American content providers. It’s just a free app if they can’t earn money on it.

God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s the perfect use case for crypto to avoid US payment rail controls. Get a16z on the phone, he said with less sarcasm than one would expect.

Using crypto doesn’t somehow make you immune to prosecution. If the government says TikTok is banned, no company’s chief counsel is going to suggest getting around the ban by using bitcoin.

It took forever for the US to do anything about Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb breaking the law. In a post competency, low regulation environment we’re entering, it makes sense to explore creative solutions to extend runway imho (vs immediately folding).

I would argue the lack of action against those was due to lack of political will. At least at the beginning many saw Uber and Airbnb as net positives, American led innovators offering competition to hotels and taxi cartels. TikTok on the other hand is getting hammered by both sides of the aisle. the incoming admin has its contradictions but has been pretty pro tariff / anti Chinese competition so I am not sure games like that are going to play much but we shall see.

I can’t edit this now but I see Trump has changed his tune on TikTok in another comment, so maybe they will have better luck.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/22/trump-says-he-wants-to-kee...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/trump-says-it-could-be-wo...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre7vdz4npzo

> It took forever for the US to do anything about Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb breaking the law.

And yet look how fast tik tok was banned.

Land of free speech? Maybe in like a John Wayne movie was this ever true…

Like you know other parts of Bill or “Rights” like “prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures” except like your toothpaste at the airport… Americans are generally too funny thinking it is still “land of the free”

Hayes Code. Comics Code Authority.

And so on and so forth.

None of those were laws?

The Hayes Code exists to have a standardized industry guideline in response to individual states issuing dozens of differing film censorship bills. So while it is not a law, it is a guideline for how to be compliant with a rapidly proliferating number of censorship laws.

> Land of free speech? Maybe in like a John Wayne movie was this ever true…

What country would you say has stronger free speech protections than the US? I won't say there's none, because there are roughly 200 countries, and I don't know enough about many of them, but I cannot name one.

Not the UK, France or Germany, and I'd be surprised to find any other European country.

For a sampling of other laws/measures:

  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insult_(legal)
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press#/media/File:World_Map_of_the_Freedom_of_the_Press_Status,_OWID.svg

Now...if this ban sticks, it will make your snark a lot more valid, starting with the year 2025.

it is not snark, I am European living most of my adult life in the US and I have had more than one laugh over the years with “we are land of the free”

You’re thinking in binary terms about a gradient.

freedom being gradient sounds a lot like part of a speech of a dictator :)

It’s a spectrum. Some places are more free than others, and we’re as far toward the free end of the spectrum as anyone unless you count places where the government has totally collapsed. I suppose there are anarchies somewhere but they’re never stable.

You can say “land of the free my ass” every time a law prevents you from doing something you want, but that doesn’t mean other places have more freedom.

I agree 100%.

I never said that other places have more freedom though. I just find it fascinating that American really believe in their "rights" and frequently mock other countries, societies, etc...

The USA is not especially high up on the World Press Freedom Index:

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

My main problem with free speech in America is how it’s become some sort of unquestionable belief that it’s absolute. There are many instances of freedom of speech being curtailed by the USA government, yet they are somehow redefined into some sort of “unspeech” and don’t count instead of being honest and saying “yes, we restrict speech on this occasion for X reason”. It’s a very dangerous Orwellian approach to not allow yourself to see when your freedoms are being restricted.

This list is reminiscent of "happiness index" which simply encodes a certain ideology via a benchmark, the components of which a reasonable American does not necessarily agree with being the utmost important factors, and only is taken seriously if abstracted and lipsticked by generic names like "press freedom" or "happiness".

The simple example that UK is ranked higher than US is prima facie evidence that it is complete bullshit, considering the lack of First Amendment and much stricter libel laws that UK media has to worry about.

The two examples of that are CSAM, which makes obvious sense to restrict, and copyright infringing material. It might make business sense not to let people post the latest Disney movie but it just goes to show the first amendment isn't absolute.

Something doesn’t have to be perfect to be good. Most American’s recognize and lament the erosion of freedoms over the years, while still valuing the many that remain.

I don’t think they should be be laughed at for that.

Even very intelligent people will accept this argument for America, and then reject it for often literally every other country.

Imagine I made the same argument for Russia, or China, or North Korea, or Syria, or Venezuela, or some other country the Western mainstream media says is bad. You'd presumably come up with a reason - immediately, effortlessly, almost without thinking - why it didn't apply in that case, and that that country really was bad, and their imperfections really meant they were not good.

Unlike the U.S., which simply cannot fall out of favour with some people, no matter what they do.

If an organisation doesn't serve its purpose, whether through ignorance, stupidity, or malice, it should be either broken up or restructured. There's no reason not to do this with businesses, states, etc, other than the usual quasi-religious ones, centered around various tired and confused dogmas involving markets, freedom, human nature, and that sort of thing.

Summary: Human beings should be given second chances, and third chances, and so on, as many chances as we can give them. Organisations on the other hand should be given one chance. We owe them nothing.

As someone that had to deal with one of the countries in your list - they’re bad.

At no stage in my argument did I make any point contrary to that, and my argument is in no way about that.

The point is simply that U.S. democracy is visibly in tatters. Clinging on to this notion that still, in spite of all the evidence in front of our eyes, the U.S. is somehow fundamentally and essentially different to the other historical empires, is just your usual bog-standard nationalist delusion.

I think that the founding story of the States is beautiful, and that some of the early writing is really quite something (I'm thinking of Paine in particular here). And I'm very fond of some of the other cultural output. It's not "pleasant" to face the reality of the modern day U.S.A., is what I'm saying, but to hope to improve the state of the world, it has to be done.

There are many statistical datapoints which suggest the country is doing very poorly socially. Then it seems to me that a serious case can be made that the vast network of state, semi-private and private institutions over there involved in the "security" sector (arms, cyber, related fields) has gotten completely out of hand and answers effectively to itself only.

I'm trying to refrain from making specific examples here, because any mention of a specific issue will result in the assumption that some partisan point is being made. Accepting that risk, perhaps we could: look at the president; look at what the alternatives were; look at the previous presidents from the last decades; look at the legal system; look at the prison system; look at povery rates; look at crime rates; look at political prisoners; look at the increase in attacks on the media; look at military spending; look at straightforward, old-fashioned corruption; look at drone strikes; look at studies of how the state's actions tracks with polls of what the populace want; etc etc.

At a certain point, it's hard to believe in the intellectual integrity of observers who cling on to the argument: "ah, but look, that other country is worse!" This is an obvious race to the bottom, and can excuse any level of depravity. Again, it's hard to see how this belief is possible to hold without a solid dose of quasi-religious nationalist fervour.

It can be good for some and bad for others, especially as someone who is not born in China but is of Chinese descent. I usually avoid sharing my opinion on geopolitics outside the family and prefer to keep to myself if I prefer Chinese brands over Western ones to avoid being judged. The government can use the law to target Chinese-born individuals, and initiatives like the 'Chinese Initiative' make me more cautious and aware of my race.

US doesn't rank at the top, but is still rated as quite free by Freedom House https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores?sort...

About 74 points higher than China based on my math

We should be more like China then? I’m confused.

"Free speech" is not like the free square in Bingo. You can't just use it whenever. Commerce is already regulated, speech is already regulated, there's no way around those things not being absolute. If you have a specific argument about the nuance of this situation, then make it.

"the Act, as construed and applied, is unconstitutional, since it imposes on the addressee an affirmative obligation which amounts to an unconstitutional limitation of his rights under the First Amendment."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General

That seems like a very different case since it imposed different rules depending on the content of the speech. The analogous situation to the tiktok ban would be shutting down the postal service, which would be surprising but presumably constitutional.

I’m no Tiktok fan but the US has extremely broad free speech protections and its hard to see how this could be constitutional.

Individuals posting videos of themselves is clearly speech so we are in the 1st amendment territory. None of the usual exceptions for certain types of content (defamation, threats, fraud etc) apply because the restriction isn’t on specific content.

The only way out I could see is saying national security/secrets require us to prevent the Chinese company Tiktok from operating in the US.

But their free speech isn’t limited. They lose a platform, which is something completely different. Free speech doesn’t mean having to facilitate it.

People can still create a website and post their clips, or move to instagram or Snapchat or bluesky or twitter or whatever.

Thats true from the point of view of the individual poster claiming free speech infringement. I guess I was thiking of it from the point of the corporation which could claim something like a right to use an algorithm to promote certain videos as speech. I’m not sure if this has been decided by higher courts yet.

> Individuals posting videos of themselves is clearly speech so we are in the 1st amendment territory.

Who’s preventing them from posting videos on platforms not controlled by CCP?

This has nothing to do with speech.

So banning a public square has nothing to do with free speech?

"A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packingham_v._North_Carolina

"The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok_v._Garland

They've determined that it's not a violation of free speech because China, and that it's not a bill of attainder because China. You could replace "China" with anything.

What does it mean to be a "foreign adversary?" When did voters get a say in that? When Democrats (and every media outlet) were accusing Trump of being a secret Russian agent, and people who supported him of being traitors, would it have been legal (and not a "punishment" but a "prophylactic" as the appeals court said about TikTok) for the legislature to limit their free speech by name?

It’s not a public square. They ban people from their private square all the time.

The Court held that social media—defined broadly to include Facebook, Amazon.com, The Washington Post, and WebMD—is a "protected space" under the First Amendment for lawful speech

The court also held that forcing tik tok to sell or be banned is lawful.

The US has a long history of banning foreign-owned media; newspapers, radio stations and tv stations have been the traditional targets. The Federal Communications Act set limits on foreign ownership of broadcast licenses by prohibiting foreign entities from owning more than a certain percentage of a broadcast licensee. This is actually a large part of the reason Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, decided to become an American citizen.

Laws banning the foreign-ownership of influential apps seem like the modern day progression of the original FCA.

Tik Tok is not a public square. A public square is a public square.

Would this sort of targeted app ban by the federal govt be the first of its kind in US? Without any arguments of the pros or cons, the precedent I think is worthy of some consideration.

I think Grindr underwent a forced divestiture from its Chinese owners due to US gov as well.

Not sure about apps specifically, but there's plenty of precedent for banning foreign-owned media (newspapers, tv stations) in the United States. This seems like a natural evolution of those old laws.

YouTube shorts, worse app, same addiction, trashy content promoted by their banal algorithm, completely fine

I even prefer long form YouTube, which is also addictive! I open more tabs every day than I can possibly watch in a week

And all social media apps suffer from this (addiction, clickbait title/thumbnails, low quality fluff, propaganda, censorship...)

Even Netflix, but we call it "binge", instead of addiction, so that's also fine

Progress should be made in interesting relevant content discovery, and addiction prevention

But trying to beat China at their own game seems like a shot in the foot

Many commenters argue that free speech is being infringed upon, but isn't this really about protecting user data and preventing an adversarial and autocratic foreign power from influencing U.S. citizens? Sure, it is hypocritical to not protect the same user from U.S. companies harvesting their data, but you get my point.

Shutting down TikTok in the U.S. doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions. There are countless other ways to share and publish thoughts freely.

None of these platforms, like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X, are public squares where citizens have any of these rights. They are privately owned and regulated by unending terms of service agreements, with users often moderated or banned for minor infractions by company algorithms. Free speech has never truly existed in these spaces, nor is it likely to ever do so.

1) this is going to open younger peoples eyes to installing stuff outside of app stores. which i think is a great development.

2) if We believe that social media has the ability to influence to the degree that we’re going to outlaw a company, why tf are we not outlawing all manipulative algorithms, from every country? i absolutely do not magically trust billionaires just because they’re from the US… and i certainly don’t trust them more than i trust any government. there’s reasonable arguments that they’re more dangerous than governments. after everything we’ve seen these social media titans do, it’s absurd to trust them. we have so much actual material real evidence of their societal manipulation in every direction.

3) im not at all convinced outright outlawing is the answer. but i’ll kinda rhyme with 2) again, if We collectively admit it’s dangerous enough that it must be made illegal, then all of these companies are dangerous—all of them.

> i absolutely do not magically trust billionaires just because they’re from the US… and i certainly don’t trust them more than i trust any government. there’s reasonable arguments that they’re more dangerous than governments. after everything we’ve seen these social media titans do, it’s absurd to trust them.

What does it mean to "trust" them?

Right now you are on hacker news, a social media site which is owned by ycombinator and is run by a board of some billionaires. What are you doing here reading the articles on the front page and posting comments??

i’m not sure which part confuses you—it means what i said. i don’t magically trust them more than i trust any government. if the collective We have decided we don’t trust governments with algorithmic manipulation powers, why on earth are we trusting anyone with concentrated power: billionaires, churches, governments, etc…

it would seem We have deemed social media to be incredibly dangerous. i’m not yet personally convinced it is, but We apparently decided already. so why are we ignoring other wannabe kings wielding something we deem dangerous?

>if the collective We have decided we don’t trust governments with algorithmic manipulation powers, why on earth are we trusting anyone with concentrated power: billionaires, churches, governments, etc

This is a crazy extrapolation.

The sale/ban of tik tok was forced because the US government/people do not trust a China owned company. That is not simply extrapolated to, "oh well if we don't trust the CCP, how can you trust any government or institution ever?"

There are an awful lot of Chinese products that are not illegal, what specifically about TikTok are We concerned with?

It isn’t because it’s a pair of pliers or a notebook. it is because it has been decided it is too dangerous for that government to wield against society. again, if it’s too dangerous for them, why is it magically not too dangerous for the wannabe kings behind US social media companies?

they have at various times,

1) been caught manipulating citizens,

2) outright admitted their desires to strongly influence politics

3) refused to cooperate with elected officials investigating abuse

4) actively resisted any kind of oversight

so again i’ll say, im not convinced it is truly this dangerous, but We have declared that it is terrifyingly powerful. if it is this dangerous, it should absolutely not be in the hands of people who have already proven time and time again they’ll use it against us and really don’t want any oversight or transparency of their actions.

Could they not allow another TikTok variant to be made that doesn't have the problematic ties. (I'm no TikTok fan)

I believe bytedance has a US company now

This already exists. Several Western-owned social media platforms have cloned many of TikTok's features and much of its user experience. They just haven't done as good a job of it.

The court's gave TikTok the option of changing ownership amd they declined.

TikTok should be banned even if it wasn't Chinese. At least for minors. It's an extremely addictive drug.

Meanwhile YouTube shorts comes preloaded in every android device and can be used by children. With their "lawful" trashy/disturbing content and recommendation algorithm

Absolutely, shorts shouldn't be available to Youtube children accounts.

I'm surprised it doesn't come from the EU. On the other hand, I'm not sure if this move is against short form content in general, but rather against China.

I wish the entire world would agree to ban short form content and influencer content in general. Things I saw on reels/shorts range from mild pornography, conspiracy theories, medical advice, promoting overconsumption, financial advice, etc. Nothing useful comes out of these platforms.

The problem is not with the short-form content medium. The problem is with the culture you live in. As a speaker of multiple languages, I see many different faces of TikTok in different countries. In most Western countries, the content I get is absolute trash, basically OnlyFans promoters and various stupid jokes. In another country I live in (not English-speaking), I get interesting political commentary, everyday useful tips/hacks, interesting views on my city, and of course comedy and dancing.

Interesting point. I do agree that I consume mainly English-speaking content.

I'd still argue, however, for the usefulness of the content you consume from non-English-speaking short form content.

- Political commentary -- why would I care for some random person's opinion on politics? If there are people whose opinion I respect, wouldn't it be smarter to just consume their content directly (newsletter, telegram channel, whatever)?

- Tips/hacks -- I'm not sure what you get, but I found most of these to be super simple/useless, or promote yet another super specialized tool that you can buy, "using my affiliate link down in the description"

- Views on my city -- I found some travel related content, most of it is fake. It showed me "interesting" locations, containing mountains and waterfalls in the... NETHERLANDS, the most flat country in the world.

- Comedy -- this one is actually good. The problem is that I can't seem to "train" the algorithm to focus on comedy/memes/fail videos. No matter how hard I try, I end up with conspiracy theories/OF promoters/men-women dynamics. Maybe it says something about me...

> I'm surprised it doesn't come from the EU. On the other hand, I'm not sure if this move is against short form content in general, but rather against China.

How can you be unsure about that, of course it's a move against China. There is after all an impending ban on TikTok specifically, not on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram or Snap.

It's not surprising that it doesn't come from the EU, it's probably challenging to write legislation there that specifically targets TikTok / Chinese corps while excluding American corps.

I thought America had freedom?? How can they claim to have freedom if the government says they can't even use a video app.

Using the app won't be illegal, you just can't get it from US app stores anymore (e.g. the personal freedom of users is preserved, only the freedom of some companies to do business in the US is restricted - e.g. a regular tradewar scenario).

"What good is a phone call, if you are unable... to speak?"

-- Agent Smith

This will be interesting. I know how to install apps on my Android. I will keep using tik tok and see what happens?

Well, Chinese users are used to have to use a VPN to access banned content. I think it is now our turn.

Ok so who’s building ZK social networks?

So Tiktok becomes a webapp right?

Who do you people trust more, a national government or a tech company?

Media & social media is a tool in the Western World to manufacture consent. Ain't no room for alternative narratives or wordings. That's why the ruling class needs to either have full control over (social) media or ban it altogether. So much is clear after one year of genocide in the ME.

That is observable untrue. Social media thrives because of the lack of consent in the population. Social media amplifies dissent. That is why many people find these places so toxic.

Do you believe that META does not censor content? Or amplify specific views? Or suppress the reach of certain others?

> Do you believe that META does not censor content?

To some degree for sure, simply because they have to by law.

> Or amplify specific views? Or suppress the reach of certain others?

They have the technical capabilities and what Meta in particular does: I don't know. But given the social media landscape as a whole (not only platsforms by Meta) and seeing so many nutjobs having tremendous reach with lies and fake content, I really don't think there is a lot of suppression or view-shaping going on. The views would be a lot more homogeneus if you were being manipulated on a large scale.

Since you mentioned the conflict in the ME: There are proponents of both sides with tremendous reach and depending on your bubble, you either see more of the one side or the other. But of course, since the immediate conflict has been going on for a while, the sentiment changed.

Some valid points. But seeing how traditional media has been framing certain events, avoiding to name certain agressors, while being very clear with others, it is obvious that our Western media has a strong bias towards certain narratives. You might say "isn't that normal / desired?". No, I would like to have objective reports, no matter who is doing what.

I agree, western media seems more (self-?)controlled than social media. But this post is specifically about social media.

TikTok has helped me more than decades of doctors.

Pro-palestinian content on TikTok that doesn’t support US foreign policy is the only real reason this is happening now. Congressmen have openly and plainly discussed this.

This is unfair. Apple is not blocked in China now and Americans are getting lot of money from sales in the country, I hope it will become blocked for unfair trade practices.

Apple is only allowed to do business in China because they bent over to the CCP. China banning Apple from doing business in China would indeed be an interesting tit-for-tat though :)

This was always about running defense for the likes of Israel and it’s ongoing televised genocide….

This isn’t about national security, if it had been this would’ve never gotten as far as it has been, the door would’ve been closed long ago.

TikTok and its algorithm isn’t beholden to the US’s government mandate like the other social media platforms. It also just happens to be the one with the largest amount of users and engagement, compared to the others..

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the numerous times TikTok has been on the chopping block (nearly every year it’s existed) understand what’s at play here.

Anyone who's used TikTok knows the platform is heavily moderated and not at all an "anything goes" paradise for the exchange of free ideas. So, if, as you suggested, the moderation does not favour the US government's mandate, then the obvious question one should be asking is: whose mandate does it favour?

False dichotomy. It doesn't need to favor anyone else's mandate. We are observing a lack of favor to any one mandate. The US mandate is to suppress "anti-US views" (in quotations because what the American populace thinks is anti-US/pro-US and what the American government thinks is anti-US/pro-US is oftentimes drastically different).

What people really mean (without even knowing it) when they say tiktok pushes propaganda is that it isn't suppressing the propaganda they don't like. They mean that after the "funniest Trump moments" video with 10 million views, there shouldn't be a video about the evils of Black Rock, it should instead be one of the "US military is EPIC" phonk edits.

Again, this would only be true if the platform had a laissez-faire attitude toward content, which it clearly does not. What can and can not be shown on the platform is heavily moderated, therefore there is _some_ mandate being fulfilled.

Now we've already agreed that it's not the US's mandate, and I suppose you could argue that it is not the mandate of any of the US's opponents ether. Whether there are any geopolitical entities who don't seem to have the same balance of criticism vs. praise as the others, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

This has nothing to do with Israel. It's economic protectionism and refusing to allow a totalitarian government to have a platform they can use to run unfetterd influence campaigns on our citizens.

> TikTok and its algorithm isn’t beholden to the US’s government mandate like the other social media platforms

Oh please, possible government censorship/influence over US-run social media has been investigated to death over the past several years. There's no there there.

> There's no there there.

You mean, like the DoD antivax campaign [1], which Meta explicitly allowed to continue after warning DoD their campaign was obvious to them? The same Meta that constantly publishes blog posts about them taking down foreign influence campaigns? DoD already admitted, but I guess I should probably take your word that these things don’t exist? (To be fair, these things usually don’t exist (tm) until declassified decades later. I always wondered why this one was exposed and even acknowledged so soon.)

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

At root, this topic is about "misinformation". The topic is interesting as misinformation itself may be subject to misinformation! I'm sure most would agree that the topic is politicised at the very least.

One thing that we can look into at is just how effective misinformation really is. Another thing is to examine how we approach the topic. Do we see people around us as "the masses" that are easily brainwashed and influenced but ourselves as rational, free thinkers? What are the impacts of a culture that is growing to believe that its own people can be easily brain washed or that its people should be protected from harmful information.

Another win for freedom and free speech! brought to you be the Meta lobbying team.

Every time you hear about freedom of speech in US, let's not forget that this is the country that gave 10 years prison term for anti-war speech (and for being a socialist) to Eugene Debs [1]. For comparison, in Russia the maximum term for anti-war speech now is 7 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs#Sedition_convic...

I honestly thought the US already forced TikTok to store all data on a US company's servers.

Looks like it's mostly stored in Oracle Cloud.

And the funny part is when they ban it from the United States, one of the side-effects is moving all the data out of the US .... removing ... US Citizen data onto foreign land.

Data might be stored in the US, but Chinese laws and control still apply to Bytedance, regardless of where the data is physically stored.

It's the same reason why multiple data transfer frameworks between the EU and US have been ruled illegal (e.g. Privacy Shield).

US law does not care where the data of its companies is stored and allows for surveillance of non-US citizens. Since EU citizens have a right to privacy, no US company can legally handle EU-citizens data.

Obviously this is bad for trade and business, so there'll always be a new law made to temporarily allow for data transfers. Until it'll be ruled illegal again, and the cycle repeats.

And they should tell Google to be ready to remove the Google mail app since it is blocking ipv4 and ipv6 address literals... wait...

Donald Trump in a recent interview with NBC said he would do what he can to help TikTok since it had played a part in getting him elected. He takes office on Jan 20th.

Sure, just before the inauguration, Biden's last convulsion, nothing to be surprised about after for example giving some Chinese pedophile a pardon, or his son etc etc. And the next day, the 20th of January, after the inauguration, everything will be rewinded.

The new president is inaugurated Jan 20th ...

This is excellent news!

This is one of the things in my lifetime that gives me the most optimism, alongisde the IRA Bill.

as someone in Australia who strongly supports our recent U16 ban, I hope META gets removed/broken up for you guys soon after, at least for underage users.

I'm 22 and often wish I had never been born into a world with social media, with the belief that it is one of the worst things we have ever made as a species.

I know the Tit for Tat and privacy optics, and the shutdown of dissenting views on certain proveable crimes in the ME may be bad sometimes, but these are far lesser than the desctruction of the social fabric of a society and the loss of development and inculcation of values of entire generations.

This move unfortunately has nothing to do with harm of social media. Its purely about economical war with china. US is simply protecting its interests.

So not only the ruling class in US doesnt care about the harms of social media. They are actively protecting the results - the profits and data/spying/control facebook brings. They will surely not limit or break up facebook unless it would result in getting more results.

If you are not in US though… this might good. Because the countries will most likely start to look more at their social media independence/s sovereignty.

I know this, but there is still a massive net benefit for the youth, and I hope it opens the door to more social media scrutiny.

People forget how relaxed life was before everyone could point a camera at someone and upload and embarass them in 10 seconds

Don't expect the world to change. On Jan 20, new office will start tearing up decisions.

I'm not one for the US Politics but i distinctly remember this being a keystone Trump policy last time around.

Why would it change just a couple of years later?

I dont know. Ask him?

https://time.com/6900348/tiktok-ban-donald-trump-congress/

1. A TikTok investor was a major campaign donor

2. Your party gets to be the party that helped the youth with their little toy. Courting the next generation is important. Especially for the party that is associated with older people.

3. He wanted fame and credit for the deal before, and he won’t get it now. He even suggested that he be paid a fee in exchange. He gets nothing for this.

4. Four years later nothing bad happened thanks to TikTok. It was certainly a concern that the liberal youth would use it to organize or whatever. But his party is back in power so it clearly wasn’t a political threat.

"People forget how relaxed life was before everyone could point a camera at someone and upload and embarass them in 10 seconds"

But that has been a thing since quite a while and unless you ban smartphones, won't go away. Not in general at least, but smartphone free areas (in school) are likely beneficial.

On the other hand, we can also make it illegal and enforce it in an easy way to upload pictures of other people against their will. I guess in most areas it is already illegal, but what teen would go to the police over a ridiculous video?

We all could also just accept, that everyone acts embarrassing from time to time.

Not really. It was not socially acceptable to record in all scenarios. The negative effect for the recording person was larger than the internet fame on average.

Not for the kids who grew up with this.

Kids would film themselves bullying others even before you could get internet points for sharing it.

It is also not socially acceptable today, to film another person today and upload it against their will. Kids (and grown up kids) do it anyway.

Sorry, what I mean is that the potential social fame outweighs most social penalty that you get from filming against the another persons will. The outweigh was not so clear previously, and not so easily achieved.

> but there is still a massive net benefit for the youth

No, there isn't. The youth will just switch to Instagram Reels.

> there is still a massive net benefit for the youth, and I hope it opens the door to more social media scrutiny

More realistically it just opens the door for US social media companies to fill the very profitable gap left by TikTok. Do you believe that for no reason whatsoever except the kindness of their corporate hearts, Meta, X, Alphabet, and others will just decide to abandon this segment?

It’s definitely not “purely about economical war”. A large part of it was public support for Palestine and the perceived role of TikTok in it, which explains the timing of the ban and why it succeeded this time around. Evidence? Well, many congresscritters were very open about this motive, e.g. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmaker... But yes, of course “social media is bad for children” had nothing to do with it at all.

"A large part of it"

However, the evidence is that "at least two" Congressmen mentioned it as a reason a single time each.

“You provided a single link so all the evidence in the world is that single link” is some lame trolling. The topic has been reported many times over since last October/November, with letter to Treasury Secretary [1], op-eds, hearings and addresses on Congress floor which you can look up yourself in a few minutes. [2] is a starting point from early on.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/israel-palestine-hawl...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-renew...

Don't get why your previous comment got flagged

1. There may be users who think I’m going on a flamewar tangent. I may think so myself about similar comments on a variety of topics, but IMO top-down censorship of pro-Palestinian content is something you can’t get around when discussing the TikTok ban.

2. I believe there are a substantial number of users prowling HN flagging anything perceived as anti-Israel. (Same can be said about anything perceived as pro-Israel, btw. Among other things.)

I've definitely come across the second, when posting links to verifiable hasbarah idf social media propaganda training videos and powerpoints the comment got flagged for no reason.

Honestly i think Palestine is very very minor reason. Some super pro israel politians might point to it as reason but its seems more of a cover. Why? Because there is huge support of palestine on facebook and instagram too. Its probably even bigger than on TikTok. These services have all the same content. If content creators arent already posting on all of the networks then there is army of people/bots who will hapily repost for them.

Have you followed the situation at all? Activists have been constantly screaming about censorship and sometimes unjustified bans on Facebook and co. since last year. [1] is just one of the dozens/hundreds of reports/accusations you can read. Sure you can post, doesn’t mean your content will be shown to others, and sometimes you literally can’t post or they ban your account if you’re influential.

Oh and this is BBC saying Facebook censors Palestinian news outlets, from earlier today.[2]

Of course Facebook isn’t as stupid as banning all posts that remotely smells like supporting Palestine, so you can still find a lot of that if you bothered to look. Politicians were saying even that is fanned by people finding unfiltered stuff on TikTok.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo

I am not saying networks are not doing that. They absolutely do that. But TikTok does it too. Its not like TikTok is some unfiltered bastion of freedom. TikTok is way more aggressive with shadowbans than even Facebook where they stopped caring and its all automated curation.

I simply doubt Palestine alone is someting they worry about as much as $$$ and influence.

If this was really about our kids then why not also ban Instagram, Reels, Snap etc. ?

This is pure protectionism and has nothing to do with your kids being safe nor national security.

The problem with AU's U16 ban is that it's going to end up being a de facto real ID requirement for any Australian to communicate online. And also, how many of us on this site were able to learn and grow because they got online as teenagers and learned things?

It would have been much, much better to regulate out the worst features of social media platforms for everyone than to pass a Bill that nobody knows how to implement, with a timeline of "well, you've got a year to figure it out".

I'm hoping it's a government or licensed third party provided anonymous token login system, or an email with a protected top level domain like anonymous@citizenverification.au or something.

De facto id will be a massive step backwards, if they move forward despite saying they most likely wouldn't, but not as far backwards as raising a generation on reactionary and divisive social media

lol… you must be new here. When has ANY digital initiative gone right the first time from any Australian government.

The last time they tried censorship (aka Stephen Conroy) it was thwarted by a 15 year old and abandoned. Let’s not even talk about their current piracy website ban where all you need to do is point DNS to someone non-Australian.

I'm pretty aware of how inept our government is at these policies, and their surveillance state tendencies (eg undisclosed facial recognition testing at flinder street station). But at this point i think a malicious australian government is less of a threat to the public and our way of life and emotional prosperity than social media.

The Australian Government has been hacked repeatedly, including the time Centrelink was hacked and they didn't even know they had been infiltrated (and attempted to cover it up).

Not to mention their KYC regulations led to the Optus disaster, by forcing telecoms to store PII longer than necessary.

Your position is that everyone in Australia should have their PII exposed because parental responsibility belongs with the state, as parents shouldn't be trusted to parent. It is an absolute CERTAINTY that the ID mandate will be mismanaged and be a security catastrophe.

Don't forget Australian Parliament House was hacked as well.

But this time it'll be different, right? Your position is especially egregious because it is a global ID mandate (and it'll be totally ineffective as a 10 year old can figure out a VPN).

My point is that social media is an active threat to society that is doing vast magnitudes of harm right now, where as authoritarian creep is also a great threat, but it isn't currently eroding our self of self and the sanctity of the individual, and deliberately de-training us to be reactionary animals with no regard for emotional intimacy or others, and nosediving our quality of public discourse. I'm worried of a world where people raised on social media their entire lives that teaches them to think a certain way win their careers through what are increasingly popularity contests in the 21stc, run our institutions and have their hand on our metaphorical red buttons. I don't think our society will have the discipline or the patience or maturity to stay out of unnecessary conflicts or make decisions that are in our long term interests if we keep social media as a formative part of peoples youth.

ID's can be reissued like we saw with optus and while there's a lot of pain and misfortune from insecurity of assets etc we can reverse that, mostly. You can't reverse the childhood of an entire guinea pig generation once you find out that social media mentally broke them. Obviously, assets and security aren't a concern at my age so my perspective might be a little different.

If you have anything about a global ID mandate i'd be interested, because it definitely hasn't been publicised in the media, though that doesn't always count for much.

I have a lot of conflicting views on this, but I think overall we are better off addressing the threat from social media right now.

You might view the current generation of younger people with the notion of at least a warm childhood like your own, and regular life milestones and rite of passages behind whatever struggle they're currently facing as slightly older people. That's increasingly not the case.

ID issues are causing real and active harm, right now. The authoritarian creep has led in part to the current homeless crisis. Vulnerable people have been burnt by KYC requirements (what happens when you don't even have a birth certificate anymore?), and burnt again with the inevitable data breaches when poorly implemented (Optus), and then burnt again due to the country's financial class differences.

ID helps to lock a certain class of people out of government services. That group is generally the disenfranchised, the mentally unwell, the disabled, and the kind of people that always get screwed over. The people those services were set up to help - because helping them is actually cheaper than just letting them cause chaos and then die. Unfortunately, post-setup, that cost is ignored for brownie points with various audiences.

You can't reissue IDs for people when you cancel the only ones that they have.

You can't save a generation, when their entire childhood is spent being attacked on the street because their parents dared to create them.

/me clutches pearls but if we don’t do this, a teenage boy might see boobies on the internet

While I vehemently disagree with Australia's proposed solution to this problem, this is very reductive and handwaving away very real problems.

ASIO?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-27/asio-blueprints-stole...

> undisclosed facial recognition testing at flinder street station

I hadn't heard about that particular intrusion. Got a link?

Can't find it right now but auspol has been using clearview and saying they weren't

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-04-14/clearview-ai-...

So your entire argument for supporting U16 ban is that despite knowing that:

- it will put every Australian's PII in the hands of people who have a bad track record on security - de anonymize the internet as we know it - make it easy for a foreign actor to break in (remember if there is a backdoor, it will be exploited) - increase the state's surveillance capabilities on their own citizens

All of this to do what exactly? Save democracy? Save the children? Can you prove that if we do that the outcome would be better than if we did nothing?

Do you have anything tangible in terms of proofs as to what outcome will be achieved?

My take is you don't because if you did, we would not be having this conversation.

My hope is that maybe people will stop viewing life from such a productised and artificial lens that's so far removed from the natural human experience.

Yeah, that is what I thought.

I think you are trolling and your response is just a bunch of word salad without much meaning.

You agree with the ban because you agree with the ban because you think the ban is good. There seem to be no critical analysis as to why this is good besides some supposed good intentions.

You've been making so many weirdly heated blanket assumptions about me as a person in this thread.

If you have a different opinion at least try and be civil.

you are hoping wrong then, tiktok block will only exacerbates this.

Coincidence: in portuguese tolo means fool

> Coincidence: in portuguese tolo means fool

The swipe in your response was totally unnecessary.

naivety isn’t evil but it’s highly damaging

In what world does blocking the most popular social media app directly lead to more usage of social media?

Tiktok being not from the US has differently tuned algorithms. That’s why it’s being banned. Now you have the right to be brainwashed only by US-approved algorithms. Don’t be a fool, tolo.

They have multiple times deployed not just insecure versions, but insecure protocols, for the system now known as myID. And when people have reported it as insecure - they did their best to ruin the person's life. Getting them fired, blacklisted, and worse.

In no possible future, do I foresee our government managing this as a "good thing".

> De facto id will be a massive step backwards, if they move forward despite saying they most likely wouldn't

Ah, yes, I too trust government to keep their words. Pinky promises and all that.

> but not as far backwards as raising a generation on reactionary and divisive social media

This is your opinion. You use of "reactionary" in this context implies that whatever views are being shared, you are against them. Instead of winning over people, you prefer the easy solution which is to silence them.

That is not very democratic of you.

Finally if you think that the "division" that most western societies are experiencing currently is only due to social media, then you haven't bothered researching theses topics.

These problems that are coming to light now have been a long time in the making. In reality decades, but before the governing powers could simply pretend that they did not exist whereas now, it is plain sight.

Silencing opposing voices is not moral and it is delusional to think that this will fix the broken state of western democracies just like sweeping the dust under the carpet doesn't mean that your apartment is clean.

The success rates for MOOCs is usually lower than 5%.

MOOCs were the holy grail - free, Quality, any time, education.

And it still had single digit pass rates.

———-

The people who are self motivated to learn, are probably people who move entire fields forward.

They are likely very happy while learning.

It’s an important part of human survival and existence.

We can and should optimize for it.

We are going to waste energy, if we argue that we should optimize for possibly 5% of the population.

Disregarding what 95% want, is a losing battle.

I don't think the GP was talking about MOOCs, but self-directed, unstructured learning. My teenage years on the internet before MOOCs were a thing, and I learned plenty.

While there's a lot of good learning material on the web, MOOC and other, I'm not sure it's an improvement over the alternatives — my mostly-pre-internet teenage years had me learn a lot from stuff I got from the library.

And sure, even just Wikipedia alone is bigger than most libraries, but as both are too large for one person, I'm just not convinced.

> … how many of us on this site were able to learn and grow because they got online as teenagers and learned things

MOOCs represent a cohort of self identified, motivated students, with highly flexible and quality learning material.

Completion rates act as a proxy, to estimate how many people will actually avail of the freedoms they have to learn.

5% is huge, that is 1 person in 20. 5% of the population having a bachelor's degree was enough to run an advanced society back in the 50s. For a free and easily available good that is quite a significant rate.

5% is not a voting group with weight.

60% isn’t a voting group that can handle parents motivated to take care of their kids.

However, let’s dump politics.

All things being equal, saying we should benefit 5%-20% of the population, at the cost of 95% to 80% of the population, just isnt an argument we can get behind logically.

Privacy is not a small thing to give up, but it is an easy thing to give up.

If there is to be some space for people to live without real ID, a practical alternative and argument is needed.

I find MOOC videos super useful even though I havent been motivated to complete one properly. I may not have the time to juggle work and an MOOC with homework deadlines, but sometimes the MOOC videos may be all I need to finish a complex task.

You're acting as if they're banning the Internet for U16, they're not, it's just social media (and not even YouTube, and probably not something like reddit either, at least for viewing).

How many things did you actually learn from Facebook? I'm guessing not a lot.

The problem with banning specific features etc is that it will most likely just leave giant loopholes and will be extremely hard to actually enforce.

> The problem with banning specific features etc is that it will most likely just leave giant loopholes and will be extremely hard to actually enforce.

I invite you to read the Bill^WAct and look at how it defines an "age-restricted social media platform".

Not thrilled by the definition, but still think a more general ban is better than trying to ban specific features, but I would probably just ban account creation for U16 - seems like the "cleanest" solution.

I think it will also bring major positive side effects to the web - social media sites will be forced to open up their walled gardens and smaller sites might thrive again.

Internet != social media. The former is likely a net good, the latter is definitely a net negative.

> how many of us on this site were able to learn and grow because they got online as teenagers and learned things

A huge majority, but it's not necessary as demonstrated by the ones like me that learned things as a teenager without "online" being a thing yet. Well, there were BBSes for the ones that had access to them, but they were pretty niche. We had books and monthly magazines. It was enough to bootstrap the 90s and people before us had even less and nevertheless they bootstrapped us.

The real concern is the differential between the have and the have nots. Probably lacking TikTok will have an almost zero effect because what's there will be replaced by the same things on a different platform. If a country should ever go offline and revert to books, which are out of date at the date of printing and more so every day after then, that would be a problem.

I learnt english on IRC.

Sure most of the girls I met there weren't real girls. But I did meet one of my gfs on IRC (and she was a real girl).

> I'm 22 and often wish I had never been born into a world with social media, with the belief that it is one of the worst things we have ever made as a species.

Haha so that when you ring the girl's house her father would answer the phone and ask why you are calling his daughter.

I don't use social media except for this site, still need to get on the github.

OMG, that was one of my biggest fears back then. Ah, good old times =P

I can empathize with this view, but this move is about reinforcing the current oligopoly of us-based internet giants, this is going to protect Meta's interests.

You could just not use it? Why are you pushing your tastes and opinions on others?

> as someone in Australia who strongly supports our recent U16 ban

Are you completely acknowledged about certain mechanisms doing that? I (not an Aussy) also support this but not via becoming the Government's slave.

How would you do it instead?

Just prohibit any proprietary software for the target audience and the problem is 100% over, not even 99%. Countrywide ban is understandable measures for opium and it is a working mechanism.

U16 ban? I'd argue that the highest risk in terms of Meta/IG comes from people aged 50 and up. Boomers who can't recognize fake news for shit taking everything at face value.

The kids will be fine, their bullshit radars are evolving. Old people's don't.

Beggars can't be choosers :)

Just wait until they ban something you care about and then see if you are still in favor of governments deciding what apps you should have or not have.

You think this is a win for now and then in the future based on this same precedent, the Australian government will ban an app that you use regularly because they can and there will be nothing you can do.

When that happens, you'll go protest in the street against the big fascist Australian government, am I right?

> I know the Tit for Tat and privacy optics, and the shutdown of dissenting views on certain provable crimes in the ME may be bad sometimes

If you are going down that road, maybe you can explain when it's ok to ban dissenting views. Apparently, censorship is ok in some cases but not others? Who decides what should be talked about? You?

If censorship is fine in some cases but not in others how do you differentiate between good censorship and bad censorship?

After all, when China removes comments and articles about Tiananmen from the web, they are simply doing what is best for them. But in the west, we call them authoritarians, So what does that make us?

> the destruction of the social fabric of a society and the loss of development and inculcation of values of entire generations.

This vague statement is fear mongering and and a complete hyperbole and gross exaggeration. The same thing was said about newspapers then it was TV, then it was video games and now TikTok/social media.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since not enough time has passed yet to see the effect of social media on multiple generations, then your argument is invalid.

Are there some downsides to social media? Sure. But it also enables marginalized people to connect with each other whereas in the past they would not have had a space to congregate.

It also helps uncover stories that people in power would prefer to not see the light of day. It also helps coordinate push back against new laws that in the past would have been approved without as much of a peep.

Your argument is basically, that we should throw the baby with the bath water.

It's not different than the populists parties who take complex issues and promise to solve everything with a simple solution when in fact most problems can't be fixed that way.

Appealing to libertarian principles here but I'd be hard pressed this is really about libertarian principles or if one is just mad of an action is going against a certain country's interests and is using whatever principle they can find to demean it irrespective of their actual beliefs.

Yes, and let them also remove Twitter/X asap.

That is a very naive take. Banning TikTok will make US big tech (Google and Meta) much more powerful and much harder for politicians to regulate.

Market consolidation is bad but i'm hoping this is the start of something. Even though with the elect it probably isn't

> as someone in Australia who strongly supports our recent U16 ban, I hope META gets removed/broken up for you guys soon after, at least for underage users.

oh boy… your optimism sounds childish after reading the second line

The fact that people like you vote is one of the things that make me incredibly pessimistic about our future.

Why are you optimist? Does facebook and google doing the exact same thing harm you any less?

Cmon that’s a bit hyperbolic isint it. This operation is wrong but social discourse online is good

Funny, this is one of those topics that has repeatedly given me great pessimism. If you take the conclusion that social media is corrosive to society then it should lead to a game of whack-a-mole against all social media. Yet I don't see that being the case in the emerging bipartisan narrative - the implication being that it's great when we do it.

On the other hand if you take it as a threat to national security, there needs to be a clearer argument for why that outweighs the pretty immediate free speech implications of the large number of users who do not want the app to be banned. This sets a huge precedent and yet I see proponents of the ban just getting carried away as to why the perceived short term benefits are justified with such unclear long-term ramifications. This is fundamentally about how speech on the internet stacks up against the interests of the defense department.

All options are shit, but western world governments have done next to nothing on social media before this.

We should also ask ourselves why we haven’t developed better tools or advocated more effectively for open APIs to mitigate the negative effects of social media. Platforms like Twitter/X often foster toxicity and binary thinking around complex topics. Imagine if X (or any other social platform) provided the "right" APIs, enabling third-party tools to introduce features like a "hate counterbalance" or a curated presentation of opposing viewpoints, or clarity on contentious topics. Such tools could help users break out of echo chambers and avoid the spiraling effect of focused "black hole" of hate.

There are some things that are bad, but not the domain of a government to handle. When a 4 year old kid punches another 4 year old kid in a playground fight, the government usually does not get involved. Rather, adult supervision plays an instrumental role in child development. The same is the case for the digital domain. Unfortunately, its very hard to know what someone is doing online. In some cases Ive seen parents just hand their kid their phone and allow them to do anything. In other cases Ive seen parents conciously guide kids. I also guess its harder to know when youre kid has been exposed to some type of harm. Personally, Id start by making kids aware of the dangers as early as possible.

With regards to social media, yes: we have seen some really unscrupulous use of it. Ranging from driving genocides to cyber-bullying and sex trafficking. Banning something is however often the worst way of dealing with it (I can just imagine the next generation of kids getting a high by figuring how to bypass whatever security is in place; Kids are often the best people to figure out how to break some rule that was set by some dumb adult). On the otherhand, there are people who have used the internet to do genuine good. Ive learned a tonne from youtube videos, MOOCs and wikipedia. Ive also had a tonne of good meals thanks to cooking videos on tiktok. Quite frankly, the free access to information is great for equallizing the playing field. Today I dont have to be an MIT student to learn about the latest breakthroughs in AI. Social media is also a huge boon for small businesses (like a local bakeshop). It was instrumental in reconnecting with loved ones post a natural disaster.

What we really need is to hold our big tech executives accountable. If facebook or google make money of a scam ad or sex trafficking scandal, then the executives of these companies should be charged for facilitating a crime (and charged with jail time not money). We are far passed the age where we need "rapid innovation" in this field. This should extend to cases where children are exposed to content that is inappropriate (theres no excuse now that we have the kind of AI models we have).

The other very pressing thing to note is the mental health epidemic that has started because of social media (which is where I presume you're coming from). I personally do think that kids should not be uploading stuff (and parents should not be making money of their kids cuteness). However, Im not sure how youd enforce such a thing. Banning kids under 16 will simply open a blackmarket for IDs up. Public education could be one way to help mitigate the risks, but also I think stricter penalties for social media bosses will disincentivize them from being over eager to hyper-optimize your feed. Other possibilities include rules about frequency by which social media apps can send notifications and banning them from being pre-installed on consumer devices (though I feel both are overly draconian and there may be other creative ways of getting around them).

Great firewall is one of the worst aspects of China, why do that here?

Banning the sale of a single app controlled by an adversary is building a "Great Firewall" in your book? (Note that it is not even a ban on the app at the ISP level.) There are legit arguments against the policy but this ain't one.

Great Frewall wasn't built in one day

Please explain its first day then if you want to make that case.

> explain its first day

In the beginning The Elders of the Internet created the Server and Terminals, and pipes that interconnects them

And the online community was without form, and void; and illegal/cp/terror/financing/harmful darkness was upon the face of the deep

And the Spirit of State censorship moved upon the face of the waters

And the State said, Let there be right: and there were rights and wrongs

And the State enforced the right, and it was good; and the State divided the right from the wrong contents.

Using CCP app is not a right.

Correct, it's been placed in the wrongs.

Correct.

Nice diversion from the history of Great Firewall and very specific question about what happened on its first day—what was banned specifically, and what the stated basis for the ban was.

So much for moral high ground of “free speech and free enterprise”

Yes. For their own citizens, not foreign actors who wish to influence said citizens.

Motto of the powerful. Can't beat them? Ban them. Same thing they did with Huawei they can't steal the patents it owns to use on their 5G network so ban them.

Are Huawei backdoors part of the active telecom control that China has in the US networks currently? TikTok seems much more benign.

US don't need to buy their units, just pay for the patent so they can implement the technology.

opposite, in fact

The only thing that makes Chinese control of social media seem benign is that the US is doing a far better job of pushing harmful propaganda onto itself than China could ever accomplish.

> Are Huawei backdoors part of the active telecom control that China has in the US networks currently?

No. There were audits and fond no backdoors in Huawei equipment.

Audits can only conclusively prove existence of backdoors, not lack of backdoors. At best, you get some assurance.

That's not very logical at all.

I believe that a flying unicorn orbits the moon. When no unicorn is found, does that prove that a unicorn may exist?

You can't use a negative to prove a point. Either the point is proven and supported by evidence or it is just speculation. If it is speculation, then it can be dismissed since it has no basis in reality.

In this particular case, if an audit was done and found no backdoors then as far as we know and until such a time as we find a backdoor, then there are no backdoors.

If you want to continue to believe that there is a backdoor, then this is an opinion which does not constitute proof of any sort and certainly should not be used to come up with policies such as banning a company from operating in the US in case of a mythical backdoor which has so far eluded everyone.

> If it is speculation, then it can be dismissed since it has no basis in reality.

This line has no basis in logic actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Russell’s teapot is not a logical proposition as to what’s true and what is not. It is philosophizing about burden of proof in a low information context in a debate. It is a persuasion tactic, an exercise in philosophy, not at all a logical proposition.

Also its context (religious belief in a deity) is not at all like a scenario where a history of adversarial motives are established. There would be reason to believe the adversary would do certain things if they could, simply because the incentive is so strong and their history of behavior suggests that.

Simply the line that was suggested “there is no backdoor until we find one” is logically self-defeating. The logical proposition of the existence of backdoor cannot be a function of us finding one or not. You can discuss what the policy should be as a risk analysis question, not as a logical “there is no backdoor” from Iraqi Information Officer meme template.

Huawei has a history of spying. China is good at spending money to sweep things under the rug and pretend like it didn’t happen. Look how they are using it to spread propaganda STILL to this day that Covid didn’t originate in Wuhan.

Huawei sells teleco gears it's designed to transport information (including propaganda)

Or do you mean the huawei corp is spreading propaganda of some sort?

It's only bad when others do it :-)

A burst of commenting without upvoting is a good way to quickly bury a post on HN.

So many decisions are being made during the transition that could have been made before the election. Is this normal / good for the countries in general?

Regarding TikTok I agree that it's a national security problem for USA in its current form, so actually it is not even the decision that I oppose.

The decision was made a year ago when the bill was passed.

The date is pretty suspect though.

Not really

Yes, it is. It’s not common to enact laws on the day before one leaves office. Pardons, sure.

It’s clearly an attempt to ram it through before the administration changes. Even a year ago they knew there was a good chance of that.

How is it rammed through?

Do you think it’s just coincidence that the date was the last day of a presidential term? Can you think of other controversial laws that did that?

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