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Comment by omnimus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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