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Comment by flkenosad | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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