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Comment by recroad | Hacker News Reader

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Let me lay out how this works:

The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.

Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.

6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".

This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.

Devil's advocate: Can this not also happen on literally any other social network? Can this kind of shit not also be initiated by domestic agents, or agents of allied nations, or even just some bored haxor group with a penchant for chaos?

If what you said is the primary reason for banning TikTok (bad actors can do bad things), it's also a valid reason to ban literally every social network, or possibly even all user-generated content on the internet.

On non CCP controlled platforms, they cannot chose what stories to "organically" promote and who to promote them too. Most people have no concept of the 99% of posts to social media that never get traction.

They can still kind of do it, but it requires a lot of work to fool other companies algo's into artificially promoting what you want. Much easier to just call up Bytedance and say "We need everyone in this area seeing this tiktok tomorrow".

If you think domestic social media companies aren't capable of silently promoting certain content at the request of someone with influence... you wouldn't happen to be in the market for a bridge, would you?

Non CCP controlled platforms can definitely choose what stories to promote. Musk does it every day on twitter. Oligarch controlled social media is just as much a blight as government controlled social media.

Of course they do, but they aren't interested in toppling the west.

Guess we will find out. They sure do seem to prefer Russian style oligarchy and control over Western values.

To your first paragraph, yes, across the board, and yes to more scenarios than you even laid out here.

To the second, you misunderstand the issue the US government has here. It is not that the social network is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority. It is that it is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority that they are enemies with.

Whether you consider them your enemy, whether they consider you theirs, whether you think that China really is or is not an enemy of the US government, and whether you consider the US government your enemy or not is all irrelevant to the point at hand, as interesting as they may be in other contexts; this is about the beliefs of the US government.

China has similar concerns and has already taken numerous similar steps, and it's equally not any sort of hypocrisy or anything because the principle they operate under is not about the existence of control, but who has the control.

You might want to get your paranoia checked out. I'm not even going to bother asking for the many sources that support your overwhelming reason.

Russia had Bernie Bros and Magatards brawling with each other at pre-planned rallys across the street from one another. And they didn't even have access to the facebook algo.

Citation needed.

Might as well ban electricity in case the Chinese manage to use it to do bad things, same (insane) logic applies.

While your scenario might make for an interesting Tom Clancy novel there's no evidence any of that is happening and no one involved in this ban with any authority is arguing that this is something they're worried about.

I agree that their example is absurd, but China has definitely used social media accounts to influence opinions on Hong Kong, Xinjiang etc. American social media companies cooperate with investigations and flagging of this propaganda. On the other hand, TikTok is almost certainly being pressured by the CCP to promote it and obfuscate any investigations.

Wow, this is a whole new level of China otherization and it leads to many bad things, and you don't have to look beyond the past 100 years to find many examples (even Chinese ones).

Maybe consider that it's being banned because it makes it harder to control the political narrative and discourse in society when people have access to information. I think Chomsky put it best: there are many ways of population control, in the old Soviet Union it used to be the boot. In "democracy" it's controlling information and the Overton Window and TikTok breaks that completely. A great example is the Israel's assault on Palestine. Has this been covered anywhere where you watch news in even remotely the most honest way? Don't think so. Is it on TikTok? I think you know the answer.

I'd also say to single out TikTok and the Chinese while ignoring Meta and Google (why not ban them?) is very questionable if you really care about the scenario you described.

All that is great, except for the part where the algorithms that collect your reactions to content and then choose new content for you in a feedback loop—which as you point out, can produce valuable effects as well as harmful ones—are a black box under some approximation of direct control by the CCP.

I keep seeing this stated as a reason for banning tt but I've yet to see any evidence. During the supreme courts oral argument last week they referred to a sealed appendix with more info, when they were passing the legislation they also referred to secret evidence that Americans can't see. I don't want to give in to conspiratorial thinking but if its as bad as they claim then we as the public have a right to see the evidence and decide for ourselves.

Evidence as to CCP control? Or evidence to another thing?

Because something that is very important to understand about China, or any other totalitarian regime, is that the people in charge don't let something like TikTok happen without having a fairly good grip on the people running it. That's just authoritarianism 101.

Evidence that they are using the app to influence US users in a direction that would benefit the ccp and hurt the USA.

If you catch someone planting bombs under all your bridges, you don’t need evidence that they’ve detonated any to take them down.

You've just described the reason for this TikTok ban.

Here's a study showing TikTok tilts toward positive views on CCP and away from negative ones, unlike trends on other socials.

https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Peer-Reviewed...

I laid out in another comment how this works, but the gist of it is that the CCP can use the populace as dumb actors to achieve their goals.

China has secret agents they need to move through an area. Why not have an asian hate awareness rally in that area at the same time?

Nobody attending that rally would have any idea they are acting as decoy agents. None would report seeing CCP propaganda on tiktok.

Maybe you're the dumb actor posting on behalf of American tech moguls?

Think of it this way:

"TikTok would rather shut itself off from the U.S. market than divest its ownership from the CCP.

That is not the action of a rational corporation and really tells you who calls the shots at TikTok."

And it would be better if "the algorithm" were under control of some unelected managers in a billion dollar company owned by finance capital?

Should I feel better or worse about it being the CCP instead of a tiny group of billionaires? From where I'm standing the cabal of tech billionaires appear to be a bigger threat to me as a normal american. Do you think this is naive?

I agree. It's the same class of people that helped China become the world's factory that is now saying what it has always been. These are the same people that is still running America.

> Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people. This sort of confirms what I had feared for a few years now: that Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.

What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?

> What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?

Let me expand this: what in the law prevents someone from going to TikTok.com and seeing the same content?

The ban is on (a) apps in the app stores and (b) hosting by American companies. It’s not sanctioning TikTok à la Huawei.

In May 2019, the U.S. government placed Huawei on the Entity List, which restricted American companies from doing business with it without a special license. This included Google, which meant Huawei lost access to the licensed version of Android and key Google services, including the Google Play Store. As a result, Huawei could no longer pre-install Google apps like Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and other essential services that many users in Western markets rely on. Huawei was once a strong competitor in Europe challenging Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers. It effectively limited Huawei's competitiveness in Western markets and diminished its momentum when it was at the peak of its challenge to Apple and Samsung. The same will happen with TikTok in the U.S. Under the umbrella of national security, competition is being sidelined.

Until two police officers come and frogmarch you to the back of a car when you are saying something the government doesn't like there is free speech.

Most people are just annoyed their social media addiction is being interrupted when they moan about account bans, or app bans in this case.

Hell, even some of the "restrictions" on free speech that are legitimately on the books in the US aren't actually enforced.

Get a ham radio license and use profanity when you transmit. Seriously. Do it. Odds are, the FCC does nothing. The thing they do when they do catch you is send you a letter saying "please don't do that".

> Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people

1. There's plenty of speech you can't say (fraud, libel), so speech is believe it or not regulated.

2. This isn't about free speech per se, it's about the right of a company to exist. the government has broad leeway to regulate which entities do or don't have the right to have limited liability. if TikTok were a unincorporated business entity and the owners were liable for lawsuit the story would be different.

3. the government forcing a sale is individual free speech maximalist position in this situation, because the users of the platform can still have their free speech. if tiktok doesn't take the deal, then the "loss of free speech" is on them, not the government.

4. America, which is supposed to be a bastion of free commerce, forced the sale of Merck away from germany (there is still a german merck with the same name). this is no different.

Are you sure that the "historical knowledge of many concepts" isn't a CCP slanted version of history? Or whatever suits the CCPs current interests? As a trivial example, do you think you are getting an unbiased view on Tiananmen Square or whether the US should back Taiwan in a war?

they aren't banning it. They gave tiktok an out -- sell to an American company or non adversarial country, if ByteDance doesn't bite on that, then that's on them.

That may be the case for you, but that's by definition anecdotal. I personally have seen the content consumed by a number of kids, and the amount of dubious at best information on the platform is absolutely rampant, and younger kids don't yet have a filter to know the bad from the good. Parental oversight can help, of course, but from my own observations, parents aren't for the most part monitoring what their kids are consuming.

Of course, my take is likewise anecdotal, and you may take it for what you will. That said, boiling the entirety of the American sentiment to fear of a "threat to their core" is disingenuous. Criticism of the effects of the app are as valid as its merits, regardless of what conclusions you draw based on your "fears".

This isn't banning dubious information. I only have to look at what my mom sends me videos about from Facebook.

No, it's not, nor did I state that it is. It is, though, making it more difficult for something I find detrimental to the development of kids to proliferate.

You, as an adult receiving that video, have the (hopefully) developed sense of what is accurate information or not, as well as the time to gestate on the content of that video and apply critical thinking. You can delete the video and move on with your life.

Tik Tok sends 15 seconds worth of such information, good or bad, and doubles down on detected interest, leaving little to no time to process before moving on to the next clip which is likely tailored towards the first clip's subject. Couple that with the suggestibility and naivete of children, and you end up with reinforcement of thin, poorly informed opinions based on information that may or may not even be remotely accurate.

The idea of banning all dubious information is a strawman.

>Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.

Americans love free speech. American oligarchs hate it.

Free Speech != freedom to do literally anything.

We don't even have free speech, btw.

You can't yell FIRE in crowded rooms with impunity, you can't say untrue things about people that harm their businesses or put their lives in danger with impunity, etc.

The idea that our politicians should not be allowed to ban something being owned by a foreign company (especially when our companies aren't allowed to operate in said country, especially when we don't exactly have friendly relations with said country) - is, IMO, absurd.

It is actually legal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater.

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

https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/blog/legal-mythbusting-serie...

It is SOMETIMES legal, which means that it is in the other times illegal.

Not necessarily that either. You’ll only possibly receive a charge if your conduct was intentionally misleading with purpose to harm. Yelling “fire” in a theater while in a Gen Z crowd (“this is fire”) or while listening to Metallica (“Fight fire with fire”) isn’t going to get a charge either, even if it possibly causes a stampede. The crime therefore could be accomplished with far more alternative words than just “fire.”

The point is: Legal experts unanimously agree this analogy is terrible and should never be used. The Supreme Court also thought so, completely overturning the case it originated from just several years later.

To the post indicating shouting fire is legal - I believe the parent’s intent is to indicate there are consequences to it. From the article —

>> The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of that crime are made out.

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