Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.

Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.

Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.

It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.

> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.

China has had such social networks for a long time. Their Weibo and Xiaohongshu are two prominent examples. Weibo started as a copycat of Twitter, but then beats Twitter hands-down with faster iterations, better features, and more vibrant user engagement despite the gross censorship imposed by the government.

My guess is that TT can still thrive without American content, as long as other governments do not interfere as the US did. A potential threat to TT is that the US still has the best consumer market, so creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization, thus snatching away TT's current user base in other countries.

> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?

This is a weird fantasy, but it brings up an interesting point. The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture. Especially when compared to Japan or Korea, countries with a fraction of the population but many, many times the influence.

I wish the CCP didn't wall off their citizens from the rest of the world in the name of protecting their own power. Think of the creativity we are all losing out on.

> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.

For whom? UK users?

TikTok users who use the Chinese version are not consuming content from US creators. They won't notice this ban at all.

I presume the US market is the dominant target market for ads / influencing, a quick google search suggests it is 75% of the global spend. So the other issue is not just losing US influencers but all influencers will take a haircut. I don't know how much of popular content is paid for by such revenue but taking a 75% haircut could put a real damper on content producers - especially those who make it a full time job. I don't know if that'll make it better with an increase in proportion of more organic content. I personally don't use TikTok - I waste enough time on HN.

There is an additional separate issue that influencer is a coveted 'career' for many children (~30%), so not only would it wipe out many jobs it'll kill their dreams. I guess like cancelling the space program at a time when kids really wanted to be astronauts.

I think there is a lot wrong with society and TikTok is part of it - but that's a much longer discussion for some other time.

> widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.

As of January 2025, the countries with the most TikTok users are:

Indonesia: Has the most active users with 157.6 million

United States: 120.5 million

Brazil: 105.2 million

Mexico: 77.5 million

Vietnam: 65.6 million

Pakistan: 62.0 million

Philippines: 56.1 million

Russian Federation: 56.0 million

Thailand: 50.8 million

Bangladesh: 41.1 million

> but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.

Can't really disagree, but it's my favorite place to pirate fonts. Typing out site:vk.com <thing I want> feels like a real life cheat code.

There are such products. Outside of America whatsapp is a dominant social app but its use internally is almost mute despite being an american social app.

Tiktok america is over 50% of tiktok revenue I think that more than anything else would choke out growth world wide.

Orkut was one American social network that barely had any American content because it was taken over by Brazilians.

I think it’s going to be a lesson to Americans about just how little their content actually matters to the other 96% of the world.

I don't think it will survive because non American cultural exports are not quite there yet you have to be born outside the US to understand the reach of Hollywood/cultural export as an opinion shaping tool

But then again Telegram survived and they had to resort to kidnapping the CEO so if it does survive the US pretty much gifted that space to a geopolitical adversary

But I'm pretty sure Langley/MD folk thought about this and are betting on it not surviving

How will YouTube shorts, and instagram stories pivot? They already aren’t seen as true rivals, but maybe they can change or spinoff a third brand. The gold in TR has always been its algorithm. Maybe they can fake it. How easy will it be to circumvent via vpn? Will other English content on tt skyrocket? Eg uk and Canada.

It will still legally have American content, but only propaganda :)

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/biden-administration-quiet...

No more exporting of Murican culture and ideologies. Kinda cool on a second thought.

It will take ages for that to happen. AFAIK the "ban" only really removes it from app stores, I don't think it even requires store owners to force it off of phones that have downloaded it already.

> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?

TikTok does not exist in China, they have their own version -- Douyin -- that complies with their more stringent privacy laws.

I remember pre-Musical.ly TikTok here in Japan, and it was MUCH better then. In fact, it noticeably degraded when Musical.ly was folded in.

American social media culture revolves around money and sex in a way that isn't as popular in Korea/Japan/S. Asia—roughly speaking, the original scope of TikTok's userbase, since Douyin has always kept Chinese users separate.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of garbage social media content in Asia, but it's more boomers and gen-z era that consume hentai/money flexing/politics/etc., so that nonsense was almost completely absent in the early days of TikTok, when the users were mostly Asian teenagers and young adults trading choreography, in-jokes, and showing off their video editing skills.

TikTok is banned in India too

I main duckduckgo, but I use Yandex more than Google these days. Incredibly useful for stuff power people in the US want to censor (and I suppose, Google is useful to russians for the exact same reason).

I don't think US content will disappear from TikTok. Most viral creators know how to use VPN. No one's gonna leave such a huge pile of eyeballs on the table.

Is TikTok big in Europe? Is Europe big on social media?

How unprecedented. The non-United Statesians will be SHOCKED when they interact with each other unmediated by the Americans.

How about WeChat, little red book, … in fact the mainland version of tt, …

Some other countries banned tiktok too, e.g. India

India also just banned TikTok, I wouldn't be surprised if bans became widespread outside of America with any country worried about China's geopolitical power.

India also banned TikTok a while ago

First, I still don't think the ban will actually happen. The current administration will punt the issue to the next and Trump has already signaled he wants to save Tiktok, whatever that means. That might be by anointing a buyer that he personally is an investor in. Tiktok may choose to still shutter in the US rather than being forcibly sold.

But there's a biger issue than loss of American content should this come to pass: the loss os American ad revenue for the platform and creators. A lot of people create content aimed at Americans because an American audience is lucrative for ad revenue. If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?

Utopia

If a US-based alternative appeared which not only substituted performatively, but also monetized creators and influencers enough to put everyone else to shame, people could not help but notice and migrate there in droves.

It would be pretty cool if there was a respectable capitalist with enough money, or if that won't do it then a bigger more-respectable political organization or something, and Tiktok would be nothing but a memory of how things used to be before they got better.

Think about it, a social force or financial pressure strong enough to reverse unfavorable trends, even after they have already gained momentum.

And all it takes is focusing that pressure in an unfamiliar direction that could probably best be described as "anti-enshittification".

I know, that's a tall ask, never mind . . .

> This is going to be an interesting experiment:

Unclear. Biden and Trump both have stated that they will decline to enforce this law.

Instagram and Facebook is more popular outside the US and China than TikTok.

Or Indian content. It will probably end up getting banned in a lot of places over time.

Until trump lets it sink, tgis is mwaninvless.

Cash bribes are how laws are define now. Is america avaluable audiemce?

They'll be on RedNote within 2 weeks.

Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.

Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.

On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.

The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.

I have a lot of Japanese friends and travel between Japan and here frequently. TikTok is huge in Japan and a lot of my For You Page is content trending in Japanese spheres. I don't live in Japan so being able to plug into Japanese media is a very, very convenient thing.

I'll probably continue trying to use the app if possible since I mostly connect with Japanese content, but I will say there's also a fun world of Japanese creators who straddle the English and Japanese speaking words who are about to lose an outlet to the English speaking world, and I feel really bad for that too.

The "algorithm" is also just so much better than Reels and others. I spent an afternoon of PTO training my algorithm a couple years ago and it's been great ever since. My partner and I share TikToks with each other all the time and. we shape each other's algorithm and interests. Reels fixates too much on your follows and Youtube Shorts is honestly a garbage experience. Both platforms really reward creators building "brands" around their content rather than just being authentic or silly. I treat Reels as the place for polished creators or local businesses who are trying to sell me something and TikTok as the place for content. I find that I get a lot less ragebait surfaced to me than I do on other platforms, though I admit my partner gets more than I do. We both skip those videos quickly and that has helped keep this stuff off our FYP.

An important thing to remember is TikTok was one of the first platforms that was opt-in for short-form content. Both Reels and Shorts was foisted upon users who had different expectations of the network and as such had to deal with the impedance mismatch of the existing network and users who didn't want short-form content. TikTok's entire value proposition is short-form content.

I don't create for TikTok, I have never had a TikTok account, and I don't use TikTok, outside of being exposed to videos on other sites, or occasionally clicking a link.

I had been exposed to DouYin before, but my first experience of TikTok in real life was someone at a party, holding their phone, exclaiming something along the lines of "I can't look away, it's so addictive." It was uncomfortable, and I'm aware of how fake this sounds, but it happened.

But I think this is very bad.

With Section 230 in crosshairs, EARN IT being reintroduced every year or two, and access to books and sites being fragmented across the US, things are very already bad, and have the potential to get much worse. TikTok being banned is censorship, and presents a significant delta towards more censorship.

Congress didn't just "ban TikTok", Congress banned its first social media. This is case law, this is precedent, this is a path for banning other social media apps.

I think this is bad because I think this is the start of something new and something bad for the internet.

I'm pretty upset about it honestly. TikTok's algorithm has always done a fantastic job of providing interesting clips in a way that Facebook and Instagram has never been able to provide. I will say that upon a new account, it's mostly garbage, but it quickly learned what I was interested in and what I would tend to engage with. It also does this while showing me considerably fewer ads than the meta platforms.

All the other content recommendation systems force you into a ghetto and are highly auto-regressive. They only show you content like they already showed you, so you will never be exposed to new things. This hampers discovery, and you end up with only a few winner-take-all accounts with mass appeal and mass distribution (e.g., "Mr. Beast") who are broadly not interesting or specialized.

TikTok is more stochastic and is more likely to give wider circulation to niche and esoteric subjects. Booktok could never happen on YouTube shorts or Instagram.

Using those other platforms is like shouting into the wind. You could have videos up for years and not get 50 views. With TikTok, a random video could be seen by 250k people.

A corollary to other systems being so auto-regressive is that they are much more dangerous for vulnerable people. If Instagram decides to start showing you extremist or otherwise political content, that is all you will see. This is the "rabbit hole" effect that people have commented upon. This doesn't happen to the same degree with TikTok; while this content can be recommended, it's not all that will be recommended.

TikTok provides the "human" element that IG and YouTube do not.

On IG and YouTube the algos are shoving "creators" in my face, which is fine sometimes. But TikTok surfaces randos whose only followers are their own family members, and they happen to be talking about something unique or funny in one video out of dozens that got only 2 views.

On IG and YouTube, the algos give me brightly lit faces, brightly lit homes, professional editing. On TikTok, I get people speaking quietly from their bed, or their recliner in what is obviously a trailer, or in the passenger seat of their car at Safeway, double-chinned and sleepy-eyed, saying something hilarious or just talking about their day or maybe sharing something they just realized.

On IG and YT, I get a video of someone falling on their face plastered with poorly worded captions and one or more logos for some social media company. On TikTok, I see the original video of that person falling on their face from the original account, and if you go to their account it's obviously just a real person who made a funny video by accident one time.

All the things that IG and YT force on me certainly exist on TikTok too, and you can surround yourself with that content if you like. But if you don't want that kind of content, TikTok lets you choose.

IG and YT don't give you that choice.

Not a content creator, but a TikTok user for several years. I really feel like the app changed my life. It opened my world to new cultures and ideas, brought me out of my comfort zone, introduced me to several real life friends. I made big changes in my life as a direct result of TikTok and have improved my life and health significantly as a result. I’ll be really sad to see it go.

I've found something like a very efficient sorting into communities of shared interest, and something egalitarian in being able to see people with 0 views and get reactions from them.

It's by contrast to say, Youtube and X, where The Algorithm (tm) sustains a central Nile river of dominant creators and you're either in it or you're not.

That said, I think the political questions are rightly the dominant ones in this convo and those color my lived experience of it.

I personally like the stupid time wasting app. There is a little pig on there that they dress up in little outfits and you can watch it eat treats

My wife, well into her 30s, initially got an inkling that she might be on the Autism spectrum after being exposed to TiKTok videos of high masking, high functioning women who talked about their Autism.

After many years and dozens of tests and questionnaires and appointments with speech pathologists, occupational therapists and psychiatrists, she was formally diagnosed last year with Level 2 Autism (there are 3 levels here in Australia).

After years of being misdiagnosed with various forms of anxiety or depression (and none of those drugs or treatments being helpful for her), this has been life changing. So much of her early childhood and past life now suddenly makes sense.

We used to be very bad at diagnosing autism in girls

technology changed our life. especially internet and smart phone impact a lot on social engagement between peoples. if people spend much time on internet or smart phones daily, if it is not tiktok, it will be something else. should we go back to non smart phone time? or even roll back to no internet time? maybe no electricity time.

technology is just like a tool. how people use it matters not the technology itself can be evil. tiktok's algorithm helps speed up information delivery to the people who likes it. eventually it helps to form a community of people online who like similar thing or have similar options. people needs to be aware of the content on any platform has "survivorship bias". seeing couple of examples is not representing the whole.

Not a content creator and use it regularly. My algorithm is mostly silly stuff, music, etc. I'm not convinced there's a discernible risk to national security, and as someone with a lot of libertarian views, I think the ban is an overstep by the US government.

The "sticky"-ness is real, but many will flock to the TikTok copies in other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, anyway.

Regardless, I enjoy the platform. It's fun to reference the viral sounds/trends on the platform with other friends that use it.

I don't have an account, but how about this: I don't want the government to ban websites or apps in general, and certainly not for who owns them.

The internet was supposed to be a global thing, where it didn't matter who you were and everyone could connect to everyone. That is the internet I grew up with.

As a millennial, I use TikTok as a “normie” version of Reddit. The algorithm has a similar vibe. It puts content in front of me that I’m likely to be interested in, exposing me to quite a diverse set of content. The instagram/youtube algorithms don’t come anywhere close in comparison.

It’s a guilty pleasure in the dopamine sense, but also surfaces a lot of informative content if you bias towards that! I suppose it depends how you use it.

> Anyone here who's not a TikTok content creator reasonably upset about losing access to the platform? Can you tell me why it will sting for you?

I like living in a country where the government does not get to decide what I'm allowed to read/watch/see. The TikTok ban chips away at that in a meaningful way.

I value this above most other concerns, including vague worries about "Chinese spying".

I'm pretty upset about it and I am not a creator.

I'm not just upset because I have a general dislike of being told I'm an idiotic, addicted, communist stooge who is easily brainwashed. I am used to folks telling me that- it started when I was writing anti-war editorials in the early oughts, so there is nothing new in that.

What I regret is that I have been following a number of quite-good political discussions on the platform, with a nicely diverse group of interlocutors.

While the discussion generally leans far left, there are many flavors of that left:

not a lot of tankies, mostly just people between "dirt bag left" and "black panther party", lots of women, BIPOC, trans folks, academics, working people, indigenous folks, queer folks of all stripes, activists, and folks who just don't like authority.

Those conversations had been very hard to come by on Yt, Ig, or Fb.

I think it's the response format for videos. I don't think it's worth bothering to speculate about other reasons, though I did note that several legitimate left news sources were shuttered in 2020 when Meta and Tw started their political purge.

Anyhow, I know that folks in the US have very little regard for political autonomy, so I am not surprised that this happens, and compared to the carceral state and the happy ecocide of the planet this is a very little thing. But I will still miss it.

I'll try to directly relate this to something you are familiar with.

> Can you tell me why it will sting for you?

Imagine Hacker News without the comments.

> The only thing I get sent from TikTok are dances and silly memes

That's like saying Hacker News is just old links about useless stuff from other parts of the internet.

> I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad.

A sense of relief may be a coping mechanism. I've heard laid-off colleagues inform me they felt relief in the immediate aftermath; granted, the lay-offs were pre-announced before they communicated who would be "impacted", and it was at a high-pressure environment; but the human mind sometimes reacts in unexpected ways to loss outside of one's control. Rationalization is a mechanism for ego defense.

It's annoying to have to take the time to train my recommender on a different platform. I'm sure I could get YouTube Shorts to eventually give me an equivalently pleasant experience, it's just a pain.

I don't really care either way. I used TikTok and uninstalled it since I found myself watching more than doing. Even if you curate your algorithm to 'good' stuff, it's still just consuming.

TikTok has replaced Reddit for me (I can expand more on why I stopped using Reddit, but it's not related to TikTok) in terms of "checking what's up on the internet" or as Reddit would put it "Checking the homepage of the internet".

I trust TikTok's "algorithm" to give me quick and entertaining short-bits about what's going on, what's interesting, etc. It learns what I'm into effortlessly, and I appreciate how every now and then it would throw in a completely new (to me) genera or type of content to check out. Whenever I open it, there is a feed that's been curated to me about things I'm interested in checking out, few new things that are hit or miss (and I like that), and very few infuriating/stupid (to me) things.

Its recommendation engine is the best I have used. It's baffling how shitty YouTube's algorithm is. I discover YouTube channels I'm into form TikTok. Sometimes I'd discover new (or old) interesting videos from YouTube channels I already follow from TikTok first. For example, I follow Veritasium and 3Blue1Brown on YouTube but I certainly haven't watched their full back catalog. YouTube NEVER recommends to me anything from their back catalog. When I'm in the mood, I have to go to their channel, scroll for a while, then try to find a video I'd be interested in from the thumbnail/title. And once I do, YouTube will re-recommend to me all the videos I have already watched from them (which are already their best performing videos). Rarely would it recommend something new from them.

On TikTok, it frequently would pull clips from old Veritasium or 3Blue1Brown videos for me which I'd get hooked after watching 10 seconds, then hob on YouTube to watch the full video. It's insane how bad YouTube recommendation algorithm is. Literally the entire "recommended" section of youtube is stuff I have watched before, or stuff with exactly the same content as things I have watched before.

Here is how I find their recommendation algorithm to work:

YouTube: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? Here is that video again, and 10 other "brisket smoking videos". These are just gonna be stuck on your home page for the next couple of weeks now. You need to click on them one by one and mark "not interested" in which case you're clearly not interested in BBQ or cooking. Here are the last 10 videos you watched, and some MrBeast videos and some random YouTube drama videos.

TikTok: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? How about another BBQ video, a video about smokers and their models, some videos about cookouts and BBQ side dishes, a video about a DIY smoker, another about a DIY backyard project for hosting BBQ cookouts, a video about how smoke flavors food, a video about the history of BBQ in the south, a video about a BBQ joint in your city (or where ever my VPN is connected from), etc. And if you're not interested in any of those particular types, it learns from how long you spend watching the video and would branch more or less in that direction in the future.

Another example is search. Search for "sci fi books recommendations":

YouTube: Here are 3 videos about Sci-Fi books. Here are 4 brisket smoking videos. Here are some lost hikers videos (because you watched a video about a lost hiker 3 weeks ago). Here are 3 videos about a breaking story in the news. Here are 2 videos about sci-fi books, and another 8 about brisket.

TikTok: Here is a feed of videos about Sci-Fi books. And I'll make sure to throw in sci-fi book videos into your curated feed every now and then to see if you're interested.

It's amazing to me how many people are derailed by the free speech argument.

This is about who controls the network, not the content on the network.

There is a law that only U.S. citizens can own TV stations. That's why Murdoch became a US citizen (allowing him to buy Fox). This is in a similar vein.

Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply. The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.

This is a limitation on foreign control of TikTok, not a limitation on speech. TikTok can stay in the us market if it eliminates the foreign control

Congress is explicitly empowered in the Constitution to regulate foreign trade. Free speech is not relevant.

Interesting that the reference linked is in reference to must-carry regulation. The tiktok scenario is the opposite though? Must-not-carry that content! I suppose Uncle Sam's sword cuts both ways.

I really like reading these because they come with annotations: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-9-1/ALD...

Also, more directly for those in the back, the actual first amendment:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The first amendment doesn't guarantee the speaker a venue for their speech. You're still free to say whatever you want to say, so long as it doesn't cross any other laws, in or on whatever other private venues or town squares you so choose.

To turn your question around, rather than spending time defending TikTok I wish people would spend time thinking about the need for actual privacy laws. The kind of laws that outline data governance and the extents to which an individual can expect their individual privacy to be respected. Maybe then we can play less whack a mole with invasive and potentially harmful social software.

Sweet summer child, do you think TikTok would've been banned if it didn't come into focus as a hotbed for pro-Palestinian content?

"The issue in the United States for support of Israel is not left and right. It is young and old. And the numbers of young people who think that Hamas' massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly odd. And so we really have a TikTok problem."

"[TikTok] is like Al Jazeera on steroids."

- Jonathan Gleenblat, ADL.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelCrimes/comments/1i3vwll/we_ha...

Something very appalling has just taken place in the USA. Old people have muzzled the free speech of young people. Americans spend more hours on TikTok than on television (but it mostly skews to young people), and now it's been taken away.

That's not right.

Publishing is speech (Bernstein vs United States).

Unpublishing the app would avoid the effects of the Act.

That's a great point. Hadn't thought about that angle

The easier answer is ”This is really eating into Meta’s revenues”

Because there is no "TikTok" ban and never has been.

There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law. TikTok is completely legal under the law as long as they divest it. However, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.

> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.

> Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.

That was explicitly brought up in oral arguments by the court, and the response by the US Gov was: "The act is written to be content neutral."

The court's opinion explains that they agree the law is "appropriately tailored" to remain content neutral. Whether it's "enemy propaganda" or not is, in their view, irrelevant to the application of the law. TikTok can exist in America, using TikTok is not banned, the owner just can't be a deemed "foreign adversary", which there is a history of enforcement (to some degree).

The replies here seem slightly off base. The Court acknowledges that 1s amm. free speech issues are at play. A law can regulate non-expressive activity (corporate ownership) while still burdening expressive activity, which is the case here. In such instances, the Court grants Congress more leeway compared to laws explicitly targeting speech. It checks that (1) the govt has an important interest unrelated to speech (it does), and (2) the law burdens no more speech than necessary (arguable, but not obviously wrong)

The first amendment doesn't apply here. You can say whatever you want anywhere else on the internet. You can print what you want anywhere you want. You can distribute what you want anywhere you want. Bytedance refused to sell TikTok so it's being shut down. They could divest, but they didn't.

There weren't any laws passed banning Soviet associated agencies from publishing based on chain of ownership. Nothing to do with SCOTUS.

Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.

Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.

> But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?

Read the decision. They thought the act was content-neutral, and they thought that the espionage concerns were sufficient to reach a decision w/o having to involve the First Amendment. Gorsuch and Sotomayor weren't quite so sure as to the First Amendment issues, but in any case all nine justices found that they could avoid reaching the First Amendment issues, so they did just that.

US has banned foreign ownership of TV/Radio stations for over a 100 years.

To oversimplify:

You can say whatever you want on a telephone call.

BUT:

The telephone network is regulated. Your cell phone must comply with FCC regulations. You personally may have a restraining order that prohibits you from calling certain people.

IE, if a phone is found to violate FCC rules, pulling it from the market has little to do with the first amendment.

>But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling?

Apparently the owners of the operation are not US citizens operating in the USA and don't have any first amendment rights because that's part of the US Constitution and doesn't apply to other countries.

Because this is not about the first amendment? This just happens to be a company that runs a social network. Congress regulates commerce with foreign nations and made the decision, as it has in many other cases, that a foreign nation can not be the beneficial owner of TikTok. TikTok then made no effort to divest, giving away the game if you want, and predictably lost this challenge.

This case was not about speech. It was about a vehicle for speech having a high risk of being used for espionage and PSYOPS. If TikTok was the only vehicle available for people to post on the internet, then maybe the First Amendment argument would hold water.

This decision doesn't tell people they can't speak any more than, say, shutting down a specific TV station or newspaper which has been used for money laundering or which is broadcasting obscene content.

Like you can just go read the opinion. It goes into detail on exactly this question and is easy to understand.

TikTok doesn't do speech. Users on TikTok do speech. Banning TikTok doesn't prevent any users from printing / distributing / disseminating their speech.

The first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.

Because the 1a protections are not very strong despite the foundational myths, and neither do the judges value this right highly, it is often trumped by "security", so this isn't a major erosion.

> why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling

because it's not about whether TikTok can operate, nor is about content on TikTok

it's about ownership and control of the platform

Because it has the option for selling

If the option wasnt there, it would have stricter first amendment scrutiny

They could have still banned it other ways though

and the first amendment aspect is also torn apart in other ways in the court ruling

Creating and distributing in the USA, sure. That is allowed. This is why the government isn't regulating Chinese content on Instagram, for example.

The issue here is that TikTok "content" (aka the algorithm that decides what content you get to see) is created abroad and controlled from abroad. The data collected by the app goes abroad. So then it becomes an import/export issue, and the government can and does regulate that.

This is why the government has already agreed to letting TikTik be run by a US entity. You can have the same content and same algorithm, just kept within the borders of the USA.

The justices said this was not about first amendment. It was about security and securing the users in the country

Text publications don't run software that reports to adversarial countries.

Print media is different. It is much more exhausting to read a newspaper because critical thinking circuits are automatically engaged.

You are more removed from the content because everything is in the physical world. And even within a single newspaper there are so many different topics that it is hard to be in a bubble.

The Internet automatically leads to bubble creation, 200 character messages and indoctrination.

It is more like loudspeakers they had in villages during Mao's tenure blaring politically correct messages. Or like the Volksempfänger (radio) during the Nazi era. Interestingly, many of the most destructive revolutions happened after the widespread use of radio.

Of course the Internet isn't nearly as bad, but most people are completely unable to even consider a view outside of their indoctrination bubble.

Because America, obviously, needs their own great Firewall. I don't see any other reason. Also no idea what you are talking about, a country that has values like this doesn't ban random social media sites and propagates them as bad propaganda without evidence.

The entire notion that there's a free speech angle here is a disingenuous red herring by Tik Tok to muddy the waters.

Speech is in no way being limited or compelled - you can say the exact same thing on dozens of other platforms without consequence. You can even say it on tik tok without consequence. You can even publish videos from tik tok in the US just fine.

This law is about what types of foreign corporation can do business in the US, and what sorts of corporate governance structures are allowed.

First amendment rights is the only argument that I agree with keeping TikTok alive. However if there is proof that China is manipulating the algorithm to feed the worst manipulative content to Americans then I do think there’s a national security concern here.

The TikTok ban is security theater through and through.

Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.

They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...

The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.

So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.

EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!

https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...

> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.

It's one of those things. If you asked most Hacker News readers how they feel about the authoritarian government of a single party state literally controlling the algorithm that determines everything you see, most would swear up and down that they would never stand for it.

But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.

I am of 100% of the same opinion as you. I have told people for years about the cyber warfare going on and that we're losing it, and they just don't seem to care and want that serotonin hit and ignore the rest. I also want curbs on other social media, but TikTok and the war of China against the US on the internet is in a league of its own. The CCP are no doubt funneling the data to their servers, and no doubt have plans for further damaging our youths' minds through brain rot of tiktok diverting them from far more productive activities. There's a reason CCP has strong curbs on similar apps regarding young people in their nation.

We just don't care. We know the all the American TLAs are on our phones, so what's a few more Chinese ones? It's a problem for Washington war wonks to freak out about, not teens in Omaha.

> Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.

Is there any evidence of this? FWIW, I saw plenty of tiktoks talking about the China hack

So, should we also ban Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu, Haier, Lenovo, Tencent, and ZTE from operating in the United States? Why just TikTok (Who is ironically also banned in China)?

And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?

> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.

I can think that China is up to no good with my data and still be mad at my own Govt for doing the exact same thing. The outrage is not that TikTok is banned, it's that Zuckerburg is doing the exact same harms to America that China is alleged to be doing, but only 1 app is banned. Hence people flocking to Rednote rather than using Reels.

There's at least three separate reasons that justify banning TikTok. If Trump bails them out, it's a complete betrayal of his base and the country at large.

1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.

3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.

Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.

Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.

I think the fallout from this is many Americans like myself don’t see China as our enemy. Based on the recent RedNote phenomenon, Chinese citizens don’t see it that way either.

Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening

This. It's this. Don't waste your time thinking past this answer, you already nailed it.

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.

I would say both at the same time

> I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.

No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.

> They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department.

Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.

Everyone outside of the US already knows the American three letter agencies and their allies like the Mossad can access, hack or destroy all their networks if push comes to shove. Most network services all over the world are run on infrastructure owned by a handful of American companies with deep defense and government ties - AWS, Google, MS.

As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?

The interesting thing is that, using these tactics, the supreme court has made the legal case for every other country to ban US owned social networks! My opinion is that the US government has made another stupid move.

Tbh I think this has a lot more to do with sympathy for Palestinians and the last year of protests on college campuses.

Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.

Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone. Regardless of which apps I choose to rot my brain with, neither the US nor Chinese government should have any say in it, period.

If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.

> The United States is currently in the middle of a cyber cold-war with China.

The United States Government is. I'm a United States citizen. Importantly, they're not fighting for me or my stability, they're fighting for the stability of oligarchs. They will gladly destabilize me and my life in service of the ruling class.

Appeals to nationalism only work on nationalists. I'd need a good reason to be a nationalist. The very few listed reasons are some vague reference to freedom as if just saying that makes it true.

Get back to me when it's "China is threatening your guaranteed housing!" or "China is going to roll back the statutory work holiday laws in the US!" or "China is attacking the information systems used for our guaranteed child care program!"

It's really simple: if you want people to love and defend the US and what it purportedly stands for, then give them concrete reasons to do so. Improve their quality of life.

Until then, leave me the hell out of the fearmongering about China. I'm much more fearful of the systemic policies of the US making me homeless than some nation state's cyberopium ruining my mind or protecting information systems that were intentionally left insecure in service of profit and the intelligence apparatus.

> They hacked all of our major telco's

Can I see the evidence?

>I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously.

Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.

Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.

> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.

If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.

For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.

People are now using Rednote, so what’s new?

Senator I'm Singaporean.

How can you call Americans naive when over and over again for the past 2 decades there have been non-stop news stories about how the US Gov spends insane amounts of effort ensuring the technology Americans use is not fully secure? Maybe you should understand that the public can actually recognize Machiavellianism.

edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:

- Bullrun

- PRISM

- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries

- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings

- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans

- Vault7

- XKeyscore

- STELLARWIND

- MUSCULAR

etc.?

> Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones

Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.

It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.

There's no compelling argument or evidence of data collection with TikTok, to my knowledge. Theres more evidence of data collection and aggregation with American platforms than TikTok. Additionally, TikTok is operated independently within the USA and hosted on American servers. I think if there's any opportunity to regulate data collection, TikTok seems to have positioned itself defensively and seems to be distant from being used as an example. The only thing that seems to matter with this ban is that TikTok is mostly owned by a Chinese company.

I'd love to be corrected, but I haven't been provided any evidence or information that suggests this ban was justified at all.

I’d love to see that happen as much as you but it really is irrelevant for this case. The truth is that this case is about which government gets to brainwash the masses. By far and away the greatest threat Tiktok poses to the US is a foreign government having that ability to control public opinion en masse.

None of the litigants proposed that, and neither did the act in question. The court doesn't usually address matters outside the controversy in question, so it's no surprise that they didn't here.

From a geopolitical perspective, this issue about 3 items:

1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.

2) Data- TikTok collects massive amounts of data on 100s of millions of Americans. Opens many avenues for spying, extortion of influence, etc.

3) Reciprocity- Foreign tech companies are essentially banned from operating in China. Much like with other industries, China is not playing fair, they’re playing to win.

Insofar as TikTok has offered a “superior” product, this might be a story of social media and its double edge. But this far more a story of geopolitics.

> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.

Source? I could only find this.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...

The government doesn't care about addictive anything, this is about control and access. If they cared about life or citizens in general they would fix healthcare and maybe introduce any kind of gun control. This is the same government that was slanging cocaine in the 1980's...

It’s not about the algorithm but about the owner of the platform.

The same algorithm in US possession isn’t a problem.

> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.

Source?

You could substitute anything you don't like (gambling, alcohol, gacha games, convenience foods, televised sports, reality TV) for "social media" in the above and it makes as much sense.

Note that the Supreme Court decided the argument based on national security grounds, not content manipulation grounds.

Justice Gorsuch in his concurrence specifically commended the court for doing so, believing that a content manipulation argument could run afoul of first amendment rights.

He said that "One man's covert content manipulation is another's editorial discretion".

Maybe it was just a genuine outlet for interconnected entertainment compared to other platforms. American's have always sought similar entertainment since the dawn of the 'couch potato.' Now we can go back to consuming curated narratives/influence on our good ole traditional grams and tubes.

China doesn't need Tiktok for opium. They have the real thing as well.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-fentanyl-pipeline-and...

That might be true but it's irrelevant. Why? Because that's not the issue the government tackled. Arguing "national security" with (quite literally) secret evidence is laughable. Data protection too is a smokescreen or the government would've passed a comprehensive Federal data protection act, which they'd never do.

It's hard to see how the government would tackle algorithmic addiction within running afoul of First Amendment issues. Such an effort should also apply to Meta and Google too if it were attempted.

IMHO reciprocal market access was the most defensible position but wasn't the argument the government made.

That being said, the government did make a strictly commerce-based argument to avoid free speech issues. As came up in oral arguments (and maybe the opinion?) this is functionally no different to the restrictions on foreign ownership of US media outlets.

What needs to happen is that all of these platforms need to be straight up banned. TikTok is getting picked on because of its ties to China, but why is it better for Zuckerberg or Musk to have the capabilities that are so frightening in the hands of the CCP?

The US social media billionaire class is ostensibly accountable to the law, but they're also perfectly capable of using their influence over these platforms to write the law.

One plausible theory for why the politicians talk about fears of spying instead of the real fears of algorithmic manipulation is because they don't want to draw too much attention to how capable these media platforms are of manipulating voters, because they rely on those capabilities to get into and stay in power.

"Too addictive" is such a nonsensical way of saying "accurate".

Nicotine being legal but TikTok is not tells you everything you need to know about government wanting to control the "addictiveness" of social media.

> beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

I think the government could fix it with a screen time limit. 30 mins for under 18's, and 1 hour for everyone else, per day.

Maybe allow you to carry over some.

After that, it's emergency calls only.

The symmetry for opium is fentanyl which China senda to the US by the ton.

I'm with you except for the last sentence.

What's happening to TikTok is not a good proxy for the trajectory of social media companies in the US, esp Meta. They've got plenty of tailwind.

I think that’s besides the point given the entity that is banning it. It’s because it’s Chinese. An equally addictive Western-made app would not have been banned.

And generally speaking as a culture we are too liberal to ban things for being too addictive. Again, showing that it is not relevant in this case since it will not inspire bans of other addictive (pseudo) substances on those grounds.

I am surprised someone has not attempted to reverse engineer it or make something very similar.

I think TikTok and social media in general is much more insidious than opium, because it is hard to know if you are using an addictive product, or what product you’re even being sold (like if you are being sold a subtly manipulated information diet). For example, it just came out that TikTok staff (in the US) were forced to take oaths of loyalty to not disrupt the “national honor” of China or undermine “ethnic unity” in China and so on. TikTok executives are required to sign an agreement with ByteDance subsidiary Douyin (the China version of TikTok) that polices speech and demands compliance with China’s socialist system. That’s deeply disturbing but also undetectable. It came out now because of a lawsuit.

See this for more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855

EDIT: the link above doesn’t work for others for reason, so here is the source story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...

Why are people upvoting this.

> this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.

I think politicians have scrutinized american social media and they're 100% fine with the misery they induce so long as they are personally enriched by them.

> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China

TikTok isn't anywhere near as destructive as opium was. Hell, purely in terms of "mis/disinformation" surely facebook and twitter are many times worse than TikTok.

Surely the appropriate modern parallel is fentanyl.

I wish it were a reckoning for social media, but reading here shows there's plenty of people here who are passionate about "China bad" and see this only through that one lens. And they seem to think it is strictly about TikTok.