1- It's in the interest of the US government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial, which China is. And unlike other countries, the Chinese government exercises a great deal of direct control over major companies (like ByteDance). If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation? (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
I think social media in general - including by US companies - does more harm than good to society and concentrates too much power and influence in the hands of a few (Musk, Zuck, etc.) So this isn't to say that "US social media is good". But from a national security standpoint, Congress' decision makes sense.
2- If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on. But those are blocked (along with much of the Western internet) or heavily filtered/censored. TikTok itself is banned in China. So there's a strong tit-for-tat element here, which also is reasonable.
China benefits greatly from the rules based order that America spends considerable effort to maintain and uphold. They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer, but they're better off with than without and recognize that.
OTOH, Russia does not. They prefer chaos.
China is definitely the stronger threat. But Russia is a greater immediate threat because they're only interested in tearing things down. It's easier to tear things down than to build them up, especially if you don't care about the consequences.
I disagree; and it's the dismissal for the past 13-14 years of China as an immediate threat which is what has in part allowed China to become such a large longer-term threat.
> They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer
I would put it differently: China wants its own global hegemony instead of the U.S.' -- and that's understandable (everyone wants to rule the world). But if the U.S. doesn't want that to happen then it has to take steps to counter it.
That's the exact reason why Communist China setup the firewall in the first place. Good luck.
The GFW doesn't just block websites/networks/content that is controlled by adversarial foreign governments, but all websites/networks/content which the CCP is unable to censor. The GFW is about controlling the flow of information to its citizens from __any__ party not under the CCP's control.
Am I rephrasing this correctly?
Yandex got fragmented into EU bits and Russian bits. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/russia-yandex-...
The head of VK is subject to sanctions https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22951307/us-sanctions-rus... (but it appears that Americans are still free to use VK if they want to?)
> (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
American-backed forces are fighting the Russian army itself in Ukraine. Implied in all of that is a desire to not have US forces fight them directly in Poland.
The US companies continue to feed the same information to the Chinese, even though the Federal government has been trying to get them to stop for almost a decade (I cite sources elsewhere in this thread).
So, all of your arguments apply equally to the big US owned social media companies.
Since the ban won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases, the important part of the question is:
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
that's not the issue; the issue is control of the network
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
No. In the US government's view, its responsibility is to counter potential foreign threats -- and not just foreign, but adversarial (this wouldn't be an issue for a social network controlled by the UK or Japan, for example) -- which would include a highly pervasive social network controlled by a foreign government that is the US' largest adversary.
As for whether social media companies in general are good or bad for American society, that's a completely separate question. (I tend to think they do more harm then good, but it's still a separate question.)
So now the US should just do everything China does? What happened to American ideals protecting themselves? If free speech really works, it shouldn't matter that TikTok exists.
For point #2, this seems like you're saying "they don't have a leg to stand on, and we want to do the same thing". If we don't support the way they control the internet, we shouldn't be doing adopting the same policies. I don't think governments should have any ability to control communication on the internet, so this feels like a huge overstep regardless of the reasons given for it
The problem in China is that there weren't strong safeguards to prevent a totalitarian control (CCP is supposed to be democratic within itself in that leaders are elected, though it's all restricted to party members, of course), and when Xi came into power he was able, within a few years, to sweep aside all opposition, primarily through "anti-corruption campaigns". So he now has a degree of control and power that would be a wet dream for Trump. (And you should see the level of adulation in the newspapers there.)
Now in the US we have a separate problem, and that is we have a system where unelected people like Elon and Zuckerberg, Murdoch, etc., exercise a tremendous amount of influence over the population through their policies and who are pursuing a marriage between authoritarian politics and big business (by the way, there's a term for this, it's called "fascism"). That is a serious problem -- but it's separate from the TikTok issue and shouldn't be used to discount the dangers of the CCP having control over a highly popular social network in the US.
As we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, social media companies based in the US are also vulnerable to US government interference — but that’s the way they like it.
They released a Marty Rimm-level report citing that pro-Palestinian was mentioned more than pro-Israeli content in ratios that differed from Meta products. This was the 'smoking gun' of manipulation when it's more of a sign Meta was the one doing the manipulation.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/6/7/china-spied-on-ho...
Every major social media and dating application has a law enforcement portal. This was documented in BlueLeaks.
But, this is done under the guise of commercial interests, usually advertising, so it's okay?
I’d argue the TikTok remedy should be applied to X, too.
Companies in China (and especially those of prominence) have formal structures and regulations that require them to cooperate with the government, and sometimes require the companies to allow the government to intervene in operations if necessary.
It is not possible for a CCP official to show up to a board meeting at X and direct the company to take some action, because that isn't how US corporations work.
But regardless, there is a huge difference between a request and actually having managerial authority -- the most obvious being that someone with managerial authority can simply do whatever they want without trying to compel someone else. Also, X, being subject to US law, must comply with that no matter what consequences Musk is threatened with. So, any threats may have limits in what they can practically accomplish.
The only problem with democracy is that it's so fragile and susceptible to bad non-democrat actors intervention, which is more of an awareness problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...
Edit: Apparently it’s not common knowledge that this is still happening. Here’s a story about a congressional investigation from 2023:
https://www.scworld.com/analysis/developers-in-china-russia-...
And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:
https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/biden-wants-to-sto...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/americans-person...
Edit 2: Here’s a detailed article from the EFF from this month explaining how the market operates: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-...
I'm not sure they do that anymore, not in the current geopolitical climate and not with the DC ghouls having taken over the most sensitive parts of Meta the company (there were many posts on this web-forum about former CIA people and not only working at the highest levels inside of Meta).
They can claim this is not a sale if they want, but it’s still a sale. Drug dealers make similar arguments about similar shell games where you hand a random dude some cash, then later some other random dude drops a bag on the ground and you pick it up.
Since Facebook was first caught doing this during the Obama administration, it’s hard to argue they are not intentionally selling the data at this point.
I’m not anti-vax. I’ve been shot up with Covid vaccines more often than I can count and I was early in line for the J and J one shot and I took an mRNA booster before it was recommended by the US once I started reading it was recommended by other country’s health departments.
But where we are now is totally the fault of Biden and the Democratic establishment.
My interpretation of the parent’s comment is that we have pretty serious (and dubiously legal) overreach on this in a purely domestic setting as well.
As someone who has worked a lot on products very much like TikTok, I’d certainly argue that we do.
There is an adjacent point that many of us feel is just as important, which is that there is evidence in the public record (see Snowden disclosures among others) that there is lawbreaking or at least abuse of clearly stated constitutional liberties taking place domestically in the consumer internet space and has been for a long time.
Both things can be true, and both are squarely on topic for this debate whether on HN or in the Senate Chambers.
2) This is not about protecting users of the app, this is about preventing a foreign state from having direct influence on public opinion.
It is obvious to me why this is necessary. If you allow significant foreign influence on public opinion, then this can be leveraged. Just imagine Russia being in control of a lot of US media in 2022. Or 1940's Japan. That is a very serious problem, because it can easily lead to outcomes that are against the interests of ALL US citizens in the longer term...
So I read it like they didn't interpret this as a free speech issue at all.
What is the list? Does WWII count as one war, or do we could belligerents individually?
Ironically, the "good" guys here allow you to talk shit on the internet about them while the "bad" guys would catch and harvest my organs someday for writing this comment.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_... [1] https://chinatribunal.com/ [2] https://theowp.org/reports/china-is-forcibly-harvesting-orga...
And funnily enough, just had a state try to pass a law making prisoners get to "choose" to donate organs for a reduced sentence https://apnews.com/article/organ-donation-massachusetts-stat...
But point is, no love for the CCP but this sort of jingoistic take sucks. China is not "literally hell"
Major social media apps? Chinese apps are still in our app stores, just not TikTok (as of Sunday).
Edit: related https://hate.tg/
There are no Russian apps that collect extensive data on hundreds of millions of Americans. (And if I'm wrong about that, the US should absolutely force divestiture of those apps or ban them).
If it wasn't ratified by the senate then we didn't enter into a treaty, I really don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.
Let them collect and ban this. Difference between Meta and TikTok is you can prosecute the former’s top leadership.
As if this would get banned.
This banning of TikTok because of "national security" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Might the next application banned on these ground be domestic? It's unsettling, in my opinion, to see this precedent set.
Define the US here. Is it the government, the people, the business interests of the private sector?
Each one of those has different interests, often competing ones.
In any functional nation the people's interests should prevail, and it seems to me that any information capable of swaying the public's opinion is informing them that their interests are being harmed in favor of other ones.
I wonder how do you know "the interests of the majority of people" is to ban Tiktok...
The interest of the people is to have a peaceful coexistence and cooperation with China, while the interest of the military-industrial complex is to keep the tension high at all times so that more and more money is spent on armaments.
Who do you think the US government will favor in the end?
Who has more power to determine the result of the next elections, considering that to run a presidential campaign you need more than a billion dollars?
No citizen gains from war except the few that sell weapons and want to exploit other countries.
Nobody wants China to take Taiwan, that's not something its possible to convince people of
It's not about convincing them to want it but rather about sowing doubt and confusion at the critical moment.
David French's NYT column last week starts with what one might call a "just-plausible-enough" scenario: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/opinion/tiktok-supreme-co... (gift link, yw).
And domestically in the US - citizens should be demanding the dismantling of the big powerful players - which ironically the US government is against because of it's usefulness abroad..... ( let's assume for one moment, despite evidence to the contrary, that the US government doesn't use these tools of persuasion on it's own population ).
They are and have been.
Social media is a legitimate threat to any countries democracy if used wisely. It is dangerous to have one of the biggest ones in the hands of your enemy when they can influence your own countries narrative to such an extent.
Note that from the little I know about both Sosaca and Georgescu, they both look like dangerous nutjobs that should not rule, but if I were a Romanian I would be more worried about a democracy that removes candidates it doesn't like for purely political reasons (not for having commited a felony or anything like that) than about them.
If they aren't already prosecuting him on this I guess technically it's legal but such a weird loophole in the law. Any spending towards promoting a candidate should be public knowledge imo. EDIT: he was claiming bullshit like GOD chose him and that's how he got that good of a result. I guess his God is the people in the shadows that made his tiktok campaign lol
> For me the biggest scandal in Romania is that they threw the people's choice to the trash just because he didn't show up in polls
I think they did it for many reasons but not because he didn't show up in polls.
Top ones are:
- PSD didn't advance in the second round and they had the leverage to pull it off
- Georgescu was clearly anti-NATO so maybe the US pulled strings
- Danger of having a president with Russian sympathies
- He was claiming that he didn't spend a single dime on the election while everyone in the know knows that his tiktok campaign cost sever million euros
Out of the fourth reasons you list at the end, only the fourth is not pure authoritarianism (why wouldn't people in a democracy be free to elect a president that dislikes NATO or likes Russia if that is their will?). Campaign funding fraud has happened in many Western countries but typically it's handling by imposing fines, maybe some jail time, but definitely not cancelling the result of an entire election.
And considering the level of education of most of the Romanian population I believe having "true" democracy would destroy the country. I understand this may not be a popular opinion but I'm trying to be realistic here lol
I just wish the Western world would drop the hypocrisy in this respect, and stop claiming to defend more democracy than it actually does. A relevant problem is that democracy is often used as an easy excuse to keep people content. Singapore is a hugely successful country in most respects, with better quality of life than most Western countries, but we shouldn't take example from it because we have democracy! China is constantly growing and improving the quality of life of their citizens, is still behind most of the West in that respect but on the path to overtake us, but it doesn't matter, we have democracy! Maybe if we weren't constantly claiming the moral high ground, when as you mentioned our own democracies are at most relative and the difference with more authoritarian countries is a matter of degree; we could be more self-critical and focus on actually fixing things.
If China could effectively influence the American populations opinions, how would that not be bad?
Do you prefer Americans to be ignorant about certain topics, or to be informed even if that comes at the cost of reduced approval for the government?
That trust wasn't lost because of foreign propaganda, but because of the government own lies.
Note: I'm not saying I either agree or disagree ... just pointing out the dynamics in the case being made.
FTA
They do, and they did. From the ruling:
The Act’s prohibitions and divestiture requirement are designed to prevent China—a designated foreign adver- sary—from leveraging its control over ByteDance Ltd. to capture the personal data of U. S. TikTok users. This ob- jective qualifies as an important Government interest un- der intermediate scrutiny.
This isn't a consumer data privacy protection.
The concerns here are obvious: For example, it would be trivial for the Chinese military to use TikTok data to find US service members, and serve them propaganda. Or track their locations, etc.
First, it's a national security issue for a company controlled by the CCP to have intimate data access for hundreds of millions of US citizens. Not only can they glean a great deal of sensitive information, but they have the ability to control the algorithm in ways that benefit the CCP.
Second, China does not reciprocate this level of vulnerability. US companies do not have the same access or control over Chinese users. If you want to allow nation states to diddle around with your citizens, then it ought to be a reciprocal arrangement and then it all averages out.
I keep seeing argument regarding "China bans social medias from other countries". It's not an outright ban saying that "Facebook cannot operate in China", but more like "Comply with the censorship rules or you cannot operate in China". It's not targeting "ownership" or "nation states". e.g. Google chose to leave, while Microsoft continues to operate Bing in China.
Meta, Musk, and others have no right or grant to operate in the EU, Canada or elsewhere. They should be banned.
• US data brokers can still sell data to foreign companies (out of control of US and thus indirectly to Chinese companies).
• Chinese companies can buy US companies (thereby obtaining lots of data).
If we killed user-tracking, then that would solve a LOT of problems.
This is false. It was made illegal in April, 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520
This is very limited and will not prevent indirect sales (like we now see happening with Russian oil for example).
It is also why I said "indirectly".
Keeping the data securely inside our country is never going to work if China can simply open their wallet and spend billions of $ to obtain the data.
It is obviously way better on this matter than China, but in principle, liberties are selectively granted in US and in China.
The TikTok ban topic has been stale for long time before it became the main harbor for Pro-Palestine content after it became under censorship by US social media thus depriving anti-Palestine from controling the narrative, effectively becoming a major concern for AIPAC et al.
Data collection is more of a plausible pretext at this point.
China blocks facebook/twitter/instagram/pinterest/gmail/wikipedia/twitch and even US newspapers.
So clearly they don't think it's okay for a US-company to do it (and are at least an order magnitude stricter about it)...
Edit:
Obviously, China has a constitution, but the freedoms enumerated there are not the same as those in America's. And those that are enumerated are pointless (like North Korea's constitution).
My point is that there's an inherent hypocrisy in saying we're more free than them, but then doing a tit-for-tat retaliatory measure. How can we be more free when we're doing the same things the other side is?
America is ridiculously pro free speech. That doesn’t mean we must then tolerate libel, slander, fraud, false advertising, breach of contract, et cetera because someone screams free speech.
The Bill of Rights exists in balances, and the First Amendment is balanced, among other the things, with the nation’s requirement to exist. That doesn’t mean the Congress can ban speech. But it can certainly regulate media properties, including by mandating maximum foreign ownership fractions.
Except for one group of people which have made any criticism of them carry legal consequences
Jews? You know we have other federally-protected classes, correct?
If you’re referring to Israel, no, there aren’t legal consequences for criticising Israel. Half of the vocal minority of the internet is constantly up in arms about Israel.
The Chinese constitution, in addition to endowing rights, also endows obligations.
So while you have things like: > Article 35 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.
You also have things like: > Article 54 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall have the obligation to safeguard the security, honor and interests of the motherland; they must not behave in any way that endangers the motherland’s security, honor or interests.
Compare this to the Supreme court, which is supposedly in Trump's hands, ruling against Trump twice on this tiktok ban alone (the first to kill his executive order, and the second to not pause the law to wait for him to take office).
The ideal world order isn't the one where Chinese can't find out what happened on Tiananmen square and Americans can't find out what happened in Gaza. That's a very shitty arrangement and I am shocked that the Americans are picking that as their future.
Twitter and Meta are foreign everywhere else, everywhere else except China TikTok is foreign as well and apparently they all lick their respective governments.
I don't see how this law banning a social media site brings us at all closer to a world where Americans cannot get access to accurate information about major global conflicts. This is so far down the imagined "slippery slope" as to be absurd. In fact, I'd strongly argue that this law would achieve the opposite. If you're relying on Tik Tok for accurate information like this, then you are opening yourself to echo chambers, biased takes, and outright propaganda. There are many excellent sources out there in America freely available and easily accessible.
Remember how Musk decided that after the elections Twitter will prioritize fun instagram of politics?
I fail to see how anything going on at Twitter is relevant to what I mentioned. Does Twitter shifting its content priorities somehow make the plethora of excellence sources unavailable?
Whatever you think of the law of the PRC, they applied it consistently, Facebook was blocked for doing something that would get any Chinese company shut down.
Tiktok is getting blocked in America for doing what American companies do.
Chinese courts are explicitly subservient to the party.
Say, for example, congress passes and the president signs a law that says that product sponsorships in videos need to be disclosed. If a US company (or a European, Australian, Japanese, etc) country violates that law, we're pretty sure that a judgement against them can change that behavior.
China? Not so much, given their history.
If you want to convince someone they're not good answers you would have to at least engage with them and show how they fail to be correct/moral/legal or something. Pretending they don't exist does nothing.
It's not perfectly fine, but you need to start with companies of foreign adversaries first.
The details specific to China and TikTok are kind of moot when talking about broad principles. And there is a valid discussion to be had regarding whether or not it does pose a legitimate national security threat. You would be absolutely correct in pointing out all of the trade that happens between China and the USA as a rebuttal to what I'm about to offer.
To put where I'm coming from into perspective, I'm one of those whacko Ayn Rand loving objectivists who wants a complete separation between state and economy just like we have been state and church and for the same reasons. This means that I want nothing shy of absolute laissez-faire capitalism.
But that actually doesn't mean that blockades, sanctions and trade prohibitions are necessarily inconsistent with this world view. It depends on the context.
An ideal trade is one in which both parties to that trade benefit. The idea being that both are better off than they were before the trade.
This means that it is a really stupid idea to trade anything at all at any level with those who want to either destroy or harm you.
National security is one of the proper roles of government.
And I don't think you necessarily disagree with me, because you're saying "we should also be protected our citizens from spying and intrusions into our privacy" and yes! Yes we absolutely should be!
But that's a different role than protecting the nation from external threats. You can do your job with respects to one, and fail at your job with respects to the other, and then it is certainly appropriate to call out that one of the important jobs is not being fulfilled. Does that make it hypocritical? Does it suddenly make it acceptable for enemy states to start spying?
By all means criticize your government always. That's healthy. But one wrong does not excuse another. We can, and should, debate whether TikTok really represents a national security threat, or whether we should be trading with China at all (my opinion is we shouldn't be). It's just that the answer to "why its bad when China does it but it's right when it's done domestically" is "it's wrong in both cases and each can be dealt with independently from the other without contradiction"
You are just seeming to ignore them for whatever reason.
Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
US tech companies pursuing profit at the expense of user wellbeing is concerning and deserves its own topic. However, there is a fundamental difference between a profit driven company operating under US legal constraints and oversight, versus a platform forced to serve the strategic interests of a foreign government that keeps acting in bad faith.
This isn't true, at least not for adults' accounts. I've watched my girlfriend use it and the content was exactly what she watched on TikTok, mostly dumb skits, singing, dancing, just all in Chinese instead of half in Chinese. It also never kicked her off for watching too long.
I was told a similar story about Xiaohongshu, where it was supposedly an app for Chinese citizens to read Mao's quotations (through the lens of Xi Jinping Thought) to prove their loyalty. Then I saw it for real and it's literally Chinese Instagram.
Regardless, assembly of an iPhone with Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese components in China is not the same as mass surveillance as a service.
In terms of algorithms, most US companies refer to that as intellectual property. Google doesn't sell their search algorithm to other search engines so I don't think your point makes any sense. Companies keep their IP secret for a reason, they don't want competition digging into their profits. What US company isn't engaging in the same completely legal behaviors?
My point about the phones is that China like America can target any electronic like the US was doing 20 years via interdiction. If we look at the NSA ANT catalog, specifically DIETYBOUNCE, everything they accuse China of is stuff we practically invented.
edit: Also I just purchased a M4 Mac mini, shipped directly from China.
Maybe. But there is a huge constitutional distinction between foreign and domestic threats. And the supreme court was pretty clear that the decision would be different if it didn't reside with a "foreign adversary".
Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Everybody forgot already US spying on Merkel's phone?
But that's okay, because America is not bound to any rules I guess. Disgusting foreign policy with a disgusting exceptionalism mentality.
Because China's political system applies absolutely no pressure for transparency.
> Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Something we know about because the US political system has levers that can be pulled to apply pressure for transparency.
You'd have to be very naive not to think that the Chinese government has an interest in controlling what US users of TikTok see. Whether they actually have or not is a somewhat useless question because we'll never know definitively, and even if they haven't today there's nothing saying they won't tomorrow.
We can say that they have both the motive and capability to do so.
We know most of it because of whistleblower leaks.
No free press, no whistleblowers.
Just because something has been repeated in the news 20000 times, it doesn't make it true without evidence. Speculation is just it: speculation.
As far as I've seen, it's not Chinese company spying on me, it's US ones, it's not Chinese companies hacking Wifis in all major airports to track regular citizens, it's US ones, it's not Chinese intelligence spying on European politicians, it's US ones, it's not Chinese diplomacy drawing the line between rebels/protesters, good or bad geopolitically, it's always Washington, it's not Chinese intelligence we know of hacking major European infrastructure and bypassing SCADA, it's US one.
The elephant in the room is US' fixation for exceptionalism and being self authorized to do whatever it pleases while at the same time making up geopolitical enemies and forcing everybody to follow.
I don't buy it, I'm sorry. I don't particularly like the Chinese system, I don't particularly love their censorship, and I don't particularly like their socials on our ground when our ones are unable to operate there (unless they abide to Chinese laws, which are restricting and demand user data non stop, something they are very willing to do in US though).
My beef is with American's exceptionalism and with the average American Joe who cannot see the dangers posed by the foreign policy of its own country. The US should set the example and then pretend the same, instead it does worse than everybody and cries that only it can. It's dangerous.
Yes there has been. TikTok admitted to it. They were tracking journalists.
This is not a mere accusation. Instead the company admitted to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
Indeed, but at the point we are in history the steps to get that done - aka, copy the EU GDPR and roll it out federally - would take far too long, all while China has a direct path to the brains of our children.
Not sure why this is a hard one to understand but with the ability to individualized media, you can easily feed people propaganda and they'd never know. Add in AI and deep fakes, and you have the ability to manipulate the entire discourse in a matter of minutes.
How do you think Trump was elected? Do you really think the average 20 something would vote for a Republican, let alone a 78 year old charlatan? They were manipulated into the vote. And that is the most innocuous possible use of such a tech.
No idea if this applies to companies, but foreign visitors do get protections.
Minor clarification that some parts specify "citizen" (e.g. voting). Others specify "person" or "resident" or the like, which would be anyone within the border.
You will not find anywhere in the text that limits this to citizenship (with the sparse examples of the concept of citizenship coming up being things like eligibility for presidential office). The purpose of the Constitution is to spell out the abilities of the government, and one of the things it is expressly forbidden from doing is passing laws that curtail peoples' ability to communicate or associate.
This amendment to the constitution was rewritten a few times, each time more clearly stating that it applies to “the people”.
From: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-7-1/ALD...
This is a very weakly held opinion, and I don’t know if the opinion addresses this.
All of the congressional hearings over the past ~15 years demonstrates how business in the US is still pretty much governed by the rule of law. I’m of the opinion that there isn’t some shadow cabal working with Musk and Zuckerberg to control our minds. However we know that the CCP absolutely manages what the public can consume, so personally while I’m no fan of heavy handed government intervention in business, this ban seems like “a good thing” to me. We must protect the short, middle and long term prospects of our population — it’s a fundamental duty of the federal government to do so.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/07/google-faceboo...
If they want speech, they should reside in the US, not just own a piece of a company that does.
The rights enforced inside the US are very generous compared to most countries and many apply to both legal and illegal residents, but restricting some rights, especially political ones, is crucial to have a sovereign state
I care becsuse I hate hypocrisy. Simple as that. They'll sweep Russian activity under the rug as long as it's done in an American website. This mindset clearly isn't results oriented.
It's a national security concern. I get that there's a lot of conversation and debate to be had on the topic but the answer here is very straightforward and I don't understand why people are so obtuse about it.
In a way, this thread could very well be monitored and commented on by a non US nation state
In the context of a discussion on a US-specific ban on TikTok I'm taking the "us" in OP's post to mean people in the US. If you aren't in the US the ban doesn't apply to you so the discussion is irrelevant.
[1]: https://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=news.ycombinator....
International Steam is also banned in China yet we curiously see the majority of users nowadays use simplified Chinese.
It'll come back as an issue in a less obvious manner next time, and every time until they pass such a law.
Which, imho, won't happen while our overall political environment remains conservatively dominant.
Except:
• the US performs these activities (data collection, algorithm manipulation allegedly, etc) for US interests, which may not always align with the interests of individuals in the US, whereas
• adversarial foreign governments perform these activities for their own interests, which a US person would be wise to assume does not align with US interests and thus very likely doesn't align with the interests of US persons.
If a person's main concern is living in a better United States, start with ensuring that the United States is sticking around for the long run first. Then we can work on improving it.
You don't have to agree that protecting those interests is worth the disruption to the global market, free speech ideology, etc. But to engage in the debate, you need to recognize that this is the core concern.
I share the exact same concern about "deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment" from US-based corporations running algorithmically-generated designed to addict consumers, and also believe that everyone needs to recognize that core concern as well.
ALL of it needs to die.
You mean letting U.S. citizens see the flour massacre video on a platform where the security state can’t ban it.
This bill languished for years until that happened.
You have an interesting and unique definition of "state censorship". Almost like one defined by a bias inherently interested in letting specific foreign interests continue to proliferate under the guise of an emotional appeal.
The influence is what law makers care far more about. Remember what Russia was doing on facebook in 2016? Now imagine that Russia actually owned facebook at the time.
Right, and silver is better than nothing.
I think many of us on HN would agree that US social media companies having the means to manipulate user sentiment via private algorithms is a bad thing. But it's at least marginally better than a foreign adversary doing so because US companies have a base interest in the US continuing to be a functional country. Plus it's considerably more difficult to pass a law covering this domestically, where US tech giants have vested interests, lobbyists and voters they can manipulate.
So yes, a targeted ban against a foreign-owned company isn't the ideal outcome. But it's not difficult to see why it's considered a better outcome than doing nothing at all.
C'mon, we can have a more informed conversation than that.
TikTok is an entertainment platform the average young American watches for more than an hour a day. Videos cover just about any topic imaginable. We just had an election. Is it really so impossible to imagine a foreign power adjusting the algorithm to show content favorable to one candidate over another? It's entirely within their power and they have every motive.
The TikTok ban would have been the perfect opportunity for any number of competing US social media apps to swoop in and offer TT's current users a replacement, but they seem to have all failed to address that market.
Just at a base level, Facebook, X, etc are staffed by Americans who have a vested interest in the country remaining functional. The CEOs of those companies are, though it's very unlikely, arrestable. Can't say the same for TikTok.
I suspect this is our fundamental disagreement. I disagree with both of these statements. Facebook's & X's executives have a vested interested in power and money for themselves and their peers. These oligarchs are in practice above the law, just like China's and Russia's oligarchs are. This decision only gives them even more control. It's bad for those US citizens who are not in the oligarch class.
Put another way, I think China & Facebook's execs are about equal in terms of danger to US citizens (I'd probably give the edge to Facebook's execs, since they have direct control over US policy, but we're splitting hairs here). So banning one but not the other is a crappy situation, because it concentrates that power even further.
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
https://www.politico.eu/article/calin-georgescu-romania-elec...
Sally stole a cookie from the cookie jar and now the teacher is pointing at the fat kid and not letting him be in the classroom alone with the cookie jar. Just bc he is fat.
Sure they haven't:
https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-far-right-european-pa...
Facebook deserves more scrutiny, that doesn't forgive or waive TikTok's issues. It's a bad faith deflection.
“Parliament and other institutions as well as national governments issued restrictions on its use in 2023 over fears of Beijing’s access to the data”
Thanks for wasting my fucking time reading your bullshit links.
The US is happy to invade countries and turns a blind eye to Israeli aggression but Russia or China want to do it and they are met with sanctions etc. The last bastion of American exceptionalism was how it’s a free market and values free speech and free competition.
There was a national security threat but the US walked right into it: China is making a move for the top spot as global hegemon. It’s recruiting other countries to say don’t work with the US, work with us instead. The US flinched. Ralph blew the conch and all the kids just installed RedNote .
That's a blow to hegemony that will have lasting consequences.
If I understand correctly how it works, it’s a propagandist’s dream, building personalized psych profiles on each person. You could imagine that it’d be the perfect place to try generating novel videos to fit specific purposes, as well - the signals from this could feed back directly into the loss functions for the generative models.
I think politicians’ efforts to regulate tech are generally not great, but I think this one is pretty spot-on.
The allegation is that it's used to spread misinformation and affect public sentiment, not for infiltration.
I suspect that it's not about data being transferred, but the fact that TikTok can shape opinions of Americans... which US companies do a lot, without any oversight.
Which makes it seem far more plausible that the real national security capability that is being defended is that of the US gov to influence narratives on social media. And while even that might be constitutional, it’s a lot less compelling.
However, there is another law that made sale of data to foreign adversaries illegal, passed in April 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520
So what's the issue? That people living in the U.S. and using TikTok might be influenced to act differently than how the powers that be want us to act?
So where exactly is the meaningful difference here? I don't see it.
The actual difference is that US does not see the money from Tiktok, and blocking tiktok is a convenient excuse to give their propaganda platforms a competetive edge.
Actually doing something about the fundamental problem of foreign influence through the internet would basically destroy sillicon valley, and no politician wants to be responsible for that.
If the US was going to get into a legitimate hot "soldiers shooting at soldiers" type of war with any country, China is extremely high on that list. Maybe even #1. Pumping data on tens of millions of Americans directly into the CCP is bad. Putting a CCP-controlled algorithm in front of those tens of millions of Americans is so pants-on-head-retarded in that context it seems crazy to even try to talk about anything more general than that.
It seems there are indeed things that can override citizen's free choice even in the "lighthouse of democracy and freedom", and CCP didn't make a mistake for building the firewall. My need to use Shadowsocks to use Google instead of Baidu or some other crap was simply a collateral damage.
Of course, the Chinese censorship is way more intensive, but this act makes a dangerous precedent.
tiktok.com links were available in China.
Obviously the USA doesn't have a GFW, so they can't actually block tiktok, just ban it from the app store and prevent business from resolving in the US around it (e.g. paying content creators).
I don't know why realpolitik is so hard for technologists to understand, perhaps too much utopian fantasy scifi?
Nothing but lazy disingenuous arguments who's only purpose is to bait conversations for replying with even lazier whataboutisms.
Either the brainrot has really set in for these people or we are being flooded with ai/bots.
(a) American companies’ business interests don’t fully align with the needs of their users or the general public,
and that
(b) the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives —which include weakening, destabilizing, and impoverishing the United States— are even less aligned with the interests of American citizens.
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.
Because people are writing Orwell fanfiction?
ByteDance is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
What facebook and ByteDance want at their core are very different things.
More dangerous to the US government? Yes, that's true.
Imagine you're a country with natural resources. Private industries want those resources. Suddenly the US media is flooded with fabricated or exaggerated stories about the country written by NGOs and Think Tanks. Suddenly, out of nowhere a coup happens in the country with the stated intention of "liberalization" and "democratic reforms". The country goes through shock therapy and structural adjustments as it takes on mountains of IMF loans to enter the world markets-- it has to sell off control of all its national resources and industries to American companies. The life expectancy plummets.
Oh wait this isn't a hypothetical this is just actual US foreign policy.