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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The whole case turns on foreign adversary control of the data.

Right, Congress was shown some pretty convincing evidence that execs in China pull the strings, and those execs are vulnerable to Chinese government interference.

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 have?

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.

The opinion today has almost nothing to do with how content is controlled on the platform; the court is very clear that they'd have upheld the statute based purely on the data collection issue.

That report was pivotal during the vote for the law and belies the actual interests.

The court addresses that directly, and every member of it, despite agreeing on little else, disagrees with you.

I don't know what Congress has said but there absolutely is evidence that TikTok has been used to spy on users for political reasons. A US based engineer claims that he saw evidence that Hong Kong protestors were spied on in 2018 at the behest of a special committee representing the CCP's interests within ByteDance. This is not surprising, most major corporations within China maintain a special committee representing the government's interests to company executives

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/6/7/china-spied-on-ho...

The DHS does that in the United States.

Every major social media and dating application has a law enforcement portal. This was documented in BlueLeaks.

Do law enforcement portals provide current location information? There's an extended history of the TikTok being used to spy on the location of user devices

https://archive.ph/kt0fY

Yes, in some cases. Grindr is the most obvious one.

Okay, that's because Grindr users choose to publicly share their current location; that's the point of the app. Governments having an API that lets them access data that users publicly share seems substantively different from governments having access to private information, obtaining that information by subverting internal controls at TikTok and ByteDance intended to keep it private. I think anyone not arguing for arguments sake would acknowledge that

Most apps coerce their users into sharing location information. That's why they released apps and did not just use progressive web apps in the first place.

But, this is done under the guise of commercial interests, usually advertising, so it's okay?

You are assuming a lot about supposed evidence nobody has said anything specific about. One shouldn't also assume people in Congress know how to evaluate any evidence. Nor justices, based on the questions they asked.

As a matter of political science and public choice theory, the legislature is the branch of government most trusted to collect information and make these kinds of deliberations.

You might buy that, but I don't. Unless they can actually put forward publicly compelling evidence of a national security risk, this can only be seen as a handout to Facebook by the government. This saga just gives more evidence that the US government exists primarily to serve the interests of US's oligarch class. Aside for those oligarchs, it does nothing to serve US citizens' interests.

Would you call Marjorie Taylor Greene a qualified and trusted investigator for the american people? I sure wouldn’t. Talking about what the legislature is supposed to be is irrelevant. What the legislature actually is is relevant.

Congress members speak of space lasers and weather control... I'm not sure they're competent as a whole. Actually, it reminds me of the Russian guy that always spouts nonsense about nuking UK into oblivion, and that theory that he's just kept around to make the real evil people look sane.

Good thing Mr Zuckerberg is a shining beacon of independence from the US government.

He's not a formally designated foreign adversary, at least not yet.

The difference is you can easily prosecute Zuck

Easily? No. Within the bounds of the US Constitution, yes.

No. Zuck is very securely within the class of citizens that is immune to prosecution within the US.

I’m sure he’s bending at the knee right now because he feels very secure and just had a change of heart about everything precisely one month after the election.

Is he bending the knee, or dropping the mask? The billionaire+ class rightly sees this as their big opportunity to seize power for the next several generations, removing worker and consumer protections and enshrining themselves as essential parts of the government.

Why is this true of Zuck but was not true of SBF?

He was just a dumb get-rich-quick kid, he didn't have any political power. Zuck has spent the past 2 decades gathering money and power.

How did SBF manage to be the #2 Democratic donor in 2022 without accruing any political power?

By being a moron.

Gigabillionaires with immense influence don't get prosecuted.

Is X vulnerable to Chinese government interference because its American executive has other business interests in China at stake?

I’d argue the TikTok remedy should be applied to X, too.

This should be applied to all social media.

Media flat out.

No, X doesn't have a corporate governance structure that requires Chinese government control, because it is a US company.

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.

A CCP official could show up at a Tesla board meeting and announce they're going to seize Gigafactory Shanghai unless Musk takes down some content on X. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference.

Tesla is quite notable as the only foreign automaker which China has allowed to operate independently in China. All of the rest of them were forced to joint venture with 51%+ control being handed over to a Chinese domestic company. So, really it's pretty surprising that they haven't done that even before Musk owned X.

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.

That's the way I like it for my children. Pardon the demagogue. The US, being the awful mess it is is still 100x better IMHO than the chinese government. It's the lesser evil kind of thing and honestly the reason I believe that democracy is 100% THE way to go. Things can only get US level nefarious with democracy. Far from perfect but much less evil.

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.

If you think the US is immune to authoritarianism...

Do people not remember 2020-2021?

Exactly, these are hostile political actors interfering in our country. This is also why Facebook and X should be banned everywhere except the USA.

Meanwhile, it's perfectly fine for foreign adversaries to use American social media to interfere with American events. Anything for that GDP.

Good point. Social media accounts should only be available to people who live in the country where the company is based. Then there's no need to ban Facebook and X elsewhere.

... and also the USA, too.

That may be true in a legal sense (and my reading of that is the same as yours).

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.

The short answer here is that directly addressing a threat from a foreign adversary formally designated by both the legislative and executive branches long before the particular controversy before the court affords the government a lot more latitude than they would have in other cases.

I’m not sure anyone is disputing that, certainly I’m not.

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.

Yes, there is a distinction there. The issue is that it's a small part of the overall problem when looked at the larger scale. The overarching issues of political influence at odds with individual citizens, hostile engagement-maximizing algorithms, adversarial locked-down client apps, and selling influence to the highest bidder are all there with domestically-incorporated companies. The government's argument basically hinges on "but when these companies do something really bad we can force domestic companies to change but we can't do the same for TikTok". That's disingenuous to American individuals who have been on the receiving end of hostile influence campaigns for over a decade, disingenuous to foreign citizens not in the US or China who can't control any of this, and disingenuous to our societal principles as we're still ultimately talking about speech.

That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia. The most famous incident involved the British company Cambridge Analytica, which used it to manipulate election outcomes in multiple countries:

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 assure you, if you read the opinion, that is indeed it, and the objection you raise about other instances of data collection not being targeted is addressed directly.

> That can’t be it. Facebook sells the same data to foreign adversaries including China and Russia.

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).

CA wasn’t data being “sold”

This is arguing technical definitions. As of this week, foreign intelligence agencies transfers money that eventually ends up at Facebook, and they get the data in return.

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.

And the difference is that the US government can tell them to stop doing it.

Facebook's owners & their peers have a massive amount of control over public policy, so no, I don't think the US government can tell them to stop doing it.

Yet the government convinced both Facebook and Twitter to suppress both the Hunter laptop and information about the Covid vaccines that we all know is true now - that it doesn’t prevent the spread of Covid and that immunity wears off.

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.

No argument here. Most Democrats, including Biden, and all Republicans serve at the whims of Facebook's owners and their peers. Hence the enormous handout to Facebook in this decision.

I think you would be hard pressed to come up with any evidence for your assertion. First of all the UK is not a foreign adversary (quite the opposite). Secondly Facebook didn't sell data in that case, it was collected by Cambridge Analytica via Facebook's platform APIs (as described in your own link). In general Facebook doesn't sell data, their entire business model is based on having exclusive access to data from its platforms.

This whole Cambridge Analytica thing is such a nothing burger - I have yet to be given a concise reason how it was anything other than targeted advertising. Something that happens day-in, day-out a billion times over on all our "western" platforms in the form of ads. And no, the fact that this data wasn't "consented to" doesn't mean anything other than being a technicality. If anything, I'd chalk the whole thing up to anti-Trump hysteria that happened around that time.

It's still completely legal for Meta to sell that user data to Chinese owned companies. So no security is provided by this change. I see it as theatre.

I thought this too, but I think there's a new law for this as well: "In a bipartisan measure, the House of Representatives unanimously pass a bill designed to protect the private information of all Americans by prohibiting data brokers from transferring that information to foreign adversaries such as China" https://allen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...

People keep coming up with other avenues by which China could get this information, but the court addresses that directly: the legislature is not required to address every instance of a compelling threat in one fell swoop.

It seems pretty bold to assume that Google, Facebook, Amazon, X, etc aren't adversaries. Foreign or otherwise.

The case turns on the fact that China is formally designated a foreign adversary. The statute doesn't allow the government to simply make up who its adversaries are on the fly, or derive them from some fixed set of first principles. There's a list, and it long predates this case.

Your mistake is assuming I'm thinking about any sort of legal definition. Adversarial nature doesn't require or government to declare it for it to exist.

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