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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Because China is a rival geopolitical power and the US is... us.

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.

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The thing is, doing it domestically is also a national security concern. We know that data leaks and breaches don't only happen, they are commonplace. Banning TikTok but continuing to allow domestic social media companies to amass hoards of the same kind of data without any real oversight is like saying, "Sorry, you can't have this on a golden platter, the best we can do is silver."

It's not leaks and breaches that are the immanent concern here. The concern is deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment -- a psyops asset that gives a competing nation significant leverage as they pursue ends that challenge established US interests in the Pacific.

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.

>The concern is deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment -- a psyops asset that gives a competing nation significant leverage as they pursue ends that challenge established US interests in the Pacific.

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.

Great. Get that law passed. The question of constitutionality doesn’t preclude _expansion_ of the ban.

Woosh

> The concern is deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment

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.

I can see information on this specific event on Wikipedia, CNN, Youtube, etc right now; all "western-controlled". It's also available through Al-Jazeera, Reuters, and other foreign sources.

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.

Raises eyebrow I’m talking about watching the video. And surely you understand the content moderation will be different once the cat is out of the bag.

Are we forgetting the psyop happens on every social media problem? Internet research agency in st petersburg says otherwise.

But it’s cool for Elon Musk to do it to get Trump elected, or zuck to do it for who knows what aims (but certainly expanding his own influence and power)

> "Sorry, you can't have this on a golden platter, the best we can do is silver."

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.

Tiktok was banned primarily for influence, secondarily for data.

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.

You're not wrong that domestic threats exist as well. But perhaps the biggest thing to know that may help you understand, is that the national security apparatus operates within the paradigm of what is called 5GW, or Fifth Generation Warfare[1]. 5GW is all about information, and a foreign adversary controlling the algorithmic news feed of 170 million Americans for an average 1 hour a day is important in that context.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_of_warfare

That's not forgetting the ability for them to just straight up 100% legally purchase a lot of this information from data brokers.

This was made illegal in April, 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520

Not all data brokers are US based; they can still buy all of this information practically.

I'm still not sure I understand the national security concerns around 17-year old nobodies publishing videos of themselves doing silly dances. Or the "metadata" those 17 year olds produce. Are people sharing nuclear secrets on TikTok or something (and not doing the same on US services)?

I haven't followed this closely, but I assumed it was related to a foreign entity having the ability to hyper-target content towards said 17 year olds (and the entire userbase in general) -- A modern form of psychological warfare.

Like Cambridge Analytica (who used Facebook to do exactly this for the 2016 election).

The concern is they won't be 17 forever. 5/10/20/30 years down the line some small portion of these kids are going to hold important jobs, and some of them will have worthwhile blackmail material in their tiktok history.

OK, wild. It's farfetched, but at least the "blackmail" angle makes a little bit of sense. Still strangely targeted. There are a lot of other apps where people are making "potential blackmail" material.

You can still push a particular group of those 17-year olds pushing specific views to influence elections. As long as some proportion of the electorate watches stuff on TikTok.

Blackmail. Information. They could be kids of someone with access/high clearance or get it themselves in a few years.

> the national security concerns around 17-year old nobodies publishing videos of themselves doing silly dances

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 trouble I have is that Facebook & X do this, too, and their owners are similarly unaccountable to US law, but we aren't we banning them. If this law were applied equally, I'd be all in favor. Instead it is transparently just a handout to Facebook to remove a business competitor. That sucks, big time.

I share that concern. But I also recognize that passing an equivalent law for domestic social media networks would be considerably less likely to pass. Perfect as the enemy of good and all that.

But this is worse than good: it's giving Facebook & X even more control over the discourse by removing a competitor.

I work from the basic principle that a foreign, government-controlled adversary having control over discourse is worse than a domestic company having the same, despite strongly disliking both.

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.

> Facebook, X, etc are staffed by Americans who have a vested interest in the country remaining functional. The CEOs of those companies are arrestable.

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.

You disagree that Facebook's employees have an interest in America remaining a functional country?

I don't think Tiktok will bring about the end of America as a functioning country. I do think Facebook's executives have an interest in gaining control for themselves at any cost, up to & including the end of America as a country if that is the most profitable route for themselves.

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.

So why a single product? Young people watch content from way more than a single app. And reportedly (from my kid) they are all just moving over to a different Chinese content-sharing app. If we're worried about "foreign" influence, shouldn't we be blocking all non-US sources of information that young people might watch and be influenced by? It looks pretty ham-fisted to just target one of those sources.

How are kids discovering a new Chinese-owned app? Is it through Tik Tok? Could the Tik Tok algo be biased towards China over US based companies?

How did they find TikTok originally? Or Snapchat, or all the other silly apps they use? We're all being bombarded with marketing and advertising every day. Maybe this new app is good at marketing and the product itself is as good as TikTok, who knows, I don't use either of them.

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.

I think this underestimates how popular TikTok is with 20/30 year olds.

Because it’s used to influence elections worldwide. Most recently the first round of the Romanian elections were won by an unheard of pro-Russian candidate who ran a disinformation campaign on TikTok, allegedly organised by the Kreml.

https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...

https://www.politico.eu/article/calin-georgescu-romania-elec...

I understand that, but, you can run that campaign on Instagram, Twitter, or wherever your target audience is, right?

Both those entities are within regulatory reach of the US administration.

Do you have any proof that the Chinese government played a role in his campaign? Because the 2016 United States election was possibly influenced by disinformation campaigns on Facebook, yet there is no ban and Zuck is taking an even more lax approach to moderation than Tiktok.

I don’t understand why people are so obtuse about national security being an excuse. Do we really believe the Chinese are going to infiltrate by way of tiktok when they can hack into our telecom networks or any significant figures individual machines? This is about neutering our biggest global economic threat.

This reads like a denial of the existence of hybrid warfare. Why wouldn't China use TikTok to sow negative sentiment about the US?

Economics, prestige, etc. It’s worth a lot to China to be competing with the US in social media / Internet stuff. China (and Russia) have been pushing a narrative that the US operates on two sets of rules for them vs everyone else.

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 .

RedNote falls afoul of the exact same law and will probably be banned soon after TikTok.

Except that's not the point at all. The US just proved to the world that it doesn't care about competition and it's citizens (in some number) have rejected the concept of "National Security" by switching to a more explicitly Chinese company.

That's a blow to hegemony that will have lasting consequences.

Plenty of negative sentiment already on US owned platforms, it gets the clicks and the clicks pay the bills.

I’d assume the concern is more swaying public opinion, sowing division to make us incapable of unified political effort, or even to destabilize us, things like that, not so much infiltrating networks - they already manufacture much of that equipment.

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.

I think we are already cooked on unifying political effort and destabilization. We don’t need help from China on this.

National security doesn't have to mean they use the app to take over the devices it is installed on. It can also be used to spread misinformation or blackmail people.

Oh. Like what our domestic social media company let happen with Cambridge Analytica? Glad our government is so focused on this one. Great work.

This is the argument that a group of toddlers make when one of them gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar. "Yeah...yah....but Mrs. Spangler, I saw Sally steal a cookie last week". OK, cool....your friend is stealing one now and currently has their hand in the cookie jar.

Terrible comparison. China hasn’t been caught doing anything nefarious with Tiktok whereas Facebook was caught red handed. The problem is a tiktok ban is based on speculation and playing on the fears of the american people. The irony is the story is pitched as China using tiktok to program a bunch of american monkeys, meanwhile our own government is programming us with “china is the adversary”

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.

> China hasn’t been caught doing anything nefarious with Tiktok whereas Facebook was caught red handed.

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.

This article literally makes my point and says nothing about China being caught red handed:

“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.

If you say so.

> Do we really believe the Chinese are going to infiltrate by way of tiktok when they can hack into our telecom networks or any significant figures individual machines?

The allegation is that it's used to spread misinformation and affect public sentiment, not for infiltration.

This law is dumb, because in no way does it prevent the exact same data to be collected, processed by a US entity and then transferred to China.

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.

It is a separate law from the one passed in April, 2024, which makes what you're talking about illegal: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520

You suspect that? It is the literal stated reason for it.

Because they're trying to ignore the national security aspect to talk about tracking generically. Which is a valid argument and a good discussion to be had, but it's irrelevant in this context.

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.

Foreign propaganda bots are just as present on US social media, and US social media amplify them just as much.

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.

Because it's not clear what the national security concern is. With weapons or infrastructure, it's easy to understand how they can be used against the U.S., but with a social media platform, it's harder to see the threat. The concern really seems to lie with the users of TikTok.

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?

I think one of the issues is the details of the national security risk hasn't been articulated well. I haven't followed this in detail, but from what I've seen in summaries, news articles etc is just a vague notion of a theoretical risk from an adversary, with no details on exactly what the risk is, or if there is an actual issue here (vs just a theoretical issue that can happen at some point).

Because personal data about US citizens is up for sale to more or less whoever wants it, and the US government doesn’t seem to have a problem with this otherwise.

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.

Laws don't have to solve all of the potential problems that may exist in order to be valid (this is one of the things they talk about in the decision).

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

But US companys sale all info about users anyway to anyone (just see today GM) and you accept in between often to over 800 cookies on websites. If thats ok, whats the difference. Why is it ok a website does include over 800 cokies?

X or Facebook isn’t “us”. If we had any reason to believe there were or were even likely to be strong effective democratic controls over their ability to manipulate public sentiment it might be different. But as it stands, it feels more like local oligarchs kicking out competitors in their market: “the US population is our population to manipulate, go back to your own”.

Because US social media companies have sold data to foreign adversaries when then used it to attempt to influence domestic matters

Surely China can just buy all the data that's being collected by US companies and sold. So whats the difference here?

Not only is it straight forward it has long precedent. We’ve long limited broadcast licenses for instance.

Yeah it's not even a point of view that requires nuance; it's pretty clearly a matter of US interests v. adversarial interests. Anecdotally, a lot of people that struggle to understand this are also squarely in the camp of assuming that the US is doing data collection solely for nefarious purposes.

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.

It seems like two different arguments if you s/US/multi-national-corporations/g in that sentence. I don't have that much faith that multi-national-corporations interests align with US (or China for that matter).

They're headquartered in the US with substantial US ownership, which is the same logic applied to Tiktok. Zuckerberg's pretty heavily rooted in the US with no obvious inclination to leave, and you can see the effect that the change in administrations is having on his steering of Meta as a whole.

Not everyone on HN is a U.S. national. Many are Chinese nationals. So the discussion here has conflict of interest depending on one’s allegiance

HN is literally banned in China [1][2]. And since VPNs are also illegal in China, they're breaking the law if they are here. I doubt they'd break the law if they had such a strong allegiance to China.

[1]: https://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=news.ycombinator....

[2]: https://en.greatfire.org/news.ycombinator.com

This has never been a significant barrier for savvy Chinese to post outside the Great Firewall.

International Steam is also banned in China yet we curiously see the majority of users nowadays use simplified Chinese.

and no chinese nationals work in the US. oh wait yes they do. and in my experience the majority plan to return to china after making enough money.

> no good answer on why its bad for a company that is supposedly under Chineese influence to collect this kind of information on us,

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.

So a US court should make decisions not in the US interest because people in other countries use some software?

No. The U.S. court should make decisions in the U.S. interest. But this HN thread represents people from around the world who may not share the U.S. interest at a personal level. Leading to remarks which are trying to sway US opinion.

In a way, this thread could very well be monitored and commented on by a non US nation state

Right, its because a law should be passed regulating this sort of data for the good of all citizens, but our congress can't / won't pass that, so they only stepped in when it became an obvious national security concern.

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.

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