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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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)?

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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.

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.

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.

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...

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 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.

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