Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

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I'm going to quote a CBS News article here because I don't feel Congress' arguments in favor of banning TikTok are being well represented. You can agree with them or disagree with them but everyone should at least understand them accurately.

TLDR TikTok is not comparable to the other services you mentioned because ByteDance is required to comply with Chinese intelligence, and China has made many public statements in recent years to the effect that it is a hostile, rival power to the United States. Allowing ByteDance to operate TikTok is granting a hostile government a tool to influence US public opinion as well as to track the locations and text messages of 170 million American citizens. Congress gave ByteDance the option to divest control so that they could get paid and TikTok could continue to operate, ByteDance refused.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-is-tiktok-being-banned-supr...

Why did Congress want to ban TikTok?

U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that TikTok threatens national security because the Chinese government could use it as a vehicle to spy on Americans or covertly influence the U.S. public by amplifying or suppressing certain content.

The concern is warranted, they said, because Chinese national security laws require organizations to cooperate with intelligence gathering. FBI Director Christopher Wray told House Intelligence Committee members last year that the Chinese government could compromise Americans' devices through the software.

As the House took up the divest-or-ban law in April 2024, Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, compared it to a "spy balloon in Americans' phones." Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said that lawmakers learned in classified briefings "how rivers of data are being collected and shared in ways that are not well-aligned with American security interests."

"Why is it a security threat?" Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said Friday. "If you have TikTok on your phone currently, it can track your whereabouts, it can read your text messages, it can track your keystrokes. It has access to your phone records."

If the Chinese government gets its hands on that information, "it's not just a national security threat, it's a personal security threat," Hawley said.

"If you have Facebook on your phone currently, it can track your whereabouts, it can read your text messages, it can track your keystrokes. It has access to your phone records."

If the United States government gets its hands on that information, "it's not just a national security threat, it's a personal security threat," Hawley (should have) said.

The US government is motivated to have their citizens content and productive.

The Chinese government is motivated to have US citizens angry and unproductive.

While productivity and happiness are not the same thing, I am personally far less worried about how my government would influence me than how China would influence me.

I'm quite worried about both, but at least I can (in theory) vote on my US overlords, at least.

Do you think X was trying to make US citizens angry or content?

>The US government is motivated to have their citizens content and productive.

meanwhile, we're

- pretending that inflation has landed and is not being resisted by the Feds

- deregulating all the anti-trust accomplishments we made over the years to drive up prices

- pantomiming at best the idea of affordable housing as housing prices surge

- increasing homelessness and unemployment nationwide Something the modern job market does not help with as more job postings than not are fake to hire non-americans (or no one at all).

- deporting immigrants while Trump likely grants even more H1B-s to billionares,

- starting multiple trade wars because Trump is showing the definition of insanity by imposing tariffs again. When last time we lost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars over it.

But yes, banning the chinese app that actually gave some income to young american citizens suffering the worst from the above was done in a snap, relatively speaking. I'm ambivalent on the actual ban, but I can't blame american tiktok users being absolutely fervent with the bald-face hypocrisy going on.

Tiktok influencer income was never going to solve any economic problems in a meaningful way.

No, but it went in the right direction. Unlike everything else with the economy as of late (if you don't have the spare money to gamble in stocks.

Wage growth has exceeded inflation in the USA for the whole of 2024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...

Real wages in all income brackets are at an all-time high (apart from a short blip during the pandemic), and overall have surged since the start of the pandemic. See e.g. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-full-tim....

Real wages but not buying power. And that ignores all the unemployment rate rising (U-3 and U-6). If you had a job and kept it in 2024, you're only slightly better off than 2023 and probably slightly worse than 2022.

If you don't been devastating. Now watch it go down in 2025 and unemployment get worse for Americans as well.

And your point is? I mean you might agree or disagree but obviously the problem was a foreign entity controlling it and not the tracking part.

Also the keystroke part seem technically entirely not true and location is only partially correct.

All I've seen since TikTok boomed in US is that public opinion has been shaped very negatively on China by the hawkish tone in Washington.

I see zero, little evidence that TikTok brought any particular sympathy to China.

Nor I've seen a single study that has demonstrated that TikTok is any more biased than other socials. In fact it was even less than some (such as Twitter).

People seem to forget US focuses a lot on Americentrism. That didn't really change much with Tiktok and its alforithm is giving users more of what it determines to be interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if less than half the american users knew Bytedance was a chinese company before all these ban talks got off the ground.

> Allowing ByteDance to operate TikTok is granting a hostile government a tool to influence US public opinion

I have always and will always say that the government does not have the sole right to influence me as a US citizen, and it is my right to slurp up "influence" from whoever and wherever I want to. The idea that Americans are too stupid to ingest whatever information is out there (edited or unedited, curated or not, propaganda or not) for the sake of democracy is a threat to the very idea of democracy itself.

The very fact that this argument has gained traction is the worst outcome of this entire debacle. I never ever ever thought I'd see Americans cheering that the government should limit the ability of their own fellow citizens to access information, and here we are.

I don't know how old you are, or what your lived experience has been. But the US did not invent the idea of democracy, nor did anyone promise us that democracy could actually work.

What the United States has accomplish over the last 200 or so years is remarkable, but it's colossally myopic to believe that the US has never curtailed the rights of it's citizens in the name of security. The OSS was never legal. The CIA definitely should not be legal. And lord only knows what the NSA does. But I promise you that restricting access to a Chinese mobile app is not the most egregious thing the United States Government has ever done.

TikTok can still serve data to the US, it just can't list its apps in US app stores.

I agree with your first paragraph - but people went pretty berserk when (supposedly) Russia was influencing US elections via social media. RT news channel was banned, the reasoning being it was Russian propaganda. Lots of people supported Facebook and Twitter, working with the government, silencing anything Russian back around the 2016 and 2020 elections. Did you?

Should Americans be free to access any information? What about secret military plans?

> You can agree with them or disagree with them but everyone should at least understand them accurately.

> "[...] it can read your text messages, it can track your keystrokes. It has access to your phone records."

Is that quote accurate though? For accessing text messages, you need to give them an OS permission. For tracking keystrokes, they need to install a keyboard app and you need to select it and use it in the app whose keystrokes they're interested in. For phone records, you again need to grant a separate permission.

I don't use Tiktok but the current gatekeepers of this world don't usually allow unnecessary permissions

All those arguments are bullshit as most of this data is now being sold by data brokers by American companies to who ever wants to buy China or otherwise. This ban was because unlike western media and social platforms the narrative was not under their control. It is ironic that Americans talk about freedoms that they have compared to Chinese but are willingly giving up more and more of these to their own government.

> the narrative was not under their control

Is the narrative on other platforms under their control? What does that even mean? US hardly has coherent narrative these days anyway or at least it changes every 4 years.

Regardless what benefits can you see in allowing the CCP to shape US public opinion in any way?

> This ban was because unlike western media and social platforms the narrative was not under their control.

Western "old" media and social media is filled with reporting about how useless and untrustworthy democratic governments are. If that is the narrative that the US government is setting it is weakening itself.

Of course there are very real reasons that citizens of democracies should not trust their government. Not least that in many cases government decision making has been captured by billionaires and corporations. But I very much doubt China or Russia want to see this problem solved.

Honestly don't see much difference between the goals of global corporations and a hostile nation like China or Russia, they both want democracy to fail and governments weakened. But the corporation probably doesn't want total collapse of society. If paths for a hostile government to exert control can be removed I'll happily take the small win.

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