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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

Democrats decided they did not like the results of the “anyone can talk to anyone” social media revolution.

I think they should have tried to adapt, they decided to focus their efforts on putting the genie back in the bottle.

Technological progress has made us more affluent and better off. My father grew up in Europe and his family couldn’t even afford shoes for him or education past the third grade. I am wholly uninterested in anti-tech politics or a politics of stagnancy as seems popular in Europe. Democrats need to stop looking to Europe for inspiration and become the party of abundance, redistribution, and human capital investment. How can we make everyone better off, rather than focusing our energies on finding the next bogeyman to blame.

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> Democrats decided they did not like the results of the “anyone can talk to anyone” social media revolution

The ban was and remains deeply bipartisan.

So then by convincing ByteDance to reinstate TikTok, did Trump just spell the end of his popularity, is Trump behaving erratically to reinstate TikTok, or are you projecting because you helped author and canvas for the bill? Moreover if the bill had so much bipartisan support, why did it need to be combined in a foreign aid package to Ukraine rather than stand on its own?

(P.S. Given your deep involvement in the bill and the sheer amount of comments you make on this site trying to convince readers that it's both popular and necessary, I think you should absolutely disclose your position on the bill. I'm a transit and modeshare advocate and I do not discuss specific bills I have helped author and sponsor online without disclaimers.)

> did Trump just spell the end of his popularity

Trump is doing what the law permits, granting a 1-time extension of not more than 90 days. In the meantime, he’ll find a way to remove the national security threat.

> why did it need to be combined in a foreign aid package to Ukraine rather than stand on its own?

This is how all bills are passed. I also advocated for the Ukraine bill; that was the weaker (and far more partisan, though not entirely so) of the two.

> I do not discuss specific bills I have helped author and sponsor online without disclaimers

Cool. I do not. (I’ll disclose my involvement if I need to add gravitas or if there’s a conflict. But it’s not a conflict to be arguing for a thing I advocated for, or vice versa. I’m not professionally in politics, after all.)

> Moreover if the bill had so much bipartisan support, why did it need to be combined in a foreign aid package to Ukraine rather than stand on its own?

You've got things reversed. The ban is what the Republicans wanted and the Ukraine support was bundled in to take advantage of that. They wanted the Tiktok ban so much they allowed the Ukraine funding (as part of the larger funding bill).

If that's the case then did Trump just lose popularity by doing this or is the idea that Trump's teflon-y nature going to keep consequences off him?

> did Trump just lose popularity by doing this

No. Heads up, he wins; tails up, blame Biden.

It's funny how the only time there's something bipartisan is when it's to do Israel's bidding.

> the only time there's something bipartisan is when it's to do Israel's bidding

The gay marriage bill was at Israel’s bidding?

I worked on the TikTok bill. I really don’t care about Israel. While it’s tempting to see everything through the lens of your pet issue, it’s myopic to believe everything is motivated by a single cause, particularly a foreign-policy line.

Since you worked on the bill, can you clarify if the driving force behind it was national security concerns which have not been revealed to the public?

> if the driving force behind it was national security concerns which have not been revealed to the public?

No. It was national security risks that have been amply disclosed. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still a crisis even if the Soviets didn’t launch.

What are the possible capabilities here?

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42738464

This has been publicly litigated well.

Right, but what's the actual demonstration of this? I keep hearing "TikTok can do bad thing" but it's not shown to actually happen and we don't seem interested in making them not do that.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xTxAilSF0

Tiktok ban bill was due to it being more pro palestinian. It's no coincidence that most congress members get funded by Israeli lobbyist group.

I worked on this bill, and believe I flipped two Senate votes for it. I really couldn’t care less about Palestine.

We all know you don't care about Palestine, you care about Israel.

> We all know you don't care about Palestine, you care about Israel

Not sure who "we" are, but they're wrong.

It's not a war I have strong views nor knowledge about. I've never visited either place and while I respect people who have strong views on both sides of the debate, my pet war over the last few years has been Ukraine. (Though even there I'm aware enough not to paint everything through the lens of Russian meddling.)

Are you a lobbyist for Meta or something?

> Are you a lobbyist for Meta or something?

Nope, just worked on it as a private citizen. (Don't have an account with any Meta service.)

In an ideal world, we'd regulate social media. I've tried and failed advocating for privacy legislation--the people who are passionate about privacy in America, unofortunately, also tend towards political nihilism, which makes the cause a political nonstarter. I'm also concerned about Chinese influence over American society, and care about Taiwan's security, so TikTok sort of aligned between my views on privacy, teen mental health and national security.

so bipartisan that the president and de facto leader of one of the parties campaigned against it? sure he switched sides, but nonetheless

> Democrats decided they did not like the results of the “anyone can talk to anyone” social media revolution.

Wasn't it Republicans that initiated what would eventually lead to the ban of TikTok? Maybe I remember incorrectly.

> How can we make everyone better off

Wasn't it a really long time ago that was the goal in the US? It seems capitalism leads to a very different goal than "redistribute so everyone is better off"

Well, this is awkward …

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/900019185/trump-signs-executi...

Democrats? The government as a whole has been incompetent with regards to tech for years now. That said, there are huge issues with the “anyone can talk to anyone” revolution, namely that some people are a bit easier to talk to and some issues are a bit easier to talk about, and that these are selected on the basis of increasing engagement and use time for advertising. This causes the benefits of said revolution to be buried under a mountain of cynicism and slop.

The key question is whether you think Nazis have the right to express their views freely. It used to be that everyone agreed this to be the case, but we are in the process of learning a very hard lesson that allowing Nazis the right to express their views freely only gives them power to restrict our speech later on.

On the contrary. I'm not afraid of Nazis, I'm afraid of those who would restrict speech for Nazis. Because once you break the seal, it's simply a matter of time until it's another unpopular thing which gets silenced... and another, and another, until we don't have freedom of speech any more. The road to hell is very much paved with good intentions.

Certainly, you express what used to be (and probably still is?) conventional wisdom. But, some of us have changed our opinions on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Me personally? I am pretty afraid of nazis, that's their whole deal, violence on people, that was kind of the whole big problem with them initially and what led to a world war and genocide. A nazi isn't just someone with different viewpoints from my own, it's people who based their whole ideology on violence, against me, my wife, my children, my friends, my coworkers.

> it's simply a matter of time

How much time? Because the way free speech absolutists talk about these ideas always seem to imply that we are mere moments from a country like Germany collapsing into authoritarianism. What evidence do we have that the US's level of free speech is truly better than a country like Germany which does specifically restrict the speech of Nazis?

I used to believe this vehemently. It has become clear that that’s a notion from a bygone age.

The internet has created a global town square where the loudest voices are the ones that catch people’s attention, regardless of the veracity of their claims. There is no truth any more, only the cult of personality.

Tomorrow the US installs a racist, rapist, treasonous kleptocrat as president because the majority of people are unable to think objectively and swallow his promises at face value, despite every indication that life will be immeasurably worse if you’re not a billionaire oligarch.

Can you point to a single time that banning the speech of Nazis has led down a vast slippery slope of further speech bans, particularly in a vaguely democratic country?

Russia is allegedly attacking Ukraine due to Nazis there. The issue with these things is that you can easily motivate horrible things with the "but we are attacking nazis!" argument, that is why people hate it when you say that.

And Russia is transparently lying. “But you call everyone a Nazi” isn’t particularly persuasive - it’s just Republican agitprop.

i do not agree that this is the key question nor do i find Nazis so compelling that i have to avert my eyes from their speech for risk of becoming convinced myself

The problem isn't that they're scary or compelling but that they bring discourse down to its basest level once they comprise a certain proportion of the environment. Imagine if 90% of HN threads were mostly just discussion about if the author of a submission or comment is Jewish, what their ulterior Jewish motives are, and what repercussions they should face in an ideal world. Many clusters of Twitter are now that.*

A lot of people see the culture shift and start posting less or leave, and then the ratio gets worse and worse. Freedom from government restriction of speech is a good thing, but I disagree that this new era calls for throwing out norms of discussion platforms curating their communities' cultures.

I fully acknowledge there are valid, interesting philosophical reasons to host a site like Twitter or 8chan where "if it's legal it's allowed", but on net I think the benefits do not outweigh the costs.

*(Even many 4chan boards are less obnoxious. In part due to its linear format.)

You’re speaking for yourself now. Millions of [mostly russian but not only] people today are convinced that the extermination of millions of Ukrainians is the morally righteous course of action.

Populations being persuaded into harbouring extremely bad ideas is a thing.

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