Yes. It is no surprise that they sue, but maybe that was a mistake. Because depending on the result, it might get TikTok banned in the EU as well.
Or the result is that indeed their operation is 100% independent of their Chinese parent company and no US data ever touches mainland China... which would surprise me.
Honest question: would it matter if they stored data in mainland china? Wouldn't it still be fine if they are storing data there but not giving it to china gov? (Not that i really believe that any data in china is safe from gov, although i could say the same about usa, but what is the actual bar that the us gov has to meet to show its a national security risk? Is data on china soil sufficient?)
Unfortunately the FISA courts have been abused like crazy. But warrants aren't just paperwork. If you're charged with a crime but the prosecution has violated your rights, you can walk free in the U.S. You have multiple layers of appeals courts to go through if you get railroaded. The CCP is truly authoritarian and rules and laws are what they say they are. Not even remotely equivalent.
We're trying to roll that back apparently. I don't have a lot of hope but we'll see. These politicians are all basically under fire this november so they better damnwell hustle.
Also, FWIW, companies can release FISA statements saying they've been accessed. How much of that is actually true depends on your level of paranoia.
Snowden revealed a FISA warrant that granted access to data on all Verizon calls. At the point that courts are granting such broad (and blatantly unconstitutional) warrants, warrants don't matter any more.
The unique part of Chinese law is the lack of judicial supremacy or "rule of law". The party has supremacy over legal system interpretation as part of the '3 Supremes' order of precedence, with workers also coming ahead of the law.
In the US system, there are still miscarriages of Justice, but there is judicial supremacy and separation of powers.
The powers aren't as separated as say the French justice system, but most would say the US judicial system is mostly independent of the other branches of government.
We trust them to answer to SCOTUS, who we in turn trust to interpret the constitution that a majority of us have agreed to keep. Basically a group of people whose entire job is to interpret the actions in terms of law, constitution, and human rights - a marrying of theories on social contract, natural rights, and separation of powers that we've seen emulated (and improved upon) across the free world :)
Overall, I particularly enjoy this system over one that is accountable to a single entity.
If there is only one party permitted, and that one party is supreme, then how is that a party? It looks like government to me. Maybe the translation to English is just wrong. The "party" isn't a party by any reasonable definition.
The real parties would be factions within the so-called party. I don't know if they have names more descriptive than "Xi supporters" and "Xi opponents".
American companies have a legal system to protect them against unlawful requests. That rule of law is under attack, but exists, which does not seem to be the case for China.
You need to read the laws in China where they require any chinese company or individual to hand over data to the chinese government on request, no exception, no lawsuit, period.
> Wouldn't it still be fine if they are storing data there but not giving it to china gov?
Hard to say if it's even enough to keep it outside of China. As long as the company is under Chinese jurisdiction, they'll have a hard time saying "no, sorry, that data center is in Singapore, we won't comply".
The EU has similar issues with the US cloud providers: even if an Amazon data center is in the EU, obviously they will hand over data if a US court order/NSL tells them to. One way that Microsoft tried to mitigate that was to have a data trustee run the data centers with Microsoft not having access, therefore not being able to give anything to the government. They've stopped offering it after a few years though.
> Wouldn't it still be fine if they are storing data there but not giving it to china gov
That's a HUGE assumption to make. All companies are required to install backdoors BY LAW in China, and the gov can even have its own employees/spies within the companies' data centers.
Why would you assume any different or that it's up to the company to give that data? It's not like the Chinese government really has to go through a democratic judge to do that.
> If Congress believes the president has used the emergency economic powers unjustly, lawmakers can overrule the order by passing a resolution that would terminate the order.
> But any pushback from Congress is unlikely, as the skepticism about the Chinese Communist Party's potential ties to the country's technology companies has gathered bipartisan support.
It's not like congress will strike down the order because it's unjustly and then propose some new legislation which bans TikTok, it's good for everyone there to be able to blame Trump even if it has bipartisan backing.
Well, the executive branch has a lot of leeway when it comes to anything at the border and beyond : eg, working with other countries such as treaties, international commerce, tariff, or war.
Further, Trump's anti-China campaign has broad political support from both parties - Congress voted to ban TikTok in federal devices just days ago.
This will be an unpopular opinion no doubt but the question isn't "should the president have this power?" It is actually "should this president have this power?" The answer to the second one is more challenging since he doesn't respect the norms of political restraint.
> Why is congress not involved if it's so important?
Congress creates laws. The President enforces them. This is an enforcement action--it's not unusual for Congress to be uninvolved.
> Should the president really have this power?
Multiple Congresses gave these powers to the President [1][2][3]. The current and next ones are free to take them back.
My personal belief is no, the President shouldn't have this power in the absence of clear and present danger. We need a commission, likely under Commerce and/or State, that assesses civil fines and passes prosecution recommendations to the DoJ. Furthermore, we need legislation describing (a) which countries are deemed economically friendly and economically adversarial, (b) how those determinations are made and (c) what companies from those countries can and cannot do as well as (d) how they may achieve "safe harbor" status (e.g. by locally hosting data and submitting code for periodic review).
Constitution and constitutional precedent also imbues the powers of foreign affairs onto the president unless there's legislation. Jefferson pushed for this to be the case: "The transaction of business with foreign nations is executive altogether. It belongs, then, to the head of that department, except as to such portions of it as are specially submitted to the Senate. Exceptions are to be construed strictly"
IMHO TikTok being owned by the CCP now is a clear and present danger to all Americans using the app.
You make some fair points, but there is no way that I would trust a government agency to actually do code reviews and verify that a company isn't doing something wrong.
I feel increasingly unsafe because this app is being operated by a company that is beyond extradition with the USA. So if they ARE busted for doing bad stuff, who is getting jailed?
In an era where every snapdragon SoC seems rootable from any old application, and you can use machine learning to pick out key words from text streams, do we really need this app in the market?
ButeDance is a Chinese company responsible for complying with directives from the CCP. If one doesn't trust the CCP, then one should not trust ByteDance.
Facebook is American company responsible for complying with directives from the US Government. If one doesn't trust the US, then one should not trust Facebook.
How is this any different? The US is one of the Five Eyes countries. They routinely spy on their own people (see Snowdon et al). I see no difference between the two in this regard, other than the US has a court system that sometimes acts independently and has a Constitution that sometimes is followed.
> ByteDance has had a party committee since 2017 and is headed by CCP secretary and company editor-in-chief Zhang Fuping (張輔評), reported Human Rights Watch. Members of the committee hold regular gatherings at which they study speeches by Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) and "pledge to follow the party in technological innovation."
> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
Banning foreign entities with executive orders? Yes, the president should. Also, this country was started by throwing British tea into the Boston harbor so it's really nothing new. Obama confiscated property from Iranians, banned certain transactions with Libya, North Korea, Syria, and others. Probably every president has issued similar EOs at some point or another. Only difference this time is that TikTok is popular. I suppose we never really lamented the loss of Soviet Saturday morning cartoons.
"(a) Any authority granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may be exercised to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat."
USA has given its President a lot more power over the years and decades.
> The app has also been used to antagonize the president, including when thousands of teens reserved tickets to the president's rally in Tulsa, Okla., with no intention of going, inflating the Trump campaign's expectations for the event and causing embarrassment over the disappointing turnout.
Forgot that was organized on tiktok. All makes sense now. If US was really interested in national security i'm pretty sure zoom would go long before tiktok
Forgetting Trumps' feelings about the Tulsa rally, I truly believe the Tulsa thing was the smoking gun. We know that TikTok did manual moderation of topics sensitive to China, as well as some more non-ethical ones (censuring/pushing results back) of disabled and 'ugly' people. My girlfriend was offered a job moderating for TikTok and their package details with the work described left a bad taste in my mouth to be honest.
But forgetting that, can we with 100% certainty say that the Tulsa rally fiasco:
a) Wasn't an idea and orchestrated by the CCP?
b) Was some teen's idea, but then was pushed to the top for political reasons by the CPP?
If you can't say with 100% certain NO to these questions, and taking in account the US and China are in some sort of 'cold war', doesn't it make sense that the US goverment cuts the feet of an app that can change election results?
Yes, Russian interference with facebook is also a possibility, but at the end, Facebook (and twitter, etc) are US entities, and if there is indeed some weird things going on, they can be investigated, banned, etc. the US can't do the same with regards to TikTok.
(ps: Not american, have no skin in who wins the election, just pointing it as an outsider a possible reason)
This line of argument can justify anything. Can we with 100% certainty say it wasn't organized by <insert whatever country you are from>? No? Time to start dropping bombs.
Honestly, that seems like an out there conspiracy to me. Not because china wouldn't do it, but because they don't have to.
No point in taking the risk of orchastrating it if americans are going to do it themselves.
And that is even assuming china is anti-trump. Geopolitically trump has been pretty good for china (at the cost of short term trade issues). I'd bet China cares more about long term gains over short term losses.
That's because Congress can't put a blanket nationwide sanction expediently -- it instead limited it to federal employees where they have absolutely authority, and pretty much cleared path for Trump's action.
After America goes and elects a jackass like Trump, how does it matter what the CCP or Russia is capable off?
The whole discussion is unnecessary.
If someone goes and flunks an exam due to their own incompetence, does it matter what external factors can make them flunk?
Trump + other bizarre self important characters in his cabinet actually believe they know what they are doing. They don't. As to the CCP knowing what its doing is another total joke.
The moves of both sides are like watching second graders working a tenth grade problem. Its true, the tantrums the second graders throw in frustration, can be entertaining or highly dramatic. But the trap people fall into is to focus on the tantrums, forgetting whats on blackboard and whether anyone in the room has the skills to solve it.
This was all fine in the age of no information or hidden information. The game old men have learnt to play in that environment is an outdated game.
Today with data overflowing about the nature of problems, about the grade level the people in the room the game changes. And what we choose to focus on will change too.
Because those folks would miss a real conspiracy even if you hit them in the face with it, but are really good in finding conspiracies where there is none.
> If you can't say with 100% certain NO to these questions, and taking in account the US and China are in some sort of 'cold war', doesn't it make sense that the US goverment cuts the feet of an app that can change election results?
Did you know that the Democrats are also not too happy with TikTok and the CCP? Biden even had his staffers remove the app. This is not as Trump/Republicans partisan as people think. There is a lot of bi-partisan support for TikTok as dangerous. It's highly probably that the solution is not the same, but many politicians are definitely worried about the app.
It's also weird that so many people believe this idea that people on TikTok did anything to the Tulsa rally. I don't think people know how the rally worked, so they take at face value someone saying TikTok users made Trump mad. Requesting tickets was not first come, first served, it was simply saying you might come. So at worst, TikTok users inflated the number of people who said they might go. So it likely had no affect on the number of people that actually showed up. Covid-19 probably was the most likely reason that people didn't show up in large numbers.
I'm not even aware of any evidence that large numbers of users were able to get reservations. A bunch of kids on TikTok saying they reserved tickets is not the same as actual proof.
I really wish that we could make people skeptical of all claims made by anyone. Don't just blindly believe some news story that includes no evidence, or quotes a few tweets because you want it to be true.
> A bunch of kids on TikTok saying they reserved tickets is not the same as actual proof.
How is that relavent? Media claimed it was an embarrasment, trump wasn't able to spin it. Does it really matter what the kids did or did not do. Its an embarasment if there is public preception it is an embarassment. It isnt any less of an embarassment even if you are right that the story is based on something untrue (which seems doubtful to me).
What are you talking about, there are, literally, hundreds of stories about why Trump is bad, evil, or an embarrassment in the media. Why would a few more stories make him choose a policy against TikTok? He is constantly saying the media lies, so why wouldn't he just slough off those stories as more lies?
I think people really want this narrative to be true, so people are reaching for any evidence to back the claim. The story sounds so much better when you can make Trump look like a crazy person who is so thin skinned he will ban an app that offends him. But a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle believe the CCP is a threat to the US, so this action is not as surprising as it may first seem. You've also got to remember that wechat was also targeted, so this is not hitting one app, but multiple Chinese apps.
While I think TikTok is a cesspool, Trump banning TikTok is a wild overextension of Federal power. How any "small gov't" conservative is okay with this, while over 1000 Americans are dying of COVID per day nonetheless, is beyond me.
They need to educate Americans on the predatory nature of TikToks software and move along.
Looks like protectionism to me, something Trump has been keen on. I got the impression it was done to make it cheaper for an American acquisition, ensuring US companies continuing dominance over social media.
Is that referring to the content or the company itself? I don't see how it's any more of a cesspool than any other social platform. Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? Every sufficiently large platform is filled with a very wide range of content, from great to awful.
As a company, I do agree they have shady practices, but again, don't most other social media apps such as Facebook and the gang use similar tracking and data collection? Of course that's a low bar to compare to but I don't see why they're being singled out here.
So? China uses data it gathers to track down and arrest dissident (and/or ship them to organ harvesting/re-education camps). Last time I checked, Facebook isn't owned by US, and US doesn't reeducate their people in such a gut wrenching ways (pun intended).
> I don't see how it's any more of a cesspool than any other social platform.
It actually is uniquely bad.
A disproportionate amount of the content consists of the sexualization of underage girls.
The way the thing is set up, there is some kind of audio, someone does a thing (usually a dance), and then other people try to do the same thing to the same sound. The audio is generally nonsense. One of the currently popular ones is a Russian cereal commercial (mepas zoo zoo zoo). Okay, fine. But then somehow the majority of the audio clips are misogynist or misandrist. Every other one seems to contain the N-word. And they're all catchy tunes that get played over and over and get stuck in your head. It's pretty messed up.
It's also moderated to show pretty young kids (especially white). And actively tries to censor unattractive and disabled kids and anything against the CCP (on American users on American soil)
TikTok has been skating by the issue of sexualizing young girls because it’s operated by a foreign company. Once an American company like Microsoft owns it...I think the nation will have another moral panic leading to protections that will take away what made TikTok popular in the first place.
I've been using TikTok for a year and I have not seen a single girl dance video in months. Not to say that those don't exist but there is far more content, yet people who've never used TikTok is just underage girls dancing to music. That's not too dissimilar than if I went to a subreddit dedicated to posting photos of barely legal girls, and claimed that's what reddit was all about. Similarly, Youtube also struggled with similar issues on its platform.
I dislike Trump (not as much as I disliked Bush, because I knew a lot of guys like Bush so I had something to focus my dislike on, and I don't know anyone like Trump)
I'm not American but I did live there a long time.
I agree the ban is some crazy stuff but:
>How any "small gov't" conservative is okay with this, while over 1000 Americans are dying of COVID per day nonetheless, is beyond me.
How is it the ban relates to people dying of Covid?
Will a chinese company really comply with the US court system in terms of discovery? I would question if they are going to comply with discovery in a way that a US company might. What exactly is forcing them to hand over actual documentation and not just forgeries? Will the Chinese court system get them in trouble for that? I doubt it.
After all many publically traded chinese companies in the US aren't actually compliant with the same laws as US companies are.
They don't even operate in China (blocked by the Great Firewall), so a pro-Chinese bias to their content is circumstantial evidence that the true purpose of the app is light foreign psyops.
I might be missing something, but I don't see the relevance of discovery when TikTok is suing the US government. The government will need to establish that it followed due process in drafting and executing the executive order. I can't see what relevant information TikTok would hold about that? Posisbly they would have correspondence between the government and themselves, but you would expect the government to have copies of that too. It may be that the order was carried out because of TikTok's behaviour, but that would need to be behaviour that the government has documentation of, so it wouldn't come through discovery.
Also, just to be clear, this law suit isn't going to be litigated by Chinese lawyers, the lawyers are going to be US lawyers who have to adhere to the US standards. If they think that TikTok is failing to provide something to the court or are acting unethically they are obligated to tell the court of be disbared.
DoJ could ask ByteDance for information about TikTok US data security. It's a no brainer to see why DoJ proving this issue would be hard if the laws were stringent, but it doesn't seem like his entity list (if that's what he's using) power has any restrictions on Chinese foreign commerce - historically it's been interpreted as very broad, so as far as SCOTUS will let him.
Whether you should side with Tik Tok or not, the above statement applies to a massive percentage of people who don't agree with the Tik Tok ban. This is dangerous thinking
This ban is clearly a distraction by the white house to take attention away from actual national security matters, specifically the foreign hacking of elections. It's absurd that this is a priority but protecting our electoral process is not. Only fools would believe a social network like this is a real threat.
You do gain something, namely you don't become the same as the people you're implying are worse than you. If everyone is on the same level, nobody is an improvement over anyone else and the contrast is a purely cosmetic one.
The executive branch's broad authority to regulate foreign commerce has been a constitutional privilege from the beginning - Jefferson strongly advocated for it, for example. Only legislation would disallow this order from going through.
Even when the judiciary system works as it's supposed to, that doesn't necessarily mean that justice is being fairly delivered, which would mean there is a problem with the law itself. I think detractors here are misunderstanding what is currently the law and what they think should be the law, in this case.
No, by taking the "high road" and valuing freedom and rights, you get global influence and alliances that are worth far, far more in the long run than any short-term profits your IP might get you.
You don't get world-class talent moving to your country by being a totalitarian state. You get it by valuing individual rights and freedom.
I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves - and the fact that HN, of all places, is cheering it
That only worked when China was a small country economically. Once China passes the U.S. and becomes the #1 economic superpower, none of this matters. These small fish "allies" are not really important.
> I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves - and the fact that HN, of all places, is cheering it
Everything you said here we already know. What you don't realize is the world is going through an invisible war right now at a scale of world war 3. These first world country people have never lived a difficult life so they just think everything will be all right just because it's been all right through their entire life. When China gains its dominance by bullying the rest of the world and the rest of the world just trying to "take the high road", they will realize there's no longer anything they can do about the situation because the Chinese economy has become too strong. This is why countries like India are taking the same route already (They were the ones who banned TikTok first).
There is no permanent "ally" in the world politics. If you naively think "taking the high road" will win you allies even if it means losing your power, you should study history and learn to see long term.
You don't have to give your IP away. US "business" men willingly gave the Chinese their IP in exchange for cheap labor. You don't have to do that, that is not the only other option.
Enforcing current laws is enough. And if it's not, IF, you enact new constitutional laws.
The best time to have banned US corporations from handing IP to China would have been 40 years ago. The next best time is now. And TikTok has nothing to do with any of this, TikTok's "ban" is just the latest random outburst from an insufferable moron.
US companies get access to one market while Chinese companies get access to both markets. While this isn't exactly fair, I don't think Americans are bothered by this. But I guess that won't be the case when most of the Americans get used to a Chinese app and criticism of the CCP is suppressed.
The US has decided to allow people to sue the government for things like this. Doesn't mean they'll win, of course, but having legal recourse in the courts is something that we have decided to allow.
There are reasons you can oppose this ban, but this isn't a good one of those reasons.
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The US promises certain freedoms and protections, and TikTok is saying the US is unfairly denying them those freedoms and protections.
China doesn't promise those things to anyone, so there's no grounds to complain they're not being fair.
I mean, imagine this argument applied to other things. "They don't allow <insert liberty> in their home country, why are they suing the US for denying <insert liberty>?"
I agree, I don't fully understand why the comparison is being made here. There are plenty of things that are unfair on either side as far as the law goes; Chinese and US businesses have dealt with that for years unimpeded.
The more interesting question is my eyes is who's going to benefit/hurt from all this and why - US consumers, US/Chinese tech cos, US/Chinese foreign interests? I'd love to hear opinions on this aspect.
Like another comment said, it'll be interesting to see what comes out in discovery.
This makes me think about it mathematically. C(us) -> M{us}; C(ch) -> M{us,ch}; P(c) proportional M; S{C} -> P;
Where, the company with greater market access, has greater access to profit, and then greater chances of winning. We strip away all other pretenses, it might just boil down to, S(C(us)) < S(C(ch)), which is just a consequence of the rule set. No way forward, when S(C(us)) > S(C(ch)) is the goal, changing the rule set is the only available action.
How does the Chinese government sue the us government for not having American rights? This literally makes no sense. How can do many people here not understand that Chinese created companies literally are owned and operated by their gov? How do you think the great firewall/mass gov censureship/social scores work?
You're trying to intentionally confuse to tangential concepts, and murdering common sense and logic to do so.
Amtrak is almost entirely owned by the US Government and has taken in 10s of billion of federal dollars to operate, yet you can go out and sue it like any other company despite the protections US Government entities normally have.
Because owning something, and being that thing, are not the same thing... in case you didn't realize. That's actually one of the core justifications of most corporations
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The Chinese government is not suing the US Government, TikTok is. Sure there's lots of fun power dynamics to dive into over who controls TikTok and so on, but if you can't get the simple fact of who's suing who, you should hush up on the topic.
That makes sense from a common sense point of view, but from a legal point of view, it's much more complicated.
China is a different jurisdiction with different legislation, different constitution and a different justice system. It's a completely different set of rules... If an American company sues China... the outcome will be decided on Chinese courts, based on Chinese legislation and Chinese constitutionality.
TikTok will fight the US in US courts, abiding to US legislation, US constitutionality, etc... In the end, it will be up to a judge or eventually the US Supreme Court to decide what happens.
Yes, China does censor sites and apps. But is it really good to censor sites and apps just like they do? Aren't we better than that? Do we want anyone having that sort of power?
The aspect I believe you're missing is that any Chinese company with over 50 employees is not a legitimate private company because the CCP essentially claims ownership over them. This means ByteDance is essentially state run and makes the national security risk a legitimate concern.
I believe the national security risk argument is stronger in the case of Huawei. Since having a state run company build essential communication infrastructure is clearly a bad idea. However, I think it also applies to ByteDance. Why would you allow a foreign government uninhibited access to huge amounts of data about your citizens? Especially when that government is a hostile totalitarian regime currently engaged in serious human rights violations.
Well, regardless of being private or public, a foreign owned company having US operations doesn't guarantee it the rights as the US operated equivalent. Foreign commerce is regulated by both the executive and legislative branch - there are no constitutionally guaranteed rights for foreign commerce.
China is a dictatorship. No one doing business in or with China does so without knowing that they have to toe the party/government line and could loose everything if they don't
The US is an elected democracy with a strong respect for the rule of law both domestically and internationally (lets not start debating that - historically and compared with China it has) and has attracted foreign capital and investment because of that.
If Trump wants to protect US citizens data then it should tighten privacy law rather than playing nationalistic tit-for-tat which will undermine investor confidence in the US.
China is a totalitarian regime which doesn't follow due process and basic freedoms.
I strongly hope that your strange "tit-for-tat" doesn't extend to basic rights of people and businesses on US soil. US is supposed to be better than that, remember?
>I strongly hope that your strange "tit-for-tat" doesn't extend to basic rights of people and businesses on US soil. US is supposed to be better than that, remember?
I think the issue here is that it's a foreign owned business. I know tit-for-tat might be happening in the eyes of US law makers, but many of the constitutional protections we afford citizens are only extended as a convenience to non-citizens - a convenience usually rooted in positive trade relationships.
To be more specific, it would be Apple preventing you from doing it in this case.
If you had a phone that let you install software on it of your choosing then you could install whatever you want, regardless of who Apple isn't allowed to do business with. They made themselves a chokepoint, so now they're a chokepoint.
The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around... no, your phone's only route is through the one corporation.
>Americans have the right to trade with foreign companies
Err, foreign affairs (and thus commerce) has always been something regulated by the US government - something reserved for the president unless the legislative explicitly declares otherwise. Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...
Do you know any constitutional clause or SCOTUS case suggesting otherwise?
Americans have no such right — the US government has the authority to impose economic sanctions on foreign governments that explicitly prohibit doing business with their companies.
Expand on these basic rights that are violated if TikTok is banned. And since when do foreign businesses have basic rights in US or any other democracy?
The free market is a two way thing. What, you wanna allow a totalitarian regime to have it's companies operating in your soil while expanding their influence?
This situation should've been stopped a while ago, China banned every company they wanted while the others let them operate everywhere according to the free market rules.
Free market does not need to be a two way thing to function. If the Chinese have to spend their money on non-US goods, those earning thw profits will be more inclined to spend their money on US goods.
Exports is what you pay for your imports. It's better for US citizens to be able to buy Chinese products even if Chinese citizens can't buy us products. They can pay for it by exporting to other countries from which China buys.
Meanwhile, when smaller countries (for example post communist ones) try to protect like that, all Americans were yelling "free market, free market, gotta open it completely and absolutely for the good of all!"
> I strongly hope that your strange "tit-for-tat" doesn't extend to basic rights of people and businesses on US soil.
Your enemy brakes rules to gain advantage, why wouldn't you.
I for long thought of this as a weakness in America.
Thousands of children of CPC's top leadership live, and study in USA, including children of Xi, Li, and Lin.
Your solution to solve your problem with China overnight was pretty much lying under your nose.
Think, not a single government employee in China can legally afford to pay for their children tuition in Harvard (which people in China jokingly call "the new Central Party School.") The salary of a government employee in China is legally capped at around CNY 32000. There is no way in hell even Chinese government ministers can pay for their children lavish lifestyles in the West from legit income.
> Your enemy brakes rules to gain advantage, why wouldn't you.
Probably because if your "enemy" (interesting that this wording started to pop up in relation to China a lot) is a totalitarian state which abuses their people... you don't want to follow their rules and societal structure.
At least that's my takeaway as an Eastern European with a bit of experience of such regimes.
Well, take a look on Mr Obama, and what legal trickery he went through to drone his own citizen (Awlaki.) Now, America can drone own citizens, but can't do this?
China's basis is that foreign companies won't respect their laws. What US laws has TikTok broken? Privacy isn't protected because an entire domestic industry has bought off Congress. Why can't a foreign company participate in the same?
>Why can't a foreign company participate in the same?
Basically foreign owned companies don't have the same constitutional rights as ones owned by US citizens - these companies operations basically being foreign commerce is where the entity list powers are derived from.
I don't believe you are correct. In the US corporations enjoy "Corporate Personhood", e.g. the corporation itself enjoys many of the same rights as a US person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
Whether TikTok is registered as a US company may be relevant however (I would expect their local operations would be).
>I don't believe you are correct. In the US corporations enjoy "Corporate Personhood", e.g. the corporation itself enjoys many of the same rights as a US person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Whether TikTok is registered as a US company may be relevant however (I would expect their local operations would be).
Foreign ownership doesn't enjoy the same rights as LLCs registered in the US, ironically. For example, even though Huawei operated in the US through a US LLC, Trump still regulated its associations as defined by the foreign affairs power - as well as how corporations with US operations interacted with these foreign associated Huawei entities.
Otherwise corporate personhood would anull all trade deals in the US, and I think even the article you linked mentions their limited protections in the US.
The issue here is until Congress intervenes, foreign affairs power still is within the executive branches jurisdiction... Which is increasingly tumultuous with Congress flipping underneath the president every cycle it feels like.
You aren't wrong, but it's fairly easy to make a plausible argument for national security.
You can argue nation security when it comes to any app that isn't doing end-to-end, especially if it's written in a way that could allow the first, or a third party, to get access to arbitrary user data with the plausible deniability that security bugs can offer.
TikTok has had security bugs that made me outright mad when I looked at an expose on some of them. The kind of comedically terrible bugs they've had not too long ago makes it absolutely certain there are many, many more. Not even checking which user is logged in when you send a message for the user? Seriously, that's embarrassing in a rarely used feature on an app with a handful of users. Core functionality on a hundreds of millions users app? That's so terrible I almost can't believe it.
Not that other apps don't have bugs, but the track record, and global spread would make a solid argument. Confound by their app appearing to spread the data over an absolutely massive number of domains, and hosts, making auditing very hard, and also attribution of blame if data gets in the wrong hand.
I'm not saying eg Facebook is necessarily much different, only what argument can be made. Incidentally, what TikTok is doing is almost certainly illegal in EU, as I have no information that they have even attempted to follow GDPR rules.
> China's basis is that foreign companies won't respect their laws
This is fallacious.
China is an authoritarian regime, not a democracy under the rule of law. There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
International free market trade is founded on reciprocity - you open your markets and I open mine, under analogous regulatory conditions. Can US companies such as Facebook or Google operate with the same degree of freedom that TikTok does in the West?
Furthermore, and perhaps more relevantly to your question of whether TikTok has broken any US laws, it may be that it has. I have a very limited understanding of US politics and law but I do know that (a) there's a trainload of highly complex national security regulations, (b) Executive Orders provide the President a means to "steer" the application of the Law, and in this case it may be simply a way of enforcing codes that have been applied very loosely or not enforced until at all now.
I don't know if the EO will hold ground or not, but if it doesn't, I hope the US (and eventually the EU, where I am a citizen) find other ways to legally challenge the abhorrent asymmetry in playing conditions for software companies in China vs. the Democratic West.
> China is an authoritarian regime, not a democracy under the rule of law. There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Would you say it's kind of like the US President being able to just ban things he just says are threats to National Security? All of the authoritarian regimes have laws that specifically allow them to do what they do. They're usually authoritarian because they can and do call everything they don't like a threat to National Security.
Where is the actual proof here? Where can everyone take a look at it?
Absolutely not, because the separation of powers guarantees that if he botches the Executive Order and it has no legal ground, it will fall under the weight of the Law.
No such mechanisms exists in an authoritarian regime like the Chinese.
I'm not sure what you're on about. Authoritarian states do have laws to justify what they do. Even Saudi Arabia has them. You can get a lawyer, you can get a judge to review your case, you can appeal decisions. They do have separation of power as well.
Read up about the countless cases in those countries. Enforcing national security laws are very, very often the reason for the most fucked up judgements. All those cases from North Korea? Yep, national security without verifiable proof of how it endangers national security.
> Authoritarian states do have laws to justify what they do
From my original comment, which you replied to:
> There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Either you didn't read that part, chose to omit it, or you are being deliberately rude, questioning "what I'm on about".
The difference between those authoritarian regimes and a democracy under the Rule of Law like the US is the degree in which the law can be arbitrarily superseded by an authority, such as a Party or Ruler, breaking the separation of powers.
Comparing the legal systems and guarantees of China, North Korea or Saudi Arabia, with those of the US is disingenuous at best.
You did not address the fundamental point which is that an Executive Order can be challenged in a Court of Law - it will be, in fact.
Do you think a decision by the CCP, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un or Mohammad Bin Salman would be afforded the same level of guarantees?
> You did not address the fundamental point which is that an Executive Order can be challenged in a Court of Law - it will be, in fact.
> Do you think a decision by the CCP, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un or Mohammad Bin Salman would be afforded the same level of guarantees?
Yes, absolutely. It happens all the time. Those rulers use _the laws afforded to them_ to rule. It's completely wrong to suggest that they just do whatever the hell they want. That's just not the case at all. Please look into the topic. Those countries have laws that make it very, very easy for the rulers to justify doing whatever they want.
MBS can put you in jail for live not because he's free to do whatever he wants but because the laws are designed in a way that gives him every reason to justify putting anyone in jail - as I mentioned, usually based on national security grounds.
Those very same national security reasons that authoritarian regimes constantly use are being used by Trump.
So yes, Trump being able to claim something a national security issue without having to provide proof, without giving the accused a chance to take a look at the evidence that supposedly exists against them, without them being able to defend themselves from the accusations, that's exactly what authoritarian regimes do.
You are absolutely delusional if you think dictatorships work under strict Rule of Law like democracies. This is basic middle school stuff - ideas that have been developed during centuries by the liberal tradition and even hark back to the Classical world - so I'm not going to bother debating it here.
I will however leave some data, from the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2020 [1]. These indices measure how strong the Rule of Law is in each country:
Germany - 0.84
United Kingdom - 0.79
Japan - 0.78
US - 0.73
France - 0.73
South Korea - 0.73
---
China - 0.48
Russia - 0.47
Turkey - 0.43
There's no data for North Korea or Saudi Arabia, because they're so closed that there's not even a point in trying to judge the quality of their legal system. Go figure.
I don't think this matters in the question. In regards with US tech companies banned in China, all of them are banned for violating Chinese laws. If you believe there is a major exception to this, name it.
This would be a better argument if the US was doing the same thing China is doing.
China has censorship laws that you might not like, but you can certainly still choose to comply if you want to be in that market. Indeed, many US companies have chosen to do so and participate in that market while others feel the cost is too high and do not.
What could TikTok do to comply here and be allowed in the US? It wasn't banned for non-compliance in some tit-for-tat measure, it was banned for simply being from China.
People would say "This lawsuit is unlikely to succeed in an authoritarian state and either way the important thing is not whether US companies can operate there, but the Chinese government's violations of human rights and curtailing of freedom of their own citizens, and that's what we should be using our social and economic power to address."
If the "game" is censorship and social control of citizens, why on earth would you cheer on either side in a tit-for-tat?
People are pretending this is about IP or free trade, but it's not like China is going to let people install Signal so US teenagers can install TikTok.
Best case scenario is what, a Chinese operated and moderated version of Facebook while the US administration gets to moderate TikTok in the US? Or the Great US Firewall? Or China just endorses Trump and he drops the whole thing.
There are tons of legitimate criticisms of China but if this isn't motivated by any of them the outcome is unlikely to be help.
Is this not a freedom of speech issue? The right is guaranteed for foreingners in the US as well.
If they can ban tik tok, they can ban signal or briar because those also might send your encrypted data overseas or because their use among "violent" protestors is a risk. How about VPN apps that siphon your personal data to china and russia! Haha
Here's the thing, US bigtech complies (in secret) with US intel community just like tik tok complies with CCP's MSS. Matter of fact, I happen to know with certainty and with first hand accounts that the US intel community offensively uses american made apps and services to spy against naturalized law abiding americans on american soil just as they would with a foreigner working for the CCP in China.
You might say, China bans US media companies so US should as well. And I will say to you that's absolute nonsense. China is a totalitarian orwelian nightmare state and the US is supposed to be a beacon of liberty and freedom in the world. The US can ban tiktok's usage amongst US government and military and anyone that does business with them. But by what right do they get to restrict communication, an unregulated non-financial interaction between americans and anyone else?
If americans want to be spied on by China in exchange for being able to use tiktok it's their right and this activity is beyond the reaches of any elected government. Even if there is a law allowing congress or the president to ban tiktok, this law is overriden by the bill of rights that restricts the government from making laws that constrain speech and communication between citizens and anyone,and that guarantees tiktok due process and a trial before being found of any wrongdoing. Congress can however restrict commerce, as in financial transaction and for profit activity with tiktok and advertisers, what congress or trump have no authority to do is to tell americans and tiktok they cannot communicate with each other. Freedom of speech is meaningless if no one is allowed to listen to you.
This needs to be done right. Do not throw away your rights by creating a precedent set by the supreme court that lets government restrict your speech. These sneaky bastards will always worm their way into slowly taking away rights from the people in order to preserve their social order.
I don't like tiktok and if you care to go back far enough into my posting history you will see how much I hate the CCP.
What is given can be taken away (if your right to communicate with a foreign entity is given by the government). And if they can ban one app,banning others is a matter of legal mental gymnastics.
I could only find one ruling limiting who is allowed free speech, though my search wasn't thorough. Border control was allowed to bar people from entry based on protected speech made outside the country.
There was generally always considered to be 5 things that were not protected under the First Amendment. I doubt think any of the founders would disagree with the notion that the following where not protected under the First Amendment.
1. Libel
2. Slander
3. Treason
4. Certain threats / incitement to violence (like hiring a hit man)
>>If americans want to be spied on by China in exchange for being able to use tiktok it's their right and this activity is beyond the reaches of any elected government.
You lost me here. That spying can have disastrous results for security and economic well-being of USA (daughter of top Intel engineer or President's top adviser for example is wiretapped by CCP) so the state has extremely legitimate reasons to watch out for the best of all. Our Congress and our courts decide if the President overstepped the line, not China.
The clock is tiking....tik-tok will get due process, meaning lawyers will be able to represent them and that's it. Maybe the whole case will be sealed and the judge can hear classified info privately.
The security and economic well being of the US comes after the citizens' rights are secured. A government that provides security and economic prosperity by sacrificing rights and liberties of citizens does not have the consent of the governed and is operating with illegitimate authority.
Your courts and congress will decide if he stepped over the line. But if they fail to do so, you lose a ton of rights. He then gets to ban "antifa" apps and democrats get to ban "alt right" russian apps. A supreme court precedent can't be challenged in court when they apply the same logic for something else. This isn't about tik tok, this is about every other app the US government can't controp or arm twist because they are not based on the US.
so if Huawei offers everyone in America free Alexa-like speakers, USA should do nothing? Or if they give free routers to major infrastructure companies..?
They could make proper privacy laws. If both Alexa speakers and Huawei speakers have to respect your privacy and both are banned for failing to do so you sidestep a lot of the issues
Let's step back for a second: Amazon wants to know what you said to sell you x brand of corn flakes or toothpaste.
What does China want to know from millions of Americans that work in engineering, military, universities, politics? See the difference. Like China cares that its company was fined by FTC for $25 million for not respecting privacy
Precisely, except businesses are not individuals and as such they don't enjoy the same rights. An ISPs business license can be taken away from it for using huawei because the government has the authority to regulate commerce. They cannot however ban individuals at those companies from receiving or sending information to huawei.
Americans can mount free 4k cameras with hd audio in everyroom in their house that streams directly to china snd they cannot be stopped from doing so based on the fact that the government does not approve of the information being transmitted.
'If americans want to be spied on by China in exchange for being able to use tiktok it's their right'
I think you're argument breaks down here. I don't think that handimf over information to a foreign government is a right. I was unable to Google for a definitive answer, but maybe a more knowledgeable person could chime in. The US already has export restrictions on knowledge ( for example encryption ) to foreign governments.
>The US already has export restrictions on knowledge ( for example encryption ) to foreign governments.
And normally people on this site deride such things as ridiculous (and actively worked around bans on exporting encryption), but when they find out Big Bad China might see their dance videos and lip synching suddenly they're happy to crush the free exchange of information.
I'm going to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment and say that you might be underplaying the power of TikTok.
It's not just that China has peoples' dance videos.
The app has complete adoption by the teenage generation. When many high-profile hacks begin with simple social engineering, all it takes is blackmail attempts on the sons and daughters of diplomats and CEOs threatening to reveal/promote to friends either private or falsified(deep fake?) data/videos to get at least some percentage of compliance.
Of course we should protect encryption and be smart and diligent when protecting our liberties, but I'm scared of TikTok, and I don't think that fear is unjustified.
I don't care how justified your fears are. I also have fears about facebook being abused by republicans and russia, and google being abused by democrats but I am not calling for their ban and I am not calling for telegram's ban either. You need to educate your fellow citizens or pressure appstore owners (google and apple) to delist tiktok. That's how a free nation functions, through dialogue not paranoia and treating the law as a suggestion.
Don't sacrifice my liberty to alleviate your fears.
If we follow your logic let's equally apply the law and ban telegram,facebook/whatsapp/instagram,google and snapchat as well. And please,let the US cease all commerce with China if they are a hostile enemy government, let's stop financing them. Unless of course like always this is about american greed and not security. Injustice is not tolerable even if security is at stake. If you claim this is just and lawful, apply it equally to all other foreign and domestic apps that can be abused similar to tiktok both by domestic and foreign forces. I have no reason to fear China more than a domestic political party that is eager to start race wars and concentration camps. The law must be fair and it must be applied equally. That is a fundamental concept where it's violation means invalidation and collapse of all legal and legitimate goverment and legal activity.
> Don't sacrifice my liberty to alleviate your fears.
Don't be melodramatic. You sacrifice your liberty for the sake of security all the time, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing.
> You need to educate your fellow citizens or pressure appstore owners (google and apple) to delist tiktok.
This is an unconvincing solution because of the subversive nature of the power of TikTok. We already see that people brush this off as "not my problem. I don't care if China has my data".
You don't have to trust domestic parties to agree that there is a legitimate security threat from Chinese controlled TikTok which must be addressed.
> If you claim this is just and lawful, apply it equally to all other foreign and domestic apps that can be abused similar to tiktok both by domestic and foreign forces.
This is ostensibly the point of the "clean network". Whether or not that particular solution is adequate or even appropriate remains to be seen, but it certainly seems aimed at exactly that problem.
> but when they find out Big Bad China might see their dance videos and lip synching suddenly they're happy to crush the free exchange of information.
This isn't what they even care about. It's all the telemetry and spying the app does, like copying your clipboard consistently (seriously how this is allowed anymore by iOS or Android is beyond me). What if you selected some proprietary information and later your kid opens up TikTok cause they love using your phone, and voila some proprietary information is copied on there, going to who knows where. Something like TikTok makes corporate espionage quite possible given its popularity. I can't imagine what other things the app is doing.
Encryption is seen as a tool and a weapon,not as speech. You have the right to choose who you communicate with. Handing over your information to a foreign government,even an enemy state at war is your right. What you don't have a right to do is to share confidential information or information that is not about yourself that will aid a foreign power. The key here is that the information id about you and no one else, this information belongs to you and you have a right to communicate with foreign entities (freedom of speech does not constrain you to speak only to citizens in america). Freedom of speech applies because you are on US soil, not because tiktok is or isn't. On that same note, you get to tell foreign governments about your experience in the US, if you are persecuted or in fear for your life and your government can't protect you (to seek asylum for example). So I'd say communication with foreign countries and governments about unpriviledged information and first hand accounts is a right. Unless of course you live in china or korea in which case you can't make your government look bad or share information about internal conditions (such as starving population).
I'm far from understanding the legal complexity, but one analogy I consider here is what it'd be like to ban a particular brand or country of origin of pens, or cellphones, or routers.
Those things are definitely used for speech, and banning them all would likely be an issue. But banning a brand of pens because you don't trust the chemicals in them as safe or routers because you're concerned about potential spy ware, seems reasonable.
In that sense, TikTok is just one of many alternatives and if the motivation isn't to regulate speech, it feels like it could fit with other bans that seem reasonable to me.
I'd assume the claim here would be that it presents national security risk, though of course I think that's probably not why the ban is really happening, and it makes sense for it to be challenged.
>. But banning a brand of pens because you don't trust the chemicals in them as safe or routers because you're concerned about potential spy ware, seems reasonable.
Banning the pen is legitimate as knowingly harming people is a crime.
Banning the router isn't the same. At most they are guilty of false advertising, and even that can probably be made legal in the license provided. Besides, I may have reasons to want a router with spyware on it.
The same would apply to TikTok, but I think they're trying to say it's also "aiding our enemies" making it akin to a light form of treason.
> I'd assume the claim here would be that it presents national security risk, though of course I think that's probably not why the ban is really happening, and it makes sense for it to be challenged.
Yeah, but they lack the authority. National security does not override anyone's rights. They don't get to do this regardless if their intent. This sets a precedent where if they can claim any entity is a national security risk they can restrict communication with that entitiy. Totalitarian regimes do this exact thing when they ban certain social media or VPNs!
It's diffrent from banning a brand of pens because you're banning commercial activity and the danger is a chemical not speech. Here you're sayiny speech itself is too dangerous to be allowed. A clear line preventing the government from doing this for a reason.
a company is not a natural citizen and as such, amendments do not extend to those. amendments are the bare minimum guarantee you as a person are given by the country of your residence or citizenship.
> The Amendments guarantee rights that you already have, countries can't give you rights.
This statement confused me, probably because I'm not from the US and am missing some cultural dogma/context. But the way I think about it, "rights" are not encoded in the laws of physics. They are social constructs. Therefore different societies can come up with a different and even conflicting set of "rights".
I make no claim to have any expertise in this field.
depending on what country you are from, you could be from a country that has a set of civil laws, as opposed to a country with a set of common laws.
common law countries tend to have enumerated rights that the government cannot take away, while civil law countries tend to have rights that because of the way that particular society is built, you have these rights.
The u.s. is the common-law state because of our declaration of Independence and Constitution that speak about how all men are created equal (before God) and thus since the government rules by the consent of the governed, the laws eumerated in things like the Bill of Rights are things that are just off limits to the US government, with limited scope contextual restrictions to non-negotiable absolute rights depending on their wordings.
You should take a look at the declaration of independence for the US. There are two types of right. The first kind is agreed upon by society like you said, the second kind are inherent to anyone and they originate from a common understanding of a creator endowing all humans with equal rights. Self evident rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as they put it.
But regardless of origin, a constitution defines what the country is made up of. Constitutional rights are a contract where the government is allowed to govern and secure the people if and only if they secure those rights and follow the articles of the constitution.
You are always free to take any action you are physically and mentally capable of. A government can only restrict that freedom by enforcing laws, they are unable to make you more free.
> But the way I think about it, "rights" are not encoded in the laws of physics. They are social constructs.
There's a long history of reasoning (i.e. logic) from first principles how to best establish communities, for example Rousseau's 1762 work, The Social Contract.
Some key arguments that Rousseau expounds:
* force does not create right; we are only obligated to obey legitimate powers
* everyone is free (because we each give up the same rights and have the same duties imposed, e.g. around property rights)
* absurd for someone to surrender freedom for slavery
There are underlying commonalities between Rousseau's work and intellectual artifacts from other cultures, such as "reciprocity" expressed by Confucius in Analects: "do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you". This concept of reciprocity is also echoed in the Christian doctrine of the golden rule.
> Therefore different societies can come up with a different and even conflicting set of "rights".
Do you not think that there are universal human rights?
> Do you not think that there are universal human rights?
I know attempts have been made to come up with "universal rights". But to my point, not everyone agrees with them. For example, the convention on children's rights has not been ratified by the US.
The poster I first responded to, has since clarified that he meant something like US law working as a blacklist of what is forbidden (as opposed to a whitelist of what is allowed). So the discussion about universal rights was a bit of a red herring, sorry.
I said nothing like that, it has nothing to do with US law, but I also don't think universal rights exist in the way you two are discussing. On a deserted island with no government, you still have the right to free speech without anyone giving it to you.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The idea that our rights come from god, not the government, is enshrined in the founding documents of the US, and the idea has been discussed in philosophy for centuries before that. It's part of why US conservatives get so bent out of shape when progressives say things like "everyone has a right to healthcare".
I agree it doesn't make much sense. It's also worth noting that 75% of the men who signed that document owned slaves.
If a publisher violates a tax law, it can be shut down without worrying about free speech issues. Same with a phone company or church in violation of federal laws (although large lawsuits are a given). Tiktok is not being shut down for its own speech, but for being an agent of foreign espionage and foreign contributions to political candidates (essentially). Thus the first ammendment issue is moot.
Signal isn't sponsored by foreign governments, so it is immune to this sort of attack. It looks like Briar has German funding. The encrypted and decentralized nature of both of those apps makes them much lower concerns for espionage and (election) interference, and of course neither provides content directly from foreign governments, so they cannot be called into question for campaign interference.
That is regulation of commerce. A publisher exchanging books for detailed account of everything you do cannot be prevented from doing so. If they violate tax law their business license and finances maybe jeopardized but their right to exchange information is not.
Signal and Briar were examples. Ok, telegram, it's russian so should it be banned? Espionage has to di with state and national secrets. A foreign government spying on americans with their knowledge and consent is not espionage. How is facebook literally recording without consent not a bigger issue? Please ban facebook before tiktok. Google and Amazon have home assistants spying on americans which is magnitudes of order worse thab tiktok!
This is the thing you have to undetstand, bytedance (tiktok's creator) being cozy with ccp is not a whole lot different than facebook and zuckergerg being in bed with the trump admin or Google being in bed with obama admin ,except China is an ocean many nukes away from doing actual harm to americans and your own government is literally facilitating the death of your own citizens as we speak! Ban facebook,google and amazon because they are helping tear apart america while you're at it!
This is pure politics, sacrificing your right in fear of a boogeyman in China because the boogeyman here is on your side. You don't get to do that, if you disagree with the bill of rights have a constitutional convention and change it.
I get to to communicate with tiktok or even the chinese government if I want. And if I share my private life with them that's my right too. The government has no authority to prevent free excercise of my rights even if they don't like it.
Right now and in 2016 facebook was used to manipulate elections in the US. Shut it down because thay clearly is a national security risk if you truly believe the government policing what private information you share or consume is a good idea.
I'd like to see a similar approach to what happened with tobacco: test apps for spyware, put warning labels in big letters (or simple icons) right up front, teach kids about the dangers in school, but ultimately let everyone decide what they do.
Of course, just as with tobacco there are huge American companies which are going to oppose this sort of transparency. And of course rolling out teaching standards requires that some standardization for app privacy exist in the first place, so I don't expect this to happen fast (if it could ever happen at all).
The US President is granted wide-ranging authority to regulate international commerce
The executive order doesn't outright ban the use of TikTok (the app), it just places a ban on "any transactions subject to the jurisdiction of the United States with ByteDance", which in essence makes it impossible for people to find the app on an App store. It's almost identical to the Huawei/ZTE executive orders. It's a bit like an economic sanction on a country, which may also include companies that engage in media/speech.
Non-commercial transactions of information can't be regulated. US advertisers can be banned from doing business with tiktok but it is a free app. If someone in China called you and read out loud every byte in the tiktok app and you wrote it down in notepad and saved it,is that speech or commerce? It is speech in my opinion. They can regulate commerce but for software and crypto they can't regulate the transfer of information,they can only regulate commercial activity with that information. Commerce such as huawei/zte physical equipment sales is dfferent than software. They can't ban software just like how they can't ban a book. They can ban book sales or a book reading service but storage, avaipability and free transfer of information cannot be banned.
They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter, so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
But we're not talking strictly about non-commercial transactions. Prohibiting US advertisers from doing business with TikTok removes a lot of incentive for TikTok to operate in the US.
> US advertisers can be banned from doing business with tiktok but it is a free app.
In addition, App Store providers can be banned from allowing ByteDance to submit it.
> They can ban book sales or a book reading service but storage, avaipability and free transfer of information cannot be banned.
The free transfer of software information is already "banned" through copyright law. Software piracy is technically simply the capital-free transfer of bits of data, and that can and is controlled by the US government.
> They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter, so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
The argument is not whether they can ban someone from mailing you a copy of the communist manifest, it's whether they can ban an American retailer from receiving copies of it from a sanctioned supplier. That's what the executive order appears to be targeting.
> Non-commercial transactions of information can't be regulated
Sure they can. Look at HIPAA, COPPA, government classification, etc. I could call a family member up at an intelligence agency and ask what kinds of stuff they're investigating, but they'd surely be committing a crime by sharing that information with me, regardless of whether or not money changed hands.
The other counterargument to this is that ByteDance only has commercial intentions with the data it gathers on users. It's not a non-profit trying to feed or clothe the needy, it exists purely as a commercial enterprise, meaning that any and all information they gather will either directly or indirectly used for commerce.
That's because you don't own the information in all those cases. Privileged information,patient information,etc... If you are the originator of the information it is your speech. Your spy buddies can't share information because it is privileged amd classified (not free speech).
I am not against banning bytedance's commercial activity. But, the reasoning needs to make it clear that the app is not banned, sharing the app is not illegal and what is restricted is bytedance's ability to engage in commerce. You can ban their commercial exploitation of information but you cannot ban the app itself or americans's ability to transmit information to them. You can revoke theie business license and ban commercial activity with them.
> If you are the originator of the information it is your speech.
This technically isn't always true either. I write software for a company and even though it comes from my brain, I still don't own it and I can't share it. I'm sure in the case of TikTok, users probably don't own their data either, the company does.
> You can ban their commercial exploitation of information but you cannot ban the app itself or americans's ability to transmit information to them.
What would be the point of ByteDance even keeping the app up if they can't monetize it? The act of users transmitting information inherently adds data to TikTok's database, which has financial value. It doesn't make sense for a company to just keep an app like that up and running while promising not to make money off of it. The compute costs alone must be enormous for an app like TikTok since they have to optimize and cache all of that video. Why would a business agree to keep operating while promising not to profit? That doesn't make sense to me.
Effectively no one treats computer software as simple information.
But even if that were the case, you can ban sharing knowledge under obscenity clauses, national security clauses, or because it incite violence.
TikTok is being banned as a threat to national security, because having your preeminent communications tool run by a foreign government is inane, unless you are or want to become a colony of that government.
We are not talking about revoking tiktok's business license. If I host the tiktok app on a server and someone downloads it, would we be breaking the law? So then it's not bytedance's activity you are restricting but americans'. You can't yell fire in a crowd but you can yell fire in a crowd if the crowd is consents to it and you can ban the provable intent to cause disruption but you can't ban the word "fire" from being yelled in a crowd. You can ban the company but not the information in the app. Software is information/speech until executed by hardware.
I am saying the business and finance of tiktok can be regulated but not the app itself. Appstores can ban it on their own but a law banning an app from an appstore is equivalent to a law banning a book from a library
I think you are trying to say that books can’t be banned... but books can legally be banned from libraries.
For example historically the US has banned books for being sexually obscene, demeaning to a particular group, or liable to foster communist sympathies.
> If someone in China called you and read out loud every byte in the tiktok app and you wrote it down in notepad and saved it,is that speech or commerce?
Nobody cares about the source code. Everyone cares about sending data back to the CCP. If Tik Tok/ByteDance wants to stop being a tool of the CCP and engaging in the persecution of Uigher Muslims, then they can go back to offering us an app with funny dances.
> They can regulate commerce but for software and crypto they can't regulate the transfer of information,they can only regulate commercial activity with that information
Crypto exports are regulated.
> They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter
Actually at one point sending pornography through the USPS WAS banned. Typically political speech gets stronger protections though.
> so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
I don't want to stir up controversity even more, but with POTUS reigning by decree most of the time, and a self-referential two-party politics cartel, isn't the US already into a constitutional crisis of sort? I mean, the US administration has every reason to question China's asymmetric conditions for investment, and the West turning a blind eye towards China totalitarism due to greed and economic necessity, but the current president's ad-hoc actions against partners (NATO, Canada, EU, Mexico, and others) don't amount to a strategic goal so much as a short-sighted signal of "doing something" in election campaigning. In fact, these actions have made it more difficult or even impossible to side with the US. The TikTok ban, apart from its terrible looks (intrusiveness into an already US-dominated market), seems to only follow Trump's desire to black-out an alleged anti-Trump social platform in upcoming elections. The reasoning for allowing Russia to meddle with elections OTOH should be even more concerning in geo-political terms: that Russia's pro-Trump stance is because Trump staying in power will only serve to weaken Western countries.
I hope they win. Living in China, I told my friends here that at least they will have their day in court - a win would really help show an advantage of the US system in a high-profile way.
Trump is doing so much to hurt the US image among Chinese citizens right now. His administration emphasizes the importance of the distinction between the government and the people, but his actions are only driving the two closer together. Poor strategy in my opinion.
Also, I’m really worried about the supposed Tencent ban. There’s no way I can get rid of WeChat...
Demography is destiny. China's much larger population is churning out STEM graduates at a way faster rate than the US, and if the US loses the soft power that was previously steering the best and brightest of them to study and work in America, it will have a much harder time maintaining its technological lead.
Yeah, including everyone at work and our customers. I could do payments through Alipay, but there’s no way people are going to accommodate me in other ways.
I don't get why he decided to ban tik tok and tencent and I'm not the biggest fan of his by any stretch of the imagination, but if America wants to ban 1 Chinese app, why is that an issue? They literally copied silicon valley businesses for decades in China.
The problem I have with this though, is that it's not a way to get protect American interests, it's probably the first in a series of last ditch efforts to portray a certain political stance before the campaign. And the effect of banning wechat, tik tok, and tencent will stoke an already considerable flame of anti chinese perspective, which the chinese americans on our soil, have to suffer for. I say ban the crap out of all Chinese apps if that's just what it is, but let's all make sure not to throw out our own under the bus with it.
Because permitting banning apps without due process is a dangerous precedent. Next up will be Signal because you could use it to talk to dangerous foreign nationals, or VPN apps because you could send secret data to the evil-state-du-jour. Process matters, even if this particular app doesn't.
So if the problem is that TikTok is gathering too much invasive data on US citizens (and supposedly siphoning it to China), and their defence is basically "So what, it's legal and everyone else is doing it too!", then isn't the obvious solution making actual digital privacy legislation that would make such data vacuuming illegal? That would solve the problem and make the American market a fair playing field rather than this hamfisted protectionism.
One difference between TikTok and other companies is that they are backed by an entity which has plans for global dominance and are not exactly aligned with American interests.
Facebook is a company that has plans for (and has achieved) global dominance and is not aligned with European interests.
Boeing is a company backed by an entity which has plans for (and has achieved) global dominance and is increasingly not aligned with European interests.
I know there's a huge difference between the US Government and the Chinese Government, but that difference is decreasing. And Facebook, well I simply do not trust them.
It’s no secret that the EU want to achieve technological sovereignty.
It seems like it would be a good thing if you didn’t have these billion-user social networks, operated by foreign entities that are likely to use them to spread propaganda, censorship, election interference, etc.
It would be an even better thing if supra-national entities (huge companies) had to deal with multi-national entities. That would level the playing field.
Countries competing for the attention of monopolistic companies will just provoke a tranfer of wealth from the citizens of all countries to those companies (see: tax havens).
> Boeing is a company backed by an entity which has plans for (and has achieved) global dominance and is increasingly not aligned with European interests.
Airbus and Boeing pretty much go toe-to-toe, no?
Also Boeing still has the very possible abandoning of the 787-Max and the WTO dispute resolution (that still hasn’t been implemented) looming over them.
Except for the part where the NSA is doing political and industrial espionage on Airbus on behalf of Boeing and the US gov so they can throw a wrench in Airbus's negotiations with other governments.
But Facebook isn't backed by the US government given that we keep pulling them in front of congress and now the executive is making an attack on Section 230. That's not to say that FB isn't globally dominant - just that it isn't propped up by any country, and it'd certainly be fair to punish them for breaking or flouting rules.
Boeing as a company producing a massive amount of planes for the EU is absolutely aligned with European interests. Their current scandal is also a scandal in the US and they've also been (and continue to be) punished and investigated for it.
You can't just say "but Facebook!" in response to TikTok, a company siphoning data into a blackhole in China at the behest of the CCP and engaging in censoring as befits the CCP. The current status quo hurts everyone whether in the US or the EU.
I don't know how Facebook and Boeing are comparable to the entity I was talking about. These companies don't have an army under them, are not running indoctrination camps and are not in border disputes with numerous countries.
> they are backed by an entity which has plans for global dominance and are not exactly aligned with American interests
The irony is that each of the entities has plans for global dominance, which is incompatible with the plans and interests the other one has.
The sad part is that it turns out the US is willing to forgo its values if this gives them a leg up on China. Makes any future rhetoric on values and morals seem a bit empty. *
* It has been pointed out that perhaps "empty rhetoric" wasn't the best choice of words. Maybe "rhetoric that no longer has any basis in reality whatsoever" sums it up better.
Rhetoric about US values has been empty since Guantanamo Bay started housing "foreign militants". Europe seems to be the only place in the West where a commitment to human rights is sincere.
Blasphemy laws have just been repackaged essentially under "anti hate speech" laws. They're palatable to the media and at the same time selectively-applicable which is ideal for population control.
Really? 27% of Germans support the right to speech that offends minority groups, and less than half of Europeans as a whole [0]. A Swedish man was convicted for producing art that was deemed racist, and the owner of the gallery that displayed it was fined [1]. A man was famously prosecuted for a video of a dog performing a nazi salute [2]. A refugee may be expelled from Denmark after he left comments "celebrating" the Charlie Hebdo attacks [3]. I'm not saying these excuse things America has done, but you saying that Europe is the last place where liberty is valued is patently ridiculous.
Reasonable people can disagree about the limits of free speech, and when it becomes an attack on others. The American obsession with allowing Nazis and racists has done nothing to improve the lives of its people.
I think you're missing the point. An "attack on others" isn't something that most Americans should be limited, if you mean by attack what I believe you do (please clarify). I'm not sure why you think the power to limit speech can't be abused: even with strict protections, we've had awful majoritarian policies like the Sedition Act and McCarthyism. We protect everyone, Nazis and racists included, because if we give the government freedom to restrict the content of speech it will be abused when the "other side" gets power.
Oh please… 28 US states have actual legislation to prohibit state offices from doing business with companies or individuals that even threaten to boycott Israel.
Not far from how NBA employees get censored by China.
The first difference being that there was plenty of successful legal action against such laws and policies which led to the law congress passes being changed. Legal precedent on the issue is very clear and so challenges to it have been quite successful, something that never would have happened in China. And, of course, organizations that support BDS aren't being kicked out of America. This is a pretty bogus comparison.
I completely disagree. Seeing Westboro Baptist Church on TV spewing their vile hatred acts as a shining litmus test that I don’t live in a totalitarian state. Watching thousands of people actively try to protect victims of the Westboro hate, gives me faith that I live in a country filled with people with great ethical resolve and compassion towards their fellow man. It’s beautiful, and the essence of what makes me proud to be an American.
The USA has been the sole military superpower for 30 years now, with more power than the rest of the world combined. If they wanted global dominance, they'd already have it long ago.
"Plans for global dominance" can mean more than just achieving it. One can also plan to maintain it or grow it. Perhaps it's just semantics but an important distinction.
In this particular case China's plan to achieve global dominance is in stark opposition to the US's plan to maintain global dominance.
I really don't know what you're trying to say. If the USA achieved global dominance, there would be no China. There would only be the USA. Globally. Obviously, that's not the case.
> If the USA achieved global dominance, there would be no China. There would only be the USA
That's really not what those words mean. "Dominance" is the fact or state of being dominant, not the state of being the only one in existence. So what I said is that the US dominates the world (geo-political, economic, military, etc.).
Let's put it in more simple terms. If Mike Tyson dominated a boxing match it really doesn't mean he was prancing around alone in the ring. Just that if anyone contested that dominance he'd punch them harder. And if that didn't work he'd bite of their ear. Which is a far more appropriate analogy than it would first seem.
Debt is serviced under a contract. The worst a lender can do is not give any future debt.
Now of course in the case of nation states, agreements are changeable by military and economic force, but in effect you would have to do more than simply hold debt to affect another counties economy.
China is the world's factory/warehouse today. Even more on a R&D world. Any war with China from the US would be shooting their feet themselves with a bazooka.
A factory and warehouse of civilian goods. That logic won’t stop people from going to war with China. It stopped no one from warring with the US, back when it was the major civilian good supplier.
I do think going to war with China is useless. The loss of life would be immense and I see no reason for people to die for ideological purposes. However, a Cold War is coming. No longer, can we pretend that China and the US will become genuine parters, with shard long term goals and policies. If we must be competitors, then it’s best to do it honestly and openly.
Rhetoric is empty by definition, its purpose is to persuade.
Also you’re speaking from a global point of view by addressing “the US” and “China” versus “our country” and “their country” so the idea that there exists “values and morals” in that context is also obviously incorrect as each culture has its own set. Even within a given culture there exists different sets. I’d go as far as to say that with the dissolution of Christianity as a cohesive unifying religion within the US values and morality no longer exist as such. Each person’s beliefs change almost daily given how fast information and ideas spread on the internet and social networks. Appeals to morality are essentially dead in my opinion
>I’d go as far as to say that with the dissolution of Christianity as a cohesive unifying religion within the US values and morality no longer exist as such. Each person’s beliefs change almost daily given how fast information and ideas spread on the internet and social networks. Appeals to morality are essentially dead in my opinion.
Yet in other developed countries (like many in Europe) where Christianity is no longer the dominant cultural institution, there is more social cohesiveness.
Religion in the US has been weaponised for political ends and became a means of tribal division in society.
Ah interesting, I think I remember Congress asking the tech CEOs if China stole data from the us shortly before the tik tok announcement, I wonder if there's a connection there.
But we use a ton of Chinese tech software and hardware outside of Tiktok, are they gonna ban them all?
A lost of Chinese hardware today doesn't send data back to China. An exception to that are mobile phones for some of which it has been proven to send data to China.
That is not the problem. I'm not a US citizen, but let's pretend I am; as a normal citizen (ie, not a politician or high profile important person) would I be more concerned about my personal data being sent to a foreign country who doesn't know me, my family, my job, and very likely will never give a damn about what i think, or rather my own government who has all interests to know what I think, especially during protests?
I have zero trust in Chinese government, but if I had to choose, even as the European citizen I am (not high profile, not employed in critical areas etc.), I'd rather send my data to China than to my own government.
China doesn't care about you because you're not a good target, you want to know who is a good Target? Chinese people living in your country, they can be blackmailed into doing things against the interests of your government.
In order to exist as functional part of modern society you pretty much have to be on at least a couple apps that exfiltrate all your data and metadata. Sure you can DIY everything but that comes with a huge time cost that most simply cannot afford.
The point out preferring one's data in the hands of a regime that doesn't have jurisdiction to send jack booted thugs to kick in one's door still stands.
> In order to exist as functional part of modern society you pretty much have to be on at least a couple apps that exfiltrate all your data and metadata.
I think you vastly overestimate 1) how much a functional human in modern society actually needs any of this garbage and 2) how much of that data and metadata is meaningful in regards to someone's privacy.
Ah sorry, that wasn't my intention, I don't even use smartphones or social media, smartTVs or closed source operating systems/software (1).
My point was, if I have to be concerned about privacy (in fact I actually am, see above) why should I fear about a foreign government while my own one is without any doubt more interested in knowing what I think?
Of course should one day I become an important public figure, or a key person in some critical environment, all the data about me would suddenly become gold; that's a very valid point by another commenter. Of course my post was from the point of view of someone who doesn't plan, nor could even choose, to become one anytime soon.
(1) hence my comments where very often I argue about closed device drivers and blobs, which are the best possible place for planting spyware.
Exactly, I'd be much more concerned about my personal data going to a government that has agency over me than the one that doesn't. The only time I'd have to worry about Chinese government having my data would be if I went to China. On the other hand, as a US citizen I could be dragged into an unmarked van by DHS goons any time based on the data US government collects on me.
In a globalized world, it’s a mistake to assume that China (or any foreign power, for that matter) has no agency over or interest in you. Especially if you are, for example, someone with even a mediocrum of power or access that they want (for example, if you’re a system administrator for a company whose secrets they want).
If they have enough leverage over you (or access through you to your secure systems), they will use it.
Yet, it's obvious that your own government has the most agency over you. And when your own government starts putting shock troops on the streets and abducting people in unmarked vans, you might want to reconsider how much information you want to share with it.
You have a valid point. One's own government is almost always more of a threat that another country's government.
But I think it's possible you aren't thinking of all the contingencies that are created by a foreign government having info about people in this country.
For a moment think: your data goes to China. China learns over the years about you, including something that can be used against you. At some point in future you are in a position at a company or have a government position where China has an interest in you, at that time it can use the data collected over the years to compromise you.
If you think that will never be the case, let’s go further, what about your spouse or even further your kids when they grow up.
You can’t have a fair playing field with China unless they also have a fair playing field with the US. That has not ever been the case. China wants to have cake and eat cake.
Not the point. OP is talking about playing field between companies not countries.
He's saying "TikTok should not gather invasive data ... neither should US-based company".
If you oppose that, then you're basically saying "the US wants to have cake and eat it too". I guess every country for itself "works"... for a certain definition of "works".
Let's avoid regression to Chinese standard please.
Am quite surprised and quite honestly shocked that it took this long for US or any country to recognize this fact.
It's not just a fair playing field war between US and China, but between China and rest of the world. Even India, whose companies are not allowed to operate in China under fair play rules banned TikTok only after the Chinese incursion across the LOC.
Have you met the American legislative process? This is the same country that when, for example, faced with stiff competition in the motorcycle market from Japanese manufacturers in the 1980s didn't start producing better and cheaper bikes, but instead just added a huge tariff on imported bikes over 700cc in order to boost Harley up. Why would this be any different?
Besides, this move isn't coming from the actual concern for citizens' and residents' privacy. It comes from the idea that economy and pandemic and terrible polling numbers for Trump mean he needs a distraction, as per his usual pattern. It was TikTok but it could have been catalytic converters or grandmothers or anything, just to get people talking about something else.
The problem isn't digital privacy; it's a fair bit more complex than that. Tech lenses aren't a great way to view geopolitics.
The US' international economic dominance is predicated on a (1) pronounced lead in certain industries and (2) a simply massive economy, which combine to (3) let the US set the rules of international "fair play." The US is where you find the thing you want to buy, and the people you want to sell to. You want access? Play by our rules - everywhere.
Tik Tok does not just threaten US data. It threatens our lead in a critical industry (1), and comes from a country that minimizes the impact of US economic might (2), meaning that China can set their own rules of "fair play" (3). Banning Tik Tok isn't to protect US data; that's totally missing the point. It's to protect the American ability to set international norms.
From that lens, this is certainly hamfisted, and I certainly don't believe views it like this, but you can damn well bet the policy nerd drafting this EO is thinking this way.
There was an old Soviet joke that "the USA meddles in the USSR's internal affairs all over the globe"... and yeah, the "policy nerds" apparently do honestly believe that the whole world is in the US's jurisdiction, but what can you realistically do?
You;'re right, but I think you're seeing China finally being taken seriously for the future and with that comes and expectation of reciprocity of commerce. If you want to fight to be the most important economy/culture you no longer can ask up to bring a knife to a gun fight.
Well if the current state is zero due process in China, and no ability for US companies to participate in their social media market, then yes their companies should have equal treatment.
I don't agree with this just on fiat from Trump, but the USA is in its rights to give Chinese the same sort of treatment that they give the USA. If you don't play by China's rules you can't be in their market, and those rules are set up to benefit China only.
In this case TikTok is getting the same treatment US tech giants have. If that is not "fair play" I don't know what is.
I wouldn't be a hyperbolic as that, but you're not wrong. It's about protecting policies and norms that manifest western democratic values on the global stage.
In one way, it's existential: the march of authoritarianism is undoubtedly accelerated by nation-states manipulating social media.
But in most others, I wouldn't get too worked up: it's more about mundane garbage ("preserving the spirit of financial disclosure processes in the context of international capital market access") - nerd sh*t.
If that is so then the whole discourse borders on the US government deceiving the American people by stating that TikTok is some data security threat.. whereas real reasons seems to be geo-politics..
Technically, that's true, but it never really works that way. Google had complied with their laws, but got hacked. Foreign websites will get shut down randomly without warning or explanation. Sometimes they'll get restored, but even then the damage is already done. iTunes is still banned in China.
Here is a Google example from when I lived in China: Google was at the time competing with Baidu over the search image market in China. My home internet was fast and with great quality. Only Google image search results had very often problems loading image previews. Its not that it "didn't work". It just failed "a little", maybe half the images in the results pag didn't load. So Google image search wasn't really blocked. It could have been total coincidence that it was like that for years and only for Google image search. The site that was coincidentally competing over the lead in the Chinese search market against a Chinese company. After some weeks, I started using Baidu image search, even though their result quality was worse. But at least it worked. I am sure many people in China did. That's "competition" in China.
Well you can’t assume a fair playing field between USA and any other country, let alone a developing one. They needed protectionist measures to be able to industrialize as well as they did.
Most US firms can do business in China. Like Tesla, who even gets preferential treatment that were envied by anyone who ever did business in China (foreigner or not).
They just relinquish certain strong hold to a sovereign nation, like they have to host their data center inside China (both politically important, and economically beneficial). And they also risk their data being stolen (or so they claim).
You missing an important point here, compliance with local laws. US companies CAN do business in China, only if they comply with Chinese laws. Whether these laws are just or unjust is beyond discussion of this thread, what matters is if you want to business in China, you have comply to it.
Imagine, if a Chinese company wants to operate in US but refuse to comply local regulations, what will happen to that company?
Fb, Google and others are banned from China because they refuse to cooperate. What about Tiktok?
This already exists in the form of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and China already flouts those rules. Your plan has been tried and does not work.
> At the same time, how can a single person decide the fate of a company in a different country?
The single person was explicitly elected to speak and act on America’s behalf. The same single person is the commander in chief for America’s military, giving them quite a bit of power when interacting with foreign countries.
And they’re impacting a foreign company’s operations in the US, something which seems to fall within the powers granted to them.
In general, I don’t like what he’s doing, but the why and how in this case appear to be by the book.
even if any of the allegations against the platform are true, banning a single major platform like this - especially coming from someone as ham-fisted and blatant as Donald Trump - won't solve any of the problems people have with how China runs their businesses
Hello, the data angle is just a diversion for kicking out tiktok and we chat getting too big and kicking American tech giants ass. Too dominant. It’s protectionism
Please preface your post by talking about tianaman square, that way I know if your a Chinese bot or CCP agent. If you fail to mention tianaman square I know you're a CCP agent.
It's a matter of who owns the user activity data on TikTok whether ByteDance retains rights to sell or rent without informing public to someone at some point in future..
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadOr the result is that indeed their operation is 100% independent of their Chinese parent company and no US data ever touches mainland China... which would surprise me.
That situation does not exist. Chinese law basically means that any data held in China can be accessed by the government at any time.
We're trying to roll that back apparently. I don't have a lot of hope but we'll see. These politicians are all basically under fire this november so they better damnwell hustle.
Also, FWIW, companies can release FISA statements saying they've been accessed. How much of that is actually true depends on your level of paranoia.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...
In the US system, there are still miscarriages of Justice, but there is judicial supremacy and separation of powers.
The powers aren't as separated as say the French justice system, but most would say the US judicial system is mostly independent of the other branches of government.
Very few people are aware about this. The party is supreme and institutions like PLA are answerable to the party, not to the people.
Overall, I particularly enjoy this system over one that is accountable to a single entity.
If there is only one party permitted, and that one party is supreme, then how is that a party? It looks like government to me. Maybe the translation to English is just wrong. The "party" isn't a party by any reasonable definition.
The real parties would be factions within the so-called party. I don't know if they have names more descriptive than "Xi supporters" and "Xi opponents".
So basically, why should anyone trust a US company if US thinks tiktok giving data to their government is a problem?
Hard to say if it's even enough to keep it outside of China. As long as the company is under Chinese jurisdiction, they'll have a hard time saying "no, sorry, that data center is in Singapore, we won't comply".
The EU has similar issues with the US cloud providers: even if an Amazon data center is in the EU, obviously they will hand over data if a US court order/NSL tells them to. One way that Microsoft tried to mitigate that was to have a data trustee run the data centers with Microsoft not having access, therefore not being able to give anything to the government. They've stopped offering it after a few years though.
That's a HUGE assumption to make. All companies are required to install backdoors BY LAW in China, and the gov can even have its own employees/spies within the companies' data centers.
Why would you assume any different or that it's up to the company to give that data? It's not like the Chinese government really has to go through a democratic judge to do that.
> But any pushback from Congress is unlikely, as the skepticism about the Chinese Communist Party's potential ties to the country's technology companies has gathered bipartisan support.
He once again imposed tariffs on Canada using the whole "national security" excuse. It seems like he can do quite a lot using that excuse...
Further, Trump's anti-China campaign has broad political support from both parties - Congress voted to ban TikTok in federal devices just days ago.
No.
Congress creates laws. The President enforces them. This is an enforcement action--it's not unusual for Congress to be uninvolved.
> Should the president really have this power?
Multiple Congresses gave these powers to the President [1][2][3]. The current and next ones are free to take them back.
My personal belief is no, the President shouldn't have this power in the absence of clear and present danger. We need a commission, likely under Commerce and/or State, that assesses civil fines and passes prosecution recommendations to the DoJ. Furthermore, we need legislation describing (a) which countries are deemed economically friendly and economically adversarial, (b) how those determinations are made and (c) what companies from those countries can and cannot do as well as (d) how they may achieve "safe harbor" status (e.g. by locally hosting data and submitting code for periodic review).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exon–Florio_Amendment
[3] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/international/Docum...
You make some fair points, but there is no way that I would trust a government agency to actually do code reviews and verify that a company isn't doing something wrong.
I feel increasingly unsafe because this app is being operated by a company that is beyond extradition with the USA. So if they ARE busted for doing bad stuff, who is getting jailed?
In an era where every snapdragon SoC seems rootable from any old application, and you can use machine learning to pick out key words from text streams, do we really need this app in the market?
How is this any different? The US is one of the Five Eyes countries. They routinely spy on their own people (see Snowdon et al). I see no difference between the two in this regard, other than the US has a court system that sometimes acts independently and has a Constitution that sometimes is followed.
Which is why Facebook is not allowed in China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law
For example, do individuals in the US not enjoy more freedom (of speech) than individuals in China?
Isn't it worth supporting and enhancing one regime and fight against the other (at least on this dimension)?
> In addition, ByteDance on April 25, 2019, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau (公安部新聞宣傳局) in Beijing. The agreement was billed as "aiming to give full play to the professional technology and platform advantages of Toutiao and Tiktok in big data analysis," strengthen the creation and production of "public security new media works," boost "network influence and online discourse power," and enhance "public security propaganda, guidance, influence, and credibility," among other aspects.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3982027
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_actions_by...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1701
"(a) Any authority granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may be exercised to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat."
USA has given its President a lot more power over the years and decades.
Forgot that was organized on tiktok. All makes sense now. If US was really interested in national security i'm pretty sure zoom would go long before tiktok
But forgetting that, can we with 100% certainty say that the Tulsa rally fiasco:
a) Wasn't an idea and orchestrated by the CCP?
b) Was some teen's idea, but then was pushed to the top for political reasons by the CPP?
If you can't say with 100% certain NO to these questions, and taking in account the US and China are in some sort of 'cold war', doesn't it make sense that the US goverment cuts the feet of an app that can change election results?
Yes, Russian interference with facebook is also a possibility, but at the end, Facebook (and twitter, etc) are US entities, and if there is indeed some weird things going on, they can be investigated, banned, etc. the US can't do the same with regards to TikTok.
(ps: Not american, have no skin in who wins the election, just pointing it as an outsider a possible reason)
No point in taking the risk of orchastrating it if americans are going to do it themselves.
And that is even assuming china is anti-trump. Geopolitically trump has been pretty good for china (at the cost of short term trade issues). I'd bet China cares more about long term gains over short term losses.
The whole discussion is unnecessary.
If someone goes and flunks an exam due to their own incompetence, does it matter what external factors can make them flunk?
Trump + other bizarre self important characters in his cabinet actually believe they know what they are doing. They don't. As to the CCP knowing what its doing is another total joke.
The moves of both sides are like watching second graders working a tenth grade problem. Its true, the tantrums the second graders throw in frustration, can be entertaining or highly dramatic. But the trap people fall into is to focus on the tantrums, forgetting whats on blackboard and whether anyone in the room has the skills to solve it.
This was all fine in the age of no information or hidden information. The game old men have learnt to play in that environment is an outdated game.
Today with data overflowing about the nature of problems, about the grade level the people in the room the game changes. And what we choose to focus on will change too.
Because those folks would miss a real conspiracy even if you hit them in the face with it, but are really good in finding conspiracies where there is none.
You mean ... shut down Facebook????
It's also weird that so many people believe this idea that people on TikTok did anything to the Tulsa rally. I don't think people know how the rally worked, so they take at face value someone saying TikTok users made Trump mad. Requesting tickets was not first come, first served, it was simply saying you might come. So at worst, TikTok users inflated the number of people who said they might go. So it likely had no affect on the number of people that actually showed up. Covid-19 probably was the most likely reason that people didn't show up in large numbers.
I'm not even aware of any evidence that large numbers of users were able to get reservations. A bunch of kids on TikTok saying they reserved tickets is not the same as actual proof.
I really wish that we could make people skeptical of all claims made by anyone. Don't just blindly believe some news story that includes no evidence, or quotes a few tweets because you want it to be true.
How is that relavent? Media claimed it was an embarrasment, trump wasn't able to spin it. Does it really matter what the kids did or did not do. Its an embarasment if there is public preception it is an embarassment. It isnt any less of an embarassment even if you are right that the story is based on something untrue (which seems doubtful to me).
I think people really want this narrative to be true, so people are reaching for any evidence to back the claim. The story sounds so much better when you can make Trump look like a crazy person who is so thin skinned he will ban an app that offends him. But a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle believe the CCP is a threat to the US, so this action is not as surprising as it may first seem. You've also got to remember that wechat was also targeted, so this is not hitting one app, but multiple Chinese apps.
Zoom is owned by a Chinese-American entrepreneur.
China has in past managed to force Chinese abroad to spy for them by threatening their families in China.
They need to educate Americans on the predatory nature of TikToks software and move along.
Is that referring to the content or the company itself? I don't see how it's any more of a cesspool than any other social platform. Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? Every sufficiently large platform is filled with a very wide range of content, from great to awful.
As a company, I do agree they have shady practices, but again, don't most other social media apps such as Facebook and the gang use similar tracking and data collection? Of course that's a low bar to compare to but I don't see why they're being singled out here.
But the wait time for organs are suspiciously short. And the accusations of Falun Gong practicioners align with these.
It actually is uniquely bad.
A disproportionate amount of the content consists of the sexualization of underage girls.
The way the thing is set up, there is some kind of audio, someone does a thing (usually a dance), and then other people try to do the same thing to the same sound. The audio is generally nonsense. One of the currently popular ones is a Russian cereal commercial (mepas zoo zoo zoo). Okay, fine. But then somehow the majority of the audio clips are misogynist or misandrist. Every other one seems to contain the N-word. And they're all catchy tunes that get played over and over and get stuck in your head. It's pretty messed up.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
I'm not American but I did live there a long time.
I agree the ban is some crazy stuff but:
>How any "small gov't" conservative is okay with this, while over 1000 Americans are dying of COVID per day nonetheless, is beyond me.
How is it the ban relates to people dying of Covid?
After all many publically traded chinese companies in the US aren't actually compliant with the same laws as US companies are.
What happened to the presumption of innocence?
Also, just to be clear, this law suit isn't going to be litigated by Chinese lawyers, the lawyers are going to be US lawyers who have to adhere to the US standards. If they think that TikTok is failing to provide something to the court or are acting unethically they are obligated to tell the court of be disbared.
Whether you should side with Tik Tok or not, the above statement applies to a massive percentage of people who don't agree with the Tik Tok ban. This is dangerous thinking
People would say "China can decide what they want to allow".
Well if China can decide (which they did first) two can play this game.
Also TikTok says this ban is baseless. If USA's ban of TikTok is baseless, what base does China have for banning everything?
If TikTok wins, it means that we didn't follow our own laws. Either change the laws or follow the current ones.
You don't get world-class talent moving to your country by being a totalitarian state. You get it by valuing individual rights and freedom.
I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves - and the fact that HN, of all places, is cheering it
> I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves - and the fact that HN, of all places, is cheering it
Everything you said here we already know. What you don't realize is the world is going through an invisible war right now at a scale of world war 3. These first world country people have never lived a difficult life so they just think everything will be all right just because it's been all right through their entire life. When China gains its dominance by bullying the rest of the world and the rest of the world just trying to "take the high road", they will realize there's no longer anything they can do about the situation because the Chinese economy has become too strong. This is why countries like India are taking the same route already (They were the ones who banned TikTok first).
There is no permanent "ally" in the world politics. If you naively think "taking the high road" will win you allies even if it means losing your power, you should study history and learn to see long term.
How can anyone paying attention to global politics for the past 20 years claim this?
>I'm amazed at the short-term thinking behind these moves
The short-term thinking was Western companies doing everything in their power to appease the CCP in order to gain access to a huge market.
The US already has that.
> You don't get world-class talent moving to your country by being a totalitarian state
Which is why immigrants prefer US to China, banning tic tok is not going to change that.
Uber lost in China mainly because of this.
There are reasons you can oppose this ban, but this isn't a good one of those reasons.
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The US promises certain freedoms and protections, and TikTok is saying the US is unfairly denying them those freedoms and protections.
China doesn't promise those things to anyone, so there's no grounds to complain they're not being fair.
I mean, imagine this argument applied to other things. "They don't allow <insert liberty> in their home country, why are they suing the US for denying <insert liberty>?"
The more interesting question is my eyes is who's going to benefit/hurt from all this and why - US consumers, US/Chinese tech cos, US/Chinese foreign interests? I'd love to hear opinions on this aspect.
Like another comment said, it'll be interesting to see what comes out in discovery.
Where, the company with greater market access, has greater access to profit, and then greater chances of winning. We strip away all other pretenses, it might just boil down to, S(C(us)) < S(C(ch)), which is just a consequence of the rule set. No way forward, when S(C(us)) > S(C(ch)) is the goal, changing the rule set is the only available action.
You're trying to intentionally confuse to tangential concepts, and murdering common sense and logic to do so.
Amtrak is almost entirely owned by the US Government and has taken in 10s of billion of federal dollars to operate, yet you can go out and sue it like any other company despite the protections US Government entities normally have.
Because owning something, and being that thing, are not the same thing... in case you didn't realize. That's actually one of the core justifications of most corporations
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The Chinese government is not suing the US Government, TikTok is. Sure there's lots of fun power dynamics to dive into over who controls TikTok and so on, but if you can't get the simple fact of who's suing who, you should hush up on the topic.
China is a different jurisdiction with different legislation, different constitution and a different justice system. It's a completely different set of rules... If an American company sues China... the outcome will be decided on Chinese courts, based on Chinese legislation and Chinese constitutionality.
TikTok will fight the US in US courts, abiding to US legislation, US constitutionality, etc... In the end, it will be up to a judge or eventually the US Supreme Court to decide what happens.
I believe the national security risk argument is stronger in the case of Huawei. Since having a state run company build essential communication infrastructure is clearly a bad idea. However, I think it also applies to ByteDance. Why would you allow a foreign government uninhibited access to huge amounts of data about your citizens? Especially when that government is a hostile totalitarian regime currently engaged in serious human rights violations.
China is a dictatorship. No one doing business in or with China does so without knowing that they have to toe the party/government line and could loose everything if they don't
The US is an elected democracy with a strong respect for the rule of law both domestically and internationally (lets not start debating that - historically and compared with China it has) and has attracted foreign capital and investment because of that.
If Trump wants to protect US citizens data then it should tighten privacy law rather than playing nationalistic tit-for-tat which will undermine investor confidence in the US.
I strongly hope that your strange "tit-for-tat" doesn't extend to basic rights of people and businesses on US soil. US is supposed to be better than that, remember?
I think the issue here is that it's a foreign owned business. I know tit-for-tat might be happening in the eyes of US law makers, but many of the constitutional protections we afford citizens are only extended as a convenience to non-citizens - a convenience usually rooted in positive trade relationships.
If you had a phone that let you install software on it of your choosing then you could install whatever you want, regardless of who Apple isn't allowed to do business with. They made themselves a chokepoint, so now they're a chokepoint.
The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around... no, your phone's only route is through the one corporation.
US restrictions on foreign trade are restrictions on Americans.
Err, foreign affairs (and thus commerce) has always been something regulated by the US government - something reserved for the president unless the legislative explicitly declares otherwise. Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...
Do you know any constitutional clause or SCOTUS case suggesting otherwise?
Expand on these basic rights that are violated if TikTok is banned. And since when do foreign businesses have basic rights in US or any other democracy?
This situation should've been stopped a while ago, China banned every company they wanted while the others let them operate everywhere according to the free market rules.
Exports is what you pay for your imports. It's better for US citizens to be able to buy Chinese products even if Chinese citizens can't buy us products. They can pay for it by exporting to other countries from which China buys.
Your enemy brakes rules to gain advantage, why wouldn't you.
I for long thought of this as a weakness in America.
Thousands of children of CPC's top leadership live, and study in USA, including children of Xi, Li, and Lin.
Your solution to solve your problem with China overnight was pretty much lying under your nose.
Think, not a single government employee in China can legally afford to pay for their children tuition in Harvard (which people in China jokingly call "the new Central Party School.") The salary of a government employee in China is legally capped at around CNY 32000. There is no way in hell even Chinese government ministers can pay for their children lavish lifestyles in the West from legit income.
Probably because if your "enemy" (interesting that this wording started to pop up in relation to China a lot) is a totalitarian state which abuses their people... you don't want to follow their rules and societal structure.
At least that's my takeaway as an Eastern European with a bit of experience of such regimes.
Basically foreign owned companies don't have the same constitutional rights as ones owned by US citizens - these companies operations basically being foreign commerce is where the entity list powers are derived from.
Foreign ownership doesn't enjoy the same rights as LLCs registered in the US, ironically. For example, even though Huawei operated in the US through a US LLC, Trump still regulated its associations as defined by the foreign affairs power - as well as how corporations with US operations interacted with these foreign associated Huawei entities.
Otherwise corporate personhood would anull all trade deals in the US, and I think even the article you linked mentions their limited protections in the US.
The legal basis for the Order banning Tik Tok [1] came from Order 13873 [2]. It's...not the best.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/05/17/2019-10...
You can argue nation security when it comes to any app that isn't doing end-to-end, especially if it's written in a way that could allow the first, or a third party, to get access to arbitrary user data with the plausible deniability that security bugs can offer.
TikTok has had security bugs that made me outright mad when I looked at an expose on some of them. The kind of comedically terrible bugs they've had not too long ago makes it absolutely certain there are many, many more. Not even checking which user is logged in when you send a message for the user? Seriously, that's embarrassing in a rarely used feature on an app with a handful of users. Core functionality on a hundreds of millions users app? That's so terrible I almost can't believe it.
Not that other apps don't have bugs, but the track record, and global spread would make a solid argument. Confound by their app appearing to spread the data over an absolutely massive number of domains, and hosts, making auditing very hard, and also attribution of blame if data gets in the wrong hand.
I'm not saying eg Facebook is necessarily much different, only what argument can be made. Incidentally, what TikTok is doing is almost certainly illegal in EU, as I have no information that they have even attempted to follow GDPR rules.
This is fallacious.
China is an authoritarian regime, not a democracy under the rule of law. There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
International free market trade is founded on reciprocity - you open your markets and I open mine, under analogous regulatory conditions. Can US companies such as Facebook or Google operate with the same degree of freedom that TikTok does in the West?
Furthermore, and perhaps more relevantly to your question of whether TikTok has broken any US laws, it may be that it has. I have a very limited understanding of US politics and law but I do know that (a) there's a trainload of highly complex national security regulations, (b) Executive Orders provide the President a means to "steer" the application of the Law, and in this case it may be simply a way of enforcing codes that have been applied very loosely or not enforced until at all now.
I don't know if the EO will hold ground or not, but if it doesn't, I hope the US (and eventually the EU, where I am a citizen) find other ways to legally challenge the abhorrent asymmetry in playing conditions for software companies in China vs. the Democratic West.
Would you say it's kind of like the US President being able to just ban things he just says are threats to National Security? All of the authoritarian regimes have laws that specifically allow them to do what they do. They're usually authoritarian because they can and do call everything they don't like a threat to National Security.
Where is the actual proof here? Where can everyone take a look at it?
No such mechanisms exists in an authoritarian regime like the Chinese.
Read up about the countless cases in those countries. Enforcing national security laws are very, very often the reason for the most fucked up judgements. All those cases from North Korea? Yep, national security without verifiable proof of how it endangers national security.
From my original comment, which you replied to:
> There are laws in China, but ultimately a corporation is subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.
Either you didn't read that part, chose to omit it, or you are being deliberately rude, questioning "what I'm on about".
The difference between those authoritarian regimes and a democracy under the Rule of Law like the US is the degree in which the law can be arbitrarily superseded by an authority, such as a Party or Ruler, breaking the separation of powers.
Comparing the legal systems and guarantees of China, North Korea or Saudi Arabia, with those of the US is disingenuous at best.
You did not address the fundamental point which is that an Executive Order can be challenged in a Court of Law - it will be, in fact.
Do you think a decision by the CCP, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un or Mohammad Bin Salman would be afforded the same level of guarantees?
> Do you think a decision by the CCP, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un or Mohammad Bin Salman would be afforded the same level of guarantees?
Yes, absolutely. It happens all the time. Those rulers use _the laws afforded to them_ to rule. It's completely wrong to suggest that they just do whatever the hell they want. That's just not the case at all. Please look into the topic. Those countries have laws that make it very, very easy for the rulers to justify doing whatever they want.
MBS can put you in jail for live not because he's free to do whatever he wants but because the laws are designed in a way that gives him every reason to justify putting anyone in jail - as I mentioned, usually based on national security grounds.
Those very same national security reasons that authoritarian regimes constantly use are being used by Trump.
So yes, Trump being able to claim something a national security issue without having to provide proof, without giving the accused a chance to take a look at the evidence that supposedly exists against them, without them being able to defend themselves from the accusations, that's exactly what authoritarian regimes do.
I will however leave some data, from the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2020 [1]. These indices measure how strong the Rule of Law is in each country:
Germany - 0.84
United Kingdom - 0.79
Japan - 0.78
US - 0.73
France - 0.73
South Korea - 0.73
---
China - 0.48
Russia - 0.47
Turkey - 0.43
There's no data for North Korea or Saudi Arabia, because they're so closed that there's not even a point in trying to judge the quality of their legal system. Go figure.
[1] https://worldjusticeproject.org/our-work/publications/rule-l...
Who are you defining as “people”? I’ve only ever seen people criticize their bans on media.
Also just maybe, they don't want that facebooks clone (Reels) now takes their place?
Maybe they don't want to be sh*t all over just cuz they are based in China and do simply not care about the conflicts the countries have?
China has censorship laws that you might not like, but you can certainly still choose to comply if you want to be in that market. Indeed, many US companies have chosen to do so and participate in that market while others feel the cost is too high and do not.
What could TikTok do to comply here and be allowed in the US? It wasn't banned for non-compliance in some tit-for-tat measure, it was banned for simply being from China.
If the "game" is censorship and social control of citizens, why on earth would you cheer on either side in a tit-for-tat?
People are pretending this is about IP or free trade, but it's not like China is going to let people install Signal so US teenagers can install TikTok.
Best case scenario is what, a Chinese operated and moderated version of Facebook while the US administration gets to moderate TikTok in the US? Or the Great US Firewall? Or China just endorses Trump and he drops the whole thing.
There are tons of legitimate criticisms of China but if this isn't motivated by any of them the outcome is unlikely to be help.
If they can ban tik tok, they can ban signal or briar because those also might send your encrypted data overseas or because their use among "violent" protestors is a risk. How about VPN apps that siphon your personal data to china and russia! Haha
Here's the thing, US bigtech complies (in secret) with US intel community just like tik tok complies with CCP's MSS. Matter of fact, I happen to know with certainty and with first hand accounts that the US intel community offensively uses american made apps and services to spy against naturalized law abiding americans on american soil just as they would with a foreigner working for the CCP in China.
You might say, China bans US media companies so US should as well. And I will say to you that's absolute nonsense. China is a totalitarian orwelian nightmare state and the US is supposed to be a beacon of liberty and freedom in the world. The US can ban tiktok's usage amongst US government and military and anyone that does business with them. But by what right do they get to restrict communication, an unregulated non-financial interaction between americans and anyone else?
If americans want to be spied on by China in exchange for being able to use tiktok it's their right and this activity is beyond the reaches of any elected government. Even if there is a law allowing congress or the president to ban tiktok, this law is overriden by the bill of rights that restricts the government from making laws that constrain speech and communication between citizens and anyone,and that guarantees tiktok due process and a trial before being found of any wrongdoing. Congress can however restrict commerce, as in financial transaction and for profit activity with tiktok and advertisers, what congress or trump have no authority to do is to tell americans and tiktok they cannot communicate with each other. Freedom of speech is meaningless if no one is allowed to listen to you.
This needs to be done right. Do not throw away your rights by creating a precedent set by the supreme court that lets government restrict your speech. These sneaky bastards will always worm their way into slowly taking away rights from the people in order to preserve their social order.
I don't like tiktok and if you care to go back far enough into my posting history you will see how much I hate the CCP.
What is given can be taken away (if your right to communicate with a foreign entity is given by the government). And if they can ban one app,banning others is a matter of legal mental gymnastics.
1. Libel
2. Slander
3. Treason
4. Certain threats / incitement to violence (like hiring a hit man)
5. Obscenity
You lost me here. That spying can have disastrous results for security and economic well-being of USA (daughter of top Intel engineer or President's top adviser for example is wiretapped by CCP) so the state has extremely legitimate reasons to watch out for the best of all. Our Congress and our courts decide if the President overstepped the line, not China.
The clock is tiking....tik-tok will get due process, meaning lawyers will be able to represent them and that's it. Maybe the whole case will be sealed and the judge can hear classified info privately.
Your courts and congress will decide if he stepped over the line. But if they fail to do so, you lose a ton of rights. He then gets to ban "antifa" apps and democrats get to ban "alt right" russian apps. A supreme court precedent can't be challenged in court when they apply the same logic for something else. This isn't about tik tok, this is about every other app the US government can't controp or arm twist because they are not based on the US.
What does China want to know from millions of Americans that work in engineering, military, universities, politics? See the difference. Like China cares that its company was fined by FTC for $25 million for not respecting privacy
Americans can mount free 4k cameras with hd audio in everyroom in their house that streams directly to china snd they cannot be stopped from doing so based on the fact that the government does not approve of the information being transmitted.
I think you're argument breaks down here. I don't think that handimf over information to a foreign government is a right. I was unable to Google for a definitive answer, but maybe a more knowledgeable person could chime in. The US already has export restrictions on knowledge ( for example encryption ) to foreign governments.
And normally people on this site deride such things as ridiculous (and actively worked around bans on exporting encryption), but when they find out Big Bad China might see their dance videos and lip synching suddenly they're happy to crush the free exchange of information.
It's not just that China has peoples' dance videos.
The app has complete adoption by the teenage generation. When many high-profile hacks begin with simple social engineering, all it takes is blackmail attempts on the sons and daughters of diplomats and CEOs threatening to reveal/promote to friends either private or falsified(deep fake?) data/videos to get at least some percentage of compliance.
Of course we should protect encryption and be smart and diligent when protecting our liberties, but I'm scared of TikTok, and I don't think that fear is unjustified.
Don't sacrifice my liberty to alleviate your fears.
If we follow your logic let's equally apply the law and ban telegram,facebook/whatsapp/instagram,google and snapchat as well. And please,let the US cease all commerce with China if they are a hostile enemy government, let's stop financing them. Unless of course like always this is about american greed and not security. Injustice is not tolerable even if security is at stake. If you claim this is just and lawful, apply it equally to all other foreign and domestic apps that can be abused similar to tiktok both by domestic and foreign forces. I have no reason to fear China more than a domestic political party that is eager to start race wars and concentration camps. The law must be fair and it must be applied equally. That is a fundamental concept where it's violation means invalidation and collapse of all legal and legitimate goverment and legal activity.
Don't be melodramatic. You sacrifice your liberty for the sake of security all the time, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing.
> You need to educate your fellow citizens or pressure appstore owners (google and apple) to delist tiktok.
This is an unconvincing solution because of the subversive nature of the power of TikTok. We already see that people brush this off as "not my problem. I don't care if China has my data".
You don't have to trust domestic parties to agree that there is a legitimate security threat from Chinese controlled TikTok which must be addressed.
> If you claim this is just and lawful, apply it equally to all other foreign and domestic apps that can be abused similar to tiktok both by domestic and foreign forces.
This is ostensibly the point of the "clean network". Whether or not that particular solution is adequate or even appropriate remains to be seen, but it certainly seems aimed at exactly that problem.
This isn't what they even care about. It's all the telemetry and spying the app does, like copying your clipboard consistently (seriously how this is allowed anymore by iOS or Android is beyond me). What if you selected some proprietary information and later your kid opens up TikTok cause they love using your phone, and voila some proprietary information is copied on there, going to who knows where. Something like TikTok makes corporate espionage quite possible given its popularity. I can't imagine what other things the app is doing.
Those things are definitely used for speech, and banning them all would likely be an issue. But banning a brand of pens because you don't trust the chemicals in them as safe or routers because you're concerned about potential spy ware, seems reasonable.
In that sense, TikTok is just one of many alternatives and if the motivation isn't to regulate speech, it feels like it could fit with other bans that seem reasonable to me.
I'd assume the claim here would be that it presents national security risk, though of course I think that's probably not why the ban is really happening, and it makes sense for it to be challenged.
Banning the pen is legitimate as knowingly harming people is a crime.
Banning the router isn't the same. At most they are guilty of false advertising, and even that can probably be made legal in the license provided. Besides, I may have reasons to want a router with spyware on it.
The same would apply to TikTok, but I think they're trying to say it's also "aiding our enemies" making it akin to a light form of treason.
Yeah, but they lack the authority. National security does not override anyone's rights. They don't get to do this regardless if their intent. This sets a precedent where if they can claim any entity is a national security risk they can restrict communication with that entitiy. Totalitarian regimes do this exact thing when they ban certain social media or VPNs!
It's diffrent from banning a brand of pens because you're banning commercial activity and the danger is a chemical not speech. Here you're sayiny speech itself is too dangerous to be allowed. A clear line preventing the government from doing this for a reason.
This statement confused me, probably because I'm not from the US and am missing some cultural dogma/context. But the way I think about it, "rights" are not encoded in the laws of physics. They are social constructs. Therefore different societies can come up with a different and even conflicting set of "rights".
depending on what country you are from, you could be from a country that has a set of civil laws, as opposed to a country with a set of common laws.
common law countries tend to have enumerated rights that the government cannot take away, while civil law countries tend to have rights that because of the way that particular society is built, you have these rights.
The u.s. is the common-law state because of our declaration of Independence and Constitution that speak about how all men are created equal (before God) and thus since the government rules by the consent of the governed, the laws eumerated in things like the Bill of Rights are things that are just off limits to the US government, with limited scope contextual restrictions to non-negotiable absolute rights depending on their wordings.
But regardless of origin, a constitution defines what the country is made up of. Constitutional rights are a contract where the government is allowed to govern and secure the people if and only if they secure those rights and follow the articles of the constitution.
There's a long history of reasoning (i.e. logic) from first principles how to best establish communities, for example Rousseau's 1762 work, The Social Contract.
Some key arguments that Rousseau expounds:
* force does not create right; we are only obligated to obey legitimate powers
* everyone is free (because we each give up the same rights and have the same duties imposed, e.g. around property rights)
* absurd for someone to surrender freedom for slavery
There are underlying commonalities between Rousseau's work and intellectual artifacts from other cultures, such as "reciprocity" expressed by Confucius in Analects: "do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you". This concept of reciprocity is also echoed in the Christian doctrine of the golden rule.
> Therefore different societies can come up with a different and even conflicting set of "rights".
Do you not think that there are universal human rights?
For example, those enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
I know attempts have been made to come up with "universal rights". But to my point, not everyone agrees with them. For example, the convention on children's rights has not been ratified by the US.
The poster I first responded to, has since clarified that he meant something like US law working as a blacklist of what is forbidden (as opposed to a whitelist of what is allowed). So the discussion about universal rights was a bit of a red herring, sorry.
"Rights" do not really make sense if you're the only human around.
The idea that our rights come from god, not the government, is enshrined in the founding documents of the US, and the idea has been discussed in philosophy for centuries before that. It's part of why US conservatives get so bent out of shape when progressives say things like "everyone has a right to healthcare".
I agree it doesn't make much sense. It's also worth noting that 75% of the men who signed that document owned slaves.
Signal isn't sponsored by foreign governments, so it is immune to this sort of attack. It looks like Briar has German funding. The encrypted and decentralized nature of both of those apps makes them much lower concerns for espionage and (election) interference, and of course neither provides content directly from foreign governments, so they cannot be called into question for campaign interference.
Signal and Briar were examples. Ok, telegram, it's russian so should it be banned? Espionage has to di with state and national secrets. A foreign government spying on americans with their knowledge and consent is not espionage. How is facebook literally recording without consent not a bigger issue? Please ban facebook before tiktok. Google and Amazon have home assistants spying on americans which is magnitudes of order worse thab tiktok!
This is the thing you have to undetstand, bytedance (tiktok's creator) being cozy with ccp is not a whole lot different than facebook and zuckergerg being in bed with the trump admin or Google being in bed with obama admin ,except China is an ocean many nukes away from doing actual harm to americans and your own government is literally facilitating the death of your own citizens as we speak! Ban facebook,google and amazon because they are helping tear apart america while you're at it!
This is pure politics, sacrificing your right in fear of a boogeyman in China because the boogeyman here is on your side. You don't get to do that, if you disagree with the bill of rights have a constitutional convention and change it.
I get to to communicate with tiktok or even the chinese government if I want. And if I share my private life with them that's my right too. The government has no authority to prevent free excercise of my rights even if they don't like it.
Right now and in 2016 facebook was used to manipulate elections in the US. Shut it down because thay clearly is a national security risk if you truly believe the government policing what private information you share or consume is a good idea.
Do you also think you have a right to not wear a mask during a pandemic or not wear a seatbelt while driving?
This is simple exchange of unprivileged information between an individual and an organization (foreign or domestic).
Of course, just as with tobacco there are huge American companies which are going to oppose this sort of transparency. And of course rolling out teaching standards requires that some standardization for app privacy exist in the first place, so I don't expect this to happen fast (if it could ever happen at all).
The executive order doesn't outright ban the use of TikTok (the app), it just places a ban on "any transactions subject to the jurisdiction of the United States with ByteDance", which in essence makes it impossible for people to find the app on an App store. It's almost identical to the Huawei/ZTE executive orders. It's a bit like an economic sanction on a country, which may also include companies that engage in media/speech.
They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter, so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
> US advertisers can be banned from doing business with tiktok but it is a free app.
In addition, App Store providers can be banned from allowing ByteDance to submit it.
> They can ban book sales or a book reading service but storage, avaipability and free transfer of information cannot be banned.
The free transfer of software information is already "banned" through copyright law. Software piracy is technically simply the capital-free transfer of bits of data, and that can and is controlled by the US government.
> They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter, so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
The argument is not whether they can ban someone from mailing you a copy of the communist manifest, it's whether they can ban an American retailer from receiving copies of it from a sanctioned supplier. That's what the executive order appears to be targeting.
Sure they can. Look at HIPAA, COPPA, government classification, etc. I could call a family member up at an intelligence agency and ask what kinds of stuff they're investigating, but they'd surely be committing a crime by sharing that information with me, regardless of whether or not money changed hands.
The other counterargument to this is that ByteDance only has commercial intentions with the data it gathers on users. It's not a non-profit trying to feed or clothe the needy, it exists purely as a commercial enterprise, meaning that any and all information they gather will either directly or indirectly used for commerce.
I am not against banning bytedance's commercial activity. But, the reasoning needs to make it clear that the app is not banned, sharing the app is not illegal and what is restricted is bytedance's ability to engage in commerce. You can ban their commercial exploitation of information but you cannot ban the app itself or americans's ability to transmit information to them. You can revoke theie business license and ban commercial activity with them.
This technically isn't always true either. I write software for a company and even though it comes from my brain, I still don't own it and I can't share it. I'm sure in the case of TikTok, users probably don't own their data either, the company does.
> You can ban their commercial exploitation of information but you cannot ban the app itself or americans's ability to transmit information to them.
What would be the point of ByteDance even keeping the app up if they can't monetize it? The act of users transmitting information inherently adds data to TikTok's database, which has financial value. It doesn't make sense for a company to just keep an app like that up and running while promising not to make money off of it. The compute costs alone must be enormous for an app like TikTok since they have to optimize and cache all of that video. Why would a business agree to keep operating while promising not to profit? That doesn't make sense to me.
But even if that were the case, you can ban sharing knowledge under obscenity clauses, national security clauses, or because it incite violence.
TikTok is being banned as a threat to national security, because having your preeminent communications tool run by a foreign government is inane, unless you are or want to become a colony of that government.
For example historically the US has banned books for being sexually obscene, demeaning to a particular group, or liable to foster communist sympathies.
Nobody cares about the source code. Everyone cares about sending data back to the CCP. If Tik Tok/ByteDance wants to stop being a tool of the CCP and engaging in the persecution of Uigher Muslims, then they can go back to offering us an app with funny dances.
> They can regulate commerce but for software and crypto they can't regulate the transfer of information,they can only regulate commercial activity with that information
Crypto exports are regulated.
> They can't ban someone from mailing you the communist manifesto for free as a book or handwritten letter
Actually at one point sending pornography through the USPS WAS banned. Typically political speech gets stronger protections though.
> so they can't ban a communist manifesto app download or punish anyone for facilitating that transfer.
The issue isn't spreading the communist manifesto. It's human rights abuses of a religious minority including forced sterilization - https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/china-conducting-mass-steril...
It looks like the USA don't like a social network they can't control the algorithm.
Trump is doing so much to hurt the US image among Chinese citizens right now. His administration emphasizes the importance of the distinction between the government and the people, but his actions are only driving the two closer together. Poor strategy in my opinion.
Also, I’m really worried about the supposed Tencent ban. There’s no way I can get rid of WeChat...
Just strong network effects, or what
The problem I have with this though, is that it's not a way to get protect American interests, it's probably the first in a series of last ditch efforts to portray a certain political stance before the campaign. And the effect of banning wechat, tik tok, and tencent will stoke an already considerable flame of anti chinese perspective, which the chinese americans on our soil, have to suffer for. I say ban the crap out of all Chinese apps if that's just what it is, but let's all make sure not to throw out our own under the bus with it.
Boeing is a company backed by an entity which has plans for (and has achieved) global dominance and is increasingly not aligned with European interests.
I know there's a huge difference between the US Government and the Chinese Government, but that difference is decreasing. And Facebook, well I simply do not trust them.
Honestly, I fear what this is leading to.
It seems like it would be a good thing if you didn’t have these billion-user social networks, operated by foreign entities that are likely to use them to spread propaganda, censorship, election interference, etc.
Countries competing for the attention of monopolistic companies will just provoke a tranfer of wealth from the citizens of all countries to those companies (see: tax havens).
Airbus and Boeing pretty much go toe-to-toe, no?
Also Boeing still has the very possible abandoning of the 787-Max and the WTO dispute resolution (that still hasn’t been implemented) looming over them.
Except for the part where the NSA is doing political and industrial espionage on Airbus on behalf of Boeing and the US gov so they can throw a wrench in Airbus's negotiations with other governments.
Boeing as a company producing a massive amount of planes for the EU is absolutely aligned with European interests. Their current scandal is also a scandal in the US and they've also been (and continue to be) punished and investigated for it.
You can't just say "but Facebook!" in response to TikTok, a company siphoning data into a blackhole in China at the behest of the CCP and engaging in censoring as befits the CCP. The current status quo hurts everyone whether in the US or the EU.
The irony is that each of the entities has plans for global dominance, which is incompatible with the plans and interests the other one has.
The sad part is that it turns out the US is willing to forgo its values if this gives them a leg up on China. Makes any future rhetoric on values and morals seem a bit empty. *
* It has been pointed out that perhaps "empty rhetoric" wasn't the best choice of words. Maybe "rhetoric that no longer has any basis in reality whatsoever" sums it up better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_and_Religious_Hatred_Ac...
Blasphemy laws have just been repackaged essentially under "anti hate speech" laws. They're palatable to the media and at the same time selectively-applicable which is ideal for population control.
[0]: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/catos-let...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/22/swedish-artist...
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/youtuber-count-dankula-avoids-jail-...
[3]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-depo...
Oh please… 28 US states have actual legislation to prohibit state offices from doing business with companies or individuals that even threaten to boycott Israel.
Not far from how NBA employees get censored by China.
And there is more to come…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Anti-Boycott_Act
In this particular case China's plan to achieve global dominance is in stark opposition to the US's plan to maintain global dominance.
I really don't know what you're trying to say. If the USA achieved global dominance, there would be no China. There would only be the USA. Globally. Obviously, that's not the case.
That's really not what those words mean. "Dominance" is the fact or state of being dominant, not the state of being the only one in existence. So what I said is that the US dominates the world (geo-political, economic, military, etc.).
Let's put it in more simple terms. If Mike Tyson dominated a boxing match it really doesn't mean he was prancing around alone in the ring. Just that if anyone contested that dominance he'd punch them harder. And if that didn't work he'd bite of their ear. Which is a far more appropriate analogy than it would first seem.
And that day they would be no US West and East coast... populated. You know what I mean.
Also, China owns the US economy by buying its debt. Try to crash down China, and look how the Dow Jones gets more sunk than the Marianas.
Now of course in the case of nation states, agreements are changeable by military and economic force, but in effect you would have to do more than simply hold debt to affect another counties economy.
I do think going to war with China is useless. The loss of life would be immense and I see no reason for people to die for ideological purposes. However, a Cold War is coming. No longer, can we pretend that China and the US will become genuine parters, with shard long term goals and policies. If we must be competitors, then it’s best to do it honestly and openly.
They have global dominance, and they got it long ago. The issue at play is not that they want it, it's that they want to keep it.
Yet in other developed countries (like many in Europe) where Christianity is no longer the dominant cultural institution, there is more social cohesiveness.
Religion in the US has been weaponised for political ends and became a means of tribal division in society.
But we use a ton of Chinese tech software and hardware outside of Tiktok, are they gonna ban them all?
And tablets. And routers. And smart TVs. Which basically encompasses pretty much all of the network-connected appliances in the average home.
(And even if a "a lost" of the rest of IoT devices don't, would you want to bet your data security on it?)
The point out preferring one's data in the hands of a regime that doesn't have jurisdiction to send jack booted thugs to kick in one's door still stands.
I think you vastly overestimate 1) how much a functional human in modern society actually needs any of this garbage and 2) how much of that data and metadata is meaningful in regards to someone's privacy.
My point was, if I have to be concerned about privacy (in fact I actually am, see above) why should I fear about a foreign government while my own one is without any doubt more interested in knowing what I think? Of course should one day I become an important public figure, or a key person in some critical environment, all the data about me would suddenly become gold; that's a very valid point by another commenter. Of course my post was from the point of view of someone who doesn't plan, nor could even choose, to become one anytime soon.
(1) hence my comments where very often I argue about closed device drivers and blobs, which are the best possible place for planting spyware.
you just posted this to a social media site
If they have enough leverage over you (or access through you to your secure systems), they will use it.
But I think it's possible you aren't thinking of all the contingencies that are created by a foreign government having info about people in this country.
For a moment think: your data goes to China. China learns over the years about you, including something that can be used against you. At some point in future you are in a position at a company or have a government position where China has an interest in you, at that time it can use the data collected over the years to compromise you.
If you think that will never be the case, let’s go further, what about your spouse or even further your kids when they grow up.
Governments play the long game.
No, because that isn't the solution to the problem being addressed. The administration doesn't want to protect privacy. It wants to ban TikTok.
He's saying "TikTok should not gather invasive data ... neither should US-based company".
If you oppose that, then you're basically saying "the US wants to have cake and eat it too". I guess every country for itself "works"... for a certain definition of "works".
Let's avoid regression to Chinese standard please.
It's not just a fair playing field war between US and China, but between China and rest of the world. Even India, whose companies are not allowed to operate in China under fair play rules banned TikTok only after the Chinese incursion across the LOC.
I really don't know what to make of this.
Besides, this move isn't coming from the actual concern for citizens' and residents' privacy. It comes from the idea that economy and pandemic and terrible polling numbers for Trump mean he needs a distraction, as per his usual pattern. It was TikTok but it could have been catalytic converters or grandmothers or anything, just to get people talking about something else.
The US' international economic dominance is predicated on a (1) pronounced lead in certain industries and (2) a simply massive economy, which combine to (3) let the US set the rules of international "fair play." The US is where you find the thing you want to buy, and the people you want to sell to. You want access? Play by our rules - everywhere.
Tik Tok does not just threaten US data. It threatens our lead in a critical industry (1), and comes from a country that minimizes the impact of US economic might (2), meaning that China can set their own rules of "fair play" (3). Banning Tik Tok isn't to protect US data; that's totally missing the point. It's to protect the American ability to set international norms.
From that lens, this is certainly hamfisted, and I certainly don't believe views it like this, but you can damn well bet the policy nerd drafting this EO is thinking this way.
I don't agree with this just on fiat from Trump, but the USA is in its rights to give Chinese the same sort of treatment that they give the USA. If you don't play by China's rules you can't be in their market, and those rules are set up to benefit China only.
In this case TikTok is getting the same treatment US tech giants have. If that is not "fair play" I don't know what is.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nba-china-feud-timeline-dary...
In one way, it's existential: the march of authoritarianism is undoubtedly accelerated by nation-states manipulating social media.
But in most others, I wouldn't get too worked up: it's more about mundane garbage ("preserving the spirit of financial disclosure processes in the context of international capital market access") - nerd sh*t.
It’s why Microsoft and Apple are available in China.
Here is a Google example from when I lived in China: Google was at the time competing with Baidu over the search image market in China. My home internet was fast and with great quality. Only Google image search results had very often problems loading image previews. Its not that it "didn't work". It just failed "a little", maybe half the images in the results pag didn't load. So Google image search wasn't really blocked. It could have been total coincidence that it was like that for years and only for Google image search. The site that was coincidentally competing over the lead in the Chinese search market against a Chinese company. After some weeks, I started using Baidu image search, even though their result quality was worse. But at least it worked. I am sure many people in China did. That's "competition" in China.
They just relinquish certain strong hold to a sovereign nation, like they have to host their data center inside China (both politically important, and economically beneficial). And they also risk their data being stolen (or so they claim).
Imagine, if a Chinese company wants to operate in US but refuse to comply local regulations, what will happen to that company?
Fb, Google and others are banned from China because they refuse to cooperate. What about Tiktok?
I don't like this company, which has already started censoring foreign nationals based on what CCP allows.
At the same time, how can a single person decide the fate of a company in a different country? What will be next?
Furthermore, what if EU decides Instagram is somehow a threat and must be shut down?
How is TikTok's fate being decided by a US ban? The CCP does this all the time, it isn't uncommon to ban foreign software.
The single person was explicitly elected to speak and act on America’s behalf. The same single person is the commander in chief for America’s military, giving them quite a bit of power when interacting with foreign countries.
And they’re impacting a foreign company’s operations in the US, something which seems to fall within the powers granted to them.
In general, I don’t like what he’s doing, but the why and how in this case appear to be by the book.
I hope you forgot a "not" somewhere in this sentence...?
CCP, influencing NPR