The US government, specifically people who have high-level access to classified intelligence, has insinuated a lot about TikTok but has not revealed any specifics about what the concerns are. Would love to see a reveal of substance, or something, literally anything.
ALL of these sorts of social media programs are terrifyingly-capable spying platforms. It'd be weird if we didn't regard one controlled by a foreign adversary as a threat. I think the domestic ones are, too—but they feed info to US law enforcement and intelligence and are making lots of money, so we can't crack down on those, I guess.
McCarthyism was primarily a political thing by politicians.
The FBI chief being discussed here, Wray, is a political appointment but not an elected politician so hopefully the appointment shields them from politics. Nevermind that the DoJ tries pretty hard to be independent of the President. But beyond that, this particular chief was appointed during the previous administration of a different party. And has served in both party's administrations.
I have no position on TikTok, but Wray saying this is not really comparable to McCarthy.
The FBI chief is and has always been highly political. J Edgar Hoover was a extreme anti-communist and was investigating suspected communists, infiltrating CPUSA and creating blacklists at the exact same time that McCarthy was conducting his hearings.
In fact the McCarthyism acticle on Wikipedia has a whole section about the FBI. The FBI was deeply involved in McCarthyism.
Something being political does not require it to be partisan. Joseph McCarthy worked hand in hand with then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, and Wray was appointed by a president who also tried to ban TikTok.
It definitely sounds like that. But to me this feels more like 'testing the waters' to see if the argument sticks with the American people. I don't think it will, because they provided even a hint of a smoking gun.
Eventually, I can see these hearings continue, but the line of argument will change to protecting American jobs, especially if Meta's ad revenues fall.
A competitor under full control of Chinese government that owes its birth to a full copy of Cisco firmware deposited by Cisco with said government as a condition for entering Chinese market.
Technology transfer isn't illegal, Cisco was happy with the commercial arrangement. More importantly Motorola before them which is who really kickstarted the Chinese electronics manufacturing sector.
I wish it was more common actually. Imagine if we shared technology more freely in exchange for reciprocal benefits. For instance Australia (my home country) has a wealth of natural resources yet very little high-tech. We should leverage China's dependency on our raw resources to obtain technology transfer to enrich our country in a mutually beneficial way.
* The extent to which TikTok tailors content, normalization of over-simplified content, ease of creating content and other factors make it great for radicalization. As well as extremist groups, this applies to more regular protest movements and generally an active citizenry, which is not in the interest of the feds.
* It has encouraged regular crime and idiocy. For example it spread knowledge of the Kia/Hyundai ignition bypass, and is full of pseudomedical nonsence.
I believe this is the answer. I'm a career military officer, but without any inside knowledge, and the most troubling "red team" ideas that I've read involve an adversary targeting our troops and families in their ordinary lives at home, where we're soft targets. Troops accept the fact that they might be told to put themselves at-risk overseas, but they expect that their spouses and children will be safe in their own neighborhoods, that their utilities will keep working[1], that their identities and bank accounts won't be stolen, etc.
We go after terrorists and insurgents the same way by learning their social networks and patterns of life. I'm sure that we wish we had stuff on our adversaries like the data from the OPM breach[2], the Strava fitness data, or the kind of data that TikTok can collect on their phones.
Militaries have extremely rigid rules about personal electronics for this reason. But this isn't about the military, this is about a national ban for everybody.
Their big concern is NOT data stealing. That is a small thing.
They are very worried about the US citizen population saying they are DONE with Lobbyists and congress selling out. US Citizens are done with the GDP being stolen via rigged industries (pharma, 2008 crisis, Medical, taxes, etc.) US Citizens starting to all agree together on TikTok, enables citizens to galvanize into a united front.
The US Gov needs to control US citizens, by banning them. This is why US intel services have removed 100% of US citizens in militia community groups people from Facebook. 100% have their facebook accounts have been shut down. They can't shoot people over facebook. The gov's risk is that people see many other citizens galvanize that they find congress w/lobbyists effectively stealing GDP.
One concrete badness IMO is the black box algorithm of it. It's controlled semi-directly by the CCP, and they openly use a different algorithm and different filters in china vs the US, and not just for cultural reasons. Letting the CCP put it's fingers on the scale of what gets fed to millions of impressionable teens is just as stupid and dangerous as letting facebook continue to do so, with the only difference being Zuckerburg isn't a nation-state actor who is openly our rival. There is a lot of possible power for China to attempt to utilize in TikTok, do you really think they won't?
> Zuckerburg isn't a nation-state actor who is openly our rival.
Zuckerberg has openly violated the privacy of millions of Americans, and been fined the largest amount in FTC history for doing so.
He might not be in the Axis of Evil, but the fact that he continues to operate his division-by-doomscroll machine on American soil makes this TikTok talk sound pretty ridiculous.
The one mentioned is that the Chinese could potentially use TikTok to control the narrative about a topic. Which is true, but it's the kind of thing everybody else does all of the time.
I think the dopamine receptor frying nature of apps like TikTok is more of a danger than the Chinese government getting hold of kids/teens data.
We have almost entire generations hooked on a short-form media content app which is rapidly decaying their attention spans and sitting in their hands like a hardcore drug. The longer term implications of children / teenagers that can't read a short book is far more detrimental than China knowing which pop songs they like.
Add to that, the moronic trends spread and perhaps encouraged on these platforms (tide pod eating, play-acting as if they're victims of the holocaust, and the sketchy sexual content on the platform).
TikTok, and to be honest, all social media, are toxic products. Maybe if the US bans TikTok, they should proceed ahead and ban the rest, "for the children's safety".
They could continuously show more traumatic events vs non-traumatic ones, or pointless stuff vs educational, etc. Not that were not already doing that to ourselves regardless.
Part of the fear may be that any compelling case made against tiktok could strongly serve the purpose of getting US social apps banned from the rest of the world for the same reasons.
The actual national security concern is probably for state-sponsored psyops.
We know Russia was able to pump a bunch of psyops campaigns into Western social media, most NATO governments now have dedicated branches that root out this kind of information.
But Russia's programs were really obtuse and relatively easy to trace. On the other hand, TikTok is all about flooding people with niche content areas. And content is consumed so much faster that it propagates quicker. And keep in mind TikTok is still state-sponsored by China despite the algorithm being so addictive that it is banned domestically.
My tinfoil hat is that US officials have reports that the Chinese state is having influence on the American news cycles, but doesn't want to admit that it's made its way already into news media and politics issues.
Your post can also be used as an argument for how disinformation claims are being weaponized. Hamilton 68 was a key figure in the Russian disinformation stuff. They claimed to have pinpointed hundreds of Russian bots and used this to create an interactive dashboard, headed by a former FBI counterintelligence official, enabling real time tracking of the latest "Russian disinformation." It was repeatedly referenced by both the media and high level politicians alike. This included Adam Schiff, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, PBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and many more. Mother Jones ran at least 14 articles on their "research" alone.
The problem is that this was, itself, all complete disinformation. Their "Russian bots" were largely made of normal, and very real, conservative Americans. [1] Many were of substantial note, including authors, lawyers (one had published a book on the constitution), news editors/hosts, and more. So you ended up in this zone where anything conservative individuals were talking about was immediately claimed to be Russian disinformation, which was equated with fake news. But you'll never see anything about this in those same news sites that ran stories based on the disinformation. Nor is their any grand demand that we shut down Hamilton 68. In fact you can still find their dashboard on the "Securing Democracy" page. [2]
So normal genuine conversation was being censored under the guise of 'securing democracy against state sponsored disinformation' while major examples of genuine disinformation, which did (and continue) completely distort democracy, remain completely ignored. Very little of it has anything to do with integrity, security, or safety. It's all petty politics. And supporting the government banning apps, with no proven misdeeds, is one heck of a nasty precedent.
I feel like this is missing the forest for the trees. The whole point of misinformation campaigns is to draw in real people. You wouldn't engage in astroturfing if you didn't think actual humans would show up.
I haven't heard about Hamilton 68 but I can't seem to find any verification about it. It also seems narrowly focused on bots and not the hundreds of professional (human!) trolls and hackers that countries like Russia (and others) employ.
I will grant you that the "fake news" problem was a completely separate issue and largely domestic: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50... We should be clear when we talk about "misinformation" we are talking about things that are materially true! Just weaponized. Russia hacked both the DNC and the GOP, but only leaked the DNC emails. Nothing was made up! We were just given a selective and unfair version of the truth.
Honestly, I consider myself a somewhat conservative leaning myself. But foreign countries are engaging in these psyops programs believing them to be effective (as is our own government)! So I think it would be incredibly naive to let foreign agents with ulterior motives run free through our systems under the guise of political speech.
I want my political trolling to be domestically produced!
I'm not really following your logic there. The endgame of domestic produced disinformation is where we're, more or less, already at. In the best case scenario people believe nothing. In the worst case scenario people feel justified in arbitrarily believing whatever they want to believe. You lose any sort of notion of institutional authority, integrity, or trust. There was a recent article shared that today "only" 25% of Americans believe the media is not actively misleading them (50% do, 25% undecided). [1] I put only in quotes, because that number seems quite high to me!
Imagine if something like The Pentagon Papers was released today. There's a good chance the mainstream media simply would not cover it. And the government itself would also likely claim it was just some sort of a Russian or Chinese disinformation campaign. At best, it'd end up being some sort of a partisan issue. Those that supported the war in Vietnam, or supported the current political party in power, would claim it was all disinformation. Those against it would claim it was the worst thing since Pearl Harbor.
The solution to disinformation is not disinformation, censorship, or anything else. It's simply more information. Because the truth always finds a way. Even in the days of the Soviet Union where the political powers had not only complete control of the media, but even strictly controlled travel in/out of the country, people knew the politicians were full of it. And that's kind of a nice moral from 'the truth always wins' type story, but really shitty from the reality of living in a society where the most correct response to basically anything is to assume, as a default, that it's, at best, a half truth. And that is the endgame of domestic disinformation.
Considering nation-states send nuclear submarines to the bottom of the ocean to tap network cables, assuming they wont use a massive trove of tracking data (largest in human history) that just falls into their lap, is extraordinarily naive.
Read any book on the history of espionage to see the efforts made to collect intelligence. Suggesting TikTok data wont be used in an intelligence context is simply ridiculous.
Same here. I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth. After all, I am of the beliefs that no tactics are "off the board." The CIA used vaccine programs as a means to track islamic terrorists. So, I wouldnt be as socked pikachu faced at China using TikTok data. But it would be nice to get real hard data. I remember people making all sorts of claims about China bugging hardware and that is why we have to ban Huaweii, but all the third party analysis I've seen of their hardware pretty much concluded, "the hardware is not bugged. The most criminal thing about this is they advertise it as a latest gen i5 but its really a i5 from 2 gens ago and probably sloppy second bunk chips. You know, chips that can't get sold to like Lenovo because they failed QC."
The rest of the world, which for simplicity's sake we'll call the EU and china, have fairly powerful protections in place. EU law applies to companies operating in the EU, and China effectively bans all foreign apps. If Chinese businesses were not de facto arms of the Chinese state, and we had the diplomatic resources to investigate and prosecute chinese companies serving american citizens under american laws, then it might make sense to leaev well enough alone.
China does not ban foreign apps, that is pure misinformation.
I think lack of success of foreign apps in China comes down to a much simpler dynamic. Foreign apps are simply not launched concurrently in China and optimised for the Chinese market from the outset. The exception to this are mobile games titles which are generally overly optimised for the Chinese market if anything and generally fail to succeed outside of it.
This results in Chinese clones of said new foriegn app/service appearing very quickly and gaining dominance before said app can "expand" to China. By the time that happens, if it does, they have to compete with an established service that is language and culture native.
Essentially if you aren't launching in China day one and have a great understanding of the -very- competitive Chinese Internet platform economy you are screwed before you even start.
No application is banned from operating in China if they are willing to follow the rules. Generally speaking companies like Google just don't like the rules so they don't operate there.
The US has many laws that cause apps to be pulled from the App Store or forcibly be shutdown by hosting companies (even non-US entities!).
Why is it different when the laws are from a different country?
It's kind of funny to me that almost everyone I talk kind of knows TikTok is bad, but in a way we really don't know what to do with.
It kind of makes me appreciate that there were lots of times we banned things after they crossed an arbitrary line of danger. Alcohol was fine until hard liquor was invented. Child work was expected, until factories came along.
In a way, I almost think of TikTok as a reverse Opium War. Opium was already a not uncommon vice in China until the British introduced much more potent strains. TikTok not being fundamentally different than the other tech that preceded it, just a more potent version.
I know distilling goes back to antiquity but I was only thinking of the emergence of consumer drinks in the 1600-1700s. Specifically era of the London Gin laws.
I think in particular it's fascinating because this was before people really measured or understood alcohol content and they really had trouble figuring out why some drinks needed no real restrictions and yet others could destroy lives.
Nearly all the time, those specific alcohol restrictions were based in classism or racism, ie, "the poors drink that so it must be the cause of all of society's ills, but expensive wine is obviously good for me!"
Well, except hard alcohol is an order of magnitude more dangerous than wine or beer. And before public drunkenness became a problem, gin was actually the preferred drink amongst the elite for a time.
Islam bans "Khamr"[1] in the Quran, and the restriction has been widely, if not universally, understood to ban all (non-medicinal) alcoholic drinks since very early on in Islamic history. Even in the Old Testament, Noah gets drunk and naked. So I think people have understood that alcohol can cause significant social and personal problems for a long time.
> Alcohol was fine until hard liquor was invented.
Alcohol is no longer fine?
> Child work was expected, until factories came along.
Doesn't that more have to do with the rising household income (thanks to productivity gains, I'd imagine) and school availability, so people could afford to let their children go to school instead of needing every hand to keep the family afloat?
I've never actually used TikTok, what makes it so much more potent than other products?
The deep state whining about TikTok is the pot calling the kettle black.
I think a lot of people would agree that Twitter and Instagram are worse for users.
Twitter is a bunch of bullying and wrath, Instagram is jealousy and avarice: extremely effective at manufacturing insecurity.
America has been colonizing the world via dominance in online industry for the past 20 years and "winning the war for data". Tiktok is a symbol of the end of this trend and american nationalists hate the idea.
I think most people with an ounce of commonsense know exactly what to do, ban it.
The problem is globalisation means the incentives for leaders is no longer in alignment with the country they govern.
In a lot of cases it's far more personally lucrative to grow the Chinese economy than it is their own. And no doubt, China works very hard to ensure this is the case. And so they all hide behind the "it's complicated" argument (it's actually not).
preventing the mass exfiltration of american data seems like something that the government has absolute authority over. If Tiktok cannot prove that they are not doing that, then this is no different from the health department shutting down a restaurant.
Is that is what is happening with TikTok? Me spying on my neighbors? I don’t even use TikTok and have never set up an account, but it seems like it is overreach without firmly and publicly stating and proving the national security threat. Until then, it’s a free speech issue in my book.
This is nothing like a restaurant being shut down. In normal enforcement, parties are innocent until proven guilty. An inspector comes, sees where you are violating rules and regulations, and gives you an overall assessment. In this case TikTok's guilt is being assumed based on zero evidence, and they're being asked to prove a negative.
Prove you don't have a little invisible gremlin, made of dark matter, named Kabuzu floating just above your right shoulder. And now prove it to people that are dead-set in the belief that you do, regardless of what you say. This is why the presumption of innocence is such an important part of any rational system of justice.
There is no presumption of innocence because it is not a person being charged with a crime. It is a corporation. More than that, it is a corporation that cannot be audited because it lives in a state hostile to US interests.
As a person, you do not need to prove your right to exist, but an entity that only exists at the whim of the democratic government in which it operates most definitely does.
Instead they mandate that apps that operate in China must follow Chinese regulations, privacy laws and of course provide access to Chinese agencies as requested.
Many American companies have decided they aren't interested in operating in the Chinese market if they have to do so under these rules. That is completely their choice and completely reasonable if you have moral issues with how the Chinese government operates their market.
Meanwhile many American companies like Microsoft for instance are happy to comply with said regulations in order to gain access to the market.
I don't think the regulations the Chinese impose are protectionist (like what the US is talking about doing) but they definitely are morally queasy for some, especially the censorship and government access rules.
So the whole "American companies are banned in China" is mostly nonsense AFAICT.
> Instead they mandate that apps that operate in China must follow Chinese regulations, privacy laws and of course provide access to Chinese agencies as requested.
And how do they do that? With the threat of banning / not allowing them to operate.
The laws are stated. If you publish an app the the App Store that violates US law you can be sure it's taken down pronto as well.
TikTok isn't violating US laws, they just want it removed for "national security reasons".
The US has plenty of better options to deal with this like applying broad data privacy legislation such as what EU and China have enacted, creation of a regulator to enforce this and inspect entities to ensure they are playing by the rules etc.
China also sets the precedent of suppressing speech and political dissent, executing a large number of prisoners and other horrors. We shouldn't follow their precedent!
Genocide here refers to policies of forced sterilization, forced contraception, and forced abortion, which have specifically been described as genocide by the US government among others.
It's worse than that. State governments are actively using their quasi-legal (they haven't passed the judicial tests yet) powers to force social media to help prosecute their citizens...
And they're hiding behind "the chinese government is worse". Yeah, they're terrible. Prosecuting women for seeking health services is also terrible.
Ha, for sixty, seventy, eighty years, most reasonable Americans have been saying all the three letter agencies "scream" power trip.
For my money, I haven't seen an app that so easily allows normal people use copyrighted music -- you know, the stuff everyone hears and is blared at us until we like it -- to express themselves.
If the data loss is such a terrible security threat, why is everyone using operating systems that enable it in the first place? Because the FBI only warns of threats that leverage the terribly insecure systems we all use to oppose the FBI's political projects.
It's a problem, it's just not a problem the FBI has credibility to warn us all about.
Distribution in App Stores, running servers on US soil, and payment using the US dollar or involving US persons would presumably all be banned. That would be enough to effectively ban it.
Raising a daughter I cannot help but wonder if a social media ban till 16, 18 or even 21 year old wouldn't be a net positive for society.
I am more concerned about my daughter shaping her view of the world through social medias than doing other age-restricted activities like watching porn or drinking beers.
It might be impossible to enforce completely but forbidding the platforms to host content made by teenagers would probably help reduce the interest for teenagers and some of its negative psychological impacts. It would probably also motive schools to implement policies to stay "social-media free".
When all of her friends communicate through social medias, she will feel excluded if she is the only one without it.
It is the same problem as, when younger, all my friends had a phone and I hadn't. Except much worse because social media really became a big part of the social and cultural life of teenagers.
I don't believe a ban would be effective unless it also applies to her social circle too. I know in some rare schools, parents organized themselves to all commit to not let their child use social medias. That might be another lead, but unlike a formal ban, it won't deter platforms to attempt to attract and retain the attention of our kids.
I think in the meantime, the best approach is probably trying to limit her time using it, making her internalize the negative consequences, and try to limit the content she posts.
I think that when the suggested alternative is having the government outlaw social media for everyone (in an arbitrary age group), it'd be better to coordinate with your daughter's friends' parents.
Just like america's style of "NO BOOZE UNTIL 21" while building a stupidly pro-getting shitfaced culture results in new college kids who have extreme levels of binge drinking, a complete ban with sudden access at a certain age will just leave us with kids suffering from horrible and debilitating addictions to social media right as they leave the home.
Maybe educate your kids in media literacy, and engender in them an understanding of high quality media vs low quality media, or how social media should be considered like a giant bucket of ice cream: Tasty but really bad for your health.
I come from a place where it is easy to get booze at 14, and where it is legal to drink at 16. Our teenager drinking culture is pretty much the same as in the US, probably worse: binge drinking, people sleeping on the sidewalk, dick swinging of "who can drink more", it is a real source of pride to be drunk from thursday to monday.
I don't think bans are the main driver of the alcohol problem.
What a well-designed ban might achieve is reducing the attractiveness of the platform by prevent platforms to host content made by other teenagers, which is one of the main reason to be on social medias at that age.
But you are right, educating her is the best I can do. And then pray that she will be an easy teenager.
TFA is light on quotes, but it seems to come down to "China could feed misinformation to users". That's the most concrete claim I've seen.
I'd buy that it could happen, but I'm still not sure it's worth "screaming" about. We get plenty of misinformation, and disinformation, via US-owned channels.
One could imagine a sinister plot where they develop a detailed model of you and use it to concoct the perfect disinformation campaign targeted at you, engaging enough so you don't shut it off, subtle enough that it isn't obvious and annoying. It's not impossible; even mediocre targeting tools have led to some pretty impressive targeted propaganda campaigns. What could they do with the information that is currently useful enough to make it a near-addiction?
And yet, it seems unlikely to me. The alternative is "they're making a ton of money", which seems a perfectly ordinary thing for them to do. That sinister plot seems to hinge on a lot of things going in their favor, like TikTok users not just moving on to the next shiny thing that catches their attention.
Maybe the FBI has more reason to believe that this really is China's plan than they can let on. But it really looks to me just like they beat us at our own game, selling entertainment, and doing it on the cheap.
I think it's plausible that the deep state feels threatened by Tiktok because it is out of reach of US misinformation campaigns: Tiktok has the power to counterprogram against falsehoods spread by US officials.
We've seen how cozy Twitter is with the state. I wonder if any US propaganda falsehoods have been corrected by Tiktok already or if this a just a threat to national orwellian potential.
i don’t understand how everyone was super worked up about russia influencing the election through facebook, but now that a foreign power literally CONTROLS the platform, people aren’t concerned about it.
fwiw, I’m not that concerned about either platform. I just think people who claim one and not the other are being inconsistent.
I'm very concerned that the US government will set a precedent for regulating what apps citizens are allowed to use.
I definitely agree about the risks and banning it from the devices of the govt officials makes sense but banning access to an app screams "the Chinese/Russian/Turkish way of governing has won, freedoms are no more".
I hope the US takes the EU approach and regulates what data is collected and transmitted where instead of walking the totalitarian route. In case you haven't notice, FB/Instagram/Twitter etc. are the same as TikTok from the perspective of Non-Americans(>%90 of the world) and TikTok just happen to be a first for Americans.
I've been living in Turkey for some years now and I promise you, it's not fun. Do you know that it has been 2 weeks since Turkey banned country's most popular(and earliest, dating back to 1999) social media for no other reason that they suspect anti-government activity by the operators because they think it is not natural to have concentration of anti-govt views? That's where you are headed.
It's only a logical fallacy in the form if p then q; if q then r if then ... so on until the end point you're arguing towards. To say that history informs us that a particular hill easily becomes slippery is not a logical fallacy.
It's a fallacy whenever someone argues from it. Like the GP, they are literally arguing from a SSF and no one believes that's what it is. Beyond the pale.
" I'm very concerned that the US government will set a precedent for regulating what apps citizens are allowed to use."
Since US law is based on precedent, it is not unreasonable to say that allowing the government to legislate which apps are available to US persons could lead to creeping powers to regulate apps more broadly. All of post 9/11 security law is practically a national park of slippery slopes.
I see the confusion. I was referring to "this feels like a slope that could become very slippery." having any meaning outside of someone arguing from SSF.
You have to realize the difference between state controlled and state approved. Maybe you don't think there is a difference?
We don't have a "Let's kill the president app" because it is illegal. It's not approved to exist. Does that mean all the apps we have left are state controlled apps?
I'm all in for banning illegal apps. What's illegal about TikTok?
What I say is that define what is illegal and what are the requirements to legally operate a service to address your concerns. That's regulation and means open and free market with safety.
Believing that an App can be misused by your adversaries or its against your interests and banning it is not free market. That's Chinese way of governing. Don't be China, Chinese government is not good.
What's illegal about anything? If you think there's some sort of legal essentialism in objects and actions, then we're coming at this from very different places. Natural law theory is, how to put this, naive. Legal realism too, while we're at it, in the sense that legal scientism is equally hallucinogenic.
If apps are banned solely for their nationality, and not the uniqueness of their functionality (spying, law enforcement, etc), then yeah, it kinda does.
"Only countries on our approve-list can deploy social media apps in our country."
An app being 'state controlled' is not an inherently good or bad thing. It's what the app does that is important. Does it collect data? Does it transmit data to foreign governments? Does it store data locally? Does it permit any kind of control of the device?
It's easy to say certain apps are bad. It's hard to say why they are bad and address the root behavior. This is a case where taking the easy road has obvious unintended future consequences. Taking the hard road helps every citizen of this country, and not just with apps controlled by foreign governments.
We need data security and privacy legislation. We do not need creeping totalitarianism. It's easy to see which road goes where.
Wouldn't regulating data privacy just shift the banning to business behaviors instead of consumer behaviors? It's still banning of choice to what the government says.
(Said with tongue in cheek. Help explain where the reasoning is wrong, though. The majority of people would rather get free apps with heavy surveillance attached than pay for anything in money or inconvenience, why is Tiktok different than everyone who sells the data to brokers who then sell it to everyone?)
The US doesn't want to compete on level field. It feels it "owns" modern mass data collection and surveillance, and it's more peeved that it doesn't have access to other markets' data than it cares about any purported espionage.
My bet is placed. China won't open its data to the US, so these bans will continue to escalate. However, any market that does share collected data with the US (or allows US companies to carry out this collection in their markets) will somehow "not be a threat" to privacy or national security.
> any market that does share collected data with the US (or allows US companies to carry out this collection in their markets) will somehow "not be a threat" to privacy or national security.
I'm fine with politicians coming up with some politically acceptable reason to ban Chinese apps when the real reason is tit-for-tat economics. I'm sick of China banning outside IP (and in many cases stealing it for themselves). It hurts a lot of us, including game developers.
It's tit for tat. Or tit for tok if you will. My only hope is they apply it consistently to all Chinese IP.
Neither of the mentioned China/Russia/Turkey allow only state-controlled apps. They allow everything, but ban unwanted or noncompliant ones.
What does state control look like in your head? Putin sending an email “please disregard your manager’s orders and do this instead”? Such thing has never existed because it is physically impossible to micromanage thousands of companies.
State control is monetary handouts or fines, bans and coercion under a threat of those.
Kinda like you’re staring directly at state control and can’t recognize what you’re looking at.
>Do you know that it has been 2 weeks since Turkey banned country's most popular social media for no other reason that they suspect anti-government activity
After seeing how the Patriot Act was passed then abused, one should be very weary of any free speech limiting precedents being set.
TikTok users. Tens of millions of them. Notice that TikTok is a social media app which created a numerous new art and social movements. That's why TikTok videos are actually dominating Instagram too. There are many people who got famous on TikTok.
Techies often forget that the numbers in the analytics screen means human beings. "The tech" is deeply psychopathic industry unfortunately, they can't grasp the pain their actions can cause on people.
Why not just make your points and engage with its replies like everyone else does? No one gains anything from your attempts to get people to say what you want them to say so you can "gotcha" them.
I was merely asking why you "discuss your ideas" in the way that you did, because it didn't seem to go over very well. You seem to have a point to make but never did so. You're indeed free to discuss things however you like, but everyone who sees through your "discussion" is also free to react negatively.
I read comments here because I sometimes learn new things or gain new perspectives, and I think that is the point of having a comment section, especially so on this website. I "told you the correct way to discuss your ideas" because I wanted to know what you actually thought, because your comments didn't convey that.
Also, when did I cry about freedom of speech? My only comment in this thread (before this one) was in response to your failed "gotcha" attempt.
> I'm very concerned that the US government will set a precedent for regulating what apps citizens are allowed to use.
Totally different topic, but it was said the same about covid regulations, how we were becoming like China, how lockdowns were supposed to limit our freedom etc.
We're basically back to the same old, and our freedom is "back".
I believe that the US government for the first time is really challenged by something and they don't know how to regulate it, because it goes fundamentally against the doctrine of freedom of speech etc. "The West is now blocking apps?"
EU regulations are nice and all, but GDPR is so easy to break, and from time to time you pay the fine, all good. In the meantime, tons of data about your citizens go away. Can you ask for that data back? It's gone. That's why this is so hard to regulate. And the right to be forgotten, well, prove it...especially in the cloud, if the application servers are hosted in a cloud provider owned by or government-friendly.
As I mentioned in a previous post, scandals concerning EU/US is just pure political BS to sell newspapers. Even if there are regulations, it's "acceptable" if from time to time a company breaches that "trust". It can even be convenient up to a certain point (but I don't work in governments etc., this is just the way I see it).
EDIT: the only time they probably did something similar was against piracy/p2p/blocking emule and all that :) but we all know money moves mountains
> EU regulations are nice and all, but GDPR is so easy to break
The good thing about it is that you give them a chance to comply and ease your concerns. If they fail to do so, you then you can ban them for actually failing to do something instead of being Chinese or making you nervous or something. This makes all the difference.
It's all about freely operating within the rule of law or leaving it to some bureaucrats gut that some app can be dangerous.
> The good thing about it is that you give them a chance to comply and ease your concerns. If they fail to do so, you then you can ban them for actually failing to do something instead of being Chinese or making you nervous or something. This makes all the difference.
That's what US is doing, if I got it right. Tiktok apparently is not playing by the rules, hence a ban. Not today, maybe tomorrow... who knows.
You seem to be making several points here which as far as I can tell boil down to the following:
- the COVID pandemic reduced some of our freedoms, but now they are back.
- GPDR is not perfect regulation. It has holes that let bad behavior sneak through.
RE: Your first point. This is an apples to oranges comparison. COVID restrictions were never anything unusual - the CDC has had legal authority to enforce quarantine for a very long time. It used those powers ascribed to it by law, and then stopped doing so when it was no longer needed. That's not at all what this thread is about, which is the government deciding that certain applications are unacceptable for it's citizens by fiat.
RE: Your second point. The EU has much stronger protections under GPDR than if it didn't exist. The answer to an imperfect regulation is not to abandon the regulation, it's to improve it. That's why we have a process to build new laws or change them. To solve problems. It's like saying the problem with your car is that it is low on oil, so instead of refilling the oil you decide to just walk.
> the CDC has had legal authority to enforce quarantine for a very long time.
I am not living in the US, however in Europe it was hell. And it was decided by the governments from each country. If I recall, some regulations became even EU-based, like traveling. We're still West, although a bit more east :) It was not about an application you have on your phone, true, but governments are the ones paid for seeing the long term vision: if citizens die (because of covid) or there is a national security issue (because another country is milking your citizens' data), you have to do something about it. This is why I compared those two topics, albeit different. For me there is no loss of freedom in either case, but I can understand those who feel their freedom taken away.
Regarding the second point, I love the fact there is the GDPR. And like you I agree it must be improved. The question is: what can you do in this case? We're talking about bit and bytes flowing through cables. How do users make sure that companies are respecting the laws? It's basically impossible. And that's when governments become aggressive: we need our whatsapp, ... we need to stop tiktok...and all that talk that might seem from unfortunate (fascist) times.
RE: enforcement of regulations. This is not a problem unique to digital world regulations. All regulations are essentially self-enforced. Some have a little more checking from the government than others. The answer is you put teeth behind it if a violation is found. This approach works decently well most of the time, and once in a while you need to add sharper teeth
> I hope the US takes the EU approach and regulates what data is collected and transmitted where instead of walking the totalitarian route
Even if they do, how do you enforce it? The way I see it all paths of enforcement lead to a ban. I would bet a lot of money that tiktok is already in violation of several of the patchwork of laws that protect US online privacy.
And it's not just tiktok it's the thousands of shity games/apps owned partially by tencent.
I don't see why this couldn't be regulated in the same way that HIPPA protects our health information.
Onerous regulation and business-killing fines have the added bonus of making the collection of personal data extremely unappealing. This is a case where the threat of regulation and enforcement has a strongly positive chilling effect on an industry.
And, if you're in an industry that must collect personal information for whatever reason, it's still possible and legal.
The core issue is their use of data, if you enact laws to curb that behavior then that covers not only tiktok but the "thousands of shity games/apps owned partially by tencent". If they continue to break the rules then you ban them and any other that is not complying; including domestically owned companies like facebook that harvest your data and use it to influence elections undemocratically.
> I'm very concerned that the US government will set a precedent for regulating what apps citizens are allowed to use.
This wouldn't be nearly as big of a problem if Apple & co. didn't have full remote control over what software you are or aren't allowed to run on your device that you paid for and supposedly own.
The technocrats in Belgium are really leading from the front across industries when it comes to rational, forward-thinking, and - most importantly - both pro-competitive and consumer friendly regulations.
Agree with other comments that GDPR isn't perfect, but at least its a start! I work in Finance, and their regulation around things like Open Banking (e.g. PSD2) is great. Of course they have their bad aspects, but overall they level the commercial playing field and protect consumer freedoms. I worry the US is letting legacy industry dominate the development of our financial (and other industries') infrastructure for short term incumbent gain but long term societal and commercial detriment.
My state's legislators are upset about the content of what appears on TikTok. While they complain about "security" in public, when they are in the chambers talking with other legislators, their dialog changes to them being offended at "youth today" posting content that makes them look bad.
Our state's legislation bans all traffic to TikTok on state networks - such as watching the videos via browser. This seems to be a non-issue until you realize that libraries, public schools and state universities are affected by this legislation.
they are more offended at the algorithm of tik tok. And one need just to confront the chinese and Global algo of Douyin to undersand why. It is a digital addiction machine, with "probably" some top-down interference. Hoping it become a step to regulate the whole social media industry as more sideffects to their damaging practices are surfacing[0]
> I hope the US takes the EU approach and regulates what data is collected
The US and the EU have different goals. EU's goal is to protect their control of propaganda within their borders. Ours is to control propaganda within our borders and protect our social media companies from foreign competitors. There is a reason why the government attacks on tiktok coincides with youtube shorts, facebook reels, instagram reels, etc. EU doesn't have a social media company to champion so they don't have that extra burden of protecting market share.
> I've been living in Turkey for some years now and I promise you, it's not fun.
Tiktok isn't going to go away. Too many companies have invested in tiktok for it to be simply banned. Tiktok is most likely going to be "confiscated". Tiktok parent will most likely be forced to sell tiktok to a US based company.
No country should allow foreign social media to spread propaganda within their borders. Every country should nationalize social media within their borders. It's insane that only the US, China and Russia seem to be protecting their social media space. I just don't get it. Social media can be used to brainwash, divide and destroy any country. It's almost like most of the world's leaders are incompetent.
He's providing a counter to your claim that censorship and surveillance are somehow more associated with foreign governments. The reality is that the US has long engaged[0] in the same kind of suppression that is portrayed to it's citizens as something that only exists in it's "enemies".
Well, that's a strawman argument. I specifically pointed out that whatever TikTok is to USA, FB/Instagram/Twitter etc. is to the rest of the world. This obviously includes all the spying and manipulation, thus the risk and as a result the need for data collection and access requirements. TikTok is nothing special.
Instead we should just make a deal with China: You allow all of our apps in China and we'll do the same. If not, we'll ban your apps.
The first thing people should think about in trade is fairness. Let's not pile up more ungodly regulations hamstringing everyone and the problem still wouldn't be solved. Chinese apps will continue to skirt the loopholes of any law we can enact barring complete ban.
China would simple threaten big Western capital in china, and Wall Street will run to Washington crying about antiasian hate or whatever strawmen of the day. China gave some auditing book to PCAOB after decades of request only under threat of forced delisting from western markets [0] in difficult times for china. Worry not CCP is changing its regulatory framework to keep "strategic secrecy" (retaliating) to ban Big 4 to operate on the country [1]
Remember that china still claim developing status at WTO to keep getting a lot of perks meant to equalize global competion like subsidized parcel shipment. Perks China obviously dont need
The US government already controls all these apps and websites all the way up to Wikipedia. Just follow all the exposures coming out now by the likes of Matt Taibbi etc. in fact they jailed CEOs who didn’t comply with the illegal demands of the government like the CEO of Quest:
Look up the Church commission or Edward Snowden. Or the Hamilton files or all the exposes now of how Big Tech was doing all the censorship for the US government both in the US and even abroad to manipulate elections and do election interference everywhere (just like they censored the Hunter Biden story before the US election).
And probably the real reason that they are upset with TikTok is that the FBI etc. doesn’t have as invasive access, control and censorship of TikTok as they do with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Wikipedia and all the others.
I’m not fully aware of Chinese and Turkish cases to comment on authorities there, but in case of Russia, some USA based social networks are banned not because they’re spreading the “truth and freedom”, but because when Russia implemented pretty much word to word laws as in EU about necessity to store personal data of Russian citizens of such networks inside Russia, the answer was basically “fuck you”. More of it, those networks were caught in suppressing one point of view but amplifying another, that suited interest of USA government in Russia. USA based social networks are for many years a propaganda tool and their hunt for Tiktok and other foreign services is just a clear example of censorship and intention to dominate social media to spread USA narratives and suppress any opposing voices.
Btw, right now we have a very good example in Georgia, where their parlament tried to implement a word for word copy of the law about foreign agents they got from USA or a softened version, and both USA and EU demanded this law to be rejected. And government there just wanted to let their citizens know what mass media or public figures are funded by foreign governments and NGO’s.
> the threat to completely shut down its platform, subsided only after TikTok began appointing Western officials to important positions within its organization, thereby giving the state considerable influence over the content and direction of the app.
This is what makes the ostensible claim that it needs to be banned for national security reasons harder to understand or accept. This leaves us just guessing about what the real reasons are, and people will call it conspiracy theory. Possible reasons could be:
-They want to consolidate the number of outlets they need to manage
-An interagency conflict between FBI and the ones managing Tiktok
-Financial benefit for the competitors in which security state has financial stake
-Some organizational or architectural issue that makes it difficult to control
????
I don't think the FBI cares about TikTok, to be honest. It seems like we're entering a period of posturing against the Chinese, using implicit 'sanctioning' methods:
- Banning TikTok
- Accusing them of the COVID lab leak theory
- Posturing with Taiwan
Seems were just building a substrate for... something. Not to sound too conspiratorial. ;)
To be clear, the Wuhan Institute of Virology's research program involving betacoronaviruses and CRISPR gene editing technology was funded in part by the US government via a grant to Ecohealth Alliance from the NIH (at least $600,000 which is fairly significant) and the lead researcher at Wuhan developed that approach in collaboration with US scientists, so it's hardly just 'China's fault'.
If a complete ban on this kind of research (CRISPR-editing wild-type viral sequences to make them more infectious in human cell lines, or in mice expressing human genes, etc.) had been implemented and enforced by NIH and NIAID, this scenario might have been avoided. Any (financial? criminal?) reckoning over who is at fault would result in at least some significant degree of shared liability between the USA and China.
It's hard to see a public Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats to U.S. security as anything except blatant propaganda, which makes this feel like propaganda warning us that the evil enemy may use propaganda to control our opinions.
2022:
"Amazon likes to collect an enormous amount of data on you. Things like: records of your shopping habits, Alexa search requests, the TV shows you watch and when you watch them, the music you stream, the podcasts you listen to, when you turn your lights on and off, when you lock your doors, identifiers such as your name, address, phone numbers, or IP address, your age, gender, your location, audio and visual information like those Alexa-requests or photos you take, the names and numbers of people listed in your contacts. The list goes on and on and on."
- https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/amazon-...
- https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/amazon-alexa-device-don...
- https://www.ventasdeseguridad.com/en/2022110822789/news/ente...
"Ring has a history of not protecting users' privacy. At one point they reportedly stored customer data--including video recordings--unencrypted on an Amazon cloud server and employees could access any of this data. There have also been reported data leaks and concerns that the Ring Doorbell app is full of third-party trackers tracking a good amount of personal information that Amazon Ring doesn’t disclose."
'It was reported that in May, 2022 Amazon's patched Ring's app for Android due a "high-severity" security vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to access personal information, location, and camera recordings.'
- https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/ring-vi....
I still don't understand the "national security concerns" from TikTok. It seems there's two:
1. The CCP has access to video-view and location data
2. The CCP can manipulate video streams to push a narrative
For #1, isn't TikTok mostly just a bunch of teenagers dancing? Who cares if the CCP access this data? Also, couldn't the CCP just purchase this same/similar data from a thousand other data brokers? For #2, pushing a narrative pretty much defines social media apps these days, for better and for worse. So, why is it so bad on TikTok or when the CCP does it? Heck, Fox News is constantly parroting Russian propaganda, yet no one is talking about banning the channel. What makes TikTok/CCP so much worse that the app needs to be banned?
I honestly don't understand what makes TikTok so much more threatening than what's already going on. What am I missing?
> Also, couldn't the CCP just purchase this same/similar data from a thousand other data brokers?
Contrary to popular belief, data-broker data is generic and not very good. Knowing that you are a 30s male who likes beer is not as useful as, say, finding out you are a high ranking military official and what remote locations you visit in the US.
> #1, isn't TikTok mostly just a bunch of teenagers dancing?
How quickly TikTok understands your preferences and feeds you content you like is scary. And it's designed to send you down niche rabbit holes. You may start watching construction videos, but within an hour you may be watching a nurse tell you pharmaceutical companies are trying to kill us but set to a fun dance.
These claims about Tiktok have been used for years, and the data collection is not much different from other corp/state social media apps. I assumed the motivation was around information control, but as researched here, https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tikto..., the company is well influenced by NATO intelligence now. The cognitive warfare landscape is evolving. I am really not sure what the justification is at this point. Perhaps they want fewer platforms to control, the architecture is not conducive to the level of control they desire, the FBI is not aligned with agencies controlling Tiktok?
What does it matter whether TikTok is a security threat (although it clearly is).
In what other trade context would it be acceptable for one country to block all access to its own market (e.g Facebook, Twitter etc) whilst still enjoying full access to everybody elses?
How is it remotely unreasonable to treat China in the same way it treats everybody else?
Any chance the people in this thread can stop with the whataboutism (“The U.S. does it too!”) and focus on the topic at hand: is TikTok a national security threat or not?
> Wray told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats to U.S. security that the Chinese government could also use TikTok to control software on millions of devices and drive narratives to divide Americans over Taiwan or other issues.
Good point. Now can we have our laws banning foreign control of news outlets and consolidation of media ownership back?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadRight now it just feels like agitprop
The FBI chief being discussed here, Wray, is a political appointment but not an elected politician so hopefully the appointment shields them from politics. Nevermind that the DoJ tries pretty hard to be independent of the President. But beyond that, this particular chief was appointed during the previous administration of a different party. And has served in both party's administrations.
I have no position on TikTok, but Wray saying this is not really comparable to McCarthy.
In fact the McCarthyism acticle on Wikipedia has a whole section about the FBI. The FBI was deeply involved in McCarthyism.
Eventually, I can see these hearings continue, but the line of argument will change to protecting American jobs, especially if Meta's ad revenues fall.
That Huawei or is there another one?
I wish it was more common actually. Imagine if we shared technology more freely in exchange for reciprocal benefits. For instance Australia (my home country) has a wealth of natural resources yet very little high-tech. We should leverage China's dependency on our raw resources to obtain technology transfer to enrich our country in a mutually beneficial way.
* The extent to which TikTok tailors content, normalization of over-simplified content, ease of creating content and other factors make it great for radicalization. As well as extremist groups, this applies to more regular protest movements and generally an active citizenry, which is not in the interest of the feds.
* It has encouraged regular crime and idiocy. For example it spread knowledge of the Kia/Hyundai ignition bypass, and is full of pseudomedical nonsence.
It also serves as a useful scapegoat.
Only a lot, lot worse.
We go after terrorists and insurgents the same way by learning their social networks and patterns of life. I'm sure that we wish we had stuff on our adversaries like the data from the OPM breach[2], the Strava fitness data, or the kind of data that TikTok can collect on their phones.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34474946
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/05/28/us-soldiers-expos...
They are very worried about the US citizen population saying they are DONE with Lobbyists and congress selling out. US Citizens are done with the GDP being stolen via rigged industries (pharma, 2008 crisis, Medical, taxes, etc.) US Citizens starting to all agree together on TikTok, enables citizens to galvanize into a united front.
The US Gov needs to control US citizens, by banning them. This is why US intel services have removed 100% of US citizens in militia community groups people from Facebook. 100% have their facebook accounts have been shut down. They can't shoot people over facebook. The gov's risk is that people see many other citizens galvanize that they find congress w/lobbyists effectively stealing GDP.
Zuckerberg has openly violated the privacy of millions of Americans, and been fined the largest amount in FTC history for doing so.
He might not be in the Axis of Evil, but the fact that he continues to operate his division-by-doomscroll machine on American soil makes this TikTok talk sound pretty ridiculous.
Science VS twerking
how to be a good citizen VS tide pod challenge
&c.
It's not a military or political threat per say, just a slow brain rot over an entire generation
https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...
I think the dopamine receptor frying nature of apps like TikTok is more of a danger than the Chinese government getting hold of kids/teens data.
We have almost entire generations hooked on a short-form media content app which is rapidly decaying their attention spans and sitting in their hands like a hardcore drug. The longer term implications of children / teenagers that can't read a short book is far more detrimental than China knowing which pop songs they like.
Add to that, the moronic trends spread and perhaps encouraged on these platforms (tide pod eating, play-acting as if they're victims of the holocaust, and the sketchy sexual content on the platform).
TikTok, and to be honest, all social media, are toxic products. Maybe if the US bans TikTok, they should proceed ahead and ban the rest, "for the children's safety".
We know Russia was able to pump a bunch of psyops campaigns into Western social media, most NATO governments now have dedicated branches that root out this kind of information.
But Russia's programs were really obtuse and relatively easy to trace. On the other hand, TikTok is all about flooding people with niche content areas. And content is consumed so much faster that it propagates quicker. And keep in mind TikTok is still state-sponsored by China despite the algorithm being so addictive that it is banned domestically.
My tinfoil hat is that US officials have reports that the Chinese state is having influence on the American news cycles, but doesn't want to admit that it's made its way already into news media and politics issues.
The problem is that this was, itself, all complete disinformation. Their "Russian bots" were largely made of normal, and very real, conservative Americans. [1] Many were of substantial note, including authors, lawyers (one had published a book on the constitution), news editors/hosts, and more. So you ended up in this zone where anything conservative individuals were talking about was immediately claimed to be Russian disinformation, which was equated with fake news. But you'll never see anything about this in those same news sites that ran stories based on the disinformation. Nor is their any grand demand that we shut down Hamilton 68. In fact you can still find their dashboard on the "Securing Democracy" page. [2]
So normal genuine conversation was being censored under the guise of 'securing democracy against state sponsored disinformation' while major examples of genuine disinformation, which did (and continue) completely distort democracy, remain completely ignored. Very little of it has anything to do with integrity, security, or safety. It's all petty politics. And supporting the government banning apps, with no proven misdeeds, is one heck of a nasty precedent.
[1] - https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105
[2] - https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/hamilton-dashboard/
I haven't heard about Hamilton 68 but I can't seem to find any verification about it. It also seems narrowly focused on bots and not the hundreds of professional (human!) trolls and hackers that countries like Russia (and others) employ.
I will grant you that the "fake news" problem was a completely separate issue and largely domestic: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50... We should be clear when we talk about "misinformation" we are talking about things that are materially true! Just weaponized. Russia hacked both the DNC and the GOP, but only leaked the DNC emails. Nothing was made up! We were just given a selective and unfair version of the truth.
Honestly, I consider myself a somewhat conservative leaning myself. But foreign countries are engaging in these psyops programs believing them to be effective (as is our own government)! So I think it would be incredibly naive to let foreign agents with ulterior motives run free through our systems under the guise of political speech.
I want my political trolling to be domestically produced!
Imagine if something like The Pentagon Papers was released today. There's a good chance the mainstream media simply would not cover it. And the government itself would also likely claim it was just some sort of a Russian or Chinese disinformation campaign. At best, it'd end up being some sort of a partisan issue. Those that supported the war in Vietnam, or supported the current political party in power, would claim it was all disinformation. Those against it would claim it was the worst thing since Pearl Harbor.
The solution to disinformation is not disinformation, censorship, or anything else. It's simply more information. Because the truth always finds a way. Even in the days of the Soviet Union where the political powers had not only complete control of the media, but even strictly controlled travel in/out of the country, people knew the politicians were full of it. And that's kind of a nice moral from 'the truth always wins' type story, but really shitty from the reality of living in a society where the most correct response to basically anything is to assume, as a default, that it's, at best, a half truth. And that is the endgame of domestic disinformation.
[1] - https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...
Read any book on the history of espionage to see the efforts made to collect intelligence. Suggesting TikTok data wont be used in an intelligence context is simply ridiculous.
I think lack of success of foreign apps in China comes down to a much simpler dynamic. Foreign apps are simply not launched concurrently in China and optimised for the Chinese market from the outset. The exception to this are mobile games titles which are generally overly optimised for the Chinese market if anything and generally fail to succeed outside of it.
This results in Chinese clones of said new foriegn app/service appearing very quickly and gaining dominance before said app can "expand" to China. By the time that happens, if it does, they have to compete with an established service that is language and culture native.
Essentially if you aren't launching in China day one and have a great understanding of the -very- competitive Chinese Internet platform economy you are screwed before you even start.
The US has many laws that cause apps to be pulled from the App Store or forcibly be shutdown by hosting companies (even non-US entities!).
Why is it different when the laws are from a different country?
It kind of makes me appreciate that there were lots of times we banned things after they crossed an arbitrary line of danger. Alcohol was fine until hard liquor was invented. Child work was expected, until factories came along.
In a way, I almost think of TikTok as a reverse Opium War. Opium was already a not uncommon vice in China until the British introduced much more potent strains. TikTok not being fundamentally different than the other tech that preceded it, just a more potent version.
If I catch your drift correctly you might want to read up on the history of distillation, and in particular the chronology thereof.
I think in particular it's fascinating because this was before people really measured or understood alcohol content and they really had trouble figuring out why some drinks needed no real restrictions and yet others could destroy lives.
I understand that it's easier to consume greater amounts of alcohol when it is in higher concentrations.
Surely a person drinking a mix drink containing 2 shots in an two hours cannot be more dangerous than someone gassing 6 beers in an two hours, right?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khamr
Alcohol is no longer fine?
> Child work was expected, until factories came along.
Doesn't that more have to do with the rising household income (thanks to productivity gains, I'd imagine) and school availability, so people could afford to let their children go to school instead of needing every hand to keep the family afloat?
I've never actually used TikTok, what makes it so much more potent than other products?
Parent is clearly referring to Prohibition
https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-....
I think a lot of people would agree that Twitter and Instagram are worse for users.
Twitter is a bunch of bullying and wrath, Instagram is jealousy and avarice: extremely effective at manufacturing insecurity.
America has been colonizing the world via dominance in online industry for the past 20 years and "winning the war for data". Tiktok is a symbol of the end of this trend and american nationalists hate the idea.
The problem is globalisation means the incentives for leaders is no longer in alignment with the country they govern. In a lot of cases it's far more personally lucrative to grow the Chinese economy than it is their own. And no doubt, China works very hard to ensure this is the case. And so they all hide behind the "it's complicated" argument (it's actually not).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/07/apple-chi...
It's enough to make you vote for a reality TV star as president...
If anything, apple should remove it from the App Store, and I will get mad at apple and think it’s an overreach.
The government making noise that they should be able to ban apps from our phones is a step too far.
Prove you don't have a little invisible gremlin, made of dark matter, named Kabuzu floating just above your right shoulder. And now prove it to people that are dead-set in the belief that you do, regardless of what you say. This is why the presumption of innocence is such an important part of any rational system of justice.
As a person, you do not need to prove your right to exist, but an entity that only exists at the whim of the democratic government in which it operates most definitely does.
And many US apps/websites are non-GDPR compliant.
Instead they mandate that apps that operate in China must follow Chinese regulations, privacy laws and of course provide access to Chinese agencies as requested.
Many American companies have decided they aren't interested in operating in the Chinese market if they have to do so under these rules. That is completely their choice and completely reasonable if you have moral issues with how the Chinese government operates their market.
Meanwhile many American companies like Microsoft for instance are happy to comply with said regulations in order to gain access to the market.
I don't think the regulations the Chinese impose are protectionist (like what the US is talking about doing) but they definitely are morally queasy for some, especially the censorship and government access rules.
So the whole "American companies are banned in China" is mostly nonsense AFAICT.
And how do they do that? With the threat of banning / not allowing them to operate.
TikTok isn't violating US laws, they just want it removed for "national security reasons".
The US has plenty of better options to deal with this like applying broad data privacy legislation such as what EU and China have enacted, creation of a regulator to enforce this and inspect entities to ensure they are playing by the rules etc.
It's a forced education camp to beat the Islam out of their Islamic population. It isn't a camp where they just kill people en mass.
No gas chambers, but thats not required.
And they're hiding behind "the chinese government is worse". Yeah, they're terrible. Prosecuting women for seeking health services is also terrible.
For my money, I haven't seen an app that so easily allows normal people use copyrighted music -- you know, the stuff everyone hears and is blared at us until we like it -- to express themselves.
If the data loss is such a terrible security threat, why is everyone using operating systems that enable it in the first place? Because the FBI only warns of threats that leverage the terribly insecure systems we all use to oppose the FBI's political projects.
It's a problem, it's just not a problem the FBI has credibility to warn us all about.
I am more concerned about my daughter shaping her view of the world through social medias than doing other age-restricted activities like watching porn or drinking beers.
It might be impossible to enforce completely but forbidding the platforms to host content made by teenagers would probably help reduce the interest for teenagers and some of its negative psychological impacts. It would probably also motive schools to implement policies to stay "social-media free".
It is the same problem as, when younger, all my friends had a phone and I hadn't. Except much worse because social media really became a big part of the social and cultural life of teenagers.
I don't believe a ban would be effective unless it also applies to her social circle too. I know in some rare schools, parents organized themselves to all commit to not let their child use social medias. That might be another lead, but unlike a formal ban, it won't deter platforms to attempt to attract and retain the attention of our kids.
I think in the meantime, the best approach is probably trying to limit her time using it, making her internalize the negative consequences, and try to limit the content she posts.
Maybe educate your kids in media literacy, and engender in them an understanding of high quality media vs low quality media, or how social media should be considered like a giant bucket of ice cream: Tasty but really bad for your health.
I don't think bans are the main driver of the alcohol problem.
What a well-designed ban might achieve is reducing the attractiveness of the platform by prevent platforms to host content made by other teenagers, which is one of the main reason to be on social medias at that age.
But you are right, educating her is the best I can do. And then pray that she will be an easy teenager.
I'd buy that it could happen, but I'm still not sure it's worth "screaming" about. We get plenty of misinformation, and disinformation, via US-owned channels.
One could imagine a sinister plot where they develop a detailed model of you and use it to concoct the perfect disinformation campaign targeted at you, engaging enough so you don't shut it off, subtle enough that it isn't obvious and annoying. It's not impossible; even mediocre targeting tools have led to some pretty impressive targeted propaganda campaigns. What could they do with the information that is currently useful enough to make it a near-addiction?
And yet, it seems unlikely to me. The alternative is "they're making a ton of money", which seems a perfectly ordinary thing for them to do. That sinister plot seems to hinge on a lot of things going in their favor, like TikTok users not just moving on to the next shiny thing that catches their attention.
Maybe the FBI has more reason to believe that this really is China's plan than they can let on. But it really looks to me just like they beat us at our own game, selling entertainment, and doing it on the cheap.
We've seen how cozy Twitter is with the state. I wonder if any US propaganda falsehoods have been corrected by Tiktok already or if this a just a threat to national orwellian potential.
fwiw, I’m not that concerned about either platform. I just think people who claim one and not the other are being inconsistent.
I definitely agree about the risks and banning it from the devices of the govt officials makes sense but banning access to an app screams "the Chinese/Russian/Turkish way of governing has won, freedoms are no more".
I hope the US takes the EU approach and regulates what data is collected and transmitted where instead of walking the totalitarian route. In case you haven't notice, FB/Instagram/Twitter etc. are the same as TikTok from the perspective of Non-Americans(>%90 of the world) and TikTok just happen to be a first for Americans.
I've been living in Turkey for some years now and I promise you, it's not fun. Do you know that it has been 2 weeks since Turkey banned country's most popular(and earliest, dating back to 1999) social media for no other reason that they suspect anti-government activity by the operators because they think it is not natural to have concentration of anti-govt views? That's where you are headed.
Banning foreign apps != allowing only state controlled apps.
" I'm very concerned that the US government will set a precedent for regulating what apps citizens are allowed to use."
Since US law is based on precedent, it is not unreasonable to say that allowing the government to legislate which apps are available to US persons could lead to creeping powers to regulate apps more broadly. All of post 9/11 security law is practically a national park of slippery slopes.
Other logical conclusions:
Banning LGBT apps != allowing only state controlled apps.
Banning pro-Trump apps != allowing only state controlled apps.
Banning abortion clinic apps != allowing only state controlled apps.
Banning gun related apps != allowing only state controlled apps.
Banning climate activist apps != allowing only state controlled apps.
Banning Fox news apps != allowing only state controlled apps.
How do you people even rationalise this in your head?
We don't have a "Let's kill the president app" because it is illegal. It's not approved to exist. Does that mean all the apps we have left are state controlled apps?
What I say is that define what is illegal and what are the requirements to legally operate a service to address your concerns. That's regulation and means open and free market with safety.
Believing that an App can be misused by your adversaries or its against your interests and banning it is not free market. That's Chinese way of governing. Don't be China, Chinese government is not good.
"Only countries on our approve-list can deploy social media apps in our country."
It's easy to say certain apps are bad. It's hard to say why they are bad and address the root behavior. This is a case where taking the easy road has obvious unintended future consequences. Taking the hard road helps every citizen of this country, and not just with apps controlled by foreign governments.
We need data security and privacy legislation. We do not need creeping totalitarianism. It's easy to see which road goes where.
(Said with tongue in cheek. Help explain where the reasoning is wrong, though. The majority of people would rather get free apps with heavy surveillance attached than pay for anything in money or inconvenience, why is Tiktok different than everyone who sells the data to brokers who then sell it to everyone?)
From 2013 -
"Court rules NSA doesn’t have to reveal its semi-secret relationship with Google" (https://macdailynews.com/2013/05/22/court-rules-nsa-doesnt-h...)
"NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say" (https://perma.cc/VY62-7WX5)
"Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans" (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-m...)
The US doesn't want to compete on level field. It feels it "owns" modern mass data collection and surveillance, and it's more peeved that it doesn't have access to other markets' data than it cares about any purported espionage.
My bet is placed. China won't open its data to the US, so these bans will continue to escalate. However, any market that does share collected data with the US (or allows US companies to carry out this collection in their markets) will somehow "not be a threat" to privacy or national security.
I'm fine with politicians coming up with some politically acceptable reason to ban Chinese apps when the real reason is tit-for-tat economics. I'm sick of China banning outside IP (and in many cases stealing it for themselves). It hurts a lot of us, including game developers.
It's tit for tat. Or tit for tok if you will. My only hope is they apply it consistently to all Chinese IP.
What does state control look like in your head? Putin sending an email “please disregard your manager’s orders and do this instead”? Such thing has never existed because it is physically impossible to micromanage thousands of companies.
State control is monetary handouts or fines, bans and coercion under a threat of those.
Kinda like you’re staring directly at state control and can’t recognize what you’re looking at.
Banning noncompliant ones is fine, banning the unwanted ones is the problem.
After seeing how the Patriot Act was passed then abused, one should be very weary of any free speech limiting precedents being set.
Techies often forget that the numbers in the analytics screen means human beings. "The tech" is deeply psychopathic industry unfortunately, they can't grasp the pain their actions can cause on people.
My reply was half made in jest but it's ironic they're crying about freedom of speech while telling me the correct way to discuss my ideas.
I read comments here because I sometimes learn new things or gain new perspectives, and I think that is the point of having a comment section, especially so on this website. I "told you the correct way to discuss your ideas" because I wanted to know what you actually thought, because your comments didn't convey that.
Also, when did I cry about freedom of speech? My only comment in this thread (before this one) was in response to your failed "gotcha" attempt.
Were TikTok to be banned, that comment would still exist.
Likewise, I'll post a video about it... to youtube, to vimeo, to wherever.
Is regulation of access to a public square a violation of free speech? What about shutdown of a given public square, knowing there are other squares?
I mean, China can find one citizen willing to publish their app for them. If a citizen chooses to publish an app they believe in, is this not speech?
Yours. TikTok will be just the beginning.
You will have the right to speak. But not using "those apps" and not using "those words".
But, who am i preaching to /s
The government doesn't get to ban speech in the park just because they allow it at the beach.
Totally different topic, but it was said the same about covid regulations, how we were becoming like China, how lockdowns were supposed to limit our freedom etc.
We're basically back to the same old, and our freedom is "back".
I believe that the US government for the first time is really challenged by something and they don't know how to regulate it, because it goes fundamentally against the doctrine of freedom of speech etc. "The West is now blocking apps?"
EU regulations are nice and all, but GDPR is so easy to break, and from time to time you pay the fine, all good. In the meantime, tons of data about your citizens go away. Can you ask for that data back? It's gone. That's why this is so hard to regulate. And the right to be forgotten, well, prove it...especially in the cloud, if the application servers are hosted in a cloud provider owned by or government-friendly.
As I mentioned in a previous post, scandals concerning EU/US is just pure political BS to sell newspapers. Even if there are regulations, it's "acceptable" if from time to time a company breaches that "trust". It can even be convenient up to a certain point (but I don't work in governments etc., this is just the way I see it).
EDIT: the only time they probably did something similar was against piracy/p2p/blocking emule and all that :) but we all know money moves mountains
The good thing about it is that you give them a chance to comply and ease your concerns. If they fail to do so, you then you can ban them for actually failing to do something instead of being Chinese or making you nervous or something. This makes all the difference.
It's all about freely operating within the rule of law or leaving it to some bureaucrats gut that some app can be dangerous.
That's what US is doing, if I got it right. Tiktok apparently is not playing by the rules, hence a ban. Not today, maybe tomorrow... who knows.
- the COVID pandemic reduced some of our freedoms, but now they are back.
- GPDR is not perfect regulation. It has holes that let bad behavior sneak through.
RE: Your first point. This is an apples to oranges comparison. COVID restrictions were never anything unusual - the CDC has had legal authority to enforce quarantine for a very long time. It used those powers ascribed to it by law, and then stopped doing so when it was no longer needed. That's not at all what this thread is about, which is the government deciding that certain applications are unacceptable for it's citizens by fiat.
RE: Your second point. The EU has much stronger protections under GPDR than if it didn't exist. The answer to an imperfect regulation is not to abandon the regulation, it's to improve it. That's why we have a process to build new laws or change them. To solve problems. It's like saying the problem with your car is that it is low on oil, so instead of refilling the oil you decide to just walk.
I am not living in the US, however in Europe it was hell. And it was decided by the governments from each country. If I recall, some regulations became even EU-based, like traveling. We're still West, although a bit more east :) It was not about an application you have on your phone, true, but governments are the ones paid for seeing the long term vision: if citizens die (because of covid) or there is a national security issue (because another country is milking your citizens' data), you have to do something about it. This is why I compared those two topics, albeit different. For me there is no loss of freedom in either case, but I can understand those who feel their freedom taken away.
Regarding the second point, I love the fact there is the GDPR. And like you I agree it must be improved. The question is: what can you do in this case? We're talking about bit and bytes flowing through cables. How do users make sure that companies are respecting the laws? It's basically impossible. And that's when governments become aggressive: we need our whatsapp, ... we need to stop tiktok...and all that talk that might seem from unfortunate (fascist) times.
Even if they do, how do you enforce it? The way I see it all paths of enforcement lead to a ban. I would bet a lot of money that tiktok is already in violation of several of the patchwork of laws that protect US online privacy.
And it's not just tiktok it's the thousands of shity games/apps owned partially by tencent.
Onerous regulation and business-killing fines have the added bonus of making the collection of personal data extremely unappealing. This is a case where the threat of regulation and enforcement has a strongly positive chilling effect on an industry.
And, if you're in an industry that must collect personal information for whatever reason, it's still possible and legal.
This wouldn't be nearly as big of a problem if Apple & co. didn't have full remote control over what software you are or aren't allowed to run on your device that you paid for and supposedly own.
Agree with other comments that GDPR isn't perfect, but at least its a start! I work in Finance, and their regulation around things like Open Banking (e.g. PSD2) is great. Of course they have their bad aspects, but overall they level the commercial playing field and protect consumer freedoms. I worry the US is letting legacy industry dominate the development of our financial (and other industries') infrastructure for short term incumbent gain but long term societal and commercial detriment.
Our state's legislation bans all traffic to TikTok on state networks - such as watching the videos via browser. This seems to be a non-issue until you realize that libraries, public schools and state universities are affected by this legislation.
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/23rs/sb20.html
[0]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/social-media-linked-t...
They may be offended but they (Google for ex.) started to copy the UI
The US and the EU have different goals. EU's goal is to protect their control of propaganda within their borders. Ours is to control propaganda within our borders and protect our social media companies from foreign competitors. There is a reason why the government attacks on tiktok coincides with youtube shorts, facebook reels, instagram reels, etc. EU doesn't have a social media company to champion so they don't have that extra burden of protecting market share.
> I've been living in Turkey for some years now and I promise you, it's not fun.
Tiktok isn't going to go away. Too many companies have invested in tiktok for it to be simply banned. Tiktok is most likely going to be "confiscated". Tiktok parent will most likely be forced to sell tiktok to a US based company.
No country should allow foreign social media to spread propaganda within their borders. Every country should nationalize social media within their borders. It's insane that only the US, China and Russia seem to be protecting their social media space. I just don't get it. Social media can be used to brainwash, divide and destroy any country. It's almost like most of the world's leaders are incompetent.
Ever heard of PRISM ?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
Instead we should just make a deal with China: You allow all of our apps in China and we'll do the same. If not, we'll ban your apps.
The first thing people should think about in trade is fairness. Let's not pile up more ungodly regulations hamstringing everyone and the problem still wouldn't be solved. Chinese apps will continue to skirt the loopholes of any law we can enact barring complete ban.
Remember that china still claim developing status at WTO to keep getting a lot of perks meant to equalize global competion like subsidized parcel shipment. Perks China obviously dont need
[0]https://pcaobus.org/news-events/news-releases/news-release-d...
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-22/china-urg...
[1]https://archive.fo/nXPRg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
Look up the Church commission or Edward Snowden. Or the Hamilton files or all the exposes now of how Big Tech was doing all the censorship for the US government both in the US and even abroad to manipulate elections and do election interference everywhere (just like they censored the Hunter Biden story before the US election).
And probably the real reason that they are upset with TikTok is that the FBI etc. doesn’t have as invasive access, control and censorship of TikTok as they do with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Wikipedia and all the others.
Btw, right now we have a very good example in Georgia, where their parlament tried to implement a word for word copy of the law about foreign agents they got from USA or a softened version, and both USA and EU demanded this law to be rejected. And government there just wanted to let their citizens know what mass media or public figures are funded by foreign governments and NGO’s.
> the threat to completely shut down its platform, subsided only after TikTok began appointing Western officials to important positions within its organization, thereby giving the state considerable influence over the content and direction of the app.
-They want to consolidate the number of outlets they need to manage
-An interagency conflict between FBI and the ones managing Tiktok
-Financial benefit for the competitors in which security state has financial stake
-Some organizational or architectural issue that makes it difficult to control ????
Seems were just building a substrate for... something. Not to sound too conspiratorial. ;)
If a complete ban on this kind of research (CRISPR-editing wild-type viral sequences to make them more infectious in human cell lines, or in mice expressing human genes, etc.) had been implemented and enforced by NIH and NIAID, this scenario might have been avoided. Any (financial? criminal?) reckoning over who is at fault would result in at least some significant degree of shared liability between the USA and China.
Where's the government to protect us? Where's the FBI? Are they working inside these companies? Is there a clear conflict of interest?
2023: "We Found 28,000 Apps Sending TikTok Data. Banning the App Won't Help." - https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-ban-joe-biden-28000-apps-sdk-data...
- https://www.techuntold.com/dangers-of-instagram/
2022: "Amazon likes to collect an enormous amount of data on you. Things like: records of your shopping habits, Alexa search requests, the TV shows you watch and when you watch them, the music you stream, the podcasts you listen to, when you turn your lights on and off, when you lock your doors, identifiers such as your name, address, phone numbers, or IP address, your age, gender, your location, audio and visual information like those Alexa-requests or photos you take, the names and numbers of people listed in your contacts. The list goes on and on and on." - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/amazon-... - https://www.indy100.com/science-tech/amazon-alexa-device-don... - https://www.ventasdeseguridad.com/en/2022110822789/news/ente... "Ring has a history of not protecting users' privacy. At one point they reportedly stored customer data--including video recordings--unencrypted on an Amazon cloud server and employees could access any of this data. There have also been reported data leaks and concerns that the Ring Doorbell app is full of third-party trackers tracking a good amount of personal information that Amazon Ring doesn’t disclose." 'It was reported that in May, 2022 Amazon's patched Ring's app for Android due a "high-severity" security vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to access personal information, location, and camera recordings.' - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/ring-vi....
2021: - https://news.ncsu.edu/2021/03/alexa-skill-vulnerabilities/ - https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/986005820/after-data-breach-e...
2019: - https://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-anyone-a-ring-camera-1840070640 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/04/19/alexa-is-lis... - jimt1234 ↗ I still don't understand the "national security concerns" from TikTok. It seems there's two: legitster ↗ > Also, couldn't the CCP just purchase this same/similar data from a thousand other data brokers? kornhole ↗ These claims about Tiktok have been used for years, and the data collection is not much different from other corp/state social media apps. I assumed the motivation was around information control, but as researched here, https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tikto..., the company is well influenced by NATO intelligence now. The cognitive warfare landscape is evolving. I am really not sure what the justification is at this point. Perhaps they want fewer platforms to control, the architecture is not conducive to the level of control they desire, the FBI is not aligned with agencies controlling Tiktok? dcl ↗ What's wrong with a simple reciprocal policy, if they don't allow foreign owned/controlled social media in their state, we don't allow theirs here. [dead] timcavel ↗ [dead] lazyeye ↗ What does it matter whether TikTok is a security threat (although it clearly is). cainxinth ↗ Any chance the people in this thread can stop with the whataboutism (“The U.S. does it too!”) and focus on the topic at hand: is TikTok a national security threat or not? alxmng ↗ The FBI is a national security concern. hedora ↗ > Wray told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats to U.S. security that the Chinese government could also use TikTok to control software on millions of devices and drive narratives to divide Americans over Taiwan or other issues.
1. The CCP has access to video-view and location data 2. The CCP can manipulate video streams to push a narrative
For #1, isn't TikTok mostly just a bunch of teenagers dancing? Who cares if the CCP access this data? Also, couldn't the CCP just purchase this same/similar data from a thousand other data brokers? For #2, pushing a narrative pretty much defines social media apps these days, for better and for worse. So, why is it so bad on TikTok or when the CCP does it? Heck, Fox News is constantly parroting Russian propaganda, yet no one is talking about banning the channel. What makes TikTok/CCP so much worse that the app needs to be banned?
I honestly don't understand what makes TikTok so much more threatening than what's already going on. What am I missing?
Contrary to popular belief, data-broker data is generic and not very good. Knowing that you are a 30s male who likes beer is not as useful as, say, finding out you are a high ranking military official and what remote locations you visit in the US.
> #1, isn't TikTok mostly just a bunch of teenagers dancing?
How quickly TikTok understands your preferences and feeds you content you like is scary. And it's designed to send you down niche rabbit holes. You may start watching construction videos, but within an hour you may be watching a nurse tell you pharmaceutical companies are trying to kill us but set to a fun dance.
In what other trade context would it be acceptable for one country to block all access to its own market (e.g Facebook, Twitter etc) whilst still enjoying full access to everybody elses?
How is it remotely unreasonable to treat China in the same way it treats everybody else?
Good point. Now can we have our laws banning foreign control of news outlets and consolidation of media ownership back?