To be fair, the distinction here is about actions by a government, versus actions by private entities. Opposition to the government banning a website does not necessarily mean that you would oppose private companies refusing to provide service to a bad actor.
At the behest of the government, no doubt. The Twitter Files show that the real situation is a lot more messy.
Large internet "infrastructure" businesses are in partnership with government officials, so I have no reason to believe that the Parler takedown was anything but political censorship. Maybe not technically, but definitely in spirit and effect - and after all, that's all that really matters.
The internet is largely made up of private companies. If Comcast decides to not route traffic to you there is nothing you can do. Private companies are the ones who decide if the internet is open or closed. The government can influence these companies behaviour, but companies technically can do what they want.
When I was growing up behind the Iron Curtain, we had a joke: in communism, the companies are owned by the government. In capitalism, it is the other way around.
On this topic, the point is, that something is banned by someone with the appropriate means. It doesn't really matter whether it is government or private enterprise, because they meet in the backroom and coordinate their steps anyway. In the end, it doesn't matter who's initiative it was, who did the execution, but the purpose and result itself.
Parler was taken down because the companies that hosted their services no longer wished to because of the content on the platform. This is complete incomparable with a piece of legislation.
"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them"
China is an existential threat for western block. She is buying almost all mines of raw materials needed for batteries and green economy, generally speaking, she's going to buy russian gas at great discount, she's undermining western established institutions.
Maybe it's a good thing for the world to be more balanced towards a so big autocracy, it seems majority of people don't care about democracy. But I'm egoist, I live in the west and I care about the future of my country.
I've been hearing this for years, possibly decades. If China is such an existential threat, why didn't we (the wealthiest country in the world) buy up those mines ourselves?
Why is TikTok of all things where we're making our stand? I don't buy it.
The US Government has very little interest in becoming the employer of mines overseas... and rightfully so. The accusations of colonialism when applied to the United States are quite appropriate.
Having arbitrary companies buy the mines is something that they occasionally do - however, that comes with the risk of exposing themselves to the corruption and issues of the country where the mines are located. The FCPA https://www.trade.gov/us-foreign-corrupt-practices-act makes it difficult for companies that aren't going to use bribery to compete against other companies and countries where corruption isn't seen as an issue.
These can make it rather difficult for the United States government or a company based in the United States to try to "buy up" the raw materials of other countries.
TikTok, however, is a way for one government that the US has a strained relationship with to potentially direct the public discourse in the US or use it to track / identify individuals. The spying that was mentioned is https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
> TikTok has admitted that it used its own app to spy on reporters as part of an attempt to track down the journalists’ sources, according to an internal email.
> The data was accessed by employees of ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company and was used to track the reporters’ physical movements. The company’s chief internal auditor Chris Lepitak, who led the team involved in the operation, has been fired, while his China-based manager Song Ye has resigned.
> ...
> ByteDance and TikTok had initially issued categorical denials of the allegations when they were first reported. The company claimed it “could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested”, and added that TikTok had never been used to “target” any “members of the US government, activists, public figures or journalists”. Those claims are now acknowledged to be false.
As a consequence of the US war with the Islamic State across Iraq and Syria; IS had previously occupied Eastern Syria where the oil fields now controlled by the US are located.
> Crickets in the media - because it wouldn’t look good.
Crickets in the news media largely because the news media covers news and static situations aren’t news (same reason whey the occupation of Crimea got intense coverage for a short time in 2014 and then critics until 2022, which wasn’t because Russian aggression and occupation looks bad for the US.)
The news media covers events related the US presence in Syria, but the ongoing fact just isn’t news.
"The news media covers events related the US presence in Syria, but the ongoing fact just isn’t news."
I hard disagree - smuggling out oil in multiple large convoys by the US military from a region just after a significant natural disaster is most certainly news. But the US media will never cover something like this.
> In 2020, a U.S. firm called Delta Crescent Energy LLC secured a deal with the Kurdish authorities under an authorization from the U.S. government. The firm’s partners include former U.S. ambassador to Denmark James Cain, also a Republican campaign donor; James Reese, a former U.S. special forces officer; and an experience oil executive, John Dorrier Jr.
> The Daily Beast reported that Delta was to earn $1 per barrel of oil exported from Syria, according to government filings. Dorrier, the firm’s CEO, had worked with a U.K. oil company with offices in Syria. He told the Military Times that Delta “had some $2 billion in contracts to sell oil into the international market that will benefit American allies in northeast Syria that have helped in the fight against the Islamic State group.”
> The Assad foreign ministry called it all a U.S. plot to “steal Syria’s crude oil.” The ministry described the Kurdish forces as “terrorist militias,” and predicted they would be defeated by the government.
> Delta Crescent Energy was the only firm licensed by the U.S. government to work in Syria. The license was permitted despite U.S. Treasury sanctions aimed at punishing the Assad regime.
> Things changed when the new Biden administration did not renew Delta’s sanctions waiver this year.
> In February, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that the 900 American troops then in Syria were there to resist IS and “are not authorized to provide assistance to any other private company, including its employees or agents, seeking to develop oil resources in Syria.”
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Do you have any additional sources that support the US is using Syrian oil fields for supplying US Bases?
You have to look at non MSM and non US media sources. What is declared "formally" by the US is not what goes on under the hood. US is generally famous for underhanded stuff like this in the middle-east.
Smuggling out and plundering valuable resources from a region that has undergone a disaster is what I call "evil" by any definition.
Also, you may wish to find and talk to some savvy educated Syrians. They will laugh if you suggest the US is doing nothing of the sort. Of-course, usually, there will be no American citizen doing this - it will be all done by third parties. They made a mistake here by explicitly involving the US Army and thus this got extensively publicised (in the non Western media).
What do you mean by existential threat? Walk me through the scenario that starts with the US not banning TikTok and ends with the non-existence of the US.
On top of that, maybe we shouldn't put tolerance itself as a goal? It's a tool. And a tool that can be greatly abused. But nowadays it seems to be a goal by itself. Which both opens up a lot of abuse and seems a wee meaningless as a goal by itself.
Combine this with "lies spread faster than truth," and you can see why advancements in communication technology proceed periods of social upheaval, at least until inoculating social technologies are developed to moderate the synergy of these two effects.
> Combine this with "lies spread faster than truth,"....
Even more complicated:
- this applies to all piecs of information, including mainstream "truths" that are not actually true
- there is an important distinction between lies, speaking untruthfully, speaking misinformatively, etc
- most people are not just bad at epistemology (and related fields), they think they are good (because it seems that way, and "seems true equals true" in our culture) - epistemology is highly counter-intuitive
Yep, the critique of social facts on HN gas gotten me some of the most extreme responses. It's also frankly, delightful to frame personal opinion in the language of social fact and have folks wires get fried not knowing how to respond. Espistomology can have it's entertaining and playful side too. :)
That's fine but domestic businesses should be held to the same standard. China doesn't allow TikTok BS to be disseminated in their territory. The same reasoning should apply to FB and Twitter.
Exactly the same arguments against TikTok can be made for basically any social media, "dumbing down the population". Only difference is what country's laws the company is regulated under, which hardly makes one better than the other.
The contention here is that one country does not allow the other to do business in their territory, yet complains when their product is threatened with a ban.
The contention is _not_ that double standards are being applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.
I'm not sure if banning foreign businesses is "censorship".
But if you insist on calling money "speech" and banning foreign businesses "censorship" then it turns out, under your very broad definitions, censorship is sometimes a very good thing!
TikTok is not being banned because of what they say, they're being banned for what they are. Ergo it's not censorship.
Same thing when RT was banned across Western Europe. It's not what they were saying that was banned, it's what they are: an arm of the Russian government. Russian shills are still free to peddle their propaganda.
Sometimes two wrongs don't make a right. Sometimes you fight fire with fire. We can all pull aphorisms out of our butts to support our side of the argument.
People don't realise how ridiculously asymmetric the relationship between China and the rest of the world is.
Spin up a cloud VM in China now. Go do it. Try.
I can, literally in minutes, go create a virtual machine hosting a web site in some random middle eastern country I probably would not visit because they're anti... everything. Anti-female, anti-christian, anti-gay, anti-freedom, anti everything I hold dear.
But I can create a virtual machine there, right now, no problems.
China? Hah... no.
That would require paperwork, in person, in chinese, paid for in renminbi, from a Chinese bank.
I'd have to get a chinese id, and submit it to a police station to get an authorisation number, which I would then have to display on every page of that web server.
Chinese companies can spin up whatever they want in any country they please.
Every other country has to sign up to Chinese censorship laws to publish anything at all on that side of the Great Firewall.
it is not about them, its about why should there be some entity out there that censors my information and decides what I'm allowed to see and what I'm not allowed to see? why does the government here feel like it must interfere with me, censor and babysit me?
The proposed ban on TikTok is not about you. No one cares to babysit you. They want to punish china for the perceived injustice (and security risk).
China has an asymmetric market, and it’s bad for US businesses but good for Chinese businesses. The US wants to send a message to china that it can also punish businesses that it doesn’t like.
yeah but it amounts to straight up censorship. Someone in the government decides what is safe for the citizens to see. How do you even ban it, does the US have mechanisms in place to enforce a government ban on a web site/app?
It’s incidental censoring. The content can and will move elsewhere, so it’s not preventing speech just limiting where it can go.
Yes the US has a mechanism to ban a company and that should apply to that company’s app. It’s just trade restrictions like with Huawei. Banning a website will be harder, but by banning advertisers from paying for ads it’ll destroy the profitability of serving American consumers.
Apart from what vineyardmike mentioned, there's a few additional levers, like having the app removed from app stores. I don't know what the current state of their traffic and DNS filtering capabilities, but if they really wanted to go nuclear they have jurisdiction over the com TLD. Wouldn't be the first time they've seized a domain on "national security, etc." grounds.
You can do all that easily in HKSAR, but you're mostly correct about the mainland. (technically you don't need a Chinese ID, just a permanent residence)
When President Trump raised tariffs on China in 2017 - economic soundness aside - the media commentary initially lambasted it as unprovoked xenophobic aggression. But the outrage soon died down as people looked at the numbers and saw it was a mere reciprocal setting of our tax rate to match or reach a fraction of China’s (and hopefully would enable future lowering negotiations). Now, in 2023, President Biden has maintained that course and the public has come around to more hawkish policy.
Pushing back on China, economically, has been broadly popular for a long damn time. It's just unpopular-among-actual-voters neoliberal trade policy, which has been the consensus policy of both major parties for decades, that's kept us from doing it—Trump, very notably, was the first major party Presidential candidate to run since probably some time in the '80s, on a platform with such a strong anti-neoliberal stance.
The media were freaking out about the trade restriction on China, but my circle of D-voting friends and I (and I'm about as libby-lib as a lib can lib) who mostly hated Trump were like "fucking good, more of this please".
I think he mostly caught at least as much shit as he deserved over his shenanigans (far less, in some cases—my "oh no, this is gonna be really bad for the health of our democracy" moment was when he made his "2nd amendment people" remark and suffered no meaningful consequences, back in the '16 campaign) but there were a handful of cases like that, where the negative media response was sharply at odds with our (as, again, solid D voters who AFAIK all voted against him twice) reactions to things he did.
Funnily enough, spinning a cloud VM is quite easy actually. You can do it in seconds on Alibaba Cloud. Getting port 80 unblocked on the other hand...
Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't really just create a single website that serves both western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is stopping them, doing this is just going give your western customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America and complying with all local laws to do so.
How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one. You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but, again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into the western market with millions of dollars with the acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some American competitor.
Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you.
Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has already done with the GDPR ...
I can think of one - banning superior foreign products and services mean that people have to use inferior local substitutes. Just because the CCP doesn't want Chinese people to use the best available products is no reason to deny them to Americans. Americans should have access to the best products that they can afford.
This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
That being said, there is always an argument for banning foreign social media companies (really all media companies) from making commercial profits in other countries. The political and military risks are significant.
When the product is commercializing and manipulating its users, though, things aren’t so clear. Is it a gift, or a Trojan horse? That’s the open question here, regardless of Congress’s demagogic motives.
> banning superior foreign products and services mean that people have to use inferior local substitutes.
TikTok is only superior in poisoning the minds of people using it here in US. That's why the Chinese version is different. I think zero is lost if people use the inferior local ones in this case.
> This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
Sure, the optimal solution for the prisoner's dilemma is that both cooperate. But once one doesn't cooperate, the optimal solution is not to cooperate. US looks like a dummy waving the flag of morality while China laughs in its face.
TikTok is superior in rapidly distributing relatively niche information to enormous quantities of interested parties.
I believe the current recommended example is "Go look up France on TikTok vs look up France on Instagram"
Addendum: TikTok is also superior at dynamically generating an advertisable collective that are specifically interested and desiring of the ads they're given. Five million small businesses found their place on TikTok entirely because they found their 2000-person size niche that would be interested in buying their product, and even encouraged them to buy it.
I agree with the sentiment, but in this case the value TikTok provides for free speech outweighs China's unfair trade policies, which have been this way for a couple decades.
Because American citizens (are supposed to) have rights that Chinese citizens don't. The first amendment covers access to information. Banning TikTok is a violation of all Americans' first amendment rights.
Banning TikTok even runs counter to the value we hear used to justify the first amendment: diversity of thought and discourse is inherently good; it allows people to decide for themselves using their faculties of rationality. We even have Benjamin Franklin and polemic if not mis-attributed Voltaire quotes[1] used to inspire a basis for free speech.
Except for some reason, diversity of thought and free speech ideals aren't actually used to justify speech people disagree with, namely China's. This two-mouthed approach is noticed. It de-legitimizes the diversity of thought value.
To anyone who has argued for free speech before but is silent now, your silence says more than your speech ever could.
I agree that banning TikTok on the grounds of its algorithm being controlled by China is dubious. After all, it is content, it is information, and it is up to an open society to call out the fact that social media is trash, that Chinese social media is anti-American disinformation poison.
However, it is reasonable to believe tiktok's recommendations are crafted to harm American intellect, prey on vanity to reward shallow behavior, and gather large scale behavioral and physical activity (site tracking, habits, physical location, items in homes, etc) for the purposes of the Chinese government. If it is recognized as a spy tool of a hostile government, why permit it?
>As suspicious as the US federal government is, I don't think what those companies do is as tightly coupled with the government as TikTok and China.
They have backdoors to all major tech companies, they actively try to control discourse in social media and they just bailed out their tech sector. If that's not being tightly coupled, I don't know what is.
>Do you think the Chinese government is generally hostile to the long term success of Western liberalism?
No
>Do you think the Chinese government has meaningful influence on the behavior of TikTok or its recommendation engine?
Probably but no concrete evidence exists
>Do you think TikTok data on its hundreds of millions of users is available for general analysis to the Chinese government?
To the same extent our data is available to the US and its allies, yes. But China cannot do much with my data, my government can.
Yes, yes, yes, but I will defend to the death for their right to say it! Free speech means accepting speech one doesn't want to hear, especially if it leads to outcomes one doesn't desire.
Did not vote, but it's because the "and nothing of value was lost" sentiment is trite. People might even agree, but there are more hacker-newsy ways of delivering that message and a better rhetorical delivery might find better reception.
I'm not sure what Ben Franklin quote you are referring to. While I'm sure he valued diversity of thought and discourse, I don't know of a clever phrase of his that gets often used.
His security-liberty quote. It's easy to frame this as "trading the liberty of free speech and free association for the security of being free from Chinese propaganda," and I agree that we should be discussing the validity of that framing as fervently as we possibly can because at the face of it, it appears to be exactly that. Every argument against that framing seems to be trying to carve out an exception for the purpose of security, often with extreme language of existential threat.
I don't see why anyone would argue on security. They keep American social networks and software products out unless they "partner" with a Chinese company. It seems obvious we shouldn't allow a double standard here.
We gave up on forcing China to keep opening up to US trade if they want us to reciprocate. We shouldn't do that.
Banning the operation of a foreign-controlled corporation from a state that harshly restricts foreign economic activities in their borders is hardly a first amendment issue. It's not even close.
[EDIT] Case law citations would be a lot more convincing than downvotes.
We aren't going to go to war vs the owners of Facebook any time soon. But maybe for the owners of TikTok.
China's Navy is already more numerous than the USA's Navy, and they include advanced stealth destroyers and probably Hypersonic Missiles.
I don't want to be a racist asshole like some others online. But there is a geopolitical reality coming towards us and we need to start preparing for it. Nothing against the Chinese people or their culture or whatever, but their leaders have some goals that conflict with the USAs goals, and it could turn hot over the next 10 years.
I'm talking about Taiwan. If China attacks Taiwan, it will be as obvious as Russia attacking Ukraine.
And the USA should support Taiwan. Not only because we get AMD, Apple, NVidia, Qualcomm, automobile chips, and F35 RADAR chips from that island... But also because Taiwan is our ally from WW2 days and we have a long history of friendship with them.
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Let me be clear, once again. Taiwan manufactures Xilinx FPGAs that are in direct support to the F35 project.
There is a geopolitical reality here that cannot be ignored.
The United States recognizes the People's Republic of China as the sole legal government of China and acknowledges the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China. This is known as the "One China policy".
The United States needs China for industrial and consumer goods. Our economy is brittle and will quickly break without them. This is the logical result of US policy. China clamping down on Taiwan from the official US position is effectively China more tightly controlling thwir existing territory.
Not even close to what happened in Russia vs. Ukraine situation.
The Kuomintang were our allies in WW2, and were forced to retreat to Taiwan in 1949.
When the famous WW2 Pilot Doolittle did his famous raid on Japan and crash-landed in China, it was the Kuomintang who saved those pilots and returned them safely to the USA, despite the Japanese atrocities that were occurring. (Well, Imperialist Japan did capture some of those pilots... but the Kuomintang did what they could)
Communist China then took over most of China and forced Kuomintang to retreat to Taiwan by 1949. And we call those people "Taiwanese" today. Historically, they are the rightful owners of China, though they lost the civil war.
Today, we're strategically ambiguous to try to not piss off China about our different viewpoints of history. But we're quickly coming to the point where ambiguity no longer helps. We're likely heading for war unfortunately.
> We aren't going to go to war vs the owners of Facebook any time soon
Speak for yourself! From my perspective, entrenched business interests have very much been at war with the people of this country for a long time.
A growing military competitor notwithstanding, the real issue we're facing here is that we've based our society around this fiction that wealth makes right - under an assumption that the wealthy will compete amongst themselves to grow their own wealth in a straightforward (short term) manner. This framework is utterly unprepared for dealing with large (extremely wealthy) actors that push in more structured and less immediately profitable directions, with the goal of reaping dividends decades in the future.
I recognize that we use the word "war" with much hyperbole here in the USA.
But when I'm using "War with China", I'm talking about true war, like the kind going on in Ukraine. I'm talking about vicious weapons designed to kill hundreds, or thousands, in the blink of an eye, and at risk of escalation into Nuclear Armageddon.
In this context, I am not taking the word "war" with any amount of whimsy or hyperbole. This isn't a "class war", or "war on poverty" or "war on drugs". What we're unfortunately preparing for is a true war.
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With any luck, China will back down and keep the tenuous peace and status quo.
The USA's count of China's ships ignores the 224 close-to-shore coast guard ships.
China has 351 surface combat ships, against the USA's 294. Yes, our Navy is still superior by capabilities, but China continues to mass produce ships, including large cruisers and carriers. They are not a threat to take lightly anymore.
If we include the 224 coast guard ships, then China's fleet is well over 575 ships as of 2022. I'm talking only of the 351 combat ships that would likely play a role in a hypothetical Taiwan confrontation.
I mean, the US has 243 coast guard ships, if you want to be pedantic (ignoring the 1400+ boats less than 65' long).
But yes, China keeps producing ships. I have no idea what will happen in a Taiwan Straight conflict where we've escalated to open conventional war looks like. I imagine that the air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missiles will be the determining factor.
But there's also a major difference. The US has a blue-water navy that can project power globally - enough power that it's an open question if the largest country in the world with the second-highest GDP can stand up to it in their back yard. There's no symmetric threat to the US where the Chinese Navy can get close enough to the West Coast have a similar threat.
US Navy will have to expose itself to Chinese missiles and Chinese Air Force, and those small Missile Patrol Boats, to defend Taiwan.
China isn't thinking about attacking Hawaii or the West Coast. What China is trying to do in the near term is complete its takeover of ... well... what it believes to be part of China.
And because various F35 chips are made in Taiwan, its a threat we cannot afford to ignore. (Along with all of our video game consoles, GPUs, AI Tensor processors, and other strategic level computer systems)
Yes, the US Navy is unrivaled. But in a local, regional conflict... especially supported by the largest Airforce in the world (China has a lot of airplanes), and some of the largest ground-based missile forces in the world (China also has a lot of advanced missiles), the US Navy very well could lose the fight to defend Taiwan.
I'm pretty sure the US Navy will park on the far side of Taiwan and attack stuff outside line of sight. Missiles and air force attacks I can see. Those Patrol boats will be barely different than land-based missile launch platforms.
> supported by the largest Airforce in the world (China has a lot of airplanes)
The US Navy has more aircraft than the Chinese Air Force does. The US Air Force has like 4 times as many, and can stage a good chunk of them over the Straight as well.
South Korea and Japan combined have about as many planes as China, and I have no idea if they (or India) get involved.
But yeah, I have no idea what happens if it stays conventional, and I have no idea how likely it is that it stays conventional (and obviously WMDs mean no one knows what happens). Given the number of fast options (e.g. missiles) to sink ships, I imagine we'll know who will win the fight quickly, but it might take months to actually slog it out.
They don't really need to park themselves between mainland and China, they already have enough forces amassed on the Ryukyus, they don't even need to bother using aircraft carriers.
The YJ-21 is 1500km, more than enough to strike Japan's mainland let alone the nearby Ryukyus. If the US Navy wishes to support Taiwan, we will be open to those missiles.
So? You don't think the USA has the same missiles in Japan and Korea ready to go as well? If China wants to launch missiles at Japan, what would stop the USA from launching similar missiles at China?
But they have the capability to launch missiles at a US Carrier Strike Group who has retreated towards Japan. That means that our Navy will be within Chinese missile range during Taiwanese defense operations.
We aren't going to support Taiwan from Japan or Korea. We're going to use our Supercarriers to sail closer and then support Taiwan in a more direct fashion. But that means our carriers have a high chance of being shot at, and possibly sunk, by these missiles. And we'll need to sail very far away (far in excess of Japan) before our CSG is safe from the Chinese missile range.
I absolutely expect our Carriers to be attacked, and possibly even sunk, in the upcoming fight.
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There's still a lot of ocean to hide in when our CSGs enter that missile range. It will be a matter of killing the Chinese sensors (ex: drones, spycraft, and avoiding satellites) which are looking for our carriers.
We're gonna need our Carriers to be closer so that there's a reasonable response time to scramble and defend Taiwan. If it takes 2-hours for our airplanes to launch from a Carrier and support Taiwan (because they're cowards and hiding in Japan), then our airplanes simply will be too late to help with the defense. I don't know how fast the Chinese can scramble and attack Taiwan, but they have gross advantages in terms of distance. Only a Carrier can even the odds, and that carrier needs to be physically close to Taiwan. That's just how the fight will go.
Yes they do. And so does the USA. The only question is how far China is willing to go to take Taiwan, and how far the USA is willing to counter them over the island. Technically speaking, the USA is already in the region, they placed a bunch of resources in the Ryukyus specifically as a deterrent to China invading Taiwan, and why they don't need to be in Taiwan proper for that deterrent to be effective.
The USA does not need carriers anywhere near Taiwan when China invades. They can handle everything from island airstrips. And we totally would support Taiwan from the Ryukyus, thats the whole reason we are there to begin with.
Projected Marine MLR deployment in Ryukyus and whatever JP is throwing to fortify is nowhere near "mass". It's not close to replacing sortie/fires output of carrier groups. Ryukyus is TW "alternative" in terms of peacetime PRC containment, i.e. stationing signit, dragging sosus infra, stationing some irbms, but it's just as much a deathtrap as TW proper during hot war. The argument for Ryukyus is that even if TW falls, US has comparable geographic access to 1st island chain containment, not that it's really significant/survivable forward stationing during war. Dissenting analysis (imo the more reasonable assessment) of Ryukyu posture is boils down to, marines need a reason to justify defense pie in IndoPac, but rationale not not great because island groups that close to PRC are unsuppliable death sentence once shooting starts.
China has built hundreds of Naval ships and is beginning to overtly threaten Taiwan with flyovers.
We all see where this is going. We know Xi wants Taiwan. Selling weapons to Taiwan so that they can better defend themselves is the moral thing to do.
Its the same thing as how the Russians blame USA for "extending" the war in Ukraine. Erm, yeah. That's the point. When we see evil and decide to do something to stop it, it makes it harder for evildoers to do what they want to do. And I think its a good thing to make Taiwan harder to get taken over.
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All China has to do, to avoid the war... is to not start it. Its not like Taiwan is in any position to attack China right now or anytime in the foreseeable future.
Shooting down a spy balloon won't start a war. And similarly, sending a spy balloon over won't start a war either. Both sides (USA and China) are smarter than that.
The only thing that really has a chance to start a war is this Taiwan situation. I don't see any room for diplomacy anymore.
> ... we see evil and decide to do something to stop it ...
Hilarious. Do you actually believe US foreign policy has anything to do with "good and evil," and if so, could you explain how this drove the decision to, oh I dunno, bomb Guatemala city? Or annex Hawaii? Or arm Saudi Arabia to the teeth? Or pick virtually any foreign intervention since WWII, really.
I point out that your moral posturing is pure bullshit, and you reply with more moral posturing about Evil, an accusation of "whataboutism," and demand a solution to "the Taiwan situation." Sorry, I'm not equipped to handle this.
I'm not entirely sure what Saudi Arabia, Hawaii, or Guatemala have to do with Taiwan.
I see that you're pissed off about these other world events, but I'm not sure what any of that has to do with the subject matter. As such, I conclude you're trying to do the Russian propaganda technique "whataboutism", where you detract from the primary discussion point by talking about unrelated subjects. The way I try to defeat this is by simply staying focused and avoid trying to be distracted by the obvious red herrings.
> Sorry, I'm not equipped to handle this.
Are you equipped to talk about Taiwan in any capability? Do you have any perspective worth sharing on that subject? I recognize that various people of the world have anti-American views, good or bad, worth sharing.
But with regards to this topic (TikTok ban), its clear that Taiwan and the military situation stands front and center.
Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it a lot lately and we have to ban such accounts because we're trying to be a different kind of site than that, and would prefer not to burn to a crisp. Scorched earth isn't ineresting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> I conclude you're trying to do the Russian propaganda technique "whataboutism"
Please don't take HN threads further into political/national flamewar, and please follow the HN rule against calling names in arguments a little more broadly. The epithet "whataboutism" qualifies as the latter—it's a label that's used to silence argument rather than respond to it. If someone brings up an example that's not relevant, a counterargument should explain what the difference is that makes it irrelevant—not simply denounce it based on what side it's on.
I mean, I could use the term "non-sequitur" (ie: an argument that is ultimately irrelevant in the current discussion, designed to distract rather than inspire) but it feels like you're just following it up with the fallacy-fallacy.
At some point, describing the opponent's argument style in what I feel is going on is important. Its a meta label. If you think "whataboutism" is a poor term, then I'll substitute non-sequitur from here on out. But I don't think my discussion point changes.
It is a fallacy to distract from an argument by posting irrelevant stuff. If I make a challenge with whataboutism (or non-sequitur), the correct response is the same. The opponent should better describe why their words are relevant to the discussion. Or alternatively, change their argument's form so that it is relevant to the discussion.
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You're right that over use of fallacies / labels can lead to a fallacy, ie: the fallacy-fallacy. That is, someone using fallacies could be making a good point and still be contributing to the discussion. And its a mistake to focus on their poor form rather than their good points.
But the labeling of points / fallacies / and naming of those points is very useful at speeding up debates in my experience and in the typical case. It concisely describes my opinion and sets up a pattern of understanding. So I don't think its a bad thing. It very much depends on the situation.
That is to say: its only a "fallacy fallacy" if I'm ignoring the good points and killing the debate. I'm not sure if I've committed this sin in this case. The other poster seems to have simply stated "What about Hawaii?" without much elaboration on why or how Hawaii could be even relevant to Taiwan... or Tiktok.
I think you already made that core point in your first sentence. There wasn't any need to add further epithets, and when you stoop to 'you're trying to do the Russian propaganda technique "whataboutism"' that's definitely pouring unwanted fuel on an unwanted fire, as well as arguably a personal attack, or at least something that's pretty likely to land as such with the other person.
Yes and if european countries are afraid the US is leaning on facebook to manipulate their views, they should ban facebook!
But if some social media network starts in france, then even if it could manipulate users, france probably doesn't care because they can "control" it with force of law.
This is no different than wanting a domestic steel and fertilizer industry. You want powerful entities to be under your control.
Ok, so you think the government should police every app and if they are developed in a country they consider to be adversarial, then they should ban it? Do you at least see the potential for abuse here?
Don't put words in my mouth, I didn't say "every" app. There are lots of infrastructure you don't want to give away essentially. A flashlight app? Yeah that's probably fine. Gambling? Sure go ahead chinese companies and take people's money for your mobile game. What if splunk was a chinese company? For example, I think we should continue to discuss whether zoom is trustworthy, didn't they get caught routing (maybe accidentally) most stuff through china?
Facebook once purposely manipulated depressed kids by adjusting what was shown to them in their feed. They should have been burned down the second that happened, and no country should allow that nonsense, even if you trust the american legal system to work. In much the same way, we should not trust tiktok, as chinese companies are incredibly opaque, so we would have a much harder time finding red flags to key us in to any nefarious activity.
In the same way, we probably shouldn't let a secretive private company have a thumb on the scale of a significant amount of american life. If we only have the political capital to ban tiktok right now because "China bad" then oh well, sometimes doing the right thing for the wrong reason is okay, like when Trump pushed for transparency in medical pricing. I don't think a free market health system is a workable system, but that was still a beneficial step in our current system.
Others say all this talk is cover because the actual law being discussed is much more draconian and gross. I would not be in favor of that.
They can, as can everyone else, just in different quantities. But you have a very low opinion of people who aren't you in assuming that everyone but you is going to be brainwashed if you can't decide what they are and are not allowed to be exposed to.
They are afraid of China getting unchecked access to the data and being able to manipulate the recommendation algorithm to subtle manipulate to public opinion about some topics.
> apply some oversight to this process...
They don't care about that, they also get the data they need from other companies they have much more influence one. Like phone companies, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, etc. etc.
> A warrant signed off by a judge is required to compel companies to comply with requests.
It’s…not. Administrative subpoenas (some of which have their own unique names, like “National Security Letters”) are a thing, and if legally valid compliance is mandatory. Sure, ultimately, if there is a disagreement about validity that can be taken to court, and a judge will be involved, but that’s not the same thing as a warrant.
The state of the law in the US is that information you share with a company no longer carries an expectation of privacy, so the government can get it without a warrant. This is called the "third-party doctrine."
Any areas where higher scrutiny is required have been specifically added by statute.
There's been some slight pushback recently against this state of affairs from the Supreme Court in the area of geolocation data, but the general rule still stands.
The federal government is the biggest spender on the planet. Sure, if they ask you for some data it wants and you refuse, they'll need to resort to legalistic methods of forcing you to get that data. Or they can dangle the prospect of their spending going elsewhere if you don't comply. Can you afford to turn down the largest economic entity on the planet?
This assumes that the government is sincere in its complaint that their concern is about user's data. I think that's cover for what they're really concerned about: user's beliefs.
TikTok is arguably the most powerful means to spread ideas, and people in that line of business do not appreciate outsiders on their turf.
The whole TikTok thing itself seems like a distraction from the contents of the bill they've drafted under the guise of only banning TikTok.
Democracy as it is is a giant magic trick, and TikTok is pulling back the curtains in it, so it must go.
I don’t know if it has been, and it would be extremely difficult to prove one way or the other.
But the potential is obvious. China already heavily manipulates content for domestic consumption, and foreign information in other contexts. Why would TikTok be an exception?
US television censors, program directors, editors “heavily censor” acceptable content. Before the internet TV was the goto black box of censored and cultivated information.
No official government body does not prevent unofficial collusion. People go to dinner, play golf, define how to scratch each others backs given the rules.
Americans are no less propagandized and experiencing information shaping. Prattling on about the authority of dead men’s political documents and philosophy is propaganda.
That is a solution, but there's nothing simple about it. Obviously there's an even much simpler solution than coming up with what would be a very very complex set of regulations and laws, that would have impact across all the industry, and that btw tech giants would love. The really simple solution could be done tomorrow, without the need of figuring out what "proper" is in this case.
Not that what you're saying shouldn't happen, but it's a different battle that needn't be intertwined with this one.
Technically I don't think the legislature or FTC can cherry pick losers. Though I suppose that's the reason for all the discussion around the implications of allowing TikTok to continue in light of trade imbalances and alleged cultural subterfuge.
If you want a fair and simple solution that applies to all companies, how about this? If an American company isn't allowed to operate in a foreign country, then don't let companies in the same industry from that country operate here. So TikTok would be banned here since China bans Twitter, etc.
Massive fine(s) for repeat offences would be even better. The EU does it for GDPR and takes companies single digit percentage of worldwide annual revenue(s).
The majority of these US companies have already been fined like this. The same should happen to TikTok if they want to continue to follow the regulations in the US.
Complex regulation like that is much harder to sell U.S. voters. A lot of Americans are libertarians or libertarian-leaning, so their first instinct is to reject regulation out of hand, unless it can be shown to be extremely necessary.
Regulation in general is a double-edged sword. While it may be great in the short term if your goal is to rein in the bad behaviour of large companies, in the long run it can act as a pretty effective moat for established companies, preventing startups from effectively being able to compete. A lot of people attribute Europe’s less competitive tech sector (vs the U.S.) to an abundance of complex regulations in the EU.
Americans are almost universally against corporate surveillance though. (Look at the percent that opt out on iOS).
We should pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing right to privacy, and it should apply to both the US government, and to firms operating withing the US.
The proposed law specifies it's targeting China, Iran and Russia, as well as North Korea, Cuba and (the Moros regime of) Venezuela. It also has rules for adding or removing countries from that list going forward.
> The claims that TikTok will become a covert Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda channel are similarly possible but hypothetical.
Isn't the claim the opposite ? tiktok china (douyin) is all about propaganda, education, tech, nationalism, success, &c. while the international version is dumb challenges, addictive content, memes &co
> Douyin vs TikTok also differs in terms of popular content. The most popular on Douyin is definitely educational content, with videos helping to improve skills and grow personally, while on Tik Tok the most popular is narrating videos, which is a great opportunity for artists, singers, and music producers. Therefore, global TikTok is more art-based, with musicians, dancers, and so on, while Douyin is skills and lifestyle-tips-based, with automatic voiceovers with no personal touch.
> “It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, and advocate for social media ethics, said of China’s approach to TikTok.
I get almost no music or dance based content on TikTok. It's algorithm almost exclusively returns videos on topics I'm interested in. Usually a mix of politics, science, cooking, crafts, cat, and couples content.
The simple explanation as to why content popularity varies across countries seems to be that there are cultural differences at play. Frankly, it feels like a lot of people are simply uncomfortable with seeing their cultural values reflected back at them.
I have no hate for TikTok, I'm sure it's useful for many. But I tend to get quickly bored of echo-chambers (HN included sometimes), where if I like some content, doesn't mean I just want to see content like that.
I need to "reset" my history of YouTube sometimes after I "spend" watching 3-4 videos of some topic, and now my YouTube is overrun with just content related to that, instead of different topics.
TikTok is guilty of the same, where after using it for a week or two, I basically see no other content than content related to a couple of videos I watched longer than others.
I liked how the internet was before, where I stumbled upon content wildly different from each other, and could acquire new tastes, instead of just being served what the algorithm have decided I should surely forever like.
China has passed a law to allow user to disable algorithmic recommendations. It probably is not in place yet, but that's may be something you are looking for.
What is really want is a algorithm that does the opposite of what current social media does. "You liked this content? Here is some content that is on the opposite side of what you might like, just for you to discover new stuff", but that's less about regulation and legislation and more about companies willing to do something different than the rest.
sounds like you just want to a different product. This is interesting by the way. I wonder how easy to use platform as a content source and run your algorithms on top of it to produce things you like. Maybe they will never expose their data, but it is interesting to think about it though.
IMO, the big problem of this world is fueled by the "like" button concept. The internet would be a much nicer place if we replace "like" with "dislike". "like" typically push people to the extreme, and "dislike" will push people to the middle.
I agree that it can be pretty samey at times. Although, I've found it much better at delivering a wider variety of content than Youtube, where my recommendations consist of videos that:
* I watched once, 12 years ago.
* Sit in recommended for a week or more, despite my obvious lack of interest in them.
* Relate to some subset of recent topics.
It's strange how static Youtube recommendations appear to be as well. I often see the same set of Youtube Shorts for a few days at a time.
I do miss when forums were more popular. It's nice when you stumble across one that's still going.
Firstly, the Verge is trash source, no better than the Daily Mail in their reporting alongside their affiliate marketing grifting with clickbait.
Secondly, a better solution is a multi-billion dollar fine for TikTok's egregious invasion of privacy and the like, worse than the other tech companies and they also got massive fines.
Either TikTok pays a multi-billion dollar in the US or they exit the US market. This is much better than a ban and a win-win-win for TikTok, US gov. / regulators and the users and the ball is in TikTok's court.
The threat is the CCP using TikTok for algorithm-directed propaganda, extortion based on video history, and anything else you can imagine.
A one-time fine doesn't fix that, and you can't get the oversight to make sure consumer data is protected because you're dealing with a state actor. But maybe you're thinking of some sort of recurring fine, like a "Sell Americans As A Service?" SAAAS? Innovations like that could help with the national deficit.
> Secondly, a better solution is a multi-billion dollar fine for TikTok's egregious invasion of privacy and the like, worse than the other tech companies and they also got massive fines.
Where is the evidence that TikTok has been much worse than their peers in this regard?
The congressional hearing was hilarious. I thought the TikTok CEO did great, and the vast majority of questions Congress asked were pants-on-head ridiculous. They are so out of touch.
To be honest it sounds like you've only read the titles of those articles.
Your Futurism article directly contradicts the claim that any of this behaviour is unique to TikTok:
> This isn't the first time that a major social platform has been caught spying on specific individuals. In the past, Facebook and Uber have both been in the hot seat for tracking the locations of journalists and political figures.
The byline of your June 2022 Buzzfeed article implies that TikTok was already actively working to remove foreign access to the data:
> an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.
This largely appears to have born out based on the PBS article regarding the recent congressional hearing[0]:
> As of October (2022), all new U.S. user data was being stored inside the country. The company started deleting all historic U.S. user data from non-Oracle servers this month, in a process expected to be completed this year, Chew said.
> access to U.S. data is managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which is run independently of ByteDance and monitored by outside observers.
The hearing itself was mostly evidence of how unfit many of your elected officials are for office. From a previous comment of mine:
> Buddy Carter confidently believes that TikTok is tracking it's users emotional response through pupil dilation but has no comprehension of why you'd need to identify someone's eyes to put a motion tracking filter over them[2]. According to Mr. Carter, TikTok isn't doing enough to protect younger users but thinks that asking a user their age and checking whether or not the users public videos align with the age they declared is "creepy".
> Dan Crenshaw used his time to state that Chinese law requires it's citizens to co-operate with their national intelligence agencies. That might have been a good point if not for the fact that TikTok's CEO, the person Crenshaw was questioning, is not Chinese.
> Richard Hudson proved himself unable of forming a coherent question as to whether TikTok attempts to access other devices on a WiFi network. Instead asking "So if I have a TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home WiFi network, does TikTok access that network?"
So TikTok not only DID admit to have foreign access to US data, but also lied and denied previously about it then according to the leak in the Buzzfeed New article.
This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before, rather than trying to evade responsibility and join the likes of Facebook who did get fined for privacy violations, if they want to continue to operate in the US.
If Facebook can't get away with the fines, neither should TikTok.
> So TikTok not only DID admit to have foreign access to US data, but also lied and denied previously about it then according to the leak in the Buzzfeed New article.
They never claimed their own employees didn't have access to the data. They claimed that access to the data was controlled and it was stored in data centres not subject to China's jurisdiction[0]:
> First, let's talk about data privacy and security. We store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law. Further, we have a dedicated technical team focused on adhering to robust cybersecurity policies, and data privacy and security practices.
Furthermore, the Buzzfeed article acknowledges that the "foreign access" was typically in the service of restricting that access:
> In the recordings, the vast majority of situations where China-based staff accessed US user data were in service of Project Texas's aim to halt this data access.
The actions of TikTok don't appear to be that of a bad faith actor. They responded to concerns about data privacy by moving customer data from their own data centres to those of an American cloud provider and have shown that they're working to restrict access to that data further.
> This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before, rather than trying to evade responsibility and join the likes of Facebook who did get fined for privacy violations, if they want to continue to operate in the US.
What regulation did TikTok break?
> If Facebook can't get away with the fines, neither should TikTok.
Facebook wasn't fined for allowing internal employees in other countries access to internal data. They were fined for spunking that data all over anyone that winked at them. In the absence of a data breach, I'm not aware of which US law TikTok would have been breaking by allowing specific employees access to internal data.
> They never claimed their own employees didn't have access to the data. They claimed that access to the data was controlled and it was stored in data centres not subject to China's jurisdiction[0]:
That is a clear denial by TikTok since they were already under investigation at the time and denied having such access to US data overseas, then the leak demonstrated that they can (and already did) have access to that data. Showing me a 2019 newsroom post already tells they haven't learned their lesson about overseas data access.
> The actions of TikTok don't appear to be that of a bad faith actor. They responded to concerns about data privacy by moving customer data from their own data centres to those of an American cloud provider and have shown that they're working to restrict access to that data further.
So making it possible for them TO access non-public US user data overseas after saying they couldn't? (and admittedly they already did). Which they did again, when employees accessed the data to trace the source leaks on US journalists and reporters overseas. [0]
With such access overseas also explains why those employees at ByteDance got fired, confirming that ByteDance is able to do it regardless.
> What regulation did TikTok break?
US privacy regulations, like they already have done years before [0]. They are no stranger to getting fined by the FTC, as with Facebook who already faced and paid a massive multi-billion dollar fine.
> Facebook wasn't fined for allowing internal employees in other countries access to internal data. They were fined for spunking that data all over anyone that winked at them. In the absence of a data breach, I'm not aware of which US law TikTok would have been breaking by allowing specific employees access to internal data.
Both cases are unprecedented with the way that user data was handled and accessed. TikTok's case alone is worthy of an extensive investigation by the FTC, since not only they have denied this and then later found to have lied after the leak, it even more deservedly should receive a multi-billion dollar fine with this case as with Facebook has done.
There are no hiding places or defences left for TikTok to fall on. If they can't pay, well they can exit the US market themselves.
Something I find odd is the focus on “data security” in basically all media coverage and politician statements. Is that what’s at issue, or is it the influence the CCP has over people through tik tok? Securing customer data isn’t really what’s at issue… It’s the fact that the CCP have one algorithm for its own people that pushes and popularizes science, economics, and other good subjects but for other countries like the USA it’s basically the polar opposite.
Data security is a red herring. The true danger is that the CCP and business are one and the same, the CCP is in a Cold War with the USA, and the CCP will do whatever it can to gain any advantage it.
> Something I find odd is the focus on “data security” in basically alal media coverage and politician statements. Is that what’s at issue, or is it the influence the CCP has over people through tik tok?
Notice, for the sake of high level rationalism, that this is a false dichotomy.
CCP influence over TikTok is a subset of the bigger problems:
- TikTok, or the medium it operates on, is extremely persuasive, it's the most potent way to spread ideas from one mind to another (for example: the beliefs you hold about China's intents, which you do not actually possess knowledge of).
- The US government does not have a means to exert control over it like the other social media giants.
Well, consider the capabilities of the two platforms, as well as the demographics of users, and so forth and so on.
> any studies/links about that?
Not that I know of, but I have a feeling these discussions have been held at very high levels of the government and various 3 letter agencies, resulting in the mass theatrical spectacle we saw in Congress the other day.....did you watch any of that? Is it not blatantly obvious that in this case, "democracy" is an illusion?
The part where the conversation format, participants, and content was clearly not at a level appropriate for a matter of this importance. High school kids could do MUCH better than what we saw there. If corporations were run as incompetently as much of the government, they'd get crushed by competitors.
Say the CCP invades Taiwan and the United States does not look too kindly on that and helps Taiwan. They could brick a large proportion of phones in the United Sates or maybe just monitor where US military service personnel are. e.g.:
I don't understand why China is allowed to have web products in our markets but we don't seem to be allowed Google, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. in theirs.
We need to just make it a fair playing field and if they want to have software startups on the Internet and in App Stores they need to open their markets to our products too.
> I don't understand why China is allowed to have web products in our markets but we don't seem to be allowed Google, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. in theirs.
Because we're a democracy with free speech and open markets, and China is not? Banning foreign speech and competition is not the victory for our way of life that some people seem to think it is.
There is a problem with TikTok - like ALL social media it uses opaque ranking algorithms that serve nefarious interests, and like ALL social media it spies ruthlessly on its users. How about we address those issues, thereby indirectly resolving the TikTok issue too?
There's no such thing as a free market, regulations are everywhere. One such regulation that I think is perfectly reasonable is that if you want to sell us things we need to be able to sell you things. This is largely true with hardware (e.g. Apple, Tesla sell into China just fine) but most software companies and especially social media have been outlawed.
Just because we are a democracy with different values to the CCP does not mean we should be taken for fools.
But we aren't banning foreign speech, we are banning a foreign platform for information dissemination. I don't see anyone promoting not allowing Chinese citizen's posts to be viewable in the USA. That is what banning foreign speech would look like.
Tiktok gained audience and market share because it happened to be a better product in its niche. Inventing any excuses to ban it is unadulterated hypocrisy.
All the words like "censorship", "free", "CCP", "national security", "china bad" are just euphemisms for childish protectionism of an oversized ego.
Let's say TikTok was the same exact company founded in another country, do you believe that the conversation about banning it would be the same? With some exceptions (maybe Russia, for example), I seriously doubt it.
I never saw publications like The Verge proclaiming that e.g. the ban of Parler was a betrayal of the open internet. Either the term open internet is to be interpreted as the internet which reflects my ideology or (to paraphrase a term made popular in the early days of the public internet) my way or no digital highway or there is just not enough money to be had from tiny players like the aforementioned Parler. No matter what it is it does not bode well for these TikTok-astroturfers.
Checking Wikipedia's Perennial Sources list [1] I notice that The Verge is listed as 'green' with a green checkmark, i.e. 'reliable': There is broad consensus that The Verge is a reliable source for use in articles relating to technology, science, and automobiles.. Here reliable probably serves the same function as open in the title of this thread, i.e. that which follows my ideology.
open internet does not live in a vacuum. and the world is not perfect.
China has banned so many US applications starting more than one decade ago.
a free and open platform only works when all players in general are following similar rules, if a few big players exploit the system and you do not act about it, you're a fool and doomed.
One example is that, you're rich and liberal and you feel for the poor, that does not mean you will share your luxury house with them or pay more tax voluntarily, point is that, there is never a pure open internet, and there is no pure anything, everything has a limit.
Since the sudden apparent concern for users' privacy IMO casts doubt on the intent, I think discussion on this issue should start with determining whether we should take those concerns at face value. Is there a legitimate concern for privacy or is it just another form of economic warfare? Are the governments protecting you as an individual or are they protecting FAANG?
There is little point in discussing this if we are all just pretending that it is an issue that it's not.
"We need to ban TikTok to protect users and the open internet!"
1 year later
"Keeping a service owned by the CCP that spies on people in hostile countries and purposefully feeds them garbage and incorrect information is against the open internet!"
TikTok (and other surveillance apps) are what is the betrayal of the open internet.
Banning TikTok alone will not fix it.
But, it is a good start. Banning everything from China would be a better start, considering the insane asymmetry the CCP enforces on everything, and the degree to which they consistently and systematically lie, cheat, spy, and steal from their trading "partners" in order to gain military advantage (and no, don't start with the false equivalency about US companies' surveillance capitalism; although it is also evil, it isn't even close to proportional).
Yes, we've got to fix all of the exploitative surveillance, but banning technology seeded by another nation-state actor like CCP because of it's both data harvesting and asymmetric warfare capabilities does not threaten the open internet.
And certainly, since CCP has banned most US technology because they won't do their dirty work of surveilling and spreading disinformation in their population, banning all CCP tech (which is all China tech) in response is a good step.
Exactly. Most people don't realize that this isn't about free speech and banning some harmless meme videos, but about information warfare and protecting American citizens from hostile aggression.
In the age of social media, information has been weaponized to an alarming extent, with the power to influence masses, incite violence and topple governments. Those Russian troll farms and Chinese bots and CCP shills aren't just doing this for the lulz; they're paid agents working for a government who's found that the easiest and cheapest way to harm your enemy is via the same channels they've built and opened for everyone to use. The East and West have been at war for decades now, and these operations no longer require sophisticated IT knowledge and expensive hackers; they only need thousands of agents willing to spread disinformation and propaganda on the internet. This sows division and panic, which eventually causes societies to crumble from the inside out. There's no doubt in my mind that the mass hysteria we've seen in the past decade has been stirred in part by foreign agents.
I encourage everyone to watch this interview of a former KGB agent[1]. He explains the power of psyops and information warfare. This was well known and in widespread use in the 1980s. Imagine how sophisticated these operations have become today with the internet.
The open internet is a mirage. There used to be barriers against distributing encryption, there’s bans for copyright violations, there’s blocks for adult imagery and revolutionary (‘terrorist’) speech.
There is no such thing as a truly ‘open’ internet and the real internet is open enough that any constructed really open network will be overrun by content no one wants to host, like racist extremism and pedophilia.
My personal approval of TikTok ban efforts is based on a more nuanced view: yes TikTok is not currently nefarious, but in the event of conflict with China, it will almost certainly be an outlet of CCP propoganda beamed straight into the US, and that is exactly when banning it would be the most politically contentious. Better to ban it now and not when the CCP uses it to influence domestic politics, at which point the optics of banning TikTok will come with the optics of banning political speech.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadLarge internet "infrastructure" businesses are in partnership with government officials, so I have no reason to believe that the Parler takedown was anything but political censorship. Maybe not technically, but definitely in spirit and effect - and after all, that's all that really matters.
On this topic, the point is, that something is banned by someone with the appropriate means. It doesn't really matter whether it is government or private enterprise, because they meet in the backroom and coordinate their steps anyway. In the end, it doesn't matter who's initiative it was, who did the execution, but the purpose and result itself.
Why is TikTok of all things where we're making our stand? I don't buy it.
Having arbitrary companies buy the mines is something that they occasionally do - however, that comes with the risk of exposing themselves to the corruption and issues of the country where the mines are located. The FCPA https://www.trade.gov/us-foreign-corrupt-practices-act makes it difficult for companies that aren't going to use bribery to compete against other companies and countries where corruption isn't seen as an issue.
These can make it rather difficult for the United States government or a company based in the United States to try to "buy up" the raw materials of other countries.
TikTok, however, is a way for one government that the US has a strained relationship with to potentially direct the public discourse in the US or use it to track / identify individuals. The spying that was mentioned is https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
> TikTok has admitted that it used its own app to spy on reporters as part of an attempt to track down the journalists’ sources, according to an internal email.
> The data was accessed by employees of ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company and was used to track the reporters’ physical movements. The company’s chief internal auditor Chris Lepitak, who led the team involved in the operation, has been fired, while his China-based manager Song Ye has resigned.
> ...
> ByteDance and TikTok had initially issued categorical denials of the allegations when they were first reported. The company claimed it “could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested”, and added that TikTok had never been used to “target” any “members of the US government, activists, public figures or journalists”. Those claims are now acknowledged to be false.
US does this for Oil rather. It isn't so sophisticated in mining. But it has occupied the Syrian oil fields and uses them to supply military bases.
Crickets in the media - because it wouldn't look good.
As a consequence of the US war with the Islamic State across Iraq and Syria; IS had previously occupied Eastern Syria where the oil fields now controlled by the US are located.
> Crickets in the media - because it wouldn’t look good.
Crickets in the news media largely because the news media covers news and static situations aren’t news (same reason whey the occupation of Crimea got intense coverage for a short time in 2014 and then critics until 2022, which wasn’t because Russian aggression and occupation looks bad for the US.)
The news media covers events related the US presence in Syria, but the ongoing fact just isn’t news.
I hard disagree - smuggling out oil in multiple large convoys by the US military from a region just after a significant natural disaster is most certainly news. But the US media will never cover something like this.
> In 2020, a U.S. firm called Delta Crescent Energy LLC secured a deal with the Kurdish authorities under an authorization from the U.S. government. The firm’s partners include former U.S. ambassador to Denmark James Cain, also a Republican campaign donor; James Reese, a former U.S. special forces officer; and an experience oil executive, John Dorrier Jr.
> The Daily Beast reported that Delta was to earn $1 per barrel of oil exported from Syria, according to government filings. Dorrier, the firm’s CEO, had worked with a U.K. oil company with offices in Syria. He told the Military Times that Delta “had some $2 billion in contracts to sell oil into the international market that will benefit American allies in northeast Syria that have helped in the fight against the Islamic State group.”
> The Assad foreign ministry called it all a U.S. plot to “steal Syria’s crude oil.” The ministry described the Kurdish forces as “terrorist militias,” and predicted they would be defeated by the government.
> Delta Crescent Energy was the only firm licensed by the U.S. government to work in Syria. The license was permitted despite U.S. Treasury sanctions aimed at punishing the Assad regime.
> Things changed when the new Biden administration did not renew Delta’s sanctions waiver this year.
> In February, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that the 900 American troops then in Syria were there to resist IS and “are not authorized to provide assistance to any other private company, including its employees or agents, seeking to develop oil resources in Syria.”
---
Do you have any additional sources that support the US is using Syrian oil fields for supplying US Bases?
https://www.thecitizen.in/opinion/us-continues-to-occupy-syr...
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2023/03/05/2863033/us-con...
https://thecradle.co/article-view/22945/us-resumes-theft-of-...
Smuggling out and plundering valuable resources from a region that has undergone a disaster is what I call "evil" by any definition.
Also, you may wish to find and talk to some savvy educated Syrians. They will laugh if you suggest the US is doing nothing of the sort. Of-course, usually, there will be no American citizen doing this - it will be all done by third parties. They made a mistake here by explicitly involving the US Army and thus this got extensively publicised (in the non Western media).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
Tolerance is an important social/psychological phenomenon, but perception is even more important. Teaching people to think in memes is dangerous imho.
Even more complicated:
- this applies to all piecs of information, including mainstream "truths" that are not actually true
- there is an important distinction between lies, speaking untruthfully, speaking misinformatively, etc
- most people are not just bad at epistemology (and related fields), they think they are good (because it seems that way, and "seems true equals true" in our culture) - epistemology is highly counter-intuitive
- Normies
- The Man
They are both utterly defenceless against it (yet: don't have any realization of it), it's almost like a weapon from another dimension of reality.
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
The contention here is that one country does not allow the other to do business in their territory, yet complains when their product is threatened with a ban.
The contention is _not_ that double standards are being applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.
White people are discriminated against in China, so we should discriminate against Chinese people in the US.
But if you insist on calling money "speech" and banning foreign businesses "censorship" then it turns out, under your very broad definitions, censorship is sometimes a very good thing!
Your argument amounts to word games.
Same thing when RT was banned across Western Europe. It's not what they were saying that was banned, it's what they are: an arm of the Russian government. Russian shills are still free to peddle their propaganda.
Spin up a cloud VM in China now. Go do it. Try.
I can, literally in minutes, go create a virtual machine hosting a web site in some random middle eastern country I probably would not visit because they're anti... everything. Anti-female, anti-christian, anti-gay, anti-freedom, anti everything I hold dear.
But I can create a virtual machine there, right now, no problems.
China? Hah... no.
That would require paperwork, in person, in chinese, paid for in renminbi, from a Chinese bank.
I'd have to get a chinese id, and submit it to a police station to get an authorisation number, which I would then have to display on every page of that web server.
Chinese companies can spin up whatever they want in any country they please.
Every other country has to sign up to Chinese censorship laws to publish anything at all on that side of the Great Firewall.
Our companies just got greedy.
China has an asymmetric market, and it’s bad for US businesses but good for Chinese businesses. The US wants to send a message to china that it can also punish businesses that it doesn’t like.
Yes the US has a mechanism to ban a company and that should apply to that company’s app. It’s just trade restrictions like with Huawei. Banning a website will be harder, but by banning advertisers from paying for ads it’ll destroy the profitability of serving American consumers.
Popper’s Paradox on the geopolitical scale.
The media were freaking out about the trade restriction on China, but my circle of D-voting friends and I (and I'm about as libby-lib as a lib can lib) who mostly hated Trump were like "fucking good, more of this please".
I think he mostly caught at least as much shit as he deserved over his shenanigans (far less, in some cases—my "oh no, this is gonna be really bad for the health of our democracy" moment was when he made his "2nd amendment people" remark and suffered no meaningful consequences, back in the '16 campaign) but there were a handful of cases like that, where the negative media response was sharply at odds with our (as, again, solid D voters who AFAIK all voted against him twice) reactions to things he did.
Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't really just create a single website that serves both western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is stopping them, doing this is just going give your western customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America and complying with all local laws to do so.
How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one. You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but, again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into the western market with millions of dollars with the acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some American competitor.
Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you.
Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has already done with the GDPR ...
This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
That being said, there is always an argument for banning foreign social media companies (really all media companies) from making commercial profits in other countries. The political and military risks are significant.
TikTok is only superior in poisoning the minds of people using it here in US. That's why the Chinese version is different. I think zero is lost if people use the inferior local ones in this case.
> This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
Sure, the optimal solution for the prisoner's dilemma is that both cooperate. But once one doesn't cooperate, the optimal solution is not to cooperate. US looks like a dummy waving the flag of morality while China laughs in its face.
I believe the current recommended example is "Go look up France on TikTok vs look up France on Instagram"
Addendum: TikTok is also superior at dynamically generating an advertisable collective that are specifically interested and desiring of the ads they're given. Five million small businesses found their place on TikTok entirely because they found their 2000-person size niche that would be interested in buying their product, and even encouraged them to buy it.
Except for some reason, diversity of thought and free speech ideals aren't actually used to justify speech people disagree with, namely China's. This two-mouthed approach is noticed. It de-legitimizes the diversity of thought value.
To anyone who has argued for free speech before but is silent now, your silence says more than your speech ever could.
1. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
I agree that banning TikTok on the grounds of its algorithm being controlled by China is dubious. After all, it is content, it is information, and it is up to an open society to call out the fact that social media is trash, that Chinese social media is anti-American disinformation poison.
However, it is reasonable to believe tiktok's recommendations are crafted to harm American intellect, prey on vanity to reward shallow behavior, and gather large scale behavioral and physical activity (site tracking, habits, physical location, items in homes, etc) for the purposes of the Chinese government. If it is recognized as a spy tool of a hostile government, why permit it?
That said, I'm not sure I would lament a body blow to social media specifically.
Let me put the questions to you directly:
Do you think the Chinese government is generally hostile to the long term success of Western liberalism?
Do you think the Chinese government has meaningful influence on the behavior of TikTok or its recommendation engine?
Do you think TikTok data on its hundreds of millions of users is available for general analysis to the Chinese government?
They have backdoors to all major tech companies, they actively try to control discourse in social media and they just bailed out their tech sector. If that's not being tightly coupled, I don't know what is.
>Do you think the Chinese government is generally hostile to the long term success of Western liberalism?
No
>Do you think the Chinese government has meaningful influence on the behavior of TikTok or its recommendation engine?
Probably but no concrete evidence exists
>Do you think TikTok data on its hundreds of millions of users is available for general analysis to the Chinese government?
To the same extent our data is available to the US and its allies, yes. But China cannot do much with my data, my government can.
Edit: if you’re going to downvote, at least explain why in a reply. Thanks.
We gave up on forcing China to keep opening up to US trade if they want us to reciprocate. We shouldn't do that.
[EDIT] Case law citations would be a lot more convincing than downvotes.
_put up proper user protecting rules by law and enforce them fairly against any company_
it's simple, fair, and would either ban TickTock due to non compliance or cripple it's ability to do whatever they are afraid of it doing
the problem is the US Government isn't against the things TickTock is doing, it's only against them being done under Chinese control
They might fear that Tik-Tok might apply some oversight to this process...
China's Navy is already more numerous than the USA's Navy, and they include advanced stealth destroyers and probably Hypersonic Missiles.
I don't want to be a racist asshole like some others online. But there is a geopolitical reality coming towards us and we need to start preparing for it. Nothing against the Chinese people or their culture or whatever, but their leaders have some goals that conflict with the USAs goals, and it could turn hot over the next 10 years.
And the USA should support Taiwan. Not only because we get AMD, Apple, NVidia, Qualcomm, automobile chips, and F35 RADAR chips from that island... But also because Taiwan is our ally from WW2 days and we have a long history of friendship with them.
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Let me be clear, once again. Taiwan manufactures Xilinx FPGAs that are in direct support to the F35 project.
There is a geopolitical reality here that cannot be ignored.
The United States needs China for industrial and consumer goods. Our economy is brittle and will quickly break without them. This is the logical result of US policy. China clamping down on Taiwan from the official US position is effectively China more tightly controlling thwir existing territory.
Not even close to what happened in Russia vs. Ukraine situation.
Taiwan during World War II, was part of the Japanese Empire...
When the famous WW2 Pilot Doolittle did his famous raid on Japan and crash-landed in China, it was the Kuomintang who saved those pilots and returned them safely to the USA, despite the Japanese atrocities that were occurring. (Well, Imperialist Japan did capture some of those pilots... but the Kuomintang did what they could)
Communist China then took over most of China and forced Kuomintang to retreat to Taiwan by 1949. And we call those people "Taiwanese" today. Historically, they are the rightful owners of China, though they lost the civil war.
Today, we're strategically ambiguous to try to not piss off China about our different viewpoints of history. But we're quickly coming to the point where ambiguity no longer helps. We're likely heading for war unfortunately.
Speak for yourself! From my perspective, entrenched business interests have very much been at war with the people of this country for a long time.
A growing military competitor notwithstanding, the real issue we're facing here is that we've based our society around this fiction that wealth makes right - under an assumption that the wealthy will compete amongst themselves to grow their own wealth in a straightforward (short term) manner. This framework is utterly unprepared for dealing with large (extremely wealthy) actors that push in more structured and less immediately profitable directions, with the goal of reaping dividends decades in the future.
But when I'm using "War with China", I'm talking about true war, like the kind going on in Ukraine. I'm talking about vicious weapons designed to kill hundreds, or thousands, in the blink of an eye, and at risk of escalation into Nuclear Armageddon.
In this context, I am not taking the word "war" with any amount of whimsy or hyperbole. This isn't a "class war", or "war on poverty" or "war on drugs". What we're unfortunately preparing for is a true war.
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With any luck, China will back down and keep the tenuous peace and status quo.
By number of ships, most of which are close-to-shore patrol boats. By volume of ships, the US Navy is more than twice as large.
The USA's count of China's ships ignores the 224 close-to-shore coast guard ships.
China has 351 surface combat ships, against the USA's 294. Yes, our Navy is still superior by capabilities, but China continues to mass produce ships, including large cruisers and carriers. They are not a threat to take lightly anymore.
If we include the 224 coast guard ships, then China's fleet is well over 575 ships as of 2022. I'm talking only of the 351 combat ships that would likely play a role in a hypothetical Taiwan confrontation.
But yes, China keeps producing ships. I have no idea what will happen in a Taiwan Straight conflict where we've escalated to open conventional war looks like. I imagine that the air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missiles will be the determining factor.
But there's also a major difference. The US has a blue-water navy that can project power globally - enough power that it's an open question if the largest country in the world with the second-highest GDP can stand up to it in their back yard. There's no symmetric threat to the US where the Chinese Navy can get close enough to the West Coast have a similar threat.
US Navy will have to expose itself to Chinese missiles and Chinese Air Force, and those small Missile Patrol Boats, to defend Taiwan.
China isn't thinking about attacking Hawaii or the West Coast. What China is trying to do in the near term is complete its takeover of ... well... what it believes to be part of China.
And because various F35 chips are made in Taiwan, its a threat we cannot afford to ignore. (Along with all of our video game consoles, GPUs, AI Tensor processors, and other strategic level computer systems)
Yes, the US Navy is unrivaled. But in a local, regional conflict... especially supported by the largest Airforce in the world (China has a lot of airplanes), and some of the largest ground-based missile forces in the world (China also has a lot of advanced missiles), the US Navy very well could lose the fight to defend Taiwan.
> supported by the largest Airforce in the world (China has a lot of airplanes)
The US Navy has more aircraft than the Chinese Air Force does. The US Air Force has like 4 times as many, and can stage a good chunk of them over the Straight as well.
South Korea and Japan combined have about as many planes as China, and I have no idea if they (or India) get involved.
But yeah, I have no idea what happens if it stays conventional, and I have no idea how likely it is that it stays conventional (and obviously WMDs mean no one knows what happens). Given the number of fast options (e.g. missiles) to sink ships, I imagine we'll know who will win the fight quickly, but it might take months to actually slog it out.
https://i2.wp.com/missilethreat.csis.org/wp-content/uploads/...
The YJ-21 is 1500km, more than enough to strike Japan's mainland let alone the nearby Ryukyus. If the US Navy wishes to support Taiwan, we will be open to those missiles.
But they have the capability to launch missiles at a US Carrier Strike Group who has retreated towards Japan. That means that our Navy will be within Chinese missile range during Taiwanese defense operations.
We aren't going to support Taiwan from Japan or Korea. We're going to use our Supercarriers to sail closer and then support Taiwan in a more direct fashion. But that means our carriers have a high chance of being shot at, and possibly sunk, by these missiles. And we'll need to sail very far away (far in excess of Japan) before our CSG is safe from the Chinese missile range.
I absolutely expect our Carriers to be attacked, and possibly even sunk, in the upcoming fight.
-----------
There's still a lot of ocean to hide in when our CSGs enter that missile range. It will be a matter of killing the Chinese sensors (ex: drones, spycraft, and avoiding satellites) which are looking for our carriers.
We're gonna need our Carriers to be closer so that there's a reasonable response time to scramble and defend Taiwan. If it takes 2-hours for our airplanes to launch from a Carrier and support Taiwan (because they're cowards and hiding in Japan), then our airplanes simply will be too late to help with the defense. I don't know how fast the Chinese can scramble and attack Taiwan, but they have gross advantages in terms of distance. Only a Carrier can even the odds, and that carrier needs to be physically close to Taiwan. That's just how the fight will go.
The USA does not need carriers anywhere near Taiwan when China invades. They can handle everything from island airstrips. And we totally would support Taiwan from the Ryukyus, thats the whole reason we are there to begin with.
It could, but it really looks to me like it's the US that is trying to make things turn hot, not China.
We all see where this is going. We know Xi wants Taiwan. Selling weapons to Taiwan so that they can better defend themselves is the moral thing to do.
Its the same thing as how the Russians blame USA for "extending" the war in Ukraine. Erm, yeah. That's the point. When we see evil and decide to do something to stop it, it makes it harder for evildoers to do what they want to do. And I think its a good thing to make Taiwan harder to get taken over.
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All China has to do, to avoid the war... is to not start it. Its not like Taiwan is in any position to attack China right now or anytime in the foreseeable future.
The only thing that really has a chance to start a war is this Taiwan situation. I don't see any room for diplomacy anymore.
Hilarious. Do you actually believe US foreign policy has anything to do with "good and evil," and if so, could you explain how this drove the decision to, oh I dunno, bomb Guatemala city? Or annex Hawaii? Or arm Saudi Arabia to the teeth? Or pick virtually any foreign intervention since WWII, really.
You can try to use whataboutism to detract from this point. But the question at hand is: what are we going to do about the Taiwan situation.
I see that you're pissed off about these other world events, but I'm not sure what any of that has to do with the subject matter. As such, I conclude you're trying to do the Russian propaganda technique "whataboutism", where you detract from the primary discussion point by talking about unrelated subjects. The way I try to defeat this is by simply staying focused and avoid trying to be distracted by the obvious red herrings.
> Sorry, I'm not equipped to handle this.
Are you equipped to talk about Taiwan in any capability? Do you have any perspective worth sharing on that subject? I recognize that various people of the world have anti-American views, good or bad, worth sharing.
But with regards to this topic (TikTok ban), its clear that Taiwan and the military situation stands front and center.
We're so fucked.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Please don't take HN threads further into political/national flamewar, and please follow the HN rule against calling names in arguments a little more broadly. The epithet "whataboutism" qualifies as the latter—it's a label that's used to silence argument rather than respond to it. If someone brings up an example that's not relevant, a counterargument should explain what the difference is that makes it irrelevant—not simply denounce it based on what side it's on.
Past explanations here if anyone cares: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=whataboutism%20by:dang&dateRan...
At some point, describing the opponent's argument style in what I feel is going on is important. Its a meta label. If you think "whataboutism" is a poor term, then I'll substitute non-sequitur from here on out. But I don't think my discussion point changes.
It is a fallacy to distract from an argument by posting irrelevant stuff. If I make a challenge with whataboutism (or non-sequitur), the correct response is the same. The opponent should better describe why their words are relevant to the discussion. Or alternatively, change their argument's form so that it is relevant to the discussion.
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You're right that over use of fallacies / labels can lead to a fallacy, ie: the fallacy-fallacy. That is, someone using fallacies could be making a good point and still be contributing to the discussion. And its a mistake to focus on their poor form rather than their good points.
But the labeling of points / fallacies / and naming of those points is very useful at speeding up debates in my experience and in the typical case. It concisely describes my opinion and sets up a pattern of understanding. So I don't think its a bad thing. It very much depends on the situation.
That is to say: its only a "fallacy fallacy" if I'm ignoring the good points and killing the debate. I'm not sure if I've committed this sin in this case. The other poster seems to have simply stated "What about Hawaii?" without much elaboration on why or how Hawaii could be even relevant to Taiwan... or Tiktok.
But if some social media network starts in france, then even if it could manipulate users, france probably doesn't care because they can "control" it with force of law.
This is no different than wanting a domestic steel and fertilizer industry. You want powerful entities to be under your control.
Facebook once purposely manipulated depressed kids by adjusting what was shown to them in their feed. They should have been burned down the second that happened, and no country should allow that nonsense, even if you trust the american legal system to work. In much the same way, we should not trust tiktok, as chinese companies are incredibly opaque, so we would have a much harder time finding red flags to key us in to any nefarious activity.
In the same way, we probably shouldn't let a secretive private company have a thumb on the scale of a significant amount of american life. If we only have the political capital to ban tiktok right now because "China bad" then oh well, sometimes doing the right thing for the wrong reason is okay, like when Trump pushed for transparency in medical pricing. I don't think a free market health system is a workable system, but that was still a beneficial step in our current system.
Others say all this talk is cover because the actual law being discussed is much more draconian and gross. I would not be in favor of that.
> apply some oversight to this process...
They don't care about that, they also get the data they need from other companies they have much more influence one. Like phone companies, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, etc. etc.
How would that work? A warrant signed off by a judge is required to compel companies to comply with requests.
It’s…not. Administrative subpoenas (some of which have their own unique names, like “National Security Letters”) are a thing, and if legally valid compliance is mandatory. Sure, ultimately, if there is a disagreement about validity that can be taken to court, and a judge will be involved, but that’s not the same thing as a warrant.
Any areas where higher scrutiny is required have been specifically added by statute.
There's been some slight pushback recently against this state of affairs from the Supreme Court in the area of geolocation data, but the general rule still stands.
TikTok is arguably the most powerful means to spread ideas, and people in that line of business do not appreciate outsiders on their turf.
The whole TikTok thing itself seems like a distraction from the contents of the bill they've drafted under the guise of only banning TikTok.
Democracy as it is is a giant magic trick, and TikTok is pulling back the curtains in it, so it must go.
I watched the hearing. The main concern voiced is manipulation of content by the CCP. User data is what cranky HN users care about.
But the potential is obvious. China already heavily manipulates content for domestic consumption, and foreign information in other contexts. Why would TikTok be an exception?
No official government body does not prevent unofficial collusion. People go to dinner, play golf, define how to scratch each others backs given the rules.
Americans are no less propagandized and experiencing information shaping. Prattling on about the authority of dead men’s political documents and philosophy is propaganda.
That is a solution, but there's nothing simple about it. Obviously there's an even much simpler solution than coming up with what would be a very very complex set of regulations and laws, that would have impact across all the industry, and that btw tech giants would love. The really simple solution could be done tomorrow, without the need of figuring out what "proper" is in this case.
Not that what you're saying shouldn't happen, but it's a different battle that needn't be intertwined with this one.
Can you elaborate?
The argument for creating regulation is not that it would be simple but that it would be comprenhensive.
The majority of these US companies have already been fined like this. The same should happen to TikTok if they want to continue to follow the regulations in the US.
Regulation in general is a double-edged sword. While it may be great in the short term if your goal is to rein in the bad behaviour of large companies, in the long run it can act as a pretty effective moat for established companies, preventing startups from effectively being able to compete. A lot of people attribute Europe’s less competitive tech sector (vs the U.S.) to an abundance of complex regulations in the EU.
We should pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing right to privacy, and it should apply to both the US government, and to firms operating withing the US.
And that's a perfectly fine reason.
We do the same thing with Iran, Russia and others.
The proposed law specifies it's targeting China, Iran and Russia, as well as North Korea, Cuba and (the Moros regime of) Venezuela. It also has rules for adding or removing countries from that list going forward.
Isn't the claim the opposite ? tiktok china (douyin) is all about propaganda, education, tech, nationalism, success, &c. while the international version is dumb challenges, addictive content, memes &co
> Douyin vs TikTok also differs in terms of popular content. The most popular on Douyin is definitely educational content, with videos helping to improve skills and grow personally, while on Tik Tok the most popular is narrating videos, which is a great opportunity for artists, singers, and music producers. Therefore, global TikTok is more art-based, with musicians, dancers, and so on, while Douyin is skills and lifestyle-tips-based, with automatic voiceovers with no personal touch.
https://marketingtochina.com/differences-between-tiktok-and-...
> “It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, and advocate for social media ethics, said of China’s approach to TikTok.
https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...
The simple explanation as to why content popularity varies across countries seems to be that there are cultural differences at play. Frankly, it feels like a lot of people are simply uncomfortable with seeing their cultural values reflected back at them.
I need to "reset" my history of YouTube sometimes after I "spend" watching 3-4 videos of some topic, and now my YouTube is overrun with just content related to that, instead of different topics.
TikTok is guilty of the same, where after using it for a week or two, I basically see no other content than content related to a couple of videos I watched longer than others.
I liked how the internet was before, where I stumbled upon content wildly different from each other, and could acquire new tastes, instead of just being served what the algorithm have decided I should surely forever like.
IMO, the big problem of this world is fueled by the "like" button concept. The internet would be a much nicer place if we replace "like" with "dislike". "like" typically push people to the extreme, and "dislike" will push people to the middle.
* I watched once, 12 years ago.
* Sit in recommended for a week or more, despite my obvious lack of interest in them.
* Relate to some subset of recent topics.
It's strange how static Youtube recommendations appear to be as well. I often see the same set of Youtube Shorts for a few days at a time.
I do miss when forums were more popular. It's nice when you stumble across one that's still going.
Secondly, a better solution is a multi-billion dollar fine for TikTok's egregious invasion of privacy and the like, worse than the other tech companies and they also got massive fines.
Either TikTok pays a multi-billion dollar in the US or they exit the US market. This is much better than a ban and a win-win-win for TikTok, US gov. / regulators and the users and the ball is in TikTok's court.
A one-time fine doesn't fix that, and you can't get the oversight to make sure consumer data is protected because you're dealing with a state actor. But maybe you're thinking of some sort of recurring fine, like a "Sell Americans As A Service?" SAAAS? Innovations like that could help with the national deficit.
Where is the evidence that TikTok has been much worse than their peers in this regard?
[0] https://futurism.com/tiktok-spy-locations-specific-americans
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-...
Could not have been more clearer and is worse than the rest of the US social networks.
Your Futurism article directly contradicts the claim that any of this behaviour is unique to TikTok:
> This isn't the first time that a major social platform has been caught spying on specific individuals. In the past, Facebook and Uber have both been in the hot seat for tracking the locations of journalists and political figures.
The byline of your June 2022 Buzzfeed article implies that TikTok was already actively working to remove foreign access to the data:
> an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.
This largely appears to have born out based on the PBS article regarding the recent congressional hearing[0]:
> As of October (2022), all new U.S. user data was being stored inside the country. The company started deleting all historic U.S. user data from non-Oracle servers this month, in a process expected to be completed this year, Chew said.
> access to U.S. data is managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which is run independently of ByteDance and monitored by outside observers.
The hearing itself was mostly evidence of how unfit many of your elected officials are for office. From a previous comment of mine:
> Buddy Carter confidently believes that TikTok is tracking it's users emotional response through pupil dilation but has no comprehension of why you'd need to identify someone's eyes to put a motion tracking filter over them[2]. According to Mr. Carter, TikTok isn't doing enough to protect younger users but thinks that asking a user their age and checking whether or not the users public videos align with the age they declared is "creepy".
> Dan Crenshaw used his time to state that Chinese law requires it's citizens to co-operate with their national intelligence agencies. That might have been a good point if not for the fact that TikTok's CEO, the person Crenshaw was questioning, is not Chinese.
> Richard Hudson proved himself unable of forming a coherent question as to whether TikTok attempts to access other devices on a WiFi network. Instead asking "So if I have a TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home WiFi network, does TikTok access that network?"
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-tiktok-ceo-...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/25/tech/tiktok-user-reaction...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZDpJHl6amo
This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before, rather than trying to evade responsibility and join the likes of Facebook who did get fined for privacy violations, if they want to continue to operate in the US.
If Facebook can't get away with the fines, neither should TikTok.
They never claimed their own employees didn't have access to the data. They claimed that access to the data was controlled and it was stored in data centres not subject to China's jurisdiction[0]:
> First, let's talk about data privacy and security. We store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law. Further, we have a dedicated technical team focused on adhering to robust cybersecurity policies, and data privacy and security practices.
Furthermore, the Buzzfeed article acknowledges that the "foreign access" was typically in the service of restricting that access:
> In the recordings, the vast majority of situations where China-based staff accessed US user data were in service of Project Texas's aim to halt this data access.
The actions of TikTok don't appear to be that of a bad faith actor. They responded to concerns about data privacy by moving customer data from their own data centres to those of an American cloud provider and have shown that they're working to restrict access to that data further.
> This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before, rather than trying to evade responsibility and join the likes of Facebook who did get fined for privacy violations, if they want to continue to operate in the US.
What regulation did TikTok break?
> If Facebook can't get away with the fines, neither should TikTok.
Facebook wasn't fined for allowing internal employees in other countries access to internal data. They were fined for spunking that data all over anyone that winked at them. In the absence of a data breach, I'm not aware of which US law TikTok would have been breaking by allowing specific employees access to internal data.
[0] https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/statement-on-tiktoks-conte...
That is a clear denial by TikTok since they were already under investigation at the time and denied having such access to US data overseas, then the leak demonstrated that they can (and already did) have access to that data. Showing me a 2019 newsroom post already tells they haven't learned their lesson about overseas data access.
> The actions of TikTok don't appear to be that of a bad faith actor. They responded to concerns about data privacy by moving customer data from their own data centres to those of an American cloud provider and have shown that they're working to restrict access to that data further.
So making it possible for them TO access non-public US user data overseas after saying they couldn't? (and admittedly they already did). Which they did again, when employees accessed the data to trace the source leaks on US journalists and reporters overseas. [0]
With such access overseas also explains why those employees at ByteDance got fired, confirming that ByteDance is able to do it regardless.
> What regulation did TikTok break?
US privacy regulations, like they already have done years before [0]. They are no stranger to getting fined by the FTC, as with Facebook who already faced and paid a massive multi-billion dollar fine.
> Facebook wasn't fined for allowing internal employees in other countries access to internal data. They were fined for spunking that data all over anyone that winked at them. In the absence of a data breach, I'm not aware of which US law TikTok would have been breaking by allowing specific employees access to internal data.
Both cases are unprecedented with the way that user data was handled and accessed. TikTok's case alone is worthy of an extensive investigation by the FTC, since not only they have denied this and then later found to have lied after the leak, it even more deservedly should receive a multi-billion dollar fine with this case as with Facebook has done.
There are no hiding places or defences left for TikTok to fall on. If they can't pay, well they can exit the US market themselves.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/bytedance-tiktok-employees-us-user-...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/27/us-gove...
Data security is a red herring. The true danger is that the CCP and business are one and the same, the CCP is in a Cold War with the USA, and the CCP will do whatever it can to gain any advantage it.
Notice, for the sake of high level rationalism, that this is a false dichotomy.
CCP influence over TikTok is a subset of the bigger problems:
- TikTok, or the medium it operates on, is extremely persuasive, it's the most potent way to spread ideas from one mind to another (for example: the beliefs you hold about China's intents, which you do not actually possess knowledge of).
- The US government does not have a means to exert control over it like the other social media giants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
Well, consider the capabilities of the two platforms, as well as the demographics of users, and so forth and so on.
> any studies/links about that?
Not that I know of, but I have a feeling these discussions have been held at very high levels of the government and various 3 letter agencies, resulting in the mass theatrical spectacle we saw in Congress the other day.....did you watch any of that? Is it not blatantly obvious that in this case, "democracy" is an illusion?
Maybe our government needs some competition.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/andro...
We need to just make it a fair playing field and if they want to have software startups on the Internet and in App Stores they need to open their markets to our products too.
Because we're a democracy with free speech and open markets, and China is not? Banning foreign speech and competition is not the victory for our way of life that some people seem to think it is.
There is a problem with TikTok - like ALL social media it uses opaque ranking algorithms that serve nefarious interests, and like ALL social media it spies ruthlessly on its users. How about we address those issues, thereby indirectly resolving the TikTok issue too?
Just because we are a democracy with different values to the CCP does not mean we should be taken for fools.
Tiktok gained audience and market share because it happened to be a better product in its niche. Inventing any excuses to ban it is unadulterated hypocrisy.
All the words like "censorship", "free", "CCP", "national security", "china bad" are just euphemisms for childish protectionism of an oversized ego.
Some of us think all social media is trash for the mind and society, and think it's doubleplusungood when a hostile foreign power controls the algo.
You're implying that I root for Instagram. That's not the angle.
Ah yes, because China can totally tolerate competition.
Checking Wikipedia's Perennial Sources list [1] I notice that The Verge is listed as 'green' with a green checkmark, i.e. 'reliable': There is broad consensus that The Verge is a reliable source for use in articles relating to technology, science, and automobiles.. Here reliable probably serves the same function as open in the title of this thread, i.e. that which follows my ideology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
There is little point in discussing this if we are all just pretending that it is an issue that it's not.
1 year later
"Keeping a service owned by the CCP that spies on people in hostile countries and purposefully feeds them garbage and incorrect information is against the open internet!"
TikTok (and other surveillance apps) are what is the betrayal of the open internet.
Banning TikTok alone will not fix it.
But, it is a good start. Banning everything from China would be a better start, considering the insane asymmetry the CCP enforces on everything, and the degree to which they consistently and systematically lie, cheat, spy, and steal from their trading "partners" in order to gain military advantage (and no, don't start with the false equivalency about US companies' surveillance capitalism; although it is also evil, it isn't even close to proportional).
Yes, we've got to fix all of the exploitative surveillance, but banning technology seeded by another nation-state actor like CCP because of it's both data harvesting and asymmetric warfare capabilities does not threaten the open internet.
And certainly, since CCP has banned most US technology because they won't do their dirty work of surveilling and spreading disinformation in their population, banning all CCP tech (which is all China tech) in response is a good step.
In the age of social media, information has been weaponized to an alarming extent, with the power to influence masses, incite violence and topple governments. Those Russian troll farms and Chinese bots and CCP shills aren't just doing this for the lulz; they're paid agents working for a government who's found that the easiest and cheapest way to harm your enemy is via the same channels they've built and opened for everyone to use. The East and West have been at war for decades now, and these operations no longer require sophisticated IT knowledge and expensive hackers; they only need thousands of agents willing to spread disinformation and propaganda on the internet. This sows division and panic, which eventually causes societies to crumble from the inside out. There's no doubt in my mind that the mass hysteria we've seen in the past decade has been stirred in part by foreign agents.
I encourage everyone to watch this interview of a former KGB agent[1]. He explains the power of psyops and information warfare. This was well known and in widespread use in the 1980s. Imagine how sophisticated these operations have become today with the internet.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ol0M6P9LLY
There is no such thing as a truly ‘open’ internet and the real internet is open enough that any constructed really open network will be overrun by content no one wants to host, like racist extremism and pedophilia.