If the concern is privacy and security, which apply to all social media platforms, then why not pass actual privacy and security laws that would apply equally to all social media platforms, regardless of who currently owns it or may own it in the future?
That's not what the concern of the bill is and it's completely transparent. Just read the first 2 pages of the bill and you can see the concern is, in the words of the bill, a "foreign adversary" and their ability to "sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology products and services in the United States".
It's quite simple - the US and China don't get along.
It's never been about privacy nor internal (to the US) security. It's very openly about cross pacific adversaries. Only meta-tech commentators have tried to apply some weird narrative of privacy.
1. This is a way of getting memes to the masses that we (the US political establishment) can't fully control.
2. Meta and others are getting their asses kicked revenue-wise by Tik Tok. Like any business, they'd use anything they could to fight back. Turns out they can use China fear mongering, so they are.
3. (Added) Believe it or not, there's nationalistic pride here. There is a reluctance to admit that an app from "the other side" (China) is more appealing to the masses than _our_ social media apps. Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas, even though they're far superior to American cars (but at least they're made by Asians who are _allies_ I guess).
No matter that banning an app is completely against the principles we claim, such as freedom for individuals, competition in a free market, and freedom of information.
Toyota and Honda both assemble cars here in the US and have a huge network of US-based suppliers. No one believes that those companies operate under Japanese government direction nor that the Japanese government has the ability to influence company management to the degree the CCP clearly can with TikTok. It is well documented that the "Golden Shares" owned by the CCP and the board seat on they have give them fundamental control of the company.
Saying that the CCP is in control due to board seats is a bad reason. China gives CCP membership to the top students in schools, and most people try and join the CCP if they can. The people that make up the tops of companies are most likely to be CCP members because of the fact that highly driven people are most likely to be in or join the CCP. Yes the Chinese government has a lot of control, but members of the CCP being on the board is nonsense. It is extra nonsense when you consider how many US companies have government members on the board. Condoleezza Rice is a board member of Dropbox for example.
Would love to see the overlap of people concerned about threats to the conditional right to own guns, and those who are completely unconcerned about this direct attack on freedom of speech.
Being able to post videos in a walled garden owned by a corporation is not free speech. freedom of speech, regardless of where you are on the political compass, is in platforms like Mastodon.
Those aren't really relevant to the topic of Chinese ownership, unless you believe the government told TikTok to actively promote those videos. The stupid destruction trends seem organic to me, and did not require CCP interference.
Tiktok is not just a dumb video host. They chose the content they show to users. And the content their system is shoving in users faces is destructive.
Are you saying there are engineers sitting behind their laptops who upvote the "bathroom destruction" trend in some kind of global dashboard? You sound very certain about the degree of control they have over recommendation systems.
I’m not saying they specifically coded in a “bathroom destruction” function, but they coded a function which results in promoting destruction videos more than any platform before it.
The amount of brainrot content that tiktok pushes is staggering. The other video platforms don’t come close.
Make no mistake, they let everything sensational trend until it makes the news because it makes them look edgy to a younger audience and that makes them lots of money... Covering your tracks is easy when there's no algorithm/operational transparency.
Social media is the puts when it comes to moral bankruptcy... It is a casino based on popularity, and so many people are dumping money into it on a regular basis that it's really too late to do anything to stem the way it manipulates our world. Congressional action is far too late and futile to the maximum in encouraging any sort of ethics, they did nothing with all the damning evidence presented about Facebook, The only reason they'd ban TikTok is to satisfy the anti-competitive lobby of US competitors if you ask me.
TilTok is a corrupt platform nonetheless, and I really wouldn't be sad if it got banned, the basis of it has already infected everything else, including YouTube to the point of useless overload, so the entire ideal of going viral and getting paid on platforms is actually way past anything meaningful any more.
We have proved time and time again that governments have propaganda and astroturfing teams deployed on all major social media, why is it so hard to believe that CCP through TikTok has a mechanism to promote some content over another?
I am no conspiracy theorist, but at some point we need to accept the countless proof we keep reading about tech used maliciously once your app reaches a significant mass of users, especially if those users live in a country you are in a bona-fide economic war with.
Some degree of skepticism is healthy, but propaganda thrives any time a skeptic dismisses valid concerns.
Lawmakers don't care about that. You're giving them way too much credit. Since the public is not in an uproar about this destructiveness, there are no votes or advantages to be gained by advocating against it.
That's for altruists, who rarely make it to Washington and don't last long when they do.
Why don't we put the ownership of the actions back on the individuals? Presumably you and I would never destroy private property because it became a viral trend. We need parents to step up and educate their children on responsible decision making, and those breaking laws* should be held accountable.
*laws that protect a negative externality for an involuntary transactor.
>Meta getting its ass kicked is a happy bonus for both political parties.
Frankly, it should get this treatment. Its executives have been consistently hostile toward government inquiries and in public statements about its users. The hubris it has shown in its treatment on political speech and disdain for paid advertisers is revolting. The stock structure of the company is a physical manifestation of everything wrong - we can treat the public and the law with disdain and you can't touch us.
Meta seems to be doing fine financially besides the VR money pit. Also in a weird way having TikTok around just bolsters their case against any sort of anti trust enforcement. That said I am sure they would be happy if TikTok did get banned but I also doubt they are sticking their neck out lobbying for that to happen (although I would not be surprised to be wrong)
Actual #1. TikTok is banned in China, but in their similar app (Douyin) their kids are limited to 40min a day and restricted from a lot of the digital opium drip that US kids are receiving in infinite quantities. Sounds like it'd only be fair to follow suit if China itself is limiting the poisoning of their own citizens:
It is mind boggling, and at the same time not surprising at all, that China is enforcing a humane policy to protect its children when we are not willing to do the same.
It is also surprising to realize that China and the chinese actually think as a nation and have a sense of collectivism, whereas the US is to each their gun and their million dollars in the bank. China has always had this sense of being one thing, historically, and even the atrocious regimes, emperors, and dictators are always representative of a populace wish to centralize and control things fluidly and efficiently. Who knows, maybe it will work out, even with the price it has that westerners won't ever consider, or ever let go of a philosophical individuality.
...because they killed or chased away any dissenters, now and historically. Look at Taiwan, or Hong Kong, the revolution, or Xinjiang. It isn't some innate characteristic of the Chinese, it is intentional.
>It is mind boggling, and at the same time not surprising at all, that China is enforcing a humane policy to protect its children when we are not willing to do the same.
By whose standards? The United States has never been an ideologically cohesive nation outside some basic principles of representative democracy - and even those have been challenged at moments in our history. The moment you get beyond the basics of a unified military, postal service, weights and measures, and currency, you quickly get into the social issues that have plagued our cohesion since the founding of the nation. Is Uncle Tom's Cabin a seminal work in understanding US history, or subversive and dangerous? We can't even decide that as a nation at the moment, so "how much social media is good for our kids?" would be a very, very ugly discussion to have at a national level.
I don't have Tik Tok installed, my kids only get the "reruns" off YouTube, but frankly I find it a bit extremist that the US government wants to ban an app that looks to me like people doing funny dances in their living rooms.
We need to move past the "TikTok = people dancing" stage of discussion.
TikTok has expanded to be the dominant short form video platform for every interest, niche, and micro niche you can imagine that exists, and even ones you can't imagine.
Please anyone reading this comment replace "TikTok = people dancing" with "TikTok = feed + discovery for short form video tailored to your specific interests no matter how niche". Yes this includes programming, science, education, dancing, gaming, cooking, acrobatics, painting, arguing, politics, news, weather, etc. basically anything you can imagine that isn't against their content policies.
That's fair - but if that's the case, how is that actually different from YouTube, Instagram, or any number of other platforms? It appears in two ways:
1) TikTok is really good at what they do.
2) They are a Chinese-owned company.
It certainly feels like if it weren't for #2, they would be praised for their innovation and held up as a great American success story. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be skepticism in the name of national security, but of all the things threatening to destroy the planet on any given day, this feels low on the list.
While I think some of it is the UX, the main thing in TikTok's favour is the massive number of people creating concise, interesting content for it.
YouTube videos are frequently 30-120 seconds of relevant content padded to 10-15 minutes. Most TikTok videos are close to just those 30-120 relevant seconds.
If Congress bans it, they'll probably lose the trust and interest of a massive percentage of Americans under the age of 30.
> feed + discovery for short form video tailored to your specific interests no matter how niche
It is this and also that young people are especially malleable, so content that they see can cause long-term psychological and emotional damage, or--more pertinently to governments' interests--can introduce ideological change that they don't control.
> I don't have Tik Tok installed, my kids only get the "reruns" off YouTube, but frankly I find it a bit extremist that the US government wants to ban an app that looks to me like people doing funny dances in their living rooms.
There is a wide variety of content on TikTok. One category is (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people who watched the Congressional "democracy" theatre on the TikTok ban realizing that their so-called democracy is fake, a laughing stock, pick your pejorative. Millions of people who formerly had no clue, now realize absolutely that what is on the label does not match what is on the tin.
Of course, they could have realized this via other means since it has been the case for ages, but whether they would have is another story.
If I was running an illusory regime, I'd take out TikTok too, it's just old fashioned common sense.
True, I think the political elite made a big mistake, revealing the clowns behind the curtain. The younger generation, even with their default disgruntlement with the system, still might've taken another decade to figure out just how much the emperor has no clothes.
USA and China have very different societies so the best you could expect in the former is an opt in facility for parents to limit time in an app. Much as I think these apps are the junk food of tech, I still prefer a less authoritarian state.
Humane by who's standards? Should the government be mandating how to raise children? Maybe the government would think compelling church attendance is a humane policy to protect children. Or we could let parents decide how to raise their kids.
Never mind that the policy here is actually not about protecting children at all, since its banning an app entirely where the vast majority of users are adults.
and b) TikTok is notably worse than American social media.
I, for example, disagree with both. I think the Chinese government is wrong about a lot of things, including the right way to raise kids. And I think TikTok is no worse than Instagram.
> "Only if you think the Chinese goverment is right"
Germany dropped bombs on the UK. The UK responded by dropping bombs on Germany. By responding in kind, was the UK therefore asserting that Germany was 'right' to drop bombs on the UK?
You're taking my statement out of context. I was refuting the claim that China's restrictive social media policy is a justification for a similar US policy.
If the UK justified their actions solely on the basis that because the Germans did it it must be ok that'd be unreasonable. (This isn't the right forum to get into it, but the ethics of civilian saturation bombings are much more complicated and I'm not saying either was in the right, though of course in total Germany was far far worse).
Tit for tat is how wars are fought, not by finding a moral high ground. Like it or not, we are in a economic and information war with China. Bury your head in the sand if you want to lose it.
> Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas
This is a holdover from the US supporting the development of industry in Japan to keep them from turning communist (which was a real threat back in the 60's and 70's)
I think you're conflating the reasoning of the ban to be against Asians, when in fact it's purely against China. Japanese car manufacturers have done absolutely nothing wrong.
Note that the Reagan administration negotiated “voluntary import quotas” with Japanese car manufacturers in the 1980s when US car manufacturers were being beaten by Japanese brands
You are also ignoring the fact that China does not allow our social media companies to operate in their jurisdiction. So part of this is a sense of fairness. Why do they get to operate here if we can't operate there?
Besides, the problem is already solvable. People could simply stop using TikTok if they agreed that its disadvantages outweigh its benefits. No one is forcing them. This is a vote with your feet issue, plain and simple.
Exactly and young people lack the life experience to comprehend the long-term risks associated with surrendering their private data to the CCP or being exposed to sophisticated disinformation campaigns over time.
So it is incumbent on the govt to protect their long-term interests.
And to also ensure that trade relationships are fair and equitable (which it currently isnt).
I'm a parent, I guide my kiddos when rationality escapes them. The process itself, parent-child, teaches them how to make their own decisions. Governments can't teach people how to make their own decisions.
The statement that trade relationships must be fair is some sort of neoliberal mumbo jumbo. I don't accept it as an assumption or a consequence. You can accept it as axiomatic if you want, but I don't see it as a consequence of any valid logical train of thought.
The idea of open markets is that no player is given favorable treatment by the government. If you allow a player that comes from a country that treats its citizens as human farms, I wouldn't call that open markets.
The two statements just don't logically follow. A better argument would be that the US, in an effort to improve human rights, sets a minimum threshold for market participation at the level of nations. Unfortunately, that's not the argument being made.
Open markets mean what it says on the tin - markets without barrier. Saying, "We're barring actors for entering the market for reason X," means closed markets even is X is "treating people poorly."
China never claimed that they value freedom, (whatever you define as freedom). They value harmony instead, (whatever you define as harmony).
By US banning TikTok, US is acting against claimed values, turning out to be hypocrite. China, by banning US social media, doesn't. Might be seen unfair, but it is a dead end that US painted itself into.
For the sake of argument, _if_ we agree that banning is OK, EU should ban social media from both, and subsidize their own the same way as US subsidized theirs.
> Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas, even though they're far superior to American cars (but at least they're made by Asians who are _allies_ I guess).
Both Honda and Toyota build a lot factories in the US, creating a lot of jobs for US Citizens that actually show up to vote. All while American brands move to Mexico, Canada etc.
TikTok might as well be the same as "BigTech" but with the bonus of being Chinese—that is something politicians can work with. I think the root of the problem, though, is we (humans) are easy to manipulate, but I dont even know how we can even begin to tackle that.
If we're using China as a role model for our information hygiene, then I think it's fair to say that the free speech experiment that some liberal democracies have practiced over the past few centuries has ran its course, and can be considered a failure.
Pack it up, folks, as it turns out, there are some things that are too dangerous to let the public hear.
I think you need to study WW2 a little bit more. The Office of Censorship opening up letters to destroy pro-Nazi sentiment, and the Office of War Information buying up Disney Cartoons to show Donald Duck / Popeye / etc. as a Navy Sailor and encourage us to buy War Bonds through very overt propaganda.
Free Speech comes and goes in the USA. We tend to lean towards the freer-side of things, but if we need to, we clamp down on it to meet our other goals.
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WW2 is hardly an outlier either. WW1 had Espionage Act of 1917, Civil War didn't even have a law, Censorship and seizure of printing presses was just so common. Pre-Civil War, the Postmaster General of slave states commonly censored pamphlets from abolitionists. I mean, the "Alien and Sedition Acts" were passed within a year or two of the Bill of Rights, allowing the President to arrest various members of the press in the 1780s. Etc. etc. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of the USA as a country.
Book burnings and other such events were also widespread in the USA throughout our history... and even have legal precedent like the Comstock laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
IMO, we've gone too far into the free-speech side of becoming absolutely idiots about the subject in recent years and all of us can benefit from researching the actual history of the USA.
Free Speech, both opening up, and restricting it, has its uses. And if you're a student of history, you'll be able to feel the ebbs and flows of this subject throughout time.
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Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.
> Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.
How about the Red Scare or Huckleberry Finn? Problem with censorship as a tool is that it will be abused. What makes you so sure that the party censoring AP African American studies won't be back in power next?
There's plenty of evils available to the US Government today. As some people like to point out, a government is an entity that has monopolized violence, which is an arrangement that's largely to the benefit of society (at least, in the cases where it is used correctly).
Execution, jailings, regulations, etc. etc. Plenty of ways for the government to be abused. Its inevitable that we give the government power to do what is necessary in society, whatever it is. Censorship is just one more power that the US Government has toyed with from time to time over the centuries.
To prevent abuse, we need to elect the right people to be our leaders, and the ones who wield that power.
China also has strict economic requirements for foreign companies too. Foreign companies of specific “strategic industries” are prohibited from operating independently in China and must open up as a joint venture with Chinese domestic companies and have party members on their board.
Bytedance is a Chinese company that is required by law to take direction from the CCP.
The CCP may find it useful to promote/suppress particular content regardless of the geographic location of the creator.
This is not an effective war strategy though. The same influence American politicians swear the Chinese government has over Tiktok can easily be obtained through any number of social media companies.
Moral high ground and fairness is the best strategy here. If it's illegal for all companies to capture this information, it makes enforcement easier and prevents foreign adversaries from merely infiltrating other companies.
There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.
I disagree. The most effective war strategy is playing dirtier than your opponent. Like, I don't know, throwing the two only atomic bombs ever unleashed on city centres.
I'm not saying that I approve it. I'm just saying that war is not an honourable endeavour. The one that goes further than the other ever dared tends to be the winner.
> There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.
Indeed. The only way to stop that is through draconian laws, so you can jail these people for "high treason", like I imagine China already does.
When you are also banning VPN access to whatever tools you deem under the control of "foreign adversaries" (which, more people should look up the government's actual definition on this lol), then privacy is very much a core narrative. If it was just about China then Chinese apps would have been banned off Apple and Google stores years ago.
This is going to be one of those things Americans look back at, like the PATRIOT act, and wonder how the hell they allowed it to happen all because of one app/event.
These guys are ridiculous, they represent the "I'm losing now so gonna take my ball home crying" mentality. Oh what a pity the US is not able to always win and have all the hot new toys made of american silicon! Of course it's very fine and dandy for all social networks that matter to be controlled on their soil, of course it's great that US is phone code #1!!1 and that .com is such an american thing at its birth. The land of freedom and opportunity cannot stomach that Zuker could not buy TikTok too? Come on give me a break. Also, even Rome fell. It's better not to start playing the loser's game, it just accelerates decadence.
I don't think it's specifically China. I think it's retribution because ByteDance won't open US offices and be beholden to the US government like other large corporations do. I think this is the US gov using them as an example of what happens when a corporation such as this dares not fall in line.
> I don't think it's specifically China. I think it's retribution because ByteDance won't open US offices and be beholden to the US government like other large corporations do. I think this is the US gov using them as an example of what happens when a corporation such as this dares not fall in line.
The bill affects multiple countries, not just China.
In fact, it encompasses "any foreign government or regime, determined by the Secretary [to be]... significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons"
Depending on how much (or little) you trust the Secretary of Commerce, that's incredibly far-reaching and could easily be abused.
Bytedance absolutely has US offices. Their Mountain View office being branded Bytedance, while their LA office is TikTok. They also have office in many cities in the US like Nashville and NYC.
That's absolutely incorrect. TikTok has plenty of US personnel and is doing something called "Project Texas" to try to assuage US regulator concern. This is about China controlling a channel that millions of Americans use to get their news
The issue is that tiktok told congress that US data was inaccessible in China but there is evidence of Chinese nationals accessing american journalist's data in China. Also I'm sure big tech lobbying is playing a large role here too, but that's the cover story at least.
Actual privacy and security laws aren't passed because this is not a sufficiently bipartisan issue to get enough votes.
One party is largely in favor of stronger privacy laws, but with enough dissenters that when that party is the majority party they still would need help from the other party.
The other party is largely against stronger privacy laws, without enough dissenters to overcome the more pro-privacy party dissenters when the more pro-privacy party has the majority.
The concern is subversion and malign influence, which is a very real problem. USMC University has a book on political warfare that covers the topic fairly.
The politicians don't want to touch privacy or security laws since that would negatively impact their benefactors as opposed to actually doing their jobs for their constituents.
Its a power grab, hopefully it won't get passed because of the loose undefined wording that could apply to anything they so choose like in ways described in Ayn Rand.
Yes but Twitter and Facebook have already been used for that purpose and continue to be used in that manner.
I get that it is not appropriate on government phones in case they manage to leverage a zeroday but for the average Joe I'm not seeing the risk of TikTok being any greater than the rest of the social media world - the same info is shared/available.
Because other social media companies aren't owned or controlled by an authoritarian state, one which expresses threats of violent aggression to its neighboring countries.
This is America, we follow through on our threats of violent aggression, no matter how far away other countries are. And when we ban speech, it's not authoritarianism, it's Freedom.
The US regulators and government is not tired of collecting money from and imposing fines on all social media and tech platforms, hence why Facebook, Google (YouTube), Instagram, Snap, etc all have been fined by the FTC for privacy violations.
Facebook and TikTok are of similar sizes and have both violated the privacy of its users and since FB has paid a giant billion dollar fine to the FTC, it already makes sense to also fine TikTok on similar grounds including overseas access to US data by specifically targeting US journalists.
Congress is also working on privacy legislation, it just takes forever because it's massive and complex. I imagine that legislators feel they have urgency/momentum behind the TikTok stuff to get something focused done. From the article below: "The House Energy and Commerce Committee last year advanced a bipartisan bill backed by Rodgers and sponsored by ranking member Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., that would produce a national data privacy standard, but the measure didn't get a House floor vote, and no similar measure has passed in the Senate."
You know they wouldn't be doing this unless the point was to expand the government's ability to harm its citizens. Which sweeping and terrifying powers does this one introduce?
I can't explain authoritatively, but my thought is that perhaps this is the only way congress has to affect the change, and they're the ones wanting to make it happen.
1) I understand that the CCP bans sites and apps. Let's not sink to their level. (Instead, let's build more and more technologies to enable their people to get around said bans).
2) This is embarrassing. You don't like TikTok? Man up and compete. Don't ban it.
3) The complexity in this bills makes it reak of corruption. There will be winners and losers in this bill. The losers we can bet are 99% of the population.
I am fine with banning what is, effectively, a Chinese psyop marketed as a social media app. I don’t really think we should be competing to make the most addictive doomscroller possible.
However, I do agree about point 3, wholeheartedly. This makes it seem like envy, where our government is salivating at the prospect of doing this themselves under the guise of protecting us from foreign powers.
> I am fine with banning what is, effectively, a Chinese psyop marketed as a social media app.
As a non-American, I would argue the last 70 years of Hollywood and social media has been a psyop by a foreign power. The DoD literally aids in the making of Hollywood movies as long as their ideological content is "correct"[1]. After all that it's pretty funny to see this kind of pearl clutching about "psyops" coming from American citizens.
Re: 1 and 2, I'm not sure this is as tit-for-tat. China has a -lot- of business regulations unfair to outsiders that the US doesn't and hasn't retaliated much on, even if it puts us on uneven grounds so to speak. And it's not like TikTok is so advanced and the US can't compete so we're banning it. There are many apps from foreign countries which are popular and not banned. It's a fear, legitimate or not, about data access and data harvesting and potential device control to what's becoming a direct adversary.
Could you highlight any particular complexity you're referring to? I read this bill and, independent of my thoughts and feelings about it, I do not find it overly complex.
I believe law is like code: the number of bugs goes up with line count. Bugs are exploited by black hat lawyers.
This bill is twice as long as the entire U.S. Constitution.
A real principled stand against these adversaries would not be resorting to their levels with this "RESTRICT ACT" and giving more power and money to negative value add lawyes, but instead would be something like "FREEDOM ACT", where we invest in technologies and tactics that go against the Great Firewall and other methods used by these countries to keep American apps out.
I heard on a podcast yesterday a suggestion that the reason the intelligence community doesn't like TikTok is that, unlike with Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, they can't just hand a warrant over to ByteDance get the data they want. If there's one thing the intelligence community hates, it's not getting the data they want.
Back in the previous administration, I figured this was all a temper-tantrum being thrown by an executive who got embarrassed when outsmarted by a bunch of kids. It may have started like that, but somehow in D.C. everyone's been convinced of the danger a foreign-owned social-media network poses. I'm still not sure I get it...
TikTok has a US business presence, their US user data is stored in the US. All of this is subject to US jurisdiction and court orders. TikTok can't tell US marshalls and federal agents to take a hike if they show up at TikTok's US headquarters with court documents--their leadership can be arrested and their servers seized.
I'm still unconvinced that tiktok holds much data that is valuable to any government. As a node in the information tree it might have some marginal utility but my understanding of tiktok is that the data primarily is how much you enjoy cat videos. Maybe the chinese government can work out your sexual orientation, or that you are anti communist, but this is only a problem if you live in China.
Even if the data is valuable, as far as I know there are no backdoors available to tiktok that aren't available to other apps (e.g any tencent game). The security model at the os level seems to be the proper place to ensure privacy, and the witch hunt against tik tok seems to only exist because it is popular.
So, they're clearly trying to describe what they're doing in general terms. I'm not a lawyer, but I wonder if that's partly a constitutional matter -- just going after TikTok by name based on a knowledge of _past_ access to American data by staff in China would sound like an ex post facto law. So they have to frame it as being about a class of services with relationships to a group of foreign adversaries. But then are there other companies that might fall afoul of this? Yandex?
This is not that. But Congress has had years of opportunities to develop actual data privacy laws and they haven't. They held proceedings focused on a single company. The tagline for this post is specifically "Senate Bill to Ban TikTok" for good reason: it was written to target a single company.
We _should_ be concerned about companies which have personal data on basically everyone and have no real limitations on how it's used, but FB is gonna keep operating. We _should_ be concerned about a government that can gather private data about Americans by secretly working with a corporation. But AT&T's cooperation with the NSA never really hurt it.
So we can just calling time-of-death on the United States' social tech dominance now, right?
Domestic tech companies shamelessly sold access to American users for manipulation by "foreign adversaries" for years, made billions, suffered no lasting consequences. Then Chinese Vine walks in, smokes everybody else in ~24 months, the mad South African buys and destroys Twitter, and Mark toddles off the cliff of irrelevance with a social network in each pocket and an Oculus strapped to his face.
No, we do the most American thing imaginable. Just like we did with the space race, we got to the moon first therefore we won, even though we weren't first in much anything in the space race at the time. So I fully expect we ban TikTok then declare one of the American social media networks the winner of the social media race.
I find a certain sense of irony in the Chinese propagandists touting arguments such as 'this is authoritarian", "this is anti-competitive", "this is because TikTok won't let the US spy on its citizens" and so forth when ALL OF THESE THINGS are done by the CCP and worse.
The reason for banning it is simple: it can be used as a first-strike weapon to influence an entire generation (or two) of Americans in a conflict with China that is almost certain to happen. Keeping it under Chinese control is a bad idea.
China has the option to sell it to an American company, take the money and build more guns to shoot at us. Honestly, it's a win-win.
Do I support TikTok? No, not in the least bit. Their privacy controls are horrendous and, at this stage, user info and content is undoubtedly siphoned and delivered straight to the CCP. Where it goes beyond that is undoubtedly in some Tom Clancy novel, of which likely pales in comparison to some even more grim reality.
Was TikTok a net good to American society? Depends on who you ask, but if anything I think most people would agree that it only exaggerated the decline of the average attention span. This moves with the larger movement to commodify clicks, quick ads and lowers the threshold towards late stage capitalism. In short, this speeds cultural decline ("I said what I said").
Would I support an American TikTok? No, see above.
Should TikTok be banned by the US congress? When is the last time you ever saw a ban of something that didn't include any overt pocket lining or omnibus-style overreach? Read the bill, the language is broad and sweeping; certainly kin to the CFAA and COPPA.
So what then? Well we're certainly at an impasse here, right? We can't rely on tech businesses to turn their shoulders to cold hard cash. We can't rely on our elected officials to "Do the right thing" without lining their pockets and sharpening their knives. Truly a conundrum with no good solution.
I'm fine if TikTok gets banned, but I feel like Facebook and all the other social media incumbents owe Americans a bunch of money for their biggest competition being banned.
How are so many people (especially on HN) fine with this? Haven't we criticized "The Great Firewall of China" for literally decades? How is this not the start of that? Genuine question. This ban seems to set horrible precedent to me. Bet everyones "coolness" with it makes me think I'm not understanding something.
The media is the fourth branch of government. It is wildly considered to be essential for a healthy democracy. You don’t want to have it controlled (for many people) by an untrustworthy and adversarial party, especially when they have a long track record of censorship and are trying to extend their own influence and rules globally.
We can still say and post what we want - it’s not content that’s being censored.
Isn't this exactly what China says about us? (And no: I don't believe them... but that frankly isn't the point. We normally get to dislike their position on indirect philosophical grounds--that people should get to see and do whatever they want and if freedom is dangerous to you then you are the aggressor--irregardless of whether they are "correct", and so we lose the moral high ground and will have to sit around in a direct mud-slinging argument if we try to use the same kind of "for the good of the people we must all lose our freedom" argument.)
You're understanding everything just fine. Speech advocates should be livid about this, but their silence on the question is quite telling.
As the sibling post mentions, the public is too stupid to be allowed to be communicated at by an untrustworthy and adversarial media. Of course, untrustworthy and adversarial refers to foreign enemies, not domestic[1] ones.
[1] Fox and friends, et al, would be the poster children[2] for untrustworthy and adversarial, but they are our untrustworthy and adversarial media firms, so mysteriously, they get a free pass.
[2] Just imagine if the 'batshit right-wing conspiracy' half of the US media landscape were ran by the Kremlin (Or some other boogieman of the week), instead of a billionaire from Australia. Same content, different source, would drive people utterly livid.
I personally was deep into digital privacy back in grade school and college when the Arab Spring began, but my own thinking shifted after learning about and working with people who blue teamed incidents like Operation Aurora and Titan Rain, as well as censorship of FB and Whatsapp in the PRC following unrest in East Turkestan in 2009.
because some people understand geopolitics and the threat of foreign propaganda undermining the nations security?
but sure, lets not ban it. lets not stop any foreign interference in our institutions and lets let our adversaries brain wash our population into destroying our country, but as long as we feel righteous that we have freedom right? thats all that matters?
every time someone brings up a whataboutism as a rebuttle to that, "what about american social media companies?? they are much worse", they are doing exactly what China wants. China will gladly sit by and watch our destruction, prodding it along, as we eat each other. Most people are just oblivious to it and will deny it because of how much peace we've had, and how far we've gone without a near-peer enemy. at least with this bill we can stop the bleed.
I was once a diehard defender of digital privacy and a small government, but over time I realized that the world really is not peaceful and countries exist out there that want to see our people dead. I understand it, I get it. But so many people are oblivious to foreign threats that they are willing to undermine their own country just so they can be on their high horse. It's not worth it.
Right he’s just closing down one of the “public squares” then saying “of course you can talk on these other less popular public squares!”
This is mind boggling that every single person on HN isn’t terrified of this.
Surely most of us were around in the 2000s when the Bush Administration demonized people who spoke against the war? Aren’t we the same people who were railing against censorship then? What HAPPENED to that community I grew up with that wouldn’t put up with censorship, who held free speech as the backbone of democracy? Where are all of those people now?
I have a few hunches, and I’m not sure I’d like to know the answer.
> he’s just closing down one of the “public squares” then saying “of course you can talk on these other less popular public squares
Let’s be real. Nobody is closing anything down. This is a bizarre game of brinksmanship between D.C. and Beijing that ends in one place: divestiture. The only reason it’s getting so much attention is because the object of concern is a social media property, not e.g. a port asset or power plant.
Do you think that the President banning people to sell paper, ink, electricity and internet access to the NYTimes has any chance to fly as not violating the 1A? I mean they can shout from the windows and write on the glass windows with lipstick.
A better analogy is – is it a violation of the first amendment if the government intercepts and holds a shipment of newspapers sent from China at customs?
Theres a fair precedent if you use the clear and present danger doctrine.
Not that I agree that it is actually an immediate threat to US national security, but anti-TikTok pundits claim it is and can spin their argument that way. Its not unreasonable following that premise.
Diving in, the list of "foreign adversaries" is amusing. China and Russia have to be on there. Iran and North Korea I guess. Cuba and specifically a Maduro led Venezuela are a stretch.
What this bill actually seems to do is allow the Secretary of Commerce to review any communication technology, including both apps and hardware, used by a million Americans, and then suggest the president punish it if it poses an "unacceptable risk" of stealing IP, damaging infrastructure, interfering with elections, extorts a person in power, or just "otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons."
Then it discusses what penalties the President can enact, which are banning the thing, confiscating their assets, and confiscating their collected data (and code? not 100% on this.)
Next, how to designate a communication device needing review or foreign adversary, basically someone high up says so. Then how to remove a foreign adversary, which seems much more difficult though it may just have more possible methods.
The rest seems to deal with the minutia of enforcement. I also can't be bothered to read this once, let alone twice, but it also means I'm not quite sure what investigative powers the Secretary of Commerce has without getting a warrant.
So it's called a bill to ban TikTok, but it seems to give the government a fairly clear path to banning any foreign communication technology widely used. The adversary part doesn't even seem necessary, the only time the foreign adversary comes up is if they are undermining the democratic process. Which means Russia can't interfere in elections, Israel and Saudi Arabia can.
A strategy doomed to failure: kick the far-right off Twitter so they can plan a revolution on Parler. Kick the QAnon people off Facebook so they can reorganize on Gab. All this will ever achieve is to scatter people into deeper and darker ideological echo chambers.
(10) ICTS COVERED HOLDING ENTITY.—The term “ICTS covered holding entity” means any entity that—
(A) owns, controls, or manages information and communications technology products or services; and
(B) (i) has not less than 1,000,000 United States-based annual active users at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President; or
(ii) for which more than 1,000,000 units have been sold to persons in the United States before the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President.
(11) INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS OR SERVICES.—The term “information and communications technology products or services” means any hardware, software, or other product or service primarily intended to fulfill or enable the function of information or data processing, storage, retrieval, or communication by electronic means, including transmission, storage, and display.
this seems pretty broad, not just TikTok, but WeChat, Little Red Book, Yandex and any cellphone made by Chinese companies has 1M+ unit sold may all be subject to same restrictions
Good. If American software companies face anti-competitive restrictions on accessing the Chinese market, then we may as well do the same. Paradox of Tolerance and whatnot.
What I don't get is why we didn't pursue something in the WTO years ago.
China doesn't allow FB, Insta, Twitter, etc to operate in its market, but its companies can provide such a service to US customers? Is that not protectionism?
If we're afraid that China will use TikTok to push their propaganda in the US, we should be appropriately concerned that banning a platform to stop targeted speech is in conflict with our own norms around free speech. But instead insisting that TikTok can only operate in the US if FB/Snap/Twitter can operate in China on equal terms seems like it would be more in line with our rhetoric around wanting a rules-based international order, and freedom of both trade and speech under most circumstances.
If western social media companies were able to offer their services in China, their fear of our propaganda would be much worse than our fear of theirs.
PRC has "developing nation" status in the WTO. This allows the PRC to get special and differential treatment in a number of IP and general trade related agreements.
If those companies were willing to obey the same rules that Chinese companies have to obey in China (censoring what the government tells them to censor, sharing personal data that the government asks for, sharing technology that the governments asks for) they could operate in China.
It's not all that different from how US restaurant chains cannot operate in the UAE unless they take things off the menu that violate Islamic dietary rules. So Wendy's in Dubai does not sell The Baconator.
So there's nothing really to pursue via the WTO. It's not a protectionism issue when domestic and foreign companies have to obey the same or similar restrictions, even if those restrictions are onerous.
What's the complaint exactly? Unrestricted global free trade isn't something every country is expected to support or the WTO is meant to enforce. China can ban foreign companies and services from operating in their jurisdiction for any or no reason. Other countries are free to do the same.
> China doesn't allow FB, Insta, Twitter, etc to operate in its market
> If western social media companies were able to offer their services in China
I've seen this meme floating around a lot recently and feel the need to add in some relevant history.
Between the mid and late aughts Google, Facebook, and Twitter were all operating in China. Around this time the Chinese government got very serious about content filtering and imposed new restrictions on what could be shown/uploaded. There was a very strong backlash from the US side that American companies might be helping to build the Great Firewall. Many Americans were outraged and US politicians warned the companies not to build infrastructure that could be used for censorship. So the American companies acquiesced and either left the market or were banned (Twitter).
I remember the outrage back then. It's like what I see now but with the facts reversed! Back then the concern was that American tech companies would export infrastructure that could be used by China for social control. Now it's "China won't allow American tech companies!".
"We've always/never been at war with EastAsia."
Kind of disturbing stuff. Watch the congressional hearing of the TikTok CEO and tell me that the powers who are pushing this care about facts.
There has been a very large increase in aggressive talk vs China. It feels very strange considering these same areas were against economic warfare with China when Trump was in Charge, and I would be money were against the Iraq and/or Afghanistan wars at some point. The "facts" don't matter. For what its worth, my memory is in line with yours, the back lash was absolutely on the US side.
Chinese containment has been a bipartisan agenda since the Obama presidency at least. It was the “trade war” being fought through used tariffs that certain people disliked and placing them on our allies that was overwhelmingly rejected.
So companies that refuse to build tools for compliance with China's unique censorship/control policies are not allowed in the country. Most American tech companies opted to leave voluntarily rather than implement these controls, and at least one that did not implement the controls or voluntarily leave was instead forcibly banned.
I see the point you're making here, but at the same time, I think the situation as explained here can still be viewed as China not allowing American tech companies to operate in China the way those companies want to do business.
Has the US provided ByteDance with an opportunity to become compliant with this country's requirements that it has opted against? That would seem very similar to what transpired with Twitter in China.
Allow me to elaborate a bit more: by implementing the firewall, China not only isolated itself, it enabled the western internet to concentrate western investment on Silicon Valley firms, that with no big Chinese companies around, established today’s western world internet monopolies. Or in plain English, by closing itself, China literally helped US companies dominate the www.
China on the other hand, not only had their domestic market entirely for their own domestic giants, creating their own expertise and talent pool, they also didn’t even had to think on what to do, as they could just copy US apps “with Chinese characteristics”, making A LOT of money too.
There was a lot of talk about technology transfer, but you right, the narrative 100% changed from helping the CCP to “China bad”, but how bad they really are when they allowed America to make a true empire on the www without the Chinese companies as competitors?
How America is reacting to its very first Chinese competitor says a lot about America true sportsmanship on the market, it’s very childish and lame if you ask me.
I’m having trouble finding useful info about size of china online sector vs USA in terms of GDP. But it definitely isn’t US dominating. Some sites say china is close 2nd to USA, but when I look at numbers china is 3x USA (7.1T Chinese digital economy vs apparently 2.1T in USA).
You're making the opposite argument of the comment you're replying to, though. China can't simultaneously have isolated itself (as you say) and it be the fault of Western companies choosing not participate in China (as the person you're replying to) says.
It sounds like you both agree China made a market that was specifically hostile to American companies, including intentionally banning some, though. Which is kind of the point most people are making when they talk about market reciprocity.
The problem there is that Google, Facebook and Twitter refused to export American values abroad and chose to comply with the censorship laws of foreign governments. I do regard it as morally unacceptable for an American tech company to collaborate with political repression in a foreign country either by silencing dissidents or by helping that foreign government track down dissidents.
I also think it is quite reasonable that American tech companies should be allowed to operate in China and uphold American values in China if TikTok is allowed to operate in the US. I don't see a contradiction. The entire point of letting China into the WTO and allowing China to help Walmart and Amazon acquire inventory to offer "low prices" was to bring freedom to China by opening the country up to capitalism (this was stated more or less openly by western neoliberal policy makers at the time). It definitely wasn't to strengthen the CCP and weaken the USA but that's what the actual result of 2 decades of "free trade" with China has been.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter didn't have that choice. They could either agree to follow Chinese censorship, or be steadfast and get banned. They did the latter.
TikTok is not asking to be allowed to operate in the US and uphold Chinese values. It's just asking to be allowed to operate in the US, and agreed to public oversight on its algorithms and data storage. This is essentially equivalent to what the Chinese government asks of American companies, and what they declined to do, in large part due to moral disagreement from their employees.
> This is essentially equivalent to what the Chinese government asks of American companies, and what they declined to do, in large part due to moral disagreement from their employees.
Sigh, it isn't just this: China doesn't do rule of law, so American companies have to follow rule by law when operating in China, but they are also subject to American anti-corruption laws even for their operations in China, which makes doing business in China difficult (unless they can be isolated from that like they are in manufacturing). If it were just "moral disagreements due to employees", the CEOs would find a way around that, but technically it is just hard to do social media in China under Chinese rules that you won't even be told what they are.
But I agree TikTok should be treated fairly, even if that fairness is definitely not reciprocated in China.
WTO regulation of services is very limited. It mainly regulates the flow of goods. Unilateral domestic regulation or bilateral agreement with China are the only options.
They'd have sided with China who on their official books says "they can come back they just have to follow our laws", while in practice continuing to ban and restrict these companies regardless.
I don't feel any sympathy for Tiktok considering they block and remove content that goes against the CCP's narratives. So yeah, it's fair game when they do shit like that.
politics aside and taking into consideration that all of our governments suck in their own special ways...it pains me greatly that China is considered an adversary with the US..and Russia too..what good could come to the world if the three had a healthy relationship and pooled our greatest minds and resources toward the betterment of mankind.
1. Apple adds easy support for non-Apple app stores and side-loading to iOS to comply with the recent EU regulations that require opening things up in 2024, and then people can download TikTok from outside the US and install it?
2. TikTok users switch to using the TikTok website instead of the app?
It looks like the main thing the app gives you that the website can't is a convenient way to film short video and edit it and add music all on your phone and then post that. Surely someone could write a social network agnostic app just for filming, editing, and adding music that can upload that short video to any of your social media accounts (TikTok, YouTube shorts, and whatever other ones allow video). The destinations could be entirely user configurable and support any social network that provides a halfway decent upload API.
What's the US going to do? Try to make a US equivalent of China's Great Firewall? I don't think that would work here, because our free speech laws make it too easy to circulate circumvention information.
If I was a company that does mobile apps I'd be seriously looking right now into making that general short video maker/uploader app. If the US does successfully cut off TikTok all those users aren't going to just stop wanting to post and read the kind of things they are now doing there. They are going to try to move to other platforms. Done right, maybe my app would be something they use as part of that.
The language on what constitutes a violation is vague, but it does appear you could face hefty fines and jail time for this behavior under the current draft of the act.
"Hence anyone using a VPN to access TikTok would be in trouble—specifically, subject to up to $1 million in fines, 20 years in prison, or both."[1]
If you believe the Senator who wrote it (up to you I guess), this doesn't meet the bar for prosecution.
> Warner's office says this isn't so. Spokesperson Rachel Cohen told Newsweek that the provisions only apply when someone is "engaged in 'sabotage or subversion' of communications technology in the U.S., causing 'catastrophic effects' on U.S. critical infrastructure, or 'interfering in, or altering the result' of a federal election in order for criminal penalties to apply."
I can't find that language in the act. It seems to apply to any violation of the act. The linked article goes over the language of the act and it seems to have the same impression thereof.
While I don't personally mind banning Tik Toc since I think that it is a drain on our culture and is likely addictive, I do have serious concerns:
Why nothing about US media companies pushing advertising based on data that really should be protected by privacy laws?
Why nothing about the material released from Twitter by Matt Taibi, et. al.? Very concerning stuff for a country talking the talk about democracy.
Why not enforce limits on what kids can watch and for how long, as China does? While I am all for free speech and liberty for adults, I think it is necessary for parents to put some guardrails on their kids.
There is a lot more at stake here: the USA (my country) is struggling to maintain the dollar hegemony, has some severe looming economic problems, and has the same general problems shared by all countries. The USA has been very successful by carrying a big stick and hitting other countries with it. But, what was once a successful strategy is, I think, now a very poor strategy. An Empire like ours should sometimes orchestrate a graceful exit, on terms best for our country. Now when I say best for our country, I mean best for people, and not what is best for Wall Street, Our Military Industrial Complex, etc.
> Why not enforce limits on what kids can watch and for how long, as China does? While I am all for free speech and liberty for adults, I think it is necessary for parents to put some guardrails on their kids.
This is the parent's job. Kids can't even play in the front yard without CPS being called, and adding more complexities like this sounds like an even worse nightmare.
The US is "the ship of Theseus"'ing itself, replacing parts that have worked in the past, but are no longer serving the ruling class to their satisfaction, with parts (policies) plagiarised from China that do better serve the ruling class.
Carefully selected to keep the ship distinctly itself, but still ever so slightly different each time.
(I just like the irony of plagiarising policy from China as a parallel to their plagiarising IP from the US - and likely elsewhere).
> Why nothing about US media companies pushing advertising based on data that really should be protected by privacy laws?
Privacy is not the major concern here.
> Why nothing about the material released from Twitter by Matt Taibi, et. al.? Very concerning stuff for a country talking the talk about democracy.
Twitter is subject to the US courts and legal system and while there are issue we can work to resolve them.
> Why not enforce limits on what kids can watch and for how long, as China does? While I am all for free speech and liberty for adults, I think it is necessary for parents to put some guardrails on their kids.
Again not the issue.
Seriously, read at-least the start of the bill it makes it very very clear the main concern is limiting foreign powers ability to mass influence the general USA population.
740 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadIt's quite simple - the US and China don't get along.
It's never been about privacy nor internal (to the US) security. It's very openly about cross pacific adversaries. Only meta-tech commentators have tried to apply some weird narrative of privacy.
1. This is a way of getting memes to the masses that we (the US political establishment) can't fully control.
2. Meta and others are getting their asses kicked revenue-wise by Tik Tok. Like any business, they'd use anything they could to fight back. Turns out they can use China fear mongering, so they are.
3. (Added) Believe it or not, there's nationalistic pride here. There is a reluctance to admit that an app from "the other side" (China) is more appealing to the masses than _our_ social media apps. Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas, even though they're far superior to American cars (but at least they're made by Asians who are _allies_ I guess).
No matter that banning an app is completely against the principles we claim, such as freedom for individuals, competition in a free market, and freedom of information.
The amount of brainrot content that tiktok pushes is staggering. The other video platforms don’t come close.
Social media is the puts when it comes to moral bankruptcy... It is a casino based on popularity, and so many people are dumping money into it on a regular basis that it's really too late to do anything to stem the way it manipulates our world. Congressional action is far too late and futile to the maximum in encouraging any sort of ethics, they did nothing with all the damning evidence presented about Facebook, The only reason they'd ban TikTok is to satisfy the anti-competitive lobby of US competitors if you ask me.
TilTok is a corrupt platform nonetheless, and I really wouldn't be sad if it got banned, the basis of it has already infected everything else, including YouTube to the point of useless overload, so the entire ideal of going viral and getting paid on platforms is actually way past anything meaningful any more.
tiktok incentivizes teenagers to create content, and makes going viral extremely easy... as long as you can up the ante on current edgy activity
they hosted the videos and banned them as they were reported.
you can't even search the term anymore as it shows a get help button instead.
however i can go on youtube and watch all of the ripped tiktok that people downloaded before it was removed.
I am no conspiracy theorist, but at some point we need to accept the countless proof we keep reading about tech used maliciously once your app reaches a significant mass of users, especially if those users live in a country you are in a bona-fide economic war with.
Some degree of skepticism is healthy, but propaganda thrives any time a skeptic dismisses valid concerns.
That's for altruists, who rarely make it to Washington and don't last long when they do.
*laws that protect a negative externality for an involuntary transactor.
Frankly, it should get this treatment. Its executives have been consistently hostile toward government inquiries and in public statements about its users. The hubris it has shown in its treatment on political speech and disdain for paid advertisers is revolting. The stock structure of the company is a physical manifestation of everything wrong - we can treat the public and the law with disdain and you can't touch us.
So while I think it’s fair to ask for a reference, it is prudent to assume it’s happening, unless proven otherwise.
They don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2023/03/24/douyin-tiktok...
By whose standards? The United States has never been an ideologically cohesive nation outside some basic principles of representative democracy - and even those have been challenged at moments in our history. The moment you get beyond the basics of a unified military, postal service, weights and measures, and currency, you quickly get into the social issues that have plagued our cohesion since the founding of the nation. Is Uncle Tom's Cabin a seminal work in understanding US history, or subversive and dangerous? We can't even decide that as a nation at the moment, so "how much social media is good for our kids?" would be a very, very ugly discussion to have at a national level.
I don't have Tik Tok installed, my kids only get the "reruns" off YouTube, but frankly I find it a bit extremist that the US government wants to ban an app that looks to me like people doing funny dances in their living rooms.
TikTok has expanded to be the dominant short form video platform for every interest, niche, and micro niche you can imagine that exists, and even ones you can't imagine.
Please anyone reading this comment replace "TikTok = people dancing" with "TikTok = feed + discovery for short form video tailored to your specific interests no matter how niche". Yes this includes programming, science, education, dancing, gaming, cooking, acrobatics, painting, arguing, politics, news, weather, etc. basically anything you can imagine that isn't against their content policies.
1) TikTok is really good at what they do.
2) They are a Chinese-owned company.
It certainly feels like if it weren't for #2, they would be praised for their innovation and held up as a great American success story. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be skepticism in the name of national security, but of all the things threatening to destroy the planet on any given day, this feels low on the list.
YouTube videos are frequently 30-120 seconds of relevant content padded to 10-15 minutes. Most TikTok videos are close to just those 30-120 relevant seconds.
If Congress bans it, they'll probably lose the trust and interest of a massive percentage of Americans under the age of 30.
It is this and also that young people are especially malleable, so content that they see can cause long-term psychological and emotional damage, or--more pertinently to governments' interests--can introduce ideological change that they don't control.
There is a wide variety of content on TikTok. One category is (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people who watched the Congressional "democracy" theatre on the TikTok ban realizing that their so-called democracy is fake, a laughing stock, pick your pejorative. Millions of people who formerly had no clue, now realize absolutely that what is on the label does not match what is on the tin.
Of course, they could have realized this via other means since it has been the case for ages, but whether they would have is another story.
If I was running an illusory regime, I'd take out TikTok too, it's just old fashioned common sense.
Never mind that the policy here is actually not about protecting children at all, since its banning an app entirely where the vast majority of users are adults.
a) the Chinese goverment is right
and b) TikTok is notably worse than American social media.
I, for example, disagree with both. I think the Chinese government is wrong about a lot of things, including the right way to raise kids. And I think TikTok is no worse than Instagram.
The Chinese government is right in the sense that drug cartels generally avoid getting too high on their own supply.
Germany dropped bombs on the UK. The UK responded by dropping bombs on Germany. By responding in kind, was the UK therefore asserting that Germany was 'right' to drop bombs on the UK?
If the UK justified their actions solely on the basis that because the Germans did it it must be ok that'd be unreasonable. (This isn't the right forum to get into it, but the ethics of civilian saturation bombings are much more complicated and I'm not saying either was in the right, though of course in total Germany was far far worse).
This is a holdover from the US supporting the development of industry in Japan to keep them from turning communist (which was a real threat back in the 60's and 70's)
In what other trade context would this scenario be acceptable?
And how does giving access to an authoritarian regime, famous for controlling speech, promote free speech?
Besides, the problem is already solvable. People could simply stop using TikTok if they agreed that its disadvantages outweigh its benefits. No one is forcing them. This is a vote with your feet issue, plain and simple.
A democratically elected government banning something is the people deciding.
A lot of people choose meth.
And to also ensure that trade relationships are fair and equitable (which it currently isnt).
Besides, anytime we see the government intervene on matters like this, we're reminded how they make it worse.
And you didn't address my point with respect to young people's lack of life experience. Or that trade relationships should be fair and equitable.
The statement that trade relationships must be fair is some sort of neoliberal mumbo jumbo. I don't accept it as an assumption or a consequence. You can accept it as axiomatic if you want, but I don't see it as a consequence of any valid logical train of thought.
And what you describe as "neo-liberal mumbo-jumbo" I think for most people would be seen as simple commonsense.
Open markets mean what it says on the tin - markets without barrier. Saying, "We're barring actors for entering the market for reason X," means closed markets even is X is "treating people poorly."
What EU's social media companies? Exactly.
By US banning TikTok, US is acting against claimed values, turning out to be hypocrite. China, by banning US social media, doesn't. Might be seen unfair, but it is a dead end that US painted itself into.
For the sake of argument, _if_ we agree that banning is OK, EU should ban social media from both, and subsidize their own the same way as US subsidized theirs.
It is being true to what I claim that I'm, what my values are. If I start playing opportunist, how I'm better that the other guy?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
We do ban some import vehicles. Specifically light trucks.
Harley-Davidson famously tried to get Japanese V-Twins banned for not leaking oil. Er, I mean, for “stealing their signature exhaust noise”.
Both Honda and Toyota build a lot factories in the US, creating a lot of jobs for US Citizens that actually show up to vote. All while American brands move to Mexico, Canada etc.
TikTok might as well be the same as "BigTech" but with the bonus of being Chinese—that is something politicians can work with. I think the root of the problem, though, is we (humans) are easy to manipulate, but I dont even know how we can even begin to tackle that.
I’m finding the wording strange because the US arguably has more cross-Pacific allies than adversaries.
Pack it up, folks, as it turns out, there are some things that are too dangerous to let the public hear.
Free Speech comes and goes in the USA. We tend to lean towards the freer-side of things, but if we need to, we clamp down on it to meet our other goals.
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WW2 is hardly an outlier either. WW1 had Espionage Act of 1917, Civil War didn't even have a law, Censorship and seizure of printing presses was just so common. Pre-Civil War, the Postmaster General of slave states commonly censored pamphlets from abolitionists. I mean, the "Alien and Sedition Acts" were passed within a year or two of the Bill of Rights, allowing the President to arrest various members of the press in the 1780s. Etc. etc. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of the USA as a country.
Book burnings and other such events were also widespread in the USA throughout our history... and even have legal precedent like the Comstock laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
IMO, we've gone too far into the free-speech side of becoming absolutely idiots about the subject in recent years and all of us can benefit from researching the actual history of the USA.
Free Speech, both opening up, and restricting it, has its uses. And if you're a student of history, you'll be able to feel the ebbs and flows of this subject throughout time.
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Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.
How about the Red Scare or Huckleberry Finn? Problem with censorship as a tool is that it will be abused. What makes you so sure that the party censoring AP African American studies won't be back in power next?
Execution, jailings, regulations, etc. etc. Plenty of ways for the government to be abused. Its inevitable that we give the government power to do what is necessary in society, whatever it is. Censorship is just one more power that the US Government has toyed with from time to time over the centuries.
To prevent abuse, we need to elect the right people to be our leaders, and the ones who wield that power.
I believe in reciprocity. If someone treating you poorly, there's no reason you need to keep allowing them to walk over you.
Sucks for us Westerners to see our Internet firewalled, but that's what happens when you're in a war, whatever its nature. Everybody pays for it.
Moral high ground and fairness is the best strategy here. If it's illegal for all companies to capture this information, it makes enforcement easier and prevents foreign adversaries from merely infiltrating other companies.
There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.
I disagree. The most effective war strategy is playing dirtier than your opponent. Like, I don't know, throwing the two only atomic bombs ever unleashed on city centres.
I'm not saying that I approve it. I'm just saying that war is not an honourable endeavour. The one that goes further than the other ever dared tends to be the winner.
> There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.
Indeed. The only way to stop that is through draconian laws, so you can jail these people for "high treason", like I imagine China already does.
This is going to be one of those things Americans look back at, like the PATRIOT act, and wonder how the hell they allowed it to happen all because of one app/event.
The bill affects multiple countries, not just China.
In fact, it encompasses "any foreign government or regime, determined by the Secretary [to be]... significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons"
Depending on how much (or little) you trust the Secretary of Commerce, that's incredibly far-reaching and could easily be abused.
It's not that simple. The commitee can change the definition of "foreign adversary" under SEC. 2. (8) (B) at their will.
"TikTok spy journalist" returns a lot of results in your favorite search engine
One party is largely in favor of stronger privacy laws, but with enough dissenters that when that party is the majority party they still would need help from the other party.
The other party is largely against stronger privacy laws, without enough dissenters to overcome the more pro-privacy party dissenters when the more pro-privacy party has the majority.
So nothing passes.
The politicians don't want to touch privacy or security laws since that would negatively impact their benefactors as opposed to actually doing their jobs for their constituents.
Its a power grab, hopefully it won't get passed because of the loose undefined wording that could apply to anything they so choose like in ways described in Ayn Rand.
I get that it is not appropriate on government phones in case they manage to leverage a zeroday but for the average Joe I'm not seeing the risk of TikTok being any greater than the rest of the social media world - the same info is shared/available.
Facebook and TikTok are of similar sizes and have both violated the privacy of its users and since FB has paid a giant billion dollar fine to the FTC, it already makes sense to also fine TikTok on similar grounds including overseas access to US data by specifically targeting US journalists.
https://rollcall.com/2023/02/02/lawmakers-stumble-on-data-pr...
Can’t the administration or a governmental agency (such as but not limited to FTC, FCC etc.) ban it?
I think that’s how it works in many other countries.
The reverse, where government agencies ban things without Congress, is the unusual thing from a Constitutional perspective.
Those bodies were created by congress to delegate the duties of congress to the Executive branch.
They work for the Executive but are given authority by the Legislature.
The thing you may be conflating as the reverse is executive orders.
2) This is embarrassing. You don't like TikTok? Man up and compete. Don't ban it.
3) The complexity in this bills makes it reak of corruption. There will be winners and losers in this bill. The losers we can bet are 99% of the population.
However, I do agree about point 3, wholeheartedly. This makes it seem like envy, where our government is salivating at the prospect of doing this themselves under the guise of protecting us from foreign powers.
Do you personally use tiktok?
As a non-American, I would argue the last 70 years of Hollywood and social media has been a psyop by a foreign power. The DoD literally aids in the making of Hollywood movies as long as their ideological content is "correct"[1]. After all that it's pretty funny to see this kind of pearl clutching about "psyops" coming from American citizens.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unof...
Re: 3, can't argue there.
This bill is twice as long as the entire U.S. Constitution.
A real principled stand against these adversaries would not be resorting to their levels with this "RESTRICT ACT" and giving more power and money to negative value add lawyes, but instead would be something like "FREEDOM ACT", where we invest in technologies and tactics that go against the Great Firewall and other methods used by these countries to keep American apps out.
Back in the previous administration, I figured this was all a temper-tantrum being thrown by an executive who got embarrassed when outsmarted by a bunch of kids. It may have started like that, but somehow in D.C. everyone's been convinced of the danger a foreign-owned social-media network poses. I'm still not sure I get it...
Of course they can. Bytedance is keeping American TikTok data in the U.S. The problem is that it's also filtering out to China.
This is not something you have to speculate about, they clearly outline the process for law enforcement to get information: https://www.tiktok.com/legal/page/global/law-enforcement/en
Are there any examples of ByteDance refusing to hand over data in response to a warrant?
Even if the data is valuable, as far as I know there are no backdoors available to tiktok that aren't available to other apps (e.g any tencent game). The security model at the os level seems to be the proper place to ensure privacy, and the witch hunt against tik tok seems to only exist because it is popular.
The only way this ends: They keep tipping until they fall off.
But moreover, laws should be about behavior. You don’t ban Philip Morris, you ban selling tobacco to kids and smoking indoors.
This is not that. But Congress has had years of opportunities to develop actual data privacy laws and they haven't. They held proceedings focused on a single company. The tagline for this post is specifically "Senate Bill to Ban TikTok" for good reason: it was written to target a single company.
We _should_ be concerned about companies which have personal data on basically everyone and have no real limitations on how it's used, but FB is gonna keep operating. We _should_ be concerned about a government that can gather private data about Americans by secretly working with a corporation. But AT&T's cooperation with the NSA never really hurt it.
Domestic tech companies shamelessly sold access to American users for manipulation by "foreign adversaries" for years, made billions, suffered no lasting consequences. Then Chinese Vine walks in, smokes everybody else in ~24 months, the mad South African buys and destroys Twitter, and Mark toddles off the cliff of irrelevance with a social network in each pocket and an Oculus strapped to his face.
I guess it was fun while it lasted.
The reason for banning it is simple: it can be used as a first-strike weapon to influence an entire generation (or two) of Americans in a conflict with China that is almost certain to happen. Keeping it under Chinese control is a bad idea.
China has the option to sell it to an American company, take the money and build more guns to shoot at us. Honestly, it's a win-win.
Was TikTok a net good to American society? Depends on who you ask, but if anything I think most people would agree that it only exaggerated the decline of the average attention span. This moves with the larger movement to commodify clicks, quick ads and lowers the threshold towards late stage capitalism. In short, this speeds cultural decline ("I said what I said").
Would I support an American TikTok? No, see above.
Should TikTok be banned by the US congress? When is the last time you ever saw a ban of something that didn't include any overt pocket lining or omnibus-style overreach? Read the bill, the language is broad and sweeping; certainly kin to the CFAA and COPPA.
So what then? Well we're certainly at an impasse here, right? We can't rely on tech businesses to turn their shoulders to cold hard cash. We can't rely on our elected officials to "Do the right thing" without lining their pockets and sharpening their knives. Truly a conundrum with no good solution.
How are so many people (especially on HN) fine with this? Haven't we criticized "The Great Firewall of China" for literally decades? How is this not the start of that? Genuine question. This ban seems to set horrible precedent to me. Bet everyones "coolness" with it makes me think I'm not understanding something.
We can still say and post what we want - it’s not content that’s being censored.
As the sibling post mentions, the public is too stupid to be allowed to be communicated at by an untrustworthy and adversarial media. Of course, untrustworthy and adversarial refers to foreign enemies, not domestic[1] ones.
[1] Fox and friends, et al, would be the poster children[2] for untrustworthy and adversarial, but they are our untrustworthy and adversarial media firms, so mysteriously, they get a free pass.
[2] Just imagine if the 'batshit right-wing conspiracy' half of the US media landscape were ran by the Kremlin (Or some other boogieman of the week), instead of a billionaire from Australia. Same content, different source, would drive people utterly livid.
I personally was deep into digital privacy back in grade school and college when the Arab Spring began, but my own thinking shifted after learning about and working with people who blue teamed incidents like Operation Aurora and Titan Rain, as well as censorship of FB and Whatsapp in the PRC following unrest in East Turkestan in 2009.
but sure, lets not ban it. lets not stop any foreign interference in our institutions and lets let our adversaries brain wash our population into destroying our country, but as long as we feel righteous that we have freedom right? thats all that matters?
every time someone brings up a whataboutism as a rebuttle to that, "what about american social media companies?? they are much worse", they are doing exactly what China wants. China will gladly sit by and watch our destruction, prodding it along, as we eat each other. Most people are just oblivious to it and will deny it because of how much peace we've had, and how far we've gone without a near-peer enemy. at least with this bill we can stop the bleed.
I was once a diehard defender of digital privacy and a small government, but over time I realized that the world really is not peaceful and countries exist out there that want to see our people dead. I understand it, I get it. But so many people are oblivious to foreign threats that they are willing to undermine their own country just so they can be on their high horse. It's not worth it.
Seems like there's... a LOT of calve-outs for due process / checks-and-balances? or is that fairly normal and i'm mis-interpreting in my ignorance?
It's authorizing the President to ban certain classes of transactions. Not behavior let alone speech.
This is mind boggling that every single person on HN isn’t terrified of this.
Surely most of us were around in the 2000s when the Bush Administration demonized people who spoke against the war? Aren’t we the same people who were railing against censorship then? What HAPPENED to that community I grew up with that wouldn’t put up with censorship, who held free speech as the backbone of democracy? Where are all of those people now?
I have a few hunches, and I’m not sure I’d like to know the answer.
Let’s be real. Nobody is closing anything down. This is a bizarre game of brinksmanship between D.C. and Beijing that ends in one place: divestiture. The only reason it’s getting so much attention is because the object of concern is a social media property, not e.g. a port asset or power plant.
Is this what is happening? This seems to me like free speech absurdism.
Not that I agree that it is actually an immediate threat to US national security, but anti-TikTok pundits claim it is and can spin their argument that way. Its not unreasonable following that premise.
I'm so cynical, I bet even that is a lie.
Diving in, the list of "foreign adversaries" is amusing. China and Russia have to be on there. Iran and North Korea I guess. Cuba and specifically a Maduro led Venezuela are a stretch.
What this bill actually seems to do is allow the Secretary of Commerce to review any communication technology, including both apps and hardware, used by a million Americans, and then suggest the president punish it if it poses an "unacceptable risk" of stealing IP, damaging infrastructure, interfering with elections, extorts a person in power, or just "otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons."
Then it discusses what penalties the President can enact, which are banning the thing, confiscating their assets, and confiscating their collected data (and code? not 100% on this.)
Next, how to designate a communication device needing review or foreign adversary, basically someone high up says so. Then how to remove a foreign adversary, which seems much more difficult though it may just have more possible methods.
The rest seems to deal with the minutia of enforcement. I also can't be bothered to read this once, let alone twice, but it also means I'm not quite sure what investigative powers the Secretary of Commerce has without getting a warrant.
So it's called a bill to ban TikTok, but it seems to give the government a fairly clear path to banning any foreign communication technology widely used. The adversary part doesn't even seem necessary, the only time the foreign adversary comes up is if they are undermining the democratic process. Which means Russia can't interfere in elections, Israel and Saudi Arabia can.
China doesn't allow FB, Insta, Twitter, etc to operate in its market, but its companies can provide such a service to US customers? Is that not protectionism?
If we're afraid that China will use TikTok to push their propaganda in the US, we should be appropriately concerned that banning a platform to stop targeted speech is in conflict with our own norms around free speech. But instead insisting that TikTok can only operate in the US if FB/Snap/Twitter can operate in China on equal terms seems like it would be more in line with our rhetoric around wanting a rules-based international order, and freedom of both trade and speech under most circumstances.
If western social media companies were able to offer their services in China, their fear of our propaganda would be much worse than our fear of theirs.
It's not all that different from how US restaurant chains cannot operate in the UAE unless they take things off the menu that violate Islamic dietary rules. So Wendy's in Dubai does not sell The Baconator.
So there's nothing really to pursue via the WTO. It's not a protectionism issue when domestic and foreign companies have to obey the same or similar restrictions, even if those restrictions are onerous.
> If western social media companies were able to offer their services in China
I've seen this meme floating around a lot recently and feel the need to add in some relevant history.
Between the mid and late aughts Google, Facebook, and Twitter were all operating in China. Around this time the Chinese government got very serious about content filtering and imposed new restrictions on what could be shown/uploaded. There was a very strong backlash from the US side that American companies might be helping to build the Great Firewall. Many Americans were outraged and US politicians warned the companies not to build infrastructure that could be used for censorship. So the American companies acquiesced and either left the market or were banned (Twitter).
I remember the outrage back then. It's like what I see now but with the facts reversed! Back then the concern was that American tech companies would export infrastructure that could be used by China for social control. Now it's "China won't allow American tech companies!".
"We've always/never been at war with EastAsia."
Kind of disturbing stuff. Watch the congressional hearing of the TikTok CEO and tell me that the powers who are pushing this care about facts.
So companies that refuse to build tools for compliance with China's unique censorship/control policies are not allowed in the country. Most American tech companies opted to leave voluntarily rather than implement these controls, and at least one that did not implement the controls or voluntarily leave was instead forcibly banned.
I see the point you're making here, but at the same time, I think the situation as explained here can still be viewed as China not allowing American tech companies to operate in China the way those companies want to do business.
Has the US provided ByteDance with an opportunity to become compliant with this country's requirements that it has opted against? That would seem very similar to what transpired with Twitter in China.
China on the other hand, not only had their domestic market entirely for their own domestic giants, creating their own expertise and talent pool, they also didn’t even had to think on what to do, as they could just copy US apps “with Chinese characteristics”, making A LOT of money too.
There was a lot of talk about technology transfer, but you right, the narrative 100% changed from helping the CCP to “China bad”, but how bad they really are when they allowed America to make a true empire on the www without the Chinese companies as competitors?
How America is reacting to its very first Chinese competitor says a lot about America true sportsmanship on the market, it’s very childish and lame if you ask me.
It sounds like you both agree China made a market that was specifically hostile to American companies, including intentionally banning some, though. Which is kind of the point most people are making when they talk about market reciprocity.
I also think it is quite reasonable that American tech companies should be allowed to operate in China and uphold American values in China if TikTok is allowed to operate in the US. I don't see a contradiction. The entire point of letting China into the WTO and allowing China to help Walmart and Amazon acquire inventory to offer "low prices" was to bring freedom to China by opening the country up to capitalism (this was stated more or less openly by western neoliberal policy makers at the time). It definitely wasn't to strengthen the CCP and weaken the USA but that's what the actual result of 2 decades of "free trade" with China has been.
TikTok is not asking to be allowed to operate in the US and uphold Chinese values. It's just asking to be allowed to operate in the US, and agreed to public oversight on its algorithms and data storage. This is essentially equivalent to what the Chinese government asks of American companies, and what they declined to do, in large part due to moral disagreement from their employees.
Sigh, it isn't just this: China doesn't do rule of law, so American companies have to follow rule by law when operating in China, but they are also subject to American anti-corruption laws even for their operations in China, which makes doing business in China difficult (unless they can be isolated from that like they are in manufacturing). If it were just "moral disagreements due to employees", the CEOs would find a way around that, but technically it is just hard to do social media in China under Chinese rules that you won't even be told what they are.
But I agree TikTok should be treated fairly, even if that fairness is definitely not reciprocated in China.
They'd have sided with China who on their official books says "they can come back they just have to follow our laws", while in practice continuing to ban and restrict these companies regardless.
1. Apple adds easy support for non-Apple app stores and side-loading to iOS to comply with the recent EU regulations that require opening things up in 2024, and then people can download TikTok from outside the US and install it?
2. TikTok users switch to using the TikTok website instead of the app?
It looks like the main thing the app gives you that the website can't is a convenient way to film short video and edit it and add music all on your phone and then post that. Surely someone could write a social network agnostic app just for filming, editing, and adding music that can upload that short video to any of your social media accounts (TikTok, YouTube shorts, and whatever other ones allow video). The destinations could be entirely user configurable and support any social network that provides a halfway decent upload API.
What's the US going to do? Try to make a US equivalent of China's Great Firewall? I don't think that would work here, because our free speech laws make it too easy to circulate circumvention information.
If I was a company that does mobile apps I'd be seriously looking right now into making that general short video maker/uploader app. If the US does successfully cut off TikTok all those users aren't going to just stop wanting to post and read the kind of things they are now doing there. They are going to try to move to other platforms. Done right, maybe my app would be something they use as part of that.
"Hence anyone using a VPN to access TikTok would be in trouble—specifically, subject to up to $1 million in fines, 20 years in prison, or both."[1]
[1]https://reason.com/2023/03/29/could-the-restrict-act-crimina...
> Warner's office says this isn't so. Spokesperson Rachel Cohen told Newsweek that the provisions only apply when someone is "engaged in 'sabotage or subversion' of communications technology in the U.S., causing 'catastrophic effects' on U.S. critical infrastructure, or 'interfering in, or altering the result' of a federal election in order for criminal penalties to apply."
And this bill without question needs to be passed into law in some form.
Why nothing about US media companies pushing advertising based on data that really should be protected by privacy laws?
Why nothing about the material released from Twitter by Matt Taibi, et. al.? Very concerning stuff for a country talking the talk about democracy.
Why not enforce limits on what kids can watch and for how long, as China does? While I am all for free speech and liberty for adults, I think it is necessary for parents to put some guardrails on their kids.
There is a lot more at stake here: the USA (my country) is struggling to maintain the dollar hegemony, has some severe looming economic problems, and has the same general problems shared by all countries. The USA has been very successful by carrying a big stick and hitting other countries with it. But, what was once a successful strategy is, I think, now a very poor strategy. An Empire like ours should sometimes orchestrate a graceful exit, on terms best for our country. Now when I say best for our country, I mean best for people, and not what is best for Wall Street, Our Military Industrial Complex, etc.
This is the parent's job. Kids can't even play in the front yard without CPS being called, and adding more complexities like this sounds like an even worse nightmare.
Carefully selected to keep the ship distinctly itself, but still ever so slightly different each time.
(I just like the irony of plagiarising policy from China as a parallel to their plagiarising IP from the US - and likely elsewhere).
Privacy is not the major concern here.
> Why nothing about the material released from Twitter by Matt Taibi, et. al.? Very concerning stuff for a country talking the talk about democracy.
Twitter is subject to the US courts and legal system and while there are issue we can work to resolve them.
> Why not enforce limits on what kids can watch and for how long, as China does? While I am all for free speech and liberty for adults, I think it is necessary for parents to put some guardrails on their kids.
Again not the issue.
Seriously, read at-least the start of the bill it makes it very very clear the main concern is limiting foreign powers ability to mass influence the general USA population.