A Chinese company isn't bound by US laws, so this is a necessary precursor to that.
Edit: I stand corrected, they are bound by our laws, but it's orders of magnitude easier to enforce those laws on a company based in the US than a company based in China.
Theoretically, yes. But the US isn't a police state where their activities would be constantly monitored in great detail for compliance. There's a lot they could do under the radar, and a lot of groundwork they could lay for some future inappropriate action.
Normally how this works is that national laws dictate what an app can do when operating in the nation's territory, and it's then up to the app owner to decide whether they want to do business in that nation's territory or not.
This is how EU rules apply to US tech companies. US rules for Chinese tech companies is no different in principle.
IMO however the problem isn't privacy, it's being able to stick a thumb on the algorithmic feed and control the information consumption of a slice of society. And TikTok isn't the only problem, it's broadly applicable across consumer tech.
One could hope that this is a brick in the path towards a solid, comprehensive privacy law at the national level. Especially given bipartisan criticism of "home grown" spying platforms such as Facebook and Google, it certainly doesn't seem impossible (just unlikely).
Privacy is not an engaging issue. It isn't controversial to most people.
The problem is that our first-past-the-post voting system naturally prioritizes engagement over everything else. That's why our elections are always about controversy, and never about progress.
I understand this would theoretically stop the CCCP from getting info on US Consumers, but is there anything to this that actually limits the data collected? I assume not.
The one outlet you called out by name is already a publicly traded company, not one that is controlled by a foreign country. 63% of it is owned by institutional investors (Vanguard, Blackrock, etc).
As much as I don't care about tiktok going away, and acknowledge the privacy and security risks, there's something about banning a highly popular website that doesn't sit right with me. Is there precedent in the USA for anything like this?
It's important to note this isn't banning TikTok. It's forcing the sale of it from a CCP-linked parent company. The precedent for this would be US pressuring sale of Grindr from Chinese ownership due to privacy concerns: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/grindr-sold-china-national...
I don't disagree that the way TikTok is operated is problematic for the US. But will making TikTok a US corporation prevent any of the problems? Couldn't the company still legally send private information to "partners" which indirectly makes it's way to the CCP? And couldn't it still freely choose to moderate and promote posts according the priorities and values of the company? Being staffed by a large number of CCP-friendly employees, those will reflect CCP policies. For this to have any impact we need privacy laws to restrict this US company anyway.
It still seems like security theater to me, which is particularly unfortunate because it is a real security threat.
Are you opposing the divestment law? If so, and you think TikTok is a real security threat, what is the alternative measure?
I don't agree that this is security theater. Divestment will put the entity which controls TikTok under the jurisdiction of U.S. law, and no, it isn't obvious that the company would still legally be able to export data to the CCP. I also don't understand arguing against a measure on the basis that it won't work well enough - you have to argue that the measure itself is bad.
I didn’t know that Rupert Murdoch had to become a U.S. citizen to own a U.S. newspaper. So precedents for old school media but of course the problem is new media not needing physical distribution that can be readily monitored.
Good thing that rule was in place, otherwise it could have opened the door for some unscrupulous person profiting off of national division and disharmony.
A better middle ground at this stage could have been requiring TikTok to daily display to users (and require they confirm/accept) a message stating the indirect CPC ownership, the risk to their personal info, and the serious risk of seeing state directed disinformation campaigns. Most would still use TikTok but perhaps it might get drilled into their heads to actually question some things they see on it.
Personally think the data protection issue are overblown. The ability to influence through disinformation campaings, whether for CPC, Russia or whomever is their friend, is a way bigger thing for me.
Uncertainty and doubt is a good and honest position. It is an unusual situation, and it could potentially create a dangerous precedent, particularly in other countries where US-owned software is dominant. There is strong evidence that TikTok is being used to spy on Americans, especially those in the military and those in power, and that this represents a real risk to American interests. The downside is this may unleash a waive of retributive banning (e.g. other countries banning US-owned apps). I personally don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, globally: geographically partitioned services (and therefore power) are fine by me. Of course rich donor corps in the US won't like having their addressable market reduced. We'll see if they can convince us to invade another country to force them to use eBay though.
I think you totally missed the argument: it's not about copying anything China does, it's about reciprocating restrictions that they place on your country. If China places a tariff on US imported goods, then the US places a tariff on Chinese goods.
This is and has been the case even for non-adversary countries, and is bread-and-butter foreign policy
Reciprocating tariffs has been a thing for hundreds of years before the US even existed. The justification isn't "they're doing it, so let's just copy them", it's "they're inflicting economic impact on us by reducing the profit of our exports to them, we'll put pressure on them to stop that by reducing the amount that we import for them".
It's not simple "but he hit me first" logic: it's macroeconomics with an actual strategy in mind.
"Free" doesn't mean no restrictions. For example, apps/websites like Myspace and Facebook and anything that's been used to spread hate, cause bullying, or threats have always been a target of regulation, albeit never an outright ban.
In the case here, it's ostensibly being done with national security considerations in mind. What remains to be determined is whether or not these concerns are valid. But the idea that "free" means the government has no power to ban things, including apps, borders naïvety.
I thought this was DOA once Trump came out against it (after speaking with major donor Jeff Yass). Wondering who will end up being candidate buyers - Microsoft? Google?
I'm a big proponent of free speech and the first amendment, but I agree with the reasonings for banning it or forcing US owners.
China most definitely has their hands in the data that TikTok amasses and given its popularity it's not an insignificant risk to U.S. citizens. We all know how easy it is to manipulate users... aka Cambridge Analytica.
It'll be interesting to see what legal challenges come up if the bill passes the senate because that is where the real discussion will occur. I ultimately see it being reversed, but I can also see a solid framework for future bills being illuminated via the courts.
Not necessarily making room for native companies, as the Silicon Valley giants have adapted. But they enforce certain rights, for example privacy, and if US companies (not just social media) do not want to comply they are forced to leave the EU. Some newspaper websites are not visible from Europe for that reason.
1) wouldn't blame them if they did
2) we are in this military alliance called NATO; if you are depending on each other for military help, you're not thinking about social media based threats
Also, literally the Nazis. We lost over 400,000 people helping free Europe from the last lot who tried consolidating control. Pax Americana has been one of the longest stretches of peace in Europe. Vaccines and peace…
A lot of those Nazis went on to become part of the government of West Germany. And now Germany's in NATO. Now, their far right wing party is on the rise. The Nazis lost WWII, but fascism won.
You also broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread, including with personal attacks. I know the other commenter was being provocative, but it's not ok to post the way you did in response.
You broke the site guidelines extremely badly in this thread—way over the line at which we ban accounts. Moreover, you've been doing it in other threads too - e.g.:
You're not a foreign adversary - you're a colonial overlord. If a European or other US 'ally' nation attempts to act against American 'national interest' their government is swiftly toppled - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the...
The US Army literally have an entire army unit dedicated to running propaganda campaigns on social networks internationally. It's ludicrous to suggest this isn't employed to impact political and social policy in 'friendly' nations.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
That being said, there are worse things than Pax Americana. I'd certainly rather living under US influence than CCP. I'd be the first to argue that NATO has prevented another war in Europe. But lets not deny the reality on the ground.
You're making some extremely strong claims, with minimal evidence. I don't deny that the CIA can be pretty nasty to 2nd and 3rd world governments, but claiming the US is a "colonial overlord" over our European allies is just not true. The first priority of our European allies is domestic politics; just like us, everyone wants to get re-elected. Sometimes domestic politics push countries towards the US, sometimes they pull them away. Countries like Hungary and Turkey make diplomatic trouble for the US, and we don't launch coups against them. The US would love it if Germany built up a decent military, but Germany isn't because the political will just isn't there. Between the 60s and the 90s, France literally left NATO. Europe in general has been extremely slow to scale up artillery production to support Ukraine (the US has been better, although but not by much); if the US had as much power over Europe as you think we do, we would have just told Europe to up production and they would have. But this did not happen.
I'm under the impression they already do. There are lots of data collection rules that US companies have to follow. This I see as an alternative to outright banning. I'm sure Facebook, et. al. are audited by EU agencies to make sure they are in compliance.
I think the reason for the outright ban is more due to it being a Chinese product. China isn't known to be very transparent.
If they feel their relationship with the US is similar to the US's relationship with China in the relevant ways, then they absolutely should do the same. My understanding is that they don't feel that way, generally speaking.
They do in fact impose less extreme controls on data from these platforms, that lesser extremity presumably reflecting their lesser perception of the US's use of that data as highly dangerous, as compared to the US's perception of China.
That is a much lesser punishment than what the US is doing in this thread. A fine that is a small but non-insignficant percentage of annual revenue is a measured response when you want to punish bad behavior but allow businesses to still operate within the jurisdiction.
Restricting business operation altogether is a response a country gives when they see the other party as extremely adversarial, which is a few orders of magnitude above what EU fines are to Big Tech.
If they feel there is a sufficient security threat posed by US based social media/apps, then I see no reason why they shouldn't.
But its pretty clear that the security threat posed by US based services vs certain others is starkly different, especially since the US is generally seen as a beneficial/friendly state.
Not Europe, but around 2015, Russia passed a law requiring foreign companies to store data on servers in the country. Then banned LinkedIn in 2016 [0], and tried to get Twitter and Facebook to comply in 2017-2019 [1]. All of which were met with ridicule from many people in the US (IIRC from article comments and reddit).
IMO, somewhat similar situations - popular social media, known for data gathering, based in another country that is viewed as a geopolitical and/or ideological opponent and is often villified.
I can't imagine who would genuinely ask this- and it's suspiciously plastered in every single thread on this topic. Think hard! In which way is Europe and the US's relationship different than China and the US's relationship?
The US legislation applying to TikTok specifically applies to companies that are considered foreign adversaries. As far as I'm aware, with the exception of possibly Russia and Belarus, the US is not considered to be a foreign adversary by European nations.
> We all know how easy it is to manipulate users... aka Cambridge Analytica.
There is little to no evidence that CA was able to manipulate anyone other than gullible campaign managers. And frankly the idea that a list of pages someone liked could be used to create a skeleton key that turned people into Republican voters is... far-fetched.
> We all know how easy it is to manipulate users... aka Cambridge Analytica.
There is little to no evidence that CA was able to manipulate anyone other than gullible campaign managers. And frankly the idea that a list of pages someone liked could be used to create a skeleton key that turned people into Republican voters is... far-fetched.
Similarly, I haven't seen anyone actually articulate what the risk from TikTok actually is. They will eavesdrop on users? App store review is supposed to catch that. Promote videos about controversial topics to users? That's cable news. See what videos you have watched or liked? Doesn't seem like a big risk...
> Similarly, I haven't seen anyone actually articulate what the risk from TikTok is.
Profiling of a large population, you put them in cohorts, and slowly shift what you show to these cohorts (based on their preferences, worldviews, etc.) to slowly nudge them into a worldview you'd like. It won't be 100% effective but it can definitely shift perceptions, if each cohort is siloed into their own reality bubbles through what you show them you can stochastically nudge them into a view you want them to hold based on their preferences.
If marketing works even to the people aware of how it works, a concerted effort to use someone's profiling data telling what do they like, dislike, will definitely work on a majority of users.
It's not like it will be blunt, it only has potential if you use this data to slowly shift views by using what's most effective to each cohort, with a large amount of data you can be quite precise in defining these cohorts and using different strategies/tactics for each one depending on what's most effective.
Have you ever worked on anything that did profiling based on accumulated data? I've worked on a few projects back in the early 2010s and even at the time it was scary how much you could infer about your users based on some 100-200 data points collected over a period of 2-5 years. Weaponising that is not the complicated part, the data collection is.
This is fascinating. I think this nuanced approach to shifting the perspectives and beliefs of the population of an adversarial nation is exactly the threat that is being missed by other commentators saying "what does TikTok do that's so bad anyway?" The point is that it is extremely subtle and yet very powerful...if China can convince US citizens that China deserves to rule Taiwan, for instance, the US government may find itself without the popular support or political will to take action to protect Taiwanese democracy in the event of an incursion by China.
>if China can convince US citizens that China deserves to rule Taiwan, for instance, the US government may find itself without the popular support or political will to take action to protect Taiwanese democracy in the event of an incursion by China
What is so awful about the idea that people in the United States might be convinced of something? What does it matter who is doing the convincing? You just don’t like the hypothetical outcome you suggested.
Are you opposed to a Taiwanese propaganda campaign, conducted through a newly popular Taiwanese social media app and directed at convincing U.S. citizens to support Taiwan in the event of an incursion by China? What’s the difference?
I find scary the idea that the U.S. government would try to protect its citizens from anyone’s speech or ideas. The best response to speech you don’t like is to argue forcefully against it; not to suppress it. We can make up our own minds.
I don’t want the government trying to suppress or protect me from thoughts or ideas it thinks are bad.
Because it's 10x harder to debunk bullshit than to claim it. You don't know what you don't know, and unfortunately the majority of people are too lazy to critically evaluate their views. For example, how many people actually read linked articles as opposed to just commenting based on the title?
That's how modern misinformation works, you simply bombard social media networks until the truth is lost in a sea of misinformation.
The difference between the truth and the lie though is that in the end when you actually have to implement policy or predict something, lies tend to eventually collapse in on themselves. Credibility as such emerges for the people/insitutions/frameworks that can consistently predict or give results that reflect reality more. But that can take years or even decades, while gepolitical decisions need to made today.
You might be right, but the existence of a problem doesn’t mean that government intervention will make things better.
I don’t want government deciding, on my behalf, what is or is not bullshit — and then taking legislative steps to suppress ideas it doesn’t like.
Is Communism bullshit? Is anti-Anericanism bullshit? How about liberalism? Conservatism? Homosexuality?
Maybe. But those are for me to decide, based on whatever information people want to use to try and convince me. It is not appropriate for government to legislatively suppress ideas or information it thinks is wrong.
If you think otherwise, do you have a problem with the Chinese internet firewall? From their perspective, China is protecting its citizens from harmful, wrong information. You just disagree about their value judgments. (I assume.)
I don’t know the details of course but if China wants the data there are umpteen companies who engage in data brokerage and can get the info they want.
I’m not for or against this bill, but it seems like really the issue is data collection in general, which obviously the Congress has no interest in regulating.
Americans are ejecting to get this information. You have to download software, optionally allow it to send you notifications, the purposefully open and interact with it.
If you know your mind melts when you see it, then why consume it? Why install it at all?
There are plenty of companies that offer digital crack: video games, porn, social media (including this site). But we must give agency to humans. We must acknowledge that they make decisions voluntarily.
Regardless of the source, either we should regulate data, including streaming videos of all kinds, or we don't. Singling out a company seems like a political stunt with zero real world impact. And a bad policy at that.
> If you know your mind melts when you see it, then why consume it? Why install it at all?
For the record, I don't and never have. Occasionally something leaks through to me, including epiphenomena like this discussion. HN can be stressful at times too, but it's still somewhat useful and it'll be the final thing of this sort for me, should it ever kick the bucket (hope not, though).
> We must acknowledge that they make decisions voluntarily.
There's considerable behavioral determinism when exposing a population to addictive substances and propaganda. Modern neuroscience has basically killed the myth of free will. From an adversary's perspective this is awesome. From a profiteering actor's (corporations, drug cartels, influencers, casinos) perspective this is awesome as well. Would you like some sauce with this social capital?
> Regardless of the source, either we should regulate data, including streaming videos of all kinds, or we don't. Singling out a company seems like a political stunt with zero real world impact.
Sure, for all I care we can pull the plug on all of them and be better off. The systems we had for scientific, journalistic or cultural innovation and dissemination were sufficient and much better behaved (private TV can go as well). No more "professional" streamers (haha). No more perpetual reinserting the same recycled info into the collective goldfish's mind.
This would also abolish the "need" for storing the 86263961826th minecraft let's play, freeing up exabytes of storage space in the process.
Small online communities, that can actually (federatively?) host and moderate themselves will survive as they have before the maelstrom.
Your account has been using HN primarily for political battle and flamewar. You've also been breaking the site guidelines regularly in other ways.
We ban accounts that do this. It's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. I don't want to ban you because your account has been around a long time, but we need this to stop.
This isn't about regulating what content American citizens are creating. It's about regulating the involvement of adversarial foreign governments to distribute that information. These are quite separate concerns.
>regulating the involvement of adversarial foreign governments to distribute that information
How is that any different than say Press TV, whose website and media are not banned and are freely viewable in the US because we have freedom of expression?
If TikTok is propaganda, they have to register as foreign agent, which they haven’t, so that will make them illegal.
However, I don’t see them being propaganda yet, but technically they can be overnight by download a new model from headquarter (and even without US user data leave US soil). The bill is trying to stop that possibility.
I don’t feel it morally sound to punish someone for sth they haven’t done yet. But what do I know? Reading many here and on Ars, most are actually thinking the two country are at war, so they can do anything to each other
I don’t think we are at war, but if enough people believe that way, does it matter?
Distributing propaganda in the US, even as a foreign country, is allowed by the 1st Amendment. Americans have a right to receive information. This bill is trying to stop something Americans have a right to
I think there's probably no way we can trust the data isn't going to China. This is China we're talking about.
But I don't even think the real problem is videos of high school girls doing choreographed dances going to China. The problem is psyops and disinformation. I think it's much more likely TikTok could be, and probably has been, used to sow political discord. It's not hard to imagine the Chinese government "suggesting" to TikTok that they alter their algorithm to promote content that, say, discourages people from voting, or promoting political violence, or eschewing vaccinations.
Funnily enough, this is why I prefer Chinese devices and apps as a Westerner living in the West. My threat vector is my local security apparatus coercing my data or my devices. Correspondingly, If I were living in China, I'd consider it safer to use Western tech. Meanwhile, I don't really care what China does with my stuff while I'm not in China, I just hope that China doesn't collude with my local authorities.
What happens to your argument if you consider that Western actors can manipulate you the same as China? Even more so, given that they have more power over you (presuming you're based in the West).
My argument isn't assuming there is no manipulation from the West and as someone who lives in the West, I'd rather to have one less avenue for manipulation.
Would be interesting to know if there is any data regarding the degree of cooperation between hostile countries. If I use two VPNs from countries who hate each other am I completely untrackable?
If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated, then the logical conclusion of that belief is that adversarial foreign governments have the right to propagandize in America and to Americans. If you abandon your principles the moment someone invokes the foreign menace then you don’t really have principles.
People like to think of themselves as being pro-freedom because it’s hip and cool and they are brainwashed from a young age to be proud to live in “the land of the free” but the moments you interrogate those beliefs a little they start to fall apart. It’s more of a political aesthetic than a true belief system.
I don’t think freedom of speech should be given to any collective. Individuals should enjoy it as an absolute right, but a corporation is a legal construct undeserving of such natural rights.
A similar example, people should be able to freely assemble, corporations should not be able to form cartels.
> If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated (...)
No, nobody truly believes that. Whoever is trying to sell that is trying to manipulate you. We have exceptions, provisions and considerable case law which adds a lot of *) to the first amendment. The 'principles' you're referring to have never actually been a thing outside of political emotional speeches and Republican rallies.
None of us have been alive when America was in a hot war to see exactly how far free speech stretches when actual lives are at stake. We're in a cold war right now and people should adjust their expectations. I'm not shedding any tears when a foreign corporation has its 'free speech' rights restricted. If it wants free speech it should move to the USA.
Freedom of speech isn't a blanket everything-goes. The government can impose time and place restrictions on where and when you can express yourself. So to me, getting rid of TikTok is restricting place. You can very well express yourself on other platforms if TikTok is removed from the U.S. marketplace.
Yes, this is a bullshit distraction issue. Our congresspeople should be focused on other things, e.g., stopping the genocide of Palestinians, protecting LGBTQ/trans rights, reducing the cost of living for average americans.
Precisely. Not sure it gets passed but let's say it does. Today is March 13th plus a week for senate and President. Takes effect in 6 months. Right in the middle of the campaign. Someone will say we did it. Someone else will say not enough. But we get the freedom to not use it :)
To be honest, I think they've been talking about this since the Trump campaign or sometimes shortly thereafter, quickly wouldn't be the adjective coming to mind thinking about this situation
You know they can both be true simultaneously, right?
It’s a perfectly well understood fact that our nations use businesses, and literally every other avenue possible to spy on and propagandize each other’s populations
As a result, each nation has to counter that it does so mostly privately, but sometimes very publicly.
This is all part of the totally broken, absolutely run by children, international relations system.
It’s exceptionally mundane and exceptionally bad for all citizens as a result. However it’s great for business. So you’re not going to see a change until citizens demand different international economic, political, communications and relations structure that isn’t based on competition.
What's your point? China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns? "The supreme art of war is to defeat the enemy without fighting", e.g. to undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions, to gain the ability to compromise our critical infrastructure, and to influence our politics. All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.
The point is that the West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets. Going beyond, it claimed that (in the post Reagan/Thatcher era) that free markets are a prerequisite for being a rich country. Yet, the moment free markets became inconvenient, the west dropped that narrative and went full protectionist. As a result, China gets a propaganda victory in the eyes of non-Western nations.
All things considered, it's a minor problem for the US/West. Just looking like hypocrites. Compared to, say, the 2003 Iraq war it's a nothingburger.
This is the paradox of tolerance [1]. It’s a worn discussion and far from hypocritical.
In any case, I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people and allies. More pointedly when the other side is a dictatorship.
> the exact argument e.g. Turkey used to ban Wikipedia/Youtube/Twitter etc.
Which one(s)? (Genuinely curious.)
Also, was it a ban or divestment requirement? What wins me over on this bill is it isn’t a ban. It isn’t even a requirement to be controlled by an American. ByteDance could sell TikTok to a Korean or Hugarian or Middle Eastern country—even Turkey—and be in compliance with the law.
> I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people
Turkey's constitution also guarantees free speech etc. However, there are also laws that say you cannot insult people's religious sensibilities or serve sexually explicit content. The motivation for these laws is that this type of content degrades the moral fabric of society.
Politicians whipped up moral panics and judges (who were in many cases appointed by those very same politicians) issued rulings requiring these platforms to remove the offending content. The platforms refused, and were banned. When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country".
> When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country"
When the facts change our opinions should, too. I used to be a free-trade absolutist. It’s become clear that doesn’t work.
I remain a strong free-speech advocate. Which is why I was against Trump’s proposed TikTok ban. This, however, is different. There is an out in divestment—to an American or non-American. And even if ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok.com won’t be blocked. Moreover, the entire process is subject to judicial oversight. If ByteDance’s Constitutional rights are being abrogated, they have a forum in which to find relief.
Turkey’s tale is cautionary. We should be mindful when we find we were previously wrong. But I think this is different. Free trade (in its absolute sense) isn’t a core American value. Free speech is. The First Amendment protects ByteDance’s speech. It does not guarantee its distribution.
West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets
China is not free, not a democracy, and not a free market, so there no hypocrisy. What was crazy was supporting the one sided relationship where we export our industry and production capacity to China while they block and steal from our businesses.
I'd support TikTok in the US if China gets rid of their firewall.
> Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?
Because we are not China and our institutions are built on presumption of freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. If we start emulating China, we will become China. Our institutions are supposed to be robust enough to handle local and foreign propaganda and if they are not, then censorship is certainly not a solution that would be compatible with the liberal democratic values that we are supposed to hold.
The point is that they get to access the Western market with their dancing video app, but Westerners aren't allowed to access their market with the apps they make. That gives those Chinese companies an unfair advantage in potential market reach.
A simplistic economic model that overlooks hundreds of important factors may provide a basic Econ 101 understanding but it does not reflect how the world truly operates and proves nothing.
Sure it's a simple model. But the burden of proof lies with the person claiming that free trade needs to be bilateral. That's not some inherent property of it, or something immediately obvious. A basic look at it past "It's not faaiiiiiir" actually shows quite the opposite
Free trade generally does not mean you have to let foreign companies operating in your country do things that domestic companies are not allowed to do.
Most of those sites are not in China not because China says that they cannot operate there but rather because China say they would have to obey the same rules Chines companies do. That generally involves things like storing data on Chinese citizens only on servers in China, censoring things the government wants censored, and giving the government easy access to information including identifying information to unmask anonymous posters.
This is post hoc nonsense. China blocked US tech companies so that they could copy what the US companies do without any threat of superior competition.
US Citizens still have the same freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. Those rights don't extend to foreign adversaries. If you want to relay Chinese or Russian or Ukrainian or Israeli or Hamas propaganda, you are completely free to do it, without censorship. Limiting the ability of any of those countries to project it within the US is reasonable stance.
You're limiting the information US Citizens can get from the outside world - therefore you are limiting their freedom of thought and access to information.
I think it's a dangerous road to go down, the US is already extremely inwards facing and suffers from not knowing much about the outside world. I've had hundreds of US Citizens talk to me face to face who don't know what language we speak in Australia, don't know we use different money, not know the seasons are backwards, not know it's a 15 hour flight, not know we don't have a president, etc. etc. (this list is endless). US Citizens are not very well educated about how things work in other countries, clearly to their own detriment.
Just yesterday I was talking to a friend in the US saying my friend has 18 months fully paid maternity leave and he almost fell over. His wife got 10 weeks.
Many countries do things better than the US, and it's dangerous to limit US Citizens learning about that, else they will have no notion things can be (and are) better elsewhere, and should be improved.
> All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.
Those campaigns mostly took part on platforms owned and operated by US companies.
>> China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?
Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
>> undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions
It seems like Americans did a pretty good job of this themselves at the last election cycle. A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result. How much worse can TikTok make things?
>> Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
The paradox of tolerance.
>> A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result.
2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions, so yeah, prohibiting foreign-owned social media networks in advance of the upcoming election is definitely a step in the right direction.
>> 2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions
Why is nothing being done about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Truth Social, etc. etc? There are more users on Facebook alone.
Besides if your country is strong enough you should be able to shrug it off. France recently put the right to abortion in the Constitution despite American media.
> TikTok is a propaganda threat controlled by a non-friendly state to the US
Yes. Would you have been offended when during the Revolutionary War we restricted British propaganda? German and Nazi propaganda in the World Wars? Soviet propaganda in the Cold War?
Let’s reverse the roles. How thrilled would we be if we could have had a propaganda arm active and accepted in Nazi Germany or the CCCP? If we had person-by-person profiles of interests and affiliations for every person in Russia or Iran?
I wouldn't be offended but we didn't really do any of that, at least not as a systematic government effort. We required registration of foreign agents which the government used as a basis to stop Nazi propaganda newspapers when they didn't register. But they had the option to register. Sputnik radio is registered and broadcasting today in the US. The strict interpretation of the Espionage Act that Wilson et al wanted was later overturned.
We absolutely restricted distribution of state-controlled news.
We didn’t block it. Same as, even if ByteDance refuses to divest, this bill wouldn’t block TikTok from being accessed on the web. It’s just taking it out of American app stores and off American hosting services.
If nobody wants to kill TikTok, then what is the point of removing it from the app store?
Has anyone considered that the content pushed on TikTok is actually the content Americans want? Perhaps the reason TikTok is super popular is precisely because of their tailored content.
Is there any evidence it's been used for propaganda? I don't use TikTok a lot, but it seems very non-political (maybe it's my filter bubble). The real cesspool of hatred and madness is Facebook - but of course Congress doesn't care too much about that.
As far as I remember from the previous elections the Russian bots were operating on US based platforms
non-political is political. Do you imagine that there aren't people making political TikToks? Or that non-political themes don't affect politics? Or that bubble control doesn't affect politics?
Gosh, no politics in my relaxing doom-scrolling video app. Is it some nefarious plot to pacify the evil capitalists.. or wait... maybe they just know what consumers want?
It's confusing, but I think I can explain. If you are able to enjoy your life and not worry about something for any period of time, you are actually making a political statement that everyone else is wrong and you think they deserve to die. Every problem in the world must be your problem too, forever and always.
catskul2's comment was very ambiguous, but a charitable interpretation of the first part
> non-political is political. Do you imagine that there aren't people making political TikToks?
is that you are indeed in a filter bubble of non-political content which exists alongside political content. One example of political content on TikTok within the larger Israel-Hamas war topic was the brief trend of commenting on Osama bin Laden's manifesto called "Letter to America" [1]. If you were (not saying that you are) knowingly ignoring the existence of political content on a specific topic on TikTok, then you would be making an inherently political decision (which does not mean that you should change your decision).
Is that what I'm doing? I thought I was making an Orwell reference to imply that a peculiar kind of very public gaslighting he warned about is not confined to the slogans of 1984's Party.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by “propaganda”. Personally I think it can be convincingly argued that any message transmitted to you from a State is propaganda
(Note: that means that I don’t believe that all propaganda is inherently evil, sometimes your interests align with a State. For example governments paying for advertising to discourage smoking is a great thing, IMO!)
I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have and my understanding is that allegiance to the State (eg, the State’s sole stewards the CCP) is a big part of life there. I’ve even been told that staying in the good graces of the State’s only official political party is important if you want to do things like buy property or start a business.
TikTok is administrated by humans, many of whom live in China.
Those humans are, I assume, ambitious and want to do well for themselves and therefore likely want to appease the State.
Therefore, when I read articles about how the administrators of TikTok can effectively decide what goes viral it makes me fear what I’ve begun calling ‘incidental’ propaganda.
Probably those China-based administrations at TikTok don’t want to actively harm American society, but it’s certainly true that America and China have different interests in the world. I assume that any administrators in China will never choose to make something go viral if it is critical of the Chinese State or its interests.
You can see how that might skew things for those that only get their news from TikTok, right?
(This is my understanding and thinking on things right now given the information I have. I gladly welcome any new information if someone reads this and disagrees. But please be kind :))
Having lived there for several years I didn't find the state some ever-present aspect of life - but it doesn't seem particularly relevant
Your line of reasoning seems fine, but it basically applies to any "other". If some European decides what goes viral, he is going to subject poor stupid american viewers to their nefarious European biases - and those biases may harm our society!
Furthermore the biases of US based company executives may harm our society as well. I'll grant you that they may be less inclined, but gosh, rage bait and selling sweets to children does make them a whole lot of money.
So the logic isn't wrong, but it seems to be applied selectively in cases that just happen to benefit large American tech companies - who are incapable of providing US consumers a product that's nearly as good as Tiktok
Maybe biases in algorithms need to addressed.. But that should be done in a thoughtful unbiased holistic that applied equally to everyone - instead of this embarrassing kneejerk "the commies are taking over" kind of way
I’ll certainly agree that the ‘red scare’ vibe to this bill makes me uncomfortable — even if I agree with the action overall.
I certainly am biased towards companies that operate in a way that I’m familiar with. In the companies I’ve worked in delivering value to shareholders trumps all else at the end of the day. (I don’t love it but it’s predictable)
As you allude to that causes some quite nefarious behavior, but it’s predictable to me for the most part.
To me, this is in contrast with what I see happening in the Chinese market. Again, this is colored by my experience. From the outside looking in it appears that companies based in China bend much further to appease their government than in the markets I’ve worked in (US, UK and Japan) and that makes me less inclined to trust them.
I am a Chinese that has been living in the West for a few years.
> I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have
IMO, these opinions are a bit biased.
1) those are probably the people who chose to stay in the West;
2) Chinese people (incl. me) sometimes talk extravagantly about life in a "communist country", since to some degree it pleases the Western audience and adds some fun to the talk.
Maybe a CCP member has to show their allegiance from time to time, but I am not and I can not recall I was asked to do so in any form. Probably asked to sing the national anthem every morning when I was in the school? And despite the censorship, people, especially young netizens, invent all kinds of altered words mocking domestic politics, often to my surprise how much they are aware of, given that I already live in the West out of the bubble, that people usually think Chinese internet is.
Taking a particular different mindset as unconscious propaganda and thinking it's harmful seems to support the Chinese internet firewall project and the opinion that people are not able to make "correct" opinions on their own.
The 60 minutes episode last year (?) insinuated that the CCP's main goal is social disorder eg they heavily restrict the Chinese version for kids to be education oriented where the American version is basically all ages softcore porn and ragebait.
In other words they have content restrictions in their country as with TV and other media, while the international version is more similar to its competition in Instagram?
The YouTube and Facebook short-video recommendations I got when those features launched were mostly young women wearing very little and doing something that I'm guessing is not the main point of the video. YouTube knows I like music, so it gave me women playing violin in tiny skirts, though I think this stopped happening at some point.
I didn't even watch the videos, they insisted on putting them on the home page despite me giving 0 engagement. I finally adblocked the element.
As someone who has actually used douyin (about one or two years ago) I can say for certain that that isn't true in the general case. Perhaps the rules are a bit stricter but I saw absolutely zero educational content at all in any form. I did see some military videos which seemed like propaganda as they showed up randomly but its hard to say if those only showed up because I watched the first one to its end for example. The only possibility is that they only enable the education mode if you are actually located in China or if you sign in as a child or something. But it didn't seem to be the default experience from what I saw first hand. It shows you want you want to see.
Id like to see the Uighar camps but sure as heck known that isn't happening. /s
It's hard for me to imagine a lot isn't filtered out. There is a reason they have a separate app. It's likely one is heavily filtered and the other is their propaganda tool but I'd like to see more evidence to indicate that but it's a hard thing to track given they could be just feeding kids the worst things for them or favorable views to their party and we wouldn't even know.
> American version is basically all ages softcore porn and ragebait.
My own experience, as well as my partner's, disputes this. My content is generally creators in the neurodivergant, LGTBQIA+, power generation for Alaska towns, wildlife rescues, D&D, cosplay, and news.
Only the last can occasionally contain ragebait, but it's generally not. Most of the things that make me angry are those like Nex Benedict's death, the death toll in Gaza strip, women being treated poorly by doctors, etc. Actual issues brought up in real time, not manufactured outrage.
My partner's content is generally "customer states", cats, dogs, ferrets, and couples sharing the amusing parts of their lives.
A data sample of only two, to be sure, but the absence of softcore porn and ragebait entirely makes 60 minutes' claims suspect.
Here is a study which compares the prevalence of topics on Instagram with the prevalence of topics on TikTok, and shows that topics which are sensitive to the CCP (Tibet, Hong Kong) occur 5-10x less frequently than comparable topics which are not sensitive to the CCP
What a strange study... They seem to just count the number of videos on certain hashtags. The huge discrepancy would require a very large fraction (but not all) of videos under certain hashtags to be banned/removed entirely. That would be immediately obvious when just uploading videos under that hashtags (which they don't do)
They simply dismiss the alternate explanation .. that it's a demographic difference or a time difference. Uygher stuff was a hot topic before Tiktok became popular. And people that are super pumped about that issue and are posting about Chinese political issues probably are I'm guessing not the kind of people to be using Tiktok. Those are just wild guesses.. but there are a lot of ways to explain the difference observed here.
In any case.. just mildly muting topics is pretty benign.. I was expecting promoting conspiracy theories or bots posting AI generated videos. The stuff the Russians (and I think Chinese as well?) botfarms do on Facebook is way crazier
I remember seeing a study that compared the content TikTok served to children in China vs other countries. I would have to look and find it again.
But basically, Chinese children got lots of science, engineering, and other educational content, while other countries got your run of the mill generic time-wasting nothingburger nonsense kind of content.
Check out the difference between CNN International and CNN US. One is a proper news channel covering US and Intl affairs and competing for influence with BBC, NHK, France 24 and DW.
The other is a editorial banter from talking heads discussing 2 political parties like they're competing with ESPN.
Well yeah I don't rely on any major media outlets to stay informed. At least various perspectives are allowed to exist in America as opposed to bringing "black-vanned" in China
This is 100% anecdotal and lacks any kind of research, but... I heard it was a more subtle propaganda. The American feeds could have messages about how bad the economy is, how futile working is in a corrupt system, how depressed and traumatized your peers are.
On the opposite side you would fill it with messages about the virtues of hard work, stories of success and happiness, etc.
That seems possible, but that might just have to do with the state of the culture before TikTok anyways. Maybe the doom and gloom among young people in North America is because of other factors and content relating to it just happens to get more popular. China might have a more positive population right now, that makes and supports more positive content.
I think it's both. You don't think it's possible TikTok usage data is being accumulated for prominent Americans and/or their children for the purpose of intelligence gathering? I'd actually be surprised if it wasn't happening.
Name, age, location, politics, device, amount of time spent, interests, etc.
The easiest actionable thing would be propoganda of some sort, but there's a chance of a lot of smart people working on something that I can't imagine. I'm not saying this happening, but looking at Youtube and Meta, it's not hard to imagine.
It's an election year. Intelligence can include things like your political affiliation and level of engagement, and can be (ab)used by targeting specific areas/demographics with supportive/decisive content. Think Theil's Palantir, but controlled by a foreign government.
Can you really not imagine how a nation state could get valuable intelligence by having an intimate knowledge of how a large portion of another nation states population is thinking?
Quite a lot! There are articles ad infinitum about how specifically tailored the TikTok algorithm is for many users.
I certainly think that knowing very specifically what a substantial portion of a county/market’s population is interested in qualifies as intelligence.
How effectively you make that information actionable is up to the creativity of your intelligence/advertising apparatus.
Another way to look at it is the fact that China does not let American social media in its market. Why should America give China access to it's markets when that's not reciprocated?
TikTok is Douyin with a different coat of paint. They're near identical apps run by the same company, ByteDance. It's not banned in China, it just has a different name.
Sure, by virtue of China's stricter regulation of social media. But for all intents and purposes, Douyin is TikTok in China. Or rather TikTok is Douyin in the rest of the world outside of China.
Douyin is TikTok in China. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that TikTok is the export version of Douyin.
Reasons for having two apps are rife with speculation. One is that censorship in Douyin is more prevalent than on the export version (that one is pretty obvious). There's also speculation that the export version of Douyin has an algorithm tuned to be more addictive.
But let's be clear, by ByteDance's own statements the two apps have shared management and technology.
No, we shouldn't. Be we also shouldn't be schmucks that give market access that isn't reciprocated. Most free trade agreements work on reciprocity. We agree not to put tariffs on country X's cars because they agree not to put tariffs on ours. A ban is essentially an infinite tariff. If that's how a foreign country is going to treat American companies, why not respond in kind?
Because it goes against one of our purported values. I'd hope that this action had some inherent merit (I'm not claiming it doesn't), and it's not just retaliation.
Are we protecting America's trade interests with this bill? I don't think so...
What purported value is it going against? Allowing market access to countries that don't reciprocate is not one of our values. Nor is it one of China's. Or most countries, for that matter. When other countries erect tariffs, we usually respond on kind. And when we raise tariffs other countries - including close friends like Canada - they respond with their own tariffs against American imports too.
You've got it backwards: reciprocal trade agreements are the norm not just in US politics but across the world.
We're banning the company not the ability to express. They can upload the exact same videos to YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, and who knows how many alternatives.
This is the foundation of reciprocal trade agreements:
We don't put tariffs on your cars if you don't put tariffs on ours. We don't ban your social media companies if you don't ban ours.
ByteDance is a Chinese corporation. The US federal government does not govern it and has no responsibility to allow a Chinese corporation to express itself in the US by publishing propaganda.
> all 160 million US TikTok users install a PWA of TikTok and everything is fine
I’m not saying the bill is performative. The app-store and hosting ban will be effective. The point is nothing will be censored. Distribution will have been curtailed.
Americans have more than one value at a time. Americans also claim to value fairness, and they conduct trade with all kinds of people. If some of those people fail to conduct trade fairly, Americans do not need to oblige those failures.
That's false, American social media simply refused to follow Chinese law. (I believe facebook specifically refused to remove accounts belonging to ETIM/TIP, an organisation recognised by the UN, EU and at the time the USA as a terrorist group)
Incorrect, Facebook is flat out banned in China no matter whether they comply with CCP censorship. I'm very interested in sources to substantiate the claim that Facebook is refusing to ban groups that even the US designates as terrorists.
One, this article was published years after Facebook was blocked in China so it can't be the cause of the block. Also, China daily is a propaganda outlet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Daily
It's literally run by the "Central Propaganda Department".
Zuckerberg tried damn hard to get his crap into China, he even asked the Chinese president Xi in person to name his unborn baby. He became quite "unfriendly" to China/CCP after all those efforts got him nothing in return.
You've been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. Can you please not? I recognize that you're representing a minority point of view and I know how frustrating that can be (believe me, I know). But if you keep breaking the site guidelines, we can't suspend moderation because of that.
Also, it's not in your interest to do this because it makes your comments less persuasive and indeed gives people an easy reason to dismiss them. So if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Also, in case it's helpful, here is a list of moderation posts I made for a user who was in a similar position a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. It's old(ish) now but the principles are all still the same.
explain to me how this isn't all xenophobic ? If any of this was real or legit all users would be clamoring for data privacy laws, not a forced sale of some fake boogey man bs.
If you're a mod then please why are you allowing for this. Half this xenophobic speach and anti chinese rhetoric is worse than calling it out.
(I'm a mod, yes.) I'm not defending anyone else's bad comments. I'm saying we need you to follow the rules, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are. The same goes for everyone.
I've put in countless hours, over the years, trying to do just what you're demanding here. That's why I gave you that last link to look at. We've learned the hard way that there are limits to what moderators can do about this, unfortunately—and when you post comments that are egregiously breaking the site guidelines, you make this problem harder.
Just to be clear, I don't want you to stop posting! I'm saying we need you to make your substantive points thoughtfully, in keeping with the HN guidelines. I realize how hard that is when feeling the pressure of being outnumbered by an ignorant majority. But if you post things like "you sound as ridiculous as the politicians", "jfc the absolute garbage rhetoric", and so on, you make it impossible for the mods to do much about the comments on the other side—people will simply point to your posts and say "but it's ok for them to break the rules?"
We cut people slack for being under the pressure of holding a minority view in an argument, but there's a limit to how far we can take that, and your comments are unfortunately beyond that limit. That's why I responded to you, in the hope of persuading you to understand this dynamic. I have a lot of sympathy for your position—not because I agree or disagree about the underlying topic, but because I know what it feels like to be outnumbered on the internet.
US national security adversaries are platform neutral. If TikTok is banned, they'll just put more resources into the things that aren't banned. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, who by all accounts spouts Russian propaganda daily, and changed the algorithm to where it makes up a solid 50% of my "For You"...and I have yet to see many, if any, Republicans or Democrats saying we should ban it, or even yank Elon's security clearance, or sever his government contracts. I don't see how you can have it both ways.
TikTok shouldn't be banned, and if it is, it could eventually open the door for US owned companies without "direct" ties to also be forced "divest." Some of Facebook and Twitter's biggest investors are not exactly US allies. To me, it's a slippery slope. The "tit for tat" argument also falls flat to me, the US shouldn't try to mimic being China. China's attempts to wall itself off from the world have hurt it more than helped it.
If we really wanted to address this, we'd just have legislation on personal data in general, not this company targeting nonsense; but we'll never do that because Facebook/Twitter/Google/Microsoft/etc all have their hands lining the pockets of plenty of lobbyists in DC. They just maybe don't realize, or care, at the moment that eventually their own allegiances will be called into question.
But if Western people are generally not dumb, are patriotic and think rationally, they won't believe foreign propaganda, and so there is no need to ban TikTok, right?
It's not even just about propaganda. Watch Tik Tok videos in China and it's all young people helping the elderly, learning job skills, and doing other socially virtuous things. Watch Tik Tok videos outside of China and it's all videos of kids stealing cars, eating Tide pods, and pranking people in Home Depot.
TikTok shows you what you want to see. I see a lot of musical covers, dumb jokes about the Dune films, standup comedy clips. I don't know what first ~20 videos a brand new account with no history sees but this caricature of TikTok (Tide Pods? really?) is pretty outdated.
I think forcing a sale of TikTok is fine -- after all China effectively does the same thing for all US companies in China.
But H.R. 7521 gives power to handle more than TikTok. (g)(3)(B) [1] certainly looks to me like it can be used by any President to pressure or outright censor many foreign sites and apps.
Pass a privacy law, stop arbitrarily banning. What exactly would be the justification for forcing the sale rather than passing a law solving the actual problem?
The actual problem is threat of algo manipulation in times of crisis. But they apparently don't want to make that their argument. It's the only valid justification imo. Data privacy should apply to all companies.
It’s probably an issue of messaging: telling a population that someone is misusing the information, potentially militarily, is an easier pill to swallow than telling them they are susceptible to algorithmic manipulation by a foreign adversary. And do they even want to open the can of worms about their susceptibility to domestic manipulation?
But the government hates online privacy. It stops them from spying. And (though I don't know this for a fact) I feel tech giants could be lobbying against privacy laws.
So much trash and they ban this trash because China controls it. I honestly can't think of one thing China has done to harm me. The people who control the US media, however...
Maybe not you personally millions of Americans are being directly harmed by China every year.
They're threatening to invade Taiwan, a friendly and sovereign country. They're supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They're spying and stealing IP. They're harassing and threatening dissidents in the US. And the list goes on.
Probably the most aggressively awful thing China is doing is deliberately flooding the US with Fentanyl and other drugs, killing far more Americans than all gun deaths (including suicides!) per year.
The Chinese government is incredibly hostile toward the US government and population.
It'd be really great if China and Russia were friendly countries. The way the UK, EU, Japan, and most other major countries relate to the US. No one would like it more than most Americans.
But China and Russia are run by dictators and dictators have a tendency toward doing evil. It makes sense to shield ourselves against as much of their evil shit as we reasonably can.
It will 100% be enforced if passed. There is marginal political will to pass this. There is no political will to bail out TikTok if ByteDance or Beijing throw a hissy fit.
The grandparent comment wasn’t asking about the likelihood of the US enforcing the ban (assuming the bill passes and TikTok refuses to divest). Obviously, the answer to that is somewhere near 100%.
The question was, assuming the bill passes, what’s the likelihood of TikTok deciding to divest (and thus remaining non-banned) vs. TikTok refusing to divest (and getting banned).
Got it. I think they get banned for a while and then fold. Unless Beijing decides to take a hard line, which they might, though hundreds of billions funds a lot of R&D [1].
0%, PRC won't allow US normalize ability to nationalize her companies, regardless if TikTok is legally based in Singapore, the geopolitics won't allow it. They'll likely retaliate by trying to heavily degrade a major US company with large PRC exposure like Apple or Tesla.
Should the Iranians and the Chinese think in the same manner? Isn't this largely a question of how much you trust the official narrative of the local elites?
I've been reading endless headlines about how hard it is to do business in China because the Chinese courts subpoenaed business records from Bain's China offices etc., wonder if I'm going to see endless articles about how hard it is to do business in the US.
And as others have said - no privacy protection laws for Americans passed - only if the company is Chinese.
I'm going to ask an intentionally stupid question. TikTok is largely just kids dancing and other innocuous videos, even if Bytedance is sucking up all that data and sending it back to the CCP, how does that constitute a national security threat?
Young people getting bombed by the US and its allies, are posting videos of themselves getting bombed and American teens have enough empathy to find such content moving.
Considering Israel also has horrible videos of egregious violence being committed at them by Palestinians it's concerning that you don't think that's grounds for propaganda or manipulation.
I use it myself and never get dancing videos. I get videos about gaming, sketch-comedy, abstract comedy, fails and mishaps, podcast snippets, global conflicts, politics etc.
There's something for anyone on TikTok. It's a bit scary how well the algo knows my interests, but at least it's interesting content.
One positive in all this is when Twitter got blocked in China, over night basically everyone under the age of 24 learned how to use VPNs, and learned how to subvert various official software update mechanisms.
I'm thinking that this, or something like it, could be what is finally going to break the stranglehold that Apple and Google have on the US app store market, even if it's just an unintentional side effect.
If Hauwei weren't banned they could promote some sort of a "TikTok" phone and maybe a lot of people would buy it.
Maybe they should still do it given China 's ability to crank out nth variation of existing devices overnight and make it some sort of underground "drop" kinda like how Gen-Z is going insane over sneaker drops.
When Biden passes this bill (which he said he would), I can only assume Dems will lose a large part of the younger voting demographic. If jot now, then 4 years from now. Because no chance in hell is China selling this thing, and Trump is already talking about how much he loves TikTok now.
> Because no chance in hell is China selling this thing, and Trump is already talking about how much he loves TikTok now.
Which is insane because in 2020, Trump was the one trying to ban tiktok and Biden was defending it. Now the script flipped? In the meantime, all they've done in the past 5 years is give tiktok free advertisement.
Agreed it's crazy, but it's a good political move. Everyone agrees we should ban it, but no one wants the blame because you'll have a huge amount of teenagers and young adults who will blindly hate you for it. So if you're the one who isn't in charge of the hard-but-good decision (or in Trump's case, if you don't particularly give much of a shit about it anyway) it's easy to just pick the most politically advantageous side.
Domestically, maybe, and only in the short term. Internationally, not at all. It makes America look very weak and hypocritical, at a time when America can ill afford to look even worse.
> Everyone agrees we should ban it.
No, they don't. The media and political classes agree. That's not the same thing.
In reality less than half agree, last I checked [0].
> you'll have a huge amount of teenagers and young adults who will blindly hate you for it.
Blindly? Young people already hate Biden, and it's not because of TikTok. It's the two-faced support of mass murder, the economy, the inequality, the lies, the inflation, the oil drilling, the union attacks, the failure to deliver on campaign promises, etc. [1]
Blaming TikTok for that is just an easy wedge. There's nothing smart about it; it's cynical, divisive, and extremely stupid in the long term.
Don't know if they ever agreed to sell. IIRC they did partner with Oracle to host their infrastructure, as a way of showing that they were trying to allay US concerns.
> would give the president the authority to ban any app or website both foreign and domestic based
No, it has to be controlled by a foreign adversary country [1].
The broadest power is in 3(a)(ii) on page 10, which lets the President designate an app as a foreign adversary controlled application if it is a significant national security threat following public notice and reporting requirements. But even then, it’s a divestiture order subject to judicial review, not the power to ban.
I guess the "and" on 3(b)(i)-(ii) clears up my concerns of "any" website/app.
(B) a covered company that—
(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the
national security of the United States following the issuance of ...
If this goes all the way to the White House and is signed by Biden, I think it could completely derail his chances of getting re-elected. Trump has come out against this bill (for insane and corrupt reasons) but would definately seize the moment and capitalize on it. They are giving the Trump campaign a huge amount of ammunition here.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 406 ms ] threadEdit: I stand corrected, they are bound by our laws, but it's orders of magnitude easier to enforce those laws on a company based in the US than a company based in China.
Theoretically, yes. But the US isn't a police state where their activities would be constantly monitored in great detail for compliance. There's a lot they could do under the radar, and a lot of groundwork they could lay for some future inappropriate action.
This is how EU rules apply to US tech companies. US rules for Chinese tech companies is no different in principle.
IMO however the problem isn't privacy, it's being able to stick a thumb on the algorithmic feed and control the information consumption of a slice of society. And TikTok isn't the only problem, it's broadly applicable across consumer tech.
It’s unclear there is support for that. I’ve worked on privacy issues. Virtually nobody calls in support of them.
This, on the other hand, is a national security bill. Every elected I know is being inundated from both sides.
The problem is that our first-past-the-post voting system naturally prioritizes engagement over everything else. That's why our elections are always about controversy, and never about progress.
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692202, but we merged those comments hither)
CCCP - "United [Soyuz] Soviet Socialist Republic"
It still seems like security theater to me, which is particularly unfortunate because it is a real security threat.
I don't agree that this is security theater. Divestment will put the entity which controls TikTok under the jurisdiction of U.S. law, and no, it isn't obvious that the company would still legally be able to export data to the CCP. I also don't understand arguing against a measure on the basis that it won't work well enough - you have to argue that the measure itself is bad.
Personally think the data protection issue are overblown. The ability to influence through disinformation campaings, whether for CPC, Russia or whomever is their friend, is a way bigger thing for me.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/us-pushes-chinese-owner-of-g...
I would definitely be more okay with allowing Chinese websites/apps in the US if China wasn't banning so many Western ones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...
Pretty soon you have "China doesn't let people say bad things about their leader, neither should we"
and
"China uses force to take things from other countries, why shouldn't we"
Your ideals and morals should be strong enough they don't change based on a bad actor.
This is and has been the case even for non-adversary countries, and is bread-and-butter foreign policy
Your justification is literally "They're doing it to us, so we should do it to them".
Apply that logic to everything China does. Do you want to behave like them?
Wait a few years and it will be about reciprocating other things China does.
It's not simple "but he hit me first" logic: it's macroeconomics with an actual strategy in mind.
Reciprocating =/= literal copying.
In the case here, it's ostensibly being done with national security considerations in mind. What remains to be determined is whether or not these concerns are valid. But the idea that "free" means the government has no power to ban things, including apps, borders naïvety.
China most definitely has their hands in the data that TikTok amasses and given its popularity it's not an insignificant risk to U.S. citizens. We all know how easy it is to manipulate users... aka Cambridge Analytica.
It'll be interesting to see what legal challenges come up if the bill passes the senate because that is where the real discussion will occur. I ultimately see it being reversed, but I can also see a solid framework for future bills being illuminated via the courts.
We’re not your foreign adversary? (If we are, we shouldn’t have an obligation to defend you.)
This bill permits TikTok’s sale to a European owner. It just bans its ownership by a foreign adversary country.
[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2518
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39682943
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39636608
and we've already asked you once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39362247.
I'm not going to ban you right now but we need you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and start following the rules strictly. No more personal attacks, especially.
More often they don't get elected at all due to coordinated media campaigns influencing elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_the_United_K...
The US Army literally have an entire army unit dedicated to running propaganda campaigns on social networks internationally. It's ludicrous to suggest this isn't employed to impact political and social policy in 'friendly' nations. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
That being said, there are worse things than Pax Americana. I'd certainly rather living under US influence than CCP. I'd be the first to argue that NATO has prevented another war in Europe. But lets not deny the reality on the ground.
I think the reason for the outright ban is more due to it being a Chinese product. China isn't known to be very transparent.
Sadly European intelligence services actually want US to spy on their citizen in order to gain access to the data legally.
They do in fact impose less extreme controls on data from these platforms, that lesser extremity presumably reflecting their lesser perception of the US's use of that data as highly dangerous, as compared to the US's perception of China.
US tech companies currently getting slapped around with large fines in the EU for similar infringements of privacy etc.
Restricting business operation altogether is a response a country gives when they see the other party as extremely adversarial, which is a few orders of magnitude above what EU fines are to Big Tech.
Big difference
This is like arguing Europe was colonised by Britain when they helped the continent repel Napoleon.
Oh how the tables have turned
But its pretty clear that the security threat posed by US based services vs certain others is starkly different, especially since the US is generally seen as a beneficial/friendly state.
IMO, somewhat similar situations - popular social media, known for data gathering, based in another country that is viewed as a geopolitical and/or ideological opponent and is often villified.
0: https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/17/technology/russia-linkedin-...
1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/russia-tries-to-...
There is little to no evidence that CA was able to manipulate anyone other than gullible campaign managers. And frankly the idea that a list of pages someone liked could be used to create a skeleton key that turned people into Republican voters is... far-fetched.
There is little to no evidence that CA was able to manipulate anyone other than gullible campaign managers. And frankly the idea that a list of pages someone liked could be used to create a skeleton key that turned people into Republican voters is... far-fetched.
Similarly, I haven't seen anyone actually articulate what the risk from TikTok actually is. They will eavesdrop on users? App store review is supposed to catch that. Promote videos about controversial topics to users? That's cable news. See what videos you have watched or liked? Doesn't seem like a big risk...
Profiling of a large population, you put them in cohorts, and slowly shift what you show to these cohorts (based on their preferences, worldviews, etc.) to slowly nudge them into a worldview you'd like. It won't be 100% effective but it can definitely shift perceptions, if each cohort is siloed into their own reality bubbles through what you show them you can stochastically nudge them into a view you want them to hold based on their preferences.
If marketing works even to the people aware of how it works, a concerted effort to use someone's profiling data telling what do they like, dislike, will definitely work on a majority of users.
It's not like it will be blunt, it only has potential if you use this data to slowly shift views by using what's most effective to each cohort, with a large amount of data you can be quite precise in defining these cohorts and using different strategies/tactics for each one depending on what's most effective.
Have you ever worked on anything that did profiling based on accumulated data? I've worked on a few projects back in the early 2010s and even at the time it was scary how much you could infer about your users based on some 100-200 data points collected over a period of 2-5 years. Weaponising that is not the complicated part, the data collection is.
What is so awful about the idea that people in the United States might be convinced of something? What does it matter who is doing the convincing? You just don’t like the hypothetical outcome you suggested.
Are you opposed to a Taiwanese propaganda campaign, conducted through a newly popular Taiwanese social media app and directed at convincing U.S. citizens to support Taiwan in the event of an incursion by China? What’s the difference?
I find scary the idea that the U.S. government would try to protect its citizens from anyone’s speech or ideas. The best response to speech you don’t like is to argue forcefully against it; not to suppress it. We can make up our own minds.
I don’t want the government trying to suppress or protect me from thoughts or ideas it thinks are bad.
That's how modern misinformation works, you simply bombard social media networks until the truth is lost in a sea of misinformation.
The difference between the truth and the lie though is that in the end when you actually have to implement policy or predict something, lies tend to eventually collapse in on themselves. Credibility as such emerges for the people/insitutions/frameworks that can consistently predict or give results that reflect reality more. But that can take years or even decades, while gepolitical decisions need to made today.
I don’t want government deciding, on my behalf, what is or is not bullshit — and then taking legislative steps to suppress ideas it doesn’t like.
Is Communism bullshit? Is anti-Anericanism bullshit? How about liberalism? Conservatism? Homosexuality?
Maybe. But those are for me to decide, based on whatever information people want to use to try and convince me. It is not appropriate for government to legislatively suppress ideas or information it thinks is wrong.
If you think otherwise, do you have a problem with the Chinese internet firewall? From their perspective, China is protecting its citizens from harmful, wrong information. You just disagree about their value judgments. (I assume.)
At least according to their website, it seems like US data does not leave US data warehouses: https://usds.tiktok.com/our-approach-to-keeping-u-s-data-sec...
I don’t know the details of course but if China wants the data there are umpteen companies who engage in data brokerage and can get the info they want.
I’m not for or against this bill, but it seems like really the issue is data collection in general, which obviously the Congress has no interest in regulating.
Americans are ejecting to get this information. You have to download software, optionally allow it to send you notifications, the purposefully open and interact with it.
It's rational consumption. Simple as.
Edit: I now realize what /s means.
Surely letting someone make your populace addicted and/or stupid is problematic? In a way I consider it China's late payback for the opium wars.
There are plenty of companies that offer digital crack: video games, porn, social media (including this site). But we must give agency to humans. We must acknowledge that they make decisions voluntarily.
Regardless of the source, either we should regulate data, including streaming videos of all kinds, or we don't. Singling out a company seems like a political stunt with zero real world impact. And a bad policy at that.
For the record, I don't and never have. Occasionally something leaks through to me, including epiphenomena like this discussion. HN can be stressful at times too, but it's still somewhat useful and it'll be the final thing of this sort for me, should it ever kick the bucket (hope not, though).
> We must acknowledge that they make decisions voluntarily.
There's considerable behavioral determinism when exposing a population to addictive substances and propaganda. Modern neuroscience has basically killed the myth of free will. From an adversary's perspective this is awesome. From a profiteering actor's (corporations, drug cartels, influencers, casinos) perspective this is awesome as well. Would you like some sauce with this social capital?
> Regardless of the source, either we should regulate data, including streaming videos of all kinds, or we don't. Singling out a company seems like a political stunt with zero real world impact.
Sure, for all I care we can pull the plug on all of them and be better off. The systems we had for scientific, journalistic or cultural innovation and dissemination were sufficient and much better behaved (private TV can go as well). No more "professional" streamers (haha). No more perpetual reinserting the same recycled info into the collective goldfish's mind.
This would also abolish the "need" for storing the 86263961826th minecraft let's play, freeing up exabytes of storage space in the process.
Small online communities, that can actually (federatively?) host and moderate themselves will survive as they have before the maelstrom.
We ban accounts that do this. It's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. I don't want to ban you because your account has been around a long time, but we need this to stop.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: this has been a problem for a long time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35777673 (May 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23752945 (July 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331270 (May 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19350549 (March 2019)
How is that any different than say Press TV, whose website and media are not banned and are freely viewable in the US because we have freedom of expression?
However, I don’t see them being propaganda yet, but technically they can be overnight by download a new model from headquarter (and even without US user data leave US soil). The bill is trying to stop that possibility.
I don’t feel it morally sound to punish someone for sth they haven’t done yet. But what do I know? Reading many here and on Ars, most are actually thinking the two country are at war, so they can do anything to each other
I don’t think we are at war, but if enough people believe that way, does it matter?
minimizing employee access to U.S. user data and minimizing data transfers across regions – including to China.
It is "minimized", or in other words, accessible from China.
But I don't even think the real problem is videos of high school girls doing choreographed dances going to China. The problem is psyops and disinformation. I think it's much more likely TikTok could be, and probably has been, used to sow political discord. It's not hard to imagine the Chinese government "suggesting" to TikTok that they alter their algorithm to promote content that, say, discourages people from voting, or promoting political violence, or eschewing vaccinations.
People like to think of themselves as being pro-freedom because it’s hip and cool and they are brainwashed from a young age to be proud to live in “the land of the free” but the moments you interrogate those beliefs a little they start to fall apart. It’s more of a political aesthetic than a true belief system.
A similar example, people should be able to freely assemble, corporations should not be able to form cartels.
No, nobody truly believes that. Whoever is trying to sell that is trying to manipulate you. We have exceptions, provisions and considerable case law which adds a lot of *) to the first amendment. The 'principles' you're referring to have never actually been a thing outside of political emotional speeches and Republican rallies.
None of us have been alive when America was in a hot war to see exactly how far free speech stretches when actual lives are at stake. We're in a cold war right now and people should adjust their expectations. I'm not shedding any tears when a foreign corporation has its 'free speech' rights restricted. If it wants free speech it should move to the USA.
This is simple Nation State realpolitik. TikTok is a propaganda threat controlled by a non-friendly state to the US.
Any other way to look at this is naive.
It’s a perfectly well understood fact that our nations use businesses, and literally every other avenue possible to spy on and propagandize each other’s populations
As a result, each nation has to counter that it does so mostly privately, but sometimes very publicly.
This is all part of the totally broken, absolutely run by children, international relations system.
It’s exceptionally mundane and exceptionally bad for all citizens as a result. However it’s great for business. So you’re not going to see a change until citizens demand different international economic, political, communications and relations structure that isn’t based on competition.
All things considered, it's a minor problem for the US/West. Just looking like hypocrites. Compared to, say, the 2003 Iraq war it's a nothingburger.
This is the paradox of tolerance [1]. It’s a worn discussion and far from hypocritical.
In any case, I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people and allies. More pointedly when the other side is a dictatorship.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Make of that what you will.
Which one(s)? (Genuinely curious.)
Also, was it a ban or divestment requirement? What wins me over on this bill is it isn’t a ban. It isn’t even a requirement to be controlled by an American. ByteDance could sell TikTok to a Korean or Hugarian or Middle Eastern country—even Turkey—and be in compliance with the law.
> I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people
Turkey's constitution also guarantees free speech etc. However, there are also laws that say you cannot insult people's religious sensibilities or serve sexually explicit content. The motivation for these laws is that this type of content degrades the moral fabric of society.
Politicians whipped up moral panics and judges (who were in many cases appointed by those very same politicians) issued rulings requiring these platforms to remove the offending content. The platforms refused, and were banned. When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country".
When the facts change our opinions should, too. I used to be a free-trade absolutist. It’s become clear that doesn’t work.
I remain a strong free-speech advocate. Which is why I was against Trump’s proposed TikTok ban. This, however, is different. There is an out in divestment—to an American or non-American. And even if ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok.com won’t be blocked. Moreover, the entire process is subject to judicial oversight. If ByteDance’s Constitutional rights are being abrogated, they have a forum in which to find relief.
Turkey’s tale is cautionary. We should be mindful when we find we were previously wrong. But I think this is different. Free trade (in its absolute sense) isn’t a core American value. Free speech is. The First Amendment protects ByteDance’s speech. It does not guarantee its distribution.
I thought I wasn’t American enough for your liking [1][2] but also worked for the government [3]. (Is it a foreign one? Out of curiosity, which?)
Now I work…on Reddit?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685747
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692339
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692709
China blocks many major Western websites and apps. Reciprocating is far from unfair: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...
China is not free, not a democracy, and not a free market, so there no hypocrisy. What was crazy was supporting the one sided relationship where we export our industry and production capacity to China while they block and steal from our businesses.
I'd support TikTok in the US if China gets rid of their firewall.
Because we are not China and our institutions are built on presumption of freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. If we start emulating China, we will become China. Our institutions are supposed to be robust enough to handle local and foreign propaganda and if they are not, then censorship is certainly not a solution that would be compatible with the liberal democratic values that we are supposed to hold.
It's ridiculous to let Chinese apps and websites operate in the West when China blocks so many Western sites and apps: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...
They make a superior dancing video app, so then engineers in silicon valley can go work on something else instead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
Resources are reallocated elsewhere
Most of those sites are not in China not because China says that they cannot operate there but rather because China say they would have to obey the same rules Chines companies do. That generally involves things like storing data on Chinese citizens only on servers in China, censoring things the government wants censored, and giving the government easy access to information including identifying information to unmask anonymous posters.
I think it's a dangerous road to go down, the US is already extremely inwards facing and suffers from not knowing much about the outside world. I've had hundreds of US Citizens talk to me face to face who don't know what language we speak in Australia, don't know we use different money, not know the seasons are backwards, not know it's a 15 hour flight, not know we don't have a president, etc. etc. (this list is endless). US Citizens are not very well educated about how things work in other countries, clearly to their own detriment.
Just yesterday I was talking to a friend in the US saying my friend has 18 months fully paid maternity leave and he almost fell over. His wife got 10 weeks. Many countries do things better than the US, and it's dangerous to limit US Citizens learning about that, else they will have no notion things can be (and are) better elsewhere, and should be improved.
Nothing is being censored. TikTok.com will still work. This bill limits TikTok’s distribution, not existence nor even access to Americans.
Wait for it.
Those campaigns mostly took part on platforms owned and operated by US companies.
Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
>> undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions
It seems like Americans did a pretty good job of this themselves at the last election cycle. A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result. How much worse can TikTok make things?
The paradox of tolerance.
>> A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result.
2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions, so yeah, prohibiting foreign-owned social media networks in advance of the upcoming election is definitely a step in the right direction.
Why is nothing being done about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Truth Social, etc. etc? There are more users on Facebook alone.
Besides if your country is strong enough you should be able to shrug it off. France recently put the right to abortion in the Constitution despite American media.
Yes. Would you have been offended when during the Revolutionary War we restricted British propaganda? German and Nazi propaganda in the World Wars? Soviet propaganda in the Cold War?
Let’s reverse the roles. How thrilled would we be if we could have had a propaganda arm active and accepted in Nazi Germany or the CCCP? If we had person-by-person profiles of interests and affiliations for every person in Russia or Iran?
We didn’t block it. Same as, even if ByteDance refuses to divest, this bill wouldn’t block TikTok from being accessed on the web. It’s just taking it out of American app stores and off American hosting services.
We will have a new debate.
Nobody wants to kill TikTok. There is simply way too much money in it.
Has anyone considered that the content pushed on TikTok is actually the content Americans want? Perhaps the reason TikTok is super popular is precisely because of their tailored content.
As far as I remember from the previous elections the Russian bots were operating on US based platforms
> non-political is political. Do you imagine that there aren't people making political TikToks?
is that you are indeed in a filter bubble of non-political content which exists alongside political content. One example of political content on TikTok within the larger Israel-Hamas war topic was the brief trend of commenting on Osama bin Laden's manifesto called "Letter to America" [1]. If you were (not saying that you are) knowingly ignoring the existence of political content on a specific topic on TikTok, then you would be making an inherently political decision (which does not mean that you should change your decision).
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/osama-bin-ladens-lette...
Is war also peace and freedom also slavery?
Si vis pacem, para bellum
> freedom also slavery
Total freedom for one includes their ability to enslave others.
My point is, you’re presenting false dichotomies to justify another (the political and the non-political).
If your populist parties aren't on it, they're incompetent.
(Note: that means that I don’t believe that all propaganda is inherently evil, sometimes your interests align with a State. For example governments paying for advertising to discourage smoking is a great thing, IMO!)
I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have and my understanding is that allegiance to the State (eg, the State’s sole stewards the CCP) is a big part of life there. I’ve even been told that staying in the good graces of the State’s only official political party is important if you want to do things like buy property or start a business.
TikTok is administrated by humans, many of whom live in China.
Those humans are, I assume, ambitious and want to do well for themselves and therefore likely want to appease the State.
Therefore, when I read articles about how the administrators of TikTok can effectively decide what goes viral it makes me fear what I’ve begun calling ‘incidental’ propaganda.
Probably those China-based administrations at TikTok don’t want to actively harm American society, but it’s certainly true that America and China have different interests in the world. I assume that any administrators in China will never choose to make something go viral if it is critical of the Chinese State or its interests.
You can see how that might skew things for those that only get their news from TikTok, right?
(This is my understanding and thinking on things right now given the information I have. I gladly welcome any new information if someone reads this and disagrees. But please be kind :))
Your line of reasoning seems fine, but it basically applies to any "other". If some European decides what goes viral, he is going to subject poor stupid american viewers to their nefarious European biases - and those biases may harm our society!
Furthermore the biases of US based company executives may harm our society as well. I'll grant you that they may be less inclined, but gosh, rage bait and selling sweets to children does make them a whole lot of money.
So the logic isn't wrong, but it seems to be applied selectively in cases that just happen to benefit large American tech companies - who are incapable of providing US consumers a product that's nearly as good as Tiktok
Maybe biases in algorithms need to addressed.. But that should be done in a thoughtful unbiased holistic that applied equally to everyone - instead of this embarrassing kneejerk "the commies are taking over" kind of way
I’ll certainly agree that the ‘red scare’ vibe to this bill makes me uncomfortable — even if I agree with the action overall.
I certainly am biased towards companies that operate in a way that I’m familiar with. In the companies I’ve worked in delivering value to shareholders trumps all else at the end of the day. (I don’t love it but it’s predictable)
As you allude to that causes some quite nefarious behavior, but it’s predictable to me for the most part.
To me, this is in contrast with what I see happening in the Chinese market. Again, this is colored by my experience. From the outside looking in it appears that companies based in China bend much further to appease their government than in the markets I’ve worked in (US, UK and Japan) and that makes me less inclined to trust them.
> I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have
IMO, these opinions are a bit biased. 1) those are probably the people who chose to stay in the West; 2) Chinese people (incl. me) sometimes talk extravagantly about life in a "communist country", since to some degree it pleases the Western audience and adds some fun to the talk.
Maybe a CCP member has to show their allegiance from time to time, but I am not and I can not recall I was asked to do so in any form. Probably asked to sing the national anthem every morning when I was in the school? And despite the censorship, people, especially young netizens, invent all kinds of altered words mocking domestic politics, often to my surprise how much they are aware of, given that I already live in the West out of the bubble, that people usually think Chinese internet is.
Taking a particular different mindset as unconscious propaganda and thinking it's harmful seems to support the Chinese internet firewall project and the opinion that people are not able to make "correct" opinions on their own.
Discussions like this are why I love HN <3
I think I’ll be chewing on your final paragraph for some time. Thank you!!!
Is there evidence - any evidence whatsoever - that CCP or bytedance is using tiktok to push a particular flavor of propaganda? No.
That said, TikTok's moderation is quite unfriendly to LGBTQ+ and Palestine creators (even though they find ways around it).
I didn't even watch the videos, they insisted on putting them on the home page despite me giving 0 engagement. I finally adblocked the element.
It's hard for me to imagine a lot isn't filtered out. There is a reason they have a separate app. It's likely one is heavily filtered and the other is their propaganda tool but I'd like to see more evidence to indicate that but it's a hard thing to track given they could be just feeding kids the worst things for them or favorable views to their party and we wouldn't even know.
My own experience, as well as my partner's, disputes this. My content is generally creators in the neurodivergant, LGTBQIA+, power generation for Alaska towns, wildlife rescues, D&D, cosplay, and news.
Only the last can occasionally contain ragebait, but it's generally not. Most of the things that make me angry are those like Nex Benedict's death, the death toll in Gaza strip, women being treated poorly by doctors, etc. Actual issues brought up in real time, not manufactured outrage.
My partner's content is generally "customer states", cats, dogs, ferrets, and couples sharing the amusing parts of their lives.
A data sample of only two, to be sure, but the absence of softcore porn and ragebait entirely makes 60 minutes' claims suspect.
that’s not what i’m talking about.
start a completely new profile and see what is recommended.
That just speaks to what people in general find interesting. Instagram and YouTube shorts do the same thing.
Use the app for more than two minutes, and you're out of the "popular" bubble.
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...
They simply dismiss the alternate explanation .. that it's a demographic difference or a time difference. Uygher stuff was a hot topic before Tiktok became popular. And people that are super pumped about that issue and are posting about Chinese political issues probably are I'm guessing not the kind of people to be using Tiktok. Those are just wild guesses.. but there are a lot of ways to explain the difference observed here.
In any case.. just mildly muting topics is pretty benign.. I was expecting promoting conspiracy theories or bots posting AI generated videos. The stuff the Russians (and I think Chinese as well?) botfarms do on Facebook is way crazier
But basically, Chinese children got lots of science, engineering, and other educational content, while other countries got your run of the mill generic time-wasting nothingburger nonsense kind of content.
Food for thought.
The other is a editorial banter from talking heads discussing 2 political parties like they're competing with ESPN.
On the opposite side you would fill it with messages about the virtues of hard work, stories of success and happiness, etc.
Edit: Not to mention location data alone is valuable. The entire intelligence community runs on information, all of it has some value.
The easiest actionable thing would be propoganda of some sort, but there's a chance of a lot of smart people working on something that I can't imagine. I'm not saying this happening, but looking at Youtube and Meta, it's not hard to imagine.
The danger with TikTok is inherent to all these algorithmic feeds. It is like, bad for you. People get mentally ill from them.
I certainly think that knowing very specifically what a substantial portion of a county/market’s population is interested in qualifies as intelligence.
How effectively you make that information actionable is up to the creativity of your intelligence/advertising apparatus.
Reasons for having two apps are rife with speculation. One is that censorship in Douyin is more prevalent than on the export version (that one is pretty obvious). There's also speculation that the export version of Douyin has an algorithm tuned to be more addictive.
But let's be clear, by ByteDance's own statements the two apps have shared management and technology.
Are we protecting America's trade interests with this bill? I don't think so...
You've got it backwards: reciprocal trade agreements are the norm not just in US politics but across the world.
Are we doing this because they banned Facebook? Again, I don't think so.
This is the foundation of reciprocal trade agreements: We don't put tariffs on your cars if you don't put tariffs on ours. We don't ban your social media companies if you don't ban ours.
Unless China is part of the US, I don't see how CCP/Bytedance can get First Amendment protection.
Nobody proposed blocking TikTok.com. It’s just limiting its distribution.
I’m not saying the bill is performative. The app-store and hosting ban will be effective. The point is nothing will be censored. Distribution will have been curtailed.
I'd be interested to know the source of your claim that facebook wouldn't be allowed if it complied fully with Chinese law?
It's literally run by the "Central Propaganda Department".
Also, it's not in your interest to do this because it makes your comments less persuasive and indeed gives people an easy reason to dismiss them. So if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Past explanations here in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Also, in case it's helpful, here is a list of moderation posts I made for a user who was in a similar position a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. It's old(ish) now but the principles are all still the same.
If you're a mod then please why are you allowing for this. Half this xenophobic speach and anti chinese rhetoric is worse than calling it out.
I've put in countless hours, over the years, trying to do just what you're demanding here. That's why I gave you that last link to look at. We've learned the hard way that there are limits to what moderators can do about this, unfortunately—and when you post comments that are egregiously breaking the site guidelines, you make this problem harder.
Just to be clear, I don't want you to stop posting! I'm saying we need you to make your substantive points thoughtfully, in keeping with the HN guidelines. I realize how hard that is when feeling the pressure of being outnumbered by an ignorant majority. But if you post things like "you sound as ridiculous as the politicians", "jfc the absolute garbage rhetoric", and so on, you make it impossible for the mods to do much about the comments on the other side—people will simply point to your posts and say "but it's ok for them to break the rules?"
We cut people slack for being under the pressure of holding a minority view in an argument, but there's a limit to how far we can take that, and your comments are unfortunately beyond that limit. That's why I responded to you, in the hope of persuading you to understand this dynamic. I have a lot of sympathy for your position—not because I agree or disagree about the underlying topic, but because I know what it feels like to be outnumbered on the internet.
TikTok shouldn't be banned, and if it is, it could eventually open the door for US owned companies without "direct" ties to also be forced "divest." Some of Facebook and Twitter's biggest investors are not exactly US allies. To me, it's a slippery slope. The "tit for tat" argument also falls flat to me, the US shouldn't try to mimic being China. China's attempts to wall itself off from the world have hurt it more than helped it.
If we really wanted to address this, we'd just have legislation on personal data in general, not this company targeting nonsense; but we'll never do that because Facebook/Twitter/Google/Microsoft/etc all have their hands lining the pockets of plenty of lobbyists in DC. They just maybe don't realize, or care, at the moment that eventually their own allegiances will be called into question.
Not teenagers, TikTok's main target
> Just to be clear, is this based on your own experience, or did you
From https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68554075:
But H.R. 7521 gives power to handle more than TikTok. (g)(3)(B) [1] certainly looks to me like it can be used by any President to pressure or outright censor many foreign sites and apps.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
But there do have to be contents, and whatever you put in there is subject to media coverage.
They're threatening to invade Taiwan, a friendly and sovereign country. They're supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They're spying and stealing IP. They're harassing and threatening dissidents in the US. And the list goes on.
Probably the most aggressively awful thing China is doing is deliberately flooding the US with Fentanyl and other drugs, killing far more Americans than all gun deaths (including suicides!) per year.
The Chinese government is incredibly hostile toward the US government and population.
It'd be really great if China and Russia were friendly countries. The way the UK, EU, Japan, and most other major countries relate to the US. No one would like it more than most Americans.
But China and Russia are run by dictators and dictators have a tendency toward doing evil. It makes sense to shield ourselves against as much of their evil shit as we reasonably can.
It will 100% be enforced if passed. There is marginal political will to pass this. There is no political will to bail out TikTok if ByteDance or Beijing throw a hissy fit.
The grandparent comment wasn’t asking about the likelihood of the US enforcing the ban (assuming the bill passes and TikTok refuses to divest). Obviously, the answer to that is somewhere near 100%.
The question was, assuming the bill passes, what’s the likelihood of TikTok deciding to divest (and thus remaining non-banned) vs. TikTok refusing to divest (and getting banned).
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-owner-boosts-...
The former is unquestionably worse and a far greater threat to citizens of this country than anything TikTok does.
Yes, and they do.
Also TikTok! ByteDance operates a separate app in China [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Douyin
And as others have said - no privacy protection laws for Americans passed - only if the company is Chinese.
I use it myself and never get dancing videos. I get videos about gaming, sketch-comedy, abstract comedy, fails and mishaps, podcast snippets, global conflicts, politics etc.
There's something for anyone on TikTok. It's a bit scary how well the algo knows my interests, but at least it's interesting content.
I'm thinking that this, or something like it, could be what is finally going to break the stranglehold that Apple and Google have on the US app store market, even if it's just an unintentional side effect.
Maybe they should still do it given China 's ability to crank out nth variation of existing devices overnight and make it some sort of underground "drop" kinda like how Gen-Z is going insane over sneaker drops.
When Biden passes this bill (which he said he would), I can only assume Dems will lose a large part of the younger voting demographic. If jot now, then 4 years from now. Because no chance in hell is China selling this thing, and Trump is already talking about how much he loves TikTok now.
Which is insane because in 2020, Trump was the one trying to ban tiktok and Biden was defending it. Now the script flipped? In the meantime, all they've done in the past 5 years is give tiktok free advertisement.
Yes.
> but it's a good political move
Domestically, maybe, and only in the short term. Internationally, not at all. It makes America look very weak and hypocritical, at a time when America can ill afford to look even worse.
> Everyone agrees we should ban it.
No, they don't. The media and political classes agree. That's not the same thing.
In reality less than half agree, last I checked [0].
> you'll have a huge amount of teenagers and young adults who will blindly hate you for it.
Blindly? Young people already hate Biden, and it's not because of TikTok. It's the two-faced support of mass murder, the economy, the inequality, the lies, the inflation, the oil drilling, the union attacks, the failure to deliver on campaign promises, etc. [1]
Blaming TikTok for that is just an easy wedge. There's nothing smart about it; it's cynical, divisive, and extremely stupid in the long term.
0 - https://www.reuters.com/technology/close-half-americans-favo...
1 - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/young-voters-...
Didn’t they agree to sell it to Oracle back when Trump threatened to ban it?
It would give the president the authority to ban any app or website both foreign and domestic based on the wording of the text of the bill.
Can anyone verify if this is true in the text of what was passed?
No, it has to be controlled by a foreign adversary country [1].
The broadest power is in 3(a)(ii) on page 10, which lets the President designate an app as a foreign adversary controlled application if it is a significant national security threat following public notice and reporting requirements. But even then, it’s a divestiture order subject to judicial review, not the power to ban.
[1] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
(B) a covered company that— (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of ...
Thanks for the link to the text.
Yes [1].
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
If they sell 80% of the shares (and voting power), sure. That would require either the largest IPO in history and/or massive valuation cuts.