I think the biggest effect of this is going to be that a lot of creators are about to lose a lot of money that they were generating from sponsorships: whether above or below the table.
But most will slowly migrate to other platforms due to uncertainty (users and advertisers), though it remains to be seen exactly to where.
Maybe Snap? YT Shorts is bad, as are most other “shorts as a feature” platforms where discovery UX is terrible.
Just speculation for the time being as we need to see what ByteDance decides to do. Can’t recall the exact article but I think they do plan to fight this decision.
I don't know if it's the lack of content or what, but doing the same searches on Instagram usually return garbage. And their algo refuses to understand that I want to see music/books/movies reels instead of girls dancing almost naked.
Why do people believe that TikTok will stop functioning? That is not the intent, and is not the likely outcome. TikTok will just not be owned by a Chinese company.
The same tiktok? I highly doubt any sale will come with the algo, which is literally the bread and butter on what makes Tiktok so great and better than the competition. For users who only surf the FYP, the quality is set to seriously decline.
Maybe I'm ignorant but can somebody explain to me how the federal government can just ban TikTok? If I create an app or business can the feds just decide to ban it and it's over?
The constitution makes no reference to citizens with regards to what congress can and cannot do. Nearly all these things are couched with "congress shall pass no law" -- the focus is restricting the behavior of congress rather than the citizenry.
This is a totally bunk argument. If you want an argument that does work against the constitution, SCOTUS' "empty shell" or Lysander Spooner's "Constitution of no authority" are of far more weight, but have more disturbing implications (e.g. You can disregard it completely; our system is precisely the "odious arbitrariness" the founders denounced).
It's not. A bill of attainder declares a specific person guilty for past actions and punishing them - thereby denying them the right to a judicial trial.
While this bill does refer to a specific organization, it doesn't punish them for past actions, but rather constrains US companies in the future. That is perfectly ok as shown in cases like Huawei v. United States or Kaspersky Lab, Inc. v. DHS. Like Kaspersky, it's "prophylactic, not punitive."
The state can pass whatever legislation it wants; we've seen convincingly that constitutional restraints are not substantially motivating (although the strongest evidence for this in the current week is not this bill, but the legislation surrounding the ongoing surveillance regime(s)).
But the bigger question is the literal one you've asked: how the federal government can just ban TikTok?
What makes the government think that they can stop packets at some arbitrary line in the sand, when every indication in the history of the internet shows the opposite?
They aren’t going to stop packets. They are going to prevent TikTok from doing business in the US. No apps in the App Store, no ads from American companies, etc. no money from American customers.
...but doesn't this just seem completely delusional?
They were unable to stop drug cartels. And drug cartels need a highly centralized and sophisticated organization, and need to ship a physical product across a border.
Congress has extremely sweeping authority to dictate interstate and international commerce. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution:
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
To borrow money on the credit of the United States;
To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
"
Calling it a "TikTok ban" is sort of inaccurate, but unfortunately that's how the media and politicians have referred to it. The act doesn't ban TikTok; it bans TikTok from having China-based owners (in this case the Chinese company ByteDance). The act requires the China-based owners to sell TikTok to non-China-based owners or cease operations in the US.
I'm guessing Congress justifies its authority here based on national security. The bill refers to "foreign adversary controlled applications".
Whether it's a "ban" or not gets into "ship of theseus" territory. The company as it exists is not allowed to continue existing. A new corporate structure with new owners is required or the app will be banned.
From the point of view of users I don't think anyone cares who owns it, they would just care that the product continues to exist. In that sense if they divest it is not a ban at all.
Congress and the president can pass whatever law they want. Anyone can also challenge it in the courts, and the Supreme Court is the highest court in the USA.
For example, how would they address it? Govt banning services of ByteDance Inc.? They will change their name. Services of company headquartered at 11 Example Street, ExampleTown, PRC? Change their headquarters. Services using given logo? Modify the logo. Services using given brand name? Change it slightly. IP address range? Domain name? And so on.
Internet service by one company is not trivial to address in a "ban". Unlike, for example, a chemical molecule. At least they have the experience in specifying and addressing that.
Cringey coder perspective. These ideas may avoid the letter of the law. They don’t avoid the spirit of the law. You will be punished for trying such lame evasion efforts. You can’t hide hundreds of millions of users.
You will find that few large US companies are looking to provoke the federal government. Apple, Google, ISPs, cloud providers, etc. will all be compelled by this law.
They have to store the data somewhere and it much more likely that they will sell than engage in value killing whack-a-mole with federal agencies
We have a rather large amount of experience with sanctions and people trying to evade them.
I think we might be able to manage to identify a company with hundreds of millions of users trying to mask themselves by... changing their name.
It's not like we're going to firewall them off. The bill bans distribution of the app in the US app stores and US companies from offering any kind of internet hosting services related to the app.
Yes, if TikTok wanted to provide an .apk from a non-US server that connects to non-US servers to operate, that would not be prohibited by this law. I'm sure there are hundreds, even thousands of current American TikTok users who would consider making use of this.
I don't think so. But you can easily switch to the Chinese app store from America, you just need RMB to buy any paid apps. You can have apps installed from both stores on your phone.
The same way that the government addresses most issues. They tell people not to do something, and if they refuse then they get fined, their assets frozen and confiscated, and eventually people are arrested.
Bytedance would have to withdraw all its assets and employees from anywhere in the west to escape the consequences.
Importantly, this was a law passed by Congress and signed by the president. A fair vote by all the representatives of a Republic should be able to do anything constitutional. And what's constitutional can also be amended by a large majority.
99% Invisible recently introduced me to the political concept of Noticeably Improving People's Lives (abbreviated as NIPL), which refers to how politicians get votes by making visible, positive improvements to people's lives. Not only is this bill bad policy (does nothing to protect people from foreign surveillance and violates free speech), its shit politics. All it's going to do is make the 150m Americans who use TikTok angry. So I am pretty baffled by US politicians insistence to go down this route.
Today's issue of Platformer explains it as the following:
>The Supreme Court has previously held that Congress can’t ban foreign propaganda, including propaganda from China. In Lamont vs. Postmaster General, the court considered a law that required the postmaster general to detain “communist political propaganda” sent through the mail. The Post Office was then required to send the addressee a card asking whether they wanted the propaganda to be delivered, in what the court ultimately ruled had an unconstitutional chilling effect on speech.
US version of "free speech" is that the congress cannot make a law that prevents someone from speaking. It was an example of extreme freedom (i don't have the English translation, but basically a freedom that supersede other freedoms, its philosophy 101 or close to that)
It's less true now, starting from when the mafia used this freedom to threaten judges and jury (Basically, when 80% of people think "full freedom of speech is stupid in this particular case", the US government will effectively suppress it).
I've talked with someone who argued that it effectively never truly existed, and gave me a lot of pre-prohibition examples i can't remember, and even a few from pre-civil war era, that targeted white people (which was surprising because most of the other did not), but i don't know if i trust him, and don't really know US history well, so if you're interested, you should research it yourself and not trust what i just wrote (which is basically, "Yes, No, It's complicated and i don't really know". I'm such a helpful person :/)
[edit] Not saying if it's good or bad btw, extreme freedoms are a cultural foundation of the US, and in my opinion define the country.
exactly. Nothing changes if TikTok is sold, and even if it ends up banned in the US, she would be zombified by Instagram or whatever else people flock to
She will just do it on Instagram reels now. I wish They were banning all short format video platforms and black box algorithmic suggestions. But obviously they aren't.
the average age of a congress person (house and senate) has gone up by one year, per year, for roughly 20 years.
that tells you that the "normal" organic churn of the past simply stopped dead in its tracks. we have been ruled over by nearly the exact same set of 50 somethings as they have slowly turned into 70 somethings. one very narrow cohort has held onto power so long they personally turned us into a gerontocracy.
this is why the tiktok ban is such a priority despite the fact that it has no constituency at all in the electorate. they don't really represent today's electorate, they represent 20 years ago's electorate that's finally had enough of this internet bullshit.
congress is supposed to be a lagging indicator of popular will by design, its just that for the last 20 years we've been increasing the incremental amount of lag by roughly one year per year, so we've been effectively in stasis.
Well, you probably voted in a congressman who voted in favour of this... And while there is a vocal segment of a population who might oppose it, there also plenty of comments in this very thread who support it. How do you know this isn't an enactment of the popular will here?
Apparently there are 150 million users in the US. If even a small part of the non-users oppose a ban, that's about half the population (especially since we can exclude small children).
I’m kind of in favor of term limits (though I would make them a bit longer) but there are surely some downsides, like increasing campaign spending and this the influence of money in politics.
I can almost hear the Meta execs cackling in their bathtubs of cash.
Seriously though, this decision just feels unsubstantiated and rushed. There are so many claims of manipulation and our data being used by China via TikTok but I can't help but feel a company like Instagram does the exact same thing but it's not a Chinese company so we are just... okay with that?
I don't believe it has to be sold to Americans. It just can't be "controlled by a foreign adversary" (which is a very specific set of criteria in the law). [1]
There are plenty of scenarios where TikTok ends up under non-American control. Only four countries (China, Iran, North Korea, Russia) are foreign adversary countries. [2]
Congressional Representation: Accountability from the Constituent’s Perspective
Abstract: The premise that constituents hold representatives accountable for their legislative decisions undergirds political theories of democracy and legal theories of statutory interpretation. But studies of this at the individual level are rare, examine only a handful of issues, and arrive at mixed results. We provide an extensive assessment of issue accountability at the individual level. We trace the congressional roll-call votes on 44 bills across seven Congresses (2006–18), and link them to constituent’s perceptions of their representative’s votes and their evaluation of their representative. Correlational, instrumental variables, and experimental approaches all show that constituents hold representatives accountable. A onestandard deviation increase in a constituent’s perceived issue agreement with their representative can improve net approval
by 35 percentage points. Congressional districts, however, are heterogeneous. Consequently, the effect of issue agreement on vote is much smaller at the district level, resolving an apparent discrepancy between micro and macro studies.
Control-F: "In what follows, we uncover a picture of the electorate that, although not hyperinformed and hyperrational, is one in which constituents are sufficiently
attentive that the majority can and does hold their representatives accountable for the decisions that they make
on important pieces of legislation."
Verification Materials: The materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures
and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard
Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QOVWMM
And they shouldn't. China has been doing that for years and it has been very bad for the western world. This is basic game theory. How about China stop being an adversary and allow US companies to settle in their country without needing a chinese owner and having its IPs stolen?
Because the mass manipulation tool is owned by a foreign adversary with a vested interest in manipulating the US to weaken it on the international stage, so that it can establish a new global hegemony.
A more interesting question; why doesn't the source matter to you?
Apps track information of all kinds about you and it’s not hard at all to link this data to your real world identity. Even just the search and watch history would be a goldmine for any foreign (or domestic) spy program, especially if you consider what was discussed in the Snowden leaks.
“The case for harm has not been made”
Do you think the American government would say publicly “we know China is exploiting this data because that’s exactly what we do and China is even worse than us.
This is true for any app, and tracking people who watch stupid videos is not useful for national security.
The Snowden leaks were bad because they showed Americans spied on without warrants. This is about users who for better or worse install the app intentionally.
I'm glad you agree that the US government has not actually made the case for harm.
The Snowden leaks were bad because they exposed a lot of 100% legal, directly part of their charter activity by the NSA, like monitoring the communications of foreign leaders and other non-US persons.
"n a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act"
This article is unrelated to what I was talking about; you should go back and read both what I said (specifically who I mentioned being targeted for surveillance) and the article you linked (specifically who is mentioned being targeted for surveillance).
Ah, you are saying they were bad because they let foreign nationals know that the NSA was doing its normal mission. But I don't think that part would surprise anyone.
This bill was never about data privacy. If it was, they’d say something about data brokers and idk ban data brokers from selling Americans’ data to the Chinese.
I get that we aren't best buds with china but they are also a huge trade partner with the US. Bigger than many countries which we have friendlier feelings towards.
What sort of adversarial actions have they taken against the US?
The most recent one I can think of is responding with tariffs against the US after we put tariffs on their solar exports.
Beyond that... the Korean war I think was the last time we were any sort of direct/semi direct conflict with them. And Taiwan is the touchiest aspect we have with them.
What type of company does China keep?
Last I checked, they were pretty buddy-buddy with Russia, and North korea on an estranged leash. If we know other countries fund terrorist organizations for intent of undermining western influence, is it that big of a stretch to say China is probably doing the same thing?
You can't use 'direct conflict' as a measure in this type of game. Russia has done damning harm to american politics, but its not clear how to measure that effect.
Large scale hacking of US companies, IP theft, brinksmanship regarding issue of Taiwan (backed by real incentive to follow through) where have you been?
This is a solid point. What most people don't get is that despite the enormous investment the CIA, NSA, and DoD Sigint have made into their offensive security teams, most of their budget is dedicated to Friday team-building activities, Bowling Nights, and Foosball tables. The US definitely does not hack anybody.
"Everyone but FVEY are the super evil hackerz" is a childish, head-in-the-sand position to hold in the modern geopolitical climate. Everyone is hacking everyone, and China is not some sort of unique Bad Guy in this regard.
Agreed, but if you're going to play whataboutism, then you surely understand that China does not allow US companies unfettered idealogical access to their populace, so why should we grant them as much?
I mean.. are you really not aware that the US and China have an adversarial relationship? Both countries embedding spies, industrial espionage, trade wars, soft power projection, etc etc. Power is a zero-sum game.
What kind of power do you mean? The military, economic, and industrial power of China and United States have both been increasing, it doesn't look like "zero-sum".
US and China choose to act this way, but they could stop harassing each other without affecting their own power bases.
Articles and headlines themselves do not constitute evidence. All we get from your Reuters article is an allegation from the US Government (of Iraq WMD fame), and a denial from the Chinese Government. It's hearsay not evidence. Where is the evidence?
I can't imagine what else we would call them. Also, turnabout is fair play. You can't run a company in China without giving up ownership and abiding by a number of, often draconian, rules. This isn't a "ban", it's a "You can't be owned by China" law. Given what China requires I find that completely reasonable.
Feels like giving them billions of dollars in trade every year and making them a critical dependency of the US economy is a weird way of being at war. Are you sure that's not just a typo for "valued trading partner"?
WWII gave the US opportunity to dramatically expand its Pacific sphere of influence right to China's shores and borders. At that time, China was largely turned inward, modernizing and recovering. But China is no longer in that condition and openly signals that they're ready to start asserting their own influence over the region.
Further, the escalation of NATO/Russian tensions, the war in Ukraine, and resurgent Gaza conflict, have all contributed to a specific window of opportunity for China to act as these each spread US readiness thinner than at quieter times.
This has all unequivocally and openly set China as an adversary to the US until that "sphere of influence" conflict is resolved. They're not hiding it, the US is not hiding it. There's no question about this except among people who just happened not to be paying attention to what's going on in the region.
We can hope (perhaps too optimistically) for a gradual diplomatic reorganization or deescalation without hot trade or military conflict, but the whole world is preparing -- on many fronts -- for more confrontational scenarios.
Even the current tensions at the South China Sea alone where a war could break out is a pretty good sign that they are. In fact China is probably the biggest threat to the US but Israel will make you think it is Arabs as they continue to use the US for its own goals.
But to me it's more scary what American companies and government can do with that data towards me. China having it doesn't affect my unless I'm going there.
There was plenty of criticism of that form, by AOC for example, but part of the democratic process is making progress where and when compromise can be found. Later efforts to restrict American companies can use this as precedent and a litmus test.
Not letting foreign governments control media in your country is definitely a thing that governments do, and I imagine the intelligence agencies know more than we do about what involvement the CCP has with TikTok. Any public hearings or debate are just for show.
> Not letting foreign governments control media in your country is definitely a thing that governments do
Except that china never controlled media in the US, they just offered one option out of many. The fact that the option China offered was widely preferred over those made by US companies seems to be the problem. I'd rather have an open internet where we can get access to information from companies in other countries. We shouldn't be blocked from accessing Chinese Youtube anymore than we should be blocked from Chinese websites or the media at bbc.com or abc.net.au
That doesn't mean that China controls the media, it means the US companies that do control media care more about money than anything else. Just like most US companies do. They don't bow down to China, they only worship higher profits. If some other country paid them more money to insert Winnie the Poo into every movie than the money they make from China by inserting maps with the Nine-Dash-Line or giving a Chinese actress a cameo they'd be doing that instead.
You should look into how Chinese state linked companies buys stakes in newspapers around the world and ask yourself why they'd ever want to do such a thing. Also, the belt and road initiative or loans to African nations
> I can almost hear the Meta execs cackling in their bathtubs of cash.
Arguments or statements like this only serve to piss people off. It probably does benefit Meta but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the bill should be passed.
I doubt instagram will replace it. Just like Youtube Shorts, they will fail to grab its audience. People who are using instagram/youtube are there because they like the format, and if they wanted tiktok, they 'd go to tiktok
YouTube Shorts is not really a replacement product for TikTok. They inherently have a different content creation and discovery model. Reels is much closer to TikTok.
Correct. US company data on citizens is most likely made available to the US government via fiber splicing and backdoor agreements. Separately, China is in a position to exercise way too much manipulative control over wide swaths of the US populace. That's generally agreed upon as "not a good thing".
Will Meta benefit with their massive network of boomers who can't tell generative AI from real life? I dunno, I doubt it. I think we'll see something else entirely replace Tiktok.
I'll relent and admit that some of the people might knowingly have acted in the interest of the CCP, because you surely cannot be saying that it is not in the CCP's interest to avoid TikTok's divestment.
You are displaying a level of paranoia about the Chinese government that is clearly unhealthy. When US apps are facing legislation abroad that would ban them or regulate them
in unfavorable ways they also notify their users. Take a step back and ask yourselves what the multinational company TikTok would do when facing a ban in one of its most profitable markets. Probably rally their users to oppose it.
The Chinese government
and the US government exert their influence over companies in the same way -- regulation, backdoor conversations asking them to kill/mute stories, and NSL type requests. There's not some
government propagandist sitting at a switchboard. In fact it's the "West" that goes above and beyond with an entire technical apparatus to real-time mass censor social media to "protect democracy." If you don't consider every US company to be a direct arm of the US government but do for China then it's because your feeling about China than your feelings about social media manipulation.
It is in China's interest to avoid divestment because TikTok is a successful company making China money. And now it's in their interest to avoid divestment to not get bullied by the US gov't. If TikTok had the power you and others in this thread ascribe to them they would be more successful at swaying public opinion.
>If you don't consider every US company to be a direct arm of the US government but do for China then it's because your feeling about China than your feelings about social media manipulation.
I do. I live in the EU, and our laws arguably don't allow sharing data with US companies for that exact reason (Schrems II judgement)
It doesn't matter why TikTok does anything. They have shown they can influence their users en masse, and they're legally obligated to do it if the Chinese authorities demand it.
If I were a tech company who's service was about to be made illegal, I would certainly tell my users about it before I was shutdown. It would be pretty rude to suddenly cease function on them without letting them know why, and I think most users would like to know in advance of the service shutting down.
This could be interpreted as CCP manipulation, but what else did you expect them to do?
Show me another company that convinced thousands of young teens to call their representatives, about anything. [0] If your rebuttal of that is that it’s a good thing kids called their representatives, my response would be, TikTok has proven to have enough influence to get kids to call congress. Think about that for a second. A singular entity controlled by China influences thousands of children to pass along the concerns of TIKTOK THE COMPANY.
It will be "watching funny dance videos", because that is what they were calling about this time, because it's what they care about.
You might believe that the next thing will be, "let China take over the Senkaku islands", but if so, you have not been around children in several decades.
I think the fear goes: today this is high-urgency spin about a bill which is demonstrably capable of affecting the behavior of hundreds of thousands. Tomorrow this is high-urgency spin about whatever TikTok wants, who can be more-or-less coerced to publish lots of things that would be detrimental to the US.
They learned from Musk and his "If X dies because of advertiser boycotts the world will know and they will judge". Ironically the world knew and did not care in that instance haha.
The US has had rules against foreign ownership of media since forever. The main geopolitical rival having control over the largest source of media consumed by children (which incidentally, is banned in China) is insane and should have been stopped a long time ago.
People talk about data collection. I am sure that is happening, but the far bigger issue is having a regime who wishes you harm in change of what your young people are and are not seeing for hours every day. There is a lot of propaganda, a deluge of videos pushing of divisive extremism and misinformation. The people pushing this are also using western platforms, but they're doing it more effectively on TikTok. This cannot end soon enough.
Well BBC has a division called "BBC America" which distributes their content in the US, which itself is jointly owned by AMC and anther US company called BBC Studios. I do not know anything about the details of this, but I imagine there were regulatory considerations when setting this up.
But anyway, my point was that the concern over foreign influence is not a new idea and has been something people were worried about even over a century ago.
I don't think that concern is entirely unwarranted, I just don't think it's justification for censorship. If TikTok were violating US laws and refusing to comply that'd be one thing, but "Kids prefer an app made by a company in China" isn't really good enough.
It's very strange that our government doesn't care that our phones are made in China, that damn near everything for sale on Amazon comes from China, that we're constantly getting Chinese products that are low quality, covered in heavy metals, and/or drenched in formaldehyde, yet a Chinese owned app goes too far?
We don't write and pass the laws, and what we're "okay with" doesn't really matter to the decision-makers. Hopefully though, the passage of this bill will catalyze a more widespread discussion about the hypocrisy of the US Government. They can at least be clear about the motivation: "Only _our_ state surveillance apparatus should have such direct access to this psychic imprint of the American people."
What I'm curious about is whether the new ownership will be sufficiently savvy to sniff out any automated data sharing.
It seems to me that the most likely outcome is that some money will opaquely change hands and that TikTok will remain available, either because of a shell game divestiture or because of a policy change. There's just too much money at stake.
But even if that doesn't happen, and the US state starts to regard TikTok as banned, what makes anyone think people will stop using it?
Many western resources are banned in China, and it seems that the primary effect of this is simply the proliferation of tools to subvert the ban.
One thing I don't understand, at a high level: how, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, can anyone believe that the internet will shape itself around the whims of legacy states on anything but very short timescales?
There is no case of successful censorship of this nature, let alone with such a large and popular resource. Conversely, there are many, many cases of failed attempts at censorship, even by the largest and most powerful states and corporations in the world.
Is there some reason to believe that this trend will very suddenly reverse?
The thing about China banning stuff is that it is sponsored by the whole government, so every ISP in China is forced to comply with the ban. In the US, unless all of the ISPs are forced to ban tiktok at a network level, the ban will essentially be on new downloads I'm sure.
If the ban is on new downloads, it will mean that the ban doesn't hit particularly hard, except for there will be no more platform growth, which would mean that the company sees all of the issue with it, but the users do not which would stagnate the platform and lead to its eventual death. Frogs in a pot of water turned up to a boil, instead of dropped in at a rolling boil kind of thing.
If it is banded in ISP level, there is essentially no real chance that anybody will put any effort to get around it. I see big statements all the time about how people slightly younger than me don't even know what command prompt is, which is frankly a wild statement because even people I know my age that are not techy. Like I am still know how to do almost all of the basic commuter commands and know how to download a VPN and similar. We are either going to see a Renaissance of tech people opened up because of the ban on tick tock and them learning about technology to try and circumvent it, or we are going to see the total death of the platform because most people don't really know how to do anything technical on a phone or computer anymore.
Either way, it's going to cause some fairly large shifts until something is done, and if nothing is done, maybe the main shift will be just to a different platform rather than a different societal state of mind.
Keep in mind the politicians who pushed this stuff are so old they still think in terms of physical assets and not digital. By banning something they think its like blocking a ship entering port. We will have to see how things play out but if ByteDance moves faster to circumvent rules than the government can update the rules they might be able to establish a consistent loyal foothold no matter whatever the government will do.
I guess I implicitly assumed that TikTok was the poster child for a more general / sweeping legislative push. Consider tech companies, startups, etc, operating under Chinese funding either directly or indirectly.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/... is the relevant text of the bill presented to the President. It's restricted to companies with 1M+ MAUs that allow users to create profiles and share content, and only then if the President makes a public notice and public report to Congress of that determination for a specific company.
In theory, this could be used more broadly. Not a lawyer, but there's a reading that it would give a president the ability to unilaterally force divestiture in companies that have as little as a "choose your username for your online account" functionality. It's unlikely to affect B2B supply chains, though. Presidents have many existing tools at their disposal anyways if they want to disrupt those.
I think they meant the US domain tiktok.com is banned. TikTok itself is not banned in CN, and its web presence there is likely available at the respective CN domain. I’m guessing it’s tiktok.cn, but I’m not checking so I take no responsibility if it’s a phishing domain.
...but seriously: The Chinese state pretends that Wikipedia is banned in China. Does anybody seriously think that Chinese people don't use Wikipedia, like every day?
Routing around a ban of this nature is so utterly trivial, and the primary audience of TikTok is strongly integrative of demographics which are digital natives accustomed to subverting such bans (heck, they got almost universal training in this area by having to jailbreak their school-issued tablets).
Baidu, the local Internet giant, has its own encyclopedia.
You'd be surprised how different some countries are in their Internet usage. Russians don't really use Facebook, and Google faced an uphill battle to be accepted there. Czechs apparently prefer homegrown map services (such as Seznam) to Google Maps.
Douyin as someone else mentioned is the Chinese equivalent to TikTok and it has completely separate content. The international TikTok content (not US specific) is not available in China.
> The international TikTok content (not US specific) is not available in China.
These comments are very confusing to me. Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective?
Do y'all not have friends in China? Contacts who visit?
Do they suddenly drop off the face of the earth? Of course not, they install a VPN and carry on, and communicate with you via all the normal media.
The Great Firewall is really just a means of forcing people not to acknowledge what they know, and to only publicly speak about the censored version of history and politics.
But it's no more effective than any other internet censorship (which is to say, it is trivially bypassed).
I never said the content would be impossible to access given the use of a VPN. The comment I responded to implied that they thought TikTok would be available simply by using a Chinese domain name. Granted, Douyin does have a Chinese domain name, but it does not have the content on TikTok.
> Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective?
It's extremely effective. Just because a very small fraction of the population 1) know how to use a VPN, 2) are willing to pay for it, and 3) bother to use it, doesn't mean the GFW is ineffective. The CCP doesn't need 99.99% efficiency rate, 95% is plenty to control their population.
But you're saying that 95% of people refrain from reading resources that are not served by The Great Firewall?
That seems like a huge, huge stretch.
I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
Joking aside, that's not how statistics work. But I am reasonably confident that a random sampling of 1000 Chinese people drawn proportionally from where they live (meaning mostly in smaller cities, not Beijing, Shanghai, do not speak English, are not well off or highly educated, etc.), that only 50 of them would be using a VPN regularly. But I could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 and the point about control of the population still stands.
I would not be surprised if the use of VPNs in China is not as prevalent as is often assumed. I knew a Chinese guy in his thirties who came to the US for a graduate program and he was excited to tell me of the websites he now had access to that he wasn't able to access on the Chinese web.
What people don't understand is that it's hard to discover VPNs in the first place. They're not going to be in the Chinese iOS app store (which is separate from the rest of the world), or local Android app stores (Google Play isn't even there). Websites advertising VPN services are likely to be inaccessible (though not all are). I used a VPN for years in China, as did some Chinese I knew, but even among highly educated and well-off Chinese in a 1st tier city it was less prevalent than you would think, not to mention your average Chinese person living in a 2nd tier or smaller city (the vast majority of the pop).
My 95% was an educated guess, it could well be 90%. But I would be shocked if it were any lower than that.
> I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
I know many as well, but there's major selection bias at work here, in that if you 1) met them abroad, 2) spoke to them in English about 3) a highly sensitive subject, they are highly likely to be one of the 5%.
Douyin is owned by the same company but not the same platform. It is subject to Chinese gov censorship (like all media in China), while Tiktok is not (therefore banned).
The self consistent actions could just be "tit for tat" responses to the behavior of others. Does China allow free reign of American companies within its borders? No? Then China doesn't get that right either.
Regardless, TikTok isn't going away, it is just changing owners. How does that have any effect on freedom of the press?
All of our global companies do what China wants to operate there, and what they ask is a lot more onerous than to spin out a separate entity for local operation.
At least the US is trying to protect the privacy of its citizens in this case. The CCP meanwhile required Apple to prevent Airdrop from functioning properly in China in order to stop the spread of information between protest groups.
So you're saying the USA is better and thus it never needs to be compared in any aspect related to 'freedom'? That's a nice way of never having to challenge your assumptions.
It's not a strawman. The US espouses freedom of speech, and TikTok is comparable to running a printing press. It also espouses a general freedom to own and run private enterprises.
> A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.
Grandparent: Please, US doesn't need to prove anything w.r.t freedom vs. China.
Parent: So you're saying the USA is better and thus it never needs to be compared in any aspect related to 'freedom'?
Me: GP didn't say the USA never needs to be compared in any aspect related to freedom, they said _relative to China_ the US doesn't need to prove anything.
It's objectively a strawman.
That's separate from the issue of whether or not this infringes on the freedom of speech, but 1) freedom of speech in the US is not nor ever has been absolute with no limits and 2) this move absolutely deserves scrutiny.
Meh, foreign tech companies still can't even operate in China. The only way even things like iCloud exist there is because Apple literally handed it over to be owned and operated by the Guizhou government.
The Bill of Rights does not inherently apply to non-citizens. There's nothing stopping the people from running TikTok without government oversight. The only problem is that a foreign adversary controls it. This really is not comparable to China's restrictions.
Certain aspects of it do, but it doesn't as a whole. See United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez for the precedent that the Fourth Amendment doesn't totally apply to non-citizens. The Supreme Court hasn't specifically ruled on the First Amendment, it's hard to imagine that they would say hostile nations have an inalienable right to publish as much propaganda as they want in the US.
Even assuming that exception is taken up, it would be difficult to prove in a court that TikTok is using its editorial control to publish propaganda beyond what other social media platforms do quiescently.
Propaganda is what advertising is. Should the courts restrict companies from their ability to advertise?
It's not a criminal trial. The US doesn't have to prove that TikTok did anything. They merely need to show a compelling interest in restricting its future actions.
Yes, but at some point you have to know where to draw the line. That line should be national security.
If China is indeed receiving data from TikTok, the future isn't going to be fun, especially with AI tech heating up.
Truth is, when China benefits, the Han Chinese people benefit. Every other ethnicity? Uncertain.
When the US benefits, a variety of ethnicities benefit. The US is now diverse enough where it must work in the interest of a variety of ethnicities in order to operate effectively.
So unless you're Han Chinese, you're more likely to benefit when the US wins.
Like what? Are Americans downloading Tiktok under duress of some sort? Every American competitor has algorithmic video feeds, so there plenty of market substitutes.
This isn't about whether or not algorithmic slop is unhealthy. It's quite obviously awful for the people it's exploiting. It's about who's controlling it. This is without a doubt the proper handling of this from a foreign policy standpoint. The company went out of their way to prove exactly how a foreign government could use the service as a tool to affect policy.
That aside, people do use shit like TikTok, Facebook, Google, and other social media and adtech bad actors' services because they don't fully understand what they're signing up for. To a certain extent, people do use them under duress -- completely checking out from them is going to have a pretty measurable impact on how people interact with you. You will be an afterthought to a lot of people in your life. People will think you not consuming those products is strange. Interacting with many institutions you have to deal with will be harder. Many (maybe even most) people can't handle that.
None of this makes a case for government intervention. From what I can tell, you can be ostracized in a US high school if your text messages are in the wrong colour. DOJ isn't dragging Apple into court for forcing teens to buy iPhones to fit in better.
The economy is designed to get people to sign up for things they don't fully understand. Payday loans, sports gambling, margin trading. None of these are illegal, but they should all have strong public education campaigns so citizens know the risks. Social media should be treated the same.
The second paragraph of my post is completely beside the point, I just wanted to point out that it's a bit silly making the "downloading under duress" point when people _do_ do that in a lot of ways.
The law is not about whether or not it's healthy for people. It's about whether or not it is an uncontrolled tool that an adversarial foreign government can use to sway public opinion in the US. No government with any urgent sense of self-preservation would let that fly.
No, it's not about that. It's about controlling the flow of information, which is totalitarianism 101. Every totalitarian government tries to do the same; it's just that China has perfected the toolkit and has the resources to implement it.
It's a rebrand + censorship then? I'm not sure the distinction you're trying to make exactly, it's not like Douyin is a completely different thing from Tiktok, so I think "completely separate platforms" is also a stretch. The core technology and parent company/ownership is the same for both.
Its functionally completely separate. Douyin content for people unter 18 its like educational material, science experiments, and pro social content. Tiktok for under 18 in the US is like bikini girls dancing, robot voices reading reddit threads while videos of people playing video games play in the background, and lefty social justice content.
Last time this was discussed during the Trump admin it was going to be Oracle that TikTok would be divested to, I wonder if that will still be the case now
From the world where the USA was the bastion of free speech which was condemning countries like Turkey for blocking social media to a world where the USA blocks social media. I guess when the reasons are about money(i.e. Chinese block American companies) its all good because it can't be about national security since the countries who used to block American social media were condemned for doing it in the name of national security. Or is it?
Anyway, this bothers me so much. It wouldn't take that much time before every country adopts the China/North Korea model once the USA leads the way, because you know, other countries also have national security concerns. Maybe the Spanish or Irish will want to protect their citizens being indexed by the US for their support for Palestine? Who know, banning apps is a thing now. Maybe soon all country-to-country communications will need to go through monitored cables with keys provided for inspection(maybe businesses can get an exception with acquiring a license?).
We are progressively sliding in a segregated world and it is a scary world because the tech to control all the communications is in place.
I wish the USA took the EU model where its free but regulated.
The desire for control over communications and the support by the people disgusts me. You will end up finding out that the Chinese/North Korean way of doing things is not going to provide you with security or prosperity.
They get a possible future competitor and due to the forced nature of a potential sale are unlikely to get a fair price. Realistically they will not sell.
You complain about the USA regulating TikTok and then you wish it followed the EU model, which is more regulated?
The EU is inching closer to effectively banning US social media companies with their prohibitions on ads anyway. We may see region-specific social media at some point.
Regulated means a framework of doing business, its not a ban. For example, the government can decide that car from now on have to use lead-free gasoline. That's not ban on cars, it means that from now on the cars should run lead-free.
EU isn't banning American social media, its banning certain practices and if the American social media companies want to do business they simply don't do these things and they will be fine. Unless, you know, forcing Meta to sell to Luxotica or something.
In the EU all social media companies have to comply to the same rules. This is normal "regulation". China also regulates all social media companies on whether or not they are willing to censor speech or not. This is also called normal "regulation" as it applies to all social media companies. No single social media is selected out and discriminated against.
On the other hand, US is regulating Tiktok AND pretty much only Tiktok, which is breaking no laws except now this new one where part of its ownership is Chinese. This wouldn't look as farcical if the US forced facebook, twitter, etc. to comply with privacy issues, etc.
> Chinese exclusion act all over again...a ban on race/ethnicity vs practice
This is an incredibly bad-faith comparison. People of Chinese descent aren't being discriminated in any way by this bill. In the same way China blocking Google isn't an act of racism, this is putting restrictions on a foreign state which is acting belligerentlyt towards us.
We required American companies to stop doing business with the Nazis when we went to war with them. (Though not a moment sooner.) That wasn't racism, it was strategic sense.
It's not a bad-faith comparison at all. There's nothing about Tiktok's practice that is necessarily illegal as it follows basically the same business model as all other social media companies. It is only that it has a Chinese shareholder amongst its shareholders, and therefore must be ban unless this Chinese shareholder sells his share.
We aren't at war with China, nor are we close yet. Although it seems like people do want to move closer to a war and seem to hype China as some existential threat to the USA, and therefore try to justify such ideas. This is despite the fact that historically China has pretty much never used its navy to try to attack another nation except for basically (Japan), and that was when the Mongols had seized control of the nation about 800 years ago. China has throughout history basically repudiated the Mongols' methods and violence, and the Mongol ruled dynasty was considered one of the shortest in Chinese history because of this. Moreover one of the reasons why the Mongols did not succeed in conquering Japan was because the Chinese did not give the Mongols seafaring ships, and the keels were too flat to be stable in the ocean, despite the fact that China did have the technology for stable ships. This meant that the Chinese ships that were sent to Japan to attack easily capsized and the Mongol soldiers on them drown.
China blocking Google isn't China blocking Google because it is a US company. China is blocking due to the fact that Google doesn't censor. When Google tried to reenter the Chinese market, it was blocked and criticized from TWO different sources (1) Various US government officials and congressmen; (2) Google's own employees. Google acceded to pressure from the US, not China.
> only that it has a Chinese shareholder amongst its shareholders, and therefore must be ban unless this Chinese shareholder sells his share
The issue is the Chinese state's involvement. (TikTok's CEO perjuring himself about this didn't help [1].)
> We aren't at war with China
They are, under U.S. law, a foreign adversary [2].
If we were at war with China, we'd be talking about sanctioning ByteDance. Not merely removing it from app stores if it can't find a non-Chinese buyer.
> historically China has pretty much never used its navy to try to attack another nation except for basically (Japan)
Historically America has never used its space force to attack anyone. Meanwhile, China literally invaded and annexed Tibet in 1951 [3] and continues to use no uncertain terms about its intentions in respect of Taiwan [4].
(1) We are talking about an existential threat to the US. The idea that China is literally going to take its navy/army and try invading the US.
(2) Taiwan and Tibet are different cases and could not be considered clear and cut cases of invasion and annexation.
(3) Tibet and Taiwan was never internationally recognized as independent and were/are considered a part of Qing, later Republic of China and later by most nations as a part of a "China" whether now the PRC or previously ROC. They tried to secede, similarly like what happens during a civil war. Therefore they did/do not have what people call Westphalian sovereignty. We similarly e.g. also don't talk about the South during the Civil War as being a separate internationally recognized state. And therefore we also do not talk about the Union invading a different nation, the Confederacy, but simply a civil war within a nation. Nor do we say that the Union annex the Confederacy.
Taiwan has the same constitution, national anthem, flag, etc. as the Republic of China under Sun Yatsen. It still regards all of China, which includes all of the mainland territories as part of its territory, and Taiwan is a mere province, which is considered "Free China". It was the previous Chinese government before the PRC took control during a civil war in 1949. That civil war in a sense never ended. And throughout Chinese history there has been many cases where essentially civil wars took e.g. a 100+ years to settle, but there was sometimes periods of relatively peace between parties, even a trading relationship. A famous one is e.g. the Three Kingdoms period.
> We are talking about an existential threat to the US
What? No. We’re talking about Xi invading Taiwan. That causes war between China and the U.S., U.K., Australia, Japan and India.
> Taiwan and Tibet are different cases and could not be considered clear and cut cases of invasion and annexation
Oookay buddy.
> Tibet and Taiwan was never internationally recognized as independent and were/are considered a part of Qing
A lot of Western China wasn’t historically China. Hence why Beijing has to commit crimes against humanity to integrate it [1]. We can play this game endlessly for any piece of territory.
> That civil war in a sense never ended
Just so it’s clear to the thread, the pro-TikTok’er here is an avid advocate of China invading Taiwan, and thus war between America and China. This is why we need to dismember TikTok from ByteDance or remove it from app stores.
TikTok is currently also under heavy scrunity in Europe.
In any case, it's just tit for tat, pretty much all western social media platforms are banned in China, why should Chinese social media platforms be treated differently in the western world?
>pretty much all social media platforms are banned in China, why should China have free reign in the western world?
This is so out of touch that its hard to comprehend. Is it maybe because the supposedly fee people should have the freedom to choose what to use? Unlike you know, the Chinese or North Koreans? Fuck Chinese government, its not something that the "free" world implements. Stop copying the Chinese government.
Is "freedom" only about businesses in the USA? What happen people's freedoms?
For everyone here having the vapours over this, note that the US government also prohibits more than 20/25% foreign ownership of radio/tv stations and airlines, and has for almost 100 years. It’s going to be ok.
Is there more of that type of content? Or is it pushed up by the tiktok algorithm more than other social media? I don't think this is the case, but you are not in a position to state that categorically.
I don't think you'll ever be able to get a straight & correct answer to that question, but I don't think it really matters, because the effect is the same.
I and every friend I've talked to about tiktok has seen much more political content on tiktok than other short video apps.
You don’t think it matters whether you are viewing the authentic crowdsourced views of your countrymen, or the boosted political propaganda of an adversary?
The work "ban" is in scare quotes for a reason. The law doesn't ban TikTok. Rather, it bans TikTok from having Chinese owners. If the law stands, the end result will likely be that TikTok will be sold to US owners, rather than TikTok going away.
It's surprising to me that this this pretty significant distinction has been glossed over both in media reporting and in general comments here on HN.
To be clear, I'm not supporting the law with this comment, just clarifying what the actual content of the law is.
While I get the point... if the EU said Facebook could not be available in the Country unless the company divested from US interest, would we not call it a ban?
I think it matters whether it really is a ban or just called a ban, because the whole First Amendment argument hinges on this question.
If TikTok was banned in the sense that it had to shut down then the First Amendment argument could work. But if it's just a forced sale then it has no bearing on the freedom of speech of TokTok users.
"Forced sale" is interesting, because it assumes that a Chinese company would allow itself to be forced to sell. If TikTok refuses, the government either has to admit that they have no power to force a sale or actually ban access to the service, or they have to start demanding that app stores remove the app, and DNS providers stop resolving the website, and that ISPs start blocking the IPs. This would become a complete shitshow pretty much instantly.
It's glossed over because it creates a more emotional response framing it like that rather than giving the technical details that reveal the actual situation is perhaps less sensational?
This is pretty much a ban. Why would the company convert their main product into a competitor? Majority of congress isn't stupid and knows what they want to happen.
Because the shareholders would most likely rather have X billion dollars from selling the company than 0 dollars from refusing to sell and getting banned.
It wouldn't be 0 dollars, though; the majority of their users are apparently outside the US. So the question is: how does the amount you could get by selling a US-inclusive Tiktok compare the potential future earnings of a US-free Tiktok? If the market prices it accurately, you'd sort of expect the former to be higher (a US-inclusive version seems obviously more valuable), but maybe they think the market undervalues them, or maybe prospective buyers would smell blood in the water because of the deadline and try to low-ball, etc.
> Why would the company convert their main product into a competitor?
Thats easy to answer.
The reason why is because they'd get paid 10s of billions of billions of dollars for it, and otherwise their investment would massively lose a large amount of value otherwise.
Also, bytedance wouldn't be competing with tiktok anymore in those markets as they'd have sold it off.
So the choice is either to make a bunch of money, or to instead have their investment become worthless.
I'm fairly certain the title of this article already makes that perfectly clear: "starting clock for ByteDance to divest it". If anyone is unclear on what is meant, that is purely a failure of reading, not a failure of media reporting.
The reason it is kind of wild is because a company being forced to sell basically the only thing it has in order to stay relevant in the second most major region of the world is kind of big news, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they just took the ban and then only started working in Europe and China. Is bytedance even known for anything other than tiktok? What do they do other than provide the service for tiktok?
It originally started in china as short video sharing and is quite successful there. TikTok came after their home market success. I’m spacing on the name.
ByteDance did a ton of stuff in China before getting into short videos, which was a hype cycle with a whole bunch of players until eventually they consolidated to one or two.
The amusing thing looking at this from China perspective is that ByteDance has been hit by the government over and over again for appealing to the mainstream.
The first big success they had was a social media platform centered around memes/jokes, and because the CCP doesn't have a sense of humor they crushed this platform when it started getting too popular.
Their second big success was a news aggregator that focused on surfacing news people actually wanted to read instead of the news the CCP wanted people to read. Which is to say mostly lowbrow gossip and sensationalist storytelling instead of long and tedious treatises about how great the party is. The Xi administration crushed that too, mandating changes in the platform that made it just as sanitized as all the other Chinese "news" outlets.
TikTok getting popular overseas seems like the result of a very well-timed purchase of musical.ly. The small number of western Gen Z youth I'm in contact with say they came to TikTok through musical.ly. Either way, we all see how successful that has been. Once again, ByteDance figured out a product that gave the "low end population" exactly what they wanted, and once again the government is punishing them for it.
At this point you wonder if these guys should just throw their hands in the air and pivot into oil or pharmaceuticals or some other addiction industry that's totally in the government's pocket. I guess the suspicion of some in the US government is that that's already happened and that's why this fun app that everyone loves is actually a tool of the CCP.
I've seen articles saying that it would be hard to find any large enough investors to buy it who also don't cause a monopoly. Can ByteDance spin off TikTok to a separate company which would have an IPO and go public and in the process no longer have Chinese owners?
Facebook didn’t start to become globally popular until around this time. In 2006/2007 when I joined you still needed a .edu or in my case a .mil email address to access it. Basically as soon as it started becoming popular in China it was banned.
The organized protests[1] were just a convenient excuse. Race riots have occurred in many countries and you can link those back to various social media platforms which were used to organize protests.
[1] The protests as you describe them… there is a lot to unpack here and it’s not a good enough excuse to ban American social media companies. But if you think it is, then the US also gets to arbitrarily ban foreign social media companies.
You're focusing too much on the what and not the why. Banning all foreign business in certain market segments to protect your domestic industry is fine (because it's all countries) Banning Chinese businesses because we're imposing trade restrictions with China is fine (because it affects everyone). Hell banning specific companies because they don't comply with local laws is fine too (because it's the same rules for everyone).
Fuck this one particular subsidiary majority owned by a Chinese company rubs me the wrong way because China doesn't do this to us. As a general rule US companies can operate in China and US companies are allowed to own stake in Chinese companies.
To me this is an escalation of the fair-weather, "I don't like you, you don't like me but we can still be professionals when it comes to mutually beneficial trade" attitude we've had.
The easiest way to understand this issue is to ask yourself why American social media companies can’t operate in China with the same level of operational freedom that Tik Tok can in the United States. Once you have those answers you will understand why it needs to be banned from the perspective of the United States.
It is already well known that tiktok ai models and algorithms trained on Chinese citizen data is non-exportable, so tiktok will never be able to sell to a non-chinese entity.
It really isn't, it's not in anybody's national interest to allow other companies to force a sale. It would set a terrible precedent where any Chinese tech company could see their Western/International operations get captured and therefore cause major loss of expected returns.
Just because it doesn’t say “ban” doesn’t mean its not one. It is well known that China lists algorithms and AI models trained on citizen data as a non-export so tiktok will never be able to sell to anyone other than a Chinese company unless they retrain the model etc.
The CEO has mentioned that they will simply pull out of the US market.
> they also have to remove the addiction algorithm
Whoever they sell it to, if they end up doing that, is going to be more than willing to put in place their own addiction algorithm, in just the same way that American social media and other adjacent tech companies have implemented them.
I'm in no way a fan or user of TikTok, but thinking this will improve the app seems naive.
A Facebook or Twitter-esque addiction algorithm is WAY better than a CCP addiction algorithm since the latter tries to socially engineer unrest and disillusion, on purpose, as a targeted act of Nakatomi-esque cyberwarfare against a totalitarian regime's rivals. The former kind maybe does so as an inadvertent externality, and with every reason to wager to a far lesser degree.
Meta won't turn up the heat on antisemitism and down on something the CCP doesn't like. It might turn up the heat on, I don't know, trans rights, and down on neo Nazis, but it's much more benign dystopic info filtering than an actual "what will destabilize the US and fuel stochastic terrorism and civil war?" agenda (which is against Meta's best interest).
The US social media seems to be encouraging nationalism and conservatism. Which Im also not to happy about. It seems to be creating more unrest in the west rather than strength progress and unity.
China might not even need to influence the west through tiktok, meta and friends seem to be doing plenty of it themselves. None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh
I give TikTok negative benefit of the doubt though. Nobody can prove if the stream of craziness is organic or a result of Chinese propagandists tuning the algorithm, but I'll believe it's the latter every time. Could I even afford not to? It's just game theory at this point.
> None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh
The Nirvana Fallacy is when you reject the better of two outcomes because it's not good enough compared to some mythical optimum.
In this case, the optimum could be some social media service that "strengthens progress and unity" or it could be a total ban on social media altogether, both of which seem pretty mythical. :p
I believe organic, chaotic derangement is better than extrinsic, targeted derangement in magnitude and outcome.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted - but I think this is thoughtful and to the point.
The highest ideal American SNS follow is profit. That will generate all kinds of externalities that might be bad for society. Still, at least so far, we've found it to be the least destructive optimization target in modern human history (vs. socialism).
The CCP is clearly tuning the algorithm in the SNS under its control to limit topics it deems undesirable in its goal of an ideal society. Whoever thinks this isn't so bad hasn't experienced an authoritarian state personally or at least highly underestimates the pain and suffering one can inflict.
Having the US's primary rival, which runs massive disinformation campaigns, also opaquely control the content that US youth consume en masse seems worse than...just about any alternative.
Someone like Facebook wants the algorithm to show addictive content that generally isn't super offensive to the average person. Someone like the CCP wants the algorithm to show addictive content that idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.
I'm not convinced anything on TikTok is more divisive than any other social media platform. And Reddit seems to be filled with a lot more tankies than other platforms.
> Having the US's primary rival, which runs massive disinformation campaigns, also opaquely control the content that US youth consume en masse seems worse than...just about any alternative
How is it worse than making disseminating disinformation illegal? The law as written lays bare the true motivation - it's not about fighting disinformation ("inauthentic user activity" has been detected across all social networks for the purposes of disinformation). It almost certainly is about protecting American companies from competitors with better AI algorithms. The legislature has telegraphed that the tech/potential for abuse are not problems by themselves - ownership by a Chinese company is what they take issue with.
But why is that a bad thing, China has the same regulations on companies not Chinese? Its not "better" algorithms its "weaponized" algorithms designed for specific populations including its own population which I imagine are not as damaging then the ones applied to others. My point is, of course this will be banned if the US gov cannot benefit from it and considered a threat to certain people.
I didn't say it was a bad thing - I said there's a better option that wasn't taken. IMO, protecting citizens from bad behavior by domestic and foreign companies is nobler than corporate protectionism. YMMV .
I don't see how people can say this with a straight face knowing that American adversaries operate almost in the open on Facebook. You don't need to control the platform to control the message. That's what social media companies sell!
But you need to control the platform to siphon user data , have a foothold into everyone's phone and to peddle misinformation and entertainment instead of education (Chinese version operates differently than the non-Chinese one).
There is no greater vehicle to deliver a hooking mechanism to target specific users for spyware upload than an app that is installed on a lot of platforms.
Weechat is one other such tool btw. and that thing behaves strangely compared to e.g. Whatsapp if you install it.
If it has to come down to companies increasing division in Western countries for profit over ideology, then fine. One is a negative externality that can be mitigated, the other is the entire point (therefore cannot be made better).
I don't think the GP was talking about ads at all when referring to foreign adversaries influence on Facebook. They wouldn't need ads. They're doing fine disseminating disinformation already. TikTok does not promote CCP messages through ads, either.
While this AFAIK only applies to the US, it should be the #1 issue to solve. By a wide margin. It's honestly baffling that not everyone with half a brain is up in arms about it.
It doesn’t sound like you’ve ever used TikTok. I assumed the same thing going in and found quite the opposite. I’m way better informed since I started using it. In some cases by people that were actually involved in whatever event was newsworthy.
Have you even used TikTok?
Facebook connects you with the people around you, and TikTok connects you with your favorite people on earth. That's the essence of the product.
Selectively reducing or excluding some events as not newsworthy while promoting others is observable when using ticktock and the underlying means of propaganda people are concerned about.
For a US example you can simply count the minutes of coverage Fox News and CNN give to various stories for the same basic effect. How much coverage you gives the Russia- Ukraine war can be just as impactful as if you refer to it as a Russian invasion or not.
I don't use TikTok, but I use Facebook and Google's short video versions. I find just as many anti-CCP as pro-CCP content on it, and...I guess these are mostly TikTok videos because many of them still have TikTok watermarks.
I've found way more false news and stuff on TikTok than anywhere else, even about innocuous things and not something serious like a war. It's taken on the form of modern day chain mails in the way it spreads lies, with the participants being the most invested. They all think they're doing citizen journalism yet most of them verify nothing.
Let me not even get started on the deep fakes lurking on the platform.
Not only is there more false info on Tiktok, the user comes away with high certainty they are being reliably informed. Because accounts popular on Tiktok focus strictly on presentation and entertainment, not anything actual journalists prioritize.
The effect is less informed with higher certainty, and terrible combination for training citizens for actual civil discourse.
> idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.
You're right, everyone I know now buys their glycine from Donghua Jinlong instead of using domestic manufacturers. This is clearly not because of the superior manufacturing capabilities of Donghua Jinlong, who are ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified, and whose glycine is industrial AND food grade, but because of an insidious campaign by the CCP to promote Chinese glycine across the entire industry, trying to crush American glycine manufacturing. I demand congressional hearings about what our elected politicians are doing about this threat to American-made glycine!
On a serious note, it's so amusing to me to read the comments of people who hate TikTok, but who clearly haven't used it. They simply have no idea what it looks like and the kind of content that is popular on it.
But they're very certain that it's bad!
Meanwhile, I'm scratching my head trying to understand how my watch history could have any value whatsoever. Cute kittens, shirtless guys chopping wood, sad hamster memes, Sanchez the sleepy racoon, Young Royals edits, some dude eating all kinds of cheese, A bunch of confused Americans in Europe and vice versa, PEDRO PEDRO PEDRO, guys promoting their onlyfans, schwapeepee, and of course Donghua Jinlong content, although it seems to have run its course now.
> “socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries
Do you have a single example of a successful Chinese media campaign, disinformation or information - just one?
Because I can name, off the top of my head, disinformation campaigns by Trump (election was stole) , by Israel (bunker under a hospital), by Isis (mass recruitment in western countries), by oil companies (heat pumps don’t work in Britain’s unique climate), by food companies, by Russia, by Greenpeace, by crazy people on 4chan but I cannot name a single message that came out of China and got major public resonance in the west.
CCP is a major pusher of disinformation/propaganda. Look up Dragonbridge. Or how YouTube had to remove thousands of CCP propaganda channels. Or the classic "US Army Covid Origin" story that China pushed when social media came for Wuhan.
China's 50-cent army buys social media accounts, or creates fake personas, to push narratives and abuses reporting/takedown mechanisms to suppress unfavorable posts and channels.
>Having the US's primary rival, which runs massive disinformation campaigns, also opaquely control the content that US youth consume en masse seems worse than...just about any alternative.
Sounds like a skill issue. The Us has decades worth of a head start on the internet and social media. If "the enemy" can just waltz in and disrupt that in a matter of 5 years, I think we have bigger issues on hand.
> Someone like the CCP wants the algorithm to show addictive content that idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.
Yeah, America has a decade long headstart on that too. We blamed facebook in 2016, we're blaming Tiktok in 2024. How long are we going to deflect this to the internet?
I'm looking forward to more regulation of social media to be honest... All of the algorithms only end up working against the entertainment and educational factor of it all anyway. I'm thoroughly convinced that the social media mega-platforms have all moved out of algorithms to just pushing sponsored ads all day. Many of these ads repeat far too often every time I log in, and it's been making me want to ban all the apps anyway...
I just don't we'll ever see bans of social media working in the USA if the company is from here, at least not for the next 15 years, SCOTUS will most likely shoot down any attempts to do any serious regulation of social media except for maybe people under 18.
> I'm looking forward to more regulation of social media to be honest
I'm afraid that's not goign to happen in the US. Politicians never let a disaster go to waste: had the will been there to regulate social media in general, the hysteria around TikTok would have precipitated it. Instead, we got a law specifically targeting TikTok and ignoring other SM.
Facebook & Instagram have had tons of Congressional scrutiny over the past decade, the problem is they never really did much to fix issues with the platform as a result.
The mere fact that these social media CEOs are building vast bunkers and amassing billions of dollars highlights the issue that they are literally shoveling value out of these platforms into their own pockets, and those of their investors, while preying upon the instincts of all their users in a deeply psychological manner.
Playing devil's advocate: you can't block on native apps, and some mobile web browsers don't have extension support.
Also, please avoid ad-hominem ("hilariously limited intellect"); it overshadows what otherwise would be a valid point (enforcing a ban vs. practicing personal habit, critique on blanket statements, etc.)
Personal web sites have been around for ages. Things worked better before when there was a proper search related to individual web sites and music blogs. There was also a lot less obsession with minute-to-minute updates from artists and scams to get on playlists and for likes and followers.
I'm a musician myself, and social media is totally overburdening the music economy with scams for musicians like paying for ads and bot services just to get visibility. Social Media overall is considered to be a wasteland dedicated to promoting only artificially engineered celebrity music and stories right now in the opinion of many.
You're right, but to the consumer like me I cherish how I'm able to connect to my favorite individuals like Andrej Karpathy and still learn a lot. I guess most people are likely the same, and spend an awful amount of time daily on this, whether they know it or not.
Google and Meta already have plenty of TikTok-style videos with addictive algorithms, so I don't think we will be much better off if TikTok leaves the market. Kids will just migrate to other competitors.
Yeah. Google won this war already by getting Chromebooks into schools, which are mandatorily tied to a Gsuite account and thus have YouTube Shorts, drive, Gmail, etc access.
As a parent, I hate google a lot more than TikTok. I can already block TikTok, but I can't block youtube because the school district mandates it.
They don't need chromebooks in schools, my kid uses YouTube kids at home (that doesn't include shorts), teens will have their own phone usually, and youtube is already a popular place for them to go, discovering YouTube shorts (if they haven't already), is easy.
But ya, if a teen is otherwise cut off from devices besides the ones they get from school, then you could see that as a weak point, although I don't think that applies to a significant portion of families. For the ones that it does apply to, they probably have bigger problems to worry about than TikTok being banned.
The admins should be able to block YouTube for minors when asked. There's a way to do it but it's by OU not individual user. Fight for it if you want it.
The algorithm's novelty and recommendation accuracy is so far beyond what other competitors like Google, Snapchat, and Meta have that this seems like a coordinated effort by the private sector to push forth their mediocre products and centralize social media service which I absolutely DETEST. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly announced how far behind Tiktok Meta was. Many years later they are still playing catchup.
Though, the saddest thing is that it seems like the U.S citizens, (i.e ANY of tiktoks 160 MILLION US users) have absolutely no say in the operations,a yet we actually interact with the app not these old people in Congress. The fact that Biden so swiftly signed the bill too makes me frustrated as I want to vote for him, but he keeps doing or okaying things that are counter to my values.
There are plenty of US companies that are authorized to use government-funded patents, that would prevent them from transferring ownership to foreign owners. This isn't a "poison pill" conspiracy, this is standard export control for state-funded technology.
Companies that are export controlled have military tech. The idea that a social media app would have a poison pill for export control is ridiculous and shows how owned these supposedly independent companies really are.
ITAR applies to many technologies that are trivial to duplicate or have been redeveloped outside the US to bypass those restrictions. Memory chips hardened for space are subject to ITAR. These memory chips are commercial with lead tape on them.
They could work on a "good enough" algorithm that is basically already in public/open source domain when they sell it. 80% of its value is captive audience and "cool factor" with younger users.
Of course the CEO is going to say that, because they don't want the law passed. When the chips are down, it's a lot less likely that just pull out than that they take the money from one of the many salivating buyers.
If TikTok is in bed with the CCP as much as Congress says they are, think about the actual cause and effect of their different options.
If ByteDance sells TikTok to US owners to satisfy the requirement, they give up control of a successful platform developed inside of China to a self-declared adversary that already controls most of the world's social media platforms, representing a significant loss to China as they attempt to compete online.
If ByteDance ignores the demand to sell, the US government has obligated itself to prevent its citizens from accessing one of the most popular social media apps in existence, something that the affected users will be extremely angry about, and will likely make claims of state censorship.
If I were China, and my goal was to leverage TikTok to do harm to America, I would choose the option that turns US citizens against the government over the option that transfers power from China to the US.
China is a communist country. State owned industry. The leash they give business "owners" might be long (long enough to fool westerns it's just another USA), but it is still a leash, and they are still under control of the party. No courts, no rights, no lawsuits. Party wants, party takes.
aren't they already split and use different app in China vs US. Interestingly Chinese app's algorithm chooses more STEM videos, while Western version just pushes addictive crap.
Theoretically they could sell "TikTok" to a US company who then licenses algorithm processing to the Chinese entity, no?
The US entity isn't beholden to the CCP and can decide to switch algorithm providers if they suddenly notice it's getting very propaganda-y, which provides a degree of independent oversight appeasing US concerns while not necessitating actually switching from the current systems.
The law requires the President (i.e. executive agencies) to verify any such transaction, and it specifically calls out "cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing" as subject to review. So they thought about that.
As I understand TikTok has been investing in building out a U.S. fulfillment center network over the past two years, perhaps a drop in the bucket for them. With this investment and the loads of U.S employees they have I would be surprised if they leave their large (largest?) user base.
This they can actually sell, plenty of fulfillment companies that would be interested in buying. They aren't selling their tech though and I don't blame them, Facebook wouldn't sell to be in China so whatever. However, I am disappointed because we aren't China and shouldn't govern the same. I personally will be voting for any non incumbent going forward (for my remaining time in this country, I'm getting out of here), the current legislature on both sides is insane, dangerous and (obviously) slowly creeping up the road of fascism.
There's a great book that I think everyone should read:
"On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" by Tim Snyder, it's also is short and to the point (audiobook is 2 hours long) and teaches people what to look for to see when their country slides into authoritarianism and what to do to fight it.
The author also reads it on YouTube if you can't get a hold of it.
I am baffled that any thoughtful person would take a CEO statement at face value without considering incentives.
1) prior to bill passage, convincing the public that they will pull out is optimal as it helps argue against bill, regardless of whether it is at all true
2) but, after bill passage, the incentives are totally different. Pulling out means giving up a billion dollar market that could instead have been sold. The shareholders would be livid.
So I am very skeptical. I have heard CEOs say many things they later were found to clearly never have meant seriously, simply because it was what they needed to say at the time. Like, "we would never do outsourcing or layoffs, your division is totally safe"....
I would think thoughtful HN readers would be just a little less credulous
That does not follow at all. Perhaps they simply don't want to spin off a future competitor, and decide that selling simply isn't worth that future risk.
That would be delusional, since TikTok's success is due to first-mover advantage due to network effects, not any hard to replicate technology or other real moat. They can imagine otherwise but that is just stroking their own egos.
They were the first popular short-form algorithmic addictive feed app. Anyone can make one now (YT Shorts, Insta Reels, etc), there's no secret sauce anymore like there may have been years ago. But TikTok stays number one because they were number one -- network effects.
If they disappear, a new competitor takes over and is just as strong as they were. All the value is in the niche, not the occupant of the niche. It really would be like they're giving it away instead of at least collecting a few billion cash for it. It would be monumentally stupid. They'd get the future competitor just as much whether they sell or not.
The law doesn't ban them from having Chinese owners.
It bans American companies from providing services that distribute, maintain or update any sufficiently popular apps substantially owned or controlled by foreign adversaries.
TikTok could host APKs from CCP headquarters if they want to.
Is this just a distribution ban or will US actually block the app at net/protocol? I have never used the thingie but this ban business motivated me to download it the other day.
Give it a try. It's weird, fun, educational, stupid. It's whatever you make of it. Is it also whatever China wants you to make of it? Maybe. But they could do the same thing with news, TV, or movies.
The most essential advice I can give to any new user of TikTok is to be EXTREMELY liberal with the "long press > not interested" feature. The default FYP ("For you page", the algorithmic feed) is initially tuned towards the average teen, with lots of garbage (pranks, half-dressed women, and assorted other trashy content). The algo is pretty good at picking up what keeps your attention, so be careful what you give your attention to.
If you tune it right, there's a lot of good content on there, though.
The crux of TikTok's success is that you don't have to "game the algorithm" like in other apps, and it's quite resilient even if you try. It seems to know what's an organic signal and what's an artificial signal.
Most other short-form content recommendation algorithms overfit like crazy (ahem Instagram ahem), and many users trying to bend it a certain way mess it up.
I believe so. It's called "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" not "TikTok Ban Act", so it can be applied to apps like WeChat as well.
>the end result will likely be that TikTok will be sold to US owners
Why does everyone assume this is likely? The CCP has already said they would block a sale of TikTok. This happened a while ago - so the US saying TikTok must be sold is an effective ban. The misdirection of the wording of the ban is just dishonest.
> misdirection of the wording of the ban is just dishonest
Ban usually means you can't use it anymore. Take, for example, Google in mainland China. Banned without unusual circumvention. If TikTok refuses to sell to a non-Chinese owner, on the other hand, they get removed from app stores. Their website still works without any circumvention. Not banned. Even in the worst case.
> you are moving the goalposts. Now it's not "they will be forced to sell", but "the website will still be available"
Where did I set a goal post? What does the goal even represent in this metaphor? What counts as a ban?
The United States is capable of banning stuff. When we take down pirate websites, we're enacting a ban: domain seizures, asset freezes, criminal penalties and possibly sanctions. We can even go lightweight: say it's illegal to provide services to Americans (or more draconian, which I must add lines up with China's approach, make it illegal to access them) and then leave enforcemnt to the executive.
What we're doing here is milquetoast: sell enough to non-Chinese owners so they no longer have a controlling stake or distribute this from non-American servers and via the internet and sideloaded apps. Calling this a ban is like saying someone was banned from a restaurant because they arrived after it closed.
>Where did I set a goal post? What does the goal even represent in this metaphor?
It has gone from "not a ban" because they just have to sell, to "not a ban" because because the website is still available.
It's an effective ban because the CCP has already said they will not allow a TikTok sale. Congress knows there's no recourse for ByteDance. They aren't going to hand over the IP to a non-Chinese entity. If France said they were going to ban NVDA unless NVDA sells to a French national we would call it a ban.
>Calling this a ban is like saying someone was banned from a restaurant because they arrived after it closed.
The irony about this is that China has the same exact policy in the mainland, but no one argues whether or not Google is banned in China. Google used to be in China! China said Google had to censor some topics or they wouldn't be allowed to do business in China. Google opted to leave.
Nobody sits around pontificating that it technically wasn't a ban because all Google needed to do what follow Chinese law on censorship.
> It has gone from "not a ban" because they just have to sell, to "not a ban" because because the website is still available
These are both true, though. Again, if you want to see a ban, look at how Facebook is treated by China.
But fair enough, people are using the term "ban" inconsistently. I wouldn't say anyone's moving the goalposts as much as we're using an ambiguous term interchangeably.
> If France said they were going to ban NVDA unless NVDA sells to a French national we would call it a ban
This is tautology. You literally said if Sally were to do X to Andy unless {}, then X = X.
> Nobody sits around pontificating that it technically wasn't a ban because all Google needed to do what follow Chinese law on censorship
You can't go to Google.com in China. You will be able to go to TikTok.com and access its content freely after it's been, per your definition, banned. From a free-speech perspective, that seems material.
I get your point from a free-trade perspective. This is obviously not a free-trade bill. Maybe that's where the discussion is losing traction...
Why are you framing this in such a way that treats one party as having agency and the other party as being immovable? The US is not banning TikTok, they are posing stipulations towards its use and you believe the CCP when they say they won't comply with those stipulations. But why is that a ban, versus "the CCP refuses to let TikTok comply with US law?"
Do you consider Google banned in China? The CCP had stipulations for Google's continued business in China. It was unable/unwilling to follow them, so Google left (voluntarily, infact).
I've never seen anyone argue that Google isn't technically banned in China. It's clearly a ban when China does it.
Yes. Is this even a contentious point? Despite the fact EU hasn't bothered to null-route an application that doesn't comply, they will impose onerous fines.
And what do companies do that don't want to comply to GDPR? They ban EU users. You can use the search bar here to find countless people talking about being banned. There's no ambiguity - there's only ambiguity when it comes to TikTok.
If I purchase a car with low gas mileage, and then the EPA requires cars to have minimum gas milage, that "bans" my car. Even though technically, I could figure out some way to rebuild it to comply.
>It's surprising to me that this this pretty significant distinction has been glossed over both in media reporting and in general comments here on HN.
That's because:
* Saying it'll get banned makes for a more sensational headline.
* Saying it'll get banned is accurate enough for most practical purposes.
* Saying it'll get banned is simpler than explaining the details of divestiture. Most Americans probably don't even know what "divest" means without pulling out a dictionary.
Another reason could be: many are not sympathetic to the America's claims that these foreign platforms are at the whims of a country it is at odds with and which have repeatedly demonstrated covert abilities to change American's perception.
Speaking with some younger American co-workers in the past, their suspicion/hatred of their own country is astounding to see and it seems to have coincidentally begun after TikTok entered US market a few months before US elections.
So the worry seems to be that young American voters exposed to a foreign social platform will influence upcoming elections. I do not think this is far fetched as multiple countries have come out to expose various tactics by certain countries to influence perception.
>their suspicion/hatred of their own country is astounding to see
Speaking as an American, our country was founded on the principles of being apprehensive of governments including our own. Being suspicious of our own government is a very American thing and should not be understood as surprising.
See our Declaration of Independence for further reading and context.
And old people losing their connection with objective reality is connected to fox news. Next argument. It's being banned because old technically illiterate people (most of congress) latched onto a simplistic solution to the wrong problem,
The US has already done this with a different company, without passing a law[1]. I don't know what else to say, other than the TikTok algorithm must be some secret sauce and actually is being manipulated by Beijing and that's why they're making such a big deal about a forced sale in this case. Otherwise, this would just be a giant liquidity event for these senior business executives and that would be that.
Instead, the TikTok CEO is invoking the First Amendment and "freedom" to emotionally manipulate people into thinking Congress did something wrong here.
Also wonder whether the law names TikTok in particular or just some criteria that matches it. If it's the latter, are other companies also on the clock?
It bans American companies from providing services that distribute, maintain or update any sufficiently popular apps where a company is headquartered in, or has more than a 20% ownership share of the company held, in a country that has been determined to be a foreign adversary.
It is much, much broader than a 'tiktok ban', it applies to any company that fits that criteria. So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company. It's not just a ban, it simply won't exist on the internet for US users.
There are probably a bunch of companies that will be subject to this if it's upheld in court, and the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet. It'll also likely result in Chinese interests devesting down to >20% from US companies that they do not want banned, for much the same reasons.
Basically, this is the result of a bunch of tech-illiterate politicians who have no idea how any of this works, passing a law that looks good in news headlines without regard to the potential consequences. So business as usual on the hill.
> So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company.
Provided they have more than 1 million MAU (which they do, obviously). The president would also have to affirmatively ban it and report to Congress about the specific threat that company poses, and what assets need to be divested. TikTok is the only company written into the bill by Congress that doesn't require affirmative action by the president, or the report.
> the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet
Only if the president believes they should be banned.
1 million MAU is nothing. Throw up AdSense on something that gets 1m MAU and that pays for a single developer. Also, I don't like the President getting this kind of power over businesses. It's bad enough when they can make angry Twitter threats... now they can give them a corporate death penalty.
Sure, that's a valid concern to have, and I'm not saying the bill is a great idea. I'm just pointing out that there's nothing automatic about the process and the clock to divestment wouldn't immediately start ticking the moment a company crosses 20% Chinese ownership. The person I was responding to said the bill could get weaponized by the CCP to ban things via the threat of them acquiring more than 20% ownership, but that's not how the bill works.
As people are pointing out, no. This isn't a blanket law, it requires per-case executive action to enforce.
What the law absolutely does do is make "Chinese Ownership" an existential risk to companies with software products with large numbers of US users. Riot, Epic et. al. will be strongly incentivised to get their PRC shareholders to divest, and in the future other companies will be disincentivized from accepting that kind of investment.
> The law doesn't ban TikTok. Rather, it bans TikTok from having Chinese owners.
My prediction: China would absolutely throw away a few billion to enjoy the chaos that results from the country that preaches free speech painting itself into a corner and banning it. Enacting a ban on the most popular app among Gen Z would cause a huge uproar.
It would be like taking away terrestrial radio from boomers. It's that popular.
Yeah. This is really a generational thing. That's why the ban was bipartisan... nobody in Congress is of the age that uses TikTok. However, the youth in this country are going to be enraged, far more than I think a lot of people expect. I don't use TikTok but the people I know who use it are extremely passionate about the app.
I mean, I’m happy to see tiktok removed from app stores for the same reasons as I’d be happy to see any social media apps be removed from app stores, so from that perspective, I don’t think it matters that I haven’t used tiktok unless it’s somehow exempt from the problems that are endemic to social media apps.
I mean it's debatable whether or not social media is good for society, and there's legitimate concerns about data privacy, but do you really want the govt to remove them?
Good question! I wouldn’t trust a government aiming to remove them, but seeing them run afoul of legitimate legislation (where I’m not actually familiar enough with the US/tiktok law to really make a judgement call on) in ways that get them punished satisfies me. (Assuming those punishments are in line with principles I otherwise support - e.g. I wouldn’t support ISP-level blocking.)
> the people I know who use it are extremely passionate about the app
It's addictive and they don't fully understand the dangers of CCP spyware and CCP controlled algorithm. It's like drugs addicts being passionate about drug use.
> Enacting a ban on the most popular app among Gen Z would cause a huge uproar.
Or they just move over to FAANG competitors? I've never used TikTok before since it is an app, but I use YouTube shorts and whatever that Instagram short thing is Facebook is pushing into my feed (with...erm...a lot more addictive algorithms than YouTube). Ok, I'm not Gen Z, but it looks like content providers are already hedging their bets on platforms (they often don't even remove TikTok watermarks), I don't see why consumers wouldn't follow. Its not like YouTube or Facebook is blocked in the USA.
Currently the FAANG competitors are much worse; their recommendation engines are inferior. That's why consumers overwhelmingly prefer Tiktok currently.
Content providers are stealing their own TikTok videos, although I'm sure some providers are stealing other people's TikTok videos to make money on Reels and Shorts, especially the Chinese ones I've seen (probably ripped off by other Chinese wanting to make some quick money).
For example, if they (or some party that's directly targeted like Apple or Cloudflare) gets a U.S. court to enjoin enforcement of some of the provisions.
Buzzkill! Everybody else on here was having fun opining that it's 100% certain that China pulls the plug, or conversely that a sale will happen, and you just had to point out that it's an empirical question where nobody can read the CCP's mind. Boo.
If I forced you to sell your home and said you couldn't live there anymore, and if you refused to move, we would tear your house down. Would you then say that I am banning you from living in your home? Kinda feels like a ban, even though it's just a forced sell.
China has made very clear they do not want ByteDance to sell. And that ByteDance should follow Chinese law.
Hmm I wonder why..
I think it's unlikely they will sell and it will instead be removed from US markets. China would prefer that we don't have another successful social networking platform, and they would like to keep their spyware for use in other countries.
They only need to sell the US portion of the business. They can continue to operate everywhere else, right? Why would they throw away tens of billions of dollars (value of the US portion)?
The CCP does not care about the marketcap of bytedance, they care about the soft power that tiktok allows them to wield. The CEO of bytedance may want to sell, but the CCP won't let them.
In US those are essentially equivellent as money buys soft power very easily. This whole thing is US not wanting to expand user rights but protect it's soft power and it shows.
I think either way this whole thing is a big W for CCP and L to US democracy that doesn't have the balls to actually expand regulation when it's clearly wanted and needed.
They would lose soft power in the US but what if the CCP accepts this and shifts their tactics to slowly but surely flood the rest of the world with anti-US propaganda? Unfortunately, it really doesn't look like the US could win here.
A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China. You can't own a broadcast station in the US as a non-US citizen. Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen to buy Fox. I don't know if I agree with this but you can't say there is no precedent for it in the US or in China.
If the ban was based on the context of the speech it would violate the constitution, but ownership of corporations is fair game to regulate. It's not uncommon for countries to have foreign ownership restrictions on other industries like banking, utilities, railroads, etc.
The other problem is the teapot calling the kettle black. If the US has precedent, and this action follows that precedent, then our bitching and whining about Google and Facebook in China previously makes us look really contradictory.
We’ll end up validating Chinese policies all these years if we claim this action has precedent.
If it doesn’t have precedent, then it’s even worse. It becomes a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them (or their practices).”
> The other problem is the teapot calling the kettle black.
You could say the same thing about China complaining about this. Actually, that's what people would think of first when you mentioned "the teapot calling the kettle back". Frankly, I think people in China are surprised we kept our internet open for so long. Anyways, yes, American is now admitting that they will play by the same rules as China, rather than giving them a pass.
What does it matter what China does? If they don’t want our stuff then that’s their choice. I mean, we voluntarily use an economic blockade as a weapon against North Korea, Iran, and Russia, and it is not to their benefits.
My whole second point about joining them is saying that it shouldn’t matter what China does or says. They are hypocrites so we can be too???
I mean, if you think like that, then it doesn't really matter at all. Americans aren't so bound to concept of Chinese face that they actually even care about this. Since we don't get face hurt, accusations of hypocrisy are pretty pointless anyways.
Saving face is not just about saving face. There's also your credibility at stake. There's only so many times you can invade a country under false pretenses before the international community, or even your own constituency, starts siding with the opposition. I guess also if we really don't have any principles anymore, we'll have devolved back to survival of the fittest principles. At which point we don't need thinkers, just people doing what they can to get what they can all the time. No need to argue or make points. Just fight it out and save some time.
China said "American companies not welcome in China's internet", well they didn't say it, they just made that the truth. America saying "Chinese companies not welcome in America's internet" 10 years later isn't going to raise many eyebrows abroad. For the most part, people are wondering why it took so long.
> I guess also if we really don't have any principles anymore, we'll have devolved back to survival of the fittest principles.
China has been very clear that the principle should be tit for tat. All of their economic and foreign policy is based on that, from the visas they issue to visitors, the tariffs we exchange on vehicle production, and the foreigners they throw in prison when one of their own is put on house arrest in Canada. This is just a very late counter-reaction to a policy China has held for awhile.
It's the sovereign right of any country to be protectionist. Protectionism is actually the default. Open markets is not the default. I'd like to think the open US market is what makes it great, and too much protectionism actually stifles innovation and the robustness of the domestic economy.
The US market hasn't historically been that open. We started this country with tariffs as the only thing funding the government. All the free trade market stuff we have today was carefully negotiated via the WTO, and even then there is a huge bias in supporting allies (remember, when China opened up in the late 90s, it was antagonistic with Russia and actually a US ally since the the late 70s, that is all history now).
But we're not. The mantra of the West has always been that government must stfu and let the people talk. Government is charged with protecting that right for the people.
China is a government, so, just like our government, it must stfu.
This is a pretty straightforward protection of the people from government that's very much in line with American ideals.
I'm seeing downvoters here. Do you guys mean that people shouldn't have a right to free speech? Or you believe that if we give foreign governments the right to free speech, that they won't use it to silence you? I can think of at least one example that did.
It's like this: imagine your neighbor is a raging alcoholic, and you say - he can get drunk and beat his wife, so I should too. And anyone who says this is bad can clearly see that he was the first one to do it.
Because we exactly didn't. Look what's flying over your head.
China: censors free speech in China then makes a US speech platform and censors American speech on the new platform. Blocks US platforms in China because they refuse to censor speech for the CCP.
US: blocks China from owning speech platforms because the US doesn't allow censorship and doesn't trust China to stop censoring speech on the platform.
Literally the opposite thing. How you've managed to conflate two completely opposite things is very interesting.
Are you a habitual TikTok user? Or do you work for the CCP?
I'm openly suspicious that you might be getting paid to conflate these very obviously opposite things.
How would it validate China? China has made itself a laughing stock hypocrite. It tells everyone how bad free speech is, and then it begs for free speech?
Conversely America is holding to its core values of restricting governments from acting in the political field. That right is reserved for citizens, and is especially protected from government use. America is founded on restricting government so that free speech can exist.
This move firmly reestablishes America as a leader in free speech protection, as it protects citizens speech from influence by government, both domestic, and now, foreign.
This isn't the US joining China's practices, they aren't cracking down on all foreign ownership, they're targeting China as a tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat is the right response to a defector like China, the US still cooperates with other cooperators like those in Europe.
There can only be a finite number of broadcasters because of how radio works, so it makes sense to regulate. (A little bit of sense, not a lot.)
There should be no restrictions on who owns a website. There can be an unlimited number of websites, and every website's "reception range" is the entire planet.
Today's rulemaking pushes us one step closer to a Great Firewall. If ByteDance moves operations entirely to China, what measures will the government enact to prevent people in the US from using it? (It will probably be strong-arming app stores, but that will fail because they can just make it a web app. So the only option will be to have two Internets, one with everything except TikTok, and one with everything.)
It will be interesting if this extends to other apps. Will it be unamerican to play Genshin Impact?
In this particular case, the law targets financial interactions with the company in question. So it wouldn't actually ban the company from serving on the internet, but no US company can knowingly facilitate their services on their servers.
Ex, ByteDance couldn't go to AWS and ask for capacity, nor could they go to Hurricane Electric and ask for Peering.
No because a US person can be called in to answer questions in a court of law or before congress. If the owner is Chinese living in London, where would you even begin ?
Freedom of speech is my right to be able to bitch about Biden or Trump without having to worry that I'll die in prison.
Freedom of speech is not a right of foreign entities sending me memes about them to manipulate who I will vote for in the election.
There's a law where foreign entities can't own TV or Radio in US. This might be controversial, but IMO it should be updated to also include social media as this is source where people get news from.
Well, no, that's not quite right. Even though we nominalize the concept of 'freedoms' as something that we have (making it possible to conceptualize there being people who don't have them), the actual legal framework in place operationalizes these freedoms as restrictions on the exercise of political power, without qualification.
In other words "freedom of speech" means that Congress doesn't have the power to pass laws that suppress speech itself, regardless of where it comes from. It's not that the first amendment applies to some people (and certainly not that it doesn't apply to others), but that it applies to Congress and limits what laws they can pass without qualification.
Your interpretation might have been right before. But now you're looking at a vast majority bipartisan vote that makes something inarguably clear; China doesn't have those rights as of the most recent interpretation. That's now true, regardless of previous interpretations.
That's not the way it works. Bipartisan votes in Congress don't alter the constitution, or expand Congress's own power under the constitution, unless the vote is for a constitutional amendment, which must subsequently be ratified by the states to become effective.
Firstly, they didn't expand or alter the Constitution.
I'm not sure where you got that from. Reading back and I don't see it anywhere.
Stated again, hopefully more clearly; by exercising restrictions on China they've reestablished that China is not "the people" described in the Constitution. So, it's not protected from congressional acts.
And second, they didn't need to do that anyway. Foreign policy is a power reserved for Congress and the President. No amendment ever restricted that power.
Amendment I takes precedence over Article I. Congress does not itself get to decide what "the people" refers to in the Constitution, and acts of Congress do not alter or establish any meaning of any terminology in the Constitution. Where there is ambiguity, the courts resolve it -- Congress does not have the final say in interpreting the rules that define and limit its own power.
Further, the protection of free speech in the first amendment does not even refer to "the people", but simply prohibits Congress from abridging the freedom of speech per se, without qualification or any exception for who is doing the speaking. Congress cannot pass laws that abridge the freedom of speech as a matter of actual effect, regardless of whether they are doing so under the auspices of exercising other powers.
Foreign policy powers don't come into it -- if the act restricts free speech, it is unconstitutional, regardless of what end Congress was attempting to pursue.
To clarify further, interpretation of what it means to to be a right of people vs a limit on Congress; FEC v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life is one of many examples where we have to assume SCOTUS interpreted that it's a right of people as there was no congressional action for them to limit in that case. They are clearly protecting people.
These cases go back and forth.
I would argue that it wasn't necessary to spell out that constitutional rights apply to citizens because the law is presumed to defer to common practice in cases where no law exists. That is, laws go back to long before the Constitution and those laws are referred to as common law.
In that sense; the king has lordship of his subjects, and no obligation to subjects of other kingdoms. He collected taxes, and provided protection from foreign threat and justice for his subjects.
Likewise, citizens of China don't pay taxes to the US, they have not that obligation because they are not subjects of the US government. Neither do they have the rights that are afforded a subject thereof.
Congress has no need to clarify that. It's presumed to be the case. That they mention it in certain amendments is incidental, despite the creative interpretations I've read, mostly from immigration proponents. (Not that I'm opposed, I'm an immigrant.)
No doubt, lots of people prefer to interpret this differently, especially when it's a right they need for a specific reason. That's exactly what China is doing here.
They are arguing about why the law should be interpreted in their favor this time. And next time they will argue the other way, as they do against their subjects.
It's up to the judge what it means in each case, but as a generally accepted interpretation, applying US law and protections to a foreign nation without some kind of formal alliance specifying more directly what is provided, is an egregious stretch of the imagination. It's ridicule, at best.
I didn't see the parent say there was no precedent.
But anyways, I like to hope that the US is better than China. If US citizens are abused while in China, I would be appalled to see Chinese citizens abused in the US as retribution.
I think it would be a poor argument to liken the US banning Tik Tok to US (or other) citizens being abused in China with supposed retaliatory measures.
We don’t need to overly moralize this and somehow find the US on a pedestal with impossible to reach and shifting standards of behavior that are only applicable to the US when it’s convenient for various bad actors and despotic regimes (Putin, Hamas, CCP, Iran, North Korea).
America can be “better” than China without having to accept disadvantages. Likewise China could allow American social media companies to show that it is sincere in being interested in free and fair business. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be regulations but there’s simply no good argument to allow a Chinese social media company to operate in the US without reciprocal activity and nothing, nothing is lost by banning Tik Tok.
Actually a free market is one of the main points of America. It’s not a moral argument of its superiority but a practical argument that a free market should result in the best outcome for all.
I still believe in this, and if you look at America’s policies of sanctioning countries like Russia, blocking a business from operating in a country is actually a detriment to that country because they lose access to the benefit that that company provides. Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party.
I don’t fundamentally believe it’s about fair playing ground or advantages/disadvantages for equivalent US companies in China. The current consensus is really about national security, and having China be able to access data on US people. If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way.
Furthermore if it did become about fair playing ground for domestic companies then I think it fundamentally misunderstands the free market economic model. The free market would benefit domestic companies. It would strengthen domestic companies to have competition.
The free market has never existed in an unregulated state, and since the founding of the country there have been rules and regulations on imports and what companies can operate in the United States and under what circumstances.
It was framed as a moral argument by suggesting the US should be “better”. At least that was my interpretation. I don’t think arguing from a market perspective really changes that interpretation but instead further weakens China’s lack of allowing American social media companies to operate in China with the same unfettered market access.
> If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way.
We kind of care and we have been caring more. The problem is that legally it has been difficult to say “go ahead and build or operate your business in the US except if you are China”. Likewise China just blanket applies the rules that it has to entities that want to operate in China.
> Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party.
So far from what I’ve seen these types of actions have been very specific and targeted. In the case of Tik Tok there isn’t any loss to citizens and letting it continue to operate with impunity in the US brings all sorts of negative externalities that the market isn’t equipped to solve.
It’s also important to remember that some things are more important than profit. The economy and market are just one aspect of a nation. Lowering cost and increasing competition are nice but they are not the point of civilization.
> The free market has never existed in an unregulated state, and since the founding of the country there have been rules and regulations on imports and what companies can operate in the United States and under what circumstances.
Of course in practice that's true, but we also tout free-er markets as something to strive for, especially when it comes to us imposing it on other countries in conflict with their sovereign rights to restrict their own markets.
> So far from what I’ve seen these types of actions have been very specific and targeted. In the case of Tik Tok there isn’t any loss to citizens and letting it continue to operate with impunity in the US brings all sorts of negative externalities that the market isn’t equipped to solve.
I think TikTok is a highly special case, and sort of brings to light the rationale why China decided to ban foreign mega tech corps, especially social media ones. We also saw a backlash when Facebook tried to influence India's elections and politics with a banner on their website. Social media is indeed a special case.
But I think this problem is also similar to the national security vs privacy/encryption battle. We are giving up some of our principles to make our short term lives (national security) easier. Yes, TikTok can be weaponized as an influence machine... however letting it run free could mean developing a more natural resistance to it in the American population (if possible). If we devolve to market manipulation we'll rely on it as a crutch. Why stop there? Why not engineer the whole economy.
Trade is conducted by individuals and businesses, not by nation-states. The fact that two parties have agreed to a mutual value-for-value exchange makes it fair by definition, and what is unfair is encumbering some people's commerce in order to serve the interests of some particular political faction.
The proper moral position is for trade to be governed by rational rules that apply consistently regardless of who is trading with whom or what country they are from.
Nations are just as relevant as businesses as abstractions as far as trade is concerned. Free trade across the world arguably only exists because it's made possible by the rule-based order with the might of the US Navy and affiliates to secure it.
Nations are abstractions. Trade involves individuals and businesses. Whatever the US Navy is doing to secure overseas shipping lanes doesn't change the nature of that in any substantive way.
> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China.
And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.
"Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)."
We can say that Google and Facebook are "banned" or "censored" in China even though China would surely be happy to unban them if they sold their operations in China to a Chinese business. So it is consistent and fair to say that this bill "bans" or "censors" TikTok.
Telling a business it's free to do something if there's no profit involved is like telling a man he's free to drink whiskey if he can jump over the moon.
> China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.
China does way more than that. China forces all companies that wish to do business in China to host their data in China in a way that ensures the CCP has complete access to it.
It boggles the mind how some anonymous accounts try to attack the US for interfering with a Chinese company doing business in the US, particularly one which is a notorious security hole, but leave out the fact that CCP's China goes well beyond as a matter of policy.
it boggles the mind that everyone is complaining about tiktok and yet, each of the big cloud providers have data centers in china, hey but dont worry guys, they're physically separated honest
If you start a business in the US and you're only adding China DC's specifically for Chinese customers, I don't see why you'd invest more time and money in connecting the CCP to your US DC's.
It would make more sense that Chinese customers would want to host their data in the US not vice versa, and in that case you would treat them the same as American customers in American data centers with the same security in place.
It's the cheaper solution, caters to all customer needs, and doesn't risk your customers' faith.
I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't separate them.
Do you have some reason to believe they aren't or are you just guessing that they wouldn't take precautions? Because in this case, the precautions are actually the easier topology to build, I think.
It boggles my mind how people look at China's censorship regime and think, "wow we are so far behind in the censorship race, we must move in that direction and start banning things ASAP"
The U.S. might be doing that, you just don't know because that kind of thing comes with gag orders making it a federal offense to even reveal that any such thing is occurring.
I'm absolutely not defending China's authoritarian regime and overall the U.S. isn't seems less bad, but at the same time it's a bit rich to pretend the U.S. doesn't do the same if it matters.
China passed data law after US and Europe, actually very similar law.
Also China does not stop companies to do business with Facebook and Google, if you look up numbers from Facebook and Google, a big chunk ad revenue would come from Chinese companies.
China is banned. TikTok isn't banned. You're conflating those to say that TikTok is banned, but your argument is what applies to China, not TikTok.
In the same sense, it's not Google that's banned in China. It's free speech. Google just can't operate without it so it decided to exit the market by refusing to allow CCP access to user data and to implement CCP firewalls.
You can conflate things to make them sound like the same thing. Words can have subjective and loose meaning.
But reality is very complex and very specific and doesn't have any loose meaning. And this is not remotely the same thing.
> And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.
Well that’s the crux, isn’t it.
If TikTok is just a business, like ByteDance insists, any business would rather get something than nothing. So ByteDance would sell.
If TikTok isn’t merely a business but rather an organ of soft power, and China blocks a sale, then the suspicions of the U.S. intelligence community are confirmed.
The stance of the US is that ByteDance has to sell off what is already a separate product (TikTok).
Google, Facebook etc don't have a "Chinese market" product at all, so there's nothing to sell off. If they did have a Chinese market product, worth many tens of billions of dollars, they would very likely sell it rather than spike it.
That's weak if common logic. Wealthy people burn a lot of money out of spite, constantly.
Essentially, you are asking everyone to assume that Bytdance does not really have a financial choice in the matter, and therefore financial irrationality is evidence of corruption.
When the reality is that the money may not mean as much to them as you are asking people to assume, and that in lieu of a payout they'd rather not reward a sale to the country that is strong-arming them. Which few with financial flexibility, and a healthy ego, would.
ByteDance would sell, but China is blocking it for export restrictions. It does not confirm anything. China is not a business, and it will look bad if US can force ByteDance to sell. You are mixing up ByteDance and China. China is not responsible for returns to ByteDance shareholders.
I think, also with respect to the comments to this comment, we need to appreciate the minute nature of this scenario and statement.
Journalists and your everyone else enjoys free speech, it must not be curtailed, neither must it be fostered.
While companies as a disembodied judicial entity cannot have speech in the same sense as people of flesh and blood, they can, simply based on their properties, act as an amplifier or muffler.
This requires at least some level of care which cannot be guaranteed if the business is run by a company headquartered in an unfriendly foreign nation which does not allow free speech at all and only allows businesses to conduct international business that is sanctioned.(We have had numerous reports about this now over the past years that foreign investors and companies operating in China are actually competing with the Chinese state there.)
If you don't agree, let's take out China in this argument and phrase it differently:
Would you think it would've been a good idea to have foreign investors from Nazi Germany run newspapers and radios in the states in the 1930s and leading up there? (I mean we had Nazi parties in the US around that time, BUT from today's perspective we would agree that such a scenario(the media-outlets) is a clear cut case with the US-government prohibiting it.)
What was better in the 1930's was that the newspaper industry was in the business for the news. They were a news-company.
These days hedge-funds and for profits(not necessarily bad but it takes a turn when it is unadulterated greed by all means necessary( The Atlantic wrote a nice piece about this where Money swoops in buys a newspaper and runs it into the ground and that regularly and at scale, just cannot find the article)). So our position is a bit dire and we have Television and an industry that strives to captivate/capitalize all the attention it can get for a few pennies to deal with these days.
The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death).
Pair that with the New Silk Road initiative and the Dollar-Imperialism the Chinese government tries to run in the Pan-Pacific region and the picture becomes less welcoming.
Don't get me wrong, there is enough blame to go around for everybody, but I rather have it come from a non fascist entity. That being said, I can go into Washington and demonstrate peacefully(!) against Biden or Trump and I can ask questions about the past. Try doing that in Bejing with respect to Xi or Tienamen Square.(So while we can blame both sides there is still more to one argument than the other, so much for whataboutism) Considering that 'Grandpa' Xi enforced a personal cult around him starting with children's school books(not unlike Putin) and with what goes on with the Uyghur population in China's north, the attempts to strong arm Taiwan , the alignment of China with Russia, the broken promise made to Hong Kong and other items, I have to say that China is fascist and the CCP communist in name only.
The concept of Lebensraum is firmly on the agenda of global and, if you are unfortunate enough, also local politics again.
China and Russia only differ in the choice of their tooling, approach and starting positions.(China is less commercially insulated than Russia it appears. Propably one of the reasons China's is a bit softer trying to incorporate time.)
From an economic perspective I totally get that no company wants to have their business taken away, but I doubt Bytedance is just a company. This is just a change in ownership, nothing out of the ordinary. The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership.
That framing, in the light of what I just wrote, becomes highly suspect. Almost vicious, bordering on the willingness to divide and incite. (Which reminds me: Totalitarian regimes like to be ...
> China and Russia only differ in the choice of their tooling, approach and starting positions
This is deeply, deeply wrong - China and Russia are natural opponents, they are two autocracies that deeply distrust each other and do not understand each other’s culture. They will never be like USA and UK.
The alignment between then, is because they both face pressure from USA. It’s not natural and is a huge failure of US foreign policy.
Russia emulates Europe, it produces weapons using German machines, and bottles vodka on Italian production lines. Buying Chinese equipment gets local governors in trouble. They are happy selling natural resources and have no real desire to compete with US in iPhone production or car market. The main friction is around territory. They are kinda like brexiteers - they don’t really have their own vision of the future outside of a narrow. Specific issue.
China is totally different, they have a vision that is very different - it is not ‘be like the west but better’ - it’s be their own thing. they are getting off oil and plan to compete in high-tech industries. That’s not to say they are better, but the plan is totally different
I don't think that GP was asserting that China and Russia are close natural allies. You're drawing some accurate distinctions, but I'm not entirely sure how they relate.
> This is deeply, deeply wrong - China and Russia are natural opponents, they are two autocracies that deeply distrust each other and do not understand each other’s culture
Well Stalin and Hitler were like that too.
Luckily for the world Hitler couldn't stay his hand reaching for Moscow, otherwise the Allies wouldn't have faced a Germany being engaged in a two front war. Also, considering that Putin and XI met during the Olympic Winter Games face to face and that the invasion of Ukraine commenced right after the games as to not affront Xi, depriving him of China's moment in the Limelight is telling non the less. So there must be some mutual understanding. Especially considering that Xi is slavering over Taiwan.
> The alignment between then, is because they both face pressure from USA. It’s not natural and is a huge failure of US foreign policy.
I wouldn't consider it failure. Opponent is Opponent no matter what.
>Russia emulates Europe, it produces weapons using German machines, and bottles vodka on Italian production lines. Buying Chinese equipment gets local governors in trouble. They are happy selling natural resources and have no real desire to compete with US in iPhone production or car market. The main friction is around territory. They are kinda like brexiteers - they don’t really have their own vision of the future outside of a narrow. Specific issue.
The whole world produces weapons. This is a red herring implying that Russia is just doing what Europe does. That is outright wrong.
Europe does not try to forcefully move borders attempting to annihilate a sovereign nation by committing genocide. And I doubt they are bottling Vodka from Russian production in Italy, especially not since the sanctions. Vodka may have originated in Russia, BUT every company can distill and sell it.
Same goes for weapons.
I also doubt that it would get anyone in trouble buying Chinese, otherwise, Me thinks, a lot of people in Russia would be in trouble, especially way out East.
The way you label the War in Ukraine is also ... euphemistically put... and no, they are not like the Brexiteers. Please don't take me or anyone else here a fool.
Britain left the EU because of populism and now they are dealing with the fallout. They have no notion of reviving the British Empire. Putin wants to recreate the UdSSR. He himself declared the downfall of the Soviet Union the single most geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century.
In short he is a Soviet still in mind and manner.
>China is totally different, they have a vision that is very different - it is not ‘be like the west but better’ - it’s be their own thing. they are getting off oil and plan to compete in high-tech industries. That’s not to say they are better, but the plan is totally different
Really?
Ask the Philippines, Vietnam or in general countries around the South China Sea, read news articles not penned by the South China Morning Post or read accounts from fishermen there. I am sure that the picture you fine there is totally different. Territorial saber rattling, building of artificial islands trying to stake a claim. China always say they come in peace and that we all should be tolerant, but when you try to see if that sentiment is true, then it is only true for others, for all other situations China comes first. Their recent political statements have become a statement of whataboutism and we are the victims of the bad bad west and we did no wrong ever...
To my mind their vision of the future is a Chinese one where everything non-Chinese is to be treated as second rate at best.
They are not like the west and definitely not better, otherwise the Chinese Government wouldn't have warned against the bad influences of Christmas some months back. Open minded, tolerant... with that message I don't think so. And you are right, their plan is different. Industrial espionage on a very very large scale. And please don't try to white-wash or absolve. They are creating new power plants burning coal at a rate higher...
Have you ever been to China? They have made more progress in the last few decades than the whole western world combined. And the west in in a serious decline. If anything that statement should be backwards.
Before you reflexively dismiss this argument and go hit that downwards triangle: what you are saying is China had more glory during the Opium wars than it does now. Surely you can see how absurd this statement is.
> TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly
This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.
(example based on physical addiction) If I was a smoker, and Phillip Morris completely changed it's marketing near me, and sold completely different cigarettes in my local area that were wildly different than the market standard, just because there was a local smoker inhabiting the area, I'd be furious. Especially if they were "dumbed down" versions of what actual smokers got.
If a website serves me wildly different content, even if we search for the same terms, have the same interests, then that's a load of BS. And if I was in China, I'd also be vaguely annoyed at the nanny state behavior.
"Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, 'Essays on Mind and Matter'
> This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.
Do you have proof of this? Either in the positive, or the negative (if Chinese kids search for garbage they will be given garbage?)
There is a massive lack of garbage on Chinese TokTok. It's not actively injected into society like they do in the American version. It's a propaganda tool in both countries, each having a targeted purpose.
Amount of text is seldomly a metric for good or bad texts, some stuff needs explaining.
Especially when dealing with matters like this where others do not warrant their positions.
> This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.
Really?
Then this investigation should be wrong, but they are a reputable source and I trust them, especially since that is not the only report or the only source.
> "Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, 'Essays on Mind and Matter'
That is THE MOST inhumane and humanity denying thing I have read today.
It does not matter the color of your skin or the cultural background of your upbringing, we all bleed when stabbed and we all feel pain and fear. If that sentiment is still alive in the governing ranks of that country and wide spread we should all be very very careful and worried.
> (example based on physical addiction) If I was a smoker, and Phillip Morris completely changed it's marketing near me, and sold completely different cigarettes in my local area that were wildly different than the market standard, just because there was a local smoker inhabiting the area, I'd be furious. Especially if they were "dumbed down" versions of what actual smokers got.
A) you would have to notice to be upset
B) that is not how services and the internet work. We could sit side by side and use the same app and visit the same website and could,depending on connection or identifying markers still see totally different content or sentiments being expressed. Considering that we are on HN, I fear you know and you played that card deliberately non the less.
> If a website serves me wildly different content, even if we search for the same terms, have the same interests, then that's a load of BS. And if I was in China, I'd also be vaguely annoyed at the nanny state behavior.
Search for Tienamen Square inside the GFW and outside and also add the word Massacre to it and observe.
We also see a less politically colored version of this in general dubbed the Search Engine Bubble.
Also, you are free to be annoyed, but if you speak up you might also be 'free' to receive a free political 'reeducation' or sanctions.
Also, it's nice to see a bipartisan bill in the national interest. There used to be a saying, "politics stops at the water's edge." Every so often we remember that.
Yes, I have heard that saying being quoted some time ago.
While I mostly exist on the other side of the water's edge... I am happy and hopeful that that is the case and hope it will continue to be that way and that the circus some politicians yonder the water's edge are putting on stops.
Some things do, and should transcend, political boundaries.
e.g. while I, would I be eligible to vote in the US, would most likely not vote Republican(probably not aged enough yet :D ), I must say that I like this guy https://www.facebook.com/RepZachNunn/videos/this-isnt-a-horr... simply for trying to do the right thing there.
Found it while I was prompted to do some more research due to busying myself with this thread.(and it is not the only report I found... See here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S160061352...) I always thought of it to be some boogie man story made up by Falun Gong or Falun Dafa hanging about the CBD to rope in support. Finding out that it is actually substancial... I think this is my seeing evil moment if I ever had one, and I am only in front of a computer screen in my PJs.
>Would you think it would've been a good idea to have foreign investors from Nazi Germany run newspapers and radios in the states in the 1930s and leading up there?
Good idea? No. But the world isn't exactly ran on good ideas. Instead of Nazi germany newspapers they went straight to american broadcast itself and seeped in like a poison.
And the sad part is I don't even blame them. People want to hear what they agree with. Some may be legitmately brainwashed, but I've seen enough examples of individuals shunning the truth to conclude that we're well into a post-truth era.
>The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death).
And would Tiktok be the fastest growing social media if it did the same? China can force their citizens to watch whatever they deem worthy. they have literal curfews for playing games implemented by the government. imposing that onto the west is just a bad business decision.
It goes back to the root issue, many westerners have long lost that disciplined to be an educated populace, to identify and defend against bias. to will themselves towards what they need to do as opposed to want. a single social media side won't change that.
>The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership.
They would if they pulled out of the US. I'd look forward to the fallout that ensues. Maybe it will get the you to understand the power of their vote.
> It goes back to the root issue, many westerners have long lost that disciplined to be an educated populace, to identify and defend against bias. to will themselves towards what they need to do as opposed to want. a single social media side won't change that.
Really?
That is like saying that Russians are always good at chess or Chinese good at Kung Fu or Japanese good at Karate.
We had this type of rhetoric during the time of the Cold War as well.
Aside from it being profiling let's entertain this:
If what you say were true, then the populace of China(to borrow your verbage) wouldn't start laying flat. You wouldn't have to introduce a system of snitching and forced conformism via the social credit system(which is less technical than is made out to believe in the west, more like some dada and wify on the bench taking notes) and you wouldn't have dissidents or the need to 'shield/protect' the population from any foreign influence via the GFW.
And onto other parts:
> And would Tiktok be the fastest growing social media if it did the same? China can force their citizens to watch whatever they deem worthy. they have literal curfews for playing games implemented by the government. imposing that onto the west is just a bad business decision.
Really?
It is only a crime, bad if caught and now they have been caught and called out.
Also, how do you measure growth?
Over the past years commercial data from within China has been dubious.
And what is the fastest growing anyways?
Usershare? Tiktok enjoys an unfair advantage. China has a large population and western products are not allowed to participate and e.g. Weibo or tencent are de factor monopolies. I assume it to be similar with Tiktok.
Also, things that are not good for you usually are the most fun.
Think junk food.
There is nothing wrong with that or endulging it it(every once in a while), but, once again, it is nefarious when there is malicious purpose behind it like with Tiktok. A foreign power trying to subvert values and a way of life.
And to answer your question: Yes, given that the Chinese Government is footing the bill they have more clout than their competitors because of that.
> They would if they pulled out of the US. I'd look forward to the fallout that ensues. Maybe it will get the you to understand the power of their vote.
Well, then the ownership does not change.
Their choice, it is their company. They may do with it as they please, but if they don't play by the rules they may conduct business elsewhere only. Why stop a parting guest?
It's, not profiling, it's culture. You abandon all your safety nets in lieu of a increasingly individualistic society, and then costs of living increases as wages stagnate. The logical conclusion is that you start to become more selfish, and focus more on your own survival and satisfaction, instead of thinking in the larger picture about long term goals or how you can server your community or society.
It didn't have to go that way but that's the direction it went. And I see no initiative to change that.
>f what you say were true, then the populace of China(to borrow your verbage) wouldn't start laying flat.
In all honestly, most of my post has nothing to do with China at all. So I have no idea what you are deriving from my statement.
>so, how do you measure growth?
As a social media platform? Aquire more users, capture to market share, and increase profit margins. Asia isn't so different from NA/EU in that regard.
Then when expanding/globalizing you adjust your platform to the culture. China has theirs, the US has a different one. Facebook has to do this, Google has to do this, Even Apple has to do this. Nothing is really unique from a business perspective.
>Usershare? Tiktok enjoys an unfair advantage.
The US doesn't care about the Chinese userbase. And if the Chinese userbase could influence platforms, Weibo would be the Facebook of the world, instead of Facebook.
That's the quirk of growth that companies can forget when expanding. You don't just get a bunch of famous or masses of users and things become profitable nor even popular. Even companies as big as Amazon may pull out of a country if it can't properly understand this.
>but if they don't play by the rules they may conduct business elsewhere only. Why stop a parting guest?
Again, I don't really care about their fate. I'm looking at the fallout from a bunch of angry ticktok users. The last time we had a bunch of angry people on social media enraged by some trivial issue we got Trump.
Maybe I can't stop the second coming, but I sure as heck won't have the wool I've my eyes again and get caught up in the petty squabbles.
>It's, not profiling, it's culture. You abandon all your safety nets in lieu of a increasingly individualistic society, and then costs of living increases as wages stagnate. The logical conclusion is that you start to become more selfish, and focus more on your own survival and satisfaction, instead of thinking in the larger picture about long term goals or how you can server your community or society.
If that is so altruistic, I am sure a mom from that cultural background would forfeit the future of her child so that another family(maybe her sister's) has a better life ensuring the thriving of their offspring instead. I have known many a people of Asian decent. What you describe is pure idolism. A cliche, a stereotypical, unreflected, reflexive - dare I say romatizised - vision of the Eastern Culture. If it were true, why are so many people migrating then? Away I mean? And what about the wandering workers that are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth? Also, what you are framing as logical is human nature. It is not different based on culture. Only its hue changes. You also left out my point about the generation that lies flat and other remarks.
> In all honestly, most of my post has nothing to do with China at all. So I have no idea what you are deriving from my statement.
ByteDance is a Chinese company with Bejing's blessing. The whole debate, not just our little discussion here, is framed US-China or West-China.
> Then when expanding/globalizing you adjust your platform to the culture. China has theirs, the US has a different one. Facebook has to do this, Google has to do this, Even Apple has to do this. Nothing is really unique from a business perspective.
Really?
Recall project Dragonfly of Google's ? Does any Chinese company operating in other jurisdictions require a minimum percentage of Chinese shareholders or similar shenanigans?
> The US doesn't care about the Chinese userbase. And if the Chinese userbase could influence platforms, Weibo would be the Facebook of the world, instead of Facebook.
See project Dragonfly again. A lot of companies are interested in the Chinese market. That is all Bloomberg ever raves about when it comes to the Chinese market opening and Earning calls being presented.
So the statement that the US(or the west in general) is not caring about the userbase in China is outright wrong. A lot of consumers, biiiiig market. They are just not allowed to touch it or under hefty penalties with big handicaps.
And weibo was beaten to the punch, Tiktok wants to become the youtube/whatsapp of the world. Don't try to misdirect here ;) .
> That's the quirk of growth that companies can forget when expanding. You don't just get a bunch of famous or masses of users and things become profitable nor even popular. Even companies as big as Amazon may pull out of a country if it can't properly understand this.
See my previous reply. I must also add, tongue in cheek, .... or is coerced to leave because of unfair competitive scewing. Amazon is the kingpin of online retail and must be checked in in general. Such a 800pound Gorilla knows what it is doing. So I doubt that would qualify for your argument to begin with.
> Again, I don't really care about their fate. I'm looking at the fallout from a bunch of angry ticktok users. The last time we had a bunch of angry people on social media enraged by some trivial issue we got Trump.
That is a discussion worthy of its own thread and I am not touching it in order to stay focused(nice try though). Let's just say that doing the right thing should be done regardless of the implications because it is worth doing. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be smart about it. And reigning in China's delusions of gradeur and Xi's pipedream of wanting a legacy as big as Mao's no matter the cost on the back of millions of people is the right thing. You can't let a bully step over you.
It’s banning it because of national security concerns and has nothing to do with capitalism. Honestly though this administration doesn’t seem to take national security very seriously so this will probably fall to the wayside and be enforced with the same vigor as our border security laws - so yeah nothing for them to worry about.
Somehow, it becomes a security threat when the product is superior than local offerings
The Biden admin has also been looking to halt BYD sales in the US, citing security threats [0]. BYD’s cars are often cheaper than Teslas and very well reviewed
Just like crack and fentanyl! Let the market decide, cowards.
Although it is fun that it's totally fine for an American company to take the reins and continue on.
This could have been done with emphasis on the way China engineers TikTok/Douyin in each country and the effects on the end users - but that wouldn't make anyone with money or power very happy. The thing it does is fine - merely where the data goes and who pulls the levers is the concern.
The "ban" will change nothing in our society, thank God.
Ironically we’d see far fewer overdoses and a lot less drug-related violence worldwide if America would legalize the drugs people are going to take in America regardless of drug laws. You didn’t pick a great example.
> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China
Every company that complies with the local laws can open any kind of company in China and they do.
The US has to do the same per WTO law as long as Tiktok obeys the US law. And it does. Hence the made up 'national security' horsesh*t to justify the ban - otherwise it would run afoul of WTO rules.
It's somewhat of a sinophobic/red scare dogwhistle and provincial protectionism insecurity gasp of declining global influence because it doesn't necessarily matter who owns it when day-to-day operations are led by the same people with the same interests and allegiances as before. Domestic politicians compete to look tough by seeming to attack convenient, distant foreign adversaries in symbolic ways.
US news media is able to spin headlines to maximize drama and outrage for the chumbox sales while misinforming readers. The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world and so US mainstream news media doesn't have to seek excellence in evidence, integrity, accuracy, or precision.
If this is Sinophobic, China must be pissing its pants terrified of the United States. It's a shame for the two of them I guess.
>The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world
Objectively wrong. It's one of the most educated countries in the world, just mediocre compared to the rest of the OECD. They're more educated than China, no matter how well a small number of urban Chinese students do on international standardised tests.
Comparing wintermelon and oranges. Live a few more decades and then your definition of "objective" may face reality. The higher education system of the US is selectively excellent, but 0.5-0.75% of Americans have top tier university degrees. Only 39% of Americans have any college degree at all, but this includes online and colleges that accept anyone. Fewer and fewer Americans read books of substance, or any books at all. America is deeply anti-intellectual from its founding arising from the culture of English settler merchants, with a tiny core of intelligentsia that grew around exiled religious movements.
a. Quantitatively
- Reading: Canada is 3rd, America is 24th
- Science: Canada is 7th, America is also 24th
- Math: Canada is 9th, America is 39th
^ There should be negligible differences between them given vast similarities.
b. Qualitatively - Meet and talk to enough people from Asia (Japan, China, Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China) and Europe (Iberian and Eastern) & UK. And then talk to many Americans from anywhere other than from the coasts. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, MAGA, and QAnon are the mainstream norm rather than the exception. The difference is: they don't have government censorship, a totalitarian regime, or social credit habits as an excuse for their ignorance. There are billboards with borderline racist MAGA slogans in the South US.
In china in 2018, 17% completed tertiary education. If you're comparing the worth of society by tertiary educational achievement, than Canada is beating America and crushing China. I already said that Americans educational achievements are mediocre relative to the rest of the OECD. However I'd bet money that its PISA scores would hold up next to China's if China actually tested the same percentage of the population that America did.
One country has borderline racist MAGA slogans. The other has Han Chauvinism and forced propaganda for a totalitarian state. There's plenty of conspiracy theories and misinformation in both countries. Here's a study showing that 13.8% of people in China considered GMO foods as a form of bioterrorism targeted at China[1].
I'm not saying America doesn't have problems, but most of the criticisms you lobbed at America can just as easily be lobbed at China, and yet China seems to be economically expanding rather rapidly relative to America or most places. I'll also say being highly educated isn't all roses, every country with tertiary education levels as high or higher than Canada's has a well sub-replacement birthrate - the education levels you idealise aren't even independantly sustainable.
It’s alarming to me that you think the owners of arguably the most successful social media company in the world would sell it only to appease a single country. It comes off as a typical American perspective of thinking they’re the center of the world. At TikTok’s current global growth rate, they could exceed the entire user base of the USA in just a few months. I’m not sure how that user share corresponds to revenue as I’d assume the US is a lucrative market,but I just don’t see it. And TikTok has directly said they won’t be divesting.
A propaganda tool doesn’t need to be immediately financially profitable though, that’s not their expected main outcome (though I guess that can be a nice bonus).
The US is typically more profitable than all the other countries combined, as people here have far more disposable income after all expenses, and are more inclined to spend it.
The advertising market in the US pretty much eclipses the whole rest of the world, so yes the owners are very likely to sell it to appease a single country.
I don't think it is possible or economically viable for ByteDance to sell TikTok under the terms set out, even if they wanted. Because of the shared code base with Douyin and the bill's requirements on severing ties between the two.
The likely outcome is that TikTok will stop operating in the US and continue in Europe and other places plus Douyin will continue in China.
Nope it doesn’t ban TikTok from having Chinese owners. TikTok could very well continue to have Chinese owners, and if so the US will ban the product domestically
>app stores in the US would have to drop the app, and Internet hosting services would be prohibited from providing services that enable distribution of TikTok in the US
So just install it like a normal application instead of using an "app store". But does this mean if I host the .apk or whatever on my personal website I would be breaking the law?
This little blurb is not the actual law, so it's not worth considering what it means. You'll have to read the text of the law with a lawyer to see how clear it is. Even if the letter of the law leaves a little room for interpretation, think about what you would be trying to prove because I think the courts will agree that the spirit of the law is clear.
> does this mean if I host the .apk or whatever on my personal website I would be breaking the law
Yes, provided you are doing it in a way "through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application" [1]. (It would be perfectly legal to go to TikTok.com, however.)
> The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated...
Anyone who is legally knowledgeable know how this works? The text says "It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute..a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out..internet hosting services to enable the distribution", and it specifices that this includes source code. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States specified that the publication of source code was protected by the first amendment, so the government would need a compelling reason to prevent that publication. Is there a conflict here? Is preventing the publication of an apk likely to withstand court scrutiny?
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
Hopefully it'll be sold to someone who will ruin it and we'll have one less addictionware monstrosity ensnaring millions of people into mindlessly scrolling through schlock.
Unfortunately that leaves Instagram, which is in many ways worse. Maybe Elon Musk can buy that one and destroy it next. He already did us a solid by ruining Twitter.
You won't have to, but if an actual ban went through, and an iPhone is your only means of connection, you would be truly SOL, because Apple's captured ecosystem only allows users to run what Apple will permit.
We need open ecosystems and access to full root-level control of our devices by default. Accept no substitutes.
Correct me if I am wrong but this only limits people who already haven't downloaded the app yet? People who already have the app wouldn't just have it forcibly uninstalled from their phone right? I have had apps that didn't make it to the 32 -> 64 bit transition stay on my phone when my apps get transferred from phone to phone.
Like I said in my example, Apple carries over apps through the cloud from phone to phone when you migrate. This is different from allowing it to be visible in the store.
>app stores in the US would have to drop the app, and Internet hosting services would be prohibited from providing services that enable distribution of TikTok in the US
So just install it like a normal application instead of using an "app store". But does this mean if I host the .apk or whatever on my personal website I would be breaking the law?
Yes. Hosting it for personal use would not be a crime, but distributing it would be. Additionally, even if people were to get it from you without you getting in trouble, they would all have to use a VPN to even begin to see anything, which is past the capabilities of most of the populace currently, which would make hosting it and distributing it via sneakerware basically useless.
It's funny how many of the comments here have really no idea the level of restrictions that are on US (or European) companies who want to operate in China (not just manufacture for export).
Crazy, all the spying we do and we can't provide any definitive proof of anything yet we're jumping to banning a company. Looks like all that red scare stuff isn't a thing of the past, eh? And we all get to suffer for it. From losing a platform, to facing shadow bans with no recourse, to laws being passed that continue to stamp out our civil liberties to the point that we forget they were even there, what's it all for?
China can and already has used tiktok to influence the U.S. population. Just because the US spies a bunch doesn’t mean we shouldn’t protect our best interests.
As a non-american (Canadian) citizen, I'm genuinely curious why this evidence can't be made public?
Wouldn't that be a far better way to end this debate and un-fracture opinions?
I'm Canadian too, but my guess would be that sharing what they know publicly would give away too much about how they learned it, and would give adversaries a better chance of hiding more in the future.
I'm writing one right now, just waiting on the CCP to get back to me with their internal communications and commit history at tiktok which will prove this.
That's a bit of a ridiculous standard.
Mostly because I don't think China is liable to hand out the records they've been gathering to cross check findings from other study.
You don't need records conduct research if a specific message is being spread on TikTok against chance, to at least back up an unsubstantiated theory — even if not practical in the court of law.
For anyone who uses TikTok regularly, it's evident there frequently political content that outright contradict's China's positions, spreading unfettered through the platform.
Even if there is zero evidence supporting an influence campaign on the platform, the ease of collecting user data or spying on users is something I would expect an active adversary to do. Like it or not, China and America are at odds with each other, and it's almost silly to assume that China would not be exploiting a successful tool for their own means.
That's hardly the subtle influence that we're all supposed to be afraid of. If that's the only example you cas come up with... that's not a strong case.
How does someone do data collection on how the Chinese government weaponizes a social media platform? That would almost certainly involve Tailored Access Operations (or whatever they are calling offensive cyber warfare these days), not only of questionable legality but definitely compromising the sort of Tactics/Techniques/Procedures you REALLY don't want made public.
As if US apps don't influence the population of other nations. Should every US company be required to divest in every other nation where they have users?
Came here to say this. The US owns Apple and Google, both of which are tremendously more influential than TikTok could ever hope to be. Turnabout is fair play.
Google left China because they didn't want to play by China's rules. Whatever their motivations, I'm glad google stood up to them, but we're not even accusing China of refusing to follow any particular US law. I don't think the US getting our own version of the Great Firewall of China is a good thing.
And TikTok is free to leave if they don't want to play by our rules that companies with large numbers of American users can't be substantially owned or controlled by a foreign adversary and still do business with US companies.
see, this is what is great about soft power. If you use it right who is not straight up an enemy will probably give you a lot of leeway as long as mutually beneficial. China is... not doing that.
The Tik Tok ban is years late and I don't know why any US citizen could not understand why it's the right thing to do, unless on the payroll of the Chinese government.
Not on the payroll of the Chinese government here, and I still think it's terrible for congress to tell us what software we're allowed to run on our own devices or to prevent us from accessing media from other countries.
If TikTok were breaking US laws and refused to comply that'd be one thing, but that's not the case. They say their just worried about "influence" which is beyond hypocritical and not really grounds for censorship. Should they ban websites hosted in other countries next?
Let's say the CCP were to establish hegemony in the future and even managed to create a bloc of pro-China politicians in US congress. Do you think these notions of free speech will matter then? We've already seen implicit pressure to censor Taiwan or Hong Kong.
Like it or not, your freedom to access whatever software you wish is only really possible because you have a state that is capable of resisting foreign pressure to allow you to do so. This move is very much part of that removing leverage from an explicitly illiberal group. Paradox of Intolerance and so forth. You can pridefully choose to reject that, but I don't think your freedoms will last very long then.
> Let's say the CCP were to establish hegemony in the future and even managed to create a bloc of pro-China politicians in US congress. Do you think these notions of free speech will matter then?
I don't think that having access to websites and media in China, alongside all the websites and media from everywhere else on Earth, will result in us electing congressmen who are secretly working for China. There is zero evidence that TikTok is making that happen. There's no evil on TikTok that isn't on facebook and youtube. What good is it for us to voluntarily give up our freedoms in order to keep the China boogeyman from taking them from us?
There's no evil on TikTok that isn't on facebook and youtube.
Apple has LGBT+ and BLM wallpapers on the phone by default. TikTok only reaches everyone with TikTok installed (and even then, only those that actually uses the app). Apple reaches everyone with an iPhone with its propaganda.
We should block the behavior, not target specific companies or groups because we don't like them. If influencing our elections is bad (and I agree it is) then we should ban corporations from influencing our elections. If we think collecting and aggregating a bunch of data on people is bad we should ban that, rather than picking a single company to ban from doing it while allowing a bunch of others too.
I actually truly believe we should do this- a GDPR style bill for the US that protects people's right to privacy and limits corporations ability to influence our governments. The fact that we know how easy it is for companies to do this but are just upset that a specific company is doing it tells me we're approaching this in the wrong way.
Did anyone claim anything happened that would require definitive proof? The argument was that a Chinese company having that kind of ability to reach US citizens is too dangerous in and of itself to let it stand.
There's ample evidence of China and other countries attempting to influence American events using social media and other means.
It's not a red scare if it is true. And it's not a red scare because China isn't being targeted here because they are Communist - they are being targeted because they are a geopolitical adversary. Russia would be treated in the same manner if some killer app came out of there, and they aren't Communist.
You’re misconstruing the argument. American citizens don’t elect Chinese politicians, I don’t want the Chinese government to have my data. I don’t want the American government to either, but at least I can vote for my American government.
This gov't must really make you feel safe then. I remember people saying Bush made them feel safe. That played out well. You know what makes me feel safe? Making my own decisions.
this comment is either naive or in bad faith. I wonder how a moderately educated person can miss the difference between a propaganda machine operated by a geopolitical enemy and a for-profit company operating within the framework of national laws are different.
You can't miss that if you're even half smart or don't have an agenda.
As a US citizen I have recourse against action by US companies and the government through both courts and the electoral process. What recourse do I have against action by Chinese entities?
From what I understand it’s not just about spying. The Chinese Communist Party knows how harmful and addictive the algorithm is that the Chinese version of the app focuses on showing higher quality content (quality as judged by them).
So if they know it’s harmful, they have an interest on showing low quality content to the western audience and possibly psychologically and intellectually affect an entire generation.
> The Chinese Communist Party knows how harmful and addictive the algorithm that the Chinese version of the app focuses on showing higher quality content
This is pure conspiracy theory. You think the nation that produces and loves Grand Theft Auto needs a relatively puritan foreign country, where certain depictions of death are restricted in media, weed and porn are totally illegal, to push such debauchery on the American people?
They were the first ones to do it at scale. Before, you had to seek out the debauchery. TikTok is saying, don’t worry, we have hundreds of scrollable hours waiting for you, just keep scrolling.
Vine had no where near as good of a recommendation algorithm as TikTok. Reddit for over a decade relied on self-curation and upvoting to determine what to show you.
TikTok curated content without the need for a user to do anything else than scroll. You can have a remarkably well personalized TikTok experience without liking, following, or saving any content.
I doubt being offered whatever youtube's version of 'soft porn material' is counts as "harm". There are clearly concerns over disinformation and outright lies with tiktok which we've seen can have hurt people, and I can understand that, but the same can be said for every other social media platform in use which makes singling out the one popular Chinese platform seem pretty suspicious.
OTH, western social media platforms cannot operate in China, why should Chinese social media platforms be allowed to operate in the western world? Even without the whole "spy angle" it makes a lot of sense, trade wars like this happen all the time also between western nations. If China opens up their market, things can be reconsidered.
There are a lot of things China does which limits US reach within their country that the US, as a more free society, would not be a good fit for the US.
This seems to me to be one of things we probably should not have done.
We don't need proof. We didn't have proof of anything 90 years ago when we banned foreign ownership of our TV and radio stations. Are you really this ignorant to US history? Do they not teach US history or civics in school any more?
If I were Bytedance I would cut off the US. I certainly would not sell to a competitor. And I’d probably do a licensing deal for the content with a new entity without US based shareholders.
If you leave the US then you've accomplished what they wanted anyways. And now you're much poorer for it. The upside is you feel like you did it on your terms or something?
Then you’d be wasting a huge amount of money for no good reason. If TikTok gets banned Meta will probably vacuum up the audience with Instagram Reels. It would be posturing with no real purpose.
From Bytedance's point of view that's correct but the Chinese gov. would almost certainly interpret giving in to this as an incentive for Washington to ask "which sell off are we going to go for next". You'd effectively send the signal that this is a winning strategy to simply acquire Chinese firms by force. Beijing would almost certainly prevent that sale.
If Reels was any good wouldn't it have become a meaningful force in its own right by now? As it stands from my point of view it is mostly stolen recycled week old TikTok content. That TikTok "magic" is made on their platform because of what their algorithm rewards. Meta does not have that "magic".
I see where you are coming from but we have to consider why TikTok became so good in the first place and can that really be replicated in a vacuum? Look at X, once they got taken over, others tried to step up (Mastodon, BLueSky, threads). They all obviously grew...but the winner was nobody. People just stopped using that category of app altogether in favor of a different category (discord) or nothing at all.
If TikTok truly is a Chinese psyop, the most effective thing they could do is spend their remaining days sewing discontent with the government, refuse to sell, and let the whole thing burn down, thus riling up "the youths" and teaching them that their own government is a problem.
They could also tell TikTok users to install a VPN and access the servers in China directly.
I actually see this as a silver lining. I want young people to realize the government effects them and can directly ruin things they enjoy. I want young people to be more involved in politics and to vote.
> I actually see this as a silver lining. I want young people to realize the government effects them and can directly ruin things they enjoy.
Would you also consider it a win if young people realize the dangers of social media apps owned by geopolitical competitors able to alter the mindset of the population?
Sure, I guess. That's a very loaded question about a complex issue so I'm not sure how to answer it. But I can say, despite the complexities of that issue, my higher ideals are:
I want people to be more involved in politics and I want more people to vote. Wanting more people to vote is a safe side of history to be on I think.
I also want people to be able to access the content and information they choose. If that is the content and information on TikTok, who am I to deny them? I believe in free speech, morally (I say morally because, yes, I know the 1st Amendment doesn't apply everywhere, morally).
> Wanting more people to vote is a safe side of history to be on I think.
This is going to be a hilarious statement in 20-50 years.
It's funny because on HN of all places, where all wildly successful companies are ran as absolute monarchies, and all the devices we type on are produced by companies ran as absolute monarchies, there's this undeserved reverence for "democracy" as if it's some sacred church or something.
If the voting population is so easily swayed by a video scrolling app, maybe, just maybe democracy isn't such a good idea? Would you work for a company where the CEO makes important decisions based on the amalgamation of 30 second videos that happen to come across his/her feed? I wouldn't. I don't think I want to participate in a country ran like that either. I'd expect the decisions to appear schizophrenic, which quite frankly describes our current political situation in the US.
Like, we have 100K+ fentanyl overdoses a year in the US, and I don't see any TikToks "informing voters" about that. No one cares. In fact, I don't even expect normal people to care about it---in a healthy society they shouldn't even be aware of it. It would take a special person, who is egoically invested in the health of his population to change that. Someone like a startup CEO, ala Washington, Jobs, etc.
So no, you're not on the "safe side of history" by advocating for something that's politically fashionable at the moment. History is written (and re-written) by the winners, and I wouldn't put my money on "democracy".
The wildly unsuccessful companies also run as absolute monarchies, as well as the wildly successful companies that became wildly unsuccessful due to poor decisions made by the monarch. Most CEOs barely understand how their business operates, and they rely heavily on the layers of management underneath them to make and enact decisions. The same is true of monarchs.
"alter the mindset of the population" is such a vague boogeyman. Literally anyone with an internet connection has the capability to "alter the mindset of the population".
Not at scale. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hysterical about it, but to me it seems indisputable that media companies (and this covers TV companies, newspaper companies when you go back far enough) have the ability to alter how a significant section of the population feel about a topic. A single person with an internet connection does not have the same power.
Yes at scale. There are individuals who run social media accounts that reach hundreds of millions of people every month.
You can amass more reach and influence than many of the biggest TV stations / newspapers of the previous generation with nothing more than an internet connection.
> There are individuals who run social media accounts that reach hundreds of millions of people every month.
And who holds the levers to that reach? The social media companies. If they want that account’s posts and I be less visible to users they’ll be able to do it in a heartbeat (and have!)
Sure, I'm not disputing each social media company has the ability to alter public discourse.
My whole point is that there are literally billions of entities (everyone on Earth with an internet connection) who also have the ability to alter public discourse at scale. Hence why it's a vague boogeyman... the phrase "alter the mindset of a population" could be used to describe anything from a Orwellian propaganda machine to a Mr. Beast video.
In the 1990's, you could've claimed "Tetris is a software product developed by a geopolitical competitor (Russia) that has the capability to alter the mindset of the population" and you would've been right, but it would've been a silly thing to get worked up over.
Yes, but that would also mean realizing the dangers of social media apps owned by American companies and our allies also being able to alter the mindset of the population, which is a great thing.
I don't even think you need to cook up possibilities as complicated as "psyop."
It is an absolute firehose of data on users and in aggregate, that is incredibly powerful. "Oh look, more people than usual have been working in office building 12 at Lockheed Martin this week" etc.
There's so many ideas about what TikTok's purpose is. By "psyop" I mean, if the purpose of TikTok is to influence the general mindset of the American populaton, then they'd throw a big tantrum and rile people up.
As you say, another possible purpose is that TikTok is used as a source of data and intel. I suppose it is a fine source for that, but also, if that's all China really wants, they can probably just buy most of that data on the shadowy data markets. The US Government shows no signs of stopping our personal data from being sold.
Gen-Z is already a pretty rockstar generation having seen their older Millenial siblings grow up post 9/11 and then get totally screwed in the 08 crash only to then graduate themselves into a pandemic and a market that is valuing their debt laden college skills less by the day. They started off cynical and so far have been a lot more active than Millenials when they came of age. They might be the group that finally enacts meaningful change. It is too early to tell though but I remain optimistic.
Hopefully the scars from Gaza remain with them and they take a different stance with Israel. A TikTok ban killing off one of the most desired career paths of this generation (TikTok influencer) will have a lasting impact on them when they take the reigns.
This is economically irrational to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. If Beijing truly does this, it somewhat cements the argument that TikTok was a CCP policy tool.
I think it is reasonable that Beijing will not allow any sort of sale just for posture purposes. They don't want to be see as forced by Washington to do something and they care less about private economic outcomes than we do here, at least on the surface.
Depends. If you model this as a reputation game, depending on who is the sane and who is the crazy sender, the PBE might might be a pooling equilibrium(i.e makes sense to build the reputation of being a predatory firm).
> makes sense to build the reputation of being a predatory firm
To what end? It isn't going to placate the hawks in America. And it's likely to inflame them elsewhere, e.g. in Europe. The only way you can position it as a win is within China's domestic politics, where it would save face for Xi and his acolytes. (Hence, the inefficiency of dictatorship.)
I wasn't making a concrete case(I have no idea what is either in U.S gov's or Xi's head), was just making the point that when you allow for signals with costs and subsequent belief updates then setting multiples of billions of dollars on fire may be economically rational.
USA seems to make around 10-15% of their users, and is probably a big source of income. Purely for the economics, this would be lousy idea. Especially as a cut-off from the USA could influence other markets, including losing them too. EU has some movement too, they probably will watch very close what will happen there and act accordingly.
1,774 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 451 ms ] threadBut most will slowly migrate to other platforms due to uncertainty (users and advertisers), though it remains to be seen exactly to where.
Maybe Snap? YT Shorts is bad, as are most other “shorts as a feature” platforms where discovery UX is terrible.
Just speculation for the time being as we need to see what ByteDance decides to do. Can’t recall the exact article but I think they do plan to fight this decision.
This is a totally bunk argument. If you want an argument that does work against the constitution, SCOTUS' "empty shell" or Lysander Spooner's "Constitution of no authority" are of far more weight, but have more disturbing implications (e.g. You can disregard it completely; our system is precisely the "odious arbitrariness" the founders denounced).
While this bill does refer to a specific organization, it doesn't punish them for past actions, but rather constrains US companies in the future. That is perfectly ok as shown in cases like Huawei v. United States or Kaspersky Lab, Inc. v. DHS. Like Kaspersky, it's "prophylactic, not punitive."
But the bigger question is the literal one you've asked: how the federal government can just ban TikTok?
What makes the government think that they can stop packets at some arbitrary line in the sand, when every indication in the history of the internet shows the opposite?
They were unable to stop drug cartels. And drug cartels need a highly centralized and sophisticated organization, and need to ship a physical product across a border.
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes; "
Whether right or wrong, whether politically motivated or not, it has gone through the house, senate and president which is not a small thing.
I'm guessing Congress justifies its authority here based on national security. The bill refers to "foreign adversary controlled applications".
Internet service by one company is not trivial to address in a "ban". Unlike, for example, a chemical molecule. At least they have the experience in specifying and addressing that.
They have to store the data somewhere and it much more likely that they will sell than engage in value killing whack-a-mole with federal agencies
I think we might be able to manage to identify a company with hundreds of millions of users trying to mask themselves by... changing their name.
It's not like we're going to firewall them off. The bill bans distribution of the app in the US app stores and US companies from offering any kind of internet hosting services related to the app.
The same way that the government addresses most issues. They tell people not to do something, and if they refuse then they get fined, their assets frozen and confiscated, and eventually people are arrested.
Bytedance would have to withdraw all its assets and employees from anywhere in the west to escape the consequences.
This is also overwhelmingly likely to go unchallenged by the court system due to the provision being passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
>The Supreme Court has previously held that Congress can’t ban foreign propaganda, including propaganda from China. In Lamont vs. Postmaster General, the court considered a law that required the postmaster general to detain “communist political propaganda” sent through the mail. The Post Office was then required to send the addressee a card asking whether they wanted the propaganda to be delivered, in what the court ultimately ruled had an unconstitutional chilling effect on speech.
https://www.platformer.news/tiktok-ban-bill-senate-legal-cha...
In particular TikTok is not being “banned” based on content, so it’s likely strict scrutiny will not apply.
It's less true now, starting from when the mafia used this freedom to threaten judges and jury (Basically, when 80% of people think "full freedom of speech is stupid in this particular case", the US government will effectively suppress it).
I've talked with someone who argued that it effectively never truly existed, and gave me a lot of pre-prohibition examples i can't remember, and even a few from pre-civil war era, that targeted white people (which was surprising because most of the other did not), but i don't know if i trust him, and don't really know US history well, so if you're interested, you should research it yourself and not trust what i just wrote (which is basically, "Yes, No, It's complicated and i don't really know". I'm such a helpful person :/)
[edit] Not saying if it's good or bad btw, extreme freedoms are a cultural foundation of the US, and in my opinion define the country.
If she is so zombified by TikTok, won't she just continue to use it? Why would she comply with the ban?
Moreover, even if she does, there are many other nearly identical sources of zombification. Won't she use fall prey to those instead?
They'll take 20 seconds to install one app to route around the ban, and then forget about it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fszq_PSWIAUwaWw?format=jpg&name=...
the average age of a congress person (house and senate) has gone up by one year, per year, for roughly 20 years.
that tells you that the "normal" organic churn of the past simply stopped dead in its tracks. we have been ruled over by nearly the exact same set of 50 somethings as they have slowly turned into 70 somethings. one very narrow cohort has held onto power so long they personally turned us into a gerontocracy.
this is why the tiktok ban is such a priority despite the fact that it has no constituency at all in the electorate. they don't really represent today's electorate, they represent 20 years ago's electorate that's finally had enough of this internet bullshit.
congress is supposed to be a lagging indicator of popular will by design, its just that for the last 20 years we've been increasing the incremental amount of lag by roughly one year per year, so we've been effectively in stasis.
Seriously though, this decision just feels unsubstantiated and rushed. There are so many claims of manipulation and our data being used by China via TikTok but I can't help but feel a company like Instagram does the exact same thing but it's not a Chinese company so we are just... okay with that?
with a ban being the fall back outcome
There are plenty of scenarios where TikTok ends up under non-American control. Only four countries (China, Iran, North Korea, Russia) are foreign adversary countries. [2]
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/4872#d_2
https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
Abstract: The premise that constituents hold representatives accountable for their legislative decisions undergirds political theories of democracy and legal theories of statutory interpretation. But studies of this at the individual level are rare, examine only a handful of issues, and arrive at mixed results. We provide an extensive assessment of issue accountability at the individual level. We trace the congressional roll-call votes on 44 bills across seven Congresses (2006–18), and link them to constituent’s perceptions of their representative’s votes and their evaluation of their representative. Correlational, instrumental variables, and experimental approaches all show that constituents hold representatives accountable. A onestandard deviation increase in a constituent’s perceived issue agreement with their representative can improve net approval by 35 percentage points. Congressional districts, however, are heterogeneous. Consequently, the effect of issue agreement on vote is much smaller at the district level, resolving an apparent discrepancy between micro and macro studies.
Control-F: "In what follows, we uncover a picture of the electorate that, although not hyperinformed and hyperrational, is one in which constituents are sufficiently attentive that the majority can and does hold their representatives accountable for the decisions that they make on important pieces of legislation."
https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/files/cces/files/AnsolabehereKu...
Verification Materials: The materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QOVWMM
AFAIK china requirements are mostly about censorship and using chinese datacenters
> China has been doing that for years
China has been doing many things I would like the US to not start doing... Let's say that the US could find better role models
It's not about what's being done, it's about who's doing it.
A more interesting question; why doesn't the source matter to you?
“The case for harm has not been made” Do you think the American government would say publicly “we know China is exploiting this data because that’s exactly what we do and China is even worse than us.
The Snowden leaks were bad because they showed Americans spied on without warrants. This is about users who for better or worse install the app intentionally.
I'm glad you agree that the US government has not actually made the case for harm.
The Snowden leaks were bad because they exposed a lot of 100% legal, directly part of their charter activity by the NSA, like monitoring the communications of foreign leaders and other non-US persons.
"n a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act"
I get that we aren't best buds with china but they are also a huge trade partner with the US. Bigger than many countries which we have friendlier feelings towards.
The most recent one I can think of is responding with tariffs against the US after we put tariffs on their solar exports.
Beyond that... the Korean war I think was the last time we were any sort of direct/semi direct conflict with them. And Taiwan is the touchiest aspect we have with them.
You can't use 'direct conflict' as a measure in this type of game. Russia has done damning harm to american politics, but its not clear how to measure that effect.
This is a solid point. What most people don't get is that despite the enormous investment the CIA, NSA, and DoD Sigint have made into their offensive security teams, most of their budget is dedicated to Friday team-building activities, Bowling Nights, and Foosball tables. The US definitely does not hack anybody.
"Everyone but FVEY are the super evil hackerz" is a childish, head-in-the-sand position to hold in the modern geopolitical climate. Everyone is hacking everyone, and China is not some sort of unique Bad Guy in this regard.
US and China choose to act this way, but they could stop harassing each other without affecting their own power bases.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/apt31-chine...
The fact is the accurately attributing expert cybercrime is extremely difficult and anyone that implies otherwise is making a fool out of you.
Just look at the situation in the Philippines at Second Thomas Shoal. They're actively baiting the US.
How about we don't take the "bait" in the South CHINA Sea that is thousands of miles away from even the furthest abroad US territory (Guam)?
Very little of the South China See is owned by China. China doesn't own it any more than Japan owns the Sea of Japan.
I can't imagine what else we would call them. Also, turnabout is fair play. You can't run a company in China without giving up ownership and abiding by a number of, often draconian, rules. This isn't a "ban", it's a "You can't be owned by China" law. Given what China requires I find that completely reasonable.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
Yes, they are officially recognized as a foreign adversary. They're the first country listed:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
https://www.sandboxx.us/news/the-man-who-stole-americas-stea...
Further, the escalation of NATO/Russian tensions, the war in Ukraine, and resurgent Gaza conflict, have all contributed to a specific window of opportunity for China to act as these each spread US readiness thinner than at quieter times.
This has all unequivocally and openly set China as an adversary to the US until that "sphere of influence" conflict is resolved. They're not hiding it, the US is not hiding it. There's no question about this except among people who just happened not to be paying attention to what's going on in the region.
We can hope (perhaps too optimistically) for a gradual diplomatic reorganization or deescalation without hot trade or military conflict, but the whole world is preparing -- on many fronts -- for more confrontational scenarios.
Only in election years.
Except that china never controlled media in the US, they just offered one option out of many. The fact that the option China offered was widely preferred over those made by US companies seems to be the problem. I'd rather have an open internet where we can get access to information from companies in other countries. We shouldn't be blocked from accessing Chinese Youtube anymore than we should be blocked from Chinese websites or the media at bbc.com or abc.net.au
Nonsense. If you want to make a movie that actually makes money you have to cut it for the Chinese censors on set.
Arguments or statements like this only serve to piss people off. It probably does benefit Meta but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the bill should be passed.
Correct. US company data on citizens is most likely made available to the US government via fiber splicing and backdoor agreements. Separately, China is in a position to exercise way too much manipulative control over wide swaths of the US populace. That's generally agreed upon as "not a good thing".
Will Meta benefit with their massive network of boomers who can't tell generative AI from real life? I dunno, I doubt it. I think we'll see something else entirely replace Tiktok.
If the product wasn't something that people truly loved, would the callers have had that level of commitment to follow through?
Seeing the lack of political action in this country, I'd presume the answer to be NO.
This is not a factual statement. It is a statement that contains something resembling a fact, however it is still just your subjective opinion.
The Chinese government and the US government exert their influence over companies in the same way -- regulation, backdoor conversations asking them to kill/mute stories, and NSL type requests. There's not some government propagandist sitting at a switchboard. In fact it's the "West" that goes above and beyond with an entire technical apparatus to real-time mass censor social media to "protect democracy." If you don't consider every US company to be a direct arm of the US government but do for China then it's because your feeling about China than your feelings about social media manipulation.
It is in China's interest to avoid divestment because TikTok is a successful company making China money. And now it's in their interest to avoid divestment to not get bullied by the US gov't. If TikTok had the power you and others in this thread ascribe to them they would be more successful at swaying public opinion.
I do. I live in the EU, and our laws arguably don't allow sharing data with US companies for that exact reason (Schrems II judgement)
It doesn't matter why TikTok does anything. They have shown they can influence their users en masse, and they're legally obligated to do it if the Chinese authorities demand it.
This could be interpreted as CCP manipulation, but what else did you expect them to do?
No, in this case it was OVERT manipulation, not covert. The important word, however, is: manipulation.
I am so floored by comments in this thread either denying or not caring about literal brainwashing by a foreign adversary of the US.
Do you really believe this?
Wonder what their next concern will be?
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/03/14/tikt...
You might believe that the next thing will be, "let China take over the Senkaku islands", but if so, you have not been around children in several decades.
People talk about data collection. I am sure that is happening, but the far bigger issue is having a regime who wishes you harm in change of what your young people are and are not seeing for hours every day. There is a lot of propaganda, a deluge of videos pushing of divisive extremism and misinformation. The people pushing this are also using western platforms, but they're doing it more effectively on TikTok. This cannot end soon enough.
Why doesn't this apply to websites hosted overseas generally, or for other countries besides china. I can access media at www.abc.net.au just fine.
But anyway, my point was that the concern over foreign influence is not a new idea and has been something people were worried about even over a century ago.
It's very strange that our government doesn't care that our phones are made in China, that damn near everything for sale on Amazon comes from China, that we're constantly getting Chinese products that are low quality, covered in heavy metals, and/or drenched in formaldehyde, yet a Chinese owned app goes too far?
We don't write and pass the laws, and what we're "okay with" doesn't really matter to the decision-makers. Hopefully though, the passage of this bill will catalyze a more widespread discussion about the hypocrisy of the US Government. They can at least be clear about the motivation: "Only _our_ state surveillance apparatus should have such direct access to this psychic imprint of the American people."
What I'm curious about is whether the new ownership will be sufficiently savvy to sniff out any automated data sharing.
The difference is that Mark Zuckerberg will put on a suit and go and get yelled at by members of Congress for a few hours.
But even if that doesn't happen, and the US state starts to regard TikTok as banned, what makes anyone think people will stop using it?
Many western resources are banned in China, and it seems that the primary effect of this is simply the proliferation of tools to subvert the ban.
One thing I don't understand, at a high level: how, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, can anyone believe that the internet will shape itself around the whims of legacy states on anything but very short timescales?
There is no case of successful censorship of this nature, let alone with such a large and popular resource. Conversely, there are many, many cases of failed attempts at censorship, even by the largest and most powerful states and corporations in the world.
Is there some reason to believe that this trend will very suddenly reverse?
If the ban is on new downloads, it will mean that the ban doesn't hit particularly hard, except for there will be no more platform growth, which would mean that the company sees all of the issue with it, but the users do not which would stagnate the platform and lead to its eventual death. Frogs in a pot of water turned up to a boil, instead of dropped in at a rolling boil kind of thing.
If it is banded in ISP level, there is essentially no real chance that anybody will put any effort to get around it. I see big statements all the time about how people slightly younger than me don't even know what command prompt is, which is frankly a wild statement because even people I know my age that are not techy. Like I am still know how to do almost all of the basic commuter commands and know how to download a VPN and similar. We are either going to see a Renaissance of tech people opened up because of the ban on tick tock and them learning about technology to try and circumvent it, or we are going to see the total death of the platform because most people don't really know how to do anything technical on a phone or computer anymore.
Either way, it's going to cause some fairly large shifts until something is done, and if nothing is done, maybe the main shift will be just to a different platform rather than a different societal state of mind.
What are the other 2nd and 3rd order effects of this?
Covered countries are here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
In theory, this could be used more broadly. Not a lawyer, but there's a reading that it would give a president the ability to unilaterally force divestiture in companies that have as little as a "choose your username for your online account" functionality. It's unlikely to affect B2B supply chains, though. Presidents have many existing tools at their disposal anyways if they want to disrupt those.
...but seriously: The Chinese state pretends that Wikipedia is banned in China. Does anybody seriously think that Chinese people don't use Wikipedia, like every day?
Routing around a ban of this nature is so utterly trivial, and the primary audience of TikTok is strongly integrative of demographics which are digital natives accustomed to subverting such bans (heck, they got almost universal training in this area by having to jailbreak their school-issued tablets).
surprised as you may be, the vast majority certainly do not use Wikipedia
You'd be surprised how different some countries are in their Internet usage. Russians don't really use Facebook, and Google faced an uphill battle to be accepted there. Czechs apparently prefer homegrown map services (such as Seznam) to Google Maps.
These comments are very confusing to me. Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective?
Do y'all not have friends in China? Contacts who visit?
Do they suddenly drop off the face of the earth? Of course not, they install a VPN and carry on, and communicate with you via all the normal media.
The Great Firewall is really just a means of forcing people not to acknowledge what they know, and to only publicly speak about the censored version of history and politics.
But it's no more effective than any other internet censorship (which is to say, it is trivially bypassed).
It's extremely effective. Just because a very small fraction of the population 1) know how to use a VPN, 2) are willing to pay for it, and 3) bother to use it, doesn't mean the GFW is ineffective. The CCP doesn't need 99.99% efficiency rate, 95% is plenty to control their population.
Source: myself, many years living in China.
But you're saying that 95% of people refrain from reading resources that are not served by The Great Firewall?
That seems like a huge, huge stretch.
I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
Joking aside, that's not how statistics work. But I am reasonably confident that a random sampling of 1000 Chinese people drawn proportionally from where they live (meaning mostly in smaller cities, not Beijing, Shanghai, do not speak English, are not well off or highly educated, etc.), that only 50 of them would be using a VPN regularly. But I could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 and the point about control of the population still stands.
> I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
I know many as well, but there's major selection bias at work here, in that if you 1) met them abroad, 2) spoke to them in English about 3) a highly sensitive subject, they are highly likely to be one of the 5%.
Douyin is owned by the same company but not the same platform. It is subject to Chinese gov censorship (like all media in China), while Tiktok is not (therefore banned).
Regardless, TikTok isn't going away, it is just changing owners. How does that have any effect on freedom of the press?
TikTok can decide to not sell, in which case it's banned, or it can sell, in which case it's not.
At least the US is trying to protect the privacy of its citizens in this case. The CCP meanwhile required Apple to prevent Airdrop from functioning properly in China in order to stop the spread of information between protest groups.
This ban runs against both of those.
It is absolutely a strawman:
> A straw man fallacy (sometimes written as strawman) is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction.
Grandparent: Please, US doesn't need to prove anything w.r.t freedom vs. China.
Parent: So you're saying the USA is better and thus it never needs to be compared in any aspect related to 'freedom'?
Me: GP didn't say the USA never needs to be compared in any aspect related to freedom, they said _relative to China_ the US doesn't need to prove anything.
It's objectively a strawman.
That's separate from the issue of whether or not this infringes on the freedom of speech, but 1) freedom of speech in the US is not nor ever has been absolute with no limits and 2) this move absolutely deserves scrutiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices
Enjoy the data.
Propaganda is what advertising is. Should the courts restrict companies from their ability to advertise?
If China is indeed receiving data from TikTok, the future isn't going to be fun, especially with AI tech heating up.
Truth is, when China benefits, the Han Chinese people benefit. Every other ethnicity? Uncertain.
When the US benefits, a variety of ethnicities benefit. The US is now diverse enough where it must work in the interest of a variety of ethnicities in order to operate effectively.
So unless you're Han Chinese, you're more likely to benefit when the US wins.
I don’t understand the people coming out of the woodworks saying this is suppressing “freedom of the press” or speech.
Set up your own domain, get a VPS, upload your trash to VPS. There ya go, no more “censorship”.
Oh wait , you don’t want to do the work to set this up? Sounds like a personal problem.
I don't remember the First Amendment distinguishing between free speech that informs and that which entertains.
Most news on television is selected for its entertainment value. Does that give the government more power to regulate it?
Last time I checked China wasn't within US borders.
> Do they even operate in china?
If they were going to, they won't now.
Douyin, like all social media in China, is subject to government censorship. Tiktok, like Google, FB, IG, etc., are not and therefore banned in China.
That's why they are two completely separate platforms.
It’s understood that the US already does this with Facebook and other websites.
That aside, people do use shit like TikTok, Facebook, Google, and other social media and adtech bad actors' services because they don't fully understand what they're signing up for. To a certain extent, people do use them under duress -- completely checking out from them is going to have a pretty measurable impact on how people interact with you. You will be an afterthought to a lot of people in your life. People will think you not consuming those products is strange. Interacting with many institutions you have to deal with will be harder. Many (maybe even most) people can't handle that.
The economy is designed to get people to sign up for things they don't fully understand. Payday loans, sports gambling, margin trading. None of these are illegal, but they should all have strong public education campaigns so citizens know the risks. Social media should be treated the same.
The law is not about whether or not it's healthy for people. It's about whether or not it is an uncontrolled tool that an adversarial foreign government can use to sway public opinion in the US. No government with any urgent sense of self-preservation would let that fly.
That's like saying Facebook and Instagram are not separate platforms.
Anyway, this bothers me so much. It wouldn't take that much time before every country adopts the China/North Korea model once the USA leads the way, because you know, other countries also have national security concerns. Maybe the Spanish or Irish will want to protect their citizens being indexed by the US for their support for Palestine? Who know, banning apps is a thing now. Maybe soon all country-to-country communications will need to go through monitored cables with keys provided for inspection(maybe businesses can get an exception with acquiring a license?).
We are progressively sliding in a segregated world and it is a scary world because the tech to control all the communications is in place.
I wish the USA took the EU model where its free but regulated.
The desire for control over communications and the support by the people disgusts me. You will end up finding out that the Chinese/North Korean way of doing things is not going to provide you with security or prosperity.
Very sad day.
The EU is inching closer to effectively banning US social media companies with their prohibitions on ads anyway. We may see region-specific social media at some point.
EU isn't banning American social media, its banning certain practices and if the American social media companies want to do business they simply don't do these things and they will be fine. Unless, you know, forcing Meta to sell to Luxotica or something.
Similarly, other regulations may become so onerous as to result in de facto bans. There’s not really a sharp distinction.
On the other hand, US is regulating Tiktok AND pretty much only Tiktok, which is breaking no laws except now this new one where part of its ownership is Chinese. This wouldn't look as farcical if the US forced facebook, twitter, etc. to comply with privacy issues, etc.
It will be especially interesting when Trump admin starts getting its way next year. The USA fucked up badly by pivoting into being fake China.
This is an incredibly bad-faith comparison. People of Chinese descent aren't being discriminated in any way by this bill. In the same way China blocking Google isn't an act of racism, this is putting restrictions on a foreign state which is acting belligerentlyt towards us.
We required American companies to stop doing business with the Nazis when we went to war with them. (Though not a moment sooner.) That wasn't racism, it was strategic sense.
We aren't at war with China, nor are we close yet. Although it seems like people do want to move closer to a war and seem to hype China as some existential threat to the USA, and therefore try to justify such ideas. This is despite the fact that historically China has pretty much never used its navy to try to attack another nation except for basically (Japan), and that was when the Mongols had seized control of the nation about 800 years ago. China has throughout history basically repudiated the Mongols' methods and violence, and the Mongol ruled dynasty was considered one of the shortest in Chinese history because of this. Moreover one of the reasons why the Mongols did not succeed in conquering Japan was because the Chinese did not give the Mongols seafaring ships, and the keels were too flat to be stable in the ocean, despite the fact that China did have the technology for stable ships. This meant that the Chinese ships that were sent to Japan to attack easily capsized and the Mongol soldiers on them drown.
China blocking Google isn't China blocking Google because it is a US company. China is blocking due to the fact that Google doesn't censor. When Google tried to reenter the Chinese market, it was blocked and criticized from TWO different sources (1) Various US government officials and congressmen; (2) Google's own employees. Google acceded to pressure from the US, not China.
The issue is the Chinese state's involvement. (TikTok's CEO perjuring himself about this didn't help [1].)
> We aren't at war with China
They are, under U.S. law, a foreign adversary [2].
If we were at war with China, we'd be talking about sanctioning ByteDance. Not merely removing it from app stores if it can't find a non-Chinese buyer.
> historically China has pretty much never used its navy to try to attack another nation except for basically (Japan)
Historically America has never used its space force to attack anyone. Meanwhile, China literally invaded and annexed Tibet in 1951 [3] and continues to use no uncertain terms about its intentions in respect of Taiwan [4].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/05/30/tikt...
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Tibet_by_the_Peo...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-drops-peaceful-reu...
(2) Taiwan and Tibet are different cases and could not be considered clear and cut cases of invasion and annexation.
(3) Tibet and Taiwan was never internationally recognized as independent and were/are considered a part of Qing, later Republic of China and later by most nations as a part of a "China" whether now the PRC or previously ROC. They tried to secede, similarly like what happens during a civil war. Therefore they did/do not have what people call Westphalian sovereignty. We similarly e.g. also don't talk about the South during the Civil War as being a separate internationally recognized state. And therefore we also do not talk about the Union invading a different nation, the Confederacy, but simply a civil war within a nation. Nor do we say that the Union annex the Confederacy.
Taiwan has the same constitution, national anthem, flag, etc. as the Republic of China under Sun Yatsen. It still regards all of China, which includes all of the mainland territories as part of its territory, and Taiwan is a mere province, which is considered "Free China". It was the previous Chinese government before the PRC took control during a civil war in 1949. That civil war in a sense never ended. And throughout Chinese history there has been many cases where essentially civil wars took e.g. a 100+ years to settle, but there was sometimes periods of relatively peace between parties, even a trading relationship. A famous one is e.g. the Three Kingdoms period.
What? No. We’re talking about Xi invading Taiwan. That causes war between China and the U.S., U.K., Australia, Japan and India.
> Taiwan and Tibet are different cases and could not be considered clear and cut cases of invasion and annexation
Oookay buddy.
> Tibet and Taiwan was never internationally recognized as independent and were/are considered a part of Qing
A lot of Western China wasn’t historically China. Hence why Beijing has to commit crimes against humanity to integrate it [1]. We can play this game endlessly for any piece of territory.
> That civil war in a sense never ended
Just so it’s clear to the thread, the pro-TikTok’er here is an avid advocate of China invading Taiwan, and thus war between America and China. This is why we need to dismember TikTok from ByteDance or remove it from app stores.
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countrie...
In any case, it's just tit for tat, pretty much all western social media platforms are banned in China, why should Chinese social media platforms be treated differently in the western world?
This is so out of touch that its hard to comprehend. Is it maybe because the supposedly fee people should have the freedom to choose what to use? Unlike you know, the Chinese or North Koreans? Fuck Chinese government, its not something that the "free" world implements. Stop copying the Chinese government.
Is "freedom" only about businesses in the USA? What happen people's freedoms?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch
There's a lot more leftist/anticapitalist content (and political content in general) on tiktok compared to youtube shorts and instagram reels.
I and every friend I've talked to about tiktok has seen much more political content on tiktok than other short video apps.
Really?
Who owns the damn thing anyway?
Oh right. Communists.
It's surprising to me that this this pretty significant distinction has been glossed over both in media reporting and in general comments here on HN.
To be clear, I'm not supporting the law with this comment, just clarifying what the actual content of the law is.
If TikTok was banned in the sense that it had to shut down then the First Amendment argument could work. But if it's just a forced sale then it has no bearing on the freedom of speech of TokTok users.
Thats easy to answer.
The reason why is because they'd get paid 10s of billions of billions of dollars for it, and otherwise their investment would massively lose a large amount of value otherwise.
Also, bytedance wouldn't be competing with tiktok anymore in those markets as they'd have sold it off.
So the choice is either to make a bunch of money, or to instead have their investment become worthless.
The tiktok that you know about is the international app that already doesnt compete with the rest of bytedance.
The amusing thing looking at this from China perspective is that ByteDance has been hit by the government over and over again for appealing to the mainstream.
The first big success they had was a social media platform centered around memes/jokes, and because the CCP doesn't have a sense of humor they crushed this platform when it started getting too popular.
Their second big success was a news aggregator that focused on surfacing news people actually wanted to read instead of the news the CCP wanted people to read. Which is to say mostly lowbrow gossip and sensationalist storytelling instead of long and tedious treatises about how great the party is. The Xi administration crushed that too, mandating changes in the platform that made it just as sanitized as all the other Chinese "news" outlets.
TikTok getting popular overseas seems like the result of a very well-timed purchase of musical.ly. The small number of western Gen Z youth I'm in contact with say they came to TikTok through musical.ly. Either way, we all see how successful that has been. Once again, ByteDance figured out a product that gave the "low end population" exactly what they wanted, and once again the government is punishing them for it.
At this point you wonder if these guys should just throw their hands in the air and pivot into oil or pharmaceuticals or some other addiction industry that's totally in the government's pocket. I guess the suspicion of some in the US government is that that's already happened and that's why this fun app that everyone loves is actually a tool of the CCP.
It was not. It was only banned in 2009 after it was allegedly used to organise protests that escalated into deadly race riots in Xinjiang.
The organized protests[1] were just a convenient excuse. Race riots have occurred in many countries and you can link those back to various social media platforms which were used to organize protests.
[1] The protests as you describe them… there is a lot to unpack here and it’s not a good enough excuse to ban American social media companies. But if you think it is, then the US also gets to arbitrarily ban foreign social media companies.
Fuck this one particular subsidiary majority owned by a Chinese company rubs me the wrong way because China doesn't do this to us. As a general rule US companies can operate in China and US companies are allowed to own stake in Chinese companies.
To me this is an escalation of the fair-weather, "I don't like you, you don't like me but we can still be professionals when it comes to mutually beneficial trade" attitude we've had.
Unintentionally funny comment when positioned next to its sibling about this exact thing happening to FB in a targeted way back in '09
The CEO has mentioned that they will simply pull out of the US market.
Whoever they sell it to, if they end up doing that, is going to be more than willing to put in place their own addiction algorithm, in just the same way that American social media and other adjacent tech companies have implemented them.
I'm in no way a fan or user of TikTok, but thinking this will improve the app seems naive.
A Facebook or Twitter-esque addiction algorithm is WAY better than a CCP addiction algorithm since the latter tries to socially engineer unrest and disillusion, on purpose, as a targeted act of Nakatomi-esque cyberwarfare against a totalitarian regime's rivals. The former kind maybe does so as an inadvertent externality, and with every reason to wager to a far lesser degree.
Meta won't turn up the heat on antisemitism and down on something the CCP doesn't like. It might turn up the heat on, I don't know, trans rights, and down on neo Nazis, but it's much more benign dystopic info filtering than an actual "what will destabilize the US and fuel stochastic terrorism and civil war?" agenda (which is against Meta's best interest).
China might not even need to influence the west through tiktok, meta and friends seem to be doing plenty of it themselves. None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh
> None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh
The Nirvana Fallacy is when you reject the better of two outcomes because it's not good enough compared to some mythical optimum.
In this case, the optimum could be some social media service that "strengthens progress and unity" or it could be a total ban on social media altogether, both of which seem pretty mythical. :p
I believe organic, chaotic derangement is better than extrinsic, targeted derangement in magnitude and outcome.
Take some responsibility for Americans posting on social media to other Americans, for the love of god.
The highest ideal American SNS follow is profit. That will generate all kinds of externalities that might be bad for society. Still, at least so far, we've found it to be the least destructive optimization target in modern human history (vs. socialism).
The CCP is clearly tuning the algorithm in the SNS under its control to limit topics it deems undesirable in its goal of an ideal society. Whoever thinks this isn't so bad hasn't experienced an authoritarian state personally or at least highly underestimates the pain and suffering one can inflict.
Someone like Facebook wants the algorithm to show addictive content that generally isn't super offensive to the average person. Someone like the CCP wants the algorithm to show addictive content that idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.
I'm not convinced anything on TikTok is more divisive than any other social media platform. And Reddit seems to be filled with a lot more tankies than other platforms.
How is it worse than making disseminating disinformation illegal? The law as written lays bare the true motivation - it's not about fighting disinformation ("inauthentic user activity" has been detected across all social networks for the purposes of disinformation). It almost certainly is about protecting American companies from competitors with better AI algorithms. The legislature has telegraphed that the tech/potential for abuse are not problems by themselves - ownership by a Chinese company is what they take issue with.
I didn't say it was a bad thing - I said there's a better option that wasn't taken. IMO, protecting citizens from bad behavior by domestic and foreign companies is nobler than corporate protectionism. YMMV .
I don't see how people can say this with a straight face knowing that American adversaries operate almost in the open on Facebook. You don't need to control the platform to control the message. That's what social media companies sell!
There is no greater vehicle to deliver a hooking mechanism to target specific users for spyware upload than an app that is installed on a lot of platforms. Weechat is one other such tool btw. and that thing behaves strangely compared to e.g. Whatsapp if you install it.
Not according to his employees
They would have to be bribing the IRS. No way.
I don't like or use Facebook and I hope it dies a horrible death. But I'm also a realist.
>That's what social media companies sell!
In any case, without paid ads, their "friend me" campaigns didn't work. There's some research from the FBI on this.
Can't find the link right this second but I'll post back if I do.
To be fair having first past the post voting does wonders for division. No external enemy necessary.
For a US example you can simply count the minutes of coverage Fox News and CNN give to various stories for the same basic effect. How much coverage you gives the Russia- Ukraine war can be just as impactful as if you refer to it as a Russian invasion or not.
I don't use TikTok, but I use Facebook and Google's short video versions. I find just as many anti-CCP as pro-CCP content on it, and...I guess these are mostly TikTok videos because many of them still have TikTok watermarks.
I'm legitimately terrified to know what this means.
Let me not even get started on the deep fakes lurking on the platform.
The effect is less informed with higher certainty, and terrible combination for training citizens for actual civil discourse.
Same thing with propaganda used by social media.
This video illustrates the effects of it: https://youtu.be/pB7WzqUq4Nk?t=324
You're right, everyone I know now buys their glycine from Donghua Jinlong instead of using domestic manufacturers. This is clearly not because of the superior manufacturing capabilities of Donghua Jinlong, who are ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified, and whose glycine is industrial AND food grade, but because of an insidious campaign by the CCP to promote Chinese glycine across the entire industry, trying to crush American glycine manufacturing. I demand congressional hearings about what our elected politicians are doing about this threat to American-made glycine!
Readers might also be happy to know DHJL glycine is Halal, Kosher, and Reach certified, and more recently, FDA approved as well!
But they're very certain that it's bad!
Meanwhile, I'm scratching my head trying to understand how my watch history could have any value whatsoever. Cute kittens, shirtless guys chopping wood, sad hamster memes, Sanchez the sleepy racoon, Young Royals edits, some dude eating all kinds of cheese, A bunch of confused Americans in Europe and vice versa, PEDRO PEDRO PEDRO, guys promoting their onlyfans, schwapeepee, and of course Donghua Jinlong content, although it seems to have run its course now.
Do you have a single example of a successful Chinese media campaign, disinformation or information - just one?
Because I can name, off the top of my head, disinformation campaigns by Trump (election was stole) , by Israel (bunker under a hospital), by Isis (mass recruitment in western countries), by oil companies (heat pumps don’t work in Britain’s unique climate), by food companies, by Russia, by Greenpeace, by crazy people on 4chan but I cannot name a single message that came out of China and got major public resonance in the west.
China's 50-cent army buys social media accounts, or creates fake personas, to push narratives and abuses reporting/takedown mechanisms to suppress unfavorable posts and channels.
> Most DRAGONBRIDGE activity is low quality content without a political message, populated across many channels and blogs
If anything, this is a demonstration that their efforts are futile and incompetent, very much non-threat. I’ve seen even 4chan do better
We have multiple actors that push divisive misinformation through bots, much more successfully, and we do not apply any scrutiny to that.
Sounds like a skill issue. The Us has decades worth of a head start on the internet and social media. If "the enemy" can just waltz in and disrupt that in a matter of 5 years, I think we have bigger issues on hand.
> Someone like the CCP wants the algorithm to show addictive content that idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.
Yeah, America has a decade long headstart on that too. We blamed facebook in 2016, we're blaming Tiktok in 2024. How long are we going to deflect this to the internet?
I'm afraid that's not goign to happen in the US. Politicians never let a disaster go to waste: had the will been there to regulate social media in general, the hysteria around TikTok would have precipitated it. Instead, we got a law specifically targeting TikTok and ignoring other SM.
The mere fact that these social media CEOs are building vast bunkers and amassing billions of dollars highlights the issue that they are literally shoveling value out of these platforms into their own pockets, and those of their investors, while preying upon the instincts of all their users in a deeply psychological manner.
Also, please avoid ad-hominem ("hilariously limited intellect"); it overshadows what otherwise would be a valid point (enforcing a ban vs. practicing personal habit, critique on blanket statements, etc.)
I'm a musician myself, and social media is totally overburdening the music economy with scams for musicians like paying for ads and bot services just to get visibility. Social Media overall is considered to be a wasteland dedicated to promoting only artificially engineered celebrity music and stories right now in the opinion of many.
You mean like Facebook, YouTube, and Starbucks?
Riiiggghhhttt…
As a parent, I hate google a lot more than TikTok. I can already block TikTok, but I can't block youtube because the school district mandates it.
But ya, if a teen is otherwise cut off from devices besides the ones they get from school, then you could see that as a weak point, although I don't think that applies to a significant portion of families. For the ones that it does apply to, they probably have bigger problems to worry about than TikTok being banned.
Though, the saddest thing is that it seems like the U.S citizens, (i.e ANY of tiktoks 160 MILLION US users) have absolutely no say in the operations,a yet we actually interact with the app not these old people in Congress. The fact that Biden so swiftly signed the bill too makes me frustrated as I want to vote for him, but he keeps doing or okaying things that are counter to my values.
If ByteDance sells TikTok to US owners to satisfy the requirement, they give up control of a successful platform developed inside of China to a self-declared adversary that already controls most of the world's social media platforms, representing a significant loss to China as they attempt to compete online.
If ByteDance ignores the demand to sell, the US government has obligated itself to prevent its citizens from accessing one of the most popular social media apps in existence, something that the affected users will be extremely angry about, and will likely make claims of state censorship.
If I were China, and my goal was to leverage TikTok to do harm to America, I would choose the option that turns US citizens against the government over the option that transfers power from China to the US.
China is a communist country. State owned industry. The leash they give business "owners" might be long (long enough to fool westerns it's just another USA), but it is still a leash, and they are still under control of the party. No courts, no rights, no lawsuits. Party wants, party takes.
That's simply a lie. Douyin is full of the same trash as Tiktok.
Nope! He has said - TT is not going anywhere and vows to fight back legally. I was a bit shocked to find court put a hold on Trump’s ban of TT
Very big example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merck_%26_Co.
The US entity isn't beholden to the CCP and can decide to switch algorithm providers if they suddenly notice it's getting very propaganda-y, which provides a degree of independent oversight appeasing US concerns while not necessitating actually switching from the current systems.
"On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" by Tim Snyder, it's also is short and to the point (audiobook is 2 hours long) and teaches people what to look for to see when their country slides into authoritarianism and what to do to fight it.
The author also reads it on YouTube if you can't get a hold of it.
1) prior to bill passage, convincing the public that they will pull out is optimal as it helps argue against bill, regardless of whether it is at all true
2) but, after bill passage, the incentives are totally different. Pulling out means giving up a billion dollar market that could instead have been sold. The shareholders would be livid.
So I am very skeptical. I have heard CEOs say many things they later were found to clearly never have meant seriously, simply because it was what they needed to say at the time. Like, "we would never do outsourcing or layoffs, your division is totally safe"....
I would think thoughtful HN readers would be just a little less credulous
They were the first popular short-form algorithmic addictive feed app. Anyone can make one now (YT Shorts, Insta Reels, etc), there's no secret sauce anymore like there may have been years ago. But TikTok stays number one because they were number one -- network effects.
If they disappear, a new competitor takes over and is just as strong as they were. All the value is in the niche, not the occupant of the niche. It really would be like they're giving it away instead of at least collecting a few billion cash for it. It would be monumentally stupid. They'd get the future competitor just as much whether they sell or not.
Isn't this just another reason to conclude China views Tiktok as a national security asset?
It bans American companies from providing services that distribute, maintain or update any sufficiently popular apps substantially owned or controlled by foreign adversaries.
TikTok could host APKs from CCP headquarters if they want to.
Heck, they could post their IPA or source code if they wanted. This law isn't what prevents users from sideloading.
If you tune it right, there's a lot of good content on there, though.
Most other short-form content recommendation algorithms overfit like crazy (ahem Instagram ahem), and many users trying to bend it a certain way mess it up.
Why does everyone assume this is likely? The CCP has already said they would block a sale of TikTok. This happened a while ago - so the US saying TikTok must be sold is an effective ban. The misdirection of the wording of the ban is just dishonest.
Ban usually means you can't use it anymore. Take, for example, Google in mainland China. Banned without unusual circumvention. If TikTok refuses to sell to a non-Chinese owner, on the other hand, they get removed from app stores. Their website still works without any circumvention. Not banned. Even in the worst case.
2. I am looking forward to seeing the justifications that will be trotted around once the USG torpedoes net neutrality and bans the website
Where did I set a goal post? What does the goal even represent in this metaphor? What counts as a ban?
The United States is capable of banning stuff. When we take down pirate websites, we're enacting a ban: domain seizures, asset freezes, criminal penalties and possibly sanctions. We can even go lightweight: say it's illegal to provide services to Americans (or more draconian, which I must add lines up with China's approach, make it illegal to access them) and then leave enforcemnt to the executive.
What we're doing here is milquetoast: sell enough to non-Chinese owners so they no longer have a controlling stake or distribute this from non-American servers and via the internet and sideloaded apps. Calling this a ban is like saying someone was banned from a restaurant because they arrived after it closed.
It has gone from "not a ban" because they just have to sell, to "not a ban" because because the website is still available.
It's an effective ban because the CCP has already said they will not allow a TikTok sale. Congress knows there's no recourse for ByteDance. They aren't going to hand over the IP to a non-Chinese entity. If France said they were going to ban NVDA unless NVDA sells to a French national we would call it a ban.
>Calling this a ban is like saying someone was banned from a restaurant because they arrived after it closed.
The irony about this is that China has the same exact policy in the mainland, but no one argues whether or not Google is banned in China. Google used to be in China! China said Google had to censor some topics or they wouldn't be allowed to do business in China. Google opted to leave.
Nobody sits around pontificating that it technically wasn't a ban because all Google needed to do what follow Chinese law on censorship.
These are both true, though. Again, if you want to see a ban, look at how Facebook is treated by China.
But fair enough, people are using the term "ban" inconsistently. I wouldn't say anyone's moving the goalposts as much as we're using an ambiguous term interchangeably.
> If France said they were going to ban NVDA unless NVDA sells to a French national we would call it a ban
This is tautology. You literally said if Sally were to do X to Andy unless {}, then X = X.
> Nobody sits around pontificating that it technically wasn't a ban because all Google needed to do what follow Chinese law on censorship
You can't go to Google.com in China. You will be able to go to TikTok.com and access its content freely after it's been, per your definition, banned. From a free-speech perspective, that seems material.
I get your point from a free-trade perspective. This is obviously not a free-trade bill. Maybe that's where the discussion is losing traction...
I've never seen anyone argue that Google isn't technically banned in China. It's clearly a ban when China does it.
And what do companies do that don't want to comply to GDPR? They ban EU users. You can use the search bar here to find countless people talking about being banned. There's no ambiguity - there's only ambiguity when it comes to TikTok.
If I purchase a car with low gas mileage, and then the EPA requires cars to have minimum gas milage, that "bans" my car. Even though technically, I could figure out some way to rebuild it to comply.
That's because:
* Saying it'll get banned makes for a more sensational headline.
* Saying it'll get banned is accurate enough for most practical purposes.
* Saying it'll get banned is simpler than explaining the details of divestiture. Most Americans probably don't even know what "divest" means without pulling out a dictionary.
Speaking with some younger American co-workers in the past, their suspicion/hatred of their own country is astounding to see and it seems to have coincidentally begun after TikTok entered US market a few months before US elections.
So the worry seems to be that young American voters exposed to a foreign social platform will influence upcoming elections. I do not think this is far fetched as multiple countries have come out to expose various tactics by certain countries to influence perception.
Speaking as an American, our country was founded on the principles of being apprehensive of governments including our own. Being suspicious of our own government is a very American thing and should not be understood as surprising.
See our Declaration of Independence for further reading and context.
Instead, the TikTok CEO is invoking the First Amendment and "freedom" to emotionally manipulate people into thinking Congress did something wrong here.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-03-06...
Does yandex have an app or use cloudflare?
It is much, much broader than a 'tiktok ban', it applies to any company that fits that criteria. So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company. It's not just a ban, it simply won't exist on the internet for US users.
There are probably a bunch of companies that will be subject to this if it's upheld in court, and the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet. It'll also likely result in Chinese interests devesting down to >20% from US companies that they do not want banned, for much the same reasons.
Basically, this is the result of a bunch of tech-illiterate politicians who have no idea how any of this works, passing a law that looks good in news headlines without regard to the potential consequences. So business as usual on the hill.
Provided they have more than 1 million MAU (which they do, obviously). The president would also have to affirmatively ban it and report to Congress about the specific threat that company poses, and what assets need to be divested. TikTok is the only company written into the bill by Congress that doesn't require affirmative action by the president, or the report.
> the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet
Only if the president believes they should be banned.
Anything they sell just gives them more money to buy more ownership.
What the law absolutely does do is make "Chinese Ownership" an existential risk to companies with software products with large numbers of US users. Riot, Epic et. al. will be strongly incentivised to get their PRC shareholders to divest, and in the future other companies will be disincentivized from accepting that kind of investment.
And surely that's intentional.
Abuse of power in a nutshell.
It does not look good at all. It just shows that they have no trust in their own citizens. And maybe for a reason.
My prediction: China would absolutely throw away a few billion to enjoy the chaos that results from the country that preaches free speech painting itself into a corner and banning it. Enacting a ban on the most popular app among Gen Z would cause a huge uproar.
It would be like taking away terrestrial radio from boomers. It's that popular.
We can be skeptical, but not afraid of foreign owned media.
100% agree.
I would say this offers some insight into the real reason they want to ban TikTok.
It's addictive and they don't fully understand the dangers of CCP spyware and CCP controlled algorithm. It's like drugs addicts being passionate about drug use.
Or they just move over to FAANG competitors? I've never used TikTok before since it is an app, but I use YouTube shorts and whatever that Instagram short thing is Facebook is pushing into my feed (with...erm...a lot more addictive algorithms than YouTube). Ok, I'm not Gen Z, but it looks like content providers are already hedging their bets on platforms (they often don't even remove TikTok watermarks), I don't see why consumers wouldn't follow. Its not like YouTube or Facebook is blocked in the USA.
Currently the FAANG competitors are much worse; their recommendation engines are inferior. That's why consumers overwhelmingly prefer Tiktok currently.
https://manifold.markets/mint/conditional-on-the-tiktok-ban-...
Hmm I wonder why..
I think it's unlikely they will sell and it will instead be removed from US markets. China would prefer that we don't have another successful social networking platform, and they would like to keep their spyware for use in other countries.
I think either way this whole thing is a big W for CCP and L to US democracy that doesn't have the balls to actually expand regulation when it's clearly wanted and needed.
Because freedom of speech doesn't work in practice?
We’ll end up validating Chinese policies all these years if we claim this action has precedent.
If it doesn’t have precedent, then it’s even worse. It becomes a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them (or their practices).”
You could say the same thing about China complaining about this. Actually, that's what people would think of first when you mentioned "the teapot calling the kettle back". Frankly, I think people in China are surprised we kept our internet open for so long. Anyways, yes, American is now admitting that they will play by the same rules as China, rather than giving them a pass.
My whole second point about joining them is saying that it shouldn’t matter what China does or says. They are hypocrites so we can be too???
> I guess also if we really don't have any principles anymore, we'll have devolved back to survival of the fittest principles.
China has been very clear that the principle should be tit for tat. All of their economic and foreign policy is based on that, from the visas they issue to visitors, the tariffs we exchange on vehicle production, and the foreigners they throw in prison when one of their own is put on house arrest in Canada. This is just a very late counter-reaction to a policy China has held for awhile.
China is a government, so, just like our government, it must stfu.
This is a pretty straightforward protection of the people from government that's very much in line with American ideals.
China.
China is using TikTok to suppress free speech, so I don't see how your analogy relates here.
China: censors free speech in China then makes a US speech platform and censors American speech on the new platform. Blocks US platforms in China because they refuse to censor speech for the CCP.
US: blocks China from owning speech platforms because the US doesn't allow censorship and doesn't trust China to stop censoring speech on the platform.
Literally the opposite thing. How you've managed to conflate two completely opposite things is very interesting.
Are you a habitual TikTok user? Or do you work for the CCP?
I'm openly suspicious that you might be getting paid to conflate these very obviously opposite things.
Conversely America is holding to its core values of restricting governments from acting in the political field. That right is reserved for citizens, and is especially protected from government use. America is founded on restricting government so that free speech can exist.
This move firmly reestablishes America as a leader in free speech protection, as it protects citizens speech from influence by government, both domestic, and now, foreign.
It still wouldn't violate the Constitution. Rights are reserved for citizens. It's perfectly legal to tell TikTok what they can or can't say.
That's not what Congress has done, but it would be legal.
There should be no restrictions on who owns a website. There can be an unlimited number of websites, and every website's "reception range" is the entire planet.
Today's rulemaking pushes us one step closer to a Great Firewall. If ByteDance moves operations entirely to China, what measures will the government enact to prevent people in the US from using it? (It will probably be strong-arming app stores, but that will fail because they can just make it a web app. So the only option will be to have two Internets, one with everything except TikTok, and one with everything.)
It will be interesting if this extends to other apps. Will it be unamerican to play Genshin Impact?
Ex, ByteDance couldn't go to AWS and ask for capacity, nor could they go to Hurricane Electric and ask for Peering.
Freedom of speech is my right to be able to bitch about Biden or Trump without having to worry that I'll die in prison.
Freedom of speech is not a right of foreign entities sending me memes about them to manipulate who I will vote for in the election.
There's a law where foreign entities can't own TV or Radio in US. This might be controversial, but IMO it should be updated to also include social media as this is source where people get news from.
In other words "freedom of speech" means that Congress doesn't have the power to pass laws that suppress speech itself, regardless of where it comes from. It's not that the first amendment applies to some people (and certainly not that it doesn't apply to others), but that it applies to Congress and limits what laws they can pass without qualification.
Firstly, they didn't expand or alter the Constitution.
I'm not sure where you got that from. Reading back and I don't see it anywhere.
Stated again, hopefully more clearly; by exercising restrictions on China they've reestablished that China is not "the people" described in the Constitution. So, it's not protected from congressional acts.
And second, they didn't need to do that anyway. Foreign policy is a power reserved for Congress and the President. No amendment ever restricted that power.
See Article 1.
Further, the protection of free speech in the first amendment does not even refer to "the people", but simply prohibits Congress from abridging the freedom of speech per se, without qualification or any exception for who is doing the speaking. Congress cannot pass laws that abridge the freedom of speech as a matter of actual effect, regardless of whether they are doing so under the auspices of exercising other powers.
Foreign policy powers don't come into it -- if the act restricts free speech, it is unconstitutional, regardless of what end Congress was attempting to pursue.
These cases go back and forth.
I would argue that it wasn't necessary to spell out that constitutional rights apply to citizens because the law is presumed to defer to common practice in cases where no law exists. That is, laws go back to long before the Constitution and those laws are referred to as common law.
In that sense; the king has lordship of his subjects, and no obligation to subjects of other kingdoms. He collected taxes, and provided protection from foreign threat and justice for his subjects.
Likewise, citizens of China don't pay taxes to the US, they have not that obligation because they are not subjects of the US government. Neither do they have the rights that are afforded a subject thereof.
Congress has no need to clarify that. It's presumed to be the case. That they mention it in certain amendments is incidental, despite the creative interpretations I've read, mostly from immigration proponents. (Not that I'm opposed, I'm an immigrant.)
No doubt, lots of people prefer to interpret this differently, especially when it's a right they need for a specific reason. That's exactly what China is doing here.
They are arguing about why the law should be interpreted in their favor this time. And next time they will argue the other way, as they do against their subjects.
It's up to the judge what it means in each case, but as a generally accepted interpretation, applying US law and protections to a foreign nation without some kind of formal alliance specifying more directly what is provided, is an egregious stretch of the imagination. It's ridicule, at best.
But anyways, I like to hope that the US is better than China. If US citizens are abused while in China, I would be appalled to see Chinese citizens abused in the US as retribution.
We don’t need to overly moralize this and somehow find the US on a pedestal with impossible to reach and shifting standards of behavior that are only applicable to the US when it’s convenient for various bad actors and despotic regimes (Putin, Hamas, CCP, Iran, North Korea).
America can be “better” than China without having to accept disadvantages. Likewise China could allow American social media companies to show that it is sincere in being interested in free and fair business. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be regulations but there’s simply no good argument to allow a Chinese social media company to operate in the US without reciprocal activity and nothing, nothing is lost by banning Tik Tok.
I still believe in this, and if you look at America’s policies of sanctioning countries like Russia, blocking a business from operating in a country is actually a detriment to that country because they lose access to the benefit that that company provides. Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party.
I don’t fundamentally believe it’s about fair playing ground or advantages/disadvantages for equivalent US companies in China. The current consensus is really about national security, and having China be able to access data on US people. If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way.
Furthermore if it did become about fair playing ground for domestic companies then I think it fundamentally misunderstands the free market economic model. The free market would benefit domestic companies. It would strengthen domestic companies to have competition.
It was framed as a moral argument by suggesting the US should be “better”. At least that was my interpretation. I don’t think arguing from a market perspective really changes that interpretation but instead further weakens China’s lack of allowing American social media companies to operate in China with the same unfettered market access.
> If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way.
We kind of care and we have been caring more. The problem is that legally it has been difficult to say “go ahead and build or operate your business in the US except if you are China”. Likewise China just blanket applies the rules that it has to entities that want to operate in China.
> Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party.
So far from what I’ve seen these types of actions have been very specific and targeted. In the case of Tik Tok there isn’t any loss to citizens and letting it continue to operate with impunity in the US brings all sorts of negative externalities that the market isn’t equipped to solve.
It’s also important to remember that some things are more important than profit. The economy and market are just one aspect of a nation. Lowering cost and increasing competition are nice but they are not the point of civilization.
Of course in practice that's true, but we also tout free-er markets as something to strive for, especially when it comes to us imposing it on other countries in conflict with their sovereign rights to restrict their own markets.
> So far from what I’ve seen these types of actions have been very specific and targeted. In the case of Tik Tok there isn’t any loss to citizens and letting it continue to operate with impunity in the US brings all sorts of negative externalities that the market isn’t equipped to solve.
I think TikTok is a highly special case, and sort of brings to light the rationale why China decided to ban foreign mega tech corps, especially social media ones. We also saw a backlash when Facebook tried to influence India's elections and politics with a banner on their website. Social media is indeed a special case.
But I think this problem is also similar to the national security vs privacy/encryption battle. We are giving up some of our principles to make our short term lives (national security) easier. Yes, TikTok can be weaponized as an influence machine... however letting it run free could mean developing a more natural resistance to it in the American population (if possible). If we devolve to market manipulation we'll rely on it as a crutch. Why stop there? Why not engineer the whole economy.
> Why stop there? Why not engineer the whole economy.
Why go to extremes? You could just argue the opposite and argue why don’t we explicitly allow slave labor, bribery, and dumping?
As soon as you provide an argument against any of those things you can use that same rationale to argue to ban a company like Tik Tok.
I lost hope long ago.
The proper moral position is for trade to be governed by rational rules that apply consistently regardless of who is trading with whom or what country they are from.
And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.
"Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)."
We can say that Google and Facebook are "banned" or "censored" in China even though China would surely be happy to unban them if they sold their operations in China to a Chinese business. So it is consistent and fair to say that this bill "bans" or "censors" TikTok.
If TikTok wants to give up the revenue, they can continue to send propaganda to the US, and kids can continue to watch and make videos.
China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.
give a dog a bad name and it's as good as dead.
I bet you that would become a thing at school, getting the geekier kids to "install tiktok 4 me pls"
China does way more than that. China forces all companies that wish to do business in China to host their data in China in a way that ensures the CCP has complete access to it.
It boggles the mind how some anonymous accounts try to attack the US for interfering with a Chinese company doing business in the US, particularly one which is a notorious security hole, but leave out the fact that CCP's China goes well beyond as a matter of policy.
It would make more sense that Chinese customers would want to host their data in the US not vice versa, and in that case you would treat them the same as American customers in American data centers with the same security in place.
It's the cheaper solution, caters to all customer needs, and doesn't risk your customers' faith.
I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't separate them.
Do you have some reason to believe they aren't or are you just guessing that they wouldn't take precautions? Because in this case, the precautions are actually the easier topology to build, I think.
I'm absolutely not defending China's authoritarian regime and overall the U.S. isn't seems less bad, but at the same time it's a bit rich to pretend the U.S. doesn't do the same if it matters.
Also China does not stop companies to do business with Facebook and Google, if you look up numbers from Facebook and Google, a big chunk ad revenue would come from Chinese companies.
In the same sense, it's not Google that's banned in China. It's free speech. Google just can't operate without it so it decided to exit the market by refusing to allow CCP access to user data and to implement CCP firewalls.
You can conflate things to make them sound like the same thing. Words can have subjective and loose meaning.
But reality is very complex and very specific and doesn't have any loose meaning. And this is not remotely the same thing.
It's only improbable if the suspicion is true, and in that case: good riddance.
Also TikTok apparently isn't even allowed in China they have their own version.
Well that’s the crux, isn’t it.
If TikTok is just a business, like ByteDance insists, any business would rather get something than nothing. So ByteDance would sell.
If TikTok isn’t merely a business but rather an organ of soft power, and China blocks a sale, then the suspicions of the U.S. intelligence community are confirmed.
Using that logic, facebook, google, etc are not businesses either since they chose to be banned from china.
Google, Facebook etc don't have a "Chinese market" product at all, so there's nothing to sell off. If they did have a Chinese market product, worth many tens of billions of dollars, they would very likely sell it rather than spike it.
Essentially, you are asking everyone to assume that Bytdance does not really have a financial choice in the matter, and therefore financial irrationality is evidence of corruption.
When the reality is that the money may not mean as much to them as you are asking people to assume, and that in lieu of a payout they'd rather not reward a sale to the country that is strong-arming them. Which few with financial flexibility, and a healthy ego, would.
Journalists and your everyone else enjoys free speech, it must not be curtailed, neither must it be fostered.
While companies as a disembodied judicial entity cannot have speech in the same sense as people of flesh and blood, they can, simply based on their properties, act as an amplifier or muffler.
This requires at least some level of care which cannot be guaranteed if the business is run by a company headquartered in an unfriendly foreign nation which does not allow free speech at all and only allows businesses to conduct international business that is sanctioned.(We have had numerous reports about this now over the past years that foreign investors and companies operating in China are actually competing with the Chinese state there.)
If you don't agree, let's take out China in this argument and phrase it differently:
Would you think it would've been a good idea to have foreign investors from Nazi Germany run newspapers and radios in the states in the 1930s and leading up there? (I mean we had Nazi parties in the US around that time, BUT from today's perspective we would agree that such a scenario(the media-outlets) is a clear cut case with the US-government prohibiting it.)
What was better in the 1930's was that the newspaper industry was in the business for the news. They were a news-company. These days hedge-funds and for profits(not necessarily bad but it takes a turn when it is unadulterated greed by all means necessary( The Atlantic wrote a nice piece about this where Money swoops in buys a newspaper and runs it into the ground and that regularly and at scale, just cannot find the article)). So our position is a bit dire and we have Television and an industry that strives to captivate/capitalize all the attention it can get for a few pennies to deal with these days.
The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death).
Pair that with the New Silk Road initiative and the Dollar-Imperialism the Chinese government tries to run in the Pan-Pacific region and the picture becomes less welcoming.
Don't get me wrong, there is enough blame to go around for everybody, but I rather have it come from a non fascist entity. That being said, I can go into Washington and demonstrate peacefully(!) against Biden or Trump and I can ask questions about the past. Try doing that in Bejing with respect to Xi or Tienamen Square.(So while we can blame both sides there is still more to one argument than the other, so much for whataboutism) Considering that 'Grandpa' Xi enforced a personal cult around him starting with children's school books(not unlike Putin) and with what goes on with the Uyghur population in China's north, the attempts to strong arm Taiwan , the alignment of China with Russia, the broken promise made to Hong Kong and other items, I have to say that China is fascist and the CCP communist in name only.
The concept of Lebensraum is firmly on the agenda of global and, if you are unfortunate enough, also local politics again.
China and Russia only differ in the choice of their tooling, approach and starting positions.(China is less commercially insulated than Russia it appears. Propably one of the reasons China's is a bit softer trying to incorporate time.)
From an economic perspective I totally get that no company wants to have their business taken away, but I doubt Bytedance is just a company. This is just a change in ownership, nothing out of the ordinary. The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership. That framing, in the light of what I just wrote, becomes highly suspect. Almost vicious, bordering on the willingness to divide and incite. (Which reminds me: Totalitarian regimes like to be ...
This is deeply, deeply wrong - China and Russia are natural opponents, they are two autocracies that deeply distrust each other and do not understand each other’s culture. They will never be like USA and UK.
The alignment between then, is because they both face pressure from USA. It’s not natural and is a huge failure of US foreign policy.
Russia emulates Europe, it produces weapons using German machines, and bottles vodka on Italian production lines. Buying Chinese equipment gets local governors in trouble. They are happy selling natural resources and have no real desire to compete with US in iPhone production or car market. The main friction is around territory. They are kinda like brexiteers - they don’t really have their own vision of the future outside of a narrow. Specific issue.
China is totally different, they have a vision that is very different - it is not ‘be like the west but better’ - it’s be their own thing. they are getting off oil and plan to compete in high-tech industries. That’s not to say they are better, but the plan is totally different
Well Stalin and Hitler were like that too. Luckily for the world Hitler couldn't stay his hand reaching for Moscow, otherwise the Allies wouldn't have faced a Germany being engaged in a two front war. Also, considering that Putin and XI met during the Olympic Winter Games face to face and that the invasion of Ukraine commenced right after the games as to not affront Xi, depriving him of China's moment in the Limelight is telling non the less. So there must be some mutual understanding. Especially considering that Xi is slavering over Taiwan.
> The alignment between then, is because they both face pressure from USA. It’s not natural and is a huge failure of US foreign policy.
I wouldn't consider it failure. Opponent is Opponent no matter what.
>Russia emulates Europe, it produces weapons using German machines, and bottles vodka on Italian production lines. Buying Chinese equipment gets local governors in trouble. They are happy selling natural resources and have no real desire to compete with US in iPhone production or car market. The main friction is around territory. They are kinda like brexiteers - they don’t really have their own vision of the future outside of a narrow. Specific issue.
The whole world produces weapons. This is a red herring implying that Russia is just doing what Europe does. That is outright wrong. Europe does not try to forcefully move borders attempting to annihilate a sovereign nation by committing genocide. And I doubt they are bottling Vodka from Russian production in Italy, especially not since the sanctions. Vodka may have originated in Russia, BUT every company can distill and sell it. Same goes for weapons. I also doubt that it would get anyone in trouble buying Chinese, otherwise, Me thinks, a lot of people in Russia would be in trouble, especially way out East. The way you label the War in Ukraine is also ... euphemistically put... and no, they are not like the Brexiteers. Please don't take me or anyone else here a fool. Britain left the EU because of populism and now they are dealing with the fallout. They have no notion of reviving the British Empire. Putin wants to recreate the UdSSR. He himself declared the downfall of the Soviet Union the single most geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century. In short he is a Soviet still in mind and manner.
>China is totally different, they have a vision that is very different - it is not ‘be like the west but better’ - it’s be their own thing. they are getting off oil and plan to compete in high-tech industries. That’s not to say they are better, but the plan is totally different
Really? Ask the Philippines, Vietnam or in general countries around the South China Sea, read news articles not penned by the South China Morning Post or read accounts from fishermen there. I am sure that the picture you fine there is totally different. Territorial saber rattling, building of artificial islands trying to stake a claim. China always say they come in peace and that we all should be tolerant, but when you try to see if that sentiment is true, then it is only true for others, for all other situations China comes first. Their recent political statements have become a statement of whataboutism and we are the victims of the bad bad west and we did no wrong ever... To my mind their vision of the future is a Chinese one where everything non-Chinese is to be treated as second rate at best.
They are not like the west and definitely not better, otherwise the Chinese Government wouldn't have warned against the bad influences of Christmas some months back. Open minded, tolerant... with that message I don't think so. And you are right, their plan is different. Industrial espionage on a very very large scale. And please don't try to white-wash or absolve. They are creating new power plants burning coal at a rate higher...
Haha, haha, ha...
Have you ever been to China? They have made more progress in the last few decades than the whole western world combined. And the west in in a serious decline. If anything that statement should be backwards.
Before you reflexively dismiss this argument and go hit that downwards triangle: what you are saying is China had more glory during the Opium wars than it does now. Surely you can see how absurd this statement is.
> TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly
This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.
(example based on physical addiction) If I was a smoker, and Phillip Morris completely changed it's marketing near me, and sold completely different cigarettes in my local area that were wildly different than the market standard, just because there was a local smoker inhabiting the area, I'd be furious. Especially if they were "dumbed down" versions of what actual smokers got.
If a website serves me wildly different content, even if we search for the same terms, have the same interests, then that's a load of BS. And if I was in China, I'd also be vaguely annoyed at the nanny state behavior.
"Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, 'Essays on Mind and Matter'
Do you have proof of this? Either in the positive, or the negative (if Chinese kids search for garbage they will be given garbage?)
But the materials that are "acceptable" to give to you in the first place is mostly garbage on TikTok and highly curated on the Chinese version.
That's the point.
> This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.
Really? Then this investigation should be wrong, but they are a reputable source and I trust them, especially since that is not the only report or the only source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T_Lu1S0sII
> "Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, 'Essays on Mind and Matter'
That is THE MOST inhumane and humanity denying thing I have read today. It does not matter the color of your skin or the cultural background of your upbringing, we all bleed when stabbed and we all feel pain and fear. If that sentiment is still alive in the governing ranks of that country and wide spread we should all be very very careful and worried.
> (example based on physical addiction) If I was a smoker, and Phillip Morris completely changed it's marketing near me, and sold completely different cigarettes in my local area that were wildly different than the market standard, just because there was a local smoker inhabiting the area, I'd be furious. Especially if they were "dumbed down" versions of what actual smokers got.
A) you would have to notice to be upset B) that is not how services and the internet work. We could sit side by side and use the same app and visit the same website and could,depending on connection or identifying markers still see totally different content or sentiments being expressed. Considering that we are on HN, I fear you know and you played that card deliberately non the less.
> If a website serves me wildly different content, even if we search for the same terms, have the same interests, then that's a load of BS. And if I was in China, I'd also be vaguely annoyed at the nanny state behavior.
Search for Tienamen Square inside the GFW and outside and also add the word Massacre to it and observe. We also see a less politically colored version of this in general dubbed the Search Engine Bubble. Also, you are free to be annoyed, but if you speak up you might also be 'free' to receive a free political 'reeducation' or sanctions.
Also, it's nice to see a bipartisan bill in the national interest. There used to be a saying, "politics stops at the water's edge." Every so often we remember that.
Yes, I have heard that saying being quoted some time ago.
While I mostly exist on the other side of the water's edge... I am happy and hopeful that that is the case and hope it will continue to be that way and that the circus some politicians yonder the water's edge are putting on stops.
Some things do, and should transcend, political boundaries. e.g. while I, would I be eligible to vote in the US, would most likely not vote Republican(probably not aged enough yet :D ), I must say that I like this guy https://www.facebook.com/RepZachNunn/videos/this-isnt-a-horr... simply for trying to do the right thing there. Found it while I was prompted to do some more research due to busying myself with this thread.(and it is not the only report I found... See here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S160061352...) I always thought of it to be some boogie man story made up by Falun Gong or Falun Dafa hanging about the CBD to rope in support. Finding out that it is actually substancial... I think this is my seeing evil moment if I ever had one, and I am only in front of a computer screen in my PJs.
Good idea? No. But the world isn't exactly ran on good ideas. Instead of Nazi germany newspapers they went straight to american broadcast itself and seeped in like a poison.
And the sad part is I don't even blame them. People want to hear what they agree with. Some may be legitmately brainwashed, but I've seen enough examples of individuals shunning the truth to conclude that we're well into a post-truth era.
>The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death).
And would Tiktok be the fastest growing social media if it did the same? China can force their citizens to watch whatever they deem worthy. they have literal curfews for playing games implemented by the government. imposing that onto the west is just a bad business decision.
It goes back to the root issue, many westerners have long lost that disciplined to be an educated populace, to identify and defend against bias. to will themselves towards what they need to do as opposed to want. a single social media side won't change that.
>The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership.
They would if they pulled out of the US. I'd look forward to the fallout that ensues. Maybe it will get the you to understand the power of their vote.
Really? That is like saying that Russians are always good at chess or Chinese good at Kung Fu or Japanese good at Karate.
We had this type of rhetoric during the time of the Cold War as well.
Aside from it being profiling let's entertain this:
If what you say were true, then the populace of China(to borrow your verbage) wouldn't start laying flat. You wouldn't have to introduce a system of snitching and forced conformism via the social credit system(which is less technical than is made out to believe in the west, more like some dada and wify on the bench taking notes) and you wouldn't have dissidents or the need to 'shield/protect' the population from any foreign influence via the GFW.
And onto other parts: > And would Tiktok be the fastest growing social media if it did the same? China can force their citizens to watch whatever they deem worthy. they have literal curfews for playing games implemented by the government. imposing that onto the west is just a bad business decision.
Really? It is only a crime, bad if caught and now they have been caught and called out. Also, how do you measure growth? Over the past years commercial data from within China has been dubious. And what is the fastest growing anyways? Usershare? Tiktok enjoys an unfair advantage. China has a large population and western products are not allowed to participate and e.g. Weibo or tencent are de factor monopolies. I assume it to be similar with Tiktok. Also, things that are not good for you usually are the most fun. Think junk food. There is nothing wrong with that or endulging it it(every once in a while), but, once again, it is nefarious when there is malicious purpose behind it like with Tiktok. A foreign power trying to subvert values and a way of life. And to answer your question: Yes, given that the Chinese Government is footing the bill they have more clout than their competitors because of that.
> They would if they pulled out of the US. I'd look forward to the fallout that ensues. Maybe it will get the you to understand the power of their vote.
Well, then the ownership does not change. Their choice, it is their company. They may do with it as they please, but if they don't play by the rules they may conduct business elsewhere only. Why stop a parting guest?
It didn't have to go that way but that's the direction it went. And I see no initiative to change that.
>f what you say were true, then the populace of China(to borrow your verbage) wouldn't start laying flat.
In all honestly, most of my post has nothing to do with China at all. So I have no idea what you are deriving from my statement.
>so, how do you measure growth?
As a social media platform? Aquire more users, capture to market share, and increase profit margins. Asia isn't so different from NA/EU in that regard.
Then when expanding/globalizing you adjust your platform to the culture. China has theirs, the US has a different one. Facebook has to do this, Google has to do this, Even Apple has to do this. Nothing is really unique from a business perspective.
>Usershare? Tiktok enjoys an unfair advantage.
The US doesn't care about the Chinese userbase. And if the Chinese userbase could influence platforms, Weibo would be the Facebook of the world, instead of Facebook.
That's the quirk of growth that companies can forget when expanding. You don't just get a bunch of famous or masses of users and things become profitable nor even popular. Even companies as big as Amazon may pull out of a country if it can't properly understand this.
>but if they don't play by the rules they may conduct business elsewhere only. Why stop a parting guest?
Again, I don't really care about their fate. I'm looking at the fallout from a bunch of angry ticktok users. The last time we had a bunch of angry people on social media enraged by some trivial issue we got Trump.
Maybe I can't stop the second coming, but I sure as heck won't have the wool I've my eyes again and get caught up in the petty squabbles.
If that is so altruistic, I am sure a mom from that cultural background would forfeit the future of her child so that another family(maybe her sister's) has a better life ensuring the thriving of their offspring instead. I have known many a people of Asian decent. What you describe is pure idolism. A cliche, a stereotypical, unreflected, reflexive - dare I say romatizised - vision of the Eastern Culture. If it were true, why are so many people migrating then? Away I mean? And what about the wandering workers that are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth? Also, what you are framing as logical is human nature. It is not different based on culture. Only its hue changes. You also left out my point about the generation that lies flat and other remarks.
> In all honestly, most of my post has nothing to do with China at all. So I have no idea what you are deriving from my statement.
ByteDance is a Chinese company with Bejing's blessing. The whole debate, not just our little discussion here, is framed US-China or West-China.
> Then when expanding/globalizing you adjust your platform to the culture. China has theirs, the US has a different one. Facebook has to do this, Google has to do this, Even Apple has to do this. Nothing is really unique from a business perspective.
Really? Recall project Dragonfly of Google's ? Does any Chinese company operating in other jurisdictions require a minimum percentage of Chinese shareholders or similar shenanigans?
> The US doesn't care about the Chinese userbase. And if the Chinese userbase could influence platforms, Weibo would be the Facebook of the world, instead of Facebook.
See project Dragonfly again. A lot of companies are interested in the Chinese market. That is all Bloomberg ever raves about when it comes to the Chinese market opening and Earning calls being presented. So the statement that the US(or the west in general) is not caring about the userbase in China is outright wrong. A lot of consumers, biiiiig market. They are just not allowed to touch it or under hefty penalties with big handicaps. And weibo was beaten to the punch, Tiktok wants to become the youtube/whatsapp of the world. Don't try to misdirect here ;) .
> That's the quirk of growth that companies can forget when expanding. You don't just get a bunch of famous or masses of users and things become profitable nor even popular. Even companies as big as Amazon may pull out of a country if it can't properly understand this.
See my previous reply. I must also add, tongue in cheek, .... or is coerced to leave because of unfair competitive scewing. Amazon is the kingpin of online retail and must be checked in in general. Such a 800pound Gorilla knows what it is doing. So I doubt that would qualify for your argument to begin with.
> Again, I don't really care about their fate. I'm looking at the fallout from a bunch of angry ticktok users. The last time we had a bunch of angry people on social media enraged by some trivial issue we got Trump.
That is a discussion worthy of its own thread and I am not touching it in order to stay focused(nice try though). Let's just say that doing the right thing should be done regardless of the implications because it is worth doing. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be smart about it. And reigning in China's delusions of gradeur and Xi's pipedream of wanting a legacy as big as Mao's no matter the cost on the back of millions of people is the right thing. You can't let a bully step over you.
America did. Still does. And now it’s banning and regulating superior products off the market.
Where and when did America claim that?
The Biden admin has also been looking to halt BYD sales in the US, citing security threats [0]. BYD’s cars are often cheaper than Teslas and very well reviewed
0: https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/24087919/biden-tariff-c...
China did. Still does. And now it's begging and suing to keep those freedoms.
Although it is fun that it's totally fine for an American company to take the reins and continue on.
This could have been done with emphasis on the way China engineers TikTok/Douyin in each country and the effects on the end users - but that wouldn't make anyone with money or power very happy. The thing it does is fine - merely where the data goes and who pulls the levers is the concern.
The "ban" will change nothing in our society, thank God.
The important part should be understanding the whys and building access to a robust nonpunitive way out for those who want it.
But the profits of addiction are too important either way.
Every company that complies with the local laws can open any kind of company in China and they do.
The US has to do the same per WTO law as long as Tiktok obeys the US law. And it does. Hence the made up 'national security' horsesh*t to justify the ban - otherwise it would run afoul of WTO rules.
US news media is able to spin headlines to maximize drama and outrage for the chumbox sales while misinforming readers. The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world and so US mainstream news media doesn't have to seek excellence in evidence, integrity, accuracy, or precision.
>The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world
Objectively wrong. It's one of the most educated countries in the world, just mediocre compared to the rest of the OECD. They're more educated than China, no matter how well a small number of urban Chinese students do on international standardised tests.
a. Quantitatively
- Reading: Canada is 3rd, America is 24th
- Science: Canada is 7th, America is also 24th
- Math: Canada is 9th, America is 39th
^ There should be negligible differences between them given vast similarities.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/02/15/u-s-stude...
b. Qualitatively - Meet and talk to enough people from Asia (Japan, China, Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China) and Europe (Iberian and Eastern) & UK. And then talk to many Americans from anywhere other than from the coasts. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, MAGA, and QAnon are the mainstream norm rather than the exception. The difference is: they don't have government censorship, a totalitarian regime, or social credit habits as an excuse for their ignorance. There are billboards with borderline racist MAGA slogans in the South US.
One country has borderline racist MAGA slogans. The other has Han Chauvinism and forced propaganda for a totalitarian state. There's plenty of conspiracy theories and misinformation in both countries. Here's a study showing that 13.8% of people in China considered GMO foods as a form of bioterrorism targeted at China[1].
I'm not saying America doesn't have problems, but most of the criticisms you lobbed at America can just as easily be lobbed at China, and yet China seems to be economically expanding rather rapidly relative to America or most places. I'll also say being highly educated isn't all roses, every country with tertiary education levels as high or higher than Canada's has a well sub-replacement birthrate - the education levels you idealise aren't even independantly sustainable.
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41538-018-0018-4
The likely outcome is that TikTok will stop operating in the US and continue in Europe and other places plus Douyin will continue in China.
1) Their algorithms (presumably video recommendations) are proprietary and used by their other Chinese apps
2) TikTok revenue isn't that significant for them
Maybe these reasons are bogus, but I'd not be surprised if they do refuse to sell.
So just install it like a normal application instead of using an "app store". But does this mean if I host the .apk or whatever on my personal website I would be breaking the law?
Yes, provided you are doing it in a way "through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application" [1]. (It would be perfectly legal to go to TikTok.com, however.)
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521... § 2(a)(1)(A)
The bill itself says:
> The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated...
So the website is explicitly included in that
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
Unfortunately that leaves Instagram, which is in many ways worse. Maybe Elon Musk can buy that one and destroy it next. He already did us a solid by ruining Twitter.
We need open ecosystems and access to full root-level control of our devices by default. Accept no substitutes.
No, you'd just go to the website.
So just install it like a normal application instead of using an "app store". But does this mean if I host the .apk or whatever on my personal website I would be breaking the law?
/s
My point is that it's impossible to prove what the commenter was asking for.
For anyone who uses TikTok regularly, it's evident there frequently political content that outright contradict's China's positions, spreading unfettered through the platform.
The same govt that screwed the entire world with Covid-19 will use tiktok for nefarious purposes. This isn’t a stretch.
https://www.amazon.com/Unrestricted-Warfare-Chinese-Wang-Xia...
How does someone do data collection on how the Chinese government weaponizes a social media platform? That would almost certainly involve Tailored Access Operations (or whatever they are calling offensive cyber warfare these days), not only of questionable legality but definitely compromising the sort of Tactics/Techniques/Procedures you REALLY don't want made public.
Also, who said we're going to firewall them?
The Tik Tok ban is years late and I don't know why any US citizen could not understand why it's the right thing to do, unless on the payroll of the Chinese government.
If TikTok were breaking US laws and refused to comply that'd be one thing, but that's not the case. They say their just worried about "influence" which is beyond hypocritical and not really grounds for censorship. Should they ban websites hosted in other countries next?
Like it or not, your freedom to access whatever software you wish is only really possible because you have a state that is capable of resisting foreign pressure to allow you to do so. This move is very much part of that removing leverage from an explicitly illiberal group. Paradox of Intolerance and so forth. You can pridefully choose to reject that, but I don't think your freedoms will last very long then.
I don't think that having access to websites and media in China, alongside all the websites and media from everywhere else on Earth, will result in us electing congressmen who are secretly working for China. There is zero evidence that TikTok is making that happen. There's no evil on TikTok that isn't on facebook and youtube. What good is it for us to voluntarily give up our freedoms in order to keep the China boogeyman from taking them from us?
Apple has LGBT+ and BLM wallpapers on the phone by default. TikTok only reaches everyone with TikTok installed (and even then, only those that actually uses the app). Apple reaches everyone with an iPhone with its propaganda.
I actually truly believe we should do this- a GDPR style bill for the US that protects people's right to privacy and limits corporations ability to influence our governments. The fact that we know how easy it is for companies to do this but are just upset that a specific company is doing it tells me we're approaching this in the wrong way.
I’m not against such a privacy law but I think it’s orthogonal to the TikTok issue.
It's not a red scare if it is true. And it's not a red scare because China isn't being targeted here because they are Communist - they are being targeted because they are a geopolitical adversary. Russia would be treated in the same manner if some killer app came out of there, and they aren't Communist.
You can't miss that if you're even half smart or don't have an agenda.
So if they know it’s harmful, they have an interest on showing low quality content to the western audience and possibly psychologically and intellectually affect an entire generation.
This is pure conspiracy theory. You think the nation that produces and loves Grand Theft Auto needs a relatively puritan foreign country, where certain depictions of death are restricted in media, weed and porn are totally illegal, to push such debauchery on the American people?
Vine hit the American streets long before TikTok before it was killed by mismanagement.
TikTok curated content without the need for a user to do anything else than scroll. You can have a remarkably well personalized TikTok experience without liking, following, or saving any content.
This seems to me to be one of things we probably should not have done.
They get a free pass to use licensed music because it’s a huge marketing channel for the labels. Lose America and that goes away.
They could also tell TikTok users to install a VPN and access the servers in China directly.
I actually see this as a silver lining. I want young people to realize the government effects them and can directly ruin things they enjoy. I want young people to be more involved in politics and to vote.
Would you also consider it a win if young people realize the dangers of social media apps owned by geopolitical competitors able to alter the mindset of the population?
I want people to be more involved in politics and I want more people to vote. Wanting more people to vote is a safe side of history to be on I think.
I also want people to be able to access the content and information they choose. If that is the content and information on TikTok, who am I to deny them? I believe in free speech, morally (I say morally because, yes, I know the 1st Amendment doesn't apply everywhere, morally).
This is going to be a hilarious statement in 20-50 years.
It's funny because on HN of all places, where all wildly successful companies are ran as absolute monarchies, and all the devices we type on are produced by companies ran as absolute monarchies, there's this undeserved reverence for "democracy" as if it's some sacred church or something.
If the voting population is so easily swayed by a video scrolling app, maybe, just maybe democracy isn't such a good idea? Would you work for a company where the CEO makes important decisions based on the amalgamation of 30 second videos that happen to come across his/her feed? I wouldn't. I don't think I want to participate in a country ran like that either. I'd expect the decisions to appear schizophrenic, which quite frankly describes our current political situation in the US.
Like, we have 100K+ fentanyl overdoses a year in the US, and I don't see any TikToks "informing voters" about that. No one cares. In fact, I don't even expect normal people to care about it---in a healthy society they shouldn't even be aware of it. It would take a special person, who is egoically invested in the health of his population to change that. Someone like a startup CEO, ala Washington, Jobs, etc.
So no, you're not on the "safe side of history" by advocating for something that's politically fashionable at the moment. History is written (and re-written) by the winners, and I wouldn't put my money on "democracy".
You can amass more reach and influence than many of the biggest TV stations / newspapers of the previous generation with nothing more than an internet connection.
And who holds the levers to that reach? The social media companies. If they want that account’s posts and I be less visible to users they’ll be able to do it in a heartbeat (and have!)
My whole point is that there are literally billions of entities (everyone on Earth with an internet connection) who also have the ability to alter public discourse at scale. Hence why it's a vague boogeyman... the phrase "alter the mindset of a population" could be used to describe anything from a Orwellian propaganda machine to a Mr. Beast video.
In the 1990's, you could've claimed "Tetris is a software product developed by a geopolitical competitor (Russia) that has the capability to alter the mindset of the population" and you would've been right, but it would've been a silly thing to get worked up over.
It is an absolute firehose of data on users and in aggregate, that is incredibly powerful. "Oh look, more people than usual have been working in office building 12 at Lockheed Martin this week" etc.
As you say, another possible purpose is that TikTok is used as a source of data and intel. I suppose it is a fine source for that, but also, if that's all China really wants, they can probably just buy most of that data on the shadowy data markets. The US Government shows no signs of stopping our personal data from being sold.
Hopefully the scars from Gaza remain with them and they take a different stance with Israel. A TikTok ban killing off one of the most desired career paths of this generation (TikTok influencer) will have a lasting impact on them when they take the reigns.
This is economically irrational to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. If Beijing truly does this, it somewhat cements the argument that TikTok was a CCP policy tool.
To what end? It isn't going to placate the hawks in America. And it's likely to inflame them elsewhere, e.g. in Europe. The only way you can position it as a win is within China's domestic politics, where it would save face for Xi and his acolytes. (Hence, the inefficiency of dictatorship.)
do not discount the importance of this; much of CCP's actions revolve around its survival