The only argument that speaks for allowing an state controlled media company from a hostile foreign power to operate in your country, in my opinion, is to trust in the ultimate wisdom of the consumer.
ByteDance employs ex-NATO officials at high ranking positions. So it's tough to say if they are being wholly by a "hostile foreign power" as you put it.
Thus whole thing reeks of boomer Chinese and U.S. spies believing in magical social media mind control powers and fighting a war over something that doesn't exist in any such meaningful form.
I get where you are coming from but I feel you are trivialising it a bit. It is only social media recommendations but I think they are a tool in information warfare. I won't cite any sources so feel free to disregard but social media is a major driver of information consumption today and it can be used to serve ideological ends if those who control it desire so.
I don't know anything about the geofencing psyop bit though.
There are dozens of companies with vastly more cultural literacy vying to manipulate you into buying goods every day. Amidst the sea of "look at my notification! Look at my recommendation! ANNOYING clap AD clap TIME!!!!!!!", why do you think some random overly angry/insulting recommendation with a bizarre or nonsensical framing coming from China is going to change minds rather than be ignored?
Foreign propaganda tends to gain traction when laundered through someone people pay attention to. (E-)celebrities, political figures, charismatic activist figureheads. Not a recommendation algorithm endlessly exploited by advertisers to get a tiny crumb of attention from.
The Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense have minimal literacy in the economics of attention and it shows.
Why? You could just hire a non-ex-goverment employee to do that. At least they won't come with the ideological baggage that would prevent them from engaging in sabotaging their own government. Also you paint the picture of these officials as self-serving turncoats. It might be true of some but I find it hard to believe that it is an acceptable generalisation.
ByteDance/TikTok is suing the US government. Yes, foreigners who operate in the US have standing in US courts. Especially in this case where they're being targeted by an act of Congress.
And while US courts have repeatedly shown bias in rulings against non US companies, even if they are from close allies, it's just a limited bias. I.e. you have still a standing it's just slightly harder.
In difference to US companies suing in China where you have on paper also a standing but the bias against you in all kinds of subtle ways is so earth shattering that most times it's not even worth considering suing.
I think what is most interesting about this article and what it highlights is that software, especially software that is as big as tik Tok is almost offered the same protections that modern corporations are afforded. They simply are their own entity. To say that tik Tok is Chinese owned as said in the article is not necessarily true as the software is based in the cloud and the business side is located in the Cayman Islands. If America wins this prosecution this could have big impacts on other large tech companies as their “nationality” simply does not matter as they have become their own global entity.
Word-smithing. The Beijing government can tell the TikTok management, "give us all your data" and they will have to do it. That is not true of your other hypothetical companies.
There are very few companies that (1) operate at large scale in the US, and (2) have such an obligation to a hostile government.
Chinese government has a seat on the board and there is a law that requires all Chinese companies provide data if queried (this sounds highly similar to U.S. national security laws).
Chinese national security law essentially requires cooperation with anything regulators deem necessary. This isn’t like the western world where the law is written from a presumption that citizens enjoy individualism as a default.
> Article 11: Citizens of the People's Republic of China, all state organs and armed forces, each political parties and mass organization, enterprises, public institutions and other social organizations, all have the responsibility and obligation to preserve national security.
> Article 77: Citizens and organizations shall perform the following obligations to preserve national security:
> (4) Providing conditions to facilitate national security efforts and other assistance;
> (5) Providing public security organs, state security organs or relevant military organs with necessary support and assistance;
> (7) Other duties provided by law or administrative regulations.
> Article 79: Enterprises, public institutions, and organizations shall cooperate with relevant departments in employing relevant security measures as required by national security efforts.
As a European I couldn't care less about Tiktok spying on me. US companies and NSA do the same.
My problem is the unfair competition of Chinese app devs having access to Western markets when Western app devs don't have the same level of access to the Chinese market.
People always treat it as hyperbole but I really think that the point of this is being missed. I don't like when anyone spies on people and think we need much much better data privacy laws for the modern generation.
That said, there's a large difference between the US/Europe spying on each other, and a country like China, who (along with the US and Europe) has plans to go to war should they deem it necessary.
I will not be shocked if this generation is remembered as the biggest security leak in history.
If we weren't in the Second Cold War against an autocratic near-peer rival, I would be more sympathetic to this "both sides are the same" argument. But given the context, both sides aren't the same as far as my security is concerned. I don't want this rival to control the most powerful information warfare tool ever invented.
As a European, I agree with US being cautious about TikTok, you're going to get a bunch of data about people who are young, taking things out of context can make them blackmailable in the future, whenever they're in charge of something.
What I don't understand is this hatred of Trump, he was the first one to consider China an enemy, I remember when he started with the tariffs, the whole democratic party went crazy. Trump has been right about many things that now are like normality.
I remember the first act of Biden was to stop a railroad strike and causing a environmental disaster the day after
Trump is a hot headed contrarian and Biden is a people pleaser who maintains the status quo and doesn't rock the boat. That doesn't mean that Trump is wrong to worry about China and it doesn't mean that Democrats think China's dominance is A-OK either.
I am more keen to consider democrats as contrarian, I don't think they've any idea, rather than "beat Trump", "Trump bad", "There will be no democracy if Trump wins elections"
As another European, it seems to me like you haven't given much attention to internal US politics. Trump has (at the very least) repeatedly questioned some foundational principles of democracy. I recommend you check out "Project 2025" - if this prospect doesn't make you worry about the political future of the most powerful nation on earth, then we have a fundamentally different understanding of what a healthy democracy looks like.
Democrats (and I don't mean the party) should be worried about Trump and what comes with him.
> As a European I couldn't care less about Tiktok spying on me. US companies and NSA do the same.
I don't understand this argument. Are you OK with US companies or the NSA doing it? How does one group doing something bad justify not caring about another group doing it?
Not to mention, the US is an allied country whose interests overwhelmingly align with the interests of most of Europe. Conceptually, surveillance sucks - but if these are my only choices, I'd much rather have a dossier with the NSA than with their Chinese counterpart.
> How does one group doing something bad justify not caring about another group doing it?
If you have two choices and both behave same on some principle, trying to have a principled stand is futile.
> I'd much rather have a dossier with the NSA than with their Chinese counterpart.
That's a naive view. For Italians, dossier with Giorgia Meloni or her friends can be far more dangerous than with Xi. By proximity and relevance, they are more likely to be vocal about/active in Italian politics. Also, Italian govt. has far more power to influence their lives than Chinese govt. has.
As an Indian, I'll be far more concerned about how much I am tracked by Modi/Indian police/agencies than the Chinese counterparts.
your hyperbole does not contribute to this conversation; it only makes China look worse. please attempt to control your emotional connection to your home country before posting.
On HN, if not automatic china bad, it must mean my home country is china. It has come to this.
I think TikTok is sorely needed. Maybe HN folks need to use TikTok more since according to them, it’s a machine for CCP propaganda. Let’s get more balanced views here.
To be clear, I’m a big admirer of China on a cultural level and I do read and listen to Chinese media (though not TikTok/Douyin). I certainly don’t blame China for divisions in the Middle East and I don’t think I've ever seem that claim here. Those divisions are ancient.
Supporting Russia’s revanchist war on Ukraine has undeniably hurt the ability of many western countries, especially in Europe to trust Chinese controlled social media or infrastructure, though.
>Supporting Russia’s revanchist war on Ukraine has undeniably hurt the ability of many western countries
I don't think China "supports" Russia's war efforts like how the US is sending billions and weapons to Ukraine. They're buying cheap oil (just like India) and ignoring the call for sanctions on Russia from the same entities that have sanctioned China.
Why should China follow those sanctions? It makes no sense for China.
After all, it's the G7 that has excluded China, India, and other BRICS members. It's G7 that has set out to slow China's growth and their rise in high value exports such as tech. So why should China then follow G7 sanctions? Some perspective is needed.
Blame should be put solely on the entities who started the war.
It is worth pausing for a moment to ask who these policies really favour though. I'd contend that the reason why China blocks Western media access is because they want their people to be poorly informed, especially about the weaknesses of the CCP. The policy creates weaknesses in China and makes it easier for them to descend into groupthink. AFAIK they haven't made radical changes to prevent something like the Great Leap recurring, they still have a dangerously centralised system that could cannibalise itself in a 5-year groupthink episode.
The reason the West generally doesn't adopt policies like that is because we believe in letting people speak the truth to power and that generally gives us an advantage because we have more overall perspectives and are more likely to organise around the truth. It is challenging to suppress discussions about our own weaknesses and we are aware of where the major problem points are likely to be.
Mimicking China's policies restricting access to markets is probably a loss for us. We want asymmetry here, it gives us an advantage. Given that we seem to have/be giving up the industrial edge it is worth holding on to what we have left.
Well this absolutely isn't true. Foreign access to the Chinese market is incredibly restricted. Most businesses require a local partner to operate in China, the capital requirements are incredibly high, corruption is through the roof, and when the local partner or the government rip you off, you absolutely will not have equal protection under the law.
> Most businesses require a local partner to operate in China
This, again, is a free speech issue. If your business truly have nothing to do with free speech (sorry, but iCloud and Microsoft 365 all had a free speech issue since they enable people to connect and publish), for example Amazon, no local partner is required. And Amazon has been there since forever.
Sometimes, even in a domain with free speech issue, you can have market access to China. For example, Steam is able to sell games in China since many years ago, even with their community page frequently blocked by GFW due to mostly unregulated user-generated content. They certainly can be cut-off: they rely on Alipay and WeChat Pay for payment. But this hasn't happened.
Oh, and Epic, GOG too.
> the capital requirements are incredibly high, corruption is through the roof, and when the local partner or the government rip you off, you absolutely will not have equal protection under the law.
While I indeed don't feel safe about the law protection. I wonder have you actually tried to setup a business in China? Or you are just repeating what you saw on Reddit?
The restricted and prohibited categories have certainly been liberalised a lot recently, but it definitely hasn’t been trimmed down to only free-speech related categories.
I’m not sure how you’d connect mining, energy, health care, transport, agriculture, or quite a few of those categories to free speech.
> While I indeed don't feel safe about the law protection. I wonder have you actually tried to setup a business in China?
Yes, I’ve been involved in a couple of WOFEs and quite a few JVs. I’ve worked on and off with companies doing business in China for the past 20 years or so. Access to legal protections has improved somewhat, but it’s been a (sometimes very serious) issue for many of the people I’ve worked with.
I don't know if it's fair to say that the CCP should be characterized as a weak government, as opposed to the government that pulled off a miracle in modernizing China and competing on the world stage.
A lot of people criticize the state of Chinese academics as uncreative and fraudulent, and their industries as copycats, but there might cross a tipping point where China is clearly more innovative than the EU, even as the EU leads the world in democratically-minded regulations and civic rights.
There are many world democracies and autocracies. We absolutely should never expect that merely following some first principles of free markets and democracies should determine why some nations rank atop the world.
> The reason the West generally doesn't adopt policies like that is because we believe in letting people speak the truth to power and that generally gives us an advantage because we have more overall perspectives and are more likely to organise around the truth. It is challenging to suppress discussions about our own weaknesses and we are aware of where the major problem points are likely to be.
>The reason the West generally doesn't adopt policies like that is because we believe in letting people speak the truth to power and that generally gives us an advantage because we have more overall perspectives and are more likely to organise around the truth. It is challenging to suppress discussions about our own weaknesses and we are aware of where the major problem points are likely to be.
The reason the West doesn't adopt policies like this is that we run our own propaganda operations against our own citizens. Corporate advertising is an arm of this. The people and organizations with the most wealth and power can buy the biggest megaphones, and our system just lets those viewpoints get massively amplified. We don't need to suppress individual thought and speech, since it largely isn't competitive in the average American's mind.
they use that information to manipulate you as much as they can
which is most people is a lot more then they think it is
like a _huge lot more_, humans are fundamentally quite manipulable
especially teens, the main target audience of TickTock
well they also can use the information to idk. know exactly when it's the best time to kitnap a kit of someone they want to blackmail, it's not that china hasn't done stuff like that more then just one or two times
I care a lot about TikTok spying on me because they can then use that information to manipulate speech in our society to serve the needs of the CCP. Speech and exchange of ideas is foundational for democracy and if it is corrupted through hard to detect algorithmic manipulation, it can be destabilizing.
I ALSO think the lack of reciprocal market access and the differences between TikTok (its equivalent) in China and the US version are concerning. It’s telling that children in China have caps on how much time they can spend in the app, but the US version doesn’t have any such thing.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. TikTok isn’t being banned by the US government because it’s spying on Americans. It’s being banned because it can be used as an incredibly effective mass propaganda machine.
If a foreign adversary directly controls the media your citizens consume, that is a pretty huge risk.
What an all around terrible situation. The US government has had over two decades to come up with general laws to protect personal information and maintain competition by requiring open interoperability - protecting against all attackers foreign and domestic. Instead, they've sat on their hands while the surveillance industry has been allowed to keep festering, becoming ever more entrenched in Americans' day to day lives while being championed as bastions of "growth" and "innovation".
Now that a single foreign company has gained the level of breakout popularity that had already been achieved by 20+ domestic companies, it's time for pearl clutching galore. Every single argument being levied at China and their authoritarianism is a dynamic we've already been suffering from domestic corporations and their authoritarianism. Give me a break!
Instead of hanging their hats on this simplistic election year stunt, the government could still create universal regulations that reign in the surveillance industry and give Americans control of their personal data and digital lives, preserving individual liberty rather than trying to mitigate the downstream effects on the collective. Yet apart from essentially toothless regulations by a few states regarding some very specific types of personal data, still crickets.
So I guess the lawmakers' concerns still aren't really about protecting Americans, but just making sure nominally American surveillance companies at least get paid when Americans get surveilled and propagandized by foreign powers? It seems like no matter which way this case gets decided and which way the precedent gets set, We the People are set to lose.
That was implied, and I don't see how spelling it out changes anything. The nominally domestic corporations aren't exactly sitting around fretting about how to preserve freedom.
The issue is not protection of consumers, worthy as that is as a goal. No one ever said it was. I'd like to see that achieved, too. But your "20+ domestic companies" are not owned by enemy countries.
The issue is surveillance by a hostile nation. It's not a "stupid election year stunt," since we have elections every other year, and that rule would preclude any effort to do anything ever.
Which even without Tiktok, can be straightforwardly done by China (and every other foreign power) paying the domestic surveillance companies for access and influence in straightforward business relationships. And if that gets clamped down on in another decade, then by paying more for not so straightforward business relationships.
China would have to pay Meta and Google a LOT of money to get the same kind of info it gets from TikTok directly. And Meta and Google would report those payments in some way.
Could you expand on specifically what you think is happening? Cynicism is easy but it is no substitute for analysis. Disliking domestic surveillance does not make for a foreign nation automatically getting the info.
That kind of assumes Oracle is lying about the data they host and control for the US instance of TikTok, or that Oracle is unable to secure said data.
A few things are curious to me about all of this, which leads me to believe it’s political posturing.
The EU has a similar arrangement to the US in that they have an “auditor partner” and host the entirety of the EU infrastructure and services within the EU. The EU is not taking severe business actions in the shadow of undisclosed national security grounds.
There’s frequent statements about “massive data collection”. What data? I can only find IP addresses and volunteered contact information being collected. TikTok doesn’t have access to device location data, so IP addresses are the closest there is to geo location. TikTok has said they scrub that when stored - easy to verify.
TikTok has given their auditor (at least in the US) access to the recommendation engine algos. I assume that access comes with some ability to confirm what they audit is what’s actually in use, but haven’t seen reporting that confirms it.
And finally I don’t understand why so many politicians, including all presidential candidates and a not insignificant number of congressional members use TikTok.
Just some of the reasons I think this is more special interest/politically motivated rather than actual national security issues that would be any different than other socials.
> There’s frequent statements about “massive data collection”. What data?
That is a good question. Answer: among other data, the very data of the platform itself. Everything nearly every young person has said in a message on the platform, public or private. Everything they view, and how they view it. Same with interactions. Easily enough to build a complete psychographic profile ("who in this list is most vulnerable to coercion?") and a convincing AI clone if one were so inclined.
And that's if the mere content viewed or posted or interacted with, wasn't itself enough for blackmail. Which it often is. It could be something as simple as coercing a summer intern to visit a website on a vulnerable computer, if they want to prevent those DMs to Alice or Bob from being leaked. Oops, now all those trade secrets, aren't.
> I don’t understand why so many politicians, including all presidential candidates and a not insignificant number of congressional members use TikTok.
Most of them, I assume, aren't reaching out to their mistresses or paramours over tiktok. Location data collected by the app obviously is still an issue there.
It's not great to think about, and it's not a justification for actions about which the blackmail revolves, but that's how some intelligence ops have historically happened.
This is the argument that Facebook/Google aren't actually selling your information.
I think "selling your information" is a good high level description that conveys the essence of what is going on - your information is being used by whomever will pay to use it. But yes, digging into the details it's more like F/G are trusted third parties who keep comprehensive surveillance records on you, and sell services based on exploiting those records, with an incentive to not leak the whole trove because it's their competitive advantage.
The argument for this topic then becomes if F/G are found to be providing services to foreign governments that undermine national security, domestic laws can then be made to stop this behavior. But this assumes that the way those services can be abused will be blatant, the foreign powers using those services will be easy to spot, and also that foreign governments won't be able to exfiltrate significant parts of the databases through their use of the services (what Cambridge Analytica did).
Focusing on F/G also skips the entire ecosystem of smaller players that don't have the scale, scope, or product to be acting as trusted third parties, but instead do just sell the raw records themselves - to F/G, and also to any startup that comes along with funding and an acceptable narrative. Like the carriers and intermediaries selling phone tower data. And that whole cottage industry of apps and frameworks that collect data. And ANPR and other pure infrastructure providers. And the traditional surveillance industry ("credit bureaus").
The essential commonality in both of those is that while it feels good to address the most glaring high-level problems, as long as the underlying incentives remain it just becomes a game of wack-a-mole. And wack-a-mole isn't enough to stop determined foreign actors.
And, while this certainly won't happen unless things seriously escalate, the US Government could absolutely pull whatever records they want, whenever they want, and if need be charge the US companies and its members with appropriate crimes.
You cannot do that to a foreign government. I'm not naive enough to think that these corps aren't spying on people or that they're not selling that data to foreign, even hostile actors, but there's simply a different level of consequence.
If you replace China with Russia you can quickly see how fucking absurd this is. Yes NO ONE should be able to do this kind of shit, but it's absolutely another tier of fucked when you don't even have the veil of government as a threat to make people think twice.
> Which even without Tiktok, can be straightforwardly done by China (and every other foreign power) paying the domestic surveillance companies for access and influence
I think your definition of surveillance is too broad. If any data broker can pay Facebook to get my data, then it's effectively public data and therefore cannot really be a national security concern. Alternatively, if TikTok hoards all their user data to use against a presidential candidate in 20-30 years, that is a security concern. It's also a concern that China can, at any time, change the algorithm to promote their own talking points. Second hand data and access is simply a much different ball game compared to direct platform control
A graph of people, who they know, their movements, lifestyles, and political beliefs is mostly certainly a national security concern, regardless of whether it's widely known.
Addressing "change the algorithm to promote their own talking points" is what I meant by "maintain competition by requiring open interoperability". Bundling content publishing/hosting services together with client presentation software (including feed ranking editorialization) is anticompetitive and should be prohibited by requiring published APIs for all interaction between the two products. Then users could use competitive clients to access TikTok content (and Facebook content, etc), rather than having to suffer whatever manipulation has been deemed legally acceptable.
> Now that a single foreign company has gained the level of breakout popularity that had already been achieved by 20+ domestic companies, it's time for pearl clutching galore.
Well seeing as this other country is likely to be at war with either us or our allies soon, yes that is a pretty big deal.
If a country that we are likely to be at war with has significant influencer over our population, that is indeed a big deal.
> So I guess the lawmakers' concerns still aren't really about protecting Americans,
Of course it is about protecting Americans. It is about protecting Americans and our allies from the effects of an upcoming war between super powers.
That is very much a reasonable concern.
> We the People are set to lose.
No we don't. If an enemy country is less effectively able to wage war against us or our allies, that would be a win for our country. Us and our allies winning wars is better than us losing them.
China will start it when they invade our ally Taiwan.
It would also, almost certainly involve a pre-emptive strike from china onto american forces. This would be because China knows that the only way to have even a chance of success is to strike first against the USA.
Maybe a politician will be elected in Taiwan that China really doesn't like. Maybe the decades long, existing trends will continue towards the Taiwanese people no longer thinking themselves as having any sort of chinese identity. Or maybe Xi will simply try to distract the population from problems at home with a foolish hopeless war. There are a lot of possibilities!
> How long has the US or its allies been planning
They aren't planning on starting a war. If China doesn't invade Taiwan, there will be no war.
But yes, the USA would absolutely defend Taiwan from an invasion, and already gives Taiwan weapons to do so.
I hope that some of the politicians in china will eventually learn how foolish such an invasion will be. Or, perhaps, China will simply saber rattle and do nothing like it has been sabre rattling for decades.
China has enough problems as it is, but there is still a chance that they will go off the deep end and invade our allies.
If that happens though, the USA will absolutely defend against such an invasion though.
Nobody in government leadership and military command is concerned about authoritarianism and civilian surveillance: These are passionate ethics notions that don't have pragmatic importance. What they care about is giving a major de facto enemy nation (who it's also jointly preparing a conventional and nuclear war against) substantial media production capabilities and backdoor staging areas within its own borders. It's tantamount to granting Germany broadcasting control over most domestic US airwaves prior to 1941. Wars may be decided by the beliefs of the citizens who doomscroll TikTok.
no one will ever convince me that any of the owners of megasocial companies are benevolent while state backed are somehow different. none of these people should have the kind of power they have—whether governments or billionaires, no matter their nationality.
if we’re declaring that tiktok gives china massive amounts of power then this means that twitter gives elon massive amounts of power and amazon gives bezos massive amounts of power. if we’re declaring this is happening, then no, i don’t want anyone to have that kind of power. particularly small groups of billionaires who are shady and dark af. and who refuse to be transparent. and who refuse to be held accountable. and who actively take a “we rich deserve privacy protections and you non-billionaire peasants give us all of your secrets.”
if we’re declaring tiktok gives this kind of power then we’re absolute fools if we don’t stop them all. and i don’t think that’s hyperbolic.
I actually don't know the answer to this. The US government has more influence over US companies, but US companies also have more influence over the US government.
im absolutely cynical these days, so take that into account, but i’m skeptical if some billionaires are influenced at all by the us government let alone “controlled”
either way, if social media in its current form is that dangerous, and it very well may be, why do you believe any group should have that kind of power? that seems so strange to me.
How has banning TikTok helped India or changed the situation at all? What did they gain from it, in your opinion? As an Indian, it seems to just be another in a long list of app / internet bans and controls from a country that bans every thought and news the government doesn't like. For a country whose most prominent journalists are forced to post news reporting on YouTube as all channels have been grabbed by the ruling party, of course they will jump to banning things they don't like.
I don't think the reasons are easily digested. That social media does manipulate people at scale so a foreign government shouldn't be doing that. Once you broach that people ask: Why is it acceptable to do to ourselves? Which moves people nervously close to asking: Why aren't domestic social media algorithms regulated?
I find that a lot of these games are against opponents (real or imagined) that see the chessboard. They see moves ahead and realize that asking question x inevitable leads to y leads to z and z means that I lose money so let's act as if x is ridiculous or not feasible or crazy.
my issue with TikTok is not its privacy policy, or whether it spies on me or not. my issue with TikTok is it does not enforce its community standards on pro-CCP stances
i've reported over 100 antisemitic content and comments - none of them have been taken down
simply having an israel flag and yellow ribbon on your tiktok name can result in over 20 antisemitic replies, even if your comment has nothing to do with the conflict
this lack of action seems to contribute to the growing number of teens developing antisemetic views, which is deeply, deeply troubling
you've put your political position in your name on a social network, every comment you make is now directly connected to it. anyone trying to do something that has "nothing to do with the conflict" is reminded of the situation because of your choice of name.
> moreover, why should one be targeted by harassment by simply being born in a certain country?
When you type something like this, does it at least cross your mind that palestinians are humans, too? For their disgrace, they were also born in a certain country.
did i say something about the Palestinians? read my statement again - no one should be targeted by harassment by simply being born in a certain country - that includes Israelis, Palestinians, or any other nationality
I could not agree with you more. I hope you do say the same when Israel does the collective punishment on the Gazans. When the Israeli Minister says, phrases like human animals. I can understand being harassed just for by being born in a particular part of the world. But you do need to realize that it has been nothing short of appalling crimes committed against Palestinians by the Israeli regime. Not now, not today, but for the best part of the whole century. In that context a flag does evoke more than a sense of connection, it invariably evokes the crimes that are committed under it. Especially every citizen has served in the militterry apparatus in some for.
I would argue that it is though. There are other symbols which you can use which are not associated with the actions of your government, such as the Star of David or a Menorah.
I remember during the Iraq war that many Americans as they traveled liked to put a Canadian flag on their backpack to distance them selves from the actions of their government, which they—and many others—correctly deemed immoral and unjust. Putting the Israeli flag and a yellow banner (which is worn by Israeli government officials) strongly indicates that you are at least sympathetic to the actions of your government.
That's what you think those symbols mean for these people.
In the post-Oct 7 context, most likely, and if we're to be charitable here (and absent any other signals to the contrary) what they meant with those symbols was some mixture of "Our people are under attack, we need to stick together" and "Bring the hostages home, please."
Your misconstrual of the yellow ribbon, which obviously has deep grassroots origins (and in the current context only refers to the wish for a speedy return of the hostages) as being somehow suspect simply because it is also worn by government officials -- seems especially inappropriate, in this context.
And it certainly is not appropriate for you to tell them that they should be using the Star of David or other religious symbols, which have entirely personal meaning to them, in their stead.
What matters here is that there's no way these people deserve, or even remotely deserve, to be assuaged with antisemitic abuse (for the sake of simplicity, let's just assume that's what these replies actually were) from anyone. Even if some of these people were also indicating (via the Israeli flag or other means) some degree of support for their government's policies.
That's the main point, and the only point really, to be drawn from these observations of antisemitic abuse (assuming they are accurate).
BTW this applies to pretty much any national flag, in any context. One can think whatever one wants to about it, privately. But there's no reason the person displaying it should be subjected to comments of any kind (particularly comments directed at their identity) simply for displaying it.
It's just one of those things we need to cut people slack for.
the space is for your name, & your flag is not your name. nation flags are inherently political. that said by all means indicate what you like in your name, it is for you to decide. your decision to use a flag will trigger positive and negative responses. i'm just answering so you understand why you're getting the responses you're getting.
on the topic of 'simply indicating strong ties' you might want to see how confederate flag supporters are handled.
What do you expect. A lot of the people -- including the US congress-- believe, with or without proof, that TikTok is just a CCP stooge at its very core, or else why the congress wants it divested from China holding.
This would happen on X as well given its lax content moderation, so should the US government forcibly ban it?
Maybe I'm a free speech absolutist. I don't think the gov't should be able to ban any app for the content on that app (barring extreme things like csam, etc.)
While I know many people want others to be banned for this type of material and these comments removed, as someone who grew up as a 15 year old during peak 4chan years I have a different perspective that might be enlightening to anyone older.
There are games, stories, books and movies filled with murder, rape, nazis, evil, gore, antiheroes etc. I was never once motivated to replicate that behaviour. It was always just something crazy/bad people did. All my friends also knew the world is full of crazy people who believe crazy things.
Every guy in my school had seen 4chan atleast if not pol.
At the end of the day what prevents people from turning evil is being raised well. You could ban all depictions of rape/murder in the world but we would still have rapists, racists, theives, and murderers.
I am a free speech absolutist. I do not believe the cost of hiding evil in the way you advocate would meaningfully influence how many evil people are created. I do believe letting the government enforce or police it in any way might seem okay in the short term but overall harm us in the long term.
imagine this scenario: you're just a simple teen being born in a certain country, not having to do with any kind of conflict or politics, and you're bombarded with hate comments like "jump" and "keys", which are euphemisms for self-harm, and even "baby killer" for simply belonging to a certain population or ethnicity.
i have experienced this firsthand - i received these exact replies on a comment i posted on a cute cat video.
no one, especially not an innocent person, should be subjected to such treatment.
I do not think it is different. I actually see that as an opportunity to learn an important lesson in human behaviour.
If I was the parent of the teen, I would tell them its just stupid shit people say online, and worse some people are like that in real life too. If you were face to face in just about any setting most of them probably would not think or dare say these things. Its just criminal jeering. Dont give it any consideration." And that would probably be the end of it. Maybe they are still upset for a bit, but kids cry and dont want to go on their first day of school, but they must go to school. You either learn now when you are young or learn later when you are an adult and It will be much harder.
If your parents/friends dont somehow guide you through that you are in for a difficult life regardless of whether some random person sends mean unicode at you.
i see your point, but we should draw a line between malevolence that we teach our children so they're well-informed and malevolence that borders on hate crimes.
such behavior will never go away, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take actions against them.
when TikTok says the comment that told them to end their life has "no violation," it's deeply hurtful and traumatic, and there's no life lesson to be learned here.
we have laws and guidelines for a reason. we enforce them so that we have a functioning society.
There are many lessons to learn here. Dont be thin skinned online. Evil is real, etc. Dwtermine your value by your own self estimation, not an anonymous vote. (extremely important lesson in a social media world) Many many lessons.
We have laws, but that mere fact is not an excuse to make any and every law so it is not a very strong point. Besides, free speech is law, and it is constantly enforced. It is law. And it was a law very intentionally created so that we can have a functioning society, explicitly made from the perspective of someone who was subjected to restrected speech from another government. Free speech is a rare liberty that only the most prosperous nations enjoy, and had to be payed for with millions of bodies and blood. I highly recommend talking to an older person who fled the soviet union.
Side point, I do not believe in hate crime as distinguished from crime. Crime is crime. If I murder someone is it twice as immoral if they are black? There should be no distinction. The mere existence of a legal distinction violates my good sense.
my point is, hate speech such as pushing others to commit suicide or promoting their genocide, should definitely removed in any platform.
saying "don't be thin-skinned" to a person who just received death threats is pathological.
hate speech is definitely not free speech. and addressing hate speech does not limit free speech.
on your advice on talking to an older person, i do have grandparents who were silenced by an oppressive regime. my advice to you is, talk to the people who were actually receiving these hateful comments, perhaps you'd be enlightened.
Hate speech should be allowed if we had real free speech. Until someone physicially violates your body or your property it should not be a crime. It is legal to vehemently dislike someone/something for arbitrary reasons. It should be legal to both think and advocate for whatever you want. It should be legal to have any qualitative experience short of violating someones physical property.
Every male under 35 has been told to kill themselves on teamspeak/xbox live 1000 times and were fine. Just ignore it. Stop advocating to put us all in a police state because some people dont know how to not look at their phone screen for five seconds, or close their laptop.
Its tiktok. It is 90% ads and 9.9% trash anyways. Just uninstall the app.
There's a qualitative difference between games, stories, books and movies and a platform that purports to present real, organic people and opinions to you. It fundamentally changes the way you engage with the content.
Why did antisemitic attitudes almost double in the US in 2021-2022 according to surveys of beliefs? Did parenting get worse?
I think your understanding of how people form beliefs is not accurate.
Both good and bad ideas are contagious. Humans are vulnerable to social proof. Most humans aren't that smart. Most humans aren't impervious to the madness of crowds. They will adopt the religion of their parents. They will adopt the bigotry of their peers, typically no more and no less. A person from 100 years ago is more racist than a person today because they were surrounded by different norms. People aren't rational actors, they absorb what they're given.
There is a lot to disagree with here, but... you should have more faith in your fellow man or you might as well give up. Are we all just mindless automaton to be programmed by a sanctioned agenda? Atleast if we let the calculation be decentralized we know nature will guide us to nash equilibrium.
I don't want to die in another racism fueled genocide. Whether or not that genocide will be a natural Nash equilibrium is of no interest to me.
I have no faith in my fellow man after studying history. I have faith only in good systems that attenuate humanity's worst aspects and allow humans to flourish despite our flaws.
Free speech is a good system that allows humans to flourish, and is basically only around in the best places with modern prosperity. It is the fascist nations that enact speech restrictions.
Go read 1984. Go learn about how wrongthink influences daily life in soviet era.
The right that you are even allowed to discuss this topic has been paid for in blood over centuries. Be greatful. Dont undo it.
Every liberal democracy has speech restrictions, including the US. It is illegal to defame someone in the US. Hate speech is illegal in much of Europe and the Anglosphere.
None of this has been a slippery slope to autocracy because that's not how fascists or communists peel back rights. They peel back rights by first undermining democracy and the separation of powers. Then once they've done that, and the Constitution becomes just another piece of paper, the speech rights get removed afterwards. That's the causal directionality.
Anyway, I'm not advocating for more government speech restrictions, so this is a sidetrack. I value the US first amendment as is. But I want private social media companies to do basic moderation. Survival is paramount, and private social media companies allowing rampant race based hatred is doing more harm than good to that objective.
I never said anything about a slippery slope. Either way I do think that you are more free to speak in the woods 200 years ago, than now jumping from one corporate kindergarten to another.
The problem with letting companies decide their own free speech subrules is that I am always inside a company kindergarten. At work, online, in public. Every website. How would I avoid them? Hide in my room with my phone in airplane mode after work? As it remains the only place that we can talk freely is when we are in hiding from perpetual corporate surveillance. Do you really think it was like this when the country was founded? I do not trust any entity to regulate what is allowed to be said or not said at all, be that the government, or bussinesses.
Yes, it was always like this until only a few years ago. The medium of communication was print and then radio and television. The largest private entities in these mediums did not have an allocated hour or page for hate preachers to proselytize to their large audience. The largest private distribution channels of print media did not allow any such material, either. For the most part, they moderated their private platforms by banning those content creators. Well, large private Rwandan radio channels didn't self-moderate, but that's an exception that proves how important what I'm talking about is.
You're conflating the medium (the internet, print media) for the private actors within the medium (Tik Tok, NYT, bookstores). Hate preachers will still be free to create their own little hate websites, newspapers and radio channels as they always have.
None of this is a violation of free speech, and to say otherwise is a modern politicized bastardization of the American sociolegal concept of free speech. The concept was never about an implied right to unlimited discoverability and for private shop owners to carry a hateful newspaper or TikTok to carry a hateful channel. Private storefronts have, for the most part, rightfully rejected to assist in the distribution of harmful material. This worked as a nice balance that attenuated the worst aspects of speech (e.g. the hateful content that incited the Rwandan genocide) via self-regulation, which allowed the government to stay far away.
After people doing this to White men for at least the past few years and largely being encouraged by people from Israel it's a little hard to feel sympathy.
I think this is really about just not being a sucker.
Why would we allow a country that bans all our news and social media tech companies to operate their company here?
If they want to operate tiktok, then we should be allowed to operate google/Facebook/twitter/etc. They can’t ban our companies on national security grounds and then act like we are crazy for banning theirs.
The difference between europe banning us companies vs Europe banning Chinese companies is simply that europeans can operate similar companies in the United States without issue, whereas any service like this owned by europeans would be immediately banned in China.
Tit for tat policies serve as an effective standard for encouraging foreign countries to open their markets, as each side is incentivized to reduce trade barriers in response to similar actions by the other, ultimately fostering fair and balanced economic exchanges. We do it with airlines, why wouldn’t we do it with social media.
I would agree if this were the reason. But it's not the reason. The US gov't admits this is largely due to unrestricted Palestinians being able to post on TikTok when US social media is forced to ban them (Meta, etc.)
I just don't think my gov't should be able to ban me from seeing information online. I hate China, but I hate my government banning my own consumption of media more.
So you want to copy the tactics of an authoritarian regime like China? Your strategy to "get back at them" is to take them as inspiration out of spite?
You'd be destroying your own country by setting precedents and new legislation and suffer its implications forever, when instead you could respond with a capitalism mindset, understand the market and put together a coordinated effort to kick their asses and make them lose mindshare.
No, it’s simply to encourage basic fairness and it’s a basic component of international relations. We do this regularly in many different industries across many different countries, and so do most other countries.
It’s also a simple component of how our visa system works. The reason Americans and Europeans can travel to so many countries visa free is that if you want to travel here then you have to let us travel there.
Denying one country the ability to operate here, because they deny us the ability to operate there will still allow basic freedom, because most other countries don’t operate draconian bans like this. The reality is that by applying these rules we are more likely to spread capitalism, democracy and freedom, by demanding China open up their markets.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadIt's idiocy borne from octogenarian hysteria.
Really does sound like you're dressing up a pig treating social media recommendations as akin to warfare.
I don't know anything about the geofencing psyop bit though.
There are dozens of companies with vastly more cultural literacy vying to manipulate you into buying goods every day. Amidst the sea of "look at my notification! Look at my recommendation! ANNOYING clap AD clap TIME!!!!!!!", why do you think some random overly angry/insulting recommendation with a bizarre or nonsensical framing coming from China is going to change minds rather than be ignored?
Foreign propaganda tends to gain traction when laundered through someone people pay attention to. (E-)celebrities, political figures, charismatic activist figureheads. Not a recommendation algorithm endlessly exploited by advertisers to get a tiny crumb of attention from.
The Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense have minimal literacy in the economics of attention and it shows.
no, it isn't tough. Your ex-NATO officials are employees who lack the power to say No to the CCP.
In difference to US companies suing in China where you have on paper also a standing but the bias against you in all kinds of subtle ways is so earth shattering that most times it's not even worth considering suing.
There are very few companies that (1) operate at large scale in the US, and (2) have such an obligation to a hostile government.
Citation needed
Chinese government has a seat on the board and there is a law that requires all Chinese companies provide data if queried (this sounds highly similar to U.S. national security laws).
https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/2015nsl/#_Toc423592316
> Article 11: Citizens of the People's Republic of China, all state organs and armed forces, each political parties and mass organization, enterprises, public institutions and other social organizations, all have the responsibility and obligation to preserve national security.
> Article 77: Citizens and organizations shall perform the following obligations to preserve national security:
> (4) Providing conditions to facilitate national security efforts and other assistance;
> (5) Providing public security organs, state security organs or relevant military organs with necessary support and assistance;
> (7) Other duties provided by law or administrative regulations.
> Article 79: Enterprises, public institutions, and organizations shall cooperate with relevant departments in employing relevant security measures as required by national security efforts.
My problem is the unfair competition of Chinese app devs having access to Western markets when Western app devs don't have the same level of access to the Chinese market.
That said, there's a large difference between the US/Europe spying on each other, and a country like China, who (along with the US and Europe) has plans to go to war should they deem it necessary.
I will not be shocked if this generation is remembered as the biggest security leak in history.
I don’t want to be spied on in general. No matter by whom.
What I don't understand is this hatred of Trump, he was the first one to consider China an enemy, I remember when he started with the tariffs, the whole democratic party went crazy. Trump has been right about many things that now are like normality.
I remember the first act of Biden was to stop a railroad strike and causing a environmental disaster the day after
Democrats (and I don't mean the party) should be worried about Trump and what comes with him.
I don't understand this argument. Are you OK with US companies or the NSA doing it? How does one group doing something bad justify not caring about another group doing it?
Not to mention, the US is an allied country whose interests overwhelmingly align with the interests of most of Europe. Conceptually, surveillance sucks - but if these are my only choices, I'd much rather have a dossier with the NSA than with their Chinese counterpart.
If you have two choices and both behave same on some principle, trying to have a principled stand is futile.
> I'd much rather have a dossier with the NSA than with their Chinese counterpart.
That's a naive view. For Italians, dossier with Giorgia Meloni or her friends can be far more dangerous than with Xi. By proximity and relevance, they are more likely to be vocal about/active in Italian politics. Also, Italian govt. has far more power to influence their lives than Chinese govt. has.
As an Indian, I'll be far more concerned about how much I am tracked by Modi/Indian police/agencies than the Chinese counterparts.
That seems insane given that China has been engaged in a proxy war against Europe (via Russia) for the past couple of years.
I think TikTok is sorely needed. Maybe HN folks need to use TikTok more since according to them, it’s a machine for CCP propaganda. Let’s get more balanced views here.
Supporting Russia’s revanchist war on Ukraine has undeniably hurt the ability of many western countries, especially in Europe to trust Chinese controlled social media or infrastructure, though.
I don't think China "supports" Russia's war efforts like how the US is sending billions and weapons to Ukraine. They're buying cheap oil (just like India) and ignoring the call for sanctions on Russia from the same entities that have sanctioned China.
Why should China follow those sanctions? It makes no sense for China.
After all, it's the G7 that has excluded China, India, and other BRICS members. It's G7 that has set out to slow China's growth and their rise in high value exports such as tech. So why should China then follow G7 sanctions? Some perspective is needed.
Blame should be put solely on the entities who started the war.
You know -- concern for human life, human rights, rule of law, that sort of thing.
I'd be happy to see both those of countries sanctioned in appropriate measure for what they've done.
I’m not taking one side for another. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy.
The reason the West generally doesn't adopt policies like that is because we believe in letting people speak the truth to power and that generally gives us an advantage because we have more overall perspectives and are more likely to organise around the truth. It is challenging to suppress discussions about our own weaknesses and we are aware of where the major problem points are likely to be.
Mimicking China's policies restricting access to markets is probably a loss for us. We want asymmetry here, it gives us an advantage. Given that we seem to have/be giving up the industrial edge it is worth holding on to what we have left.
This, again, is a free speech issue. If your business truly have nothing to do with free speech (sorry, but iCloud and Microsoft 365 all had a free speech issue since they enable people to connect and publish), for example Amazon, no local partner is required. And Amazon has been there since forever.
Sometimes, even in a domain with free speech issue, you can have market access to China. For example, Steam is able to sell games in China since many years ago, even with their community page frequently blocked by GFW due to mostly unregulated user-generated content. They certainly can be cut-off: they rely on Alipay and WeChat Pay for payment. But this hasn't happened.
Oh, and Epic, GOG too.
> the capital requirements are incredibly high, corruption is through the roof, and when the local partner or the government rip you off, you absolutely will not have equal protection under the law.
While I indeed don't feel safe about the law protection. I wonder have you actually tried to setup a business in China? Or you are just repeating what you saw on Reddit?
https://english.shanghai.gov.cn/en-EstablishaCompany/2023120...
I’m not sure how you’d connect mining, energy, health care, transport, agriculture, or quite a few of those categories to free speech.
> While I indeed don't feel safe about the law protection. I wonder have you actually tried to setup a business in China?
Yes, I’ve been involved in a couple of WOFEs and quite a few JVs. I’ve worked on and off with companies doing business in China for the past 20 years or so. Access to legal protections has improved somewhat, but it’s been a (sometimes very serious) issue for many of the people I’ve worked with.
A lot of people criticize the state of Chinese academics as uncreative and fraudulent, and their industries as copycats, but there might cross a tipping point where China is clearly more innovative than the EU, even as the EU leads the world in democratically-minded regulations and civic rights.
There are many world democracies and autocracies. We absolutely should never expect that merely following some first principles of free markets and democracies should determine why some nations rank atop the world.
Have you ever talked to an average person
The reason the West doesn't adopt policies like this is that we run our own propaganda operations against our own citizens. Corporate advertising is an arm of this. The people and organizations with the most wealth and power can buy the biggest megaphones, and our system just lets those viewpoints get massively amplified. We don't need to suppress individual thought and speech, since it largely isn't competitive in the average American's mind.
they use that information to manipulate you as much as they can
which is most people is a lot more then they think it is
like a _huge lot more_, humans are fundamentally quite manipulable
especially teens, the main target audience of TickTock
well they also can use the information to idk. know exactly when it's the best time to kitnap a kit of someone they want to blackmail, it's not that china hasn't done stuff like that more then just one or two times
I ALSO think the lack of reciprocal market access and the differences between TikTok (its equivalent) in China and the US version are concerning. It’s telling that children in China have caps on how much time they can spend in the app, but the US version doesn’t have any such thing.
If a foreign adversary directly controls the media your citizens consume, that is a pretty huge risk.
Now that a single foreign company has gained the level of breakout popularity that had already been achieved by 20+ domestic companies, it's time for pearl clutching galore. Every single argument being levied at China and their authoritarianism is a dynamic we've already been suffering from domestic corporations and their authoritarianism. Give me a break!
Instead of hanging their hats on this simplistic election year stunt, the government could still create universal regulations that reign in the surveillance industry and give Americans control of their personal data and digital lives, preserving individual liberty rather than trying to mitigate the downstream effects on the collective. Yet apart from essentially toothless regulations by a few states regarding some very specific types of personal data, still crickets.
So I guess the lawmakers' concerns still aren't really about protecting Americans, but just making sure nominally American surveillance companies at least get paid when Americans get surveilled and propagandized by foreign powers? It seems like no matter which way this case gets decided and which way the precedent gets set, We the People are set to lose.
The issue is surveillance by a hostile nation. It's not a "stupid election year stunt," since we have elections every other year, and that rule would preclude any effort to do anything ever.
Which even without Tiktok, can be straightforwardly done by China (and every other foreign power) paying the domestic surveillance companies for access and influence in straightforward business relationships. And if that gets clamped down on in another decade, then by paying more for not so straightforward business relationships.
China would have to pay Meta and Google a LOT of money to get the same kind of info it gets from TikTok directly. And Meta and Google would report those payments in some way.
Could you expand on specifically what you think is happening? Cynicism is easy but it is no substitute for analysis. Disliking domestic surveillance does not make for a foreign nation automatically getting the info.
A few things are curious to me about all of this, which leads me to believe it’s political posturing.
The EU has a similar arrangement to the US in that they have an “auditor partner” and host the entirety of the EU infrastructure and services within the EU. The EU is not taking severe business actions in the shadow of undisclosed national security grounds.
There’s frequent statements about “massive data collection”. What data? I can only find IP addresses and volunteered contact information being collected. TikTok doesn’t have access to device location data, so IP addresses are the closest there is to geo location. TikTok has said they scrub that when stored - easy to verify.
TikTok has given their auditor (at least in the US) access to the recommendation engine algos. I assume that access comes with some ability to confirm what they audit is what’s actually in use, but haven’t seen reporting that confirms it.
And finally I don’t understand why so many politicians, including all presidential candidates and a not insignificant number of congressional members use TikTok.
Just some of the reasons I think this is more special interest/politically motivated rather than actual national security issues that would be any different than other socials.
That is a good question. Answer: among other data, the very data of the platform itself. Everything nearly every young person has said in a message on the platform, public or private. Everything they view, and how they view it. Same with interactions. Easily enough to build a complete psychographic profile ("who in this list is most vulnerable to coercion?") and a convincing AI clone if one were so inclined.
And that's if the mere content viewed or posted or interacted with, wasn't itself enough for blackmail. Which it often is. It could be something as simple as coercing a summer intern to visit a website on a vulnerable computer, if they want to prevent those DMs to Alice or Bob from being leaked. Oops, now all those trade secrets, aren't.
> I don’t understand why so many politicians, including all presidential candidates and a not insignificant number of congressional members use TikTok.
Most of them, I assume, aren't reaching out to their mistresses or paramours over tiktok. Location data collected by the app obviously is still an issue there.
It's not great to think about, and it's not a justification for actions about which the blackmail revolves, but that's how some intelligence ops have historically happened.
No actually. Tiktok at one point already admitted that they spied on journalists.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
This is something that Tiktok has already done.
I think "selling your information" is a good high level description that conveys the essence of what is going on - your information is being used by whomever will pay to use it. But yes, digging into the details it's more like F/G are trusted third parties who keep comprehensive surveillance records on you, and sell services based on exploiting those records, with an incentive to not leak the whole trove because it's their competitive advantage.
The argument for this topic then becomes if F/G are found to be providing services to foreign governments that undermine national security, domestic laws can then be made to stop this behavior. But this assumes that the way those services can be abused will be blatant, the foreign powers using those services will be easy to spot, and also that foreign governments won't be able to exfiltrate significant parts of the databases through their use of the services (what Cambridge Analytica did).
Focusing on F/G also skips the entire ecosystem of smaller players that don't have the scale, scope, or product to be acting as trusted third parties, but instead do just sell the raw records themselves - to F/G, and also to any startup that comes along with funding and an acceptable narrative. Like the carriers and intermediaries selling phone tower data. And that whole cottage industry of apps and frameworks that collect data. And ANPR and other pure infrastructure providers. And the traditional surveillance industry ("credit bureaus").
The essential commonality in both of those is that while it feels good to address the most glaring high-level problems, as long as the underlying incentives remain it just becomes a game of wack-a-mole. And wack-a-mole isn't enough to stop determined foreign actors.
You cannot do that to a foreign government. I'm not naive enough to think that these corps aren't spying on people or that they're not selling that data to foreign, even hostile actors, but there's simply a different level of consequence.
If you replace China with Russia you can quickly see how fucking absurd this is. Yes NO ONE should be able to do this kind of shit, but it's absolutely another tier of fucked when you don't even have the veil of government as a threat to make people think twice.
I think your definition of surveillance is too broad. If any data broker can pay Facebook to get my data, then it's effectively public data and therefore cannot really be a national security concern. Alternatively, if TikTok hoards all their user data to use against a presidential candidate in 20-30 years, that is a security concern. It's also a concern that China can, at any time, change the algorithm to promote their own talking points. Second hand data and access is simply a much different ball game compared to direct platform control
Addressing "change the algorithm to promote their own talking points" is what I meant by "maintain competition by requiring open interoperability". Bundling content publishing/hosting services together with client presentation software (including feed ranking editorialization) is anticompetitive and should be prohibited by requiring published APIs for all interaction between the two products. Then users could use competitive clients to access TikTok content (and Facebook content, etc), rather than having to suffer whatever manipulation has been deemed legally acceptable.
Well seeing as this other country is likely to be at war with either us or our allies soon, yes that is a pretty big deal.
If a country that we are likely to be at war with has significant influencer over our population, that is indeed a big deal.
> So I guess the lawmakers' concerns still aren't really about protecting Americans,
Of course it is about protecting Americans. It is about protecting Americans and our allies from the effects of an upcoming war between super powers.
That is very much a reasonable concern.
> We the People are set to lose.
No we don't. If an enemy country is less effectively able to wage war against us or our allies, that would be a win for our country. Us and our allies winning wars is better than us losing them.
So, how will the war begin? Who will begin it? How long has the US or its allies been planning to start this war?
China will start it when they invade our ally Taiwan.
It would also, almost certainly involve a pre-emptive strike from china onto american forces. This would be because China knows that the only way to have even a chance of success is to strike first against the USA.
Maybe a politician will be elected in Taiwan that China really doesn't like. Maybe the decades long, existing trends will continue towards the Taiwanese people no longer thinking themselves as having any sort of chinese identity. Or maybe Xi will simply try to distract the population from problems at home with a foolish hopeless war. There are a lot of possibilities!
> How long has the US or its allies been planning
They aren't planning on starting a war. If China doesn't invade Taiwan, there will be no war.
But yes, the USA would absolutely defend Taiwan from an invasion, and already gives Taiwan weapons to do so.
I hope that some of the politicians in china will eventually learn how foolish such an invasion will be. Or, perhaps, China will simply saber rattle and do nothing like it has been sabre rattling for decades.
China has enough problems as it is, but there is still a chance that they will go off the deep end and invade our allies.
If that happens though, the USA will absolutely defend against such an invasion though.
no one will ever convince me that any of the owners of megasocial companies are benevolent while state backed are somehow different. none of these people should have the kind of power they have—whether governments or billionaires, no matter their nationality.
if we’re declaring that tiktok gives china massive amounts of power then this means that twitter gives elon massive amounts of power and amazon gives bezos massive amounts of power. if we’re declaring this is happening, then no, i don’t want anyone to have that kind of power. particularly small groups of billionaires who are shady and dark af. and who refuse to be transparent. and who refuse to be held accountable. and who actively take a “we rich deserve privacy protections and you non-billionaire peasants give us all of your secrets.”
if we’re declaring tiktok gives this kind of power then we’re absolute fools if we don’t stop them all. and i don’t think that’s hyperbolic.
either way, if social media in its current form is that dangerous, and it very well may be, why do you believe any group should have that kind of power? that seems so strange to me.
Do Americans want the US to be like that?
I find that a lot of these games are against opponents (real or imagined) that see the chessboard. They see moves ahead and realize that asking question x inevitable leads to y leads to z and z means that I lose money so let's act as if x is ridiculous or not feasible or crazy.
i've reported over 100 antisemitic content and comments - none of them have been taken down
simply having an israel flag and yellow ribbon on your tiktok name can result in over 20 antisemitic replies, even if your comment has nothing to do with the conflict
this lack of action seems to contribute to the growing number of teens developing antisemetic views, which is deeply, deeply troubling
moreover, why should one be targeted by harassment by simply being born in a certain country?
When you type something like this, does it at least cross your mind that palestinians are humans, too? For their disgrace, they were also born in a certain country.
Even as a Citizen of the US I can’t hold many government jobs because of my background.
I remember during the Iraq war that many Americans as they traveled liked to put a Canadian flag on their backpack to distance them selves from the actions of their government, which they—and many others—correctly deemed immoral and unjust. Putting the Israeli flag and a yellow banner (which is worn by Israeli government officials) strongly indicates that you are at least sympathetic to the actions of your government.
In the post-Oct 7 context, most likely, and if we're to be charitable here (and absent any other signals to the contrary) what they meant with those symbols was some mixture of "Our people are under attack, we need to stick together" and "Bring the hostages home, please."
Your misconstrual of the yellow ribbon, which obviously has deep grassroots origins (and in the current context only refers to the wish for a speedy return of the hostages) as being somehow suspect simply because it is also worn by government officials -- seems especially inappropriate, in this context.
And it certainly is not appropriate for you to tell them that they should be using the Star of David or other religious symbols, which have entirely personal meaning to them, in their stead.
What matters here is that there's no way these people deserve, or even remotely deserve, to be assuaged with antisemitic abuse (for the sake of simplicity, let's just assume that's what these replies actually were) from anyone. Even if some of these people were also indicating (via the Israeli flag or other means) some degree of support for their government's policies.
That's the main point, and the only point really, to be drawn from these observations of antisemitic abuse (assuming they are accurate).
BTW this applies to pretty much any national flag, in any context. One can think whatever one wants to about it, privately. But there's no reason the person displaying it should be subjected to comments of any kind (particularly comments directed at their identity) simply for displaying it.
It's just one of those things we need to cut people slack for.
on the topic of 'simply indicating strong ties' you might want to see how confederate flag supporters are handled.
Maybe I'm a free speech absolutist. I don't think the gov't should be able to ban any app for the content on that app (barring extreme things like csam, etc.)
There are games, stories, books and movies filled with murder, rape, nazis, evil, gore, antiheroes etc. I was never once motivated to replicate that behaviour. It was always just something crazy/bad people did. All my friends also knew the world is full of crazy people who believe crazy things.
Every guy in my school had seen 4chan atleast if not pol.
At the end of the day what prevents people from turning evil is being raised well. You could ban all depictions of rape/murder in the world but we would still have rapists, racists, theives, and murderers.
I am a free speech absolutist. I do not believe the cost of hiding evil in the way you advocate would meaningfully influence how many evil people are created. I do believe letting the government enforce or police it in any way might seem okay in the short term but overall harm us in the long term.
imagine this scenario: you're just a simple teen being born in a certain country, not having to do with any kind of conflict or politics, and you're bombarded with hate comments like "jump" and "keys", which are euphemisms for self-harm, and even "baby killer" for simply belonging to a certain population or ethnicity.
i have experienced this firsthand - i received these exact replies on a comment i posted on a cute cat video.
no one, especially not an innocent person, should be subjected to such treatment.
If I was the parent of the teen, I would tell them its just stupid shit people say online, and worse some people are like that in real life too. If you were face to face in just about any setting most of them probably would not think or dare say these things. Its just criminal jeering. Dont give it any consideration." And that would probably be the end of it. Maybe they are still upset for a bit, but kids cry and dont want to go on their first day of school, but they must go to school. You either learn now when you are young or learn later when you are an adult and It will be much harder.
If your parents/friends dont somehow guide you through that you are in for a difficult life regardless of whether some random person sends mean unicode at you.
You cant change the world. Go look at the grafiti people used to write in Pompeii 2000 years ago. https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p... This type of behaviour isnt going anywhere. Dont open your feelings to it.
such behavior will never go away, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take actions against them.
when TikTok says the comment that told them to end their life has "no violation," it's deeply hurtful and traumatic, and there's no life lesson to be learned here.
we have laws and guidelines for a reason. we enforce them so that we have a functioning society.
We have laws, but that mere fact is not an excuse to make any and every law so it is not a very strong point. Besides, free speech is law, and it is constantly enforced. It is law. And it was a law very intentionally created so that we can have a functioning society, explicitly made from the perspective of someone who was subjected to restrected speech from another government. Free speech is a rare liberty that only the most prosperous nations enjoy, and had to be payed for with millions of bodies and blood. I highly recommend talking to an older person who fled the soviet union.
Side point, I do not believe in hate crime as distinguished from crime. Crime is crime. If I murder someone is it twice as immoral if they are black? There should be no distinction. The mere existence of a legal distinction violates my good sense.
my point is, hate speech such as pushing others to commit suicide or promoting their genocide, should definitely removed in any platform.
saying "don't be thin-skinned" to a person who just received death threats is pathological.
hate speech is definitely not free speech. and addressing hate speech does not limit free speech.
on your advice on talking to an older person, i do have grandparents who were silenced by an oppressive regime. my advice to you is, talk to the people who were actually receiving these hateful comments, perhaps you'd be enlightened.
Every male under 35 has been told to kill themselves on teamspeak/xbox live 1000 times and were fine. Just ignore it. Stop advocating to put us all in a police state because some people dont know how to not look at their phone screen for five seconds, or close their laptop.
Its tiktok. It is 90% ads and 9.9% trash anyways. Just uninstall the app.
I think your understanding of how people form beliefs is not accurate.
Both good and bad ideas are contagious. Humans are vulnerable to social proof. Most humans aren't that smart. Most humans aren't impervious to the madness of crowds. They will adopt the religion of their parents. They will adopt the bigotry of their peers, typically no more and no less. A person from 100 years ago is more racist than a person today because they were surrounded by different norms. People aren't rational actors, they absorb what they're given.
I have no faith in my fellow man after studying history. I have faith only in good systems that attenuate humanity's worst aspects and allow humans to flourish despite our flaws.
Go read 1984. Go learn about how wrongthink influences daily life in soviet era.
The right that you are even allowed to discuss this topic has been paid for in blood over centuries. Be greatful. Dont undo it.
None of this has been a slippery slope to autocracy because that's not how fascists or communists peel back rights. They peel back rights by first undermining democracy and the separation of powers. Then once they've done that, and the Constitution becomes just another piece of paper, the speech rights get removed afterwards. That's the causal directionality.
Anyway, I'm not advocating for more government speech restrictions, so this is a sidetrack. I value the US first amendment as is. But I want private social media companies to do basic moderation. Survival is paramount, and private social media companies allowing rampant race based hatred is doing more harm than good to that objective.
The problem with letting companies decide their own free speech subrules is that I am always inside a company kindergarten. At work, online, in public. Every website. How would I avoid them? Hide in my room with my phone in airplane mode after work? As it remains the only place that we can talk freely is when we are in hiding from perpetual corporate surveillance. Do you really think it was like this when the country was founded? I do not trust any entity to regulate what is allowed to be said or not said at all, be that the government, or bussinesses.
You're conflating the medium (the internet, print media) for the private actors within the medium (Tik Tok, NYT, bookstores). Hate preachers will still be free to create their own little hate websites, newspapers and radio channels as they always have.
None of this is a violation of free speech, and to say otherwise is a modern politicized bastardization of the American sociolegal concept of free speech. The concept was never about an implied right to unlimited discoverability and for private shop owners to carry a hateful newspaper or TikTok to carry a hateful channel. Private storefronts have, for the most part, rightfully rejected to assist in the distribution of harmful material. This worked as a nice balance that attenuated the worst aspects of speech (e.g. the hateful content that incited the Rwandan genocide) via self-regulation, which allowed the government to stay far away.
Being anti Israel is not anti semitism.
Being anti Zionist is not anti semitism.
Saying from river to sea Palestine will be free is not anti semitism.
Calling for the destruction of a state is not antisemitism.
I’ve personally come across 2 actually anti-Semitic content on TikTok and have reported it and have seen it taken down.
I think there are many people sympathetic to the government’s position that will be totally satisfied and this quote is not correct at all.
Why would we allow a country that bans all our news and social media tech companies to operate their company here?
If they want to operate tiktok, then we should be allowed to operate google/Facebook/twitter/etc. They can’t ban our companies on national security grounds and then act like we are crazy for banning theirs.
The difference between europe banning us companies vs Europe banning Chinese companies is simply that europeans can operate similar companies in the United States without issue, whereas any service like this owned by europeans would be immediately banned in China.
Tit for tat policies serve as an effective standard for encouraging foreign countries to open their markets, as each side is incentivized to reduce trade barriers in response to similar actions by the other, ultimately fostering fair and balanced economic exchanges. We do it with airlines, why wouldn’t we do it with social media.
I agree 100%. We don’t need to make it any more complicated than this simple argument.
I just don't think my gov't should be able to ban me from seeing information online. I hate China, but I hate my government banning my own consumption of media more.
You'd be destroying your own country by setting precedents and new legislation and suffer its implications forever, when instead you could respond with a capitalism mindset, understand the market and put together a coordinated effort to kick their asses and make them lose mindshare.
It’s also a simple component of how our visa system works. The reason Americans and Europeans can travel to so many countries visa free is that if you want to travel here then you have to let us travel there.
Denying one country the ability to operate here, because they deny us the ability to operate there will still allow basic freedom, because most other countries don’t operate draconian bans like this. The reality is that by applying these rules we are more likely to spread capitalism, democracy and freedom, by demanding China open up their markets.
Every fucking country in the world is now going to point at the TikTok case and justify censorship.
The arguments used for blocking TikTok are literally the same arguments Iran uses to block, say , YouTube. Like, copy paste and put them there.