Utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue to operate in the current geopolitical climate. China is a surveillance autocracy and has been engaged in adversarial conduct against the West for years - including extensive psyops.
Shut it down, yesterday. Build a local clone so that people can get their fix or whatever. China sure as shit doesn’t allow its citizens to cough up their personal information for algorithmic consumption to Twitter et al.
sigh can we not have targeted-by-nationality bans and instead have .. rules?
If Tiktok the app is performing surveillance, ban surveillance by apps. All of them. Or make it technically impossible to escape its little sandbox, and let people have their entertainment.
China isn't going to listen to your rules. Ban whatever you want, Chinese companies don't have to comply, and don't have to tell you when they're not complying...
Unless you audit every foreign app's source code and sign its binaries, those laws are meaningless. And if you do that you're really just swapping foreign advertising for domestic wiretapping. shrug Lose-lose.
> Unless you audit every app's source code and sign its binaries
Isn't that called "an app store"? Good luck getting non-signed binaries on an iPhone.
My point is that if TikTok is somehow able to escape its sandbox and perform surveillance, that's a fault in the sandbox, and there should be a general process for handling this otherwise you just have to deal with the next week's app "TokTik".
There are at least three worrisome things that data can be used for:
1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).
2. Train AI for analyzing and further manipulating foreign publics, or for providing strategic insight into political and election dynamics, making political and election interference operations more effective.
3. Collate data on individuals gained from TikTok with other sources like credit ratings agency breaches, OPM, etc. for their entire life, to create a continually growing lifetime data profile on every American, European, Asian, South American, African, etc. which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar. Think of it as "customer lifetime value" [2] for political purposes.
None of which we want an adversarial, totalitarian foreign power to be capable of doing to us.
I am worried that 1, 2 and 3 is already being used by the western governments to do the exact same thing against it's own population. The FBI is just jealous they didn't have the boot on Tiktok like they do with all other kinds of social media and websites.
I'm aware of that too, it's a problem, but the lesser one imho. At least there's some modicum of accountability with Western companies subject to Western laws, which Western citizens have some say in (if they get agitated enough at least), thus some possibility for reigning them in. There's much less or none with with Chinese companies operating in the West, and sending all the data they collect back to servers in China, under CCP "law".
I don't live in the US, I have no clear way at all to change how US government agencies deal with data gathered from citizens of my country. I can't even vote there, not that "voting blue/red" would change this mess at all.
It can't be more than a week ago that we discussed here on HN a way that MS Powerpoint can leak your entire presentation to microsoft. Lots of people in my country use the entire MS suite, and I don't think the CIA/FBI/ABCDEFG should have our data.
It's not impossible for other countries to affect US internet companies. The EU GDPR is probably the best example. Once that went into effect, every website began showing popups enabling users to control cookie settings for that website, even within the US to US citizens not subject to GDPR. If there's a country or block of countries with large enough population relative to US, and where US companies operate, it can have some influence on US.
That said, yes if you use FB/etc you should assume your data could be used by US intel agencies for similar purposes. Just don't use those apps. Heck, I'm American and refuse to Facebook or any of their other services (Insta, Whatsapp, Meta). None of this stuff is actually necessary to live a happy healthy life, and often even detracts from it.
And that's precisely why there is a trade war in between the US and Eu since early 2005. Because the Eu started making up its own rules and standards. TTIP, ACTA, PIPA were all attempts by the US to bring the Eu to heel. All failed. And voila - there is a proxy war that deprives the Eu out of cheap oil and gas, leading to literal deindustrialization of the Eu.
> I'm aware of that too, it's a problem, but the lesser one imho.
How the hell CIA rendition flights are a 'lesser problem'.
> Western companies subject to Western laws, which Western citizens have some say in
Western public has not been able to change neither the economic policy, nor forign policy, nor the surveillance state laws in the past 40 years. Also, the western laws are wantonly ignored in the west when western corporate or state interests are at stake. So no.
...
This is exceptionalism. You are applying to others the standards that you are not applying to your own side, where you have no means to do anything about the problem.
Its a coping mechanism that helps avoid cognitive dissonance by projecting 'worse' problems to outside, to external 'enemies'.
>1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).
You mean China has regulations on how youths interact with the internet and the US prefers an on-going social experiment lead by sheer engagement numbers that will continue with or without TikTok?
> 1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).
That is happening, because the US audience is CHOOSING to interract with shtty content online. Actually, the majority of shtty content, from flat earth to Reagan being alive et al, come from the US.
> which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar
So Chinese government will coerce and pressure me to do what, exactly. Will it be any worse from the rendition flights of CIA.
This is a great argument for expelling all Chinese people, people of Chinese descent, people who have said anything nice about China, and people who have never said anything nice about China but I think are hindering our competitiveness against them.
It is a nonsequitur that the existence of spies necessitates widespread banning of people by national origin. We did this during WWII and it was clearly a misguided mistake.
We regulate foreign companies that do business in the US in other markets, what makes this one special?
If we actually care about surveillance by App, we have to make rules that can prevent that including requiring levels of access and transparency to enforce those rules.
Of course, there is little appetite for making those rules... But that doesn't mean that such rules are impossible.
I think it's more of a "China has been known to conduct mass espionage/monitoring of its citizens and abroad. Given that known fact, TikTok poses a concern." Don't think there's hard proof they are doing nefarious things via TikTok.
> A China-based team at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes.
Err, pretty sure that was the entire premise of my post -- that you wouldn't be able to tell when they're not complying unless you audit and sign all their code before distribution.
No, it's the opposite argument, that we SHOULDN'T do that because one it's impractical, and two if they actually did it, the solution (mass government wiretapping and auditing and pre-censorship of all "foreign" apps) would be worse than the problem it's trying to solve (TikTok not playing nice).
I'm no fan of the CCP, but I'd take Chinese propaganda over American censorship any day.
We really should have some sort of reciprocity with China by now. Frame it however you want, don't mention China specifically in the bill, etc. But they are no longer a developing nation, they are the largest or second largest economy and military power in the world, and are advancing a set of totalitarian values completely antithetical to what the US and our democratic allies have been fighting for (literally and figuratively) since WWII at least.
If US social media, search, and other internet companies are banned in China, then similar Chinese companies should be banned in the US. If US companies can't operate in China except through a joint venture with a Chinese company, to which the US company must transfer its technology to, then same should apply to Chinese companies operating in the US. Etc.
It should be clear at this point that negotiations with China won't change anything internally in China. The only option is for the US to do what is in its power to within the US (and perhaps with fellow democratic allies). Aka reciprocity.
China has uniform rules that any internet company operating in China has to follow, whether that company is Chinese or not.
Some foreign companies follow the rules and are allowed to operate in China, while others are unwilling to follow the rules, either because they have ethical qualms about the rules (which involve censorship), or more cynically, because implementing those rules would be bad for PR back in the US.
More broadly, American tech companies do a massive amount of business in China. Apple is the largest smartphone brand in China. China is the or one of the most important markets for Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and many other American tech companies.
> If US companies can't operate in China except through a joint venture with a Chinese company, to which the US company must transfer its technology to, then same should apply to Chinese companies operating in the US.
Your understanding of how things work in China is out of date by about a decade. China has continuously reduced joint-venture requirements over time. There is a select list of industries that require joint ventures, and that list shrinks every year. For example, automobile manufacturing was removed from the list a few years ago, which is why Tesla was able to build its own plant in Shanghai.
> It should be clear at this point that negotiations with China won't change anything internally in China.
China is actually willing to negotiate over many aspects of how foreign companies operate in China, trade barriers, intellectual property, etc. If the conflict with the US were only about regulations on American companies in China, it would be relatively easy to solve. The Chinese government is very pragmatic about those sorts of issues.
However, the conflict is about something much more fundamental: the US government believes that China will soon surpass the US in overall geopolitical power, and the US government desperately wants to prevent that from happening. The US views the high-tech sector as China's Achilles' heel, and believes that it can blunt China's economic development through sanctions (for example, on imports of high-end chips, or on companies like Huawei, SMIC and YMTC). There's no way for China to negotiate with the US over this issue, because China is never going to agree to not develop its economy.
> and are advancing a set of totalitarian values completely antithetical to what the US
That should be why Julian Assange is in British Guantanamo. And also why CIA rendition flights happened. And why women and children are being blown to bits in drone bombings. And definitely why the Occupy Movement was stomped down in a nation-wide raid in 30 American cities organized by the FBI.
And as of this very moment, the people who lied about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs in order to invade Iraq and murder 1 million Iraqis, are giving lectures about 'spotting misinformation'.
Save the 'values' nonsense. They don't exist where you claim them to exist.
We can - and should - have robust privacy laws at home. We should also not roll over for our adversaries. China under Xi Jinping is, without a doubt, adversarial, and the risks are existential.
You need to specify who "our" is there. USA's upper echelons, presumably?
The risks are existential to ...? Again presumably you mean those who thrive under USA-centric capitalism? You think the CCP are planning a forced takeover of Western democracy?
But are you sure you're not being manipulated a bit ? China and many dictatorships, already have enough problems ruling their own shit, you think they want to like ... take over americans ? What does that even mean, how can they even do that when they cant even take Taiwan ? The "Republic of China" Taiwan...
All they seem to want is make sure you dont talk to their own sheeps while you focus on yours lol
> You need to specify who "our" is there. USA's upper echelons, presumably?
For some reason, the random schmuck on the street in the US or the random Little Englander in East End in the UK, think that they have something in common with their elite. As if the former has a few billion in stocks and the latter has graduated from a posh public school...
The loose use of the word "genocide" in recent years is extremely concerning. Nothing that is going on in China can be called a "genocide." No one (that I am aware of) is even alleging that China is carrying out any mass killings of any group.
The use of the term "genocide" in relation to the Uyghurs is transparently propaganda, which began with Mike Pompeo during the Trump administration. Even the US State Department said they had no evidence of genocide, but Pompeo went ahead anyways and officially labeled it "genocide."
You can very justly criticize China's crackdown on what it views as separatism in Xinjiang, but it's beyond the pale to label a situation "genocide" when nobody is being killed, and when life expectancy and income of the group supposedly being genocided is increasing.
Every single Muslim majority country sent ministers and parliamentarians there, invesigated for months, and have not found any such thing. And yet, the exact same set of countries who lied to entire world about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs are claiming it to be true.
...
100 year old atrocity propaganda. Nothing more different than how the British smeared the Germans by saying that they raped babies in Belgium.
> Sorry, you mean some of the same countries who are extraditing Uyghurs to China?
Yeah, the same countries who extradite known terrorists to the country they committed their terrorist acts at. Much better than CIA's rendition flights that kidnapped whomever CIA wanted without even asking that country's government.
> I realize I'm inconvenient for you and your party line.
I should have apologized for disturbing your US State Dept. propaganda first...
When someone plays the terrorist card and at the same time condemns the former Dubya Bush administration one has to question the validity of their accusations.
And btw even if they were "terrorists" that doesn't legitimize genocide
The problem with that statement is that China isn't carrying out genocide.
This would be the first "genocide" in history in which the targeted group continued to grow in size, and in which it saw its life expectancy, income and educational levels increase.
There are actual terrorists on this world. There is actual democracy on this planet too. American establishment having usurped both terms and having hollowed them out in its discourse does not mean that they do not exist elsewhere.
> genocide
That genocide is as real as the Iraqi WMDs. Or democracy-loving Syrian 'freedom fighters'. Or the 'Libyan Opposition'.
It would be a lot easier to talk about this subject if it hadn't been so shamelessly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
The Chinese government has, by all appearances, carried out a harsh crackdown on what it views as separatism and religious extremism. It has forced large numbers of people to go through political indoctrination, based on suspicions of being sympathetic to the Uyghur separatist movement or of harboring fundamentalist religious beliefs.
The Chinese government has also begun imposing the 3-child policy on Uyghur families. The 1-child policy used to only apply to the Han majority. It has been relaxed to 3 children, but is being applied more broadly.
However, the Uyghur population continues to grow. The Uyghur language continues to be an official language in Xinjiang and it is one of the primary languages used to teach children in state schools. And as I said before, life expectancy and average incomes are increasing among Uyghurs.
The Chinese government doesn't intend to "remove" the Uyghur people. It is trying to stamp out separatism, both by implementing harsh police methods and by pumping money into the region to improve living standards.
This is not what a genocide looks like. That term is just propaganda in this case, meant to influence people who aren't at all familiar with the situation in Xinjiang.
> If you know of any Native Americans currently being genocided, please do call someone about it.
it seemed to imply that the native american genocide was over. maybe not, I probably missed context earlier up thread. I was disagreeing with that statement.
yes of course I agree that the active sterilization / genocide / cleansing of Uighur Muslims in China exists and is a human rights violation and should be stopped. I'm not going to compare its magnitude to the native american one because one is centuries-old and ongoing and one has been going on for several years (maybe longer, I have not studied it) and both are bad. hope that answers your question.
The claims of sterilization, genocide and cleansing are largely propaganda.
This propaganda takes a kernel of truth (China began enforcing the 3-child policy on Uyghurs, who were previously exempt - the policy previously only applied to the Han majority), and distorts it beyond all recognition (China is sterilizing all the Uyghurs).
Given the public's utter lack of knowledge about China in the US and Europe, it's easy to sell this sort propaganda.
It would be so much easier to discuss the actual issues (such as China's harsh crackdown on separatism in Xinjiang) if the US government were not so shamelessly distorting them for political reasons. One almost finds oneself having to defend the Chinese government, because the US government has so little compunction about pushing big lies like the "Uyghur genocide." China did use heavy police measures and political indoctrination to go after people it suspects of supporting separatism. No, it's not trying to wipe out the Uyghurs (or to do anything even remotely like that).
Lakota checking in to tell you that a basic reading of history would confirm that you’re pretty wrong.
Please don’t what-about the Uyghurs to Native American history because it’s disrespectful both ways, and minimizes their suffering. For all the conflict with Europeans, our historical experiences with them, painful as they may have been and remain, were much more nuanced and complicated than what is happening in China. I have also never met anyone native who thinks of our history as a genocide, and I’m involved in tribal politics.
Honestly even calling our history a genocide is a dramatic simplification that removes our agency (all too common in non-native takes). We fought back and won some things, lost others. That’s not something you can say about victims of genocide.
despite not wanting to discount your lived experience, I am more inclined to believe settler colonialist theory (drawing on work from trained scholars, both indigenous and not) which suggest that European settlement did lead to what was in fact genocide.
I think once manifest destiny and the American Indian wars started, a case could be made. Indian removal[0] at the very least seems like ethnic cleansing, and there are plenty of accounts of wholesale massacres of natives by European settlers and soldiers.
If you read the first paragraph of the article, the primary concern mentioned is not surveillance, it's influencing the American public in ways that benefits China and harms the US.
Psy-ops effectively
Here's a segment by 60 Minutes explaining how they show their own citizens educational, beneficial content inspiring them to be better citizens, while the rest of the world gets the degenerative content we usually associate with ticktok.
And China could easily further adjust their ranking algorithm further to highlight the views it wants us to have. All social media has the power to do this, but China has both the most adversarial incentive and a demonstrated willingness to do so.
But in all honesty, I have noticed among fellow colleagues that this is the case. Even outside of the country, you can tell that people are afraid to speak about politics.
We should have rules that include forbidding any Chinese company from selling SaaS or social media until CCP takes the Great Firewall down. They've made a pariah internet and they should stay there.
I see a sharp difference between preventing Chinese IP addresses from accessing whatever they would like, and allowing Chinese corporations to profit from the West's liberty while denying it to their subjects.
So, no, that is not my response at all. There is no technology involved in kicking these corporations out of the civilized world, just political will.
What about Russian social media (I think vk got sanctioned but not livejournal)? What about, given the other thread, Qatar? Should Orkut (Brazilian) have been allowed?
My point is that the rules should target what it does rather than simply "China=Bad", since that offers a way back into compliance with the rules. However unlikely that actually is.
What about that is that the US congress allocated $500 m for anti-China propaganda in its last budget and all the free, knowledgeable Americans who are littering this thread with their McCarthyist Cold War comments are just taken in with the 'latest thing' from their government propaganda.
Nothing more different than how Saddam was the 'greatest threat to civilization' in 2003, or Gaddafi was in 2011 etc etc.
And the 'civilization' they are stanning for is the one that kills its people if they cant pay for healthcare. Without even touching how poor are starting to choose euthanasia in Canada instead of being homeless.
...
I see this as a way in which Angloamerican denizens direct their frustrations to external 'enemies' by taking their attention away from the problems at home, which they are powerless to fix. They vilify and demean chosen 'enemies', and direct all the criticism that should happen at home towards those enemies. This avoids both alienation from their own society and the pressure to address the problems at home.
Long story short, they just avoid cognitive dissonance.
> I see this as a way in which Angloamerican denizens direct their frustrations to external 'enemies' by taking their attention away from the problems at home, which they are powerless to fix. They vilify and demean chosen 'enemies', and direct all the criticism that should happen at home towards those enemies.
Yes, well spotted - the two party system definitely employs the same mechanic: all the evils are projected out to the 'enemy', and all the wrongs in their own group are ignored. This provides group cohesion and allows them to avoid cognitive dissonance and taking responsibility for the results of their own choices.
If there were more than two viable parties, or, god forbid 3-4 viable parties like in many European countries, this would be near impossible to make work. You cant vilify 2-3 other groups as the 'ultimate' evil at the same time...
But lets start by simply banning the most criminal organizations first. If the KGB, CCP, or any other group known for imprisoning and killing literally millions of people is running a social network we need to block it right away.
Bytedance has forced CCP members on their board and you can bet the government uses the user data, behavior data and biometrics to help squash dissent.
Then we can move on to blocking the networks sharing data with less dangerous groups.
> But lets start by simply banning the most criminal organizations first
NSA and cghq have tapped onto the global fiber optic systems on a global scale and see spying on every single person on the planet with dragnet systems alongside as you say biometrics, and that includes US citizen data.
The NSA and GCHQ can literally and legally do the exact same things. In what possible what does it have "nothing to do with this"? If you are making a list of the worst actors in terms of global surveillance, they have to be at the top...
The only reasons not to include them are purely nationalistic.
I think we either need to narrowly define whataboutism or stop using it altogether. in discussions like these it takes the role of a hammer to beat anyone that questions American exceptionalism and it's kinda gross.
it always goes along the lines of your thread;
a: "hey, look at awful thing x <other country> is doing, we should do something about that"
b: "we do that too, and it is bad. we should fix it"
a: "that's whataboutism and it's off topic"
where x includes, but is not limited to: class-based legal asymmetry, extralegal incarceration, the existence of a ruling class, unprovoked invasions of sovereign territory, race-based murder by state actors, news suppression...
.. and mass surveillance with a political agenda.
Were I to Don my tinfoil chapeau, I'd say there's a taste of astroturfing to conversations like these. Abusive patterns of social interaction that certainly seem like they're in service of a national agenda. But lacking proof, I won't.
That's interesting, because I feel the exact same way but on the opposite side. "we do that too, and it is bad." just reads as deflection to me. This comment section is full of it and it's very tiresome.
I see nowhere in this comment chain, where "we do that too" was used as an attempt to shut down discussion or to justify the bad behavior.
What it was being used to do was to support the argument that "instead of just banning one company, we should create rules that apply fairly."
That isn't deflection.
Notably, the first non-TikTok entities that were mentioned as needing to be reigned in were the KGB. Nobody complained that was off topic.
So while "whataboutism" and allegations of "whataboutism" can both be (edit: and frequently are) used to distract and deflect, that doesn't mean that every instance of either is doing that. You have to ACTUALLY READ what is being said and how it relates, not make snap judgments.
I actually love this topic. It's not at all a discussion I don't like.
You can see throughout these comments, and everywhere else, every time this topic comes up, the "but also the USA" fallacious argument is brought out. It's really not relevant.
We agree. “The other guys are hypocrites too” is a truism. Great power competition is real a thing. People tend to be hypocrites, and whatabouttism is commonplace. But we can do better.
> or any other group known for imprisoning and killing literally millions of people
Neither KGB or CCP are 'known' for anything like that in 80% of the world. They aren't even 'known' for such things in majority of Europe. They are 'known' for that only in Angloamerica and sufficiently propagandized segments in its satellites.
There isnt ONE single country which the Angloamerican establishment did not smear in the past 60 years. That's why 80% of the world literally stopped heeding anything it says.
One predatory thing TikTok does that app stores should have banned ages ago is they repeatedly ask you to show them your contacts. The point is for you to slip up that one time and accidently hit "yes" so they can collect all that info. This should not be allowed.
Ok, so what, you ban warrant-less data-sharing with governments? Warrant-from-certain-trusted-countries-less data-sharing with governments? Can't just ban data-sharing with governments, there's the infamous US 'CLOUD' act and surely similar/less-specific but essentially amounting to the same legislation all over the place.
Because USA supposedly values freedom of conscience and actions (within a framework) of its citizens, something it says distinguishes it from China. If they're distinguished in this way then them acting differently is expected.
The rule is that if you arbitrarily block American companies then your country gets blocked too. It's called fair competition. If you open your country for American companies that are treated the same as your companies then we will do the same. Otherwise, no. The Chinese government and it's companies should not be treated as American citizens.
Ah yes, rules. For China. Which now decides pretty much most of the content that the western world's children see. TikTok is part of it, them acquiring gaming companies is another, and there's likely even more ways in which China is gaining control of what we're consuming.
I bet China's going to be like "guys we can't do this anymore, they just updated their terms of service with this brand new rule so we can't proceed with the head-in-toilet challenge operation".
China is pretty smart, you trying to do the same thing in their country would be impossible. Guess why?
Rules are great but rules are not always great. Sometimes the particularities of a situation are more important than the system of rules itself. There is a reason law becomes more like, a guideline in war.
Surveillance isn't the issue I don't think, it's influence. It was easy to underestimate the affect of misinformation back in 2016, but I think by now, after a few political sojourns and a pandemic both riddled with division and information chaos, we should be taking it seriously.
It's not that China would try to convert Americans to communism, but I think we should be worried that they could attempt to sway election results via TikTok. TikTok is the most efficient algorithmic feed based website to date, it's ability to take a human and just pour bite sized information into their lives is unmatched in my opinion. It makes you feel like you're part of a group that doesn't even exist, get enough talking heads talking about a topic and you get grass roots cultural movements as people imagine extreme ideas are widespread when they're not.
How would an App Store possibly know? Surveillance often happens out of band, and under foreign jurisdiction. The apps themselves may not even know or may be prohibited from disclosing it.
But this would make Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and all the other big US tech business illegal…
Nobody (in the US) wants this obviously.
Btw, the EU isn't anything better in this regard: We would like to forbid other countries to spy on us, but the EU authorities "need to have" the possibility "because terrorism, child abuse, and other 'harmful content' & 'disinformation'". (Just see the fresh Digital Services & Digital Markets acts).
Same surveillance everywhere. Only it's "OK" when done by "us", the "good ones", but not "the others", because they're the evil "bad ones"; of course.
rules are a tradeoff. being restrictive has downsides on what you can and can't do, you may affect negatively something that had only good intentions, you don't know. when you know someone is a bad actor, it is normal to make rules more restrictive, as you know that you're not negatively affecting good uses.
We can't have rules that aren't governed by nationality, because the US basically only sees nationality. TikTok is called "an issue" not because of what it does, why it does it or how it does it. It is called that because of who is doing it. As such, we can expect all this racism couched in careful political language to continue and keep continuing.
This is rather specifically not racism. You are allowed to have opinions about a country that has to do with it's government and the way it operates, without being racist. How do you or anyone else benefit from trying to connect this to racism?
I was with you till the r-bomb. Racism may be one consequence of US-China relations, but the proper r-word for the US celebrating Meta's data harvesting while condemning TikTok's is realpolitik.
So I'm an American who uses TikTok for entertainment.
I don't think it's utterly ridiculous to allow TikTok to continue. Even hearing these threats that China is possibly surveilling me - what do they get that other social media apps like Instagram get from me? From the FBI it sounds like the national security threat is that China may use it alter my feed to influence me or take over the control of my Apple phone? Has Apple warned users that TikTok will take control of their phone?
As far as I'm concerned, I'm just watching short 60 second videos and could not care less if China has my birthdate.
Reposting from another comment [0], but there are at least three reasons you should be concerned what happens with your TikTok data:
1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).
2. Train AI that can be used for analyzing and further manipulating foreign publics, or for providing strategic insight into political and election dynamics, making political and election interference operations more effective.
3. Collate data on individuals gained from TikTok with other sources like credit ratings agency breaches, OPM, etc. for their entire life, to create a continually growing lifetime data profile on every American, European, Asian, South American, African, etc. which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar. Think of it as "customer lifetime value" [2] for political purposes.
None of which we want an adversarial, totalitarian foreign power to be doing to us.
The reason for #1 is that China has regulations on what content can be shown to children. The US could pass similar regulations, but chooses not to. This isn't TikTok's or China's fault.
You are oversimplifying the issue. It's not about having your birthdate, it's about capturing data about your tastes and preferences over time to feed into a profiling model.
It's a way to capture data to use inference models to understand who you actually are, your tastes and personality.
Yes, Instagram/FB/Meta do the same, Google does the same, the difference is that Meta and Google are not the government or, worse, an adversarial government from your nation that could weaponise such data. Tailor-made suggestions and recommendations already work pretty well for adtech, tailored suggestions of content with aims to slowly shift cultures and perceptions is much more dangerous than serving compulsive consumption.
And yes, very likely the US government has some access to FB/Instagram/Meta/Google profiling data, I also believe that's dangerous (even more that I'm not an American citizen, nor live in the USA and still am probably surveilled by its government) but in a different degree and level than what TitTok and China might be able to.
The article mentioned the company sharing birthdates which is why I used it myself.
I'm just failing to understand why China using whatever data TikTok has on me to understand my tastes and personality is a national security issue for the United States.
The fear seems to be that China could tweak a US citizen's feed, based on their profiling, to inject Chinese propaganda?
> The fear seems to be that China could tweak a US citizen's feed, based on their profiling, to inject Chinese propaganda?
Yes, that's the assumption. And just to be clear, not feed you direct Chinese propaganda but drip-feed behaviour-changing content to make you more or less sensitive to some topics, and not necessarily you but maybe a different cohort they identify as being more easily manipulated. For example: teenagers or young adults (which are the majority of users on TikTok) that are still not mature enough to have developed critical thinking about what they are being fed.
It's exactly to avoid this kind of possible operation that the bells are ringing. Not necessarily because they are already exploiting it but because it's definitely a massive risk to allow such data to be vacuumed by an adversarial government.
I mean the US is just as guilty of that, with e.g. Facebook and companies using it manipulating global politics; see for example Cambridge Analytica and the list of elections they influenced [0] through nasty means. There's also the Snowden revelations that revealed the US security services have free access to social media; if you want surveillance, that's the one. And let's not even start about the psyops that the US has been doing for decades, pushing the narrative that they are the saviours of the world and all that through media and Pentagon-approved movies.
“Build a local clone” — the obvious answer is that both Instagram and Snapchat already have; and that nobody wants to switch. If only the US blocked TikTok, that’d just mean there’d still be a TikTok that every other western country has access to except the US, full of content interesting to Westerners. People with Android devices would just sideload it, and use VPNs to access it if necessary.
The less-obvious answer: TikTok is the local clone, in a sense. It’s a separate app from the Chinese Douyin app.
Personally, I’d suggest copying China’s own strategy here: tell ByteDance that if they want to operate in the US, it has to be through a contract with a non-owned US company staffed by US citizens. Essentially making TikTok into an American company that just happens to license some Chinese software IP.
You gotta get the SV nerds who run instagram stories to stop bending the knee to ads and focus on UX and make a product users actually enjoy using to be a viable competitor.
Instagram has like a 3% success rate at suggesting content from people I don't follow. Tiktok is easily over 30%.
Calling instagram a competitor to tiktok is about as naive as thinking an infomercial will pull market share from a prime time drama: it'll catch a few, but its so much worse it has no hopes of cornering the market.
Will it? Part of Tiktok's genius is that you don't even need an account to view content, or even the app - the browser experience is quite good.
Now compare the friction between wanting to see a Tiktok right now, versus trying to see one of whatever Snap's equivalent is, or Facebook and Instagram's.
Maybe that friction exists cause western companies follow some pesky regulations about user data. And, they want to make sure they can monetize their content by blocking unlimited access to those who have not accepted their terms and conditions.
Maybe tiktok doesn't follow those to begin with...
Both TikTok and Instagram are banned in Russia, and yet people use still them. You're underestimating the “network effect”. (Is there a proper name for that?)
I don't think it's that ridiculous. The default should be not to ban entertainment, and it's not so clearcut whether the danger outweighs the benefits much more than for many other legal forms of entertainment.
It's obviously entertainment. It could additionally be other things, how Top Gun is both entertainment and propaganda or bar drinking is both entertainment and has health risks.
The math might come to the risks being higher than the benefits but pretending people aren't entertained by it ironically suggests that you might be more radicalized or brainwashed than TikTok users supposedly are.
it's not obvious to me at all, in France it's used by islamist organisations to push for communitarianism and separatism, I don't call that entertainment
ISIS decapitation videos aren't cinema, yet they're videos, the medium doesn't matter, what matters is the message. Unless you want to show ISIS decapitation video at Cannes ?
If you want to play on words we can do that all day long, the problem is that it doesn't change the reality, and the reality is that like any other medium it's used for nefarious things, the second problem is that modern technology enables a small amount of people to have an increasingly greater reach and larger audience with fewer and fewer restrictions
If you can't see the difference between a soviet era propaganda painting and a 24/7 tool behing used 45 to 90 minute every single day on average by millions of kids/teenagers in their formative years I just feel sad for you to be honest.
I can kill someone with a fork, I can kill someone with a 100mt nuke, will you argue they are the same ?
> It's obviously entertainment. It could additionally be other things, how Top Gun is both entertainment and propaganda
I think you're proving the point here. Yes media can be more than one thing or serve more than one purpose. A good question to ask is how much is it entertainment vs how much is it propaganda? I'd wager that there is a lot of content on TikTok that is mostly propaganda, even if it isn't produced by state actors. Social media has given rise to a new form of propaganda that is self-perpetuating, individuals can gain social clout by repeating the propaganda they hear and adding their own flavor to it (even if they don't add content). Maybe call it Performative Propaganda. Social media algorithms help match up the people producing to those who are susceptible to consuming it and provide a selection mechanism to promote the most effective content. This is all that's needed for "memes" (in the original sense) to behave like their namesake genes and undergo rapid reproduction and evolution.
Is any of this state controlled? Maybe a small amount but I would ask does it even need to be state controlled? There's enough folie à deux out there in the world, all you need to do is provide an easy way for it to spread and you could severely damage other cultures.
> how Top Gun is both entertainment and propaganda
The recent conscription of Mr. Cruise to showcase air superiority is an insight tactically granted at the behest of American government as a reaction to international upheaval. A reminder. After the success of "Star Wars", Mr. Ford fulfilled a similar role in a film about infrastructure sabotage (hydroelectric dam and bridge - Force 10 from Navarone).
I always appreciated the Top Gun franchise because there are many scenes showing a large group of people enjoying each other's company.
It's not a huge conspiracy theory. TikTok moderates content based on the country's law, the US values free speech and so anyone can post anything they want on TikTok (and facebook, twitter). China has strict censorship laws, so content there is moderated. If you don't want to see that type of content on TikTok, then ask the US governemnt to start censoring internet.
> It's only entertainment if you're completely blind
"I don't like it so it should be banned"
That's such a low level engagement with the matter at hand, sadly these days is the level of discussion here in HN, sad to say that it seems astroturfed, but again, at this point what isn't, right?
I don't like it and it has measurable negative effects while providing 0 value besides brain washing teens *
Then they'll come crying because they don't understand why teenagers depression skyrocketed exactly at the same time as these types of social medias flourished
There are plenty of things people like which are banned, that's like the whole basis of living in organised societies....
"engaged in adversarial conduct against the West for years - including extensive psyops."
And the US has an extensive and well-documented record of doing exactly this to other nations (and far, far worse). If we start a new Cold War every between every two nations that try to undermine each other we'll quickly run out of trading partners, which isn't going to work out too well for a preeminent trading nation (or it's people).
I read an article the other day that argued that TikTok should not be banned on the basis of free speech. The argument is, while American's have the freedom to say whatever the hell we want, we have an arguably even more freedom when it comes to what we consume, with only very select content (CSAM for example) being illegal to consume.
Yes there might be targeted misinformation there, but it's up to individual Americans to decide if they want to consume that content, government should not be in the business of curating content.
The government should be concerned about protecting its citizens, as well as its political and economic environment. If a product is unsafe, it should be regulated; if the producer does not comply, it should be banned.
> That doesn't make it okay for China to run psy-ops against us
Downloading and using TikTok is a personal choice and you’ve allowed it by doing so as an individual. I don’t think we should ban individual apps from other countries. If we want that, we need some larger more thoughtful policy. But to do so effectively, we essentially need to put up a firewall and ban the sharing of domestically collected data as well (amongst other things, like enforcing these bans.)
PSY-ops as mentioned sounds negative but I’d argue it’s what TikTok and social media consumers enjoy the most.
> True, let us ban all apps from countries that (1) ban US apps and (2) seek to influence US citizens.
My view is the "app" is just a client for information sharing. It would be like putting up a firewall or banning traffic from certain TLD's. Seems ironic that the solution is to mimic the problem.
I see a lot of US psyops and I'm an American. That is even more disturbing IMO. I'd expect it from a foreign nation but not my own country. Also, why can't we just make education about foreign influence part of our curriculum and national discussion. Why do we have to ban things like speech to protect people? That is borderline just becoming China-like in itself.
Critical thinking would be a good start... but TikTok also targets a very young and immature audience that is already protected from many other things by rules.
In public elementary school here in the US they literally taught me indoctrination everyday by doing cult like rituals and allegiance to a cloth and history that whitewashed the crimes. How are young people in America supposed to be taught to think freely when they are shunned for thinking outside of the American way?
There's a golden mean between insufficient patriotism to defend your kin domain from an outsider whose victory would be genuinely worse than the current status quo, and insufficient self-criticism to prevent your kin domain from becoming worse than the current status quo through inertia. Navigating that kind of dichotomy can be learned through practice, I think the challenge in the US in particular is that the two political parties so associate the other one with one of the unhealthy extremes that the center has trouble holding.
There is a very relevant difference between a country which affords you civil rights surveiling you, and a country that you are not a civilian of surveiling you.
Its not just about being "fine" with one surveiling you and not the other.
So many argument threads on HN (and other discussion platforms) could be avoided if people understood that level and degree of issues matter.
It seems to always start from blanket statements or false dichotomies where "if your country does X why are you not ok with C country doing X?" and completely ignoring the nuances in between.
They are better though? People don't routinely go disappearing (at least on the same scale) and there are free and (mostly) fair elections. It isn't perfect but it isn't the same beast.
Surveillance isn't the primary issue. INFLUENCE OPERATIONS is. China's ability to direct content to achieve their strategic goals, and to do so at a very granular level, is too great a risk. Its not the only property with this capability (cough, 4chan/pol/, cough), but its by far the largest.
Tiktok is not China, Tiktok is owned by a private company
All the arguments that you are using can be successful leveraged against any Inqtel funded private company (of which there are plenty), so I'd recommend you to speak in a measured way
Absolutely not. China is an authoritarian state with no rule of law other than what the CCP says goes. There are no meaningful firewalls between corporate operations and the Chinese government.
> China is a surveillance autocracy and has been engaged in adversarial conduct against the West for years - including extensive psyops.
CIA and its satellites have been doing that for decades, and on top of that it has a habit of kidnapping, jailing and torturing other countries' citizens. Even the episode of 'rendition flights' could totally delegitimize any complaint from the US, leave aside its cooperative satellites.
Projecting problems and criticism to outside, imagined or concocted enemies and veering the attention away from the plague inside their own society are things which prevent the Western public from addressing the enemy in their midst. That behavior pattern is why the West has been tumbling downhill for the last 40 years.
I would say a bit more about my position rather than just make the claim that the US has a long and proud(?) history of protectionism. The US had and still has protectionist policies. Interestingly, the trade war was not so much protectionist as anti-China. The difference being that the US would rather buy from somewhere else, and if from China then it will be taxed. But protectionism means to protect a countries businesses. There were of course protectionist elements but in my opinion that was not the focus. A famous example of US protectionism was the Japan situation in the 1980s where Reagan forced Japan to limit their output to the US market.
Speaking of Japan, it, from 1930 until about 1970, was a great example of protectionism. No foreign companies were allowed to operate in Japan until 1960, and even then it was only in uninmportant low-margin industries. Imports were completely controlled by the Japanese government, which imported _everything_ based on what they thought was needed: automobiles are something that were almost never imported, for example. China today is less protectionist than Japan at it's peak but still many factors more protectionist than the US. For example, one cannot directly open a foreign business in China. They must work with a domestic company that takes half their profits.
All this isn't to say that the US isn't protectionist, or that protectionism is even bad. But your claim that "The U.S. has a long, proud history of protectionism" really has no qualifying element, and in fact all the qualifiers seem to go in the opposite direct that they should.
We're among the least protectionist -not to say we are not protectionist, but comparatively. Others have set the precedent for us. They need no examples or encouragement.
A smart foreign propaganda news outlet doesn't simply censor everything that makes their sponsor country look bad. You can push a worldview while still reporting most of the same stuff any other outlet would, and having actually-decent coverage means more people will tune in—then you save the heavy-handed slanted coverage for when it really matters.
Hell, look at something like The Economist. They're regarded as an excellent news source, which makes their efforts at pushing a certain economic and political POV far more successful than if they pushed it so hard that they weren't a good news source.
Reciprocal protectionism is much different than unilaterally doing it. Also, the Chinese gov has clearly taken an aggressive and adversarial stance against the US.
Anything Trump did was an unpopular decision. If this starts to move forward under the current administration people would be more receptive to it purely based on the fact that it's the other side now.
I'm about as libby a lib as ever lib'd and Trump's action on China was maybe the single thing I agreed with him on. Neoliberal free-trade-over-all-other-concerns policies are actually pretty unpopular among voters in both parties, but are very popular with the donor and policy-wonk class, with the result that both parties typically favor it and have since the 80s, despite their voters mostly disliking it. One of the notable things about Trump's candidacy and presidency was his breaking from this (unpopular) long-standing norm, which fit with the rest of his messaging in that he mostly ignored whatever was ordinary or standard and instead picked the kinds of positions you'd hear talking to a Republican trucker in a diner ("They ought to just build a wall" is straight out of those kinds of conversations, for instance).
Oh, wait, one other thing I agreed with him on: leaving Afghanistan ASAP. The whiney push-back he got on that and the way the military managed to sand-bag the effort until well into Biden's term and still fuck it up, was straight-up embarrassing. Heads should have rolled.
Have you been on TikTok? All I see on it are large breasted women, NASA stuff and dog rescues.
I do wonder if there’s any lobbying going on from Facebook or Google to help bolster their Reels and Shorts products, both of which seem to be garbage and miss the point of TikTok (the two way interaction).
It’s bizarre to see such comments on HN. Short-term it get that gains on the geopolitical storm, long-term I feel that will e very bad for the developers community.
You know not what you ask for. You are giving up freedom for safety.
How do we cut the app off? Remove it from the app store? People will post apps disguising a Tiktok connection. Block connections to servers in China? Doing that means creating a great firewall controlling what sorts of connections are made to American clients. If we get there, China will have proved that their method of government is better than ours. They will have already won.
american social media should be shut down yesterday everywhere in the world then - including the US, lmao
there was a really good example really recently with japanese twiiter, where trends were dominated by the diarrhea of progressive politics, and then suddenly stopped when Musk had fired a ton of dead weight. now it's all anime and games. some journo even complained that the stories they submit no longer get promoted and wondered why
A recent tiktok trend hitting my city and others seems to be calling in/airdropping/swatting/posting active shooter threats at local schools. So far, this has shut down my kid's school several times this year.
TikTok gets to be the vector for this new scale of virality, America loses future economic competitiveness. Who is the winner in this scenario?
Only figuratively in the hacker/gamer sense. TikTok is owned by ByteSense.
The "TikTok can be used to spy on americans" is much like "Russians interfered in our elections". Both are true, both are legitimately very concerning, but both are also things that the USA has been doing for decades with minimal domestic outcry.
So implicit in our attempts to reign in other countries behavior is that other countries should be attempting to reign in ours. If these are behaviors we think the world would be better off without, the best place to reign in that behavior is by starting with our own government.
As has been stated voluminously elsewhere in this comment section, and better by others than my attempt here: we have a (quasi-?)democratic apparatus and constitutional framework that governs our country's use of this power.
Does China or Russia allow for those kinds of tools for holding government accountable? Not as far as I can tell.
>Only figuratively in the hacker/gamer sense. TikTok is owned by ByteSense.
No, in the very literal sense that Bytedance has a board of directors, and on that board is a CCP member who has the real final say on everything the company does. When you are a business in China, you defacto work for the government.
China isn't America with a red flag, it's a fundamentally different system. Too many people think they know China because they understand America.
If Biden wants instagram showing people pictures of ponies, it simply isn't going to happen. If Xi wants tiktok to show people ponies, the next day every kid in america will be looking at ponies.
> No, in the very literal sense that Bytedance has a board of directors, and on that board is a CCP member who has the real final say on everything the company does. When you are a business in China, you defacto work for the government.
Would you say the same thing if they employed CIA and NSA people in executive positions, and had ex-generals and ex-spooks on the board?
No. A CIA agent might have ulterior motives being on a board, but they are just another board member (I also doubt many board members are secretly CIA).
Every company in China however answers directly to the part, and every board has a party member on it, who holds 100% of the voting power.
No, it is literally true that every company has a party member they must answer too. Whether its a board member or a local party representative.
There is no business autonomy with a court to settle differences. The party wants it, the party gets it. Full Stop.
>The board of directors of a company are not generally owners.
Like I said, China is not America. On Chinese Boards sits a party member who has absolute control. China doesn't care what function American boards typically serve.
> No, it is literally true that every company has a party member they must answer too. Whether its a board member or a local party representative.
Which still doesn't make it literally true that: "The Chinese government owns tiktok", (unless, in addition to using "own" figuratively you are also using "literal" in the now common sense that actually means "figurative").
We're not talking about America. Chinese companies are defacto arms of the chinese government. It's a communist country. Any sense of private ownership is just a sense, it doesn't really exist.
I don't know how many times we have to go in this circle until we get through that dense skull. If you think you understand Chinese business because you understand western business - you don't.
The main connection I believe is exploiting xenophobia with he goal of internet gatekeeping. There are always those wary of outside influences destroying local culture.
Still, even if they are the best at removing videos, they are also the best at breeding new issues which go viral before they are even recognized as a threat and siloing that content so only people vulnerable are exposed. A second possibility is that they may be creating a forum of disruptive content on purpose to keep people distracted with local issues. Additionally there are foreign agents, trolls acting from patriotic intent or even those who are paid, seeking to encourage problem activity or create anti-government movements.
Interesting point, but if the goal is a balkanized internet, and the means is exploiting xenophobia, doesn't that implicity prove that China is adept enough at using TikTok to stoke racial animus to justify the shutting down of TikTok?
that's interesting. Reminds me of other social media sites where there used to be bomb threats and such. TikTok is clearly kind of the wild west of the internet right now. It still has human moderation which people deliberately game and so far the leadership has evaded public scrutiny.
I have seen other destructive trends happen on TikTok too. I don't know if it is good the things people do to get more followers. The minimum age is 13. It seems like TikTok has a lot of unmoderated content, dangerous trends, and the path to gaining a lot of followers, seems morally grey too.
I can see how TikTok can shape society. Look at how college athletes can earn money on it and promote themselves. Imagine if universities began to recruit athletes with higher TikTok earnings potential and then modify the sport to appeal to that market more. Yes, I am being vague deliberately. It's probably worth asking what effects TikTok has on people.
That argument makes no sense, because we do not want to mirror other countries.
Instead, there are substantial arguments about freedom of speech and accountability. Even though they are messy, they are what we need to apply here because they are a legally binding framework that we built over decades.
By the way, I found Levitski and Ziblatt's book "How Democracies Die" [1] a pretty good treatment of these issues of balancing freedom of expression and democratic resilience.
American companies are allowed to operate in China, as long as they follow local regulation. If TikTok behaviour is concerning (it is, like google/facebook/etc are also concerning), then introduce regulations that protect users' privacy and only then ban TikTok.
As the other person said, Pretty sure they actually cant. Last I knew all China Business had to be majority owned by Chinese Citizens or CCP or both.
Americans can invest and have minority ownership in china but can not just "operate" in china like you can in the US as a Foreign company.
Infact this was the regulation trump wanted to impose on ByteDance, they needed an American partner to operate in the US, i.e they were in talks with Oracle before Biden reversed the order
Not really... you are out in left field here. The fundamental rule of international trade regulation is reciprocity within classes of goods and services. It flies in the face of basic WTO principles to allow one partner to ban a whole host of services without reciprocal penalties. In practice, this sort of reciprocity gets broken all the time, but it doesn't make sense to say "we don't want to mirror other countries" when in trade policy, mirroring is a basic mandate of the WTO framework.
Sorry but you're ignoring media regulation here, which is a completely domestic playbook and for the most part explicitly carved out of trade agreements.
For protection of domestic civic society, culture and public opinion, trade agreements are irrelevant. That's how the french got to keep their quota for french-language music in broadcasting, for example.
How does freedom of speech or more specifically the first amendment apply to a foreign owned and operated platform? If you reframed it as something else would it be different in your mind? Say, you had a foreign news service that employed American citizens to read news that was perhaps even sourced in part from American reporters but they editorialized it so that it always favored their side and belittled the American side. Would it be unconstitutional to forbid this entity to operate within the US?
Sounds like you're describing RT America, which operated unimpeded until fiscal realities forced it to withdraw from the country. Was it a scummy network? Yes. Was it protected by 1A? Also yes.
You can test whereever you want, the point is "not a single western social network is permitted to operate in China" is factually false. Social networks are available if you aren't making "trouble" for the authorities. I am not trying to defend this or anything, the current state of affair is totally messed up, but still there are some global social networks exist in China.
btw, even 4chan is accessible in China. Imagine that.
Interesting that it connects (and sad that MS is doing IP-based redirects). I asked a friend in Shanghai and she said it didn't load, but don't think I can ask her to troubleshoot.
> So what's your argument this time?
Your past couple of comments have been weirdly aggressive. I don't have an agenda.
Networks in China are crappy in general, if your friend has some bad VPN setup I can assure it will mess up something like DNS? Or even worse, if she is using the App, the Linkedin.cn would likely to break API stuff with forced redirects (that's why I call it abomination)
> been weirdly aggressive
Because something WRONG is on the Internet? LOL. IDK man. https://xkcd.com/386/ I hate "tech jornalism" like the BBC one because most of them are bad. In this Linkedin case it was sophistecated enough that people can get inaccurate conclusions based on problems on the surface. But for HN audience I hope people would verify by themselves more.
TikTok as-is presents a massive attack surface for (d|m)information and worse. And the version available in the US is highly addictive with numerous bubble creating feedback loops. The amount of engagement and time spent on the app is incredible.
The creators know this and provide an alternate version called Douyin used domestically which optimizes for educational content and has additional rules/safeguards
I don't want to harp on which country has which political motive, but it's pretty cut and dry to see that the service owners export something very different than what is presented domestically.
> The creators know this and provide an alternate version called Douyin used domestically which optimizes for educational content and has additional rules/safeguards
... Douyin is edited like that out of the goodness of Bytedance's hearts to reduce addiction or is it regulatory pressure?
Reading the article:
> Douyin, much like TikTok, is particularly popular with young audiences, and so China's top regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, has urged it to "create a good cyberspace environment for the healthy development of young people".
> Last month, under-18s in China were banned from playing video games during the week, and their play was restricted to just one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays.
It seems awfully like the China's version of the FTC decided that this ain't cool anymore, and Bytedance saw the hammer of legislation coming so they made changes..
The easiest answer here, is get the US government to not ban TikTok, but make it a rule that under-18s cannot access these applications, content must be educational, and limit screen time by banning these apps during school times, maybe only allowed for 2 hrs on the weekend etc.
However, I do remember hearing a lot that China is a facist dictatorship when these rules were made. I wonder if the same will be said for the US if they decide to make such rules.
Compelling news story, but is there a less-tabloid source? In my cursory Googling, I haven't been able to find anything. Murdoch-owned media is pretty low in my trustworthiness/objectivity rankings.
TikTok is only a part of a much larger problem that US was not ready to deal with.
Sure, TikTok having “coarse location” permissions seems like a very bad idea, give the fact it’s Chinese owned app. This is the obvious one and I personally absolutely cannot understand how this is allowed to happen. (And there is more… Russian owned family tracking apps for example)
But the larger and harder problem to solve is social media and their involvement in targeted advertising, potentially having a significant impact on election results. This applies equally to all platforms. Where do we draw the line? Should amount of money determine who gets elected? How do we know the money even comes from the parties and not from other governments? Or a new problem we have- should the richest person be able to own very influential social media?
This is no longer a democracy.
I can't imagine their reaction when they discover that so many IP cameras/NVR/DVR have been and still are being used as surveillance devices, and in some cases they have been hacked to either phone home (China?) video feeds, or as botnet hosts.
Or when they discover most of the technology equipment and chips they buy are made in China, including common networking equipment like routers that require cloud login to manage.
This is a very different threat vector. None of the examples you or the parent commenter have cited enable influence/propaganda/mis- or dis-info/psyops.
There are a couple of things we have to be careful of in these discussions: one is that the US has strong motivations for (economic) protectionism. We should be focussing on evidence of wrongdoing, not innuendo.
The second is how the accusations are being made. Too much of it reeks of borderline racism and there seems to be an uptick in outright racism against Chinese people. Remember, it is acts of the Chinese government at issue here not the acts of people who have no ties to the Chinese government.
I think economic protectionism is generally bad, but might be a reasonable response to similar moves on the part of other nations. I think this should not be conflated with the national security arguments (which aren't totally invalid, but may be overhyped to achieve a policy goal.)
I don't think it's racism for the most part, but I do agree that some people seem to have some incredibly strong feelings about China without great justification. I wonder how much of it is caused by the US's anticommunist history.
Maybe it's right to dislike China for ideological reasons. But even if that is the case, isn't banning Tiktok hypocritical? If you dislike China because they censor information coming from other countries, don't follow the will of their citizens, and regulate speech, it appears to me that urging an executive agency to ban Tiktok is doing those same things in the US.
I genuinely don't see much harm in Tiktok but plenty of people on HN seem to hate it just because it's from China and that doesn't seem like a valid reason to me.
There's no racism to be found - why do people conflate issues with the way the Chinese _government_ chooses to operate with the Chinese _people_ themselves?
The Chinese government technically owns TikTok - No doubt in my mind profile/algorithm data is being sent overseas for processing and manipulation by the Chinese government.
The Chinese government uses strategies that span _decades/centuries_ to influence countries. They can do that because they don't have to rip and replace governments/officials on regular election cycles - that's the way their government works and why some people consider Democracy to not be a great government structure - a separate tangent to go down.
The Chinese government creates/purchases a social media app that happens to attract easily influenced children/teenagers/adults, cater content directly for them to keep them on the platform for as long as possible, with the _very real_ potential for the Chinese government to influence people through algorithm manipulation, which app users don't even realize.
Don't get me wrong, it's equally as harmful when Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat does it - it's just that China studied this formula and has likely adapted it to be used as a form of cultural/government warfare against enemy countries - without even putting boots on their soil.
Distract as many minds as possible, feed them information that tells them the US/Canada/Europe isn't as "free as people say", deliberately promote key cultural "wedge" issues to emotionally enrage/depress people and eventually you have a population in 50-100 years that welcomes the Chinese government into their country because there is no cohesive American identity anymore able to stand against aggressive foreign influence/interference.
I'm not saying this is the sole purpose and goal of TikTok, and I'm not saying it's the _sole_ thing China is doing to "take over America!" - but it's a multi-faceted approach to foreign interference that nobody seems to even consider or think about. See - Belt and Road initiatives, foreign spies in high political positions influencing US politics, committing corporate espionage to steal trade secrets and technologies...
Yes, I'm also sure the USA does all of these things - personally, I'd rather have the USA doing these things instead of China, since I have more of a chance of influencing what the US is doing with our data rather than a country on the opposite side of the globe operating without recourse to western law.
1) How is TikTok worse than other social media apps? Both in terms of privacy and "the algorithm".
2) What another country's government does with my data is far less important to me than what my government is doing with my data. Am I wrong for thinking that?
Exactly. The scariest part to me is that an unelected, partisan, US intelligence agency literally moderates the content on social media through their own purpose-made moderation portals[1], than anything China is doing.
People here worried about tiktok seem to be in denial about how the USA has treated the internet (not to mention our constitutional rights, specifically the fourth amendment) for the last 20+ years.
There are no privacy laws of consequence when the people running the show report to no one and have zero oversight, yet they want us to worry about tiktok and China instead of pay attention to the gross violation of our rights by our own government.
How does watching fail videos and memes radicalize people and make them politically polarized? Would it not be obvious to TikTokers that they are being manipulated in some way, even subtly? If I want to control narratives and shape opinion, TV is how I would do it. Fox News is basically a propaganda machine, and isn't questioned, because, hey, 'merica.
Oh so our current owners are concerned that they might lose control of the culture to some new foreign owners? If I believed that the US security state was there to protect the American people I might be more concerned, as it stands this is just a changing of the guard for who will be our technocratic authoritarian overlords, and I can't be plotzed to care.
Thinking this change of "technocratic authoritarian overlords" is as much of a non-event as you seem to or that the Chinese level of control over the citzenry is equivalent to that of the USA is a crazy level of naivety that I can't even begin to unpack
Oh the Chinese are far worse at oppressing their own people, but the US seems to do a much better job of abusing foreign nations. It's not an apples to apples comparison.
The Chinese government is hilariously bad at foreign propaganda. Seriously, just look at any of their official media channels. The US has a million times more experience in this business - it has Hollywood, it funds thousands of "non-governmental organizations" all over the world, it knows how to advertise.
The people who are worried that 15-second videos on TikTok are somehow part of a long-term plan by the Chinese government to subtly change Americans' opinions are giving the Chinese government far too much credit.
"When we look at all of these wide-ranging apps that are connected to Chinese firms, it's actually almost nonsensical to ban just one when we see platforms in areas like precision agriculture, communications, gaming, all connected to Chinese firms," she says. "So what's really important is to develop more robust data privacy regulations in the United States to protect users.
TLDR:
It has nothing to do with "national security concerns", it's just they are great competition, and the US is lagging behind, so banning it would mean having a chance to catchup
Hence why they tried to lure them to move to their US based servers, so they could peek at the source code ;) ;)
Because US firms are lagging behind, some stagnating and are greedy, therefore no competitors is allowed to do better until they wake up
The US can probably replace TikTok with something "homegrown" that's sufficiently like TikTok that people will be happy to use it once it becomes widely adopted. What could replace Facebook, TikTok etc in Europe? Do we just shut down the internet because it's run by third parties who don't have our best interests at heart?
> The US can probably replace TikTok with something "homegrown"
You say that, yet Instagram, Twitter(1), YouTube who have all tried so far have all failed.
(1): You're probably reading this and saying "What? not they haven't", well open a video on Twitter then swipe it up off the screen, you're now in TwitTok.
>You say that, yet Instagram, Twitter(1), YouTube who have all tried so far have all failed.
Youtube Shorts didn't fail, they're actually way better than TikTok and are doing well. Instagram Reels are basically a flop, but Shorts are freaking addictive. I tried using TikTok a while ago after all the praise on HN for its magical recommendation algorithm. After trying to get the algorithm to give me anything interesting for an hour, I gave up. Youtube Shorts on the other hand is like crack. It's way better than YT's "normal" recommendation algorithm.
Sure, but that's with TikTok still around. Outlaw TikTok (essentially killing it), and there's no more stickyness keeping people from doing their dances on YT Shorts or whatever alternative would win.
TikTok is hitting a much broader slice of the US population, and getting a much broader slice of political opinions. And it's connecting all these people and all these opinions. You can find communists and nazi's on TikTok, building communities, and getting their voice out.
The administration hates TikTok because it is potentially destabilizing. The FBI's concern is not that it's foreign influence, but that it's allowing internal movements to gain traction. Just as the FBI suppressed internal movements throughout the 20th century they want to suppress this new medium that may threaten the status quo.
Now I don't want to see the US fall into chaos, but neither do I want to see a world where political change is stifled, which is what the FBI wants to do here.
According to Wikipedia, the prescription for destabilizing America is: "Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
Can you actually find nazis on Tiktok? I believe they have a pretty clear policy against hate in general which they apply just as liberally as for example facebook and youtube does.
TikTok's policy enforcement is pretty unreliable - sometimes it's very overzealous and sometimes it leaves bafflingly obvious stuff up. Folks on TikTok are pretty good at gaming it, there's lots of substitute words used and so on.
You won't see people saying "I love Hitler" or something, but you will hear Nazi ideology rephrased.
Besides the obvious concerns about tracking/spying, TikTok has great potential as a propaganda tool to gain subtle influence over America's youth. For example, its algorithm could be tweaked to elevate content that is favourable to the Chinese Communist Party.
I think their strategy is more insidious than that. Chinese social media inside China is actively directing youth towards vigorous / productive / pedagogical endeavours, whereas ticktock outside China heavily
promotes pointless endless innane naval gazing such as pranking, gaming, influencers etc.
They seek to create a generation of feckless know nothings in The West.
> social media inside China is actively directing youth towards vigorous / productive / pedagogical
I have a fair number of friends/relatives living in China and at least from what I've seen this is a pretty laughable claim. Very curious where you heard this from?
TikTok in China is different than the US in that it is increasingly inundated with various "get rich quick" schemes. It's essentially turned into large scale social advertising platform where everyone is trying to pitch some angle to make a quick RBM.
I'm sure there exist some "vigorous / productive / pedagogical" accounts, but there are plenty of this in the US as well. There are a lot of accounts in the US that focus on learning, exercise, getting a software job etc.
Again, would love to hear your source of this information, especially if it's first hand experience, because based on the people I talk with in mainland China this comment sounds like a very off the mark hot take.
It's hard to call this a strategy when the reason TikTok operates the way it does in China is due to regulation. Instagram reels promotes the same garbage, does the CCP direct Meta as well? If you tried to push for the same kind of social media regulation in the US, the internet would shut down in protest.
> naval gazing such as pranking, gaming, influencers etc
Yes surely none of this existed in western entertainment before TikTok and was all concocted by the the Chinese in a grand conspiracy to bring down the US. At this point I’m trying to figure out who’s better at contrived cartoon supervillain plans according to HN: Musk or China.
> Chinese social media inside China is actively directing youth towards vigorous / productive / pedagogical endeavours, whereas ticktock outside China heavily promotes pointless endless innane naval gazing such as pranking, gaming, influencers etc.
This would be interesting if true. Do you have any sources for this or is it just an observation?
Yep, shore up your own and undermine your enemy. Promote strength, work ethic, and achievement at home and promote idleness, listlessness and parasitic attitudes for the enemy.
I wonder why when China does this it’s always a bad thing. Isn’t the inverse also true i.e. western media influencing and nudging narratives, except that we can actually observe this happening right now. Where do you stand in that case?
This one's pretty simple: China is a totalitarian regime that is in direct conflict with western constitutional values. So if influence is aimed at democratic foundations, of course it's a bad thing.
I don't see why those principles should apply to a foreign country with malign intentions, they aren't a person nor do they represent a populace given that China is authoritarian.
The spying seems secondary to the influence they can wield by pushing certain stories while burying others.
Not in principle. Practically all democratic systems have provisions to defend against subversion of their core principles. Those provisions may be designed to safeguard institutions, processes such as elections and regulate information flow.
It's important to remember that the US concept of "free speech" as an absolute right is very untypical, and that it also has limits due to being narrow in its scope.
Of course, banning a social network due to arbitrary or without reasons would be against democratic principles. But following democratic and legal principles to openly apply laws and procedures designed to safeguard the state - that's not undermining at all, to the contrary!
Collapse of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in XVIII as form of proto-democracy can be here good case study. It show us how authoritarian systems can exploit democratic system.
Ironically, right wing parties in the EU rose thanks to disinformation on american social media. Following this discussion's logic, Facebook and Twitter should have been banned in the EU a long time ago.
This is technically true, but I wonder in practice. Like, the King of England absolutely has the power to withhold consent on acts of parliament. How accountable is parliament to the King? But replace the King with Congress, and parliament with the FBI.
I don't disagree that it is possible in theory, but are there any substantial examples of initiatives genuinely spawned at the general public level changing policy of the FBI? This would be required to upgrade the binary (True/False) proposition from a belief to a fact...but then only as a binary (the FBI could still be 99% beyond the will of the people).
If China were pushing a WEF narrative, everything would be okay. Instead they have their own separate agenda that does not dovetail. Look at it this way, if it were Japan or SKorea, we would not be hearing about this from that PoV. That said, even if it were a purely American company, setting aside tracking and all that, it is not a psychological net-positive. It's manipulative and induces poor choices on some. That some is on this side of too much.
For the record, I also think nudging in and of itself is a bad thing and incompatible with democracy. Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi have a great essay on that [1].
It would not be that blatant. They look more to add ambiguity and instability. They may be interested in amplifying police brutality in the eyes of users as well as lawlessness and looting simultaneously to sew discord, as an example. Or, spying isn't so bad, the US does it, why shouldn't China, etc.
TikTok can't do anything worse than domestic advertising/marketing firms already do. The idea that the CCP wants American youth for any purpose that doesn't already align with American businesses--who depend on the slave-labor priced cheap stuff from China to sell to them--is ridiculous.
China wants internal conflict that weakens the country or destroys democracy. Social media can be weaponized to do this. Foreign media ownership limits are not novel.
Wow, here in Germany this concern was always called a "right wing conspiracy theory" by literally every mainstream media outlet. Headlines like "Is Trump afraid of dancing teens?" were quite popular (even when it was clear that it's a technical problem).
This investigation into TikTok happened before Trump wanted the ban. [0][1] But the media just brainwashed a narrative to people who don't research because it came from his mouth at the ridiculous height of 2020.
Just look at the TikTok fanatics back then defending and being in denial here after Trump wanted it banned on the same national security grounds [2]. Two years later under Biden, NOW is the time they also want to ban it?
Lots of people have just been manipulated by the media and the news again for political gain, as expected. I brought that up at the time and was immediately flagged.
Perhaps it's because it was true, against the herd.
Only the Inquirer and Washington post pieces said Trump was going to ban TikTok because of racism/xenophobia; and those were both published in the editorial sections. Is that the best you got?
Call me whatever you want, but Trump had a LOT of things right. He was just massively inarticulate and his persona made it easy for people to disagree with him. But yeah, he tried to shut it down and the democrats just reverted everything just to say they reverted something trump did.
This report is nothing new and it has been known for a long time.
I wasn't necessarily opposed to his call for that. But the whole idea of somehow segmenting the app in a way that would somehow make tiktok better for us seemed kinda impractical. Just ban it or don't. If we ban it someone will make a clone in the west, or IG reels will just take over.
If only a previous president had said so and banned it. Oh, that did happen. And then Biden unbanned it because a bunch of liberal journalists told him to.
God the whataboutism that pops up everytime tiktok is discussed is suffocating.
Some people are just so desperately trying to divert attention away from it and others are trying to hijack the movement to make it into some kind of constitutional level privacy reform.
Tiktok can die, everything will be fine, and then we can focus on our own issues here.
I just don't understand how people can't see the threat. All you have to do is keep showing bad news videos about inflation, crime rate, illegal immigration to turn population against the government subtly mixed with normal videos. They can also pacify people by subtly mixing good news videos. And anyone who thinks people aren't so easily gamed don't understand people. This is like cnn and fox news on steroids. One continuous drip of emotions fed by a foreign adversary.
Briefest of case studies: Anyone whose watched the rapid growth of antisemitic propaganda and disinformation since the 2016 election may note 4chan/pol/ took the lead in dissemination of stereotypes and tropes intended to influence user thinking. Because there was widespread distrust of other media sources, and b/c /pol/ appealed to younger audiences, and b/c /pol/ developed a reputation for aggregating breaking news (often untrue but thrilling), its audience grew dramatically, to over 11m unique visitors per month. Fast forward to today and Kanye, Irving and others repeat and show /pol/ meme's as their "proof" of antisemetic conspiracies. Antisemetic propaganda has gone mainstream to the point the Jewish community is viewed by one of favorite comedians on SNL as a cabal suppressing AA aspirations, when the opposite has been true since the civil rights movement and the two are actually more in alignment on issues than apart. Tearing groups apart is geopolitics 101 and the US is losing this battle.
**
Now multiply that by 50m daily users fed disinformation on whatever topic roils you and you have an idea of the scale of threat posed by TikTok.
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>b/c /pol/ developed a reputation for aggregating breaking news (often untrue but thrilling)
On New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees *as they were occurring* on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything and—naively, I soon realized—assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism.
It's banned overnight in India along with a lot of other Chinese apps. I don't see why that can't be done in USA under national security policies. It's ridiculous to let an app from foreign adversary which can manipulate citizen behaviour through its algorithms while being able to keep track of what interests whom is allowed to operate freely. Its frankly surprising they are even having this debate. Yes meta, Google and God knows what other companies are also in a position to do this. But then the government can always drag the executives to trial legally. They can't do any of that with a foreign company.
I have no idea if it's a legitimate security risk, but regardless, if China wants to play the game with us that they are currently playing (banning non-Chinese apps from their country) we have to play that game, too. It makes no sense to play the "we'll take the high road" approach with them. If they ban our applications and services in their country, we need to ban their applications and services in our country. Full stop. The surveillance aspect isn't even a starter here, it's larger than that. If we have to play by their rules in their country, they have to play by our rules in our country.
I don't give a shit if it pisses off GenZ. GenZ's ability to share stupid videos of themselves dancing to crappy music is completely irrelevant to the wider geopolitical threats that China poses.
In full disclaimer: I helped build a service that was partially aimed at Chinese users, and had Tsinghua University as a client. When the trade wars started, our relationship was "ended" and Tsinghua took our idea & software and essentially cut us out of the equation completely. (Yes, their copycat version of our software and idea was completely useless and didn't work, but that's besides the point)
"if China wants to play the game with us that they are currently playing (banning non-Chinese apps from their country) we have to play that game, too"
That's not the American way. The United States became the center of the modern global economy because it said "you can sell your goods here, and we're gonna push really hard to make you let us sell our goods there, too. But if you don't, fine, you can still sell your goods here".
It's basically the opposite approach of a trade war.
I don't care if it isn't the American way. This is an economic cold war. China views all trade as a zero-sum-game war, and currently, we've ceded the fight completely. They can collect info and revenue in our markets, but we can't in theirs. If appeasing them is how we decide to continue, we've lost the fight and will continue to lose the fight.
Remember, to the Chinese government, a Win-Win situation is not when both parties walk away happy, it's when the Chinese side wins twice.
Yes, they do. Go read Sun Tzu's "Art of War". That's their playbook. They played along because it was advantageous to them, and now that they have a shot at taking the driver's seat, they will do as they please. They will also do as they please once they get in said driver's seat.
I've worked around Chinese people for a long time, have studied their culture extensively, and have done business with some of their top institutions, including tutoring students from Tsinghua, most of whom are the children of Party elite.
Sorry to hear you got shafted by Tsinghua U. But this is a race to the bottom. GenZ is our future. They will be in charge of our country and will make their own choices.
Shut it down, yesterday. Build a local clone so that people can get their fix or whatever. China sure as shit doesn’t allow its citizens to cough up their personal information for algorithmic consumption to Twitter et al.