The rest of the world should use this precedent to ban Instagram, Twitter and Facebook - they are no less harmful. Possibly YouTube and US based search engines, too. All of these services are not only prone to algorithmic manipulation, they actually are being manipulated to advance the preferred narratives, and suppress the "undesirable" ones. What is preferred and what is undesirable is decided in the US, sometimes with the "help" of US government (see e.g. the Twitter Files and other similar leaks).
I call social media “tobacco companies of the mind.”
All of it is toxic. All of it is manipulative. It’s all designed to addict you (“maximizing engagement” is code for addiction) to feed you ads and propaganda.
It destroys relationships, ruins people’s attention spans, and eats people’s time. It’d also the main driver of political hyper-polarization because that’s what maximizes engagement.
In the end it leaves nothing to show for itself. Books, movies, even radio and TV leave behind a cultural legacy. Social media leaves nothing because there is nothing worth saving. It’s barely even worthy of being called media.
I’ve watched it evolve since MySpace and over time it has only become less intelligent, more polarizing, less actually social, and more addicting.
Burn it all down.
Edit: TikTok seems like it’s currently the pinnacle of hyper-addictive trash. I predict the next iteration beyond TikTok will drop the pretense of social entirely and just use AI to generate personalized streams of addictive filler. It’ll be the mental equivalent of the tub or “Flaturin” the idiots eat on Idiocracy. Just addictive vapor to act as a medium for ad delivery. YouTube is kinda already heading this way.
>And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country.
If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place.
> If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place
This bill makes that explicit. TikTok doesn't have to be sold to an American. It could be sold to any of the above, and it would comply with the proposed law.
To clarify, those were not bans. They were decisions by companies not to follow the laws that every other company in that country has to follow as well.
I’m not referring to China, that case was settled long time ago. I’m talking about Europe and the rest of Asia, South America, Canada. If you think about it, allowing a foreign state unfettered influence over public opinion (as well as near total internet surveillance) is an utterly insane thing to do.
"Here are our rules we want you to follow. If you choose not to, you are banned from operating in our country"
"We cannot follow your rules because those rules are unacceptable
to us / would undermine our business model / would compromise our position in other countries we care about more / insert other reason here"
A ban means when you operate in a country, you violate their rule, or whatever they call rule, then you are banned.
In this case, you haven’t operated in this country, the government of this country tells you that if you want to operate, you have to follow rule a, rule b… Then you choose to not follow these rules, and quit.
These are different.
Another example is you are operating in a country and not violating any rule from the very beginning. One day when you are strong enough and the government of this country feels you’re threaten. Then they tells you that you have to sell your branch in their country, if not you will be banned.
With this kind of situation, a "threaten" company has no choice but to take the less bad option. And people will not understand the real reason or what actually threatening.
The ridiculous is US was always the freedom symbol for everything. I wonder if such kind of freedom only exists when US is the strongest one and others are far behind? But it's understandable that the US election day is coming.
It's a tragedy for sharing human knowledge. Say what you want about China, but there's a huge amount of amazing stuff there that the Western world just doesn't know about. Art, architecture, science, technology, etc.
Think about how much human knowledge in Discord servers is hidden from search engines --- in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.
A lot of Chinese language content is hidden in domestic gated communities regardless of whether other countries ban access or not.
The original problem here is most Chinese tech companies behave exactly like Discord in order to entice people to use their apps and ecosystem exclusively. In fact, in my experience, trying to access information freely on the web is much more difficult in China than it is in many western countries, precisely because the companies are so aggressive about forcing people to install their apps.
> in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.
I wouldn't refer to highly censored information, disinformation, and discourse controlled by the CCP as "knowledge".
Similarly for western social media. While they're not directly controlled by governments, each platform has its own biases and algorithms that enforce their values and beliefs on the information hosted on their servers. These are not public squares that protect "freedom of speech", regardless of what they may claim.
The knowledge found on these sites is of minimal value, and most of it is drowned by the noise produced by the vast majority of their users and bots.
What??? there's tons of valid information there about all sorts of topics not even remotely related to political stuff that would get censored.
There's food, technology, science, whatever. I mean sure there's noise in the form of memes like all social media sites, but calling it "minimal value" is pretty extreme.
To take one example, I use Xiaohongshu to read about camera lenses. There's a lot of good information that's not available on Western platforms (optical simulations, anecdotes about rare lenses, etc).
Perhaps "minimal value" is wrongly phrased. After all, if you find great value in these sites, I can't contradict your experience.
My point is that most content posted on these platforms is heavily modified to game and appease the algorithms that drive engagement. So you never really know if something is factual and honest.
Add to that the fact that these platforms promote content that is actively harmful to its users, and to society as a whole, and I doubt whether whatever valuable information is on them is really worth searching for and consuming. Chances are that you would be able to find the same information elsewhere, without risking your sanity.
That said, I do have an extremely negative view of all social media, and actively avoid it, so I concede that I may be missing out. :)
A better example than dedicated social media apps is perhaps Baike, commonly described as China's Wikipedia. Except it isn't, because it's not a non-profit organization with a mission to provide free and unbiased information to the world, it's a locked-down product of Baidu, one of China's major tech companies who once upon a time (much like Google) owned domestic search and maps, who also run Tieba (something like Reddit) and so on. This is the biggest difference I find on the "chinanet" - all of the top sites are owned by one of the major tech companies, and all of these companies have an interest in trying to keep you inside their ecosystem.
Outside of the chinanet this also happens, where Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft all try to keep you inside their ecosystems (to say nothing of the traditional media companies like Disney, WBD etc), but outside the chinanet there remains a small but influential "information wants to be free" movement that is unaligned with any government or corporation. So we have Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap and the Internet Archive... It's not much, but it's something.
From my perspective if people really want to see a free and open internet, where information is never hidden in gated communities, the only choice is to support non-profits with aligned missions. Then people all over the world - including China - can contribute.
God I wish Wikipedia wasn't banned by the Great Firewall.
It's kinda sad that stuff like Caltrain electrification, for example, has a huge and well-researched article despite not even being in service yet, just because of the large amount of Wikipedians in the Bay Area where the Wikimedia Foundation is headquartered. In the meanwhile, entire operational train systems both in China and elsewhere in the world that have vastly greater ridership, longer length, more advanced technology, etc, get nary a mention. I have nothing against Caltrain electrification getting a great article since I'm an inclusionist but it is just sad how little of the cool things, especially in China, are on Wikipedia.
Chinese topics are usually well-covered on the Chinese Wikipedia, the lack of an English-language article is more likely to be attributable to a shortage of English-Chinese bilinguals translating that information.
Chinese Wikipedia is mostly made by Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese people so they often are not as comprehensive for recent developments in the mainland.
MTG is bananas but she's right, why start at tiktok when there are battalions of military aged Chinese males crossing the border through Mexico, scores of Chinese tech companies operating in the US legally, and companies/politicians (like Microsoft and the Clintons) who sold America out to China decades ago. Tiktok ban is almost superficial
A nation state doesn't need precedent to ban Instagram, they could just do it. Problem is they would lose the next election because people will think it's stupid.
> Any other country if they did just ban US social media like that would probably find itself in a trade war
Probably not. There is enough frustration with the tech giants across the political spectrum that consolidating votes for a retaliation wouldn't happen.
> Not even China or Russia just went ahead and banned US tech companies
China banned Google and Facebook years ago.
And Russia? "In March 2022, Russia criminalized spreading 'misinformation' against its war with Ukraine. TikTok then banned any new uploads and only allowed old videos that were uploaded within Russia" [1].
Neither Google nor Facebook are banned in China. They could operate there if they follow the same laws as every other company in that country.
Just like some US newspapers don't show Europeans any content because they choose to not comply with European laws. These outlets are not banned in any way.
Technically, the executive can retaliate, including through the WTO. No need for Congress, that would be only necessary once it escalates, and then it wouldn't be a big tech only issue anywhere. Beyond that, there would probably be retaliation next Congress anyways.
China did not ban Google and Facebook. They both had the opportunity to comply with extremely restrictive local laws and both decided not to bother (especially Facebook for which it would likely have been too expensive).It offered both to obey the same laws and controls as local companies, and they refused. Famously, Google had Project Dragonfly to make their own TikTok/Douyin split, until political and employee pressure stopped that.
This is very much precedented (and is done by many more countries for many more industries), in a way that banning TikTok just isn't.
> the executive can retaliate, including through the WTO
Trump tried this. It was blocked by the courts [1]. Retaliatory tariffs aren't something the executive can magic up.
> China did not ban Google and Facebook. They both had the opportunity to comply with extremely restrictive local laws
Restrictive and immoral. Even withint this framework, this bill's response is incredibly forgiving. Because, again, the point is not to ban TikTok. It's to rehome it.
> in a way that banning TikTok just isn't
If anything, banning TikTok (which, again, this bill doesn't aim to do) is deeply internationally precedented [2].
> Trump tried this. It was blocked by the courts [1]. Retaliatory tariffs aren't something the executive can magic up.
The link you sent is not relevant to the claim - just because a specific kind of executive tarrif was found illegal doesn't mean that there aren't executive tarrifs. The executive has the right to impose tarrifs - the 1974 Trade Act allows the president to impose 15% tarrifs for 150 days for broad national security reasons and the 1962 Trade Expansion Act allows the president to direct the Department of Commerce to investigate and recommend any kind of tarrif or trade measures for broad reasons including general welfare. Both of these laws have been tested by the Trump administration and in most cases the tarrifs survived challenges (*1)
> Restrictive and immoral. Even withint this framework, this bill's response is incredibly forgiving. Because, again, the point is not to ban TikTok. It's to rehome it.
International trade doesn't work on the basis of freedom and morality. It works on the basis of reciprocity. The idea, and the norm, being that foreign businesses should be allowed to operate as a local business would. Restrictive and immoral laws are completely consistent with this so long as they are applied to local and foreign businesses alike. Forcing a sale to a domestic entity however is completely different and is not precedented.
> If anything, banning TikTok (which, again, this bill doesn't aim to do) is deeply internationally precedented [2].
Read the list carefully. Every one of those bans were either temporary (Bangladesh, first Indian ban, Indonesia, Jordan, Senegal, Pakistan) because TikTok chose not to comply with local laws (Iran, Russia, Afghanistan) or the result of a military conflict (Second Indian ban, Taiwan).
After this, 4 countries remain : Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nepal, and Kyrgyzstan. It turns out that, as of today, Tiktok is not banned in any of those countries. In Armenia and Azerbaijan, the ban turned out to be temporary after border flashpoints led to media suppression (*2). In Nepal, the ban is being challenged in court and meanwhile the ban is not implemented by many ISPs (*3). In Kyrgyzstan, there simply isn't actually a ban (*2)
That is to say, no, there is no precedent. Every other ban was either temporary, due to TikTok deciding local laws - applied to everyone - weren't worth compliance, or as a result of a direct military conflict with China. These are all fair, accepted, and preceded scenarios. A Tiktok ban purely based on foreign ownership just isn't precedented.
Is HN banned in China yet? I used to spend a lot of time on HN on the taxi home from work when I was living in Beijing. I’m guessing now even Reddit is blocked, HN is possibly blocked, there wouldn’t be much to kill time on without a VPN.
Why stop there? Why don’t you suggest banning Google, WhatsApp, all news sites generally, and more?
afaict the reasoning for banning TikTok kinda makes sense for getting it off of the devices of government employees. The rest seems pretty overblown and silly to me.
This is why the US government pushing a national security angle to this is idiotic. They should have made a simple trade reciprocity argument: essentially every non-Chinese social network or communication app is blocked in China, and until that changes TikTok wouldn't be allowed to operate in the US. Simple, impossible to argue with, and doesn't blow back on any US companies.
When the concern is national security why would they push a trade reciprocity argument?
You do know that Biden cannot just lie and get away with it right? Unlike in authoritarian countries, nearly all American records will be unsealed within a single generation.
Further, the press usually gets the wind of stuff being hidden.
That doesn’t stop the government from trying to hide stuff and they often succeed, but why would they take a chance on something like this which gives them an extremely tiny benefit at best.
He literally lies nearly every time he speaks and doesn’t care if something will be “uncovered”, like any other US president before him. Bush lied about Afghanistan and Iraq. Zero consequences. Obama lied about Syria and Libya - zero consequences.
Congress could pass laws strengthening data protections and increasing penalties on companies that don't follow them but protecting your data isn't the point. As other commenters have mentioned, I hope other countries take the chance to rid themselves of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Bad title. I was really confused by it. It is not banning the company. It is banning the foreign ownership of the incorporated entity.
>Legislation passed through the US House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously on Thursday calling on China's ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok or effectively face a US ban.
This is slightly less confusing but I'm still unsure. Such a law sounds unconstitutional.
Totalitarianism is where they just take your company regardless of any law, and if you complain they shoot you in the head.
You don't have to be evil to legislate that foreigners can't own sensitive companies. For instance, defence contractors. In this case TikTok is considered to have vast access to the personal information and habits to many millions of Americans and is considered a security risk. That they tried to manipulate users into a political action did not help their cause at all. This seems to be self inflicted.
But the headline is misleading anyway, it's not a ban it's a forced sale with a ban as a last reort.
TikTok is not any more harmful than US-based social media. What the US should do is demonstrate some leadership by enacting privacy laws that work the same for everyone. What happened to the "free market"? Funny also how this and every other article refers to "authoritarian China" -- as if a government telling you what platforms you're going to use moving forward isn't. Sigh.
> TikTok is not any more harmful than US-based social media. What the US should do is demonstrate some leadership by enacting privacy laws that work the same for everyone.
The concern isn't privacy, but political manipulation. National security has broad electoral support. Privacy does not. (The overlap between people who care about privacy and people who don't participate in politics is significant enough to render it moot.)
To be completely honest I was on the fence about the conflict and even leaned towards Israel's side (I grew up Muslim and Jerusalem is like the third or second holiest site in Islam, whereas in Judaism it is the holiest, so it seemed pretty straightforward) but the way things have be going recently, I just cannot rationalize the deaths that have been taking place in any shape or form. The lives on 200 Israeli hostages are not in any shape or form worth more than the lives of 200 Palestinians. So I feel like the natural reaction should be to not support Israel and TikTok should not be held responsible for that.
> The lives on 200 Israeli hostages are not in any shape or form worth more than the lives of 200 Palestinians.
Ok, this sounds bad, but maybe you meant something else? Like not that Hamas can kill/kidnap with impunity, use their own people as human shields, and Israel should just suck it up?
If these were Americans, I wouldn’t fault my government for going all out. It would just set a bad precedent to do otherwise.
Why does it sound bad? Civilian casualties are civilian casualties, and attempts to justify them only lead to more casualties. As long as people on both sides support their governments, despite the civilian casualties, the violence will continue from generation to generation.
(And yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization, but it's also the legitimate government of Gaza. It may not be the de jure government, because the Palestinian National Authority ceased to have one in the aftermath of Hamas winning the 2006 elections.)
Civilian casualties always suck, but total war means they are unavoidable. Think of how many Germans were killed during WW2 just because Hitler wanted to take over Europe? War is never clean, and insurgencies will always use civilians as human shields, so civilian casualties are unavoidable if you do anything but surrender.
Also, if you don’t want to be invaded, don’t elect leaders that think kidnapping people across the border is a good idea. Ya, it’s rarely this simple, since these places are rarely so democratic, but people have some responsibility for their governments even in the case of autocracies.
Civilian casualties may be unavoidable, but a necessary evil is still evil. And, because I'm an outsider who doesn't identify with either party, I don't see the difference between Israeli and Palestinian casualties. Civilian casualties are civilian casualties.
Justifications similar to yours have been used to support the actions of Hamas. Many Palestinians, maybe even most of them, genuinely believe so. If the same arguments can be used in good faith to support both sides, such arguments must be worthless. They can only lead to more violence and more deaths.
WW2 was a rare war, because it was so conclusive. The Allies didn't only defeat the Axis, but they also had a plan for the aftermath. A plan how to reorganize the states on the losing side and how to win over the people and make them support the new regime. Without such a plan, a war today can only lead to another war tomorrow.
If the choice is between your own people getting kidnapped and killed by Hamas periodically, and total war, most countries will choose total war. Gaza will simply never be able to survive if its goal is the eradication of Israel, because Israel will simply not roll over and take that. Which country would?
The Taliban and Hussein were telling us repeatedly that they had nothing to do with 9-11, and we had no real intelligence that said otherwise.
No one is denying that Hamas went into Israel and kidnapped a bunch of people. Maybe Hamas was relying on American pacifists and isolationists to get away with it?
Here's one way to put it: Suppose people in the Northern US had, since the end of WWII, been using a mix of economic and military tactics to force Canadians near the border out of their homes, declaring the new territory part of a New England-centric ethnostate where only people of New England descent were welcome, to the point where the only remaining Canadian areas were completely surrounded by American settlements with militarized borders. Suppose between last January-October of last year alone, Canada lost 100-500 or so children directly due to military action and thousands more civilians due to inadequate healthcare and nutrition resulting from the military blockades.
And then, suppose that a militant group of, at most, 100-1000 of those Canadians, out of 5M or so total Canadians, did a parallel to Oct. 7.
By the time we'd killed 20,000 unrelated civilians, I'd be pretty upset. I would be upset at seeing rhetoric on TV saying that Canadians were "animals" or "grass that needed to be mowed." As a Southern American, I'd be upset that my tax dollars were funding this.
It's also worth noting that this really parallels 9/11 quite well. I was slower to be upset at our tactics in Afghanistan/Iraq then, but having seen it all now, Israel's attack is clearly the same fruitless-for-workers, military-industrial-complex-feeding meat grinder as it's evidently always been.
And to be more "objective" about that comparison: 9/11 killed more Americans than Oct. 7 killed Israelis. As of 2023, Afghan civilian deaths from our war on Al Quaeda (the entire period from 2001-2023) number [1] "more than 70,000." In half a year alone, 30-35,000 Palestinians have been killed.
But I'd say that measuring human lives against one another is kinda gross, focused on hindsight, and ineffective. To do the best thing we can in the present, we need to make the choices that maximally preserve human life. And selling/giving them weapons just ain't it.
The issue is that Hamas is both completely morally bankrupt and also intractable, and Netanyahu equally so. When the war first broke out, and all these so-called "leftists" where chanting "from river to sea," and advocating for Hamas, of course I had to support Israel, because at least Israel was still democratic, and many of those IDF soldiers being sent in were muslim themselves.
Well, look at things now. It's a bloodbath. The most radical solution of them all, that the people themselves must rise up and organize and fight back against both Hamas and the Israeli government, is increasingly the only rational solution and the only end to the conflict. But that would also require an international movement and an international struggle. But why should we ask for any less, global warming will come for us all anyway if we don't change the order of the world.
That isn't entirely Israel's fault, history shows that urban warfare has always been a destructive tragedy. It's why we invented rules like clearly separating military and civilian installations. Unfortunately, Hamas turned that on its head by deliberately mixing everything so civvies can't be ignored even moreso than usual.
When you have military (FSVO military) infrastructure located underneath hospitals and UN installations among others, of fucking course it's going to be a bloodbath. It's not like Israel can just not respond to the October attack that triggered this war either.
Moral is that there are reasons why the west has adopted ways to try and be somewhat civilized if we wage war, the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet.
>Moral is that there are reasons why the west has adopted ways to try and be somewhat civilized if we wage war, the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet.
The situation was depraved from the start, as Israel and the US created Hamas in order to control the Gaza strip way back in 2006, thinking that they would never pose a substantial threat like the PLO. Of course the Israelis think its their sovreign right to decimate the territory. They built those bunkers under the hospitals, they created the very conditions which they are fighting in. They will kill as many people as needed to make up for it.
IMO it comes down to: is/was hamas the de-facto legitimate government of Gaza? They attacked a sovereign nation, and now hopelessly loosing the war they started refuse to surrender.
You could argue that by putting military installments among civilian infrastructure, Hamas has adopted a policy of Total War, effectively committing their entire population to the effort of war with Israel.
How do you fight a country that is determined to kill you even if it costs them every man, woman and child?
Of course people will disagree that Hamas is actually willing to commit every resource to the fight, but I dunno. They seem pretty ok using them as shields or bait or suicide bombers...
>When many users opened the popular app on Thursday, the company greeted them with a message to oppose the legislation, prompting a flood of phone calls to several Capitol Hill offices.
“Stop a TikTok shutdown,” the message on the app read. It included a button for people to call their representatives, saying: “Let Congress know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO.”
>Some users said on X that they were unable to use the app before placing the call.
It is essentially malware with the capability to directly affect electoral politics. It is a necessity that it is banned as soon as possible.
A push message that a number of users reported they couldn't close out until they'd dialed the number, an error which ByteDance only fixed well after the damage had already been done.
Perhaps you'd prefer the South China Morning Post, which had 0 mentions of this incident in its article[0], although to be fair that paper is owned by the Alibaba group, whose CEO magically disappeared for months one time for speaking out against Xi.
It's a good thing we have numerous other sources on the matter[1][2][3].
But I suppose they're all owned by western corporations, so who can we trust? I myself wouldn't trust the paper that casually omitted a crucial detail about the controversy.
