I think the primary argument for banning TikTok should be based on reciprocity rather than moral and/or security concerns. We can make similar arguments about the negative effects of Facebook, Instagram, and etc. even from the POVs of other countries, but the key issue here is that China heavily restricts foreign apps and services from operating in their market. If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?
I don't think we should "lowest common denominator" to oppressive regimes. Our Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press. So it should be allowed under the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects pledging your allegiance to the Flag, just as it protects China saying "China is great, you should love us instead". The First Amendment makes no attempt to moderate content; you can say pretty much whatever you want. If China's use of TikTok for propaganda upsets you, then it's on you to make a compelling argument that is better than theirs. (I actually don't think that TikTok is much of a Chinese propaganda avenue. People are just mad that it's telling kids to eat tide pods and then they get sick. Who knew that underfunding public education for years would have consequences.)
At the end of the day, what this law is asking for is a Great Firewall around the US, that prohibits which websites its citizens can visit. I do not want that, even if China's market practices are unfair. The cure is worse than the disease.
Tiktok isn't "some website", it is partially owned and controlled by the CCP, which influences what content gets shown to Americans. A majority of zoomers get most of their news and information primarily from this platform, which again is under the influence of a hostile foreign government. (TikTok also spies on US citizens for the CCP, but let's keep this restricted to the free speech argument about the ban).
We actually don't have to shrug and say "oh well, first amendment" with respect to propaganda outlets of foreign countries.
What most of the posters in this thread don't realize is that US is effectively at war with China. China is working in front of the scenes to be the major funder of Russia's war [1] against Europe, which is US's ally amongst the coalition of democratic countries. China is working behind the scenes to stop the supply of artillery shells to Ukraine. [2]. and it is increasingly and more visibly supplying Russia with military supplies. [3]
People need to stop being so naive and realize that it's the aligned democratic countries (Ukraine, Europe, US, Australia, Canada, UK, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) fighting against the last survival of dictatorships (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea). If you wish the dictatorships to win, please by all means, move there.
Please don’t act like people who are against top down banning of apps in the usa are aligned with autocracy. That’s precisely the opposite of accurate.
This would be like if someone were against the government suppressing leftist groups and barring radicals from hollywood and such during the red scare because of the violation of civil liberties, then you walked up and said they were pro russia. Completely reductive.
Current trading activities doesn't mean much by themselves. Europe also still trades with Russia. This is sort of missing the forest for the trees. You have to look at whether there are concerted efforts from Europe/US to REDUCE trade with Russia/China, which is yes. And whether US/Europe is restricting China's military capability, which is yes.
We might not be in a direct, conventional, people-shooting-each-other war, but the trade war with them is absolutely raging and we are pretty evenly matched. It's a nightmare. One of the CCP's greatest strengths is to exploit/play our economics game better than ourselves, with all the advantages that brings.
Doesn’t matter as far as the Constitution is concerned. It says “Congress shall make no law …”. Doesn’t add anything about “except in time of war” or “when it’s really inconvenient” or “when parents fail to monitor their child”.
US is not at war with China. We are in a period of escalating tension, but have broad and far reaching economic, political, and social ties. Despite our disagreements, we have in the past and continue to cooperate on mutually beneficial terms.
That said, the CCP is not hoping for the United States to suddenly become politically stabilized. They are not hoping for the US populace to embrace the current social and economic order which stands at odds to Chinese goals. The CCP is an extremely disciplined predator organization with a long-term outlook, and should be dealt with appropriately.
1. China was originally a significant importer of goods from Russia. Over the past two years, due to the lower oil prices from Russia, the import volume has increased by 30%.
2. The total purchasing amount from the European Union and India surpasses that of China, with no single entity making significant purchases of Russian energy.
3. Perhaps you should look into the historical records of energy procurement by India. In 2021, trade with Russia was essentially negligible, but it now constitutes 36%. The main financier behind the scenes should be clearer now.
> Imagine trying to suspend the 2nd amendment because of school shootings.
2A is for well regulated militias, from an era when the government struggled to raise and maintain a standing army, and wasn't sure an army could even be trusted. 2A was antiquated long before schools started having to teach toddlers survival tactics.
Many times constitution was suspended in US during wartime [1]. Also, school shooting has a very low likelihood of causing US to collapse. Losing an adversarial war against a rival of similar size with nuclear weapons and a brainwashing mechanism via TikTok will. I for one do not want to live in a world controlled by China, where the state can weld me inside my apartment [2], find random reasons to jail me then extract organs from me [3] or many of the atrocious things China does.
You are absolutely right. Turning the other cheek when facing an opponent which is pointing at you as an source of ultimate evil and acting like it is plainly stupid.
Just curious why the marketplace of ideas won't solve this? If people don't want to be influenced or want to avoid it, won't they? Or if a competitor wants to deliver a more engaging product, shouldn't consumer choice result in the best possible outcome?
This has a feeling of paternalism that rubs me the wrong way. I'd be happy to hear of a case where large scale paternalism worked out, but so far it seems like paternalism is a failed ideology whose proponents continue to not realize that, "just one more try; it will work."
What I'm hearing is an argument for cultural-Sakokuism and I have to remind the reader that it never works.
Sorry, but this just has an air of "My concerns are the only valid ones," that makes it hard to take seriously. I don't want to live in a world where my kids can get shot at school. I guess we just have different priorities, but I think it goes too far when we start saying, "Mine are right."
That's quite alright, I didn't expect to convince someone who believes that in a war for survival, an opposing dictatorship can freely operate the most powerful propaganda weapon humankind has known against the democracy. Just because you know, it's idealistic.
Can you walk me through the scenario you're envisioning? I'm having a hard time following the series of events that starts with the status quo of TikTok ownership and results in the Chinese state being able to harvest your organs. Can you paint me a picture of a timeline or a series of key turns that would lead to that outcome?
Anything's possible I guess, I mean, did anyone expect that China would allow the release of the man made covid virus from its Wuhan biolab (intentionally, or unintentionally) out to the world, killing millions in the process and giving long covid to millions more? And US and UK would be the ones that developed the vaccine successfully, and allowed the rest of the world to fully function after 2 years? And China would be the one that couldn't come up with its own vaccine, and just decided to release it into the wild in 2022 and bury any sort of mention of mass covid deaths [1]? I mean, if it were the other way around, and US and the rest of world was still shut down after 2 years while China was fully functional, TikTok could have been used by China to incite civil unrest in democratic countries, leading some to its downfall.
I mean, there's no way China would release a covid 2, right?
Ok, but can you be specific about the scenario you're envisioning that begins with China's current ownership of TikTok and ends with organ harvesting? It sounds like a specific concern you have and you've given it careful consideration.
> can freely operate the most powerful propaganda weapon humankind has known against the democracy.
if we think is a true, accurate and non-hyperbolic description of tik-tok (and by extension social media) i don’t want anyone with power to operate them. whether it’s a billionaire from any country or any government.
it isn’t clear to me why we would treat a billionaire, a mega corporation, or a government any different with anything this powerful. again, if we were to agree this description is accurate no organization or person should have this kind of influence.
i agree, we have to start somewhere. and if we think it’s the most powerful propaganda weapon ever developed, the place to start is by regulating _all_ social media.
A US citizen distributing foreign media themselves is quite different than what is effectively a directly controlled broadcast owned by a foreign government.
It's not even content per se, it's much more insidious than that.
The comment I originally replied to likened tiktok to a printing press, but that's not quite right.
Imagine a printing press owned by an enemy that would subtly manipulate the text of whatever you tried to print. Or maybe it would omit entire articles from certain recipients of the newspaper, or reorganize the page layout to emphasize different things than the editor intended.
We wouldn't allow this hypothetical printing press controlled by a hostile foreign government to be sold in the US, we would be crazy to.
Actually, yes, we would allow such a thing. Plenty of our news organizations are foreign – owned, and many of them are very elegant to your hypothetical printing press. The US simply doesn’t have the constitutional or legal framework to regulate content reproduction for ideological reasons.
The content is not what is being outlawed, only the distribution mechanism. ISIS wouldn't be allowed to own a publishing company in America; nobody thinks that somehow curtails freedom of speech. If somebody so chooses, they could distribute content from ISIS, and restrictions on that would indeed be a restriction on speech. But it wouldn't be a restriction to make it illegal to give money to ISIS.
So if you want to make the same argument, you will have to declare china's CCP to be a terrorist organization - and all of the legal implications that entails.
That's not a constitutional requirement. There's no law that says the government can only do this to terrorists. In fact, even if somebody is a terrorist, if they're American, it would still be unconstitutional to deprive their freedom of speech. ByteDance, as a foreign entity, enjoys no such protection.
Is it? When you're saying that, I think you're imagining your neighbor, not your oligarch.
When one country tries to cause chaos in another, they use a two pronged approach. (1) they offer a country's aristocracy the ability to enrich themselves at the cost of their people. This could be things like cheap labor, gas pipelines, or being the guarantor of loans. (2) They tell a countries peasantry that the worlds problems are simple and that their government is their enemy and failing them. This is only empowered by having compromised their aristocracy, so their government is failing them.
Then they put their fingers on the scale by providing resources (weapons, funding, press, intelligence, etc.) to an aligned entity capable of promoting their interests.
It's worth considering that the great firewall of china exists explicitly because the Chinese government (rationally) thinks it's risky to subject people who were subsistence farming a generation ago to foreign influence.
The cost of freedom is responsibility, and if you have an irresponsible (read: poorly educated/non critical thinking) populace, then people will unwittingly surrender their freedom. Freedom means the freedom to do the wrong thing, but that can result in bending or breaking.
Rationally...I don't find that that is implied. China is doing that rationally from a completely self interested, in the animal sense, way. The point of freedom is freedom, it's an end unto itself, if people are fooled or liable to control given such freedom, let them be. Control hardly ever "works" (in the ultimate sense), maybe in children, but we're not talking about children. Children also grow old.
Foreign nationals present on US soil only. This is why we Europeans have such a problem with having our data transferred to you, i.e. because we don't actually have any rights in the US.
I would characterise our lack of rights as complete. Some years ago Americans began torturing people who had been handed over to them on the promise that they would not be tortured already at Bromma airport, so here in Sweden, and this was presumably legal. I assume that if it had been done to me, it would have been legal as well.
The American constitution prohibits torture [1] so no one should be getting tortured by the government anywhere in the world. Of course, you could get around this by redefining what constitutes torture and getting a pliant attorney to sign off and away you go.
Data rights are not embedded in the constitution and so the US is currently in the process of creating a patchwork of (mostly state driven) legislation to define how user data can be treated. Hopefully, the Federal government will step in at some point and create some consistency and clarity with rules that are both practical and efficacious.
No, only Americans and US permanents residents are protected from torture outside of the US. Others have no constitutional protections whatsoever.
There is an inferred right to privacy though, and that is for this same reason not something applicable in cases of non-Americans and non-US residents when outside of the US.
There are already rules, there's the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, but it's implemented by an executive order, so there's nothing preventing there existing some other executive order secretly negating it.
If the first amendment actually protects TikTok here, as may be the case, then the courts can strike this down.
On the other hand, perhaps the first amendment doesn't block this. In that case, that relevant consideration would seems to be rare broad bipartisan support (as evidenced by a very lopsided 352-65 vote, but we'll see what happens in the Senate) to limit the potential harm that can be done by the information warfare capabilities of a genocidal authoritarian regime with whom it is certainly plausible that the US will be at war with in the next decade.
It is really unclear, absent a successful constitutional challenge, why the free speech maximalism preferences of a throwaway account on HN should hold more weight than lopsided bipartisan vote by democratically elected legislators.
Nope. The first amendment protects the speech of US citizens and only to a certain extent. This is why the US has a torture center in Guantanamo. To avoid issues of constitutional rights.
This is also, btw, what allows the CIA and NSA to spy on data you send overseas in violation of the 4th amendment.
First Amendment also protects visitors, resident aliens, undocumented workers, and everyone else within the jurisdiction (with some nuance for prisoners, soldiers, etc).
If someone wants to subject themselves to CCP propaganda, why stop them? If they’re that lacking in critical thinking, then maybe they’re getting what they deserve. It’s not like anyone is forcing people to use TikTok.
The funny thing is there's not really that much propaganda on TikTok, much less pro-CCP. Sure there's the potential, but it's really not even much of a thing IRL.
It doesnt have to be pro CCP. All they have to do is slightly boost anti US or anti Israel or anti Ukraine and it is the same thing. Slowly boiling the frog by boosting fringe voices and promoting them as common views.
It doesn't even have to be anti-US, all it needs to do is make the factions inside the US fight each other even more. Push two sides that are both "pro-US". That is, after all, also how CIA overthrows governments...
Yes and for this reason I support a similar ban in my country of large scale American owned social media. Given they are all guilty of the above claims.
What the American owned social networks have done to my countries populace, including its youth, is nothing short of a disaster. It’s induced complete brain rot.
Promoting fringe voices is perfectly legitimate, both in terms of politics and free speech. That is literally how all social progress comes about. It's also how we elected our previous President. Like it or not, those are the rules of the game.
> The funny thing is there's not really that much propaganda on TikTok
I recommend that you sit down in front of your computer with your beverage of choice and do a deep dive into psyops.
To address your comment, there are psyops actors in every significant (and some less significant) social media platform, even our own Hacker News. Whether you want to call their work “propaganda” or something else is mostly semantics — they are operating with an agenda, sometimes/often one that conflicts with the will and/or best interest of our nation (in my case, the US).
Fair enough... I consider that all propaganda. Anyone acting with an agenda, especially when they're trying to persuade without openly disclosing their agenda. Even more so, there's plenty of people who post stuff (like the fringe violence or whatever) who aren't necessarily psyops, but then the algo can promote it in a way that influences people. And I know this can all be done gradually and subtly.
But you should do a deep dive on tiktok if you aren't already on it! It's almost all fun/bizarre/educational videos. When you have so many people (lawmakers) critiquing it who don't use it regularly, it all just comes across as McCarthyism.
(edited to remove a sentence I started and didn't finish)
Because I'm not fancying getting what they deserve together with them. Some brainless zoomers might be casually destroying the West and causing our doom, but I don't want to suffer from their stupidity. I would rather limit their fun than my life.
An interesting phenomenon is people in the US who already got manipulated, and then spread the manipulation from within the US, eagerly and voluntarily, as US citizens
While you lost cred at “partially owned and controlled by the CCP”, I’ll bite. You seem to have knowledge that those at TikTok USDS (and TikTok Inc.) do not. Please share your data/sources on how the “CCP influences the content shown to American “zoomers””.
There’s a similar operational and data island for UK TikTok users as part of project Clover. Share your data on how the CCP is manipulating content shown to UK users while you’re at it.
At the end of the day, my opinion is that after all the changes made to segregate and protect US users this is now all political theater and posturing, and potentially setting a very dangerous precedent.
On the one hand, leaving the potential for CCP propaganda to reach citizen's eyes can be a threat model for insurgency. On the other hand, leaving it monitoring the data coming in, then earmarking when there's an uptick in "flagged" packets or whatever could be a valuable heuristic. It all depends on the point of view.
The US government working with social media companies to censor Americans (and other people) on those platforms is also pretty bad, yes. My impression is that their influence is much weaker and more marginal than is the case with the CCP and tiktok, though. But I would be sympathetic to other countries banning US social media on the ground of US govt influence.
How can you acknowledge that the USG colludes with domestic platforms to censor Americans and not think that it is targeting foreign platforms because they make that censorship more difficult?
You know, the obvious explanation that doesn’t require an unseen CCP bogeyman.
Fox News and MSNBC are propaganda for American political parties not foreign governments. They have a much stronger constitutional argument for 1st Amendment protection than Russia Today or China Central TV would.
The US government absolutely has its own government run media outlets such as Voice of America and foreign governments do ban them. For example, the Taliban has attempted to ban VOA in Afghanistan:
No, it's owned & controlled by an American family (from Australia), has its headquarters in New York City and is not beholden to any foreign governments.
Whatever you think of our home-grown propaganda outlets, the US govt taking different approaches to foreign outlets should be uncontroversial. Unlike the CCP, US citizens have first amendment rights.
Bullshit. This isn't "conservative politics". This is right-wing hate behind the thinnest veil of "political entertainment".
They don't really talk about small government or fiscal conservatism anymore. They talk about the "threat" that is posed by LGBTQ+ people and immigrants.
I can't even talk to my own father anymore without him getting angry. Angry about nothing. That's one of millions of very real relationships that have been very directly damaged by Fox News. They don't get to do that, then just shrug it off as it it's an accident, and not their primary business model.
Dude, you are very angry and I'd suggest you readjust.
My father watches fox news 24/7. I used to be angry like you anytime we touched close to politics. Now, I just don't talk about it, it's not worth it and doesn't add any value to the relationship, and never did before.
Hopefully you'll see this as you get older. Fox news didn't damage your relationship, sorry.
Ah yes, the "don't talk about politics" approach. The one fundamental/procedural union of all with all, the thing that wretches all of us out from tribal/segregated animal existence. The biggest decision tree impacting our planet and the universe at large. That thing? Yeah just ignore it, if dad thinks killing the gays should be part of the law and I don't...well ya know, let's just lobotomize ourselves psychically so we never have to broach the truths of morality, ethics, justice, and never discuss the two paths humanity and walk down. Very well. Leave it to the others, what do we know anyways, it's not like we can do anything...
I don't talk about it either. He insists we talk about it, or he silently stews over the lack of engagement, while disengaging from everyone else in the room. Sure, it didn't destroy our relationship, but I'm not going to pretend everything is just as good as it was 6 years ago: it's not.
That's just one personal example, too. You would be hard-pressed to find a random 20-minute span of the Fox News network where the primary subject of discussion isn't hate or fear. Very rarely is the primary subject actually a political position. Fox News is a constant barrage of why you should be afraid of and angry at the very existence of every person who has interests or goals that don't match the interests and goals of a right-wing transphobic christian nationalist.
Even if it were about presenting and supporting the political position of right-wing transphobic christian nationalism, it would be better. Fox News does not focus on any political position. Instead, they focus on the engagement of fear and hate that implies that position.
I'm not too worried about their opinion. I just want to do what I can to show people the reality of the situation. Fox News doesn't get to maximize the engagement of its audience and minimize the engagement of its critics.
I think when dealing with 'the other side' so to speak, a good many of us (me included) are against the forces of shear ignorance, scientific illiteracy, undo/thinly veiled racism, and a general disunion amongst men (a war of all against all). I certainly wouldn't put you in this category, but you must admit your original comment came in hot, which instinctively makes people put their shields up. I hope we can all be like the Buddha, but for me, it's exceedingly hard to embody
If you really care about who spies on who, check with AIPAC and similar groups that said that openly, and no one gave a dime.
TikTok is less censored compared to FB, Instagram, X.com etc..
Look how many Israel supporter funded this action (banning/buying Tiktok) Always look for the one with most interest in having Tiktok controlled, you will know who are are the lobbyistes behind. (Follow the money)
It's a peeve of mine when people talk about the "CCP" like this, almost universally in a negative context--like they're trying to invoke the specter of communism in a scary way. Maybe you didn't mean it that way? Why say "CCP" rather than just "China"?
Maybe because not all of China supports the CCP's goals, means, and ideology? Substantial numbers of people disagree with some or all of those, and nobody gets to influence the CCP so it hardly represents anyone besides Party members. (And even some of those have serious disagreements.)
A majority of right-wing Boomers get their news from sources controlled by corporation and politicians interested in overthrowing a legit government and could therefore be considered a threat to national security.
I could be convinced that banning both would be good.
Buddy if some meaningful proportion of your population is finding foreign propaganda convincing, your problem isn’t foreign propaganda.
USA in terminal decline and, in typical fashion, it flatly refuses to look at itself and wonder why. American power elite has no one to blame but itself.
This is a common misunderstanding of what the first amendment means.
Speech and individual expression are individual rights and not institution rights. Perhaps you have some argument with "freedom of press" but that's a pretty hefty uphill battle for TikTok to prove that they are press and not just a random social media business.
Some of our oldest and most well supported laws revolve around limiting what a business can and can't say. For example, a supplement company can't advertise "This fish oil will cure your cancer!"
The interstate commerce law gives congress the power to make laws that regulate businesses (that operate over state boundaries). That power includes things like outright banning a business for pretty much any reason.
> Some of our oldest and most well supported laws revolve around limiting what a business can and can't say. For example, a supplement company can't advertise "This fish oil will cure your cancer!"
That's misunderstanding what law is. An individual can be tried for fraud just as a business. It doesn't have anything to do with freedom of speech.
You can restrict businesses from saying things beyond what individuals can say.
For example, the FCC prevents public broadcasters from saying "fuck" on the air. Yet you can yell "Fuck the police" over and over again and be protected by the first amendment. There are words and speeches that can't be aired on public TV.
There are other instances of this. A publicly traded business cannot, for example, has to be careful with public statements. There are things they can't say while the stock market is open (such as announcing a merger). Yet an individual has no such restrictions on their free speech. The closest analogy would be preventing individuals from inciting a riot or issuing calls for violence.
And that underlines that free speech in the US has limits (and always has). About the only speech that is pretty much fully protected is political speech, but as I said, even that falls a bit short as you can get in hot water if someone uses your political speech as inspiration for violence.
TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press.
No, TikTok is essentially digital opium. And China itself has confirmed that reality by 1) restricting their citizens' daily access and 2) significantly filtering the content they can see on it:
It would only be fair of the US to follow China's example of protecting its citizens from numbing out on TikTok digital garbage. We should most certainly should follow suit with an equivalently restrictive measure.
If you honestly believed this to be true, you would be arguing for a ban on all social media, as like half of Instagram is just reposts of TikTok content and is otherwise mind-numbingly equivalent to the service.
I believe it to be true and I'd like broad, heavy restriction of algorithmically targeted content but that would go against the interests of massive companies. Not gonna happen. I'll take the win in this instance though, where national security concerns and congress' desire to look like it's doing something align to make a small positive change.
How is this a win at all though? Especially now. Every kid I know says Reels is a perfectly good alternative now (it wasn't two years ago). It's making a statement about something, but it's not helping any of the problems you noted.
You don't seriously believe that social media is analogous to the printing press, do you? Because it's not, and it's so obviously not that I'm having trouble imagining what point you were trying to make relative to 1A. Because this isn't a 1A issue either, and it never has been.
If you must, this is like destroying foreign radio towers or something, where those radio towers have the ability to algorithmically predict what people want to listen to and then generate content tuned to affecting their state of mind, what they believe, and so on. So, yeah, blow 'em up.
both things spun the world as we knew it as humans into chaos in one way or another, but despite the metaphor floating around this thread the printing press and social media are not equivalents.
And you’ve lost all perspective by hopping on the bandwagon of a xenophobic moral panic. There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.
these days instagram is much more used by older people than tiktok which has a large younger audience. Also scale wise, tiktok is crazy huge, so yes there is a difference between the two offerings
> And you’ve lost all perspective by hopping on the bandwagon of a xenophobic moral panic
In my experience the people who lead with this non-argument tend to be the most privileged. It's always nice talking down to other people of color, isn't it.
> There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.
>> There is zero difference between Instagram Reels and TikTok garbage.
> Demonstrably false.
Ageeed.
I put Reels on the bottom of the short content platforms - TokTok, Shorts, then Reels.
If you haven't used these platforms a lot, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference. Reels is boring. Everything it shows me, no matter how much I use it, always sucks. I lose interest in minutes. Shorts is decent but mostly just marketing for a channels main brand, but still gets boring after a little use or I'm back in the main tab. TikTok - where did the time go?
TikTok Live is also quite unique, never before I have I experienced other peoples lives so up close and (politely) invasively. Such a strange feeling seeing some family in India making clay cups, or the (Eastern European?) tile guy grinding for hours, or the loading dock somewhere where people are sliding massive blocks of ice around, or the Australian DJ on his balcony - while I'm across the world laying in bed at 3am.
Our Constitution also says, "The Congress shall have Power [...] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations."
Forcing a sale of TikTok so it's not foreign (with a punishment of banning if they don't), especially while making no such law for U.S. controlled competitors, is no more an infringement upon free speech than introducing a tariff or trade restriction on German-manufactured printing presses while leaving domestic models untouched.
EU is doing similar with anti-trust rules and rulings. It is their right to regulate commerce in their jurisdiction, even if that means fining Apple based on world revenue/profits rather than EU revenue/profits.
Or China! China has definitely prohibited American companies from reasonably operating in the US. Reciprocity there makes sense but it does seem that this sort of reciprocity is going further than China had, no?
If they passed a law requiring US companies operating in Europe to divest their ownership in those subsidiaries or be banned from operating there then that would be their right as a government. Isn’t the EU rather famous at the moment for forcing foreign businesses to comply with their laws and regulations? e.g. GDPR
That said, so long as you don't have data centers in the country, what can they realistically do to stop you if you have a VPN?
There's nothing illegal w.r.t a private citizen trying to circumvent censorship afaik. If you're trying to use illegal content or services (hitmen, drugs, child porn, non us compliant crypto such as finance etc), then I can see the retribution, but unless you go full middle east/CCP people will still get access to and repost it
How many times do we see the government trample on our rights behind “safety”?
I’m fully with you on this. If TikTok is harmful, spread the word and let people make that decision for themselves. If kids are too small to make that decision, that falls on the parents. Don’t take away my rights because others can’t vet companies and use their brains if they should use the apps these companies put out.
What rights is it taking away? TikTok will still exist, you will still be able to get to it on the internet. All this bill does is force a sale OR prevent American companies from platforming technology from adversarial nations (something every government does all the time... see the US and Huawei or limiting Nvidia exports to china etc).
You'll still be able to download the app from the internet (just not an App Store) or browse it on your phone on the internet. We aren't putting up a 'great firewall' or anything
My mistake then, but what’s the point then? Won’t they come for the website next if TikTok doesn’t sell? I don’t even use TikTok but I know this law will be precedence for other laws blocking outside websites.
The only way to ban TikTok is with a network firewall. US can ban local web hosting and even DNS (see pirate media sites), which might be enough to destroy the "network effect" of the site's popularity.
But has US ever banned an IP address or routing?
Well for one, it could force the sale to a non adversarial nation. Two, if it doesn't it undercuts the companies ability to deliver it on American app platforms, both of which are a positive from the viewpoint of the US government.
We have laws against foreign ownership of broadcast TV and radio. Our legal system already acknowledges that foreign ownership of the media is a bad thing that should be prevented. The problem is that these laws haven't been updated for the modern era. TikTok is not covered.
But this due to a failure of our politicians to respond to the modern era, not because the bill of rights enshrines or applies to foreign companies.
That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen in order to start FOX in the 80s. This then enabled him to build FOX News with the specific intent to become the media arm of the Republican party, by tapping Roger Ailes as the first and guiding CEO. Ailes had already worked on media campaigns for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, often credited as a major factor in their victories. So he got to run the day to day of the party's new media arm.
Murdoch himself was an international operator who wanted political power for the benefits rather than the ideology. This is demonstrated by the much more liberal leanings in Australia when that was the party willing to grant him power.
What could the impacts be today, if FOX News was owned by the CCP instead of an Aussie of negotiable political virtue?
The law in the US is that you can't make radio transmissions on TV / AM / FM frequencies without a license, because left unchecked, everyone doing what they want would make radio useless for everyone. The government has a clear reason to require licenses, and they have the power to restrict who can receive one.
The Internet doesn't work like that, though. No license is required to make a website or mobile app, because websites and mobile apps don't interfere with each other. The government wouldn't have a very strong argument to require websites to have a license, because they have no reason for doing that other than in moderating the content of the website, which is prohibited by the Constitution.
In the past, TV licenses were absolutely used to censor viewpoints the government didn't like, but now that is no longer possible, because nobody cares about TV or radio. You can bring in whatever content you want from anywhere in the world, thanks to the Internet. That is what the government is salty about; they are losing control because people don't care about TV anymore.
(I'll also point out that shortwave radio still exists. You can tune your radio to, say, 5910kHz and listen to CCP propaganda all day, and there is nothing the US government can do about it. On the flip side, we have Voice of America for a reason. We like broadcasting American propaganda into China just as much as China likes the reverse. Unfortunately, nobody listens to shortwave radio anymore. That's what the US is mad about; people like TikTok, but they don't have anything like it.)
I was referring to the section of the Telecommunication Act that limits foreign direct investment to a 20% ownership stake (which ups to 25% with FCC approval for anything more if a holding company is used).
I'm not sure I communicated my point clearly though, because I agree that the old laws do not apply because they haven't been updated to work with the internet era. I do know how the internet works, though, and that you can get data from 'anywhere'.
Nobody would really care about the issue, though, if there weren't ways to make it more difficult to operate. Banning from the app stores doesn't prevent people from watching TikTok, but it makes it more difficult. They'll get fewer users if they need to side-load a native app or use a PWA, and a significant revenue dip from blocked advertising from PWA or browser views. This gives competitors an artificial advantage that network effects can solidify in time.
But the point I was trying to make is, the US should address their failure to keep legislation up-to-date with national security objectives, rather than single out a single company.
Rather than stick-up jobs on random international corporations, eg 'Sell to our country, OR ELSE', they should have created legislation with privacy laws that apply Congress' concerns to all companies, perhaps with stricter rules for international companies. A review process and penalties could result in forced removal from the app store. This could have _prevented_ TikTok's data collection by defining a clear line they're not allowed to cross. And if they still crossed the line, their app could be removed without it clearly being biased.
Now, the stated concern (privacy violations and data transferred to China) are likely not the only problem. We would have to update the old laws and go beyond simply checking for foreign ownership. The law would need to directly address the same issue that the old law was written for (potential abuse by a foreign entity). The privacy laws would need to be there. But we'd need to also build a process enabling review of algorithmic behavior and manual processes around censorship and propaganda, when companies reach a certain size or market reach. We'd need safeguards to prevent abuse of the law (which will happen, considering the tendency for all of our institutions to come under regulatory capture at some point).
Frankly, I'd prefer if algorithmic ranking system were forced to be opened to the public in a scenario where they gain sufficient audience to cause a significant impact on public discourse, as long as we're rewriting the laws. Some might cringe and cry 'Oh no, what about the intellectual property of that dozen or so megacorps!' And no doubt these companies would also incur expense fighting the gamification of their algorithms. That's just the cost of being so impactful, and it will drive innovation if they can't keep up. And it's the best way to ensure abuses are discovered if we put regulation of censorship and algorithmic abuse in the hands of government organizations.
Basically, we need a framework to systemically address these issues. Not repeated contentious multi-year congressional fights that are triggered on a case-by-case basis. The current haphazard approach _might_ succeed against an occasional bad actor, but it's going to let dozens more through.
All they're doing now is generating talking points during an election year. It's political theatre, not problem-solving.
Is international influence something that should be stopped? Like, I should check the citizenship of someone before I listen to their ideas? It just doesn't make sense to me. If someone tells me nonsense I can ignore the nonsense. It doesn't mean the government should smash their printing press.
It's annoying when people in other countries rile up people to change how they vote, but ultimately, that's a problem with democracy. It's the worst system out there, except for all the others. People not understanding their government is the deeper problem. Does banning TikTok fix this problem? It sounds like we're saying "only opinion columnists who work for The New York Times and Fox News should be able to tell you how to vote and what issues you care about". That's really not great either, is it?
It's really depressing watching the government strip away the rights of women and transgender people. We can't blame social media influence bots for that. It's elected officials that are doing it. TikTok is just a distraction from the true hardcore hatred that we've elected.
> Is international influence something that should be stopped?
This should be a simple yes. External authoritarian governments (Russia's IRA, CCP via bytedance) should not have their thumb on the scale (trollfarms & the algorithm) for what is viewed in western democracies. I'm actually amazed that this view is controversial.
I agree with the rest of your premises, but the above should be a separate issue from them.
I'll try to weigh in. Democratic republics like the USA are heavily swayed by people, protests, etc. In the digital age, just-in-time censorship of social media like Facebook or Twitter have been extremely effective at preventing "good/bad" protests, and each government sets the rules for the social media in the country (read easy censorship). Additionally, there have been a number of international propaganda campaigns that were successful to disrupt regular elections in the USA recently. See evidence of certain protests getting huge right before and during the russo-ukrainian conflict and covid shutdowns. Tik tok the platform's users generally contribute and consume as a "community that generates content in good faith" (I use that definition loosely), but it is a arm of soft CCP power that could just-in-time promote something terrible (brainstorming here: cultivate civil-war-esque mindsets then trigger, convince the population to avoid polio vaccines, etc.) Elections are tumultuous enough without having each "town square" potentially weaponized by potentially hostile nations, so requiring that free press be free from foreign control (influence is okay under free speech) is what is being decided here.
If American democracy goes down because of "foreign influencers" from platforms like TikTok then it means that it wasn't all that strong to begin with.
I stand by my point, if half of the population can be ideologically "switched"/manipulated by a smartphone app then the original ideology (I would assume liberal-democracy in the case of US) wasn't that heavily implanted to begin with.
The US politicians should look into why that is so, why is that suddenly the US population so easy to "manipulate" away from an ideology it has strongly believed in for more than 200 years, but I guess that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).
What if the US and most other countries have always been sheepishly easy to manipulate -- but it wasn't noticeable, until modern tech like FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok appeared?
It seems to me that Xi in China agrees about this, in that they've blocked all those things (except for their own).
> that would reflect poorly on said politicians (because they're part of the problem).
How do you mean? That they too manipulate the population, and are part of a manipulation problem?
That's a great start, but it's only as valid as an activist judicial branch says it is. If congress passes a law that goes against the reading of that old parchment, someone brings a case that works its way to SCOTUS, then they vote based on the vacation they are provided, then the law is declared valid. If they decide it is not, then it is not. It doesn't matter what some armchair critic of the law thinks. They can tweet and tweet, they can blog and blog, they can vent on forums, but unless they become POTUS in a term where you get to sit 1/3 of the bench, you've got no real shot at changing it. Doesn't matter if you lean left or right, a single POTUS sitting 3 judges is rare enough to not consider it a real possibility. So an activist bench can cause disruption for decades/generations.
You talk about lowest common denominator but that's kind of always been a core issue.
Imagine an enlightened and advanced technological culture that refuses to fight. For all their advancements and liberal policies they're still open to being obliterated by another culture that doesn't really care about the whole "war is bad" thing.
I think as society/morals/ethics/law advances, we still need protections in place for "how could somebody exploit this if they don't play by the same rules that we do".
We'll always, unfortunately, still need a person with a large stick and the threat of violence even in a peaceful society.
The US constitution is for the people in the US. Chinese companies don't apply. If you want to grant freedom of speech protection under the US constitution for TikTok, then TikTok must be owned by US people.
You still have freedom to read. You will still be able to access TikTok if they choose not to sell. This is not a firewall block on TikTok, it is a business restriction on operating within the US. It simply bars US companies from hosting TikTok services or distributing the TikTok app.
> TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press.
Printing presses can't spy on the readers of the paper that goes through them[1]. I think there's a first amendment argument to be made here, but this is way too far out on the absolutist end of the spectrum, not least because this bill doesn't actually regulate TikTok's speech, only who's allowed to own it.
Commercial speech is regulated in thousands of ways already in ways much more effective than this bill. If you really believe in free speech absolutism[2] the fights to be had are elsewhere.
Algorithmic content is not free speech. The government can't make Facebook censor this message or that message, but they can certainly restrict the usage of algorithmic content feeds - that is not protected by the first amendment. I'm not just talking about Tiktok either, this is the issue they should be legislating on, and it should target all social media companies.
There is also legislation giving them to right to regulate foreign ownership of companies. It's scary how much of our stuff is owned by foreign governments. Seems like a national security risk.
How is "developing an algorithm" which selects content any different than editorial free speech? It selects content to show, and transmits that content to its users. Newspapers do this all the time, they pick the stories which get run.
Honestly curious of your take. The only difference that I see is that it can be done at scale, which doesn't necessarily mean it isn't free speech. They just have a bigger megaphone.
Algorithms aren't protected by the US Constitution, that's ridiculous. Point me to the single person who wrote the Facebook algorithm and I will change my opinion and protect its' speech. The press is explicitly protected by the first amendment. Beyond that, commercial speech is not broadly protected. Megaphones, in general, are not free speech.
And we know this. You cannot advertise cigarettes on TV, cities can ban billboards, and until recently, the law understood that donating millions of dollars to a politician is not a form a speech - it's a bribe (we'll have to work on that one).
The press has a protected right to report. Even the press that are really thinly-veiled propaganda outlets get this protection. You have a protected right to speak in public and petition the government for redress without fear of reprisal. Social media and content algorithms are neither the press nor individual citizens, and they are not covered by the language or spirit of the first amendment.
The US Constitution guaranties US citizens rights not the general population of the Earth. Our government has no way to enforce or protect rights from entities outside of the US (other than force). If as you say it is just a "giant printing press" then ownership is irrelevant - change it and print away. If on the other hand the Chinese government has a vested interest in influencing what 136 million Americas consume as information - it will probably stay under a Chinese Government sphere of influence by order of the Party.
>I actually don't think that TikTok is much of a Chinese propaganda avenue.
I don't disagree currently, but it certainly could be used for that. Due to the invisible hand of the algorithm, it would also be hard to know if a topic was trending naturally, or if TikTok was pushing a viewpoint. Setting aside the issue of whether or not TikTok should be banned, do you agree with the potential propaganda concerns?
I don't think the US Constitution gives the Chinese Communist Party Freedom of Speech. They're generally freedoms that apply to US citizens in the US, no?
> I don't think we should "lowest common denominator" to oppressive regimes.
Chinese approval of their government is much higher than most Western regimes including the US. I think you are right about how we ought to apply the 1st amendment here, but I don't find that Chinese propaganda is any more insidious or pervasive than American. We just manage it differently: in China the state directly controls the media, while in the US business interests directly control the state and the media.
> TikTok, at the end of the day, is just a kind of printing press. So it should be allowed under the First Amendment.
I don't think the First Amendment would allow you to use a printing press built out of embargoed components, or arsenic compounds.
The ban isn't on speech. It's on the platform/product, how it's built and distrbuted, and (correctly or not) perceived ways it harms society.
You can have a short-form vertical video app focused on an algorithmic recommendation feed, and you can say whatever you want on that service. But it seems Washington doesn't want it to be sending data and money overseas to the PRC.
> The First Amendment protects pledging your allegiance to the Flag, just as it protects China saying "China is great, you should love us instead".
The US constitution gives foreign governments the same rights that it gives its own citizens?
…Okay. It actually may or may not give US citizens the "Right to Receive Foreign Speech", without conferring any rights onto the foreign entities themselves, but that's still very much an open question. Here's 50 pages (that I haven't read) on the matter, if you're into it:
The word "reciprocity" cannot hide the fact that two wrongs doesn't make a right. We think it is wrong of China to censor Facebook and Twitter because that is what authoritarian regimes that don't give a shit about free speech do. For exactly the same reason it is wrong of the US to ban TikTok. And this bill has nothing to do with balancing international trade. It's stated purpose is to restrict China's ability to influence American youth.
You're muddling issues. China restricts free speech in all contexts, and also separately puts onerous requirements on or outright bans various kinds of foreign businesses.
If TikTok is banned for geopolitical reasons, reciprocity reasons or whatever you want to call it, that doesn't change anything about free speech in America. It's not the unrestricted speech that was deemed a problem with TikTok, but rather the specific geopolitical risk (or whatever).
No, you are muddling the issues. This is about speech and not about
anything trade-related. Banning TikTok is not equivalent to putting
import tariffs on cheap Chinese electronic bikes or solar panels. It's
not about whatever profits ByteDance makes from TikTok.
It's 100% about controlling the narrative. "Young Americans are
turning against Israel — and you can thank TikTok"
https://forward.com/opinion/574346/freepalestine-tiktok-isra...
Can't have that happening in the US. The right to brainwash kids is a
right reserved to the American billionaire class, their purchased
politicians and lobbyists. You can talk about "geopolitical risks",
"security issues", and "reciprocity" all you want but it doesn't hide
this fact.
(1) trade protectionism that is about protecting the right to profit off of manipulation of American youth to favored actors, rather than disfavored foreign actors (whether disfavored because their country doesn’t allow American firms the same power in their countries, or for other reasons) or
(2) totally not trade related, but speech related, and about reserving the right to manipulate American youth to the exact same favored actors discussed in #1.
This is the wrong argument. This legislation doesn't censor TikTok like China censors social media/the internet at large. It simply requires the ownership of Tiktok to be American in the US. This is the same thing China does (You can't operate in China without a Chinese partner to run your operation in China.)
You can debate whether or not it is reasonable or important to for the US to impose similar ownership requirements for businesses operating in the US, but couching it in argument of censorship the way China does it is a real false equivalence. Congress doesn't want to censor your speech on Tiktok (Which isn't how the 1st amendment works anyways) they want China to divest itself of US operations.
What's being censored here? The bill doesn't ban any speech at all - you can put any video tik tok allows on dozens of other video sharing platforms. This is a ban on certain foreign countries (er.. i mean "companies") doing some types of business in the US.
Demanding fairness and reciprocity is not wrong. It's a basic moral position. Furthermore, imposing restriction on totalitarian regimes is perfectly legitimate as well. Letting them do as they please as you argue is, in fact, the morally reprehensible position.
But Tiktok "is". At least Tiktok USA is registered in the US as a US corporation and therefore gets the same protections under US laws. Therefore constitutional protections apply.
You could say the owners of Tiktok don't necessarily get the same protections, but that's a different case. And in this case it is more similar to the Chinese Exclusion Act, but for business purposes rather than immigrational purposes, basically stating that Chinese people aren't allowed to own businesses that operate in the US, and must divest.
The constitution, or the bill of rights we appear to be talking about, or all the amendments? This seems wrong on the face of it.
The only mentions of citizenship I know of are for voting, juries, and elected positions.
By your argument Citizen's United wasn't just an abomination, but barred the congress from limiting foreign political donations, because money is speech? Interesting that's never been brought up.
I mean, I'm willing to listen to the ACLU, but the argument that forcing the sale of a corporation limits free speech is fairly weak, when commercial speech is routinely limited... as it should be. Do you think there is a corporate free speech right to sell personal information? What limits to profit on commercial speech can there be? If an unprofitable social media app were forced to close down, wouldn't laws allowing collection of debts be violations of the 1st amendment?
What's wrong? The glorious right to investment profits? It's not even censorship.
The 1st amendment right to free speech is about US citizens. This isn't even a US corporation. No 1st amendment there so it looks legal. They probably wouldn't have done anything, if the manipulation and spying had been a bit less blatant. Even Telegram and Kaspersky still operate. This isn't even a WTO trade issue since almost every single tech or manufacturing company (except Tesla?) that wants to sell in China has to be a joint owned venture. It's classic mercantilism and there's no international obligation to buy stuff or allow it's import (see fentanyl). Even TikTok isn't allowed there, VPNs are not just banned, but considered tools of terrorism. Tit for tat is a thing, this has been coming for a decade (only slowed by corporate profits and cheap labor), and the slope isn't very slippery.
Still might not happen, if Kellyanne has anything to say to Trump about it.
> almost every single tech or manufacturing company (except Tesla?) that wants to sell in China has to be a joint owned venture
Apple, Oracle, Amazon, GE, Micron, Intel, Dell, Samsung, Kingston, LG, Seagate, Inventec ... Not a single one of these is a joint venture. They are all wholly foreign-owned enterprises (WFOEs) [1][2]
According to the Department of Commerce,
> A large majority of new foreign investments in China are WFOEs, rather than JVs. As Chinese legal entities, WFOEs experience greater independence than ROs, are allowed exclusive control over carrying out business activities while abiding by Chinese law and are granted intellectual and technological rights. (https://www.export.gov/apex/article2?id=China-Establishing-a...)
> WFOE refers to a limited liability company that is 100% invested, owned by foreign investors, and independently operated. Almost 60% of foreign-owned companies are WFOEs, making it the most adopted business type. Famous multinational companies such as Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and General Electric are all examples of WFOEs.
This is true economically, but the unelected authoritarian Chinese Communist Party still has control over content and communications in those companies and their products.
Specifically relevant. Chinese Communist Party allows content on TikTok in US that is not allowed on TikTok in China.
That's a matter of compliance with local censorship laws. American social media companies are obligated to do that when operating abroad, not just in China. YouTube just blocked a Canadian video at the request of the Indian government, for example.
> In an email to CBC on Wednesday, YouTube said it had received an order from India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to block access to the video of the story from its website.
> YouTube confirmed to CBC News Wednesday afternoon that "the content has now been blocked from view" on the India YouTube country site. While the content is restricted in India, the video is still available everywhere else on YouTube.
I find the argument "Your criticism is invalid because the law doesn't violate the First amendment!" reductive and pointless. Decisions taken by the US government can be unethical, counterproductive, immoral, hypocritical, unfair, and stupid, while still being constitutional. It's not illegal for me to treat you worse because your username starts with the letter "k". Yet, many people would find it stupid and inconsistent. Here, the US government is doing the same thing, except the letter is "C".
No, no, no. China and Russia are banning Facebook, Instagram and whatnot because they are evil dictatorships. The US is banning TikTok because China is evil dictatorship.
Nice try bro, but US symmetrically responds to the hostile actions of authoritarian governments. If those authoritarian governments wouldn't be desperately trying to destroy the free world, no one would care of their silly apps.
Facebook played its role in spreading of so called Arab spring in 2011 [0]. Now look how Middle East is doing now, more than 10 years later. That's some destruction for you.
> If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?
I understand what you're saying and I actually support the ban as tiktok can be used as a giant botnet at-will by Chinas government, but an eye for an eye doesn't end well and the US is supposed to be "free" so this part of the argument I wouldn't agree with.
This simplification misses key nuances. Strategies like Tit-for-Tat (TFT) are context-sensitive and not universally "optimal." Effectiveness varies with game structure, communication clarity, and the presence of noise. Moreover, the "optimal" strategy adjusts in finite games (which you didn't clarify which type of game) due to the endgame effect.
Simple hole in your simplification: one simple misunderstanding could lead to an endless cycle of defection where everyone will defect on each other: game over.
>Strategies like Tit-for-Tat (TFT) are context-sensitive and not universally "optimal."
Of course. Hence why I didn't claim it to be universally optimal. All I'm saying is that your willingness to defect against defectors should always be non-zero, just to keep the players in line who start out with a higher predisposition towards defecting.
The noisiness of the real world should probably bias us more in the direction of cooperation, to avoid a cascade of defection as you mention, but a player who only cooperates will get taken advantage of regardless of the precise details of the game. Some amount of this dynamic can be seen currently in the relationship between western companies and the Chinese state, a relationship that is currently very different from the relationship between Chinese companies and the rest of the world.
It is also generally true that the longer the game, the more defectors suffer.
Not if there's a player for whom defecting is always better than cooperating, no matter what the other players do. And not if there's another player for whom cooperating is always better than defecting, no matter what the first player does. Then the first player should always defect and the second always cooperate.
What's being described isn't an eye for an eye, but tit for tat. And tit for tat is the norm for international relations and has been since time immemorial.
Usually it's relatively dull stuff, like if country A requires citizens of country B to have a visa to visit, country B will as a matter of course require citizens of country A to have visas to visit too.
Tit for tat makes sense in a situation where you expect to work out a deal, both sides agree to stop, and everyone is better off. E.g. allowing visa-free travel in both directions between A and B.
But for the Chinese government, social control is an existential issue, not something that can be negotiated away in a trade deal. They're always going to "tit", because allowing people to freely express themselves on the internet could end their rule overnight.
So the "tat" cannot be used as a bargaining chip, but needs to be weighed on its own merits. Does the US benefit from the ability to arbitrarily declare companies to be "foreign adversaries" and shut them down or force their owners to divest? Mightn't TikTok decide to relocate their US headquarters to Europe instead? And shouldn't Chinese founders in the US see the writing on the wall and contemplate a similar move? Is that good or bad for the US?
Drop "Chinese." Just..."Government." But I'm not even framing this as a malicious control thing. A society could just as easily break down if there's not some form of social...you used the word "control," I choose "framework." Paid on Friday, national holidays, do your taxes in April. You could frame these as a sort of control.
Also, a country not allowing citizens to pop off about committing terroristic acts against foreign entities would mitigate the potential for said country to be labelled an "enemy" by everyone else. Diplomacy is hard, but sometimes the rules are in place for a reason. I don't know though; I've never ran a country.
> But for the Chinese government, social control is an existential issue, not something that can be negotiated away in a trade deal. They're always going to "tit", because allowing people to freely express themselves on the internet could end their rule overnight.
Sounds like it’s bad idea to freely open the door to China.
> Mightn't TikTok decide to relocate their US headquarters to Europe instead?
The law says they can’t exist in China, Russia, NK, Iran so this is fine.
> And shouldn't Chinese founders in the US see the writing on the wall and contemplate a similar move?
If they leave China, and its influence, it sounds like a clear win for the US goals. If they’re already in the US then it’s a no-op and they shouldn’t be affected because why would they?
So if China bans all American literature and news sources, the US should do the same? If China deports all Chinese Americans from their country, should the US do the same?
> So if China bans all American literature and news sources, the US should do the same?
At least their propaganda outlets, yes.
> If China deports all Chinese Americans from their country, should the US do the same?
No one is calling for a return to the ugly times of WW2 [1], but banning new immigration outside of asylum claims and especially banning investment into real estate certainly should be on the table.
I disagree but I understand where you're coming from. There's an aspect of being an idealist vs being a realist in the final result. Perhaps some sort of balanced strategy is the way to go. Just definitely don't give leeway for governments to do shitty things (to their people and others) just because others are doing it.
I used to be on the idealist side myself - after all, Germany has been the driving force behind the idea "change (towards democracy) by trade" - but as we've seen with Russia and China, all that did was make us completely dependent on them, and in the case of China the resulting loss of domestic production jobs led to massive issues with "left behind" areas and a loss of trust in democracy itself.
In Africa, it's a similar situation - we poured in boatloads of money and aid, in exchange for the demand of a bare minimum of human rights, and now a lot of the countries there are falling to the lure of Russia and China. My personal position is, drop them. Let Russia and China deal with the mess, fail at it, and keep an open invitation once they realize that Chinese imperialism is just as bad as historic Western imperialism.
As someone from Africa who's currently studying in Germany, it greatly saddens me that you view the situation this way. I hope you gain a better perspective on the issue and all the suffering there.
> What’s being described isn’t an eye for an eye, but tit for tat.
Those are exact synonyms.
> And tit for tat is the norm for international relations
It’s commonly been a norm (not the norm), and its a norm that usually produces escalatory spirals, because actors tend to be more sensitive to harms to themselves from others policies and less sensitive those from other’s policy.
Eye for an eye connotes, if not denotes, proportionate justice. International relations, childish propaganda notwithstanding, is not at all about justice.
Tit for tat on the other hand is specifically a game theory term as used here, and it applies exactly to this sort of diplomatic strategic calculation.
> Eye for an eye connotes, if not denotes, proportionate justice.
No, the law of retribution is not about proportionate justice. It is about retribution.
It’s a association with justice is that it is seen as less unjust and a step toward justice and less socially disruptive than accepting deliberately-escalatory retribution for perceived wrongs as a norm.
Interesting... "eye for an eye" has an almost identical meaning to "tit for tat" in my mind. Both of them effectively mean "retaliation in kind". One slight difference I guess is that "eye for an eye" often relates specifically to justice or just punishment.
"eye for an eye" is actually a retaliation limiter, not a call to arms. It means if someone pokes out your eye, then you are limited to a maximum retaliation of poking out their eye. You are not allowed to kill them.
For this China having TikTok spread propaganda or addiction in the USA does not then give the USA permission to nuke China as a consequence.
> but an eye for an eye doesn't end well and the US is supposed to be "free" so this part of the argument I wouldn't agree with.
"stay on the moral high ground" only works when the other side is roughly playing by the same rules as you are.
With authoritarian nations, with authoritarian leaders? They see any kind of even the slightest allowance as a weakness to exploit, an explicit allowance to move the Overton window. We should have kneecapped China years ago, when the first complaints about industrial espionage came in, and same for Russia after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine. We didn't, and now we're a bunch of lame ducks swimming in a pond of manure.
That’s part of what is being criticized. Human rights are supposed to be universal, and some countries actually handle them like that, applying them to citizens and foreigners alike.
What human right is being violated? This is about what types of business are allowed to domestic and foreign entities. I've never heard anyone declare "its a basic human right for institutions designed to do business behind a liability shield to do as they please anywhere and any time".
Human rights are just made up. It means nothing to talk about them. You can scream in a desert that water is a human right as much as you want, doesn't mean it is going to rain.
Of course people are people. The person I was responding to misunderstood the US constitution as a list of human rights, as well as the enforcing mechanism for the US constitution, and who it applies to.
Yes, and Americans should have the freedoms to receive whatever information they want, including whatever is on Tik Tok. This is covered by the first amendment.
It's not the information that's banned, it's TikTok. People don't seek to ban TikTok because they fear the content, they fear the power that an enemy nation has over their citizens. It's not a free speech issue.
Imagine if a company developed a new form of paper and published many books on it. If the paper turns out to be toxic and is banned, the company can't then say "oh, no, we're being censured". It has nothing to do with the message.
The courts can look at the effect of the ban, not just the intention. If the effect is that it ends up limiting Americans' access to information (which it would, unless ByteDance gave in and sold) then a court could find it unconstitutional.
IANAL, but this is my understanding.
Same holds true of your 2nd example, if it required Americans to turn in all the books they owned printed on that paper, for example.
> it ends up limiting Americans' access to information
it is not a right to have unlimited access to any and all information.
It is only a constitutional violation (by the gov't) to _prevent_ an american citizen from any speech. It would not be a violation to legislatively ban a company, unless that company was the only place you could make speeches, and thus resulting in the outcome where there's defacto speech repression.
However, such a company ban, if it werent due a violation, would erode the trust in the US financial system. Because if the US decides they can just divest you without you violating any current known laws, it will make foreign investment in the US more difficult.
Where on earth does it say that the government cannot limit access to information? If that were true then how on earth is book censorship legal?
For that matter, how was it legal to change to digital tv broadcasts? CCP tiktok can absolutely still operate a website that wont be blocked. The medium of delivery isnt protected speech.
Yes, and Americans should have the freedoms to receive whatever information they want
And they do. This isn't a content-based ban. If a non-Chinese company acquires TikTok, they can continue to host exactly the same material without restrictions.
Can't tell if the new company would be able to host the same exact material. It's already come out that the White House pressured Google and Facebook to promote covid19 vaccine content. YouTube banning Russia-linked channels doesn't seem like their own decision either. The US doesn't control its media nearly the same way many other countries do, but there's still some control.
If you look at the rhetoric of lawmakers and lobbyists supporting the ban, a lot of it is about the content.
Totally. This is the main thing agaisnt the free speech argument. We have also passed this same law in radio and TV. It's about influence at a mass scale more than anything. I don't know why we would want a foreign ADVERSARY to have free reign.
This framing is all backwards. Americans go to TikTok for content of their own free will. This law effectively prevents Americans from using an information service they prefer.
Unless, of course, you want to admit that social media applications, through some combination of peer pressure, advertising, propaganda, manipulation, and deception subvert the free will of some portion of their users. In which case naturally they ought to be regulated in order to protect your citizens. Except... then the regulation drafted reads as "only American companies are allowed to subvert the free will of Americans", which comes off as pretty sinister.
> Except... then the regulation drafted reads as "only American companies are allowed to subvert the free will of Americans", which comes off as pretty sinister.
Sinister or not this framing makes a lot more sense than the alternative if you write it like this:
“Only companies [beholden to American interests] are allowed to [influence] Americans”.
The core premise is really rather dull. If the company poses a risk to Americans, then it should exist fully within reach of the US Gov regulations and completely out of the control of adversaries.
I’m not arguing if a us citizen should be allowed to use a property controlled by foreign adversary.
I’m arguing should a foreign adversary be able to control such a large US property in the first place?
In my opinion, having a direct line to > 100 million people where they can send push notifications that tell people to contact their government for a specific purpose is not so great. That’s leaving out the more subtle untraceable black box of deranking things their government doesn’t like.
It's called reciprocity, and has been used since time immemorial for trade agreements, border control, ceasefire agreements, retaliatory strikes and a lot of other very high level geopolitics. "An eye for an eye" works perfectly well in such contexts.
There's definitely areas of advertising that are banned/controlled so that comparison seems more damning than beneficial (e.g. alcohol to minors, medication in any country other than the US
It's not useful though. I actually think it's very cool that TikTok got a bunch of young people to contact their representatives. If this ban goes through, the political blowback is going to be extreme. It will be like the Streisand effect x100,000,000.
People aren't fools. They know that TikTok is being put into this position by the US government. You can go on any social media platform right now and see how outraged TikTok users are. This is going to have incredible political blowback from the younger generations and there won't be any "lawyering" around that. Even if the ban doesn't go through, a lot of damage has already been done.
The bill is overwhelmingly bipartisan though. There isn't anyone for some kids to go after, if it's almost a unanimous bi partisan effort.
Those kids lost. It's over.
And if people are this upset, then that is all the more reason to pull the trigger now, instead of giving our foreign adversaries more time to retaliate.
Anyway, tiktok almost divested the last time this happened. Unless they are OK will losing 10s of billions of dollars for nothing, well chances are they'll just divest, despite the current posturing they are doing.
When they're deliberately coordinated by foreign states with malicious intent? When the demands become more and more extreme towards the opposing side?
Opposing this ban isn't "malicious intent" lots of people think it's an infringement upon their rights for the US government to decide what they can and cannot see.
Businesses/commerce/trade have never been “free”. I’m not sure why this keeps being used as a rebuttal. These topics are covered in basic macroeconomics classes in the United States.
The issue is that China has banned facebook and google, etc. because they don't censor which is the law in China. If they decided to censor and follow the laws of China they would be allowed to operate there. Google tried to reenter the Chinese market but decided not to after an uproar from its own employees who didn't want to censor. Microsoft is allowed to provide hotmail and bing, etc. services there, because they decided to censor.
The problem is exactly what law has tiktok broken in the US? Is it simply that it's seen as a Chinese company, and therefore discrimination against a Chinese company or something else.
> Microsoft is allowed to provide hotmail and bing, etc. services there, because they decided to censor.
Sure, but in an act og completely understandable and justafiable reciprocality I guess we should soon see China passing laws to force Microsoft to divest from their American owners or be banned in China. And when that happens I’m sure the same people in this thread arguing that everything is peachy with USAs actions against TikTok will see it as perfectly acceptable and reasonable.
Plenty of American companies operate in Chinese consumer markets, Apple for example. One fifth of Apple's annual revenue comes from China, yet the country never retaliated with banning it while the US turned the whole world against Huawei.
That's not even remotely the same. That's more equivalent of banning the installation of tiktok on government phones, which should be considered normal for security reasons. Apple is still able to freely operate in China otherwise.
And your other articles don't have anything to do with Apple being banned, but rather that Huawei's new phone is now able to compete with Apple sales, despite US trying to destroy Huawei.
> I think the primary argument for banning TikTok should be based on reciprocity rather than moral and/or security concerns.
Reciprocity of policies isn't really conceptually coherent.
There was some semi-recent news (really, not that recent) to the effect that Saudi Arabia would allow women to drive.
Now imagine our policy toward them before they made that change. We could ignore them because they have their own country. Or we could give up on that and try to impose some kind of penalty on them.
But one thing you're unlikely to see an argument for is reciprocity. "So, they don't let their women drive? How barbaric! We'll show them -- we won't let our women drive either!"
Reciprocity in this case is supposed to mean "We allow your companies in as long as they follow the local laws, and you will allow our companies in as long as they follow the local laws." TikTok is following American law, which is significantly more permissible in terms of speech than China.
American social media giants thought it was too damaging to follow Chinese law and voluntarily retreated (Google), played the game until they got burned (Facebook) or silently comply (Bing/Microsoft).
In the case of Facebook, they didn't want to share data on Uighur separatists, who organized protests on Facebook, which in turn left hundreds of people dead. Barring any kind of moral judgment, this obviously wouldn't fly in the US either.
No, at the core of this issue is the realisation that a social media giant has enormous influence on the minds of the next generation, and having this be in the hands of foreign powers is very dangerous. Of course, the US doesn't want to be super open about this, since 4/5 global players in social media are American, and they'd rather not have other regions get similar thoughts.
In the end, the reasoning is sound while the justification is hypocritical.
Well, fine. But now the American law TikTok needs to follow (assuming it is passed by the senate and signed by POTUS) is that the US TikTok needs to be sold, or become unavailable in app stores.
Google tried to follow the law, but how can they comply when CCP laws mercurial & vague which is the opposite of EU & US law? As for meta, why would our people and companies want to knowingly participate in the genocide (not cultural genocide but full on genocide) of the Uighurs in Xinjiang?
>If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?
Because there is value in holding the moral high ground.
Because Chinese control American supplies of widgets. You can check out Tesla, Apple, Walmart where they get their goodies from. Or how about Ametican universities. If things are as simple as a tic for tac, the trade inbalance wouldnt be in 200B+ in China favor.
Maybe it would be more balanced if China allowed US software companies into their country the same way the rest of the world does. (Except Russia, Myanmar, North Korea, and a handful of other similar places.)
Because economists would have to acknowledge that protected and restricted markets are better for developing local industry than open markets. Which of course is true. But then they would have to acknowledge the whole neo-liberal experiment of open global markets is bad for us. It would also pave the way for foreign markets to follow in our footsteps and restrict google, facebook, and others, further segregating our digital spaces.
> I think the primary argument for banning TikTok should be based on reciprocity rather than moral and/or security concerns.
The argument that CCP people make is that Facebook et al aren't banned, they just need to follow the law to be allowed. The law, of course, includes unacceptable things like complying with every communist request).
A better way to ban TikTok is to require social media companies to be based in countries which follow basic human rights and democracy.
The argument is that they are an enemy. No other argument is necessary. Not free speech, not reciprocity, not that they're an oppressive government.
If in 1939 Hitler had tried to buy the CBS radio network, FDR would have stopped him, or the Congress. If it had required a Constitutional amendment, that would have passed easily.
Yeah well, that's just a matter of time in the exact same way that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was predicted over a decade ahead, often by US senators.
I'll bet that for every country in the world, a senator has predicted a war against them. And we still aren't at war with Russia, but you could call them an enemy for sure.
>If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?
Because we are the United States, and we are better than that. We are a society that promotes free trade, freedom of expression, and economic globalization to the ends of the earth.
Not the point, but firefighters actually respond to few fires (presumably better electrical codes or smokers falling asleep with a cigarette). Most of their work is now supplemental EMT, locked houses, cats in trees, etc.
Hey remember when Apple, Google & Amazon all colluded to ban Parler off the face of the planet within days, a purely political move, based on some shaky allegations of moderation?
Meanwhile TikTok is labelled as a "must have" app in the AppStore....
> Parler off the face of the planet, a purely political move
Having a policy against hosting apps that host illegal content and taking no measures to remove it is a political move? There are plenty of active conservative communities on the internet, Parler just went the "free as in anarchy" speech route. Tumblr faced a ban on iOS for pornographic content and Reddit also has to sanitize their default experience to be on app stores, so it's not just Parler.
It's why BlueSky is interesting because they have moderation which will get them on app stores, but you can turn it off.
> Parler just went the "free as in anarchy" speech route.
This is no different than X nowadays. But the political landscape has shifted even further to the right, why now no action is taken nor desired [by the politics] to do anything about it.
For instance: There is only one Dutch moderator for the entire Netherlands/Flemish community.
Many mass shootings in recent memory were live streamed on Facebook and Instagram. Removing those posts after the fact is a useless gesture. The evil already happened. Meta was never punished.
Selective enforcement of TOS is political and utter nonsense.
If TikTok were guilty of what they are accused of (being a foreign intelligence and propaganda tool), why is Congressional action necessary? Why wouldn't have private industry already quashed it as they did other apps? Those accusations seem a bit more serious than "mean posts with naughty words".
Careful. What's the alternative to taking action post hoc? The only things that come to mind for me are Thought crime and minority report's precognition.
You can't preempt what people will live stream. And the banhammer only moves so quickly.
> Removing those posts after the fact is a useless gesture. The evil already happened. Meta was never punished.
I mean this sincerely and in good faith, what else can you do? We don't have the PreCrime division. The accusation isn't that Twitter/Facebook don't ever host illegal or objectionable content but that they have a procedure for addressing and removing it. Parler just said no, we don't have and will never have such a policy. If Tumblr say, despite having a moderation policy just stopped enforcing it they would find themselves staring down the banhammer again.
As to your second point the answer is in your own question, I don't think they actually buy that TikTok is either of those things. Hell, the NFL partnered with TikTok and they're basically cheerleaders for the US military.
For that matter, the most perplexing one for me is President Biden is creating and posting campaign videos on TikTok (not in an official capacity as POTUS but as a candidate). If one truly felt the content of this bill was true, as he has endorsed signing it, why would he even use the app in the first place? Are Zoomer voters that inaccessible otherwise?
his team is going to give a very politically correct answer, something like -
"we are not against tiktok, our presence on tiktok is the best proof. we just against the idea that 160 million American users including my team are being spied on by the Chinese government, we want you all to have a better & safer tiktok not owned by China".
It's easy to botspam a competitor with terroristic and genocidal posts if you only need a fig leaf to remove the platform - not a great precedent to align with.
Also, didn't a spokesperson for Harvard recently say some calls for genocide were acceptable on their platform (campus) depending on context? Why aren't the anti-1st amendment types trying to ban Harvard?
Edit: Not a rhetorical question for the downvoters.
Not combining threads, but it was a rather obscure reference. The president of Harvard recently testified before congress that calls for genocide may not violate Harvard's code of conduct 'depending on context'. Which makes a widespread effort to censor Parler for hosting calls for genocide rather hypocritical IMHO. Hope that's clearer.
OK, last try for clarity: If you think it's just to debank Parler for hosting genocidal speech and also think it's just NOT to debank Harvard for hosting genocidal speech, I think you're a hypocrite. And if that's not your position I'd be interested to hear how I've misinterpreted it.
> I think the primary argument for banning TikTok should be based on reciprocity rather than moral and/or security concerns.
Your argument is lame at best. Using your logics above, Chinese should ban all US EVs, mobile phones and network equipment on reciprocity. Tesla has a huge factory here in Shanghai, local government even offered it free land, it is fully own by Tesla, Tesla cars are everywhere. When is the last time you see Chinese EVs on US roads? I can freely go to any CCP official and tell him/her that my US designed iPhone is good, he/she might tell me that he/she is a iPhone user as well (and then ask me to piss off). What is the likelyhood that any US officials are using Huawei phones now?
>If China is unwilling to allow US companies to compete fairly in their digital ecosystem, why the hell should we continue to grant Chinese firms unrestricted access to our market?
Because we are (used to be?) a country that believes in democracy and the will of our citizens. If people want to download a Chinese app and watch straight up Chinese news and propaganda (not even close to what TikTok actually is), they should be allowed to do so. That's the entire idea of the First Amendment...
Does that put us at a disadvantage to countries who don't have the same rules? Maybe. But that ideal and that principle is valuable and means something and IS the entire bedrock of American influence over the greater world.
As other commenters have said, the GP's argument is not about free speech but about trade.
Banning TikTok is not impinging on free speech. People are still free to say whatever they want on so many (unrestricted) platforms. If someone makes a video of a TikTok video and shares it on Youtube/Whatsapp, that's legal. The actual content is legal, so it's not a free speech/censorship issue.
This is the equivalent of "We've put sanctions on China. You can write whatever you want, as long as you don't do it using Chinese pens and Chinese paper"
It's not at all unusual for countries (including the US) to restrict commerce with a country if they believe the other country isn't engaging in fair commerce.
What I find troubling about this is the delta between the vox populi and the decision made.
Whether it's right or prudent or whatever, if you figure that people using the service don't want it shut down (~170M or roughly half of the population) then what's happening here is that our "representatives" are doing what they always do and totally ignoring their constituency.
Mind you, this isn't surprising in the least, but perhaps it's a good moment to step back and reflect a little on this snag in our governance.
I think a lot of this is the language used in reporting around it. It is presented as a Ban on Tiktok in headlines and people who regurgitate them when the purpose of the legislation is not to ban Tiktok but require them to sell their American operations to a domestic company. The penalty for non-compliance is to not allow them to operate in the US but the goal isn't to ban Tiktok.
That's a gross oversimplification, and I think you know it. We're not idiots here.
On any given year in the last decade, about 1/3 (sometimes more, sometimes less) of voters have been registered independent. George Washington was the last independent president.
We take for granted that campaign promises are there to be reneged on. Even assuming legitimate alignment with a given candidate (that is, that they are genuine about representing you), this more or less means you're not getting what's on the label.
It's well known that unless you live in one of like 6 states your vote won't affect the outcome of a presidential race. Those states tend to have lower populations.
The system is broken, and it has been for a long time. The number of things that get between your vote and the implementation of policy are enough to ensure that your voice is unimportant - whether this is by accident or design is another conversation but I haven't yet seen a reasonable argument that what we have is even remotely functional. I'm open to hearing one if you have it.
Except this is not about commerce. US wants to ban TikTok for the same reason Russia has blocked BBC. Russia believes that information from BBC can harmfully influence people's mind.
> Banning TikTok is not impinging on free speech. People are still free to say whatever they want on so many (unrestricted) platforms.
Yes, it does impinge free speech. It's not about being able to say things, it's about freedom to hear speech. The first amendment and freedom of speech also covers that, and there is speech on Tik Tok that is not available elsewhere.
As I said, they are not banning listening to the speech on Tik Tok videos. If someone makes a mirror of all TikTok videos and posts it on Peertube, it is totally fine to listen to it.
They are banning one delivery mechanism. Not the content.
By this logic, when Howl was banned from publication, you could argue it wasn't a problem. If Ginsberg performed Howl in public it would be fine. They were just banning one delivery mechanism, his press
> If people want to download a Chinese app and watch straight up Chinese news and propaganda ... That's the entire idea of the First Amendment...
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The first amendment in the bill of rights in the US constitution prevents the US government from restricting the speech of US citizens. It doesn’t say anything about foreign nationals with no status in the US. The government also has the authority to deport whomever it likes, impose tariffs and restrict imports.
Regardless of moral stance, that is the reality as I see it.
The first amendment prevents the US govt from restricting the speech of anyone in the US, not just citizens.
For example, the government cannot deport an immigrant simply because they criticized the government (they can deport for a variety of other reasons though).
> courts will not look behind [the] decision [not to waive the statutory exclusion of an alien] or weigh it against the First Amendment interests of those who would personally communicate with the alien
Interesting. Yeah, I'm broadly not sure how the first amendment applies to this TikTok bill, if at all.
I think TikTok is a security risk, but it seems to me that if the govt can ban TikTok, it can legally ban any foreign media. Which doesn't seem ideal from a free speech perspective.
160 million US citizens post/watch those videos on tiktok, tiktok is their platform for expressing themselves, by banning tiktok, they can argue that the government is taking away their platform for expressing themselves.
Regarding GP's argument, I would argue it's less about freedom of speech and more about trade protection. Although software is not a physical good, letting another country restrict us and simultaneously flood our market is not good either.
I'd wager that most Americans want fairness in relationships with other countries. And also want the government to protect them against hostile foreign governments that wish to do them harm.
Americans subject themselves to all kinds of restrictions in terms of what can be imported into the US. There's no contradiction of the freedoms protected by US Constitution in this.
There's certainly no information that Americans need deny themselves by insisting that apps like TikTok are not controlled by hostile foreign governments.
I find it really interesting how being against a ban is the "freedom" argument when the person who is most responsible for championing this ban is the whole Palantir gang led by Keith Rabois's partner.
So if TikTok was not earning any profit from US (for example, if it was sponsored by the govt), there would be no commerce and it would not be banned? I do not believe that.
Profit is not the standard for the regulation of commerce in the United States though.
When the federal government set limits on crop production with the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause as its justification, Roscoe Filburn was simply growing wheat over the limit to feed his farm animals. That wheat was never sold, and it never crossed the property line to leave his farm, much less crossed state lines. The government still fined him and he lost his case in SCOTUS establishing precedent in Wickard v. Filburn, because it affected the market prices of wheat, despite the miniscule impact.
The same could be said of TikTok even if it doesn't earn a penny in profit.
What is the nature of that commerce? I don't think you can ablate the 1A concerns this easily.
(Note that I am sympathetic to the idea that TikTok is a source of foreign influence. But it's not clear to me what precedent allows the US congress to control their ownership without doing the same to every "US" corporation that's incorporated in Ireland.)
I agree with this in principal, but in practice it seems troubling to have every person (even beyond kids) hooked on a stream of info that is controlled by a foreign government who doesn't like us very much.
If your plan is that people should be strong enough to uninstall or smart enough to recognize subtle propaganda, that seems very likely to fail.
The premise of strong freedom of speech rights is that the government being smart enough to decide what is illegal propaganda may fail as well, sometimes more catastrophically.
>we are (used to be?) a country that believes in democracy and the will of our citizens
We either need to mass-educate everyone on the whole Edward Bernays subconscious manipulation thing (which we won't do because it would catastrophically break PR, advertising, political campaigns and more) or do it ourselves, do it thoroughly, and prevent others from accessing our citizens eyes/ears, which is what we're trying to do except for that last part.
We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.
>We're far, far beyond "we'll just let our well-educated citizens decide for themselves", and it's weird to see someone act like that's how anything works. That idea's been broken for closing in on a century.
So instead we should let our better-educated governing betters and cultural/business elites decide opinion not just for themselves but for the rest of us? Because of course none of them are subject to any sort of self interest, terrible bias, corruption, mendacity or simply being ignorant due to their own cognitive failures?
The very core notion of democracy and free speech is that no one group can be fully trusted to hold the reins of control or opinion by their own decision and imposition on the rest.
Thus you introduce the largest plurality possible of rights for expression and governance to mitigate against the disasters that much more often occur with oligarchy. Far from perfect but your idea of giving any key group control of discourse for the sake of "fighting misinformation" (as if they themselves don't create shit barges of it of their own) is laughable.
Recall please (for example) that the NY Times, which spent the Trump years and beyond practically raving about the dangers of misinformation and foreign influence of opinions also happily played along with the vastly costly lies of the Iraq WMD scandal that was used to justify an invasion costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. And it did all this lying at the behest of completely domestic U.S. policy makers and leaders.
That's the sort of cozy opinion/policy leadership practices to which we should be pushing further? Fuck no.
This level of censorship isn't good, it's very bad. It's also concerning the speed at which the government mobilized to do this. It's a rapid crackdown on free speech and individual freedom.
Nothing is being censored. If ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok will be removed from App Stores and have to find new web hosting. TikTok.com will still resolve fine.
> Could you help me understand how that isn't censorship
Censorship bans the speech. If we were censoring Bytedance, we’d block TikTok.com.
This is more in the vein of “you can’t advertise your brothel at the elementary school.” You can still advertise your brothel. The distribution and amplification is just being regulated.
If we stretch your argument to absurd then we can say that putting a political prisoner in jail also doesn't limit his free speech: he is still able to write letters.
> putting a political prisoner in jail also doesn't limit his free speech: he is still able to write letters
Free speech is a big topic. I would argue that yes, that person’s speech has been curtailed, but depending on what they were jailed for (saying something offensive versus stabbery) it could be reasonable.
Unless they were jailed for their speech, what you describe would not amount to censorship.
Trump tried to do this 4 years ago, how is that a "concerning" level of speed? The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has been reviewing Tik Tok's Project Texas initiative to handle US data separately for 2 years. This was not an out of the blue move. The citation for those claims are in the linked article.
That's a bad argument because western platforms are free to compete fairly in PRC market, provided they follow PRC laws like EVERY OTHER PRC PLATFORM. Facebook/Twitter only got banned after 2009 minority riots for abetting terrorism and not cracking down on posts calling for mutual retaliatory violence. It's more accurate to say most major western platforms at the time was simply incapable of of moderating PRC content. This was pre western human moderation push, unlike domestic PRC players who already had 10,000s of human moderators because that's what was needed. Western platforms didn't want to spend the money at the time and it wasn't after they scaled their own moderation efforts that FB/Google spung up (now defunct) projects to re-enter PRC market. The fundmental fact is western platforms didn't want to put in the work to comply with PRC laws at the time because it was expensive and looked bad optically (and still does, because are they going to handover dissident info to CCP?), and it would be unfair to allow them to operate in PRC without the same onerous moderation infra as domestic PRC platforms. There's a reason Bing still operates in PRC, see recent Bloomberg piece on Microsoft keeps Bing running in PRC by basically complying to mass censorship like domestic players. Like it's not PRC's problem if internal Google decent killed project dragonfly and whatever Zuckerberg tried to do in the mid 10s.
> That's a bad argument because western platforms are free to compete fairly in PRC market, provided they follow PRC laws like EVERY OTHER PRC PLATFORM.
Dude, Chinese national living in China here. I have 3 different vpns from 3 different vendors, that is how I manage to get here and talk to you. Care to shed some light on why they restrict my free & open access to the Internet that I dedicated my entire life to build?
> after 2009 minority riots
I strongly support CCP's policies in Xinjiang, it is anti-terrorism for sure. That being said, I wouldn't call those angry & brainwashed Tibetans "terrorists".
> It's more accurate to say most major western platforms at the time was simply incapable of of moderating PRC content.
I used to visit a local forum hosted here in China quite often. They carefully moderate the content, all users have to register with their legal names, the forum even had the curfew every night as their moderators need to sleep and they couldn't afford the risk of such human moderator free hours. Guess what, they still got shutdown last year for "regulation reasons".
> There's a reason Bing still operates in PRC, see recent Bloomberg piece on Microsoft keeps Bing running in PRC by basically complying to mass censorship like domestic players.
Because Bill Gates has very good personal relationship with the very top leadership. That is the really scary part.
> I strongly support CCP's policies in Xinjiang, it is anti-terrorism for sure. That being said, I wouldn't call those angry & brainwashed Tibetans "terrorists".
The weird thing is that the CCP is much more worried about Tibet than Xinjiang. As a foreigner, I can buy a plane ticket to Urumqi today, no restrictions on needing a guide to tour in most places. But Tibet...ugh...so much paper work just to visit Lhasa, and I need a minder if I ever leave Lhasa.
The biggest problem with the party is that they always put hardliners in charge of Tibet and Xinjiang (let's be clear, the party chair controls the autonomous regions, not the ceremonial local governer). They unnecessarily stir the pot to create tension, that then explodes every 10 or so years.
> Because Bill Gates has very good personal relationship with the very top leadership. That is the really scary part.
Microsoft has been in China for a long time, and it has a China-based leadership that is very in tune it is permitted to do or not. "These are the rules, written and unwritten, for keeping Bing in China" and they just roll with that. I don't think it is even Bill, he has been hands off for a decade or two, but there are people in Microsoft's chinese leadership who are well connected.
Digital sovereignty, it's not complicated. Every country who can be in charge of their domestic information ecosystem, should. If US wants embrace PRC model of a controlled media ecosystem where tiktok / US media platforms to ban non-US aligned content from adversary sources, Tiktok would be happy to oblige and scale moderation/compliance costs accordingly. If anything they'd be at competitive advantage being able to draw from douyin experiences in PRC.
You're good example, you're still posting here, via VPN. The friction between PRC info and western eco is VPN costs - it's cheap/trivially accessible for those who need it. People reverse VPN to access geofenced PRC content in the west. People jump region blocking to access geofenced media on western streaming platforms? VPN are everywhere for those who care.
As for why, there was stanford study a few years ago trying to measure PRC propaganda on western platforms only to find they were crowded out by western antiPRC propaganda, including likes of FLG. PRC doesn't want free mixture of foreign propaganda. Constitutionally, the US shouldn't care about reverse. But here we are with TikTok ban. IMO Some ideological / info ecosystems shouldn't naturally mix. See west crack down on RU media post war. Which is fine (for me), as long as there's methods for motivated people to cross the gap.
Regardless, this isn't about free access to information, it's about operating a business in different regions by following relevant regulations. The original argument is whining about why US platforms shouldn't follow PRC law and pay similar compliance costs as domestic competitors, and somehow think that's unfair.
>wouldn't call those angry & brainwashed Tibetans "terrorists"
Neither did I. I said abetting terrorists, and terroism/radicalism foreign influences, that exploded from abroad when these restive regions got connected to global info networks after 90s, including radical seperatist movements. Hence entire regions got caught up in crack down. Including innocents, but cracking down on minorities representing 1% of population responsible for hundreds of terror events that spread out to other provinces is just sensible political policy. Heavy handed, but politically sensible, considering terrorism stopped.
The real issue beyond terrorisms is symptom of aforementioned increase in seperatisms due to PRC's "generous" ethnic oblast policy that "allowed" these frontier regions to keep their cultures and not sinicize / smoothly integrate into broader PRC society. They were never "properly colonized", because frankly PRC was too poor to heavily assert influence on frontiers without expensive infra, now they can, and are against Tibetan/Uyghur will. Of course the oppressed are mad, rebelling, justifiably. But frankly it's politically absurd that their primary language isn't Mandarin, like every repressed minority speaks dominant local language in the west, who virtue signals how bad cultural genocide is while benefitting from it because basic language integration is essential domestic serenity/stability/security. There's no melting pot if some groups of people don't don't melt into the pot.
>they still got shutdown
Most of my PRC interest forums / BBS (milwatching) got shut down last few years because crackdown on discussion of PLA related subjects due to national security. Community goes abroad, on twitter, on telegram, get a VPN. Again, that's the compromise, it's annoying, but it works. I know people who got invited to drink tea, had wechat accounts banned and reinstated after promising to behave. Which is a hell lot more than I can say about people I know who got banned on western platforms and had not avenue to appeal. Communities everywhere get dismantled all the time. You find where it reconsolidates and move on. Just like people moved on from Vine, and likely, TikTok.
>very good personal relationship
Yes Gates know how to play the game and follow the rules. It's not scary, it's business.
Ignoring everything else TikTok screwed up. They’re m being accused of having the ability to manipulate public opinion and elections.
So what did they do? Push alerts to millions of users telling them of a possible ban and helping them call their representatives to change a political issue’s fortunes.
Oops.
All of a sudden a ton of representatives who were on the fence jumped off and joined the bandwagon.
How is it a mistake for TikTok to ask Americans to participate in their representative democracy? Do we not remember when Google and Facebook blacked out their sites to stop SOPA from passing, how is TikTok's notification any different?
Raising awareness about a bill in Congress and giving US citizens the tools to speak to their representatives about it isn't "manipulating democracy", it promotes democracy. That is a foundational part of how American democracy is supposed to work, the reps vote on bills but the citizens have the last word - if that's so unacceptable that lawmakers would change sides to ban TikTok in response then Americans should start making funeral preparations for their democracy, because it sounds like these lawmakers want their constituents to be docile, silent and ignorant.
In a strict technical sense, you are correct. Anything that encourages individuals to participate in their government is promoting democracy. However, I think it's heavy whitewashing to look at this whole situation and says it's TikTok promoting democracy.
I find it very hard to believe TikTok is doing this being they genuinely want to promote democracy in the US. This threatens to end TikTok's influence over millions of Americans, they have a business/political stake in this. They're encouraging people to contact their representatives, not because it's in the individual's best interest, but because it's in TikTok's best interest. That's why it's manipulative.
Also, I'm of the opinion the foreign-funded propaganda is generally unhealthy for a democracy.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don't really want to ban TikTok. I don't trust TikTok, but I also don't want to increase the federal government's ability to censor what Americans can view. In the process of battling Chinese influence, I don't want the US to become more like China.
Obviously the issue that they're promoting is in their interests, but its the same for everyone else. Nobody would promote an issue that didn't benefit them! When Google and Facebook blacked out their sites to stop SOPA, that was because it was in their interests too, SOPA would have kneecapped the Web just as it was beginning to take off.
What frustrates me about this discussion is the way that people take anything TikTok does here and assumes that it's out of evil and malicious intent, with very little proof other than its murky links to China, which feels very Cold War 2.0.
TikTok's links to China aren't "murky". ByteDance is literally a Chinese company. Chinese companies are regularly coerced by the state in the PRC, in obvious ways (Jack Ma says Hi) and subtle ones (the coordinated dance to bail out Evergrande).
I'm sensitive to your demand for proof, but how much more "proof" do you want? If the PRC wants to manipulate western democracy by mobilizing a force of Gen-Z nuts via messages in their favorite app, they can do it, just like they do domestically.
In attempting to defend themselves (which is fair) they did the exact thing that their opponents have accused them of being able to do.
I don’t know what the right move for them was. Maybe it was just to say this was happening or link to a new story or something.
But saying it’s a “ban”* and helping people find the number to call their representative went over the line and made them look very bad.
*It’s not strictly a ban, only a ban on Chinese ownership. If an American company took total control they could continue to operate. So calling it a “ban” is a little disingenuous in someways although it’s also a lot easier to say
It might not result in maximum ByteDance profits, but TikTok's notification will help a generation of "youths" realize the political process affects them and help them care about technology censorship issues. This is a good thing.
They didn’t try to manipulate democracy, people didn’t vote for their representatives based on their ideas about tiktok, there was no referendum about how to handle tiktok, but of course they actually showed that they could have the influence to affect future democratic process
Contacting your representative to try to influence them is a fundamental part of democracy.
Democracy is not just voting for someone, a democratic government is intended to be directly influenced by the people continually. It's kind of the whole point of a representative democracy.
It is either part of democracy or trying to manipulate democracy, it can't factually be both for obvious reasons, I agree, contacting a representative is part of the democratic process and has been a practice happening forever.
Trying to manipulate democracy would be involving actions that aren't part of an accepted democratic process, like telling your supporters to go to assault Capitol Building and them showing up with assault rifles and pressure elected officials
Do you not see the difference in American companies asking Americans to pressure their American representatives on American legislature, vs. a Chinese company doing this? If Google tried to do the same thing in China when the CCP were debating banning YouTube their mainland employees would have been arrested and "disappeared."
Either you don't understand that American problems flow overseas or are just naive. American problems get exported en mass to other people via social media and the tech people still continue to flood with visuals on them regardless of where you are.
The whole reason this is even happening is because they've been caught pushing political content that is blatantly either pro-China or meant to stir shit up in the American population. The irony with your comment is that TikTok's masters in China already have the same power that SOPA was supposed to grant the US government. In other words the USA is trying to strip the CCP of that power.
They could've played ball and not pushed politics and we'd have left them alone to make their money but instead they tried to bite the hand that feeds.
> The irony with your comment is that TikTok's masters in China already have the same power that SOPA was supposed to grant the US government
Yes, the power of democracy. People spoke up and prevented a harmful law from being passed - why is TikTok exercising that right, in the same way as Google and Facebook, a problem? It sounds like you want the US to become like the CCP instead of vice versa.
Because TikTok is owned by one of our adversaries. They’ve been accused of pushing propaganda and they just accidentally proved how effective they can be at causing political change in the US.
Exactly what their opponents were afraid they had the power to do.
It looks REALLY bad. In this case it wasn’t anything sinister and they were open about it but tactically it was probably a massive mistake.
Also why didn’t they just tell everyone in the US? Why did only certain users get the message? Because of where they lived? Because they were voting age? They also proved they have an ability to target specific people for political action based on some (unknown) criteria.
That also looks horrible and plays right into their opponents hands.
> Exactly what their opponents were afraid they had the power to do.
They notified their users that their elected representatives were fast tracking a bill targeted at the service they were using. Negotiated in secret because those representatives knew it would be enormously unpopular with their constituents.
No, the whole reason this is happening is it distracts us from more serious issues such as Chinese labor practices. If politicians can "take China seriously" by banning TikTok they don't need to talk about barring import of products made using forced labor, say.
It looks like that has blocked about $100M in goods shipped from Xinjiang since inception -- about 1/3 of shipments from that region and less than 1% total imports from China in that period. I'm not sure that token amount counts as taking it seriously.
Or maybe trying to sway users overtly seems like a mistake?
Could trying to sway users subtly have still been a win in this instance?
I'd think a platform doing manipulation subtly is actually more dangerous, and the bigger potential threat from a platform. Because people being influenced would be less aware of it, and it's much harder for other parties to call out.
(Although, when I look at current TV news and some other outlets, there's such blatant manipulation and dumbing-down, from both political "sides", I wonder how more than a small minority of people can tolerate watching that, much less mimicking it. And calling it out just gets tossed into ineffectual echo-chamber sports-fandom-like noise. So maybe subtle isn't as additionally threatening as I'd been assuming.)
It’s unfortunate. They went about it honestly by doing it in the open, and that provided proof that they were dangerous.
If they had done it subtly, that would have proved that they had the power to do it too but if they weren’t caught it wouldn’t have blown up in their face.
Of course if they were caught it would be an even bigger deal.
Reps all of a sudden jumped on the bandwagon because one of their largest donors (AIPAC) doesn't like how the realities are broadcast to youth unfiltered and uncontrolled.
> They’re m being accused of having the ability to manipulate public opinion and elections.
I thought it was about stealing data?
> Push alerts to millions of users telling them of a possible ban and helping them call their representatives to change a political issue’s fortunes.
Not pushing the alert, would have changed nothing. And to be fair, isn't this how any organization in a democratic country works? Talking to their customers to communicate their problems? Raising awareness, animating people to talk to their local politicians, that's pretty common, isn't it?
I'd also include security concerns. Not as scary as anti-cheat rootkits from TenCent owned companies that millions of people willingly installed. Concerning nonetheless.
The wording could be applied to many companies, including chat apps like Telegram. The only saving grace is that the company has to be controlled by a "foreign adversary", and it seems to explicitly list and target byte dance only.
You say only saving grace like its some sort of loophole. Most of the people who support banning tiktok have always maintained that the legal justification for banning it rests on the fact that it is controlled by a foreign adversary.
That's not a "saving grace", that's the content of the legislation.
My issue is that this could be applied very broadly:
> (B) a covered company that—
> (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
> (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
> (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
> (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
---
The above gives the president the ability to shut down many websites out there from operating in the US if they are "controlled by a foreign adversary". Btw, the definition is here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/4872, which says: "Covered nation.—The term “covered nation” means—
(A)the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea;
(B)the People’s Republic of China;
(C)the Russian Federation; and
(D)the Islamic Republic of Iran."
The arguments I can think of for why you wouldn't support restricting social media owned by foreign adversaries:
* You don't believe social media companies can become literal or de facto extensions of the countries they are located in.
* You don't believe social media can influence people's beliefs and behaviors.
* You believe the above, but think a government cannot (or should not) regulate companies operating in its jurisdiction for those aforementioned purposes.
* You believe the above, but don't think that it amounts to a serious risk, even theoretically.
* You don't care about any of that, you just like the product.
* You don't care about any of that, you oppose the bill on ideological grounds other than the legislative scope, or civil liberties issues. For example (but not limited to) purely partisan reasons.
* You have issues with the specific provisions or wording of this bill, which override your general agreement that something like it may be legitimate and desirable.
Am I missing any? None are convincing me, personally, except maybe the last one, and I am guessing most people who oppose it have not done a line-by-line parsing of the text of the bill either.
> You don't believe social media can influence people's beliefs and behaviors.
> You believe the above, but think a government cannot (or should not) regulate companies operating in its jurisdiction for those aforementioned purposes.
Isn't freedom of speech (as understood in the US) exactly that, a prohibition on any regulation that prevents you from influencing people's belief and behavior?
Sure, there are limits on free speech. You aren't allowed to freely slander people, to engage in false advertising, to commit fraud, treason, etc. But a new law that specifically prevents a company from showing you a selection of videos on fears that this selection might be biased in a way that influences people is another level. It not only prevents them from speaking directly, it specifically bans them because of how they might choose which legal speech they might show you.
I completely understand why people want to do it. Allowing foreign adversaries this much influence is dangerous. But it is also unprecedented, and because of the indirection feels like a heavier restriction than say banning a Chinese newspaper from publishing in the US.
The rights acknowledged and protected by the U.S. Constitution are rights of U.S. Persons (citizens, nationals, and permanent residents). They are not all rights of non-U.S. Persons, though some, like the Fifth Amendment, clearly are rights of all Persons. For example, if you're a tourist accused of committing a crime in the U.S. you do have a right to counsel and a right to not self-incriminate, but also you don't have the right to not be deported, and you don't have the right to keep and bear arms.
Which rights are for U.S. Persons only, and which are for all Persons, is not entirely clear to me. But I strongly suspect that freedom of speech and of the press is mainly for U.S. Persons only.
It will certainly be interesting to see what the courts have to say about this.
If you believe that the constitution protects inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government then how can those rights be denied to non citizens? The government gets to decide who is and isn’t a citizen, which would mean they can decide who is or isn’t eligible for so-called “inalienable” rights.
If you really believed in that interpretation—that the bill of rights guarantees equal and identical liberties to everyone regardless of citizenship status—then what's the argument that those same rights extend only within the borders of U.S. geography? Why would we not, for example, enforce the second amendment right to bear arms on the benighted people of Australia, who don't have it? If we wanted our actions to be 100% consistent with that interpretation of the language of the constitution, wouldn't that be the outcome?
So, I think the answer to your question is that it's not feasible, practical, or desirable to be 100% consistent, and that the law is mostly cobbled together, full of edge cases, hammered into something that sort of works most of the time, and makes sense if it's dark enough and you squint.
Yes, a government is generally in charge of granting citizenship for the population which it represents. This is a mechanism that seems to work for every functioning country in the world.
What's the alternative you're suggesting, exactly?
> The government gets to decide who is and isn’t a citizen
That's your quote which I'm referencing. I think that arrangement makes perfect sense, it seems as if you're in disagreement.
I'll ask again, what's the alternative arrangement you're trying to champion here? If you don't have answer I can only assume this argument's being made in bad faith, I'm trying my best to interpret your comment charitably but unless you're more clear about what you're presenting, I'm going to read it as it was presented.
> If you believe that the constitution protects inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government then how can those rights be denied to non citizens?
I was not stating an opinion as to which way it should be. I was describing reality, and stating that I'm not sure which parts of the Bill of Rights apply to foreigners and which don't.
"Inalienable rights" is a phrase that does not appear in the Constitution, and the courts hold the Declaration of Independence to have no legal force whatsoever. Where I was talking about actual jurisprudence (like it or not), you seem to be attacking a straw man.
> The government gets to decide who is and isn’t a citizen,
Yes, but within some pretty tight limits. Persons born on U.S. soil to persons who are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. have birthright citizenship, and this cannot be taken away by statutes or bureaucratic acts. Others can naturalize according to statutes.
> which would mean they can decide who is or isn’t eligible for so-called “inalienable” rights.
It wouldn't be a country if everyone in the world had all the same rights as the country's citizens. Some rights have to be reserved to the citizens. De minimis the right to permanently reside and vote in that country. If you don't have a right to reside permanently in some country, then there must be other things which you are not allowed to do in that country.
I don't know whether the first amendment is meant to stop this kind of regulation, but I suppose that's one the courts have either settled already, or will get a chance to settle. I would guess that a foreign company's right to either operate a business in the U.S., or service U.S. citizens from a foreign country, is treated differently when it comes to first amendment protections compared to say a domestic business or a private citizen shouting on a street corner.
Lamont v Postmaster General will likely come up if this bill passes. It concerned Americans receiving foreign propaganda in the mail and the Postal Service attempting to stop this distribution.
In the precedent the U.S. government was clearly trying to find the names of Americans interested in foreign propaganda. Here the U.S. government is trying to stop ownership by foreign adversaries of social media operating in the U.S. That's clearly a significant distinction.
Did you read the actual case? It established that under the 1st amendment is a right to receive information and ideas. That established precedent is clearly at odds with the government trying to ban a source of information and ideas in the US.
From the main opinion (as opposed to Brennan's concurrence; the court was unanimous):
> We conclude that the Act, as construed and applied, is unconstitutional because it requires an official act (viz., returning the reply card) as a limitation on the unfettered exercise of the addressee's First Amendment rights. As stated by Mr. Justice Holmes in Milwaukee Pub. Co. v. Burleson, 255 U. S. 407, 255 U. S. 437 (dissenting):
> We do not have here, any more than we had in Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 327 U. S. 146, any question concerning the extent to which Congress may classify the mail and fix the charges for its carriage. Nor do we reach the question whether the standard here applied could pass constitutional muster. Nor do we deal with the right of Customs to inspect material from abroad for contraband. We rest on the narrow ground that the addressee, in order to receive his mail, must request in writing that it be delivered. This amounts, in our judgment, to an unconstitutional abridgment of the addressee's First Amendment rights. The addressee carries an affirmative obligation which we do not think the Government may impose on him. This requirement is almost certain to have a deterrent effect, especially as respects those who have sensitive positions.
You might be confused because Brennan says what you say the court said in his concurrence, but that nothing in his concurrence is dicta. The controlling opinion lays out the dicta, and it says what I wrote, as you can see from the quotes.
I see it as related to the app store. Will I be allowed to run a site that distributes the TikTok app? Or is the government restricting me from doing that?
I think there's one extension, although you _kind of_ covered it with "you just like the product"
Some people are addicted to the product. It's not even that they like it any more, and they can see the harm it causes, but they also can't imagine their lives without it.
I think it's a vital move by the government, but I also think it's too late.
Yeah, taking away someone's drug right before they're supposed to vote on whether they like you is not a good way to get people to like you.
I think the timing of this is really dangerous for democracy in the US. It may spur a fury and sense of betrayal in a lot of people, meaning they either don't vote, or they vote for the guy who makes a living on telling them the world is out to get them and no one cares about them.
I tried to keep my description vague and not specific to China. I agree that it's relevant whether China is or is not an adversary, and that China is the obvious proximate target of this legislation.
Is your point to say that you specifically don't believe China is an adversary, thus the bill is off the mark? I could read your item as saying either that, or this: in order to promote better relations between adversarial nations, bills restricting the ability of one nation to operate in another are indefensible. In other words, to make sure China is not an adversary, TikTok should not be banned.
Let’s all keep in mind that “adversaries” are just regular countries that some people in government have decided are a competitive threat or strategic obstacle. This is, frankly, bullshit.
If you want to declare a country an enemy of the United States and cut off my ability to access information from that country, you should have the fortitude to declare war. Otherwise I’m not interested in the opinion of some bureaucrat at State, thank you very much.
> * You believe the above, but think a government cannot (or should not) regulate companies operating in its jurisdiction for those aforementioned purposes.
Another way to word that is: You don't believe that the millions of people voluntary using the app are useful idiots who need to protected from themselves via government force. More likely is that the government has deemed the platform uncontrollable/uncensorable because of its foreign ownership.
The First Amendment does not directly protect the speech of non-US persons outside of US territory. However, US courts have held that the First Amendment can limit the US government's ability to restrict the speech of non-US persons abroad if that speech is directed at or received by people in the US.
I'm a big proponent of free speech and the first amendment, but I agree with the reasonings for banning it or forcing US owners.
China most definitely has their hands in the data that TikTok amasses and given its popularity it's not an insignificant risk to U.S. citizens. We all know how easy it is to manipulate users... aka Cambridge Analytica.
It'll be interesting to see what legal challenges come up if the bill passes the senate because that is where the real discussion will occur. I ultimately see it being reversed, but I can also see a solid framework for future bills being illuminated via the courts.
If they feel their relationship with the US is similar to the US's relationship with China in the relevant ways, then they absolutely should do the same. My understanding is that they don't feel that way, generally speaking.
They do in fact impose less extreme controls on data from these platforms, that lesser extremity presumably reflecting their lesser perception of the US's use of that data as highly dangerous, as compared to the US's perception of China.
That is a much lesser punishment than what the US is doing in this thread. A fine that is a small but non-insignficant percentage of annual revenue is a measured response when you want to punish bad behavior but allow businesses to still operate within the jurisdiction.
Restricting business operation altogether is a response a country gives when they see the other party as extremely adversarial, which is a few orders of magnitude above what EU fines are to Big Tech.
You're not a foreign adversary - you're a colonial overlord. If a European or other US 'ally' nation attempts to act against American 'national interest' their government is swiftly toppled - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the...
The US Army literally have an entire army unit dedicated to running propaganda campaigns on social networks internationally. It's ludicrous to suggest this isn't employed to impact political and social policy in 'friendly' nations.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
That being said, there are worse things than Pax Americana. I'd certainly rather living under US influence than CCP. I'd be the first to argue that NATO has prevented another war in Europe. But lets not deny the reality on the ground.
You're making some extremely strong claims, with minimal evidence. I don't deny that the CIA can be pretty nasty to 2nd and 3rd world governments, but claiming the US is a "colonial overlord" over our European allies is just not true. The first priority of our European allies is domestic politics; just like us, everyone wants to get re-elected. Sometimes domestic politics push countries towards the US, sometimes they pull them away. Countries like Hungary and Turkey make diplomatic trouble for the US, and we don't launch coups against them. The US would love it if Germany built up a decent military, but Germany isn't because the political will just isn't there. Between the 60s and the 90s, France literally left NATO. Europe in general has been extremely slow to scale up artillery production to support Ukraine (the US has been better, although but not by much); if the US had as much power over Europe as you think we do, we would have just told Europe to up production and they would have. But this did not happen.
You broke the site guidelines extremely badly in this thread—way over the line at which we ban accounts. Moreover, you've been doing it in other threads too - e.g.:
You also broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread, including with personal attacks. I know the other commenter was being provocative, but it's not ok to post the way you did in response.
Not Europe, but around 2015, Russia passed a law requiring foreign companies to store data on servers in the country. Then banned LinkedIn in 2016 [0], and tried to get Twitter and Facebook to comply in 2017-2019 [1]. All of which were met with ridicule from many people in the US (IIRC from article comments and reddit).
IMO, somewhat similar situations - popular social media, known for data gathering, based in another country that is viewed as a geopolitical and/or ideological opponent and is often villified.
1) wouldn't blame them if they did
2) we are in this military alliance called NATO; if you are depending on each other for military help, you're not thinking about social media based threats
Also, literally the Nazis. We lost over 400,000 people helping free Europe from the last lot who tried consolidating control. Pax Americana has been one of the longest stretches of peace in Europe. Vaccines and peace…
A lot of those Nazis went on to become part of the government of West Germany. And now Germany's in NATO. Now, their far right wing party is on the rise. The Nazis lost WWII, but fascism won.
I'm under the impression they already do. There are lots of data collection rules that US companies have to follow. This I see as an alternative to outright banning. I'm sure Facebook, et. al. are audited by EU agencies to make sure they are in compliance.
I think the reason for the outright ban is more due to it being a Chinese product. China isn't known to be very transparent.
Not necessarily making room for native companies, as the Silicon Valley giants have adapted. But they enforce certain rights, for example privacy, and if US companies (not just social media) do not want to comply they are forced to leave the EU. Some newspaper websites are not visible from Europe for that reason.
If they feel there is a sufficient security threat posed by US based social media/apps, then I see no reason why they shouldn't.
But its pretty clear that the security threat posed by US based services vs certain others is starkly different, especially since the US is generally seen as a beneficial/friendly state.
The US legislation applying to TikTok specifically applies to companies that are considered foreign adversaries. As far as I'm aware, with the exception of possibly Russia and Belarus, the US is not considered to be a foreign adversary by European nations.
I can't imagine who would genuinely ask this- and it's suspiciously plastered in every single thread on this topic. Think hard! In which way is Europe and the US's relationship different than China and the US's relationship?
I don’t know the details of course but if China wants the data there are umpteen companies who engage in data brokerage and can get the info they want.
I’m not for or against this bill, but it seems like really the issue is data collection in general, which obviously the Congress has no interest in regulating.
This isn't about regulating what content American citizens are creating. It's about regulating the involvement of adversarial foreign governments to distribute that information. These are quite separate concerns.
>regulating the involvement of adversarial foreign governments to distribute that information
How is that any different than say Press TV, whose website and media are not banned and are freely viewable in the US because we have freedom of expression?
If TikTok is propaganda, they have to register as foreign agent, which they haven’t, so that will make them illegal.
However, I don’t see them being propaganda yet, but technically they can be overnight by download a new model from headquarter (and even without US user data leave US soil). The bill is trying to stop that possibility.
I don’t feel it morally sound to punish someone for sth they haven’t done yet. But what do I know? Reading many here and on Ars, most are actually thinking the two country are at war, so they can do anything to each other
I don’t think we are at war, but if enough people believe that way, does it matter?
Distributing propaganda in the US, even as a foreign country, is allowed by the 1st Amendment. Americans have a right to receive information. This bill is trying to stop something Americans have a right to
Americans are ejecting to get this information. You have to download software, optionally allow it to send you notifications, the purposefully open and interact with it.
Your account has been using HN primarily for political battle and flamewar. You've also been breaking the site guidelines regularly in other ways.
We ban accounts that do this. It's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. I don't want to ban you because your account has been around a long time, but we need this to stop.
If you know your mind melts when you see it, then why consume it? Why install it at all?
There are plenty of companies that offer digital crack: video games, porn, social media (including this site). But we must give agency to humans. We must acknowledge that they make decisions voluntarily.
Regardless of the source, either we should regulate data, including streaming videos of all kinds, or we don't. Singling out a company seems like a political stunt with zero real world impact. And a bad policy at that.
> If you know your mind melts when you see it, then why consume it? Why install it at all?
For the record, I don't and never have. Occasionally something leaks through to me, including epiphenomena like this discussion. HN can be stressful at times too, but it's still somewhat useful and it'll be the final thing of this sort for me, should it ever kick the bucket (hope not, though).
> We must acknowledge that they make decisions voluntarily.
There's considerable behavioral determinism when exposing a population to addictive substances and propaganda. Modern neuroscience has basically killed the myth of free will. From an adversary's perspective this is awesome. From a profiteering actor's (corporations, drug cartels, influencers, casinos) perspective this is awesome as well. Would you like some sauce with this social capital?
> Regardless of the source, either we should regulate data, including streaming videos of all kinds, or we don't. Singling out a company seems like a political stunt with zero real world impact.
Sure, for all I care we can pull the plug on all of them and be better off. The systems we had for scientific, journalistic or cultural innovation and dissemination were sufficient and much better behaved (private TV can go as well). No more "professional" streamers (haha). No more perpetual reinserting the same recycled info into the collective goldfish's mind.
This would also abolish the "need" for storing the 86263961826th minecraft let's play, freeing up exabytes of storage space in the process.
Small online communities, that can actually (federatively?) host and moderate themselves will survive as they have before the maelstrom.
I think there's probably no way we can trust the data isn't going to China. This is China we're talking about.
But I don't even think the real problem is videos of high school girls doing choreographed dances going to China. The problem is psyops and disinformation. I think it's much more likely TikTok could be, and probably has been, used to sow political discord. It's not hard to imagine the Chinese government "suggesting" to TikTok that they alter their algorithm to promote content that, say, discourages people from voting, or promoting political violence, or eschewing vaccinations.
Funnily enough, this is why I prefer Chinese devices and apps as a Westerner living in the West. My threat vector is my local security apparatus coercing my data or my devices. Correspondingly, If I were living in China, I'd consider it safer to use Western tech. Meanwhile, I don't really care what China does with my stuff while I'm not in China, I just hope that China doesn't collude with my local authorities.
What happens to your argument if you consider that Western actors can manipulate you the same as China? Even more so, given that they have more power over you (presuming you're based in the West).
My argument isn't assuming there is no manipulation from the West and as someone who lives in the West, I'd rather to have one less avenue for manipulation.
Would be interesting to know if there is any data regarding the degree of cooperation between hostile countries. If I use two VPNs from countries who hate each other am I completely untrackable?
If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated, then the logical conclusion of that belief is that adversarial foreign governments have the right to propagandize in America and to Americans. If you abandon your principles the moment someone invokes the foreign menace then you don’t really have principles.
People like to think of themselves as being pro-freedom because it’s hip and cool and they are brainwashed from a young age to be proud to live in “the land of the free” but the moments you interrogate those beliefs a little they start to fall apart. It’s more of a political aesthetic than a true belief system.
I don’t think freedom of speech should be given to any collective. Individuals should enjoy it as an absolute right, but a corporation is a legal construct undeserving of such natural rights.
A similar example, people should be able to freely assemble, corporations should not be able to form cartels.
Freedom of speech isn't a blanket everything-goes. The government can impose time and place restrictions on where and when you can express yourself. So to me, getting rid of TikTok is restricting place. You can very well express yourself on other platforms if TikTok is removed from the U.S. marketplace.
> If you truly believe in the principles of free speech, no matter how offensive and evil and cynically motivated (...)
No, nobody truly believes that. Whoever is trying to sell that is trying to manipulate you. We have exceptions, provisions and considerable case law which adds a lot of *) to the first amendment. The 'principles' you're referring to have never actually been a thing outside of political emotional speeches and Republican rallies.
None of us have been alive when America was in a hot war to see exactly how far free speech stretches when actual lives are at stake. We're in a cold war right now and people should adjust their expectations. I'm not shedding any tears when a foreign corporation has its 'free speech' rights restricted. If it wants free speech it should move to the USA.
> We all know how easy it is to manipulate users... aka Cambridge Analytica.
There is little to no evidence that CA was able to manipulate anyone other than gullible campaign managers. And frankly the idea that a list of pages someone liked could be used to create a skeleton key that turned people into Republican voters is... far-fetched.
> We all know how easy it is to manipulate users... aka Cambridge Analytica.
There is little to no evidence that CA was able to manipulate anyone other than gullible campaign managers. And frankly the idea that a list of pages someone liked could be used to create a skeleton key that turned people into Republican voters is... far-fetched.
Similarly, I haven't seen anyone actually articulate what the risk from TikTok actually is. They will eavesdrop on users? App store review is supposed to catch that. Promote videos about controversial topics to users? That's cable news. See what videos you have watched or liked? Doesn't seem like a big risk...
> Similarly, I haven't seen anyone actually articulate what the risk from TikTok is.
Profiling of a large population, you put them in cohorts, and slowly shift what you show to these cohorts (based on their preferences, worldviews, etc.) to slowly nudge them into a worldview you'd like. It won't be 100% effective but it can definitely shift perceptions, if each cohort is siloed into their own reality bubbles through what you show them you can stochastically nudge them into a view you want them to hold based on their preferences.
If marketing works even to the people aware of how it works, a concerted effort to use someone's profiling data telling what do they like, dislike, will definitely work on a majority of users.
It's not like it will be blunt, it only has potential if you use this data to slowly shift views by using what's most effective to each cohort, with a large amount of data you can be quite precise in defining these cohorts and using different strategies/tactics for each one depending on what's most effective.
Have you ever worked on anything that did profiling based on accumulated data? I've worked on a few projects back in the early 2010s and even at the time it was scary how much you could infer about your users based on some 100-200 data points collected over a period of 2-5 years. Weaponising that is not the complicated part, the data collection is.
This is fascinating. I think this nuanced approach to shifting the perspectives and beliefs of the population of an adversarial nation is exactly the threat that is being missed by other commentators saying "what does TikTok do that's so bad anyway?" The point is that it is extremely subtle and yet very powerful...if China can convince US citizens that China deserves to rule Taiwan, for instance, the US government may find itself without the popular support or political will to take action to protect Taiwanese democracy in the event of an incursion by China.
>if China can convince US citizens that China deserves to rule Taiwan, for instance, the US government may find itself without the popular support or political will to take action to protect Taiwanese democracy in the event of an incursion by China
What is so awful about the idea that people in the United States might be convinced of something? What does it matter who is doing the convincing? You just don’t like the hypothetical outcome you suggested.
Are you opposed to a Taiwanese propaganda campaign, conducted through a newly popular Taiwanese social media app and directed at convincing U.S. citizens to support Taiwan in the event of an incursion by China? What’s the difference?
I find scary the idea that the U.S. government would try to protect its citizens from anyone’s speech or ideas. The best response to speech you don’t like is to argue forcefully against it; not to suppress it. We can make up our own minds.
I don’t want the government trying to suppress or protect me from thoughts or ideas it thinks are bad.
Because it's 10x harder to debunk bullshit than to claim it. You don't know what you don't know, and unfortunately the majority of people are too lazy to critically evaluate their views. For example, how many people actually read linked articles as opposed to just commenting based on the title?
That's how modern misinformation works, you simply bombard social media networks until the truth is lost in a sea of misinformation.
The difference between the truth and the lie though is that in the end when you actually have to implement policy or predict something, lies tend to eventually collapse in on themselves. Credibility as such emerges for the people/insitutions/frameworks that can consistently predict or give results that reflect reality more. But that can take years or even decades, while gepolitical decisions need to made today.
You might be right, but the existence of a problem doesn’t mean that government intervention will make things better.
I don’t want government deciding, on my behalf, what is or is not bullshit — and then taking legislative steps to suppress ideas it doesn’t like.
Is Communism bullshit? Is anti-Anericanism bullshit? How about liberalism? Conservatism? Homosexuality?
Maybe. But those are for me to decide, based on whatever information people want to use to try and convince me. It is not appropriate for government to legislatively suppress ideas or information it thinks is wrong.
If you think otherwise, do you have a problem with the Chinese internet firewall? From their perspective, China is protecting its citizens from harmful, wrong information. You just disagree about their value judgments. (I assume.)
Pass a privacy law, stop arbitrarily banning. What exactly would be the justification for forcing the sale rather than passing a law solving the actual problem?
The actual problem is threat of algo manipulation in times of crisis. But they apparently don't want to make that their argument. It's the only valid justification imo. Data privacy should apply to all companies.
It’s probably an issue of messaging: telling a population that someone is misusing the information, potentially militarily, is an easier pill to swallow than telling them they are susceptible to algorithmic manipulation by a foreign adversary. And do they even want to open the can of worms about their susceptibility to domestic manipulation?
But the government hates online privacy. It stops them from spying. And (though I don't know this for a fact) I feel tech giants could be lobbying against privacy laws.
I'm interested to see how this plays out. TikTok is popular enough that I can imagine it's making enough money outside the US to just let them ban it and not sell. The whole thing is interesting to watch from a non-China/US perspective. It feels like a move to make the US government look strong to its citizens. A move that, unusually, can have bipartisan support. It feels like propaganda really. And judging by the comments here and elsewhere it seems to be working. Of all the 'threats' faced by the US, a Chinese social media app is really at the bottom of the totem pole. US elections are far more influenced by nefarious actors on US owned social media platforms - but nobody wants to do anything about that.
Idk, every person I talk to thinks it's crazy that the US is this close to banning an app because it doesn't like the content. The idea that Americans aren't allowed to view "propaganda" is insane and very against the ideas of free speech.
But I come online and there's so much support for banning an app who hires lots of devs in Silicon Valley itself...
It's not about being allowed, but more about being steered.
And yes, other social media platforms have similar issues with algorithmic feeds, but they are currently a less clear national security threat. Though, one could argue they are radicalizing internal threats.
>less clear national security threat. Though, one could argue they are radicalizing internal threats.
I don't and will never buy this argument that showing people certain media causes violence or is a security threat. People doing violent things is a security threat. What they read or believed that led them to do that is not. Freedom of expression is vital and defending it comes with serious negative consequences. It means defending heinous views, some which have only ever been linked with radicals and violence. But they are allowed to say those views and to say them to other people. And people are allowed to read, watch, and see those views.
I agree with you! But where I differ is when people get trapped in these algorithmic bubbles because they happen to search for or like something once or twice. Then they are fire hosed that type of content over and over, which IMO is very different than being allowed to say or see something.
That's indeed where we differ. If I were alive when the radio were invented or the television, I wouldn't think the technical change changed my ideals, and I don't think that now
This "being steered" argument is bullshit. Are Fox News and CNN not steering their viewers toward a very specific democratic outcome? TV shows, movies, even books. Every piece of media that you consume wants to influence your vote one way or another.
It's also a firehose of misinformation you choose to jump into. One can reasonably watch TikTok with the understanding that it might be good for entertainment or learning about things that don't really matter. It's a terrible news source, just like any other user content driven platform.
>> The idea that Americans aren't allowed to view "propaganda" is insane and very against the ideas of free speech.
It's odd that the people who are so adamant that we can't ban 'hate speech' because 'it's a slippery slope' don't seem to care that the government banning us from viewing content is also quite a serious slipper slope.
>> But I come online and there's so much support for banning an app who hires lots of devs in Silicon Valley itself.
It's a net-positive for all the people working at Facebook + Twitter which is where the eyeballs will be diverted to.
>TikTok is popular enough that I can imagine it's making enough money outside the US to just let them ban it and not sell.
Back in 2020, 10% of TikTok users were American but they accounted for 50% of revenue, or something like that. Any US shutdown would be catastrophic for TikTok's valuation.
As much as I don't care about tiktok going away, and acknowledge the privacy and security risks, there's something about banning a highly popular website that doesn't sit right with me. Is there precedent in the USA for anything like this?
It's important to note this isn't banning TikTok. It's forcing the sale of it from a CCP-linked parent company. The precedent for this would be US pressuring sale of Grindr from Chinese ownership due to privacy concerns: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/grindr-sold-china-national...
I don't disagree that the way TikTok is operated is problematic for the US. But will making TikTok a US corporation prevent any of the problems? Couldn't the company still legally send private information to "partners" which indirectly makes it's way to the CCP? And couldn't it still freely choose to moderate and promote posts according the priorities and values of the company? Being staffed by a large number of CCP-friendly employees, those will reflect CCP policies. For this to have any impact we need privacy laws to restrict this US company anyway.
It still seems like security theater to me, which is particularly unfortunate because it is a real security threat.
Are you opposing the divestment law? If so, and you think TikTok is a real security threat, what is the alternative measure?
I don't agree that this is security theater. Divestment will put the entity which controls TikTok under the jurisdiction of U.S. law, and no, it isn't obvious that the company would still legally be able to export data to the CCP. I also don't understand arguing against a measure on the basis that it won't work well enough - you have to argue that the measure itself is bad.
"Free" doesn't mean no restrictions. For example, apps/websites like Myspace and Facebook and anything that's been used to spread hate, cause bullying, or threats have always been a target of regulation, albeit never an outright ban.
In the case here, it's ostensibly being done with national security considerations in mind. What remains to be determined is whether or not these concerns are valid. But the idea that "free" means the government has no power to ban things, including apps, borders naïvety.
I think you totally missed the argument: it's not about copying anything China does, it's about reciprocating restrictions that they place on your country. If China places a tariff on US imported goods, then the US places a tariff on Chinese goods.
This is and has been the case even for non-adversary countries, and is bread-and-butter foreign policy
Reciprocating tariffs has been a thing for hundreds of years before the US even existed. The justification isn't "they're doing it, so let's just copy them", it's "they're inflicting economic impact on us by reducing the profit of our exports to them, we'll put pressure on them to stop that by reducing the amount that we import for them".
It's not simple "but he hit me first" logic: it's macroeconomics with an actual strategy in mind.
I didn’t know that Rupert Murdoch had to become a U.S. citizen to own a U.S. newspaper. So precedents for old school media but of course the problem is new media not needing physical distribution that can be readily monitored.
Good thing that rule was in place, otherwise it could have opened the door for some unscrupulous person profiting off of national division and disharmony.
Uncertainty and doubt is a good and honest position. It is an unusual situation, and it could potentially create a dangerous precedent, particularly in other countries where US-owned software is dominant. There is strong evidence that TikTok is being used to spy on Americans, especially those in the military and those in power, and that this represents a real risk to American interests. The downside is this may unleash a waive of retributive banning (e.g. other countries banning US-owned apps). I personally don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, globally: geographically partitioned services (and therefore power) are fine by me. Of course rich donor corps in the US won't like having their addressable market reduced. We'll see if they can convince us to invade another country to force them to use eBay though.
A better middle ground at this stage could have been requiring TikTok to daily display to users (and require they confirm/accept) a message stating the indirect CPC ownership, the risk to their personal info, and the serious risk of seeing state directed disinformation campaigns. Most would still use TikTok but perhaps it might get drilled into their heads to actually question some things they see on it.
Personally think the data protection issue are overblown. The ability to influence through disinformation campaings, whether for CPC, Russia or whomever is their friend, is a way bigger thing for me.
The weird thing to me is how little concern there is for sale of data by any social media company. Very intimate details about many Americans lives can easily be purchased by US adversaries. That’s reportedly the motivation for the bill but effectively it really only change who is profiting from the data by forcing a bargain price for a foreign company and directing the ongoing revenue to us company vs a Chinese company.
I suppose it would be easier to regulate a us based company should the rules around user data sale change but this bill alone effectively does nothing to advance the security principles the bill is sold on beside make it slightly more expensive for the Chinese government to use the data.
Almost half of Americans are using TikTok. If the Chinese govt. can spy on Americans than this is definitely a national security concern. I understand that American companies like FB and Google are doing it too but hopefully they are not selling the data to Chinese companies.
After I typed that I feel FB and Google would sell data to highest bidder.
Maybe it is time to focus on privacy and clearly understanding what apps are gathering from users and how that data is being used/sold.
In the absence of legislation to the contrary, I'd be surprised if any corporation with any useful data wouldn't sell it to anyone willing to pay their price for it.
I'd hazard that even with legislation about selling outside the US, a foreign government would still just find a cut-out that looks legit enough and then have them send the data overseas regardless.
It bears repeating that this bill only bans tiktok if it isn't spun out of Bytedance. Given how American owned social media companies are treated in China, this doesn't seem entirely unfair.
It is concerning that this bill seemingly includes a very specific carve out for Yelp[0] which is not owned by China, Russia, Iran or North Korea as far as I'm aware. Sure seems like the bill probably does more than just crackdown on TikTok.
Yelp doesn't need a carve out. It seems like it is more likely a reference to apps like Baidu Maps, which is used by travelers from China. Baidu Maps was banned in India in 2020, but it would be excluded from a similar ban in the US due to that exclusion. It would also exclude Meituan from a ban, which is a Chinese alternative to Yelp.
(B) EXCLUSION.—The term “covered company” does not include an entity that operates a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.
To be clear, TikTok's main threat is persuasion and opinion manipulation. Data privacy is a nice thing to talk about, but pales in comparison to being able to influence what a huge portion of a foreign adversary population is watching.
Edit to counter likely responses: this also applies directly to US social media and mainstream media and I have extremely dim views of both I can assure you :-)
I'm going to ask an intentionally stupid question. TikTok is largely just kids dancing and other innocuous videos, even if Bytedance is sucking up all that data and sending it back to the CCP, how does that constitute a national security threat?
Young people getting bombed by the US and its allies, are posting videos of themselves getting bombed and American teens have enough empathy to find such content moving.
Considering Israel also has horrible videos of egregious violence being committed at them by Palestinians it's concerning that you don't think that's grounds for propaganda or manipulation.
I use it myself and never get dancing videos. I get videos about gaming, sketch-comedy, abstract comedy, fails and mishaps, podcast snippets, global conflicts, politics etc.
There's something for anyone on TikTok. It's a bit scary how well the algo knows my interests, but at least it's interesting content.
It really is a shame, in my opinion, that this is how the US has decided to deal with this issue. I understand how TikTok is a propaganda threat, but also see how Facebook, Twitter/X, or most any other social media is susceptible to that same manipulation. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to legislate the threat away effectively.
Broadcast news and radio are limited to at most 20% foreign ownership by default [1]. Applying a similar requirement to large internet news distributors seems reasonable if they want to do business in the US (even if "banned" they could still distribute content, they'd just be restricted in making money).
Broadcast news and radio are able to be restricted because the the US government owns the airwaves - there is (still) no meaningful regulation of the internet in the United States and therefore communications over the internet are protected by the First Amendment.
But, every American has access to even government propaganda of foreign adversaries. It's part of the 1st Amendment. Denying access to this information feels really weird. If TikTok doesn't divest, it will be banned and app stores will not be allowed to distribute it and the government telling app stores which content is and isn't approved feels like the PATRIOT Act all over again, all of us handing over our rights for some boogeyman
Yes, and Americans will continue to have access to propaganda of foreign adversaries after this bill passes. The ownership restrictions on broadcast media that OP mentions don't stop Americans from going to the Chinese state news agencies website (https://english.news.cn/). These measures limit the ability of foreign corporations to control American news distribution platforms, not the ability of Americans who want to read Chinese propaganda to do so.
> every American has access to even government propaganda of foreign adversaries. It's part of the 1st Amendment. Denying access to this information feels really weird
As it should. Fortunately, this bill doesn’t do that. If ByteDance won’t sell, TikTok gets removed from app stores. TikTok.com will remain free to access.
The bill curtails distribution and amplification, not speech.
The bill explicitly allows the President to designate a "website" as a threat. How that would be applied exactly is a different question, which is why many argue that this is a Pandora's box not worth opening.
> bill explicitly allows the President to designate a "website" as a threat
No, it has to be controlled by a foreign adversary country [1].
The broadest power is in 3(a)(ii) on page 10, which lets the President designate an app or website as a foreign adversary controlled application if it is a significant national security threat following public notice and reporting requirements. But even then, it’s a divestiture order subject to judicial review, not the power to ban.
The move escalates a showdown between Beijing and Washington over the control of technologies that could affect national security, free speech and the social media industry.
I will get beat up for this question but here goes. They are using the word "could". Does this mean there is no evidence of TikTok exfiltrating sensitive intelligence data to the CCP? The reason I ask is that if this were actually taking place there would be no need to vote on breaking up TikTok or even mention the US constitution. Such actions would immediately be an act of war or at very least trigger sanctions. So is the real purpose of this to mitigate war or to confine US communications to platforms that the US already has intercept and social manipulation capabilities on or something else beyond the reasons given in the article?
There's no evidence of that happening & it really isn't even about that. It's about the popularity of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok. The other social media giants have censorship policies on this that tilt things towards a pro-Israel perspective, but TikTok does not and is being targeted for it.
This type of protectionism could really backfire on the United States. We are a heavy net importer, and I don’t think our Congressmen understand what kind of can of worms this opens. The cynic in me wonders if Microsoft is behind all of this, as they stand to gain the most from a forced sale.
Not just a net importer, but also the main exporter of algorithmic feeds. If the US bans TikTok for fear of China manipulating public opinion via their algorithmic feed, lots of other countries might think twice whether they want to allow the same influence from the US via Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Youtube, Instagram, etc.
What’s even worse is that our elected officials had an opportunity to protect consumers and their data. Instead it’s a front for regulatory capture. I used to think it was malice but it really must be incompetence. Astronomical levels of incompetence enabled by an uneducated and complacent public.
I wouldn't say no to more localised social media platforms that revolve around a country or region- who really needs to hear about what americans in beverly hills are doing all the time. Like line in japan or something
One positive in all this is when Twitter got blocked in China, over night basically everyone under the age of 24 learned how to use VPNs, and learned how to subvert various official software update mechanisms.
I'm thinking that this, or something like it, could be what is finally going to break the stranglehold that Apple and Google have on the US app store market, even if it's just an unintentional side effect.
If Hauwei weren't banned they could promote some sort of a "TikTok" phone and maybe a lot of people would buy it.
Maybe they should still do it given China 's ability to crank out nth variation of existing devices overnight and make it some sort of underground "drop" kinda like how Gen-Z is going insane over sneaker drops.
To be honest, I think they've been talking about this since the Trump campaign or sometimes shortly thereafter, quickly wouldn't be the adjective coming to mind thinking about this situation
Wouldn't introducing actual privacy laws be better than censoring part of the internet? I doubt that American social media corporations hoard less data about it's users than Chinese. I am not defending TikTok here, because I believe it's a danger, but this new bill is equivalent to treating the symptoms instead of the cause.
This is a war over cultural influence. I'm 100% for free markets and anti-regulation (as it nearly all is based on bribes targeted to harm competition), but I've never figured out a good theoretical policy for how a free market should interact with a unbridled dictatorship like China.
China is not only a dictatorship, but a market that is closed or highly restricted to most US businesses. Free trade isn't an option if the US wanted it.
TBF only majority ownership, which Bytedance already does not have (Bytedance which is also owned 60% by foreign investors).
The current situation is already quite a bit like these 'previous OEMs'.
Reading the Musk biography, it seems like they just had the right people who really knew the Chinese government try extra hard to convince them to grant the exception to Tesla.
I personally think its more than that. We have firms here in the US that tear down the Teslas, deeply analyze the cars and sell the reports to whoever will buy (essentially other car companies). The Chinese are snapping up all the Tesla reports and multiple firms that do this work are reporting that the Chinese only want Tesla, they are offered info on the other OEMs and they don't care at all.
It seems like the Chinese know that Tesla is their primary competition. We see it in their actions as well. When Tesla announced "giga castings" for their cars, the Chinese companies were the first to jump on that train as fast as possible. Everyone else was still debating wether or not if it was worth the cost.
This bill prohibits distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok). However, the prohibition does not apply to a covered application that executes a qualified divestiture as determined by the President.
Under the bill, a foreign adversary controlled application is directly or indirectly operated by (1) ByteDance, Ltd. or TikTok (including their subsidiaries or successors); or (2) a social media company that is controlled by a foreign adversary and has been determined by the President to present a significant threat to national security. The prohibition does not apply to an application that is primarily used to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.
The bill authorizes the Department of Justice to investigate violations of the bill and enforce the bill's provisions. Entities that violate the bill are subject to civil penalties based on the number of users.
The bill requires a covered application to provide a user with all available account data (including posts, photos, and videos) at the user's request before the prohibition takes effect.
Precisely. Not sure it gets passed but let's say it does. Today is March 13th plus a week for senate and President. Takes effect in 6 months. Right in the middle of the campaign. Someone will say we did it. Someone else will say not enough. But we get the freedom to not use it :)
In a previous discussion thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692670), there was a significant amount of discussion regarding the belief that the push for this legislation may be influenced by the pro-Israel lobby, specifically in reaction to the uncensored flow of information via TikTok following the events of October 7th in Gaza. These discussions were quickly downvoted and flagged. However, I believe it is crucial to engage in this conversation respectfully and with a genuine intent for understanding. The potential influence of such lobbying efforts, if substantiated, carries profound implications that merit thoughtful discussion, irrespective of one's personal stance on Israel, Gaza, or the broader political dynamics. If you share these concerns, I encourage you to reply with any evidence supporting your viewpoint, so we can engage in a constructive and good-faith discussion about this issue.
How do you ban AIPAC when they are basically malware that is running at all layers of the stack from OS to Firmware to CPU Microcode? Good luck with that!
If you believe that people generally are not dumb, and think rationally, and therefore cannot be influenced by falseful information, foreign propaganda then you wouldn't propose such law.
Just when I think I have a handle on how stupid our politicians are... they find some way to make me realize they are even dumber than I previously thought.
According to HuffPost it was a 352-65 vote, so this stupidity was bipartisan. So much for one party being smarter than the other. Banning an extremely popular app, in an election year no less, while providing absolutely zero evidence to prove what you accuse it of doing is really some kind of next level idiocy.
This bill does nothing to address the problem of nation state propaganda spreading via social media. It just allows American politicians to claim a fake national security victory over a Chinese owned company while ignoring the fact that American owned social media companies are a steaming cesspool full of such content.
Dont get me wrong, I think TikTok is terrible. I won't use it. Ever. But that still doesn't mean it should be banned. Unless you want to ban all social media apps all at once. Probably still not something I would support, but I could definitely see proponents being able to form much more compelling arguments in favor of such an action.
As it stands right now, this makes zero logical sense.
If China were really THAT involved in the day to day operations at Tiktok, one would expect to see more pro-Russian propaganda with regards to the war. There's little to none that I've seen.
This is because the kids are pro-Palestine [1], and because of that, so is content on Tiktok. The massive killing and destruction of Gaza is visible and the kids don't like it.
And so, AIPAC is pissed that everyone can see the apartheid and the bombs dropping on families in Gaza. The US would rather control the media (like they did in the invasion of Iraq, and like they have now which led to the scandal in the nytimes).
The closest precedent for this ban are laws banning foreign ownership of TV stations.
But TV has always been national. How is global social media supposed to work when every government demands to have its own version, controlled by a local company?
Do these representatives imagine a truly separate version of TikTok, like China's Douyin, without access to foreign content, and without anyone else seeing american content, without any connections between american and foreign users? Does the US want to separate itself from the world like that? China has a long tradition of this kind of separation, the US doesn't.
The bill doesn't block any content on Tiktok, it is to require American ownership of the company. The penalty for non-compliance would remove Tiktok from appstores, but it wouldn't prevent Americans from accessing it either via the web (Probably easy to sideload on Android at least).
There is a reason this is one of the things that's passing with bipartisan support. Both parties are excusing, and are on the side of Israel and they know that public opinion turning against Israel will cause them future problems.
So much trash and they ban this trash because China controls it. I honestly can't think of one thing China has done to harm me. The people who control the US media, however...
Maybe not you personally millions of Americans are being directly harmed by China every year.
They're threatening to invade Taiwan, a friendly and sovereign country. They're supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They're spying and stealing IP. They're harassing and threatening dissidents in the US. And the list goes on.
Probably the most aggressively awful thing China is doing is deliberately flooding the US with Fentanyl and other drugs, killing far more Americans than all gun deaths (including suicides!) per year.
The Chinese government is incredibly hostile toward the US government and population.
It'd be really great if China and Russia were friendly countries. The way the UK, EU, Japan, and most other major countries relate to the US. No one would like it more than most Americans.
But China and Russia are run by dictators and dictators have a tendency toward doing evil. It makes sense to shield ourselves against as much of their evil shit as we reasonably can.
I understand this would theoretically stop the CCCP from getting info on US Consumers, but is there anything to this that actually limits the data collected? I assume not.
It's interesting how the bill can have such a heavily bipartisan approval yet there are so many opposing the decision in HN. That goes also with the general US anti-China consensus that has virtually no political lashback from domestic voters. So I would naturally assume from that then the plurality of the american voterbase would support this. So is this opposition really coming from the voterbase or elsewhere?
To be completely honest, it’s a bit naive to assume that congress people represent their constituents first. It is commonly known, and backed up by evidence, that they will back their financial backers first and foremost.
It is unclear who the backers in this case are. But when in doubt, follow the money
People largely don't seem to read past a headline that says US to ban Tiktok (or whatever other permutation of Tiktok and ban). It is an incomplete and dishonest picture of what the actual legislation does and the purpose of it.
I'm not surprised people at large get up in arms if you say congress is going to ban Tiktok. If you tell them the full story, that the legislation requires them to divest from Chinese ownership or no longer be widely available, I think the response would be somewhat different. I'd certainly like to think so, anyways.
If you try to publish your app in any of the Chinese app stores, you will be required to add an SDK to your app that basically allows them (Chinese government) to track user activity in your app.
This basically means that not only TikTok, but any app originating from China is mandated to have this tracking SDK integrated, and it's a much bigger problem than just a single app...
There’s no explicit documentation. It’s just that if a non-Chinese company/individual will want to publish something there, they need to obtain a license. This license can’t be obtained so easily, so you would have to go through some publishing company like AppTutti. These companies require you to rebuild your app with their specific SDK, without which you just can’t publish the app. One can only guess what’s in that SDK… but from my other experiences, I’m pretty sure there’s some back channel.
Here’s a quote from appinchina dot com:
Currently, foreign companies are not allowed to directly publish their apps on Chinese Android app stores. This restriction does not apply to iOS or the Apple App Store in China. All foreign app companies must either have a Chinese entity or use an authorized local distributor to publish their mobile apps and games.
This is – fairly obviously – the US working to maintain it's primacy in the control over technology (broadly) and social media (specifically).
It's certainly convenient that various security and privacy concerns align, but as many comments here point out, they don't stand up to much scrutiny, and they certainly don't warrant this level of policy response.
This is going to be a shit show. I don’t even really know where I stand. On one hand, we have to acknowledge that an adversarial government has massively succeeded in installing a botnet in our population— even if that wasn’t the initial intent of ByteDance, it’s effectively true now. On the other hand, you can’t stop people from installing spyware, donating money to fraudster politicians, surrendering themselves to cult leaders, etc. without invoking freedom of speech concerns (rightfully so). Pretty interesting situation, in a morbid way, to live through. I have no idea what’s going to happen.
It’s going to pass Congress, signed into law. Then a federal judge will issue a preliminary injunction blocking it on first amendment grounds just like what happened both times with the Montana ban in 2023 and trumps executive order in 2020
This feels mostly right. Although, it may not make it past the senate, and it might not get signed if it goes by the president. Especially since he's campaigning on TikTok.
What amazes me is how people's view in these threads are for a ban. For a counter point, the EFF thinks congress should not ban apps[0]
Because that is not the really the whole problem we are trying to solve. At root of the TikTok problem is the fact that a nation like China is not playing on a level playing field in our Free Market. A free market works when all the participants are playing on a level playing field. TikTok is not because China as a country does not believe or follow free market principles. As such to further their national goals they will happily bend and break all of our rules with no real way for us to prevent or even detect it.
You can't treat Chinese companies the same way as US companies or even most European countries. They won't play by the rules. You have to treat them differently.
The experiment we started in the 90's to try to export Free Market to the world was interesting but the data shows that it doesn't actually work in Autocratic countries. It's time to stop pretending like it produces good outcomes overall.
This bill doesn't even address that. If you want to ban Chinese owned companies because they ban ours, then present that. This is 1 company being targeted, with the potential for maybe some more later. That leaves all the rest operating as normal.
To be honest, I still don't see the issue here. TikTok is tying into existing APIs that any app can also use. There is nothing special there other than the user's data may end up in the Chinese government's hands (but... again, TikTok isn't special there).
I think we really need to think about the problem we're trying to solve here carefully, because saying "you can't watch these types of videos because reasons" is the slippery slope of all slippery slopes.
ETA: I do agree that TikTok is probably a bad thing overall, realistically it could be used to subtly social engineer the entire US population by controlling the content people see. But I don't think just outright banning TikTok is the answer. But didn't Facebook also do the same thing in the election? What are the ramifications for something like Youtube which tailors your recommended videos based on your history (you watch one Joe Rogan clip and now it starts to show right wing/conspiracy videos).
That's what confuses me. Surely they know it likely won't survive the courts. So maybe they are banning it to win points with voters, but it doesn't seem like something that would be popular with the voters. So I'm left wondering why there's so much motivation in Congress to do this.
Who are the people that want it? Lets put aside the people that don't want it.
I can think of the following:
1. American tech companies
2. AIPAC
3. "The Deep State"
4. Maybe "bleeding heart American boomers"?
Is this a large enough group to push bills through? Seems like it.
The reason we put aside people who don't want it is because to push back against a bill requires at least an equal amount of effort that it took to get it going, usually more (see right to repair legislation, fight over DMCA provisions etc.). So unless you believe the people that don't want it are really more powerful than all of the above it makes sense why its going through.
Isn't this different in that it's not blocking TikTok but instead forcing the parent to sell the American division? There's plenty of precedent for that succeeding (including relatively recently where a Chinese company was forced to end plans for an IPO and sell Grindr). This is unlikely to be blocked on First Amendment grounds simply because they're not blocking speech, just forcing an ownership change (I am definitely not a lawyer though so I could be wrong).
It’s not worse for you personally. The US government can request and use warrants for information collected by all of those entities.
The US cannot request information on Chinese citizens in China because US companies are restricted from operating in China. They don’t have any significant data.
On the other hand China now has a very valuable and large presence in tiktok here in the US and can access any collected information it wants on Chinese citizens in the US and any other user. I imagine it doesn’t take a warrant either but I’m unfamiliar with their protocols.
So it’s likely not worse for you personally, especially if you’re a typical American who is unsupportive of their government and its foreign policy.
For the average citizen, probably not, but imagine you are a celebrity, politician, government contractor, tech CEO/employee with access to IP. It's not that difficult to hash out someone's algorithm to get enough of a psychological profile on the person to initiate a detailed social engineering campaign.
Because TikTok can be used as a weapon by China. Democracies have a weakness - enemies can influence the population and therefore the government. Russia does this quite effectively in my opinion (one example is Slovakia).
Social media of US owned companies was already used as a weapon and still is. Perhaps instead of this legislation we should clearly lay out the regulations that all social media companies need to adhere too.
Because only spying from American companies is allowed. /s
In all seriousness though, it isn't. People are generally simply trying to fit in, so hating on anything China is viewed as good and everyone sticks to it.
We know because of Snowden how the US government has access to all (most likely way more) of the same data they are now worried China has access to.
Can you expand on what you mean by "installing a botnet"?
As a term of art, a botnet refers to a collection of computing devices that can be controlled remotely. I am not aware of any such capability in TikTok itself. Presumably they could attempt to offer a new version of TikTok that allowed arbitrary remote execution or one-time behavior, but this would need to get past Apple's app review process and would be subject to pretty immediate rollback.
Like if they wanted to use the install base of TikTok to perform a DDoS against an adversary, that would pretty much be a one-shot deal, after which it would be shut down.
Unless you're using botnet in a different sense, in which case this is irrelevant but I would recommend using a different word in this case ("propaganda engine" maybe) to avoid carrying along the connotations.
In that case I downgrade my assessment of this threat from "minor IT threat" to "nonsensical word salad". The idea that the CCP has a network of Manchurian Candidates waiting to do their bidding is ridiculous.
The reason why TikTok is able to spy and botnet on Americans is because we have no effective data privacy law. This is deliberate because the CIA and NSA buy shittons of user data from adtech data brokers to do an end run around the 4th Amendment.
Stopping TikTok without gutting 1A would be very easy: just copypaste GDPR into local law and make sure we have someone enforcing it. The problem is that the US government likes it's spying and Congress isn't interested in reigning them in.
It's no worse that what Facebook or Twitter does (or has done). I would prefer to have a plurality of options and not be limited to apps that are owned by countries the US deems "allies".
- Facebook+Twitter are US-based entities and have to follow US laws and regulations in a much more strict way than Tiktok
- They are not controlled by a politically-motivated adversarial government
You are also conflating apps "from a country" vs apps "under a country's gvmt control". I think most here would agree "apps from a plurality of countries" is a good goal to strive for, while "apps under a dictatorship's gvmt control" is not.
TikTok is run out of the United States and adheres to the same laws as Twitter and Facebook. Its CEO, Shou Chew, was just at a hearing in front of Congress last month.
As an example, do you think a US citizen personal data is as secure from requests from the CCP in e.g. Facebook as it is in Tiktok? That TikTok executives are as liable to US laws and prosecution as Facebook execs?
>That TikTok executives are as liable to US laws and prosecution as Facebook execs?
They absolutely are - again, TikTok is an American company with American employees who can be held liable if TikTok breaks the law - e.g. Shou Chew. The problem for the government is that TikTok hasn't broken any laws.
On the other hand, a citizen should be more scared of his own govt rather than foreign govt because foreign govt won't arrest him. So for an American TikTok is probably less threat than Facebook or Twitter.
I don't even know how you reach that kind of conclusion from that fact. It's not even strictly true. If I travel to China or Russia for a trip there is absolutely nothing stopping them from arresting me. It's only true if you never travel to that foreign country.
In the case of Russia they can do worse than imprison you. Just ask any number of Russia defectors who were killed on on Western soil. This is a very poorly thought out take.
I don’t think they were talking about traveling to Russia or China, they’re talking about living in the US. The vast majority of people will not travel to China or Russsia.
For instance if you discuss doing something illegal like getting an abortion in the US, only the US government really cares about that. Whether China knows is irrelevant.
This is a completely irrational argument, rooted solely in xenophobic appeals, that can be trivially dismissed by inverting the premise: Do Chinese citizens have more to fear from state control and monitoring of domestic social media services or those owned by companies outside China?
Those are not equivalent as I hint in my last paragraph, different countries and gvmt influence do have different risk factors. You can e.g. criticize the US gvmt in a US-based app with no consequences. Good luck doing that in China (that = criticizing the CCP on a Chinese-based app while living in China).
Actually it might be the other way round. Chinese will not care if you critisize US govt in private messages, but US platform might actually report you to FBI.
This bill if passed and enforced could be the beginning of a very deep change of the structure of the internet. Since the internet developed mainly and the infrastructure relied on US companies, it was excepted that US will play nice and will not use this to cause problems. Of course, Snowden showed us that even American are not safe. Now you are basically telling each government that we will use our tech advantage against anyone we seem an adversary. And I think WMD stories may still be fresh in the eye of any decision maker and would take this as a security issue. This might propose the actual Balkanization of the internet, as each country or group of countries might think that seeking independence from US infrastructure dominance is a national security interest. I think this might have much deeper impact that the obvious and short term effects proponents see.
Does Congress have any idea how software works? Anyone could just sideload the app directly from the web. Or you could create wrapper apps around it. Once installed, can Apple or Google steal it off your phone? If so, don't buy their products (or by a Pixel and install grapheneos).
General laws to address the tech industry's anticompetitive bundling of client software with hosted services, and to give individuals meaningful control over surveillance databases being kept on us? Nah, just some simplistic political grandstanding for the narrative of the week.
Rather than single out and ban Tiktok, we should instead mandate any application mass collecting data be open sourced, so anyone technical can verify any claims about security and privacy for themselves.
It will never happen, but it would solve the problem.
> would give the president the authority to ban any app or website both foreign and domestic based
No, it has to be controlled by a foreign adversary country [1].
The broadest power is in 3(a)(ii) on page 10, which lets the President designate an app as a foreign adversary controlled application if it is a significant national security threat following public notice and reporting requirements. But even then, it’s a divestiture order subject to judicial review, not the power to ban.
I guess the "and" on 3(b)(i)-(ii) clears up my concerns of "any" website/app.
(B) a covered company that—
(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the
national security of the United States following the issuance of ...
I wonder why Meta stock is not jumping on this news. Either the market believes the ban won't stand or is going to be circumvented somehow or the market believes Meta is not in good enough position to take that audience anyway.
If US bans TikTok then other countries should ban US apps because they can be used for spying and manipulation of public opinion the same way. Either a country makes its own apps or it becomes a subject to foreign influence.
It's very different. There are tons of foreign owned apps and websites, like Spotify for example. Are we going to force them to become an American company too?
They want their domestic companies to be able to freely sell data, that is the whole point of their long dance to avoid data protection laws. They would otherwise have already taken inspiration from 150+ countries who have proper data protection law (yes, contrary to popular beliefs, it is not just EU that has a proper data protection framework).
The idea that a piece of software can be “banned” on a national level shows how far we’ve fallen in terms of general purpose computing. In a reasonable world, banning an app would be a non-sequitur, because you would always be able to find a mirror if you wanted to use it. Once governments discover that they have this power, they will make every effort to close the PC loophole and subsequently ban anything unfavorable to the ruling class and their patrons: torrent clients, software cracks, VPNs, end-to-end encryption, etc.
there's absolutely nothing illegal about installing the app, if you can find a mirror that's operated outside of US borders by a non US company then you can just download it still
So, you think it should be technically impossible to ban child pornography? There should be no consequences for possessing this in a "reasonable world"?
CSAM is not software. It is content. In a reasonable world, there should be consequences for possessing it. Implementing these consequences on a technical level would be an egregious affront to our freedoms.
software vs content is an irrelevant distinction, they're both digital objects composed of files and bytes. I see no reason the government should not able to regulate either one of them. The government already regulates lots of software via ITAR laws.
0%, PRC won't allow US normalize ability to nationalize her companies, regardless if TikTok is legally based in Singapore, the geopolitics won't allow it. They'll likely retaliate by trying to heavily degrade a major US company with large PRC exposure like Apple or Tesla.
It will 100% be enforced if passed. There is marginal political will to pass this. There is no political will to bail out TikTok if ByteDance or Beijing throw a hissy fit.
The grandparent comment wasn’t asking about the likelihood of the US enforcing the ban (assuming the bill passes and TikTok refuses to divest). Obviously, the answer to that is somewhere near 100%.
The question was, assuming the bill passes, what’s the likelihood of TikTok deciding to divest (and thus remaining non-banned) vs. TikTok refusing to divest (and getting banned).
Got it. I think they get banned for a while and then fold. Unless Beijing decides to take a hard line, which they might, though hundreds of billions funds a lot of R&D [1].
I've been reading endless headlines about how hard it is to do business in China because the Chinese courts subpoenaed business records from Bain's China offices etc., wonder if I'm going to see endless articles about how hard it is to do business in the US.
And as others have said - no privacy protection laws for Americans passed - only if the company is Chinese.
A lot of comments here assume that two countries are either "at war" or not, even though it's much more of a gradient in which military escalation is one of the last steps. In fact, you can financially support an endeavour of a country while also sanctioning them for another thing they did. Relationships are complex.
Does Tik Tok actually need to be an app? On the consumption side I'd expect it could be done entirely web based.
I understand it has some content creation support, like recording short videos from the app, but I think there are stand-alone apps for making and editing short videos, and a Tik Tok web based app could probably be made to import from some of those.
I like Scott Galloway's take on this which is that ByteDance will simply be forced to divest/sell the US business to western interests because they won't take a $250B loss or whatever the valuation is. So we will keep our cocaine app and still secure the security interests. Sounds like a win win to me if this happens.
And of course the argument to strip citizens freedom to choose what they want to use is in the name of safety! Politicians need a new red herring or I’m going to start thinking they’re either lazy or stupid.
This might be great: Americans will see firsthand how corrupt and oppressive their government can be if it wants to.
> On Tuesday, officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department spoke with lawmakers in a classified briefing about national security concerns tied to TikTok.
It's worse than that, it gives the president authority to remove any application and force a sale or take it over in the US. Provided it's owned by an "adversary to the US government".
Domestic elites put on a whole show about foreign companies spying on citizens is bad while (implicitly) asserting that domestic companies doing the same thing is okay. Classic us versus them.
A perfect legal way to rip off and take profit. Now I wonder who (which company) is going to get the chance to take the golden goose with a steep cut, considering they have to sell it in 6 months.
What are the chances that TikTok really gets comprehensively banned in the US? This seems like the kind of thing that would get stuck in a Bermuda triangle of litigation while nothing ever happens.
Low. ByteDance will do whatever they can to delay enforcement by challenging the law for as long as they can, and in the background they'll setup a new corporate structure that maintains their status quo while technically complying with the law, at which point they'll back off from the legal battle and graciously accept the new law that they've already loopholed their way around.
I wonder what impact this will have on biden in the election- tiktok users are young and progressive and trump positioning himself as pro tiktok recently is interesting
Got to love ByteDance's insistence that they wouldn't hand over US data if asked to by the CCP. They're not even trying to hide how fucked they are anymore.
This whole thing is embarrassing. Banning an app is something the CCP does. It's not supposed to be something the US government does.
That's leaving aside the feasibility. I suppose tiktok could be banned on Iphones easily enough but it's less clear how the web app or android apps could be banned.
Free speech isn't absolute, not even in the US. It's normal and healthy for a society to adapt it's view on speech over time and as the world evolves. Hopefully toward being more open, yet openness must be balanced against the negatives.
Every generation is scared of "what the kids spend their time doing". In the 80s it was the PMRC. Later on there were at least a few video game scares ("What if my son plays Mortal Kombat and tries to rip my head off?").
I'm not advocating taking all social media from kids. Just limits and at least corporate oversight. I grew up in the 80s, with limits on my BBS and AOL time, and I survived.
Now that the Internet is cheap free and everywhere it's reasonable to ask if unfettered access and megacorps need some guardrails.
TikTok is not being "banned" by this bill. It's being prohibited from being owned by a "foreign adversary" (a defined term in US Code), with the threat of being banned from app stores and hosting providers if not divested.
One could hope that this is a brick in the path towards a solid, comprehensive privacy law at the national level. Especially given bipartisan criticism of "home grown" spying platforms such as Facebook and Google, it certainly doesn't seem impossible (just unlikely).
Privacy is not an engaging issue. It isn't controversial to most people.
The problem is that our first-past-the-post voting system naturally prioritizes engagement over everything else. That's why our elections are always about controversy, and never about progress.
A Chinese company isn't bound by US laws, so this is a necessary precursor to that.
Edit: I stand corrected, they are bound by our laws, but it's orders of magnitude easier to enforce those laws on a company based in the US than a company based in China.
Normally how this works is that national laws dictate what an app can do when operating in the nation's territory, and it's then up to the app owner to decide whether they want to do business in that nation's territory or not.
This is how EU rules apply to US tech companies. US rules for Chinese tech companies is no different in principle.
IMO however the problem isn't privacy, it's being able to stick a thumb on the algorithmic feed and control the information consumption of a slice of society. And TikTok isn't the only problem, it's broadly applicable across consumer tech.
Theoretically, yes. But the US isn't a police state where their activities would be constantly monitored in great detail for compliance. There's a lot they could do under the radar, and a lot of groundwork they could lay for some future inappropriate action.
When Biden passes this bill (which he said he would), I can only assume Dems will lose a large part of the younger voting demographic. If jot now, then 4 years from now. Because no chance in hell is China selling this thing, and Trump is already talking about how much he loves TikTok now.
Agreed it's crazy, but it's a good political move. Everyone agrees we should ban it, but no one wants the blame because you'll have a huge amount of teenagers and young adults who will blindly hate you for it. So if you're the one who isn't in charge of the hard-but-good decision (or in Trump's case, if you don't particularly give much of a shit about it anyway) it's easy to just pick the most politically advantageous side.
Domestically, maybe, and only in the short term. Internationally, not at all. It makes America look very weak and hypocritical, at a time when America can ill afford to look even worse.
> Everyone agrees we should ban it.
No, they don't. The media and political classes agree. That's not the same thing.
In reality less than half agree, last I checked [0].
> you'll have a huge amount of teenagers and young adults who will blindly hate you for it.
Blindly? Young people already hate Biden, and it's not because of TikTok. It's the two-faced support of mass murder, the economy, the inequality, the lies, the inflation, the oil drilling, the union attacks, the failure to deliver on campaign promises, etc. [1]
Blaming TikTok for that is just an easy wedge. There's nothing smart about it; it's cynical, divisive, and extremely stupid in the long term.
Don't know if they ever agreed to sell. IIRC they did partner with Oracle to host their infrastructure, as a way of showing that they were trying to allay US concerns.
> Because no chance in hell is China selling this thing, and Trump is already talking about how much he loves TikTok now.
Which is insane because in 2020, Trump was the one trying to ban tiktok and Biden was defending it. Now the script flipped? In the meantime, all they've done in the past 5 years is give tiktok free advertisement.
If this goes all the way to the White House and is signed by Biden, I think it could completely derail his chances of getting re-elected. Trump has come out against this bill (for insane and corrupt reasons) but would definately seize the moment and capitalize on it. They are giving the Trump campaign a huge amount of ammunition here.
americans have beamed their culture to the rest of the world through all sorts of means. the moral debauchery and propensity to crime (hi hiphop) introduced by american entertainment in several regions of the world aren’t spoken about enough. someone allows the rest of the world to beam new/foreign type of poison into your own territory and now what? we can’t have this here? imbecilic cowards.
I thought this was DOA once Trump came out against it (after speaking with major donor Jeff Yass). Wondering who will end up being candidate buyers - Microsoft? Google?
Regardless of what I think of this bill - the chinese accusation is some usual whataboutism: "resorting to hegemonic moves when one could not succeed in fair competition."
Lol, the US finally showing its true colors. It's a freemarket until our companies start to lose - then suddenly you gotta think of the children, national security, the brainwashed masses and the evil communists.
At this point they're basically using the same arguments the Chinese use to ban Western apps.
Bunch of sore losers. We're losing all moral authority over being a beacon of capitalism. The Chinese made a better app for funny videos and showing people dancing - this has made a lot of people very upset
>Lol, the US finally showing its true colors. It's a freemarket until our companies start to lose
If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place.
Anything with the potential to disrupt internal and external American/Western propaganda is a threat.
---
[1]
> With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.
> Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 the first of six such Guantánamo trips which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.
> The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.
> The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.
---
[2]
> Likewise, a charge that Russia had turned to China for potential military help lacked hard evidence, a European official and two U.S. officials said.
> The U.S. officials said there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia. The Biden administration put that out as a warning to China not to do so, they said.
It's only a little white lie here and there, just trust us bro!
---
[3]
> Cable television channel Al Jazeera claimed 600 civilians had been killed and filled its broadcasts with images of dead children at the Fallujah hospital and other locations within the city. Al Jazeera’s broadcasts so stung U.S. national leaders that they considered withdrawing all U.S. forces—including CENTCOM’s forward headquarters—from Qatar if its government did not do more to “bring Al Jazeera under control.”
> With little time to prepare for the mission, MNF-W had not embedded Western journalists with I MEF forces, so that the critical ground of information operations was effectively ceded to an insurgency that could distribute a one-sided message. Worse, the haste with which the operation was executed precluded the opportunity to evacuate the city of civilians properly, essentially ensuring that the insurgency had the opportunity to exploit footage of civilian casualties.
Al Jazeera "claimed," but whoops it was also true, and we can't stand the exposure.
Is there any evidence it's been used for propaganda? I don't use TikTok a lot, but it seems very non-political (maybe it's my filter bubble). The real cesspool of hatred and madness is Facebook - but of course Congress doesn't care too much about that.
As far as I remember from the previous elections the Russian bots were operating on US based platforms
Here is a study which compares the prevalence of topics on Instagram with the prevalence of topics on TikTok, and shows that topics which are sensitive to the CCP (Tibet, Hong Kong) occur 5-10x less frequently than comparable topics which are not sensitive to the CCP
What a strange study... They seem to just count the number of videos on certain hashtags. The huge discrepancy would require a very large fraction (but not all) of videos under certain hashtags to be banned/removed entirely. That would be immediately obvious when just uploading videos under that hashtags (which they don't do)
They simply dismiss the alternate explanation .. that it's a demographic difference or a time difference. Uygher stuff was a hot topic before Tiktok became popular. And people that are super pumped about that issue and are posting about Chinese political issues probably are I'm guessing not the kind of people to be using Tiktok. Those are just wild guesses.. but there are a lot of ways to explain the difference observed here.
In any case.. just mildly muting topics is pretty benign.. I was expecting promoting conspiracy theories or bots posting AI generated videos. The stuff the Russians (and I think Chinese as well?) botfarms do on Facebook is way crazier
The 60 minutes episode last year (?) insinuated that the CCP's main goal is social disorder eg they heavily restrict the Chinese version for kids to be education oriented where the American version is basically all ages softcore porn and ragebait.
> American version is basically all ages softcore porn and ragebait.
My own experience, as well as my partner's, disputes this. My content is generally creators in the neurodivergant, LGTBQIA+, power generation for Alaska towns, wildlife rescues, D&D, cosplay, and news.
Only the last can occasionally contain ragebait, but it's generally not. Most of the things that make me angry are those like Nex Benedict's death, the death toll in Gaza strip, women being treated poorly by doctors, etc. Actual issues brought up in real time, not manufactured outrage.
My partner's content is generally "customer states", cats, dogs, ferrets, and couples sharing the amusing parts of their lives.
A data sample of only two, to be sure, but the absence of softcore porn and ragebait entirely makes 60 minutes' claims suspect.
As someone who has actually used douyin (about one or two years ago) I can say for certain that that isn't true in the general case. Perhaps the rules are a bit stricter but I saw absolutely zero educational content at all in any form. I did see some military videos which seemed like propaganda as they showed up randomly but its hard to say if those only showed up because I watched the first one to its end for example. The only possibility is that they only enable the education mode if you are actually located in China or if you sign in as a child or something. But it didn't seem to be the default experience from what I saw first hand. It shows you want you want to see.
Id like to see the Uighar camps but sure as heck known that isn't happening. /s
It's hard for me to imagine a lot isn't filtered out. There is a reason they have a separate app. It's likely one is heavily filtered and the other is their propaganda tool but I'd like to see more evidence to indicate that but it's a hard thing to track given they could be just feeding kids the worst things for them or favorable views to their party and we wouldn't even know.
The YouTube and Facebook short-video recommendations I got when those features launched were mostly young women wearing very little and doing something that I'm guessing is not the main point of the video. YouTube knows I like music, so it gave me women playing violin in tiny skirts, though I think this stopped happening at some point.
I didn't even watch the videos, they insisted on putting them on the home page despite me giving 0 engagement. I finally adblocked the element.
In other words they have content restrictions in their country as with TV and other media, while the international version is more similar to its competition in Instagram?
This is 100% anecdotal and lacks any kind of research, but... I heard it was a more subtle propaganda. The American feeds could have messages about how bad the economy is, how futile working is in a corrupt system, how depressed and traumatized your peers are.
On the opposite side you would fill it with messages about the virtues of hard work, stories of success and happiness, etc.
That seems possible, but that might just have to do with the state of the culture before TikTok anyways. Maybe the doom and gloom among young people in North America is because of other factors and content relating to it just happens to get more popular. China might have a more positive population right now, that makes and supports more positive content.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by “propaganda”. Personally I think it can be convincingly argued that any message transmitted to you from a State is propaganda
(Note: that means that I don’t believe that all propaganda is inherently evil, sometimes your interests align with a State. For example governments paying for advertising to discourage smoking is a great thing, IMO!)
I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have and my understanding is that allegiance to the State (eg, the State’s sole stewards the CCP) is a big part of life there. I’ve even been told that staying in the good graces of the State’s only official political party is important if you want to do things like buy property or start a business.
TikTok is administrated by humans, many of whom live in China.
Those humans are, I assume, ambitious and want to do well for themselves and therefore likely want to appease the State.
Therefore, when I read articles about how the administrators of TikTok can effectively decide what goes viral it makes me fear what I’ve begun calling ‘incidental’ propaganda.
Probably those China-based administrations at TikTok don’t want to actively harm American society, but it’s certainly true that America and China have different interests in the world. I assume that any administrators in China will never choose to make something go viral if it is critical of the Chinese State or its interests.
You can see how that might skew things for those that only get their news from TikTok, right?
(This is my understanding and thinking on things right now given the information I have. I gladly welcome any new information if someone reads this and disagrees. But please be kind :))
I am a Chinese that has been living in the West for a few years.
> I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have
IMO, these opinions are a bit biased.
1) those are probably the people who chose to stay in the West;
2) Chinese people (incl. me) sometimes talk extravagantly about life in a "communist country", since to some degree it pleases the Western audience and adds some fun to the talk.
Maybe a CCP member has to show their allegiance from time to time, but I am not and I can not recall I was asked to do so in any form. Probably asked to sing the national anthem every morning when I was in the school? And despite the censorship, people, especially young netizens, invent all kinds of altered words mocking domestic politics, often to my surprise how much they are aware of, given that I already live in the West out of the bubble, that people usually think Chinese internet is.
Taking a particular different mindset as unconscious propaganda and thinking it's harmful seems to support the Chinese internet firewall project and the opinion that people are not able to make "correct" opinions on their own.
Having lived there for several years I didn't find the state some ever-present aspect of life - but it doesn't seem particularly relevant
Your line of reasoning seems fine, but it basically applies to any "other". If some European decides what goes viral, he is going to subject poor stupid american viewers to their nefarious European biases - and those biases may harm our society!
Furthermore the biases of US based company executives may harm our society as well. I'll grant you that they may be less inclined, but gosh, rage bait and selling sweets to children does make them a whole lot of money.
So the logic isn't wrong, but it seems to be applied selectively in cases that just happen to benefit large American tech companies - who are incapable of providing US consumers a product that's nearly as good as Tiktok
Maybe biases in algorithms need to addressed.. But that should be done in a thoughtful unbiased holistic that applied equally to everyone - instead of this embarrassing kneejerk "the commies are taking over" kind of way
I’ll certainly agree that the ‘red scare’ vibe to this bill makes me uncomfortable — even if I agree with the action overall.
I certainly am biased towards companies that operate in a way that I’m familiar with. In the companies I’ve worked in delivering value to shareholders trumps all else at the end of the day. (I don’t love it but it’s predictable)
As you allude to that causes some quite nefarious behavior, but it’s predictable to me for the most part.
To me, this is in contrast with what I see happening in the Chinese market. Again, this is colored by my experience. From the outside looking in it appears that companies based in China bend much further to appease their government than in the markets I’ve worked in (US, UK and Japan) and that makes me less inclined to trust them.
I remember seeing a study that compared the content TikTok served to children in China vs other countries. I would have to look and find it again.
But basically, Chinese children got lots of science, engineering, and other educational content, while other countries got your run of the mill generic time-wasting nothingburger nonsense kind of content.
Check out the difference between CNN International and CNN US. One is a proper news channel covering US and Intl affairs and competing for influence with BBC, NHK, France 24 and DW.
The other is a editorial banter from talking heads discussing 2 political parties like they're competing with ESPN.
Well yeah I don't rely on any major media outlets to stay informed. At least various perspectives are allowed to exist in America as opposed to bringing "black-vanned" in China
non-political is political. Do you imagine that there aren't people making political TikToks? Or that non-political themes don't affect politics? Or that bubble control doesn't affect politics?
Is that what I'm doing? I thought I was making an Orwell reference to imply that a peculiar kind of very public gaslighting he warned about is not confined to the slogans of 1984's Party.
catskul2's comment was very ambiguous, but a charitable interpretation of the first part
> non-political is political. Do you imagine that there aren't people making political TikToks?
is that you are indeed in a filter bubble of non-political content which exists alongside political content. One example of political content on TikTok within the larger Israel-Hamas war topic was the brief trend of commenting on Osama bin Laden's manifesto called "Letter to America" [1]. If you were (not saying that you are) knowingly ignoring the existence of political content on a specific topic on TikTok, then you would be making an inherently political decision (which does not mean that you should change your decision).
It's confusing, but I think I can explain. If you are able to enjoy your life and not worry about something for any period of time, you are actually making a political statement that everyone else is wrong and you think they deserve to die. Every problem in the world must be your problem too, forever and always.
Gosh, no politics in my relaxing doom-scrolling video app. Is it some nefarious plot to pacify the evil capitalists.. or wait... maybe they just know what consumers want?
Another way to look at it is the fact that China does not let American social media in its market. Why should America give China access to it's markets when that's not reciprocated?
No, we shouldn't. Be we also shouldn't be schmucks that give market access that isn't reciprocated. Most free trade agreements work on reciprocity. We agree not to put tariffs on country X's cars because they agree not to put tariffs on ours. A ban is essentially an infinite tariff. If that's how a foreign country is going to treat American companies, why not respond in kind?
Because it goes against one of our purported values. I'd hope that this action had some inherent merit (I'm not claiming it doesn't), and it's not just retaliation.
Are we protecting America's trade interests with this bill? I don't think so...
What purported value is it going against? Allowing market access to countries that don't reciprocate is not one of our values. Nor is it one of China's. Or most countries, for that matter. When other countries erect tariffs, we usually respond on kind. And when we raise tariffs other countries - including close friends like Canada - they respond with their own tariffs against American imports too.
You've got it backwards: reciprocal trade agreements are the norm not just in US politics but across the world.
We're banning the company not the ability to express. They can upload the exact same videos to YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, and who knows how many alternatives.
ByteDance is a Chinese corporation. The US federal government does not govern it and has no responsibility to allow a Chinese corporation to express itself in the US by publishing propaganda.
This is the foundation of reciprocal trade agreements:
We don't put tariffs on your cars if you don't put tariffs on ours. We don't ban your social media companies if you don't ban ours.
Americans have more than one value at a time. Americans also claim to value fairness, and they conduct trade with all kinds of people. If some of those people fail to conduct trade fairly, Americans do not need to oblige those failures.
> all 160 million US TikTok users install a PWA of TikTok and everything is fine
I’m not saying the bill is performative. The app-store and hosting ban will be effective. The point is nothing will be censored. Distribution will have been curtailed.
TikTok is Douyin with a different coat of paint. They're near identical apps run by the same company, ByteDance. It's not banned in China, it just has a different name.
Sure, by virtue of China's stricter regulation of social media. But for all intents and purposes, Douyin is TikTok in China. Or rather TikTok is Douyin in the rest of the world outside of China.
Douyin is TikTok in China. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that TikTok is the export version of Douyin.
Reasons for having two apps are rife with speculation. One is that censorship in Douyin is more prevalent than on the export version (that one is pretty obvious). There's also speculation that the export version of Douyin has an algorithm tuned to be more addictive.
But let's be clear, by ByteDance's own statements the two apps have shared management and technology.
That's false, American social media simply refused to follow Chinese law. (I believe facebook specifically refused to remove accounts belonging to ETIM/TIP, an organisation recognised by the UN, EU and at the time the USA as a terrorist group)
Zuckerberg tried damn hard to get his crap into China, he even asked the Chinese president Xi in person to name his unborn baby. He became quite "unfriendly" to China/CCP after all those efforts got him nothing in return.
Incorrect, Facebook is flat out banned in China no matter whether they comply with CCP censorship. I'm very interested in sources to substantiate the claim that Facebook is refusing to ban groups that even the US designates as terrorists.
One, this article was published years after Facebook was blocked in China so it can't be the cause of the block. Also, China daily is a propaganda outlet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Daily
It's literally run by the "Central Propaganda Department".
It's not even just about propaganda. Watch Tik Tok videos in China and it's all young people helping the elderly, learning job skills, and doing other socially virtuous things. Watch Tik Tok videos outside of China and it's all videos of kids stealing cars, eating Tide pods, and pranking people in Home Depot.
TikTok shows you what you want to see. I see a lot of musical covers, dumb jokes about the Dune films, standup comedy clips. I don't know what first ~20 videos a brand new account with no history sees but this caricature of TikTok (Tide Pods? really?) is pretty outdated.
But if Western people are generally not dumb, are patriotic and think rationally, they won't believe foreign propaganda, and so there is no need to ban TikTok, right?
> 1. you don't want govt to act for children because "parents"
> 2. you don't want govt to act for adults because they are "rational".
Yes. This is absolutely correct from my perspective. Parents have agency over their children. They are there to guide or, if necessary, inact tyrannical laws.
Adults have agency. Nobody is a victim of TikTok involuntarily. Adults are making a choice to use it or allow their children to use it.
From what exactly is the government saving US citizens by banning TikTok from the app store, or more generally? And how can we be sure that this banning power won't expand over time?
> But I contest that people are freely and knowingly giving that data to the CCP
I contest otherwise. Even if that is the case, how does that prevent the govt from acting correctly or morally?
People would love to pay no taxes, should the govt then tax no one? What kind of logic is that?
> The US government isn't saving their citizens from the CCP. They just don't want the CCP to have the data that Americans want to give them.
Strawman argument. Once again it is not just data! It is an oppressive foreign adversary that can push harmful propaganda. And has done so as pointed above!
> Regarding propaganda, it's obvious that it's content Americans want. They would leave the platform if they didn't.
Not all Americans. Americans want to ban TikTok. Thats who democracy works. The house has proportional representation.
> it's obvious that it's content Americans want
Nope, it is not obvious at all. In fact, the other way is more obvious given the majority (352-65-1) with which this passed in the House.
It is obvious Americans want TikTok banned or divested from China.
(You may be unfamiliar with democracy and how it works, if so, my apologies.)
> I contest otherwise. Even if that is the case, how does that prevent the govt from acting correctly or morally?
The govt already acts profoundly immorally. Social security is unconstitutional! My view of the government is that it exists to enrich itself, regardless of morals. While this legislation is narrowly worded, which I appreciate, it still goes so far as to prohibit a voluntary transaction. To me that is immoral.
> Not all Americans. Americans want to ban TikTok.
The Americans that want to ban TikTok aren't trying to ban it because they don't like the content. If that was the case, they could simply not use it. Instead they want to ban it because they don't like others using it, and that is categorically different.
> Democracy
I do understood how democracy works, especially federalism. This does fall under the purview of the commerce clause as it has often been interpreted by the Supreme Court, so I fully expect it to withstand legal challenges. I just think it's bad policy and hypothesize the precedent is what's needed to push for more and more.
Thank you for your response. We disagree, and that's okay.
I think it's both. You don't think it's possible TikTok usage data is being accumulated for prominent Americans and/or their children for the purpose of intelligence gathering? I'd actually be surprised if it wasn't happening.
Can you really not imagine how a nation state could get valuable intelligence by having an intimate knowledge of how a large portion of another nation states population is thinking?
It's an election year. Intelligence can include things like your political affiliation and level of engagement, and can be (ab)used by targeting specific areas/demographics with supportive/decisive content. Think Theil's Palantir, but controlled by a foreign government.
Quite a lot! There are articles ad infinitum about how specifically tailored the TikTok algorithm is for many users.
I certainly think that knowing very specifically what a substantial portion of a county/market’s population is interested in qualifies as intelligence.
How effectively you make that information actionable is up to the creativity of your intelligence/advertising apparatus.
Name, age, location, politics, device, amount of time spent, interests, etc.
The easiest actionable thing would be propoganda of some sort, but there's a chance of a lot of smart people working on something that I can't imagine. I'm not saying this happening, but looking at Youtube and Meta, it's not hard to imagine.
I think forcing a sale of TikTok is fine -- after all China effectively does the same thing for all US companies in China.
But H.R. 7521 gives power to handle more than TikTok. (g)(3)(B) [1] certainly looks to me like it can be used by any President to pressure or outright censor many foreign sites and apps.
You know they can both be true simultaneously, right?
It’s a perfectly well understood fact that our nations use businesses, and literally every other avenue possible to spy on and propagandize each other’s populations
As a result, each nation has to counter that it does so mostly privately, but sometimes very publicly.
This is all part of the totally broken, absolutely run by children, international relations system.
It’s exceptionally mundane and exceptionally bad for all citizens as a result. However it’s great for business. So you’re not going to see a change until citizens demand different international economic, political, communications and relations structure that isn’t based on competition.
US national security adversaries are platform neutral. If TikTok is banned, they'll just put more resources into the things that aren't banned. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, who by all accounts spouts Russian propaganda daily, and changed the algorithm to where it makes up a solid 50% of my "For You"...and I have yet to see many, if any, Republicans or Democrats saying we should ban it, or even yank Elon's security clearance, or sever his government contracts. I don't see how you can have it both ways.
TikTok shouldn't be banned, and if it is, it could eventually open the door for US owned companies without "direct" ties to also be forced "divest." Some of Facebook and Twitter's biggest investors are not exactly US allies. To me, it's a slippery slope. The "tit for tat" argument also falls flat to me, the US shouldn't try to mimic being China. China's attempts to wall itself off from the world have hurt it more than helped it.
If we really wanted to address this, we'd just have legislation on personal data in general, not this company targeting nonsense; but we'll never do that because Facebook/Twitter/Google/Microsoft/etc all have their hands lining the pockets of plenty of lobbyists in DC. They just maybe don't realize, or care, at the moment that eventually their own allegiances will be called into question.
> TikTok is a propaganda threat controlled by a non-friendly state to the US
Yes. Would you have been offended when during the Revolutionary War we restricted British propaganda? German and Nazi propaganda in the World Wars? Soviet propaganda in the Cold War?
Let’s reverse the roles. How thrilled would we be if we could have had a propaganda arm active and accepted in Nazi Germany or the CCCP? If we had person-by-person profiles of interests and affiliations for every person in Russia or Iran?
I wouldn't be offended but we didn't really do any of that, at least not as a systematic government effort. We required registration of foreign agents which the government used as a basis to stop Nazi propaganda newspapers when they didn't register. But they had the option to register. Sputnik radio is registered and broadcasting today in the US. The strict interpretation of the Espionage Act that Wilson et al wanted was later overturned.
We absolutely restricted distribution of state-controlled news.
We didn’t block it. Same as, even if ByteDance refuses to divest, this bill wouldn’t block TikTok from being accessed on the web. It’s just taking it out of American app stores and off American hosting services.
If nobody wants to kill TikTok, then what is the point of removing it from the app store?
Has anyone considered that the content pushed on TikTok is actually the content Americans want? Perhaps the reason TikTok is super popular is precisely because of their tailored content.
Besides if your country is strong enough you should be able to shrug it off. France recently put the right to abortion in the Constitution despite American media.
You've been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately. Can you please not? I recognize that you're representing a minority point of view and I know how frustrating that can be (believe me, I know). But if you keep breaking the site guidelines, we can't suspend moderation because of that.
Also, it's not in your interest to do this because it makes your comments less persuasive and indeed gives people an easy reason to dismiss them. So if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Also, in case it's helpful, here is a list of moderation posts I made for a user who was in a similar position a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. It's old(ish) now but the principles are all still the same.
explain to me how this isn't all xenophobic ? If any of this was real or legit all users would be clamoring for data privacy laws, not a forced sale of some fake boogey man bs.
If you're a mod then please why are you allowing for this. Half this xenophobic speach and anti chinese rhetoric is worse than calling it out.
(I'm a mod, yes.) I'm not defending anyone else's bad comments. I'm saying we need you to follow the rules, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are. The same goes for everyone.
I've put in countless hours, over the years, trying to do just what you're demanding here. That's why I gave you that last link to look at. We've learned the hard way that there are limits to what moderators can do about this, unfortunately—and when you post comments that are egregiously breaking the site guidelines, you make this problem harder.
Just to be clear, I don't want you to stop posting! I'm saying we need you to make your substantive points thoughtfully, in keeping with the HN guidelines. I realize how hard that is when feeling the pressure of being outnumbered by an ignorant majority. But if you post things like "you sound as ridiculous as the politicians", "jfc the absolute garbage rhetoric", and so on, you make it impossible for the mods to do much about the comments on the other side—people will simply point to your posts and say "but it's ok for them to break the rules?"
We cut people slack for being under the pressure of holding a minority view in an argument, but there's a limit to how far we can take that, and your comments are unfortunately beyond that limit. That's why I responded to you, in the hope of persuading you to understand this dynamic. I have a lot of sympathy for your position—not because I agree or disagree about the underlying topic, but because I know what it feels like to be outnumbered on the internet.
What's your point? China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns? "The supreme art of war is to defeat the enemy without fighting", e.g. to undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions, to gain the ability to compromise our critical infrastructure, and to influence our politics. All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.
> Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?
Because we are not China and our institutions are built on presumption of freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. If we start emulating China, we will become China. Our institutions are supposed to be robust enough to handle local and foreign propaganda and if they are not, then censorship is certainly not a solution that would be compatible with the liberal democratic values that we are supposed to hold.
US Citizens still have the same freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. Those rights don't extend to foreign adversaries. If you want to relay Chinese or Russian or Ukrainian or Israeli or Hamas propaganda, you are completely free to do it, without censorship. Limiting the ability of any of those countries to project it within the US is reasonable stance.
You're limiting the information US Citizens can get from the outside world - therefore you are limiting their freedom of thought and access to information.
I think it's a dangerous road to go down, the US is already extremely inwards facing and suffers from not knowing much about the outside world. I've had hundreds of US Citizens talk to me face to face who don't know what language we speak in Australia, don't know we use different money, not know the seasons are backwards, not know it's a 15 hour flight, not know we don't have a president, etc. etc. (this list is endless). US Citizens are not very well educated about how things work in other countries, clearly to their own detriment.
Just yesterday I was talking to a friend in the US saying my friend has 18 months fully paid maternity leave and he almost fell over. His wife got 10 weeks.
Many countries do things better than the US, and it's dangerous to limit US Citizens learning about that, else they will have no notion things can be (and are) better elsewhere, and should be improved.
Free trade generally does not mean you have to let foreign companies operating in your country do things that domestic companies are not allowed to do.
Most of those sites are not in China not because China says that they cannot operate there but rather because China say they would have to obey the same rules Chines companies do. That generally involves things like storing data on Chinese citizens only on servers in China, censoring things the government wants censored, and giving the government easy access to information including identifying information to unmask anonymous posters.
This is post hoc nonsense. China blocked US tech companies so that they could copy what the US companies do without any threat of superior competition.
The point is that they get to access the Western market with their dancing video app, but Westerners aren't allowed to access their market with the apps they make. That gives those Chinese companies an unfair advantage in potential market reach.
A simplistic economic model that overlooks hundreds of important factors may provide a basic Econ 101 understanding but it does not reflect how the world truly operates and proves nothing.
Sure it's a simple model. But the burden of proof lies with the person claiming that free trade needs to be bilateral. That's not some inherent property of it, or something immediately obvious. A basic look at it past "It's not faaiiiiiir" actually shows quite the opposite
>> China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?
Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
>> undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions
It seems like Americans did a pretty good job of this themselves at the last election cycle. A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result. How much worse can TikTok make things?
>> Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
The paradox of tolerance.
>> A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result.
2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions, so yeah, prohibiting foreign-owned social media networks in advance of the upcoming election is definitely a step in the right direction.
>> 2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions
Why is nothing being done about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Truth Social, etc. etc? There are more users on Facebook alone.
The point is that the West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets. Going beyond, it claimed that (in the post Reagan/Thatcher era) that free markets are a prerequisite for being a rich country. Yet, the moment free markets became inconvenient, the west dropped that narrative and went full protectionist. As a result, China gets a propaganda victory in the eyes of non-Western nations.
All things considered, it's a minor problem for the US/West. Just looking like hypocrites. Compared to, say, the 2003 Iraq war it's a nothingburger.
West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets
China is not free, not a democracy, and not a free market, so there no hypocrisy. What was crazy was supporting the one sided relationship where we export our industry and production capacity to China while they block and steal from our businesses.
I'd support TikTok in the US if China gets rid of their firewall.
This is the paradox of tolerance [1]. It’s a worn discussion and far from hypocritical.
In any case, I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people and allies. More pointedly when the other side is a dictatorship.
> the exact argument e.g. Turkey used to ban Wikipedia/Youtube/Twitter etc.
Which one(s)? (Genuinely curious.)
Also, was it a ban or divestment requirement? What wins me over on this bill is it isn’t a ban. It isn’t even a requirement to be controlled by an American. ByteDance could sell TikTok to a Korean or Hugarian or Middle Eastern country—even Turkey—and be in compliance with the law.
> I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people
Turkey's constitution also guarantees free speech etc. However, there are also laws that say you cannot insult people's religious sensibilities or serve sexually explicit content. The motivation for these laws is that this type of content degrades the moral fabric of society.
Politicians whipped up moral panics and judges (who were in many cases appointed by those very same politicians) issued rulings requiring these platforms to remove the offending content. The platforms refused, and were banned. When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country".
> When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country"
When the facts change our opinions should, too. I used to be a free-trade absolutist. It’s become clear that doesn’t work.
I remain a strong free-speech advocate. Which is why I was against Trump’s proposed TikTok ban. This, however, is different. There is an out in divestment—to an American or non-American. And even if ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok.com won’t be blocked. Moreover, the entire process is subject to judicial oversight. If ByteDance’s Constitutional rights are being abrogated, they have a forum in which to find relief.
Turkey’s tale is cautionary. We should be mindful when we find we were previously wrong. But I think this is different. Free trade (in its absolute sense) isn’t a core American value. Free speech is. The First Amendment protects ByteDance’s speech. It does not guarantee its distribution.
> All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.
Those campaigns mostly took part on platforms owned and operated by US companies.
Should the Iranians and the Chinese think in the same manner? Isn't this largely a question of how much you trust the official narrative of the local elites?
I don't know the dots you're trying to connect here, but there's little monetary support from Congress for Israel nowadays. Although, in my opinion, that's more to do with partisan politics than anything.
There is a reason this is one of the things that's passing with bipartisan support. Both parties are excusing, and are on the side of Israel and they know that public opinion turning against Israel will cause them future problems.
Reality is, the sudden push for a TikTok ban after it was stalled for more than a year is Palestine.
The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Vox claim censorship. Is there something more credible, maybe AIPAC themselves publicly backing the TikTok ban, or some strong correlation between AIPAC contributions and House votes on the bill?
What's the link supposed to be? Are people sharing videos about it/against Israel? (I don't use it, thought it was mostly silly dancing/reactions/pranks/etc.)
Respect is everything, the mob, eh party wants you to disparage about your own affairs and argue triballistic. The ideal is a civil war within borders of all oppossition.
Silo all the dictatorships from the internet, thats the only way to contain the poison. Liberalism has failed
First of all that was one post by one rando on the platform that didn't really take off that much compared to all the other trending posts on tiktok at the time. The media picked it up, completely took it out of context and from there it blew up due to the Streisand effect.
So much garbage on all the western news channels that it has buried the original content(probably on purpose).
The New York Times was used by a nation state to convince a meaningful portion of American voters that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The resulting war cost the US taxpayers trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, not to mention the cost to Iraqi civilians.
Seems like that's a far more meaningful impact than whatever is happening on TikTok.
While he wasn't "right", he was also a more complex character than the cardboard cutout villain that the media presented. I believe a lot of people see through the one-sided reporting and begin to mistrust mainstream media ("what else are they lying about"). Not everyone needs their news dumbed down to grade 4 level.
Anything other than open propaganda seems to be offensive to the government. I've got no clue what they're saying on TikTok about him, but kids understanding that there's some nuance and understandable motivation behind a guy like bin Laden seems like... not something to be terribly alarmed about? Of course, goes without saying, bad dude. However, there's a big difference between cartoon character who "hates freedom" and "guy who is pissed off about (among other things) the effect of US foreign policy on his country." One breeds "turn 'em to glass" sentiments, another breeds "what IS our foreign policy?"
I mean bin laden wasn't wrong that the US is responsible for much suffering in the middle east and elsewhere due to decades of meddling from funding extremists, to facilitating coups in the name of big business.
But he was wrong on many other things since he wanted basically all-out islamic war on the US akin to the fetish evalgenicals have for all-out christian war for end times in israel.
Lol.
Welcome to the world, it's fucking shit and I can't wait for a meteor to snuff us out.
The one outlet you called out by name is already a publicly traded company, not one that is controlled by a foreign country. 63% of it is owned by institutional investors (Vanguard, Blackrock, etc).
What evidence has Congress presented that Tiktok is a National Security threat?
Didn't Congress try to shut down Tiktok before but it failed?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/31/us-tiktok...
From the article:
"But none of these bills ever made it to a vote, and many have stalled entirely as lawmakers turned their attention to the boom in artificial intelligence.
...In a preliminary injunction blocking the ban [Referring to state of Montan's ban on Tiktok], US district judge Donald Molloy said the law “oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users”."
But things started to change after the Gaza War happened and the body count of Palestinians began to rise; young people who watch videos on Tiktok began to call for a cease-fire etc, etc. Congress members became re-enthused about the ban.
I think a lot of the HN crowd are beyond the target age for a lot of tiktok trends, and don't realize the extent of sociopathic behavior being enabled on tiktok. Even ignoring overtly political trends, the social contract is being shredded for money and clout.
Tiktok is not just another social media platform. It is a mass digital propaganda machine controlled by a foreign government.
People who make statements like this sound just like "concerned parents" talking about D&D and rock and roll music. 30-40 years ago. Wildly out of touch. Seriously, go take a look at what others are actually sharing from TikTok. It's none of this Chinese propaganda nonsense people are ranting about. Here's a few examples of videos ruining the youth of today!
* https://v.redd.it/8yktpgwzl4oc1 - Iron Maidens
* https://v.redd.it/n0p299qt1znc1 - If Korn wrote "1000 Miles"
* https://v.redd.it/dqpj11wk03oc1 - Ok, this is pretty genius, if you can't use chopsticks
* https://v.redd.it/ye820pezj5oc1 - On Confidence
* https://v.redd.it/lj1mwh0080oc1 - Trans man handles hateful comment in a respectable way
* https://v.redd.it/2vkx2sh624oc1 - Listen to your grandma.
All extremely typical of what I've seen on TikTok and the kinds of things my kids will send to me on occasion.
Randomly sexually harassing strangers for clout, what could go wrong.
This shit enabling sociopathic behavior happens 9 out of 10 times on tiktok and not other social media platforms.
I'm out of touch? You're literally old enough to have children who are the primary demographic of tiktok,your kids are only sharing you the cutesy videos. You have no clue, newsflash you millennials aren't hip anymore. Stop projecting.
It's hilarious that you think youtube pranks started and are over-represented on TikTok. Got any more pearls to clutch? You're just reinforcing how out of touch you are.
You don't even know what false equivalence means apparently. Yeah, the obnoxious prank videos far pre-date TikTok. See what I mean about you having no idea what you're talking about and just clutching pearls like "concerned" morons ranting about how D&D is ruining the fabric of society? You're literally bringing as much evidence and credibility as them. Really sad how "hackers" are so quick to censor things they can't comprehend. It seems "hackernews" is closer to "karennews" than anything else these days. "Why won't anyone think of the children!?"
I'm really hoping that the Senate acts responsibly and pushes this no-nonsense bill through. I think it's a step in the right direction for cutting off access to information about USA citizens by foreign advesaries. This is an important step in bringing it to the forefront of Americans minds how important privacy is. Hopefully such a shift will next lead to concern against Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. who are also running a vast information network to monetize the personal lives of Americans for anyone with enough $$. NA-GPDR here we come. I would love nothing more than to see the bankruptcy of companies like LexisNexis and Verisk.
Yes, this is a bullshit distraction issue. Our congresspeople should be focused on other things, e.g., stopping the genocide of Palestinians, protecting LGBTQ/trans rights, reducing the cost of living for average americans.
Ridiculous bill. Maniacs are running everything these days only based on wild populism. Freedoms are over in America. Time to move to Saudi or some shit.
I'm seeing a lot of "censorship is bad" propaganda coming from the shills. This resonates with liberal minded people who are against censorship.
Now, that's not to say that most people here are shills or wrong for being against censorship. However they are unwittingly being coopted just as anti-racists were when China deflected any responsibility for a lab leak.
The way the US had dealt with issues like this is in the courts of law through an evidentiary process, not by political decree, which will get slammed down in the courts anyway.
Show that TikTok causes active harm compared to FB/Twitter, put that on the public record, and clear the obstacles for a bill to ban.
You're not wrong, but it's also true that China is exploiting our liberal, rule of law way of doing things in the USA.
As for a record of doing harm, mobile apps like douyin (China tiktok) have enabled a total police state in China. Say the wrong thing in a private conversation in an app, and the police will invite you to have tea.
Try being critical of China on tiktok and see how long it takes before you get banned. This isn't a hypothetical, it has already happened.
>The way the US had dealt with issues like this is in the courts of law
How would that work in the case of TikTok. If for example the US Department of Justice were to sue TikTok, what law or regulation would it allege TikTok to have violated?
>the US had dealt with issues like this
This suggests that there were law suits in the past. Who were the plaintiffs and the defendants? What law were the defendants alleged to be in violation of?
> If for example the US Department of Justice were to sue TikTok, what law or regulation would it allege TikTok to have violated?
That's exactly what DOJ would be tasked to do, build the case against them. Surely if the risks are so dire, they can find something to persuade a judge.
