It's more like, they don't want any place on the Internet that's a social network allowing uncensored exchange between Chinese people and the Western sphere of influence.
I'm really tired of arguments like this. The US (and West as a whole) are not a bunch of angels, of course. But the kind of censorship, state-mandated propaganda, and market control you see from China is not even remotely comparable to the situation in the West. Equating the two is at best uninformed, at worst disingenuous or actively malicious.
Not yet, but this is an obvious step in the same direction, "banning" a social media platform to prevent exposure to foreign ideas. It's difficult not to assume the motives are similar, a need to control political narratives and manufacture consent for American policy.
It's not about foreign ideas. It's about a foreign, arguably hostile, government having control over what gets amplified and what gets hidden. I don't think anyone would have an issue with an official CCP account posting CCP positions on social media platforms they don't control. Those things are very, very different!
Unless you're arguing the CCP is going to force TikTok's algorithm to amplify Chinese propaganda, the algorithm is probably going to work the way it does everywhere, by optimizing for engagement by showing content similar to what a user already prefers. I'm not aware of evidence of that, though, beyond the circumstantial evidence of people claiming American leftist activism must the result of CCP brainwashing through the platform.
While social media algorithms can (and does) lead to filter bubbles and radicalism by exposure to extremist content, that just makes TikTok no more or less dangerous than all other social media platforms in that regard, and that remains the case under American ownership. And those algorithms and that extremist content are more often than not protected by American free speech rights, as are the rights of platforms to police content as they wish (this includes the right to propagandize.)
Singling out TikTok because it's owned by China, and might do things it has every legal right to do in the US anyway, seems specious. Social media is already a hotbed of disinformation and propaganda, and TikTok's influence is a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter (which is going full Nazi and the moment) and Facebook and Google, with their deep ties to the American military and intellegence services.
> Unless you're arguing the CCP is going to force TikTok's algorithm to amplify Chinese propaganda
Yes, that's my concern. We don't know the algorithms and IMO the risk is too high, given China's other efforts at propaganda. At least Twitter added community notes, but that's somewhat secondary given the algorithms potentially controlled by a hostile government.
I don’t need TikTok for foreign ideas. I see them everywhere.
For example while I don’t buy them I have absolutely heard the Russian arguments for Ukraine. You can find complete texts of every Putin speech online, not to mention thinkers like Alexandr Dugin.
The Internet is absolutely boiling over with both pro and anti Israel arguments and propaganda too. You almost can’t even avoid it.
If the powers that be don’t want me seeing arguments against US policy they are doing an awful job.
The TikTok thing is about two things: trade unfairness and how it leverages addiction to push propaganda.
Both points are valid, but the latter applies just as well to all modern social media.
To add to this: owning the platform and controlling what gets amplified is very different than posting information on someone else's platform which also is different from posting the information and disclosing your affiliation. I'm pretty sure we could easily get a strong consensus that there is zero issue in an official CCP account posting official CCP positions on Twitter or Facebook.
Arguments to the effect that TikTok gives the Chinese government direct control over the minds of millions of Americans and that they plan to use it to corrupt and destroy America seem far more slippery and fallacious to me.
No one cared about any of this until recently. I remember when the consensus on HN was that TikTok was a quirky platform that reminded people of the authenticity and creativity of the old web. Now all of a sudden people are talking about TikTok with the dreadful hyperbole they might use for nuclear bombs or chemical weapons.
My instinct is to assume I'm being manipulated, and not by the red menace everyone tells me to fear.
No one cared about it until TikTok got really popular around 2018, then it’s been in out of the news ever since. I doubt also TikTok is manipulating anyone, simply because the content is mostly apolitical and simply guys or girls teasing or doing some trend dance. But if America’s concerns are moot, Chinese concerns about American internet companies are almost certainly more moot. This is just the pot calling the kettle, but I think they are both wrong.
> But the kind of censorship, state-mandated propaganda, and market control you see from China is not even remotely comparable to the situation in the West.
In West it is not state-mandated. Just state-sponsored and state-suggested.
Tiktok promotes mental illness, fake influencer tricks and stupid dances, Douyin promotes heroic 3 year olds cooking eggs with chopsticks on a giant wok for their sick brothers.
The US is following a tit for tat strategy. Which European companies has the US forced to divest their holdings to justify the action you're proposing?
Almost all of them? Microsoft had to divest its Chinese cloud to a Shanghai water utility company (they do sewers, water reclamation and Microsoft Azure cloud!). All the auto companies that setup in China had to do it as 49/51 JVs so Chinese companies could learn lots of "how to make auto" IP, well, Tesla is the first one that was allowed to come in whole.
So from what I heard at the time was that this was spinning out of a Shanghai water utility, but ownership gets mixed up a bit, Shanghai blue cloud is owned by Beijing based 21vianet, but I’m pretty sure there was some deal that involved the Shanghai municipal government. Ah here we go:
To operate in China you need to partner with local businesses and give up 50% of the local business. Also many American businesses are simply banned and were effectively forced to divest to recover funds.
Probably none, or very few, but the reason for that is China doesn't allow local companies to be majority-owned by foreign entities in the first place.
Another, somewhat equivalent answer to your question is, "all of them".
doesn't that mean any company that does business in China should share the same security concerns if not worse than TikTok? I would be much more concerned about hardware that is being made and/or assembled by Chinse companies in China that a smartphone app
You literally can't open a business in China as a foreigner without giving a large percentage ownership to a Chinese citizen or forming a joint venture with a local Chinese company. So that is basically forced divestment upon business creation.
I remember the Nord Stream saga, where the US (or, at least a few senators) threatened to sanction a harbor if it would not cease to provide support for pipelayer ships [1].
I mean, in hindsight the US were completely right in their position towards NS, but it's a prime example of the US being not afraid to go even against allied countries.
Because the US can break Europe by removing our ability to use the dollar. We are completely attached to it like with swift or visa etc. Until we decouple from the dollar which will probably never happen as the US will prevent it, we will always be under the reign of the United States.
That is not the reason. The US wouldn't commit an unforced error in the battle to maintain global reserve currency status. There are too many countries that would be delighted to switch to non-USD options to conduct export/import transactions.
The issue is as old as the Cold War. Europe is dependent on the US' continued spending on its military machine to prop up NATO. For a deal that good, they're mostly OK with the trade-off of giving their privacy away to American tech companies.
Friends/allies don't spy on each other. [1] For one second imagine the outrage that would have occurred if it were the other way around.
The US does not operate in the interest if the EU. It will always be "America First" and if that means fucking over a European country or all of Europe, they will. I don't blame them for this as it is in essence their job to protect them selves but Europe needs to realize that even Article 5 in NATO will not protect them if the US doesn't want to.
The US operates on this planet only in their final interest and if that means ignoring international laws and signed treaties so be it. In fact the US has recently claimed that UN Security Council resolutions are non-binding to the outrage of most UN members. [2]
Allies spy on each other THE MOST. Where do you get this idea that they don't? That's how they stay allies: by knowing each other, they can actually trust their interests are aligned.
Literally EVERY embassy is used as a post to station spies from the guest nation in the host. It's an open secret, and spying is tolerated between allies up to some point - and that point is necessarily secret.
You are applying a very human-centric idea of morality to large, stable countries. If they were people, they'd be perfect sociopaths - hyperrational and emotionless, driven only by shared interests and never "friendliness."
> The US does not operate in the interest if the EU.
The United States operates in the interest of the EU all the time - but only because as powerful liberal democracies, their interests (seeing a peaceful world with freedom of trade and ever-tightening global economic integration) are aligned.
A world where the US reneges on Article 5 of NATO is a world where Europe was already pretty screwed, because that would imply that one or both of these two ceased to be liberal democracies.
> In fact the US has recently claimed that UN Security Council resolutions are non-binding to the outrage of most UN members. [2]
UNSC resolutions are non-binding for permanent members because each permanent member has a veto. There is no way to pass a resolution without the consent of the permanent members, and the US made it very clear that its abstention was only because the resolution was a moral point and had no concrete requirements (peacekeeping forces, sanctions, etc.). The US has vetoed all the attempts with CONCRETE requirements outright.
Any "legal experts" who say it's binding are dodging the point: this is a moral resolution and the US doesn't give a damn about saving Israel in the court of public opinion anymore, since Netanyahu has stopped even pretending that he's trying to minimize damage. This resolution does not compel the US or Israel to do anything since there's no mechanism to enforce their compliance.
Reciprocity would be US mandating a joint venture JV structure like in PRC aka the TikTok Oracle proposal that fell through. Issue is US is uniquly delusional in thinking they can force a foreign company to divest. PRC isn't going around ordering local Boeing/Microsoft branch to divest from US. Or not delusional since they know PRC wouldn't let TIkTok to divest would open up forced divestitures as viable strategy. Hence these TikTok bills efforts are defacto bans.
It's just like coming PRC EV ban, this isn't about reciprocity. It's about US finding out too late that of their inability to compete. PRC EV companies would love JV setup in states, where local US JV partners provide billions in various subsidies like land, tax credits, political muscling etc because they know they can still make cars cheaper. Local JV's aren't just there to rent seek they have to do serious facilitation work.
Eitherway, US will do what she does, TikTok mostly foreign owned anyways, it won't hurt PRC that much. We'll just have to see which US MNC PRC will force to divest to "leave" in response. The other consideration is does TikTok get to migrate all their US data after they leave? If not, would WFOE Tesla Shanhai get to keep their capital equipment when they get kicked out.
> As per its Special Security Arrangement, BAE Systems Inc. operates as a semi-autonomous business unit within BAE Systems controlled at a local level by American management. In May 2006 the CEO of BAE Systems described the "firewalled" status of BAE Systems Inc: "The British members of the corporate leadership, me included, get to see the financial results; but many areas of technology, product and programme are not visible to us.... The SSA effectively allows us to operate in the US as an American company, providing the highest levels of assurance and integrity in some of the most sensitive fields of national security provision."
I don't think it's delusional, I think it's intentional. The people writing and backing this bill are fully aware that the sale is not going to happen. The sale provision is merely there so Congress can say they're being reasonable, that they're not trying to take TikTok away from the millions of people in the US that use it. That if it ends up having to be banned, that's on China for not accepting the "reasonable" alternative that was presented to them.
Whether or not most TikTok users in the US will buy this bit of malarkey is another questions.
Yeah, I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to this move (and it surprises me somewhat that I feel this way). I think the only actual problem here is that the US government waited until a third to a half of the country was hooked on TikTok before taking action. The bigger issue is PR and optics, and weathering a backlash from those users when they can't use TikTok anymore.
If TikTok was an obscure app that a few hundred thousand (or even a couple million) people used, most people wouldn't think this ban would be a problem. (Granted, if it were that small, it wouldn't've provoked all this scrutiny in the first place.)
China doesn't give foreigners meaningful access to their markets (and when they do, it comes with a pile of restrictions, including on ownership structure); arguably we should not do the same. The whole "let's expose China to Western values and they'll open up and become a democracy" thing failed miserably.
Still, on a fundamental level, this all feels uncomfortable.
> China doesn't give foreigners meaningful access to their markets (and when they do, it comes with a pile of restrictions, including on ownership structure);
Unlimited access to any bit of IP of the company that at any point finds itself within China's borders seems like the biggest limitation.
What I do mind is the government letting domestic companies run roughshod over the population with surveillance/influence for the past few decades, and then when a significant enough foreign company finally does it, focusing on that foreign company while continuing to ignore the longstanding deeper problem.
Rather than focusing on TikTok, how about a general solution of a US GDPR plus anti-trust enforcement (or even additional regulation) to stop this widespread bundling of client apps with publishing services? Then people would have the right to inspect/delete records TikTok keeps about them, independent clients for TikTok would have a toggle of whether to show recommendations provided by the TikTok service, and the US government would have a much stronger case to go after TikTok if they didn't comply with either general legal requirement.
> how about a general solution of a US GDPR plus anti-trust enforcement (or even additional regulation) to stop this widespread bundling of client apps with publishing services?
There isn’t public support for this. Remember the warrant requirement for FISA? Virtually nobody called their electeds in support (see my other comment [1]). Unless someone can show a general privacy bill isn’t a similar boondoggle, it’s not worth policians’ time.
I don't get the point of half-cynicism. The fully cynical take is that this is just another inevitability in a long line of gradual steps of the unaccountable surveillance-industrial complex infiltrating our lives, having neutralized whatever democratic oversight there might have been via manufactured consent.
But the overall comment thread isn't just taking the development as a forgone conclusion and talking about technical mitigations, but rather still judging it on what ought to be. As such, I think it's worthwhile to point out that there is another straightforward approach that preserves individual liberty rather than undermining it. And back in the cynical context, this approach seemingly not being on the table is another data point supporting the cynicism.
> how about a general solution of a US GDPR plus anti-trust enforcement
I'd agree if such a solution was also being considered and would take the same amount of time. How long do you think it would take to write and pass such a bill? I think it would take so long to be essentially a useless diversion. It's an idea that people would push who never want any of these changes because it sounds like a viable alternative but it's impossible in practice.
The best time to plant a shade tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.
And realpolitik, I get that both parties work for and benefit from the corporations in their own ways, and aren't too keen on legislation that protects individual rights at the expense of corporate control. I just hate the blatant hypocrisy - this TikTok situation has only come about due to the past two+ decades of regulatory abdication.
I question the assumption of "for more". Singling out individual companies based on specific foreign ownership is of a completely different character than making general laws aimed at preserving individual liberty.
The way I see it, going down this path cements continuing centralized control from corporate and government authoritarian synergy - for example the actual mechanism of this bill is targeting the Apple/Google corporate app repositories, because telling individual users that it's illegal to communicate with TikTok is a straightforward first amendment violation.
The state already has data access, if the data is in the US. If the data isn't in the US, then why don't we have data locality laws like the EU and India? If the data is already in another country then why do we let another state have access to the data of US citizens?
> How can people trust that we are an innovative hub if this is how we operate?
Because it puts them on the exact same situation as every US company. You can call it splitting hairs, but they already have a US entity that's already subject to US laws and orders. The US's ability to access their data doesn't change (unless they've been storing user data in mainland China, which is kind of damning for them). Forcing divestment doesn't give the US any legal leverage.
And if companies are worried they'll become worth billions of dollars and become popular with every American youth and have a bespoke act of Congress force one of their many owners to divest, frankly I think they've got their priorities in the wrong place.
Censorship is always a pretty popular sentiment, as well as conflating governments with their subjects, pardon, citizens. That's one of the reasons similar measures get passed
Also a strategy to lengthen copyright/IP terms around the world for the sake of “harmonization”, harmonization meaning raise the terms to what US lobbyists negotiated there.
It’s a miracle that the TPP went down in flames. It had great marketing as an anti-China bill but mostly served to enrich a small minority of notorious tax evaders, namely companies that revolve around state granted monopolies to Intellectual Property.
Been a lot of high minded "strategy" like that. Hasn't really been working out. I don't think China's influence was growing, ours is just shrinking, you can only lose so many wars to farmers before people stop taking you seriously.
Also, I don't how you have a TPP with a country that you don't allow to own a website.
Say more about this. I can't figure out what this means. Are you referring to the person you're responding to, or to Congress? I don't know about the parent commenter, but trade wars and economic punishments seem to be in Congress' toolbox already!
China bans sites & apps from the West that violate their laws - the ad tracking, monitoring, censorship & influencer/fake news we have here... the funding schemes and market monopolizing that companies like Facebook do in the West is just not legal there. Can you blame them for not wanting it?
Companies that don't violate Chinese laws and approach China with realistic deals are allowed to operate there - you can play WoW in China because unlike Facebook it's not involved in censorship, severe privacy violations etc. and Blizzard actually worked with China (NetEase) to bring their product to market there instead of crying and trying to stoke WW3 in the news like our social media companies are doing. Just because Facebook and Google can do whatever they want unchecked in America and its vassal the EU, doesn't mean other countries have to allow it.
The West just wants to counter-block Chinese apps like TikTok in retaliation for them upholding their own rule of law.
Actually you haven’t been able to play WoW in China for a ~year. But that’s largely irrelevant to your point.
More specifically Blizzard is able to bring their product to everywhere else in the world. The fact that they choose to “work” with a local partner in China to get access to that market reads more to me like a government run racket / forced rent seeking than anything else.
> approach China with realistic deals are allowed to operate there
On a more hyperbolic note, I’m sure many people in the past paid off mobsters for the privilege of doing business in certain areas with the rationale they were being “realistic”.
To that end if the US wants to start treating Chinese backed companies a similar way (laws that distort the market) I’m not surprised. China has no moral high ground here. Or more simply your point cuts both ways.
Today WoW is unavailable in China. The linked article indicates a return to China which AFAIK is not live yet. My statement is true, and the lack of WoW in China for at least a time period will always be true. But as previously mentioned this point isn’t that important. I just found it amusing that the example you used for a company behaving well in China wasn’t even in China at the time.
> the lack of WoW in China for at least a time period
That's a more fair claim, but both goes without saying (because it's what we're talking about) and is still misleading, because and I'll quote the wowhead-
"World of Warcraft has always been popular in China"
Anyone familiar knows WoW has been available in China for many years (they even have a Blizzard China HQ) and Blizzard has been working with with NetEase for years to service that market.
That's true for a lot of other companies, everything from McDonalds to Ford. It's just social media companies whining.
> just found it amusing that the example you used
Intentionally so but could have easily mentioned GM, Microsoft, Boeing, Nike, KFC, Coke, Procter & Gamble, Intel, or Starbucks with their 7000 stores in China alone. Are you seriously claiming that American companies can't operate there? Do basic research and stop watching the news - some of you really can't be helped.
> That's a more fair claim, but both goes without saying (because it's what we're talking about) and is still misleading
Calling the truth misleading feels pretty 1984 to me but ignoring that for a moment. The truth is that Netease & Blizzard had some sort of disagreement resulting in all Blizzard games being yanked from China. It didn’t matter that Blizzard had a HQ there (which netease live-streamed the destruction of 1) or that they had nearly 2 decades of history of the “good” behavior you mention. At the end of the day Blizzard was forced out as soon as the partnership with the local Chinese company ended. Or in keeping with my hyperbolic scenario as soon as the local “mobsters” stopped getting their cut.
> That's true for a lot of other companies, everything from McDonalds to Ford. It's just social media companies whining.
> Do basic research and stop watching the news
Well let’s see using the first company you listed as an example McDonald’s is a minority partner in their China business 2.
“Last month, the U.S.-based burger maker cut a deal to repurchase the 28% stake in its China business Carlyle Group took in 2017, giving it a 48% share…. One advantage for McDonald’s: its majority partner in the China business, CITIC, provides top-level political cover, … Having a very powerful Chinese state-owned conglomerate as a partner means they are not going to be at the forefront of the geopolitical situation; that is quite important," Yu said.”
> Are you seriously claiming that American companies can't operate there?
That is straw-man & no I’m not.
I suppose at a high level my point is a) Blizzard was allowed there because they paid via the Joint Venutre not because of any “moral” behavior and b) China requires Joint Ventures or other similar arrangements for companies to get access to the China market. For one reason or another China views this as being in China’s best interest. Ok so be it but one shouldn’t be surprised that eventually another country would enact similar laws that it believes are in its own best interest. It just so happens that America is first with Tik Tok being the concern that forced the issue. So now the “reasonable”/legal deal for Tik Tok (& soon others I expect) will be different. As I said before there is no moral high ground here, just basic game theory.
> some of you really can't be helped
While this is probably not over the line. It’s best to try and refrain from personal attacks or anything approaching it. We just happen to have differing opinions on this topic and that’s ok. In fact we may learn something by discussing, otherwise what’s the point of commenting?
They also ban TikTok -- the Chinese version doesn't push the type of content TikTok does and doesn't mix international user data into the local version. Notably, several other countries with mediocre relationships with China also ban TikTok, for example India.
China makes companies practice self censorship that is heavily based on current cChinese context, they won't tell you what content is illegal, you just better not have content that they deem illegal after the fact. This makes the Douyin model very different from Tiktok in the rest of the world, where illegal content is generally well defined (no nudity, sex...erm, but Douyin-no-no Winnie the pooh is OK).
I think nudity content is not illegal in the West. It is avoided due to self-censorship, but it's the advertisers not the party that content providers fear.
Nudity isn’t illegal in itself, but presenting nudity to minors, or worse, nudity of minors, is very very illegal. It isn’t self censoring Winnie the Pooh at that point, it is a clear rule that everyone has strategies to follow.
I guess you don’t know about the “F word and SH word” incident with the blizzard GM and the pro player getting banned from overwatch 2 for swearing and appeal rejected despite the words being filtered by a profanity filter that defaults to enabled.
Censorship meaning entire narratives in the news like hiding involvement of state or corporate actors in illegal activities, not a moderator/GM abusing power in a chat.
Moderator abuse is a problem too, but tiny in comparison and not actually illegal if you agree to their terms.
You added the word "reasonable" because you knew it was a bad argument and you wanted to find a way to make it subjective. You prefer to argue about what you think is reasonable.
Disclaimer: I worked for, and helped start, a company that contracted with Tsinghua University. The list of demands they had was....well, enormous. We couldn't even say that we were our own company, whenever we faced a client within Tsinghua, we had to tell them that we were an operation owned and run by Tsinghua. Why? Because we weren't Chinese.
>* Can you blame them for not wanting it?*
No, I don't blame them at all. I applaud it, considering the fact that I find modern social media to be cancerous and dumb.
>you can play WoW in China because unlike Facebook it's not involved in censorship, severe privacy violations etc. and Blizzard actually worked with China (NetEase)
You're omitting details. Blizzard didn't "work with" NetEase, they basically gave them the IP and ability to sell the game in China as well as ownership of all servers that host Chinese players. Microsoft did the same thing with their Office suite and Azure cloud services....because they aren't allowed to independently operate in China.
BTW as much as you think it's a private company, NetEase is an arm of the Chinese government.
>The West just wants to counter-block Chinese apps like TikTok in retaliation for them upholding their own rule of law.
Not quite. China is extremely protectionist of their own homegrown companies. They don't allow foreign competition. This creates an uneven playing field. The west simply wants to play by those rules, too.
> Blizzard didn't "work with" NetEase, they basically gave them the IP and ability to sell the game in China as well as ownership of all servers that host Chinese players.
My dear bro, this is called "working with".
> Microsoft did the same thing with their Office suite and Azure cloud services... because they aren't allowed to independently operate in China.
You're the one actually being manipulative with words here: Microsoft is allowed to sell products in China and they do, by independently operate you might mean "ignore Chinese laws" some of which include the fact that Microsoft is required to share data with our government on a regular basis. Beyond ethics and ad tracking, why would another government allow US-based companies to effectively spy on them?
> They don't allow foreign competition. This creates an uneven playing field.
Again not true, you just have to follow the laws of whatever country you're operating in.
ByteDance is owned by international investors including Carlyle Group, General Atlantic and Susquehanna, 3/5 of the board are Americans, and the company - TikTok - isn't operated in the US by a Chinese company, the servers are owned by Oracle.
Without the deal with Oracle they would have to form an American company for their American operations like every international company has done since the 80s.
To use an example from back then, Sony Computer Entertainment started out in Tokyo but expanded to the US. They had to form an American company - Sony Computer Entertainment America. Imagine not doing it this way, every payment in a foreign currency, handling lawsuits, employees, etc.
Speaking of employees, given many of them are equity shareholders, if you ban ownership based on nationality, what does that mean for companies with employees all over the world? Simplified example: Remote culture, no office, the 2 co-founders are in China and NY respectively, they own equal shares of the company, it's registered in China and incorporated in the US, there are employees in both places, following all laws of each. Is that a "Chinese company"?
Under this law, would the Chinese founder have to sell his share to the American founder in order to continue operating in NY?
Why are the Hacker News comments on this so different than when this topic came up a few years ago?
I feel like a few years ago this site was inundated with posts arguing largely "Anyone anywhere on earth should be able to do business in the U.S. and own U.S. subsidary companies, no exceptions."
My opinion is still the same. If TikTok represents a threat, let the DOJ or FTC or whoever look into it and present a case to the courts and to the American public. Congress can get the voters on its side by writing a bill requiring stronger privacy measures on iOS/Android for example. But they won't because this would adversely impact Google and Facebook. A government ban is an authoritarian move that will inevitably expand to non-TikTok apps.
As for a broader change in opinion, I'd say that since 2022, American businesses have been happy to rally around protectionist policies in general (especially after the end of ZIRP) and that attitude feeds through to HN'ers that put a disproportionate amount of stock in things that people like Musk say.
For example, here's Musk admitting that Chinese EVs will dominate global market share without trade barriers:
To be clear, we haven't been asked about it. Besides the framing of the question ultimately begs the response.
Q1: Is it ok for China to control what Americans watch?
Q2: Should companies have free association?
Q1 and Q2 determine the same decision, but express different values and ultimately different responses. You have to be honest that the framing begs a particular response. That's the part that's not unbiased.
Answer to Q2 is easy: no. Nobody thinks that companies should be allowed to pledge allegiance to whoever they wish, there are already lots of laws in every country against pledging allegiance to terrorists or being owned by terrorists etc.
I absolutely love the way you are engaging with this problem, and really appreciate how you’re trying to make discourse about the fundamental issue rather than the knee-jerk ‘murica “unrationale”.
Personally I support the authoritarian measure against TikTok from a “general” standpoint since I firmly believe the nature of warfare lately has shifted to a more cultural front and thus is a matter of national security; Everything about this would be perfect if not for the glaring issue that is clear favoritism, and not addressing the root problem.
Social media and its corresponding ad-tech at large is a publicly available propaganda engine that can be wielded by the highest state backed bidder via direct ads, or the highest spending intelligence actor via artificial accounts and discourse.
LLM tech has only exacerbated this threat and in a perfect world this legislation would be the first of many steps to curtail the threat before it undermines the country any further.
Now that I’ve said my controversial bits I would love to hear what your thoughts on the matter(s) are!
If the choice is who are we going to make in charge of feeding us propaganda then the game is fixed. We play this trick on 4 year olds to make them do what we want and when done to adults it's paternalistic.
Fifteen year old me was right on this one. It's better to burn it down than pick the lesser of two evils. We always reserve the right to create our own options if what's presented to us isn't honest.
Sure the game is rigged so that someone will be feeding us propaganda, that much is a given in today’s society. I don’t believe however it is in any citizen’s best interests to allow a foreign nation to control that propaganda due to the invariably detrimental incentives at play.
The American government is more likely to produce propaganda that promotes an increase in GDP. The increase being won by sacrificing individual autonomy or quality of life is something that is at least in your control (emigrating, voting, lobbying, etc) which makes it the lesser of two evils.
As to burning it down and picking a third option… I agree in principle but recent history rarely supports that path; modern technology and weaponry renders any kind of organized revolution a nonstarter, while other means of subverting the status quo (economically, culturally, etc) have been set up to incentivize those capable of doing so to be completely apathetic in the face of obscene wealth tied directly to upholding said status quo.
Put simply we are in a social construct that is resilient to any significant change in course (or destruction) while still under threat from a foreign social construct that wishes to subvert our society to the benefit of its own.
CCP doesn't control any of those, so they aren't national security issues.
Edit: And in non American countries where US influence is a national security issue they are already adding similar laws or putting in similar pressure to ensure USA can't influence their people as much.
Nothing? Meta is owned by an American, that person probably don't want to see America get destroyed. Other nation states however has an interest in seeing USA get destroyed, so that makes things very different.
"it's not authoritarianism when it's something I want"
Nothing should happen, limitations are deliberate
Meta aside we're already here, by the way. The military and VA do this to themselves.
Recruitment strategy is commercials and Call of Duty games, while we see what really happens through our families. Half-ass postings on the Internet aren't even close to the problem.
Tldr: Don't like the news, fix it/make your own. Pray we don't have to rely on the draft.
As the other person replying to you said: yes. In the eyes of Congress, the answer is obviously and unequivocally yes, because Facebook, Twitter and Google are American companies.
It is if credible evidence of such a threat could be provided. The FTC investigated and fined Facebook $5bn for its breaches. The DOJ investigated and fined Binance $4bn and cut off its USD off-ramps, effectively banning it for US residents.
Why should TikTok not be investigated similarly?
What Congress is proposing is banning an app without first providing any evidence that the app conducts activities that are illegal under US law.
It seems like the argument against TikTok is one of potential abuse, not that a specific illegal action had been taken by ByteDance.
So, for the same reason that you can't find someone guilty of a crime that you believe they will commit in the future, the DOJ and FTC don't really have any standing here to press charges or levy fines.
I still hold the same stance today, but I am just tired of arguing for it on HN.
I noticed the same thing with the prevailing opinion on the issue changing on HN as well. However, it wasnt because there are better arguments for the ban now or some new relevant info got discovered that would affect it.
Nope, it literally devolved into tit-for-tat arguments only, except this pretty much makes the US lose any high ground here. For people who dont see how maintaining the high ground in this specific scenario[0] is very advantageous and cheap for the US, I don’t have much to add that wasnt already discussed to death in all the previous HN threads on this.
P.S. It sucks I even feel the need to say this, but no, I dont support the chinese government and have zero affiliation with it whatsoever (at least none that I am aware of lol). I do have a lot of respect for the country itself and their people. However, my respect for the country and their people is not relevant to my opinions on absolutely anything related to policymaking.
0. No, I dont believe in this approach for every scenario ever involving the US and China. Of course, I do believe in reciprocal trade sanctions and tarrifs. I dont believe in those nearly as much when it comes to the digital realm, and especially not when it is something like TikTok.
That's not quite right. Always defecting is game theoretically optimal.
However, under realistic conditions, where many agents are predisposed to cooperate but some do not that's where a tit for tat strategy can work incredibly well.
That people are predisposed to cooperate is an assumption you have to make, it cannot be derived from the rules of the game itself.
Opinions change as the situation in reality changes. Especially with the rising geopolitical tensions and the Ukraine war, not to mention now with Palestine, there's a fair portion of people who might have been more neutral that are now more hawkish.
My perspective is that if one truly cares about these ideals of freedom or such, would they be better fulfilled through keeping US Congress in line or a dominant CCP? If the CCP "wins", if they establish economic hegemony, just like we see with the censorship with Taiwan, whatever talk about defending freedoms right now against ourselves would be irrelevant at that point to an external adversary.
> Why are the Hacker News comments on this so different than when this topic came up a few years ago?
* Tiktok competes with FAANGM (MMANGA?) type companies, which happen to be heavily represented here, and those people may have pointed thoughts
* apropos of FAANGMs, China recently banned or set strict rules for FAANGM companies in China. If they're not going to play nice + make dubious demands, why shouldn't the US behave similarly?
* GPT is a thing... and was then, too. all available bot power may be focused on elections / Trump trials / Israel / Ukraine / etc., when it wasn't before, and rapid changes to viewpoints may reflect that; the 50 Cent Party has bigger fights to pick, etc.
* sort of a corollary to the above, it's an election year, a big one in several ways, and that drives the (real, human) commenters out in droves
This is really difficult for me. I have an app that is available in every country except for China because it isn’t allowed to be published there.
In that vein it seems fair and probably doesn’t go far enough — Chinese citizens are free to publish whatever they want in the US while we’re severely restricted on conducting trade in China.
On the other hand, I’d love access to that market and would prefer trade negotiations rather than tit for tat disputes like this that won’t further the interests of American businesses (outside of Meta and Snapchat)
The West was greedy and saw a trillion dollar opportunity in welcoming China into the WTO in 2000 and gave China massive leeway (this is my opinion, and probably not a majority opinion).
In my opinion (only speaking for Germany, as I follow mostly the politics here) nobody was very keen on asking questions and making demand when the Chinese were producing our shit for pennies on the dollar but buying our premium Mercedes Benz S Classes Long Lines (and similar high technology products) by the millions.
Who would've thunk that the turntables would've, well turned...
I'm not blaming China for this btw, they played their hand very well
There would no problems at all if China continues to make shirts, shoes etc...
But China started to make some high end stuff, such as Computers, and it did those so well that it could probably render US competitors irrelevant in the next a couple of decades. So all drama started.
No, it hasn't. Never seen anything relatively nice from a Chinese company, even when it's another one of their piles of manure with a different name like OnePlus.
Don't mistake the crap they make without any quality control then sell on Aliexpress by shady shops with the serious stuff their industry is perfectly capable of design and produce.
Now we could debate that millions of people buying the former contributed also to the latter, that is probably the case, but one sure fact is that they can make extremely advanced stuff at very convenient prices. Denying that because of one's nationalistic views won't change anything, unfortunately. We need to understand how to counter that in a positive way, that is, being better, not blocking their products.
Now, how do you develop an industry compared to the Chinese without transforming workers into underpaid drones with no civil liberties? That's likely the one question no western politician would like to hear, because they'd have no answer.
I think the hopes were that China, once prospering in the global marketplace as a big player, would turn democratic. Over the last decade or two, we've come to realize the opposite has happened and the Western powers are adjusting.
Of course Western companies have made a lot of money off China with cheap labor and massive marketplace, so it wasn't entirely an altruistic endeavour.
Western powers still make deals with authoritarian/non-democratic states. At this point is naive to think that the grievances with china are because “they are not democratic”.
>At this point is naive to think that the grievances with china are because “they are not democratic”.
No, the kid gloves are off because "they are not democratic." It's like being nice to the weird kid in school and the weird kid steals your lunch. No more being nice to the weird kid.
Also, consider if they were democratic, we might not be having the grievances we are currently having.
What does that have to do with anything I said? Do you think we ally with countries for moral reasons? We allied with Stalin after he invaded Poland with Germany earlier in the same war.
Because geopolitics is a game where ALL the players are sociopaths and Saudi Arabia is basically too small for their government's admitted craziness to even register.
Let’s be real. The kid gloves would be off for any country, democratic or otherwise, that tries to compete on economic throughput and global influence with the US.
Unless you’re trying to argue that the rapid economic growth happened because they are not democratic, the idea that democracy has any relevance on US relations is laughable propaganda.
If the countries were really school kids, then I might accommodate for the idea that the school bully actually believes that he’s no longer nice to the weird kid because he’s weird. But even if some US citizens are childish, countries are not school kids.
I think if you look past the last few news cycles and back into the 70s and especially the 90s, you'll better understand what our strategy with China has been.
>I think the hopes were that China, once prospering in the global marketplace as a big player, would turn democratic. Over the last decade or two, we've come to realize the opposite has happened and the Western powers are adjusting.
I guess I disagree with everything. But mostly I disagree that anyone serious actually thought that entering on a global marketplace would turn any kind of nation democratic... but I mean people at the top can have any kind of ideologies, I shouldn't consider impossible that somebody actually bought the magical markets propaganda.
Exploiting improvements in air, relative to sea, transportation that occurred since the 1960s, and combining survey data with country level measures of democracy from 1960 to 2015, the authors document that trade with democracies increases both citizens’ support for democracy and countries’ democracy scores. Trade with non-democracies has no impact on either attitudes or institutions.
According to our results, doubling trade with democracies (a change in exposure equivalent to the inter-quartile range in our sample) increases an individual’s support for democracy by 0.58 points on a 1 to 4 scale. This is similar to the difference in attitudes towards democracy between Mexico and Norway, or that between Philippines and Italy. At the country level, our estimates imply that increasing trade with democratic partners by 80% (or its inter-quartile range) raises the democracy score by around 4 points (on a scale from -10 to +10). This is equivalent to the gap between Malaysia and Canada in 2010, or that between Turkey and Senegal in 2015.
Hey, I may give it a full read later, but so far the abstract seems sound.
>Trade with non-democracies has no impact on either attitudes or institutions.
And actually it’s good that there’s research about it. Different correlations between economic and political attitudes are interesting, I believe that the relation is from the political to the economic side, not otherwise yet, my biggest gripe is, that the idea that markets would result into democracy is a big assertion with shaky foundations.
And I mean, is not like we don’t have history of countries trying to open other’s markets, sometimes even forcefully. I saw the same, now dressed with modern ideologies.
China is already democratic tho. They have workers congress on the national level, plenty of people's assemblies on the provencial and city level. They also have consultative assemblies for business issues.
Citizens are very satisfied of their government, despite some of its excesses, unlike so called western democratic governments.
Their material condititons are as good as in Europe, at least for most folks.
Just because you do not directly elect the president of your government doesn't make you less democratic. Switzerland doesn't elect its government by universal suffrage, neither does the UK, or the EU. Their democratic model is just different.
But then we have different values than China, and we claim to have more freedom (whatever it means today).
The ban on tiktok didn't come when everyone was criticizing the negative impact it had on children and teenager's mental health, it only came now when lots of its users started publicly criticizing a certain country more openly than is allowed on other platforms... So its censorship/ban will be to comply with western censorship rules,thus making us no better than China in this regard.
I guess I am looking at the issue on the level below media, primarily as a trade issue.
It’s not that TikTok can’t exist; they’ve been trying to force a sale AFAIK. Whether it’s a NatSec issue or a censorship issue seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
Ever wondered how all those fancy action movies got their tanks just like that?
Cuz they had to beg the US gov for them; they are pretty much free to use under the condition that you do not critize the government's foreign policy or the army itself.
So if you want to make a war movie that is critical of the government, good luck.
And thats just one example; there is much more regarding all the "experts" send on television to talk about this or that country that happens to be at odd with the Washington dictatorship.
So the examples you're citing are all of the US government attempting to influence media through incentives and quid-pro-quo arrangements, i.e. exactly the same way every other organization in our society attempts to do so, precisely because it is not able to exercise any sort of direct political power over the media in the way that China does.
I'm sure this legislation will be almost immediately overturned by the courts. It has severe first amendment and fifth amendment problems, along with possibly being an illegal bill of attainder.
If it was actually about privacy, they should've passed a privacy bill, but nah, it's just about making sure only U.S. companies can spy on their users, not others, also killing the only competition for Meta.
I understand that TikTok may represent a national security concern but it’s also a platform that younger generations use for protected speech. What’s the message that we’re sending to this group?
The message is that the us government does not want your protected speech moderated, curated, and amplified according to the whims of a hostile foreign nation
False. The message is the US government doesn’t want Americans to freely speak out against American foreign policy such as the current genocide against the Palestinians.
They want US citizens to communicate on US platforms where they do have influence and control so they can censor speech and continue the capitalist forever wars.
> They want US citizens to communicate on US platforms where they do have influence and control so they can censor speech and continue the capitalist forever wars.
No different to any other country. China does the same, as does Russia, Korea and Japan.
Is it a security concern compared to everything else we get from China, or are we just holding TikTok specifically to an unattainably high standard? We get so many products from China that could potentially be used for spying that we've never tried to ban due to security concerns. Who can say the ESP32 Wifi module doesn't have a hardware or software backdoor hidden in it?
AFAIK, there has never been any evidence or reason to suspect TikTok of sharing private data from Americans with the Chinese government. It seems like simply being from China is the crime the US government wants to ban TikTok for.
> AFAIK, there has never been any evidence or reason to suspect TikTok of sharing private data from Americans with the Chinese government. It seems like simply being from China is the crime the US government wants to ban TikTok for.
If you're going to argue that sending data to Bytedance in Beijing isn't sending it to the Chinese government, you're free to believe that but it would not be supported by the available evidence.
Do you have any such evidence? You linked a paywalled article saying that TikTok works with its parent company, which is hardly news. We're looking for evidence that TikTok/ByteDance shared private data from Americans with the Chinese government. US politicians would love to get such evidence.
"The government only wants your personal data harvested by companies that aren't run by an enterprise operated by actors from a hostile foreign government which itself is hellbent on taking America's place in the global economic and soft power hierarchy"
from the POV of the incumbent, yes, competition is a bad thing when you are losing.
The US government doesn't want a foreign country in control of the communication platform its youth are using. The Chinese government doesn't want that, either.
That's the problem I have with this, that Congress is banning a company instead of the practice they're supposedly worried about. But how else is the FBI supposed to spy on us? I mean, besides the renewed and expanded FISA Section 702, and also illegally.
It gets banned if it refuses to divest. If China is unwilling to let go of TikTok, even at the cost of tens of billions of dollars, that sort of tells you it has non-economic value.
It seems especially sketchy that USG is forcing TikTok to store it's data with Oracle, a company with close ties to the CIA.
The timing of this move is also suspect. TikTok is the probably the #1 platform currently where users and creators are outspoken in opposition to U.S. foreign policy in Israel/Palestine. And now the government is forcing them to sell to new owners.
> Chew added that 60% of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors such as the Carlyle Group, General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group, while 20% of the firm is owned by Zhang and 20% owned by employees around the world.
I hope so much the US bans it and those big capital houses are forced to sell their stock for pennies on the dollar to Chinese shareholders. It will be epic.
I'm surprised this passed (in the house at least) at this point in the election cycle. My suspicion is that ByteDance will in fact refuse to divest, and TikTok will get banned. Which I don't think the electorate will like very much
> My suspicion is that ByteDance will in fact refuse to divest, and TikTok will get banned.
ByteDance will sue, and the court case will likely go to the Supreme Court. If they left the USA without any legal contest, then they would be walking away from a huge amount of money.
Many people above the age of 35 hate TikTok almost entirely because young people like it, the same as (in the past) video games, rock and roll music, etc. Young people don’t vote at the rate older people do, and they won’t in this election in particular.
> I'm surprised this passed (in the house at least) at this point in the election cycle
AIPAC is willing to sacrifice Biden's re-election chances for this short-term victory because the other candidate and his whole party is also going to be favourable for them, possibly even more so.
TikTok does not actually have many such videos since they get taken down far more aggressively than they do on, say, X/Twitter or Telegram. However, TikTok has the eyeballs of the vast majority of the young people and they talk about the ongoing atrocities nonstop, and it's crushed the image of both Israel and USA over the past 6 months. From that angle, it's a huge national interest issue for both the countries' ruling establishment to get the censorship level (and censorship priorities) of such topics on TikTok under better control.
There was talk about banning / divesting from China well before the current flair up in Israel/Palestine. I don't think it has anything to do with AIPAC.
Agreed. It is rather alienating to a demographic and large numbers of business owners that both parties desperately want to connect with.
I kind of think this will churn in the courts for a long time, and achieve only ill will.
Nice try, but politics can be just put aside. Today you ignore politics, tomorrow it's banging at your door with an automatic rifle. The matters of national security have always been more important than economic freedom, everywhere in the world.
Chinese authoritarian government doesn't allow American companies to freely operate in China, but they want freedom for the Chinese companies in the West? That's a little hypocritical, don't you think?
> Chinese authoritarian government doesn't allow American companies to freely operate in China, but they want freedom for the Chinese companies in the West? That's a little hypocritical, don't you think?
Not really, no. Our government operates under our constitution, not China's.
Which is also why national security (and think of the children) is used to justify whatever they feel like. Any mention of either turns off the critical thinking parts for a large fraction of the population.
The raw data collection from TikTok contains much more than that. Think in terms of all branches of military and government messaging each other perfectly blackmailable things and then automating analysis of that.
Byte Dance says that China doesn't have access to the data and that it hasn't been accessed, but from what I've read they have a party office at the company in China. I simply don't trust a foreign adversary with the amount of data that one of these social platforms generates. Neither does China which is why a large number of services operated in China are hosted on Chinese servers run by local subsidiaries, with vastly different and far more permissive laws when it comes to government/intelligence/law enforcement (all one and the same there) accessing that data.
Hopefully that critical thinking can transfer to what's being done by American companies and intelligence agencies with user data and we can get some actual data privacy legislation at some point and enshrine a law preventing from inserting backdoors in everything that moves.
It's an interesting experiment for the government. Is there another large (forget massive) social platform, heavily geared towards the young, that was banned and the users trickled into another platform?
I can't think of an instance of this. I don't see how it won't succeed, if they cut off monetizing the posts..
I guess, what happens if someone's wearing a sponsor's t-shirt and makes a plug in the middle of their rant about someone who put their feet on the back of their airline seat?
Hahaha, this won't survive even intermediate scrutiny of the First Amendment. Tiktok really lucked out that Congress is not smart enough to pass the bill Cantwell had in mind.
I know this TikTok issue is far more nuanced (who the backers/owners are, how data is treated etc) of course.