Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.
Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?
Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.
Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.
It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.
What I've learned is that since Switzerland has 3 official languages (German, French and Italian) children and teens at school focus on learning one of the other two regions they are not from.
In particular this leads to French and Italian cantons to be moderately fluent in each other's language. Strikingly when I lived in Lausanne, more people knew Italian than English. English was really not on their radar (plus, add that francophones are kind of elitist when it comes to languages and don't really like to consume content that is not in french).
In German speaking Switzerland proficiency in English was still subpar from most of the rest of Europe when walking in a shop or going to a restaurant.
And even though I probably tend to agree with both of you, it's kinda funny to blame French or German speakers about being elitist against English speakers, of which native speakers are notoriously monolingual :-)
I'm just saying that in the French part of Switzerland English wasn't a given among any generation and it neither was common in the German/Italian parts too if you exclude the expats.
And yes, francophone tend to be very elitist about consuming exclusively french content, regardless of them being from France, Switzerland or Belgium.
This is wrong. In cities where there's a lot of tourism, they might understand. Most Swiss people only speak their local languages (German or French). As for those living in Ticino, they tend to be better polyglots.
About 40% of all Swiss inhabitants speak English at least once a week [1].
Anecdotally, I can't think of a single acquaintance younger than 50 years old that doesn't speak fluently. Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.
Some of my German speaking friends even talk in English to French speaking people, even when both have learned the other‘s respective language at school.
[1]: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerun...
We learn the other's respective language for 7 years, too. Yet, as you pointed out, people speak in English because there is no willingness to learn and apply the other's language.
Some of my friends speak English fluently, but I have a very hard bias as I work in IT. My whole family doesn't speak any language other than French. Most of the people I've been to school with don't come close to speaking English casually. None would watch an English content creator.
Due to the shared heritage between the English and German languages, perhaps it's different in the German-speaking region. If you ask someone slightly complicated English questions, they might not be completely lost - after all, some words share the same etymology. But Switzerland is absolutely not an English-speaking country at all.
But yes, I can mostly speak of the German-speaking part. People generally have little problems switching to English, and are used to speaking as well.
Many older people I know have no problems communicating in English when they‘re abroad.
Would be interesting to have the BFS statistics split by age group and region as well…
There are also other factors at play. Montréal has a fairly large community of native English speakers and receives a lot of tourism from Anglophone Canada and the United States due to its status as the largest city in Québec (and second largest in Canada). It also gets a lot of immigrants, many of which are (at least initially) more proficient in English than in French.
I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English. It also doesn't border any English-speaking countries. It seems English is mostly used as a lingua franca for communication between citizens who don't otherwise share a language rather than due to the direct presence of native Anglophones. Also, Romansh aside, all national languages of Switzerland (French, German and Italian) are spoken in areas that directly border a country where that language is the national language (France, Italy, Germany/Austria). With Switzerland being in the Schengen Area, its linguistic regions may be considered to be part of a much larger individual linguistic communities, which I feel may also diminish the need to learn other languages.
The language of French Switzerland is French. You'll never hear German, Italian, or Romansch. If you only spoke German and not French or English, you really couldn't live there very effectively (only places like Bern or Basel are truly multi-lingual), yes you'll get your official docs in German but then what? I assume the same is true in German speaking Switzerland, and I have no idea about Italian Switzerland.
If a Swiss German and Swiss French met for coffee, what language do you think they would wind up speaking? Perhaps English if neither had comfortable fluency in the other language. Not to take away from your point, but English can get you really far in this world.
> Swiss German (Standard German: Schweizerdeutsch, Alemannic German: Schwiizerdütsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwizertitsch Mundart, and others; Romansh: Svizzers Tudestg) is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and in some Alpine communities in Northern Italy bordering Switzerland.
All Swiss-German is an Alemannic dialect, not all Alemannic dialects are Swiss-German, is how I'd interpret that.
And it's quite easy to steer it towards a certain topic if you want to
Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"
The majority of the content feels regional, though.
English is used as a lot as a fallback language for inter-cultural exchanges. In that sense it's kind of dominating, but that's it. Intra-cultural communications happens in local languages, and even if that preferred language happened to be one of en-* locales, that only means everyone is functionally bilingual, and it doesn't mean cultural informational borders don't exist. Data still only goes through bridging connections.
So essentially both I guess?
Mastodon only had the raw feed and that drove European network operators insane, so much so that they effectively GFW'd itself.
I would lean for the latter, the simple explanation may be that people just prefer local content.
This is the inverse to the situation you describe but it makes me doubtful that non-US don't see a lot of American content.
You can even find guides by people trying to make their phone seem american so they can reach us audiences.
My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.
Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic
What matters is that it has the __capability__ of doing it, in ways that would be difficult to detect, when it proves expedient to do so.
See this 2019 article outlining Chinese Communist moderation policies that (obviously) were attached to the app when TikTok was new, but were removed for non-Chinese user communities.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
China has had such social networks for a long time. Their Weibo and Xiaohongshu are two prominent examples. Weibo started as a copycat of Twitter, but then beats Twitter hands-down with faster iterations, better features, and more vibrant user engagement despite the gross censorship imposed by the government.
My guess is that TT can still thrive without American content, as long as other governments do not interfere as the US did. A potential threat to TT is that the US still has the best consumer market, so creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization, thus snatching away TT's current user base in other countries.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/chinese-app-rednote-hits-1-i...
It's called Dispo. You probably haven't heard of it because it became almost irrelevant a few weeks after launch. #1 on the app store doesn't mean a whole lot.
It may not retain all the new users, but it is not going to become irrelevant.
My experience in the UK is that the whole Chinese community is on it for anything (discussions, classifieds...) instead of Facebook, Insta, etc.
Seems people are already mass migrating to Rednote. I’m not sure how that plays out though.
For many it was a revelation that the US government/media complex has been systematically lying to them about China. They are arriving at an acceptance that the US is a shabby declining empire dominated by a corrupt elite and heartless broligarchs. Always a good thing to bump up against reality, imho.
However I think that the US-based population of Tiktok refugees will subside once the novelty effect has worn off. Probably shrink by half in a month. Hopefully there will remain a positive lingering effect.
This is a weird fantasy, but it brings up an interesting point. The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture. Especially when compared to Japan or Korea, countries with a fraction of the population but many, many times the influence.
I wish the CCP didn't wall off their citizens from the rest of the world in the name of protecting their own power. Think of the creativity we are all losing out on.
The CCP has tried to get their culture out there, it just has not been successful at the visually obvious scale of Japan or Korea. But their culture is definitely getting out there, and I think we often don't spot the Chinese influence on something unless some journalist finds out and writes an article about it.
Some of their influence is leveraged in business deals, with several movies being altered by the demand of the CCP, and these changes persisting in worldwide releases, not just the Chinese-released version of the movies.
Some of their influence is leveraged in video games- Genshin Impact is a famously successful Chinese game. There are some competitive Chinese teams in various pockets of e-sports too. Tencent also owns several video game developers, and occasionally uses their influence to change parts of a game to please the CCP.
There is a Chinese animation industry (print and video), and occasionally they get a worldwide success. I remember being surprised when I found out that "The Daily Life of the Immortal King" was Chinese- you can tell it isn't Japanese but lots of people guess that it is Korean.
It basically asks "Why can't China make a movie like this?" Kung Fu Panda was a love letter to Chinese culture, and it connected with people worldwide.
I think it comes down to government censorship. Art is expression and unapproved expression is seen as a threat to a dictatorship.
It makes me sad to think of all the Chinese art we have missed out on because of the insecurity of a government.
That's soft power right there.
I've had to resort to watching anime on Netflix with Chinese dubs - anime is good because people actually talk slower and usually use simple language. When I watched Three Body (Chinese version) the dialogue was impenetrable lol
Of course they have modernized, but most actual influence obtained thus fair (e.g. international olympic committees covering up investigations, stopping the NBA from venturing criticisms) has come from projection of soft power rather than being on the cultural cutting edge.
I've never considered there to be one, although I'm open to the idea.
It's easy for me to recognize an Ameican pop culture or an Anglo pop culture, and the favor each show for certain imports over others, but those don't seem nearly so universal as your usage of "global pop culture" suggests.
Latin, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, French, Indian/South Asian, etc each represent huge "pop culture" markets of their own but also each have their own import biases.
Chinese cultural (and censor) sensibilities are why big budget US movies are almost universally boring and terrible these days. Authoritarian societies aren’t exactly known for creating good art.
Censorship is the enemy of art.
To be honest, most of the movies/shows China creates sucks. They're Marvel-esque CGI fests with awful storylines.
Meanwhile, Japan and Korea are creating awesome media.
The whole narrative about the US gov trying to "hide" China isn't really true. There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about how great China is. And we welcome Chinese immigrants every year.
The real problem is that China itself doesn't execute when it comes to soft power.
Think of any industry and there is probably a Chinese competitor that is trying.
Tesla -> BYD
Google -> Baidu
Starbucks -> Luckin Coffee
IMAX -> China Film Giant Screen or maybe POLYMAX
Finally Disney -> Possibly Beijing Enlight Pictures
They released an animated film Ne Zha in 2019 that according to wikipedia was "the highest-grossing animated film in China,[16] the worldwide highest-grossing non-U.S. animated film,[17] and the second worldwide highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the time of its release. With a gross of over $725 million,[18] it was that year's fourth-highest-grossing animated film, and China's all time fourth-highest-grossing film.[19]"
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Zha_(2019_film)
Some great info here [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2J0pRJSToU
Ok I'll admit part of the reason people don't hear about these companies is that they are still too half baked. But look at BYD, they started off producing junk but this Chinese mindset of grinding and rapid iteration has put them to be super successful today. Why couldn't that kind of happen with their Disney competitor?
Another thing that might be happening is the literal closing off of the world into two spheres. Western US led and Eastern Chinese led. As we are seeing with BYD, they are taking over all the non western markets(and some western as well) but the US has essentially slammed the door shut on them (they haven't actually but made it impossible to enter with their tariffs). Maybe the Disney competitor will take hold in the non western aligned world?
Honestly its a shame they are not open or democratic. The idea of watching or even being part of a rising country that is building their empire is fascinating to watch. Will they collapse due to demographics or these fundamental issues like communism or will they make it? Unfortunately for many people, the only option is to stick with the US and work to keep the ship afloat as there is no place for them in China.
By contrast, there's now a very good k-drama with Lee Min-ho happening in space or the Gyeongseong Creature horror drama with Park Seo-joon.
I did see some good Chinese movies, mostly out of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai directed a bunch of good ones but they all predate Xi's regime and the takeover of HK.
One of my favourite contemporary artists is Ai Weiwei, who has gone missing in 2011 only to finally reappear four years later. I understand he now lives in Portugal. Got his book on my night stand, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.
There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about people travelling the most beautiful parts of China. Free for everyone to consume.
Chinese movies/shows just kind of suck, especially compared to the quality of Kdramas and anime.
For whom? UK users?
TikTok users who use the Chinese version are not consuming content from US creators. They won't notice this ban at all.
Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.
That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.
Also, TikTok is banned in India and—ironically—China [1].
That country’s creators belong to the largest native-speaking bloc of the most-commonly spoken language (native or not) in the world.
1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
US, UK, Canada, Australia is where you find the bulk of native speakers. In say Germany or whatever they may become fluent but it’s relatively rare for German parents to be speaking English to each other in casual conversation next to an infant’s crib.
Not how a lingua franca works.
There are 1.5 to 2 billion English speakers [1]. By far the largest number of people to speak a single language. Most of them are in America [2]. (If you count English learners, No. 2 is China [3].)
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today/articl...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236986651_The_stati...
But this number is dubious as it's largely from self response. Here [2] is a list by country. So 25% of Thais, 50% of Ukrainians, 50% of Poles, and so on "speak English."
In the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true. But "my name is Bob" maketh not a common tongue. If we narrowed it down to the percent of people that could hold a basic conversation, the number would plummet precipitously, likely leaving Mandarin at the top.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_languages...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
70% of Chinese speak Mandarin as a first language [1].
> the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true
This is English learners. If you count English learners, a third of Chinese speak English and a majority of the internet-connected world.
first language = A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth
[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/pages/stat/default.a...
> Plurality of the world ... speak English
Sorry, what point are you trying to make?
As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.
Only about 60 million Nigerians speak English. Hausa is the most commonly spoken native language. Just because English is the official language doesn't mean that it's people's native language.
I'm not just making stuff up. The 400 million number is from The Ethnologue, a source which linguists generally consider as reliable.
No you don’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Nigeria
~60 million people in Nigeria speak English out of 230 million people, but that 60 million isn’t almost exclusively native speakers.
Not all Nigerians can speak English. But there are a lot who can. It honestly felt about 50/50 to me. And I see some other commenters saying that 60 million Nigerians have some ability to speak it. (But you need to think of that like if I was to say 60 million Americans have some ability to speak Spanish.)
However, even for those with some facility with English,I don't know that I'd classify it as their native language.
Of that 1/3 (of the global population) a significant percentage have extremely limited skills, though the threshold is above knowing a few random words.
wikipedia. You are a bit off...
As for native you have US+UK+Canada+Australia+NZ+Ireland. So more then your 380M.
Where does it state this?
Do you assume that all immigrants are non-native english speakers?
There are also some native born Americans to immigrants who also don’t have English as their first language and People born in China whose first language is English, but that’s ever smaller refinements on a specific estimate.
> ~47 million Americans aren’t native English speakers having immigrated from a non English speaking country.
Your link says 46M total which includes native speakers. So it does not state how many non-native speakers. (not that it would matter as most would be proficient english speakers, just pointing out you're exagerating and your numbers are wrong)
“About 47.8 million immigrants in 2023” https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-immigrants-are-in-the-...
The what now? There are no Chinese nationals using TikTok. It's banned there. Like it's now banned in the US.
Can't really disagree, but it's my favorite place to pirate fonts. Typing out site:vk.com <thing I want> feels like a real life cheat code.
As of January 2025, the countries with the most TikTok users are:
Indonesia: Has the most active users with 157.6 million
United States: 120.5 million
Brazil: 105.2 million
Mexico: 77.5 million
Vietnam: 65.6 million
Pakistan: 62.0 million
Philippines: 56.1 million
Russian Federation: 56.0 million
Thailand: 50.8 million
Bangladesh: 41.1 million
There is an additional separate issue that influencer is a coveted 'career' for many children (~30%), so not only would it wipe out many jobs it'll kill their dreams. I guess like cancelling the space program at a time when kids really wanted to be astronauts.
I think there is a lot wrong with society and TikTok is part of it - but that's a much longer discussion for some other time.
They can dream new dreams. I didn't become an astronaut—and realized I didn't actually want to become one, either.
I think we have to understand the reality that the economy today is not what it once was, not even close. I think a lot of people are looking to the influence trade since they see the corporate / political / economic future as failing them and they want to carve out something on their own while the getting is good and while they still can. Sure some just want to be famous but others appear to have a very realistic view of their prospects both as an influencer and elsewhere.
When I say "made" I mean "Earning six or even seven figures."
Crafts and art services were also doing well. And certain influencers, obviously.
It pretty much took over from Insta, which Meta somehow managed to shoot in the head with some of their algo changes.
So - politics aside - that community is pretty unhappy about this.
Dealing with this is going to be interesting insight into Trump's leanings.
The podcaster felt that with AI capabilities getting better day by day (maybe - that's another discussion) that this multi factor classification could be automated. It seems not to have been done yet AFAIK.
The truth is that the recommendation engine is power and people drawn to power in the US were too quick to abuse it driving out the old hands - and once institutional knowledge is lost it's hard to get back.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/biden-administration-quiet...
But then again Telegram survived and they had to resort to kidnapping the CEO so if it does survive the US pretty much gifted that space to a geopolitical adversary
But I'm pretty sure Langley/MD folk thought about this and are betting on it not surviving
Tiktok america is over 50% of tiktok revenue I think that more than anything else would choke out growth world wide.
TikTok does not exist in China, they have their own version -- Douyin -- that complies with their more stringent privacy laws.
Yes, but it's also singularly focused on its core experience rather than being a bolted-on experience that is confusingly blended into an ecosystem where it's not the primary experience.
Instagram Reels is a bit better but it feels very "sanitized" and fake.
I can let Spotify play on its own for hours and it will be just right...Even with songs I know nothing about, it's just very good.
I tried Tik Tok once and I could see how easily it could pick content.
But Youtube and Youtube Music are a disaster. Youtube Music is a decent service, but it's hard to get suggested anything really.
Youtube Shorts are a disaster. Sure I like the Sopranos, I find some Joe Rogan's interview interesting and sure I like the NBA, but that's virtually all it feeds me, even if I start scrolling away to other topics.
It would be pretty cool if there was a respectable capitalist with enough money, or if that won't do it then a bigger more-respectable political organization or something, and Tiktok would be nothing but a memory of how things used to be before they got better.
Think about it, a social force or financial pressure strong enough to reverse unfavorable trends, even after they have already gained momentum.
And all it takes is focusing that pressure in an unfamiliar direction that could probably best be described as "anti-enshittification".
I know, that's a tall ask, never mind . . .
It also seems… sort of bad if an individual has the ability to be strong enough to reverse a social trend, right? So we basically would have to expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence. In general it is unreasonable to expect individuals to be so enlightened as to work against their own existence, I think.
Could very well be why Tiktok appeared to begin with, as the original owner's mission.
You're right, anyone who replaced it would most likely have the same mission.
Otherwise,
>expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence.
Yeah, that won't happen.
Very few could afford it anyway, probably only the usual suspects.
Ah, so Confucius say "Enshittification will be its own reward".
I guess that's as enlightened as things are going to get :\
Unclear. Biden and Trump both have stated that they will decline to enforce this law.
Cash bribes are how laws are define now. Is america avaluable audiemce?
But there's a biger issue than loss of American content should this come to pass: the loss os American ad revenue for the platform and creators. A lot of people create content aimed at Americans because an American audience is lucrative for ad revenue. If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?
Trump can blame Biden and move on.
> If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?
Bytedance makes most of its money from Douyin.
He has a major donor who owns part of Bytedance. They’re not losing their investment with this ban.
2. Bytedance will certainly lose value if its main product loses one of its main markets.
He also has a daughter who is the only American to hold patents in China without having to license IP to a Chinese company.
We are about to see some strange mental gymnastics out of 1600 Penn.
And yet..
TikTok-based social media campaigns also e.g. managed to unexpectedly swing an election in Romania (for Georgescu, was later annulled).
[1] https://www.absatzwirtschaft.de/tiktok-vs-instagram-ein-verg... - sorry, I only found a German source
This specific campaign was done via TikTok, though, and had massive impact, which shows that TikTok has heavy usage and is popular, outside of the US and China.
(I'm not American, I have no horse in this "ban foreign TikTok" race. :D)
Why they've done it via TikTok - I simply don't know. :D
Maybe better discoverability via the For You page?
maybe next Christmas if I'm not on the Santa naughty list
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/eff-statement-us-supre...
"The issue in the United States for support of Israel is not left and right. It is young and old. And the numbers of young people who think that Hamas' massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly odd. And so we really have a TikTok problem."
"[TikTok] is like Al Jazeera on steroids."
- Jonathan Gleenblat, ADL.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelCrimes/comments/1i3vwll/we_ha...
They hacked all of our major telco's and many of America's regulatory organizations including the treasury department. Specifically they used the telco hacks to gather geolocation data in order to pinpoint Americans and to spy on phone calls by abusing our legally mandated wiretap capabilities.
Yet people are arguing that we should allow the people who did that to continue to install apps on millions of Americans phones.
I can't tell if people just don't know that this is happening, or if they take their memes way too seriously. I sort of wonder if they don't know it's happening because they get their news from Tiktok and Tiktok is actively suppressing the stories.
Chinese spy agencies don't have to make an app that millions of American teens use to harvest data on them. American companies have been doing the job for them.
They — just like the FBI, NSA, American police departments and almost every TLA — can just buy the data from a broker, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admi...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government...
The brokers don't care. They'll sell to anyone and everyone. And the people they sell to don't care either. They'll process and re-sell it too. And on and on, until it ends up in the hands of every interested party on Earth, i.e. everyone.
So don't worry, the Chinese already have a detailed copy of your daily routine & reading habits. Just love this new world that we've created to make $0.002/click.
EDIT — if it makes you feel any better, the Chinese are doing it too!
https://www.wired.com/story/chineses-surveillance-state-is-s...
> The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals.
but data harvesting is not the real problem
the big problem is that you have a social network to which millions of your citizens are connected and used daily, which is under the control of a foreign adversary; it's a bit like if CBS was owned by the CCP
None of this is a normative statement - I’m not saying that this is good or bad, but if you want to know why the US government thinks Elon is better than ByteDance, it’s because they can shoot Elon tomorrow if they decide to, but they can’t shoot Zhang Yiming without causing an international incident.
Basically what Twitter was before Elon bought it.
I think those alone would be grounds to at least take a close look at his access to Twitter data, his censorship choices and any input he has into the algorithms.
If the general public is that stupid and that this kind of protection is really needed, then it also means that democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.
that's naive. Literally leaving CNN on in your living room 3 days a week will eventually change you opinions. Our minds absorb things we hear repetitively, even if we now they might be half truths or lies.
No. Influential foreign propaganda is inconspicuous. There’s nothing to be mindful of other than “who benefits if this is widely believed?” and it’s not a low opinion to think most people aren’t mindful of that.
I fully agree. The last year has shaken my confidence in democracy more than any other time in my lifetime. Not because of threats of war or revolution, but because what is the point of elections if the majority is chronically misinformed? Why have a yes/no election if no one knows what the question is?
It's still the best worst system, and i'm still going to vote in 2 years and again in 4, but my faith is low.
Democratic values are good but not without flaws.
What is your evidence that propaganda efficacy scales inversely with intelligence?
It's far from self evident. There is all kinds of nonsense that is catnip for overthinkers. The reason I paused at that assertion is that a lot of propaganda (and in general, military misdirection) is aimed at deceiving leadership.
Well, half the country voted for a convicted felon who _illegally tried to overturn the results of an election_, so yeah, it's pretty low.
> democracy is no longer a viable form of government because the public is also too stupid to vote.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" -- Churchill
It's flawed, but still miles better than what China has. At least there are still some safeguards on Trump, unlike Xi.
There are 2 separate problems:
- Lack of US privacy legislation
- Security-sensitive systems and infrastructure owned by competitor nations
PS: Curious how many total comments there are on this article. Either everyone is 3x as likely to comment on it as usual or something else is different. Ijs.
That there exist other problems is not a justification for inaction on this particular problem.
I'd absolutely consider Meta to be security sensitive. And Microsoft. And Google. And Netflix.
"You watched Red One, and we'll tell you employer and wife about it unless you ..."
How does this work?
What does that even mean in this context? Have you used TikTok before?
TikTok's CSAM problem is well documented [1].
Disposable idiots are a necessary asset for any intelligence operation. Kim Jong-nam's assasins, for example, "were told to play harmless tricks on people in the vicinity for a prank TV show" [2].
[1] https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/tiktok-under-fede...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam
It isn't like TikTok are the only part of the internet with a CSAM problem. By default anything that offers file hosting has a CSAM problem. To keep the Chinese away from blackmail material the US would have to ban any form of image hosting served from the Chinese mainland - the CSAM people go to the CSAM, it doesn't proactively seek people out.
Of course not. I was just providing an easy example of what TikTok may have that we don’t want the CCP to.
Did you mean for that link to go somewhere different?
Your link doesn't say anything about TikTok?
> Kim Jong-nam's assasins, for example, "were told to play harmless tricks on people in the vicinity for a prank TV show"
What? How is that connected to "blackmailable individual profiles"?
How can they blackmail me? Please explain. You mean like "I see you watch cat videos so now go revolt against your government or I will tell everyone you watch cat videos?", this is the blackmail part?
They may not be able to. But it sure would be helpful to have a list of people in likely financial distress with addresses close to military installations. Such a person may not ask questions if given a job offer from an influencer or whatever to take selfies around town.
Sure, that's possible, but I think it's a bit of a stretched argument. Can't you target people like that on Facebook with ads? Can't you buy data about these people from U.S. data brokers? Can't you already access this data publicly because people share it openly on social media?
We could shut all of this shit down if we actually wanted to, but that means going after American companies too, which they won't. They want to have the cake and eat it too: outlaw foreign spying on American users without outlawing domestic spying on American users. They want to make it so China can't do exactly what social media et al does in America, to Americans. Americans are not stupid: they are perceiving this. They know they are being manipulated, perhaps by China, perhaps by the U.S., definitely by dozens if not hundreds of private enterprises, likely all fucking three.
On one hand, the American government's priority is the security of America and her citizens, but on the other, we have an entire segment of the economy now utterly dependent on being able to violate citizen's privacy at will and at scale. Surveillance capitalism and foreign surveillance are effectively interoperable. You can't kill one without killing the other.
Edit: And even more on the personal front, for your every day Joe: this is completely stake-less. "Oh China is spying on me!" big fucking deal. The NSA was caught spying on us decades ago, and by all accounts, they still are. Google AdSense probably knows my resting heart rate and rectal measurements that it will use to try and sell me the new flavor of Oreo. We accept as a given that our privacy is basically long gone, not only did that boat leave the pier, it sailed to the mid-Atlantic, sunk, and a bunch of billionaires imploded trying to check out the wreckage in a poorly made submarine. I don't fucking care if China is spying on me too, that's just a fact of my online existence.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/15/duolingo-sees-216-spike-in...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-boycott-faceb...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/over-half-million-tiktok-...
People are protesting because it's cool to do especially when you're a rebellious youngster but I'm pretty convinced it's going to fizzle out. I don't think it's fair to say it's disingenuous to believe as much. Maybe you could say it's "too early" to write it off, to which I'd respond saying it's too early to buy into the belief that it will take over American culture in any way that resembles TikTok.... and, even if it did, that it would not be banned from the US again.
Or maybe this story is hugely relevant to a lot more people than your average story? I find it hard to believe china is waging a huge phsyop on HN
E.g. Fox News comments are that are base-level "Nunh unh!" or argumentless boosting.
Meta collects your data and advertisers can indirectly use that data to serve you ads. In addition, government actors can use Meta's advertising tools to spread propaganda.
But TikTok is an all-in-one solution. The government have direct control over the algorithm in addition to having access to all of the data. They don't have to go through a third party intermediary like Meta and aren't only limited by a public advertising API.
I don't understand how or why this is hard for people to grasp? It's no different than Radio Free Europe being secretly funded by the CIA, except it's even more powerful.
This right here is the answer. People just don’t care about this type of privacy because they assume some American company already has their data. Combine that with us being two generations removed from the Cold War and the average TikTok user doesn’t see any reason why the owner of this specific data being Chinese matters and frankly I’m sympathetic to that argument. If you live in the US, someone like Musk is going to have a greater influence on your life than the Chinese government and I see no reason to trust him any more or less than the Chinese government. So any discussion of this being a matter of national security just rings hollow.
That's the real value of TikTok. Having the eyeballs of young people and being able to (subtly or not) influence their perception of the world is valuable in a way that massive amounts of data aren't.
I do also worry about this with Musk, but I also acknowledge that taking away social media ownership from a foreign company is different than taking it away from a US company.
Fox News* is America's most watched television news source. Is this the kind of alternative you are envisioning?
*Also owned by a foreign national
If there was a way to force Musk to sell X or ban it, I would support that 100%. But that's unlikely to ever happen especially now with co-President Musk. But in the meantime, either breaking TT free of CCP control, or banning it, would be at least one battle won.
My point isn't that there is some grand conspiracy here, just that if you wanted to have outsized influence on people who are there just for entertainment, you could do it and make it look organic. Inception has to be the target's idea and all that.
In a similar vein I see talking heads of people in their kitchens contemplate world issues. Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, life in China: you can get in-depth opinions on all those issues from a hairdresser in Nebraska or a mechanic in Michigan, and they all will present them well enough. So I think there is something there.
But the clear damn solution is to pass laws that prohibit a bunch of this stuff across the board. The fact that Instagram Reels can do exactly what TikTok is doing but with ties to a different world power makes this ban seem shameless. Ban them all. Or none. Or regulate them like they should be regulated. But don't pretend like this security theater is somehow going to fix anything meaningful.
Apparently influencers get a lot of unsolicited pressure to take stances on things like Palestine even if they're just a crafting influencer.
What a weird comment. I goaded an interpretation out of you? I was just trying to get at why you seemingly think TikTok is different than any other social network and your response was that "There is an undercurrent of opinion on the platform that happens to align with Chinese worldviews". But I guess the bad faith alarm has already been triggered so not much point continuing from here.
Just because Musk is a f*ing problem for all Americans, doesn't mean that the CCP isn't a problem. Not much you can do about "President" Musk -- so you have to work with what you can control.
I frankly don't understand why I keep seeing on social media people like yourselves push the idea that it's okay because other companies are also harvesting the data. It is obviously not about the data. It is about China being in a position to manipulate information flow.
That's why arguing in this sense never works. Someone isn't trying to work something out, they've already decided and are trying to explain the decision to you. That's not the same thing as thinking through something.
If there is an invasion of Taiwan, I don't think it would be unthinkable that everyone's phones being broken wouldn't be a major tactical and political advantage of shifting the US's priorities and political will in the short run.
Sure, it burns the asset in the process, but I mean... this has been a priority for an entire century.
along with details about how the US has no defensive alliance with taiwan, and that the US does not need to intervene
This is a very realistic scenario. It doesn't mean people will suddenly see messages from the CCP on their screens. It could mean that posts that are critical of China are subtly downweighted (not banned, that would be too obvious and problematic) while those favorable towards China would be upweighted.
One thing the CCP is quite good at, from its long experience of always controlling the narrative in China, is this type of social media manipulation.
If they can't take the island quickly, then maybe propaganda helps. I just think neutering or nuking everyone's phones for a few days is enough to genuinely split the attention of the American people. I think it's very safe to say our culture cares much more about it's butter than it's guns right now. We are decadent.
Edit: other sites put YouTube, and others higher with TikTok at 40% of phones.
Nothing else controlled by the CCP looks like it even comes close to that in America.
A surprising (and funny) example of this is how the open-source intelligence community and sites like Bellingcat used purchased or leaked data from private Russian commercial data brokers to identify and track the detailed movements of elite Russian assassination squads inside Russia as well as in various other countries. They learned the exact buildings where they go to work every day as well as who they met with and their home addresses. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-bellingcat-unmas...
Volunteer open-source researchers also used these readily available data sources to identify and publicly out several previously unknown Russian sleeper agents who'd spent years hiding in Western countries while building cover identities and making contacts. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/08/25/socialite-widow-j...
To your point, if volunteer internet hobbyists can use commercial broker data to identify and track elite Russian assassins and undercover sleeper agents, in Russia and around the world, China having direct access to US Tiktok data, which Tiktok sells to anyone through brokers anyway, doesn't seem like an existential intelligence threat to our national security. Forcing TikTok to divest Chinese ownership would, at most, make Chinese intelligence go through an extra step and pay a little for the data.
If politicians were really worried about foreign adversaries aggregating comprehensive data profiles on everyone, just addressing China's access to TikTok is a side show distraction. Why didn't they pass legislation banning all major social media services from selling or sharing certain kinds of data and requiring the anonymization of other kinds of data to prevent anyone aggregating composite profiles across multiple social platforms or data brokers? That would actually reduce the threat profile somewhat.
Obviously, they aren't doing that because the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, INS, IRS, Homeland Security and their Five Eyes international partners are aggressively buying data broker info on all US residents at massive scale every day and aggregating it into comprehensive profiles - all with no warrants, probable cause or oversight. The US Constitution doesn't apply because it's just private commercial data, not government data. Any such law would have to explicitly carve out exceptions allowing US and allied intelligence agencies to continue doing this. Alternatively, they could put such use under the secret FISA intelligence court. US intelligence has thoroughly co-opted FISA oversight but jumping through the FISA hoop is extra work and filling out the paperwork to be rubber-stamped is annoying. They much prefer remaining completely unregulated and unsupervised like they are now, collecting everything on everyone all the time without limit. They've certainly already automated collecting all the data they want from every broker.
So yeah... let's very publicly make a big show of slapping just China and only about TikTok - and loudly proclaim we really did something to protect citizen privacy and reduce our national data aggregation attack surface. This is the intelligence community cleverly offering a fig leaf of plausible deniability to politicians who can now claim they "did something", while leaving the US intelligence community free to pillage every last shred of citizen privacy in secret.
Any idea why it is unidirectional? If the data is openly available why can't the Russians track US/Ukrainian agents the same way?
Russian officials / employees are easier to bribe, so there are brokers selling access to car ownership / license plate records, cell phone location records and call logs, passport records etc.
There's a good Bellingcat article on this at https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-...
Or did Tom Clancy lie and they are so incompetent they can't even use OSINT tools lol
I'm not an expert though. There's a lot of detailed info on OSINT sources and methods online. The bottom line is it's extremely difficult to put the data genie back in the bottle. The stuff seeps out everywhere and searching aggregated databases from multiple sources and time periods uncovers any connection. It only requires a single slip-up happening one time. This just reinforces that a regular citizen in a Western democracy who's not a spy trained to operate under cover with a nation-state providing authentic false identities, is screwed in terms of maintaining their own privacy.
Is the FSB/GRU more incompetent than my local fentanyl dealer? new identity, plastic surgery, contacts to protect iris scanning, no digital comms except in house tech, avoiding legal entrypoints seem to be the very basic in today's age especially for a hit
Tom Clancy lied that's a few hours of my life I'll never get back lol
Like foreign adversaries can already run influence campaigns on american media platforms, often, the american ones will even cooperate with it. It’s just theater. They dont need tiktok to do whatever people are saying the reason is.
The other key point you are missing is that we can ban one app and then ban/regulate others later. You don’t have to do it all at once even if all organizations were engaging in the same behavior.
Even more - the process and legislation required to just ban/regulate Meta or other American tech companies for example is more difficult not just because of the actual legal apparatus required to make it happen, but because of economic considerations and jobs and such too. Further, no doubt the CIA, NSA, and FBI all but have offices at Meta headquarters. They might be engaging in activity or influence campaigns we don’t like - but that’s for us to figure out, not some other country.
TikTok is just some random company that doesn’t matter outside of engaging in activities we don’t like and we choose to allow it to do business in the United States as we see fit.
As casually as we can decide to allow it to do business in the United States so too can we revoke that permission. We do this all the time. We recently stopped Nippon Steel from buying US Steel. TikTok isn’t anything special.
It's about having an adversarial entity -- one with whom the US could be at war with one day -- have control over a social media network that is highly pervasive in US society. It's not about harvesting the data. It's about having the ability to subtly manipulate public opinion through control of the algorithm that determines what comes up on people's feeds.
Yes, foreign adversaries can run TV ads like anyone else, or have their people on social media to try to sway the conversation (there's even a name for these people in China - "wumao"). I'm sure there's some people working for the CCP on this thread. But control of the network is a whole other level of influence -- orders of magnitude greater.
But yet what happens in practice is people line up to defend it. I can only guess most of the people defending it are active users and aren't aware of how distorted their perception of the world is by the content they see there.
It's possible to believe TikTok is bad and that the pathway the US just proved out to banning it in the US has shown that no US court will seriously question the "security reasons" fig leaf. Telegram and Signal are both used by plenty of people the US could easily paint as "security threats" and it's unclear there's any defense to a ban that they could mount at this point.
Is there any evidence of this? FWIW, I saw plenty of tiktoks talking about the China hack
We're not going let you have nukes just because you haven't nuked anybody yet.
It's beyond naive.
People watch all sorts of content on TikTok including sexual/sensual content. While they are watching alone in their rooms, all their usage patterns are recorded in intimate details and they reveal all their sexual proclivities. That is quite easy fodder for blackmail.
Health information can often easily be gleaned from people's watch history. If you know people are struggling with their mental or physical health, or are having financial troubles, these are all things that can be used as leverage for blackmail.
They may be blackmailed for watching forbidden topics like Russia friendly channels. Or explicit material if TikTok has it.
They may be blackmailed if they are in the wrong social network if TikTok has such a thing.
And furthermore, why is it okay that it's collected AND owned by a company based in a country not subject to the rule of law?
"Facebook does it too" isn't a reason not to be worried about TikTok.
Because I, as an adult, decided that I am ok with sharing my personal data within their app in exchange for getting to use the app.
As long as I am not sharing personal data of other people (who haven’t consented to it like I did) or some government/work/etc info that I have no right to share, I am not sure how this is anyone else’s business.
P.S. I would somewhat get your argument if it wasn’t TikTok but something that could theoretically affect the country’s infrastructure or safety (e.g., tax preparation software or a money-managing app or an MFA app for secure logins). But all personal data on me that TikTok has is purely my own, has nothing critical at all (all it knows is what i watch and do within the app), and has zero effect on anyone or anything else.
The ruling mentions that users are in fact doing this.
> (Draft National Security Agreement noting that TikTok collects [...] and device and network data (including device contacts and calendars)). If, for example, a user allows TikTok access to the user’s phone contact list to connect with others on the platform, TikTok can access “any data stored in the user’s contact list,” including names, contact information, contact photos, job titles, and notes. 2 id., at 659.
I also don't believe that most adults using this app really know how much data TikTok collects. It isn't just "what i watch and do within the app". A fuller quote from the above that doesn't just focus on data involving other people is
> The platform collects extensive personal information from and about its users. See H. R. Rep., at 3 (Public reporting has suggested that TikTok’s “data collection practices extend to age, phone number, precise location, internet address, device used, phone contacts, social network connections, the content of private messages sent through the application, and videos watched.”); 1 App. 241 (Draft National Security Agreement noting that TikTok collects user data, user content, behavioral data (including “keystroke patterns and rhythms”), and device and network data (including device contacts and calenders)).
I also don't particularly believe that the US has to allow espionage just because the government spying got the individuals being spied on to agree to it.
And why have we forgotten about kids?
The law in question doesn't forbid you, or any other adult, or even any child for that matter, from knowingly installing the app. It forbids companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. You can still install the app if you want, the US companies just can't help operate the espionage app.
I'd have no problem either, if TikTok were only collecting data on you.
I wouldn't have much of a problem, if TikTok were collecting data on x0,000s of people.
To me, it rises to the level of security-sensitive when information is collected on enough people that there's a high likelihood of people in future sensitive positions (military, government, legal) having had their information collected historically.
One can't put the genie back in the bottle when a competitor government can see a new president elected... and pull up a profile of what they swiped from 10-40.
That scenario impacts not just you (the future president), but everyone you have power or influence over.
And given the Chinese government's documented willingness to coerce people in foreign countries (i.e. the "not police" police stations), betting they won't use that power seems shortsighted...
You, as an adult, may also choose to drunk drive. The country is bigger than single people. Security threats are collective.
It's easy to have a gut reaction that your own government has a greater impact on your life than a foreign one, but that does not reflect the reality that 1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens; 2) the Chinese government has; and 3) the US and China are going to war one day, and China might win.
we're not in that situation, but i would expect the people of crimea and donetsk would prefer that nobody surveilled them.
but in a practical sense, surveilliance of people in donetsk and crimea by china would be less immediately threatening to their life, because china is not conducting military action in those places.
>1) the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens
i don't understand how anyone can seriously make this claim, and i really don't understand why potential danger isn't a consideration.
potential danger is simply danger. privacy rights are established in recognition that a threat is itself harmful.
and abuse is not unreal. america has had a larger incarcerated population than any other country for my entire lifetime. both absolute size and per capita.
in america, political movements are consistently dismantled by counterintelligence. political action is met with violence and arrest.
perhaps few people are outright murdered, but it's not necessary to murder the powerless. outside of america proper, american power is much more lethal.
every concern and contradiction that threatens the present situation - environment, infrastructure, housing, healthcare, labor, war - is maintained by suppression of political organizing, enabled by surveillance.
the administration incoming next week has promised a massive project of deportation. it has promised retaliation against journalists. it is apparently motivated to criminalize the existence of transgender people. none of these threats are reduced by american surveillance of american people.
>2) the Chinese government has [abused its power]
sure. but this is a problem primarily for chinese people, and americans are not subjects of chinese power.
american surveillance of american people does not reduce any threat of chinese power.
why isn't the american legislature addressing the problems of american people subject to american power?
>3) the US and China are going to war one day.
i don't expect this. there's too much to lose on both sides. it would be a disaster and a tragedy.
true or not, it's certain that american citizens would benefit, and america itself would improve, if arbitrary surveillance on the present scale was impossible.
And before someone hops in with Kent State, Tuskegee trials, et al., let's set the comparison bar at order-of x00,000 to x0,000,000 citizens killed by the government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_to...
To the extent this is maybe remotely arguably defensible, it is only so because the US has historically defined internal subjects who it wished to abuse most intently as non-citizens (or even legal non-persons), including chattel slavery of much of the Black population until the Civil War, and the largely genocidal American Indian wars up through 1924. But even in those cases you still have to ignore a lot of abuse in the period after nominal citizenship was granted (for Black Americans, especially, but very much not exclusively, in the first century after abolition of slavery).
And should Israeli companies, like those associated with NSO Group, face similar scrutiny after reports of their tools being used to hack U.S. State Department employee phones?
As other powers arise, they will naturally want equivalence. The American government may decide that is not in their interest to make this easy - but I'd suggest as Hacker News community, we retain the ability to see beyond propaganda and balance contrary viewpoint.In this case (or the case on Nippon steel),how does one differentiate between "security" considerations and potentially a straightforward cash grab attempt by rich American investors?
This. It's this. Don't waste your time thinking past this answer, you already nailed it.
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
1. Competitive balance. China does not allow US social media companies. If we allow theirs, our industry is essentially fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
2. China controls the algorithm for determining who sees what. This gives them tremendous ability to influence public opinion, and consequently public elections. That cannot be allowed to stand as long as China is hostile to the US.
3. China gets extremely detailed data about the interests and proclivities of millions of Americans, including military personnel and elected officials. This data is not otherwise publicly available and can be used for blackmail and other manipulation. Which is completely unacceptable when we have no mechanism to punish them from doing this short of global nuclear war.
Even ignoring the enormous threat to national sovereignty, TikTok has no redeeming qualities. It's an addiction machine that profits off people wasting away in front a screen. That alone is not a reason to ban it, but it sure does make the case stronger.
Banning TikTok is a clear-cut positive for the American people. Every American adult should be in support.
There is no wall. The Trump "tax cuts" raised taxes on most Americans and cut them for the 1%. Trump has not faced any consequences for betrayal in the past, why would he now?
In fact, TikTok helps promote the lack of awareness of all the above. If anything he'll want to keep it in place, to keep the public misinformed.
Maybe the uniparty in the USA should make it a priority to improve the life of everyday Americans and not Zuck and Elon. Young people don’t care who the establishment is warring with because they know the establishment doesn’t represent them, they represent themselves.
I would say both at the same time
Please cite your sources. After decades of watching American propaganda, we know all too well that it is trivial to make up shit from thin air and have a large segment of the population eat it up.
But here you go anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
Google it yourself, if you're actually interested. It's fascinating.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/us/politics/china-hack-tr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
> On January 12, 2010, Google revealed on its weblog that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. The company said the attack occurred in mid-December and originated from China. Google stated that more than 20 other companies had been attacked; other sources have since cited that more than 34 organizations were targeted.
I am. Google Salt Typhoon.
Can I see the evidence?
Search for Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon.
Besides, who cares if China is listening to us through the app. China and I have no beef with one another. China feeds me and clothes me and builds most of the stuff in my life and I give China my money. It's a good relationship! Much better than my relationship with this state, tbh.
Exactly. Everyone is having fun bidding adieu to their Chinese spys. And I think they're losing sight of the fact that there's abundant reporting on harrassing expats and dissidents internationally, pressuring countries to comply with their extradition requests, to say nothing of jailing human rights lawyers and democratic activists and detaining foreigners who enter China based on their online footprint.
Most of the time I bring this up I get incredulous denials that any of this happens (I then politely point such folks to Human Rights Watch reporting on the topic), or I just hear a lot of whataboutism that doesn't even pretend to defend Tiktok.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/09/japan-chinese-authoritie...
And here's their overall 2025 page on China which details, among other things, harassment of critics based out of Italy, detention of U.S. based artist, and even harrassment of protestors in San Fransisco.
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/china
I think their suppression of criticism on Uighur forced labor has also encompassed harassment of extended support networks people from the region as well, but that's just off the top of my head and not necessarily on that page.
Elizabeth B. Prelogar: And the one final point on this is that ByteDance was not a trusted partner here. It wasn't a company that the United States could simply expect to comply with any requirements in good faith.
And there was actual factual evidence to show that even during a period of time when the company was representing that it had walled off the U.S. data and it was protected, there was a well-publicized incident where ByteDance and China surveilled U.S. journalists using their location data --this is the protected U.S. data --in order to try to figure out who was leaking information from the company to those journalists.
This paternalistic framing is the disconnect between you and those opposed to the ban. The idea that it's TikTok insidiously worming its way onto American phones like a virus. In reality, people download the app and use it because they like it. This ban will, in effect, prevent people from accessing an information service they prefer. You must acknowledge this and argue why that is a worthy loss of autonomy if you want to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it.
If it helps, reframe the ban as one on a website rather than an app. They're interchangeable in this context, but I've observed "app" to be somewhat thought-terminating to some people.
For the record - I would totally support a ban on social media services that collect over some minimal threshold of user data for any purposes. This would alleviate fears of spying and targeted manipulation by foreign powers through their own platforms (TikTok) and campaigns staged on domestic social media. But just banning a platform because it's Chinese-owned? That's emblematic of a team-sports motivation. "Americans can only be exposed to our propaganda, not theirs!" How about robust protections against all propaganda? That's a requirement for a functional democracy.
The point of my response is: sometimes you have to be paternalistic, and the federal government doesn't need to meaningfully defend the ban to someone who doesn't like it because those people don't matter. They meaningfully defended the ban to the courts.
No, it's just information asymmetry shaping public opinion. The US lets its dirty laundry air out. US whistleblowers, press, and historians dig up every shitty thing the US has ever done and US citizens are free to discuss it, sing about it, turn it into movies and viral memes, etc. China doesn't allow this. No one in China is going to become famous by calling for justice for those killed by Mao or exposing MSS-installed backdoors in Chinese telecoms. That kind of talk is quelled immediately. The result is that public discourse trends more anti-American than anti-China.
If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.
Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.
This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.
*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.
I'd agree that forbidding individuals from installing it would be an overreach, because it would be a more restrictive step then is reasonably necessary to eliminate the legitimate government interest of counter espionage.
I don't think that the governments actions here are more restrictive than necessary for that. The fact that they make some legitimate actions more difficult is completely acceptable (inevitable even).
For most people the Venn Diagram of cars they can acquire, and road legal cars, is a single circle. The government mandating all cars, even those driven solely on private property, be road legal would be an absurd overreach. At the same time they have no obligation to make it easy to acquire non road legal cars just because their legitimate regulations have happened to make that difficult.
The government currently lacks the ability to yank a binary from computing devices en masse, but the technology to do so is already mostly in place. (See Apple’s notarization escapades in the EU, for example. And I think Microsoft is working in a similar direction: https://secret.club/2021/06/28/windows11-tpms.html) I have a sickening feeling that this is only step one, and that the government will eventually mandate the ability to control and curate all software running on desktop and mobile devices within the country for “security” reasons. National security goons are salivating at the prospect, to say nothing of US corporations that are getting clobbered by foreign competitors.
If the government were to mandate that they use that feature, or Apple use that feature, especially to prevent future side-loaded installs, I'd be much more sympathetic to the overreach arguments. But that's not what they did. Rather this is a narrow law that prevents these companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. The fact that they could do some other bad thing doesn't mean the thing they did is bad.
The courts use phrases like "narrowly tailored to achieve the governments legitimate interest" to describe the balancing test here...
There is no such thing as unlimited liberty, especially with regards to systems under control of hostile nations such as China and Russia. Would you be comfortable allowing mass release of unrestricted Hamas / ISIS, Russian propaganda content to North American teenagers? National security is a real thing and geopolitics always play a critical role in people's lives.
One could perhaps argue that we must educate our citizens better, however I think rather than being naive, it's better to implement realistic regulations (within _democratic_ means of course) to contain the threats.
Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.
Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.
You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.
Can you think of any reason a government engaged in cyberwarfare might want to ensure there was informational asymmetry? I sure can.
What exactly it says... obviously we don't know.
I don't particularly trust Google or Apple to firewall a malicious and determined nation-state actor (0 days being 0 days), but it seems lower probability than the technically trivial data collection.
But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.
Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.
The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.
I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".
This law is different to that, it's all about specific actors, not about behavior and actions. A "people we don't like" list. CNN could be on a similar list soon. All constitutional of course - the law will specifically mention how this is all for national security. And no one's speech is being suppressed, the journalists can always write for a different news channel.
edit: before you downvote me, how many of you remember:
- Bullrun
- PRISM
- Dual EC DRBG and the Juniper backdoors, that too also were exploited by secondary adversaries
- FBI urging Apple to install a backdoor for the govt after the San Bernardino shootings
- the government only recently mandating that partnered zero-day vendors must not sell their wares to other clients who would then target them against Americans
- Vault7
- XKeyscore
- STELLARWIND
- MUSCULAR
etc.?
Who are "the people who did that" - Byte Dance or China as a whole? If it's the latter, I'm afraid there are still plenty of apps made by Chinese companies like, DJI, Lenovo, and thousands of IoT apps to control random geegaws via WiFi or BT.
It's not hard to see the pattern: any Chinese tech champion that does as well as, or better than American companies will find itself in legal peril. Huawei didn't get in trouble after hacking Nortel, but they got sanctioned much later, when their 5G base equipment was well-received by the markets. TikTok had the best ML-based recommendation systems when it burst in the scene, Google and Meta still haven't quite caught up yet.
(I'm asking about the lived experience outside of the political questions around who should decide what we see / access online.)
EDIT: Thank you for the replies! Interesting. I'm still wondering if most people use TikTok just for passive entertainment? I don't love Youtube, but it's been a huge learning and music discovery resource for me.
The only thing I get sent from TikTok are dances and silly memes but I don't have an account.
Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.
Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.
On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.
The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.
How does TikTok make money?
I'll probably continue trying to use the app if possible since I mostly connect with Japanese content, but I will say there's also a fun world of Japanese creators who straddle the English and Japanese speaking words who are about to lose an outlet to the English speaking world, and I feel really bad for that too.
The "algorithm" is also just so much better than Reels and others. I spent an afternoon of PTO training my algorithm a couple years ago and it's been great ever since. My partner and I share TikToks with each other all the time and. we shape each other's algorithm and interests. Reels fixates too much on your follows and Youtube Shorts is honestly a garbage experience. Both platforms really reward creators building "brands" around their content rather than just being authentic or silly. I treat Reels as the place for polished creators or local businesses who are trying to sell me something and TikTok as the place for content. I find that I get a lot less ragebait surfaced to me than I do on other platforms, though I admit my partner gets more than I do. We both skip those videos quickly and that has helped keep this stuff off our FYP.
An important thing to remember is TikTok was one of the first platforms that was opt-in for short-form content. Both Reels and Shorts was foisted upon users who had different expectations of the network and as such had to deal with the impedance mismatch of the existing network and users who didn't want short-form content. TikTok's entire value proposition is short-form content.
That said, the algorithm got noticeably worse after 2021. Maybe because of the TikTok shop. I’ve categorized around 3,000 clips into different collections (with 600+ being in “educational”) but that fell off over the last few years. I would be a lot more upset about the ban if they had maintained quality, but now I’m like well, whatever.
It's by contrast to say, Youtube and X, where The Algorithm (tm) sustains a central Nile river of dominant creators and you're either in it or you're not.
That said, I think the political questions are rightly the dominant ones in this convo and those color my lived experience of it.
I had been exposed to DouYin before, but my first experience of TikTok in real life was someone at a party, holding their phone, exclaiming something along the lines of "I can't look away, it's so addictive." It was uncomfortable, and I'm aware of how fake this sounds, but it happened.
But I think this is very bad.
With Section 230 in crosshairs, EARN IT being reintroduced every year or two, and access to books and sites being fragmented across the US, things are very already bad, and have the potential to get much worse. TikTok being banned is censorship, and presents a significant delta towards more censorship.
Congress didn't just "ban TikTok", Congress banned its first social media. This is case law, this is precedent, this is a path for banning other social media apps.
I think this is bad because I think this is the start of something new and something bad for the internet.
The "sticky"-ness is real, but many will flock to the TikTok copies in other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, anyway.
Regardless, I enjoy the platform. It's fun to reference the viral sounds/trends on the platform with other friends that use it.
technology is just like a tool. how people use it matters not the technology itself can be evil. tiktok's algorithm helps speed up information delivery to the people who likes it. eventually it helps to form a community of people online who like similar thing or have similar options. people needs to be aware of the content on any platform has "survivorship bias". seeing couple of examples is not representing the whole.
A sense of relief may be a coping mechanism. I've heard laid-off colleagues inform me they felt relief in the immediate aftermath; granted, the lay-offs were pre-announced before they communicated who would be "impacted", and it was at a high-pressure environment; but the human mind sometimes reacts in unexpected ways to loss outside of one's control. Rationalization is a mechanism for ego defense.
I trust TikTok's "algorithm" to give me quick and entertaining short-bits about what's going on, what's interesting, etc. It learns what I'm into effortlessly, and I appreciate how every now and then it would throw in a completely new (to me) genera or type of content to check out. Whenever I open it, there is a feed that's been curated to me about things I'm interested in checking out, few new things that are hit or miss (and I like that), and very few infuriating/stupid (to me) things.
Its recommendation engine is the best I have used. It's baffling how shitty YouTube's algorithm is. I discover YouTube channels I'm into form TikTok. Sometimes I'd discover new (or old) interesting videos from YouTube channels I already follow from TikTok first. For example, I follow Veritasium and 3Blue1Brown on YouTube but I certainly haven't watched their full back catalog. YouTube NEVER recommends to me anything from their back catalog. When I'm in the mood, I have to go to their channel, scroll for a while, then try to find a video I'd be interested in from the thumbnail/title. And once I do, YouTube will re-recommend to me all the videos I have already watched from them (which are already their best performing videos). Rarely would it recommend something new from them.
On TikTok, it frequently would pull clips from old Veritasium or 3Blue1Brown videos for me which I'd get hooked after watching 10 seconds, then hob on YouTube to watch the full video. It's insane how bad YouTube recommendation algorithm is. Literally the entire "recommended" section of youtube is stuff I have watched before, or stuff with exactly the same content as things I have watched before.
Here is how I find their recommendation algorithm to work:
YouTube: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? Here is that video again, and 10 other "brisket smoking videos". These are just gonna be stuck on your home page for the next couple of weeks now. You need to click on them one by one and mark "not interested" in which case you're clearly not interested in BBQ or cooking. Here are the last 10 videos you watched, and some MrBeast videos and some random YouTube drama videos.
TikTok: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? How about another BBQ video, a video about smokers and their models, some videos about cookouts and BBQ side dishes, a video about a DIY smoker, another about a DIY backyard project for hosting BBQ cookouts, a video about how smoke flavors food, a video about the history of BBQ in the south, a video about a BBQ joint in your city (or where ever my VPN is connected from), etc. And if you're not interested in any of those particular types, it learns from how long you spend watching the video and would branch more or less in that direction in the future.
Another example is search. Search for "sci fi books recommendations":
YouTube: Here are 3 videos about Sci-Fi books. Here are 4 brisket smoking videos. Here are some lost hikers videos (because you watched a video about a lost hiker 3 weeks ago). Here are 3 videos about a breaking story in the news. Here are 2 videos about sci-fi books, and another 8 about brisket.
TikTok: Here is a feed of videos about Sci-Fi books. And I'll make sure to throw in sci-fi book videos into your curated feed every now and then to see if you're interested.
I'm not just upset because I have a general dislike of being told I'm an idiotic, addicted, communist stooge who is easily brainwashed. I am used to folks telling me that- it started when I was writing anti-war editorials in the early oughts, so there is nothing new in that.
What I regret is that I have been following a number of quite-good political discussions on the platform, with a nicely diverse group of interlocutors.
While the discussion generally leans far left, there are many flavors of that left:
not a lot of tankies, mostly just people between "dirt bag left" and "black panther party", lots of women, BIPOC, trans folks, academics, working people, indigenous folks, queer folks of all stripes, activists, and folks who just don't like authority.
Those conversations had been very hard to come by on Yt, Ig, or Fb.
I think it's the response format for videos. I don't think it's worth bothering to speculate about other reasons, though I did note that several legitimate left news sources were shuttered in 2020 when Meta and Tw started their political purge.
Anyhow, I know that folks in the US have very little regard for political autonomy, so I am not surprised that this happens, and compared to the carceral state and the happy ecocide of the planet this is a very little thing. But I will still miss it.
I like living in a country where the government does not get to decide what I'm allowed to read/watch/see. The TikTok ban chips away at that in a meaningful way.
I value this above most other concerns, including vague worries about "Chinese spying".
Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law. TikTok is completely legal under the law as long as they divest it. However, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.
It's great that an entire nation can gain wealth through hard work and good strategic decisions, at least in some way. But it hurts me that the US lost its way in the process by losing so much manufacturing capabilities, to the point that we can't even adequately produce saline solutions, nor could we make shells or screws for our war planes cheaply.
I’d be interested if there’s any objective measure of how much a countries money is passed down back to its citizens or hoarded by people in power. Is there any such measure?
Not to mention the training and development it would give a whole new class of people in China to operate global businesses.
Congress looked at some evidence and made a decision. That is their purview and our checks-and-balances do not allow the courts to second-guess Congress like that. They can look at the "how" of the law, but not the "why".
Specifically the court looked at "what is congress' goal and is there any other way to achieve that goal that doesn't stop as much speech" and there isn't, but they can't question the validity of Congress' goals.
So there's no point in Bytedance arguing any of it, at least not in court.
I think in a national security paradigm, you model threats and threat capabilities rather than reacting to threats only after they are realized. This of course can and has been abused to rationalize foreign policy misadventures and there's a real issue of our institutions failing to arrest momentum in that direction.
But I don't think the upshot of those problems is that we stop attempting to model and respond to national security threats altogether, which appears to be the implication of some arguments that dispute the reality of national security concerns.
> Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.
I think this is a great point, but perhaps their hands were tied, because it's a policy decision by congress in the aforementioned national security paradigm and not the kind of thing where it's incumbent on our govt to prove a specific injury in order to have authority to make policy judgments on national security.
But all that only just confirms the priors of the people who are pro-Ban. And unfortunately it's about justifying why we shouldn't ban TikTok, not why we should ban TikTok. They can't provide a good justification for that, the best they can is just poison the well and try to attack those same institutions. But turns out effectively saying "fuck you" to Congress isn't going to work when Congress has all the power here.
"Oh you love hamburgers? Then why did you eat chicken last night? Hmmm, curious... You are obviously guilty"
For example, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf
Gorsuch pg 3
According to the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, TikTok can access “any data” stored in a
consenting user’s “contact list”—including names, photos,
and other personal information about unconsenting third
parties. Ibid. (emphasis added). And because the record
shows that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can require TikTok’s parent company “to cooperate with [its] efforts to obtain personal data,” there
is little to stop all that
information from ending up in the hands of a designated
foreign adversary. Id., at 696; see id., at 673–676; ante, at
3. The PRC may then use that information to “build dossiers . . . for blackmail,” “conduct corporate espionage,” or advance intelligence operations.
"But before seeking to impose that remedy, the coordinate branches spent years in negotiations with TikTok exploring alternatives and ultimately found them wanting. Ante, at 4. And from what I can glean from the record, that judgment was well founded."
Maybe that was one of the alternatives. I wasn’t on the task force but if I was asked to then I would have went one on one with their tech lead’s and asked them to stop collecting this.
But it seems it is greater than that. How you interact with it, your likes and dislikes can be used as a fingerprint and against you.
This fingerprint can then be used against firesteelrain some time in the prophetic future.
Gorsuch says
“To be sure, assessing exactly what a foreign adversary may do in the future implicates 'delicate' and 'complex' judgments about foreign affairs and requires 'large elements of prophecy.' Chicago & Southern Air Lines, Inc. v. Waterman S. S. Corp., 333 U. S. 103, 111 (1948) (Jackson, J., for the Court). But the record the government has amassed in these cases after years of study supplies compelling reason“
Then he says this.
“ Consider some of the alternatives. Start with our usual and preferred remedy under the First Amendment: more speech. Supra, at 2. However helpful that might be, the record shows that warning users of the risks associated with giving their data to a foreign-adversary-controlled application would do nothing to protect nonusers’ data. 2 App. 659–660; supra, at 3. Forbidding TikTok’s domestic operations from sending sensitive data abroad might seem another option. But even if Congress were to impose serious criminal penalties on domestic TikTok employees who violate a data-sharing ban, the record suggests that would do little to deter the PRC from exploiting TikTok to steal Americans’ data. See 1 App. 214 (noting threats from “malicious code, backdoor vulnerabilities, surreptitious surveillance, and other problematic activities tied to source code development” in the PRC); 2 App. 702 (“[A]gents of the PRC would not fear monetary or criminal penalties in the United States”). The record also indicates that the “size” and “complexity” of TikTok’s “underlying software” may make it impossible for law enforcement to detect violations. Id., at 688–689; see also id., at 662. Even setting all these challenges aside, any new compliance regime could raise separate constitutional concerns—for instance, by requiring the government to surveil Americans’ data to ensure that it isn’t illicitly flowing overseas. Id., at 687 (suggesting that effective enforcement of a data-export ban might involve).”
And the nail in the coffin is this
“All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional. As persuaded as I am of the wisdom of Justice Brandeis in Whitney and Justice Holmes in Abrams, their cases are not ours. See supra, at 2. Speaking with and in favor of a foreign adversary is one thing. Allowing a foreign adversary to spy on Americans is another.”
It's super interesting to see the custom code in TikTok not in Reels that can enable this not into politics but the algo would be cool to look at
https://kvombatkere.github.io/assets/TikTok_Paper_WebConf24....
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04086
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76520-0_...
https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/ijsss/article/view/566...
https://github.com/SyntaxSparkk/TikTok
https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-122/?utm_source=...
Has anyone scrapped all three to show for a newly created account there is significant difference in topics or something like that?
This is the next one I found (from a high schooler though)
https://www.jsr.org/hs/index.php/path/article/view/2428
It doesn’t look like a well researched area in terms of academia. I am not an expert in this so don’t know why
Your hypothetical clearly implicates the Times' speech, so intermediate scrutiny at least would be applied, requiring that the law serve an important governmental purpose. I think that would be a difficult argument for the government to make, especially if the law was selective about which kinds of media institutions could and could not have any foreign ownership in general. The TikTok law is much more specific.
It's interesting to read the full TikTok opinion https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf and search for "scrutiny" and "tailored" while referencing some of the diagrams from the overview above. It's a good case study of how different levels of scrutiny are evaluated!
(Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
So quite likely Congress could craft such a law and have it hold up, if it could show that foreign control of the NYT (which is incidentally the case) posed a national security concern.
A large part of the US-China relationship is zero-sum. If America loses, china wins, and vice versa. That relationship is not the same for, say, the US-France relationship.
China and the US have been in a massively successful, mutually beneficial global economic partnership for decades. Zero sum my ass. Take a peace pipe, make friends not war.
To say nothing of extremely adversarial cases of increasingly aggressive hacking, corporate espionage, "wolf warrior" diplomacy, development of military capabilities that seem specifically designed with countering the U.S. in mind, as well as the more ordinary diplomatic and economic pushback on everything from diplomatic influence, pushing an alternative reserve currency, and an internal political doctrine that emphasizes doubling down on all these fronts.
I don't even feel like I've ventured an opinion yet, I've simply surveyed facts and I am yet to meet a variation of the Officer Barbrady "nothing to see here" argument that has proved to be fully up to speed on the adversarial picture in front of us.
I think what I want, to feel reassured, is to be pleasantly surprised by someone who is command of these facts, capable of showing that I'm wrong about any of the above, and/or that I'm overlooking important swaths of the factual landscape in such a way that points to a safe equilibrium rather than an adversarial position.
But instead it's light-on-facts tirades that attempt to paint these concerns as neocon warmongering, attempting to indulge in a combination of colorful imagery and ridicule, which for me is kind of a non-starter.
Edit in response to reply below: I'm just going to underscore that none of the facts here are in dispute. The whataboutism, insinuations of racism, and "were you there!?" style challenges (reminiscent of creation science apologetics) are just not things I'm interested in engaging with.
why are these whatabboutisms interesting but others are not? what makes you comfortable with working with americans, when its clear how they treat expat political dissidents like Assange and Snowden? why are you ok working with the US who's military is tuned for seizing iranian oil shipments? why are you favourable to a US reserve currency when the US has been abusing its power by putting all kinds of unilateral sanctions, and confiscating reserves without any due process? its not just china thats trying to make a new reserve currency, the EU does too, so they can buy iranian oil.
minus all the whatabboutisms, america and china exchanged ~$750B worth of goods and services in 2022, with neither's trangressions being a blocker. Americans by and large care much more about the cost and variety of goods than they do about fishing rights in the south china sea. americans dont care that much about US foreign policy goals, compared to shopping and culture.
I don't agree that they are whataboutisms for starters. I don't present them in response to criticisms of the U.S. to deflect away those criticisms, which is an essential, definitional characteristic of a whataboutism. Everything ususal to the critique of whataboutisms is sufficient I think to address the new examples you present in your comment, which I would say just fall in the same old category.
The critiques of China in this context are "interesting" because they relate to democratic norms, human rights, freedom of expression and the security environment that safeguards them.
And perhaps most importantly, I don't regard democratic values and economic transactions to be in a relationship where the loss of one is compensated by the presence of the other. This is a point which I believe is a relatively well understood cornerstone of western liberal democracies.
I’m disputing none of the facts you raise, I just don’t think it’s reason enough to label the entire country as an enemy state and shut the door like a petulant child. Especially in light of the horrifying atrocities that we ourselves are funding.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. China is now grappling with sluggish GDP growth, declining fertility, youth unemployment, re-shoring/friend-shoring, a property crisis, popular discontent with authoritarian overreach (e.g. zero COVID and HK), and increasingly concentrated power under chairman-for-life Xi. Their military spending has hockey-sticked in the past two decades and they're churning out ships and weapons like nobody's business. He realizes that the demographic and economic windows of opportunity are finite for military action against Taiwan (and by extension its allies like the US and Japan). The Chinese military's shenanigans in the South China Sea with artificial islands, EEZ violations, and so forth in combination with Xi's rhetorical sabre-rattling in domestic speeches don't paint a pretty picture.
Before somebody like this poster calls me a "war-mongering [liar]" or something similar let me point out that this is the opinion of academics [1], not US DoD officials or politicians. I have nothing but reverence for China's people and culture. I'd love to visit but unfortunately it's my understanding that I'd have to install tracking software on my phone and check in with police every step of the way. This type of asymmetry between our governments is why this ban has legs.
With the gift of hindsight I think it's safe to say that neoliberal policy (in the literal sense of the term, not the hacky partisan one) is a double-edged sword that got us to where we are today. To say that the US-China relationship is sunshine and puppies is ignorant of the facts.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/04/china-war-military-taiw...
Uh, what? I've never encountered this in my trips to China.
You do have an ID scanned (like literally, on a photocopier) when you check into a hotel.
This is not a government to be friends with. It's time we go our separate ways from the CCP.
i imagine its much larger for both if you include bitcoin transactions
Either way - even if I concede this, my point stands that starving nations and denying them development isn't a great long term strategy for peace.
This isn't an attempt at whataboutism here, no one is denying that what China is doing to the Uyghurs is terrible, but the US and its allies have no moral high ground to stand on at all in this regard.
>I might as well make this clear.
>Now, regarding the international situation, The biggest wish of most of us Chinese is that the United States disappears completely and permanently from this beautiful earth.
>Because the United States uses its financial, military and other hegemony to exploit the world, destroy the peace and tranquility of the earth, and bring countless troubles to the people of other countries, we sincerely hope that the United States will disappear.
>We usually laugh at the large number of infections caused by the new coronavirus pandemic in the United States, not because we have no sympathy, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.
>We usually laugh at the daily gun wars in the United States, not because we don’t sympathize with the families that have been broken up by shootings, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.
>We usually laugh at Americans for legalizing drugs, not because we support drugs, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.When we scold American Olympic athletes, it's not because we lack sportsmanship, but because we really hope that America will disappear.
>We make fun of Trump and Sleepy Joe, not because we look down on these two old men, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.
>We Chinese are hardworking, kind, reasonable, peace-loving and not extreme. But we really don't like America. Really, if the Americans had not fought with us in Korea in the early days of our country, prevented us from liberating Taiwan, provoked a trade war, challenged our sovereignty in the South China Sea, and bullied our Huawei, would we Chinese hate them?
And that's what Chinese netziens agree without controversy on one of their biggest social media sites. What about the CCP here? Well if we look at Wang Huning, Chief Ideologue of the CCP, he is explicitly an postliberal who draws from the Schmittian rejection of liberal heterogenity, which he sees as inherently unstable, in favour of a strong, homogenous and centralized state based on traditional values in order to guarantee stability. And if it that's just internally, how do you think a fundamental rejection of heterogenity translates to foreign policy? So yes, whether you think China is a problem, China certainly thinks you are a problem.
We're talking about platforms with tens of millions of users; wide appeal is at least a quarter million likes, with mass appeal being at least a million. A local-scale influencer can gather 10-30k likes very easily on such a massive platform.
In what context is 12k likes a low amount? To me this is reminiscent of arguments I heard from neocons that global anti-Iraq war protests, the largest coordinated global protests in history at the time, counted as "small" if you considered them in absolute terms as percentages of the global population.
I think it's the opposite, that such activities are tips of the proverbial iceberg of more broadly shared sentiment.
It would be one thing if there were all kinds of sentiments in all directions with roughly evenly distributed #'s of likes. I'm open to the idea that some aspect of context could be argued to diminish the significance, but it wouldn't be that 12k likes, in context, is a negligible amount. It would be something else like its relative popularity compared to alternative views, or some compelling argument that this is a one-off happenstance and not a broadly shared sentiment.
If it is based on one post I'm sure i can find a Reddit post talking about how non white people should be slaves it's the internet lol
look man, i'm not saying china is some heavenly force of justice. but the thing about peace is that it's bigger than both sides, and it's maintained by the grace of those who understand that often the real threat isn't the enemy, it's your fear of the enemy.
But how do you know that? Do you any such examples of how the CCP or China is dicussing politics amongst themselves to support that claim, their ideological leanings and papers or their own national strategies?
One idea would be to completely ignore news outlets and look at raw data imports, exports, official visits to try to identify geopolitical patterns algorithmically has anyone on HN attempted such a thing?
If the NYT were seen as being under significant control of and risking sharing too much user data with the Chinese government then it would indeed make sense to apply the same ban.
Personally, I'm still on the fence about the ban. On one hand having asymmetry in one side banning such things and the other not is going to be problematic. On the other the inherent problems of banning companies by law. Such things work out in other areas... but will it work out in this specific type of example? Dunno, not 100% convinced either way.
I wouldn't worry about that, as FB, twitter, reddit etc are banned in China. To the extent that we want equilibrium here, banning Tiktok would reprsent a step toward parity.
ByteDance is; TikTok is not. TikTok is headquartered in USA and Taiwan. Why is that not part of the analysis? The CCP can control/influence ByteDance, the US can't do anything about that. But it could do a number of things to prevent ByteDance control/influence on TikTok, and it jumped directly to "must divest".
Congress could have passed a law banning TikTok from transmitting any user data back to ByteDance/China, for example. Why not do that, if that was the actual concern?
Guarantees of insulation from bad actors from major tech companies unfortunately are not generally credible, and what is credible, at least relatively speaking, are guarantees imposed by technology itself such as E2E encryption and zero knowledge architecture, as well as contextual considerations like the long term track record of specific companies, details of their ownership and their physical locations.
This all suggests to me that the 'Operation Texas' technical controls were actually in place and pretty good (or dude in China would have just run some SQL himself), and what isn't in place is hard process control to prevent US workers from emailing stuff to China. Which, you know, is exactly what Congress could pass a law to deal with.
Which I suppose is a different way of making the same point as you.
Anyways, who do you think China would say their #1 geopolitical adversary is?
My advice? Stop using words like "geopolitical adversary" to mask what you really want to say. This is life, not a chessboard.
This already exists in some ways. Foreign companies are not allowed to own American broadcasters. That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a (dual?) American citizen when he wanted to own Fox television stations in the United States.
Ostensibly, the US government honors the 1st and 4th amendments, and only restricts speech on the platform in rare instances where that speech is likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action, and only issues warrants for private data which are of limited scope for evidence where the government has probable cause that a crime has occurred.
The accusation is that the CCP and Bytedance have a much more intimate relationship than that, censoring (or compelling) speech and producing data for mere political favors. Whether or not this is true of Facebook's relationship with US political entities is up for debate.
No horse in this race as both horses hate and will trample me but just saying lol
The single party domination, the great firewall, the authoritarian surveillance are without comparison in scale and I think that has to be among the explicitly agreed upon facts that sanity check any conversation on this topic.
Edit since I can't reply to the comment below: all the examples mentioned below appear to involve the very equivocation between differences in scale that I spent this whole comment talking about, or attempt to equate past vs present, or are too vague to even understand the nature of the comparison, and collectively are so disorganized and low effort that they are degrading the focus and quality of the conversation as a whole.
lingchi vs waterboarding/black sites
NSA vs Great Firewall
provincial one party system vs micro nation based two party system both favoring the rich
TikTok vs Instagram/YouTube
when both sides consider you sub human kind of easy to compare them without emotion :)
but truly curious where have the facts been misrepresented? I would expect this on Reddit but not on a site like HN tbh
if any false equivalences were made or scales underestimated prove it with data to further the conversation not some hand wavy righteous comment that's for Reddit as they say :D
The equivalent in Facebook (Meta) terms would be China requiring Facebook, if it wished to continue operations in China, to sell the Chinese Facebook product to a Chinese or other, as to be defined by China, non-American entity. In some sense this is already the case.
2) US and China regulatory burdens and rule of law aren't equivalent, and I'm not going to grant that equivalency.
It’s also not a ban on the content. It’s a ban on hosting and the App Store. TikTok.com can still legally resolve to the same content.
I can see, say, Coca-Cola refusing to sell a local subsidiary if they would be forced to hand over their recipe.
Kaspersky was banned this way. Tiktok was hard coded in the law to be banned. The law allows for sale. It doesn’t enforce sale.
Does divest in this context mean sell it to a non Chinese owner?
How is it self-incrimination? That logic doesn't work.
80% of TikTok's users are outside of the U.S., why would they sell the whole thing?
And the law is written in a way that there is no value to just sell the American operation without the algorithm, they have to sell the whole thing, including the algorithm, in order for there to be a serious buyer.
It's technology highway robbery. Imagine if China told Apple "sell to us or be banned", we'd tell them to pound sand too.
Not sure that changes much but you seem to be talking about non US users, which wouldn't fall under this ruling.
Fact: TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group. An additional twenty percent of the company is owned by ByteDance employees around the world, including nearly seven thousand Americans. The remaining twenty percent is owned by the company’s founder, who is a private individual and is not part of any state or government entity. ```
Where is the evidence for this?
I found the first three alone quite compelling:
> ByteDance is Closely Connected to China’s Military-Industrial Complex
> ByteDance is Bound by Chinese State Surveillance Laws
> ByteDance’s Board is Beholden to Beijing
The above is based on a linked research paper but the numbers may actually be much higher as it can't really account for proxy ownership, various CCP committees influencing these companies, state banks providing loans only for companies that play ball, etc.
While more democratic nations are not entirely flawless on this, the separation of powers, independent judiciary, and free press do offer protections against this, as does having a general culture where these sort of things aren't accepted. Again, not flawless 100% foolproof protections, but in general it does work reasonably well.
> However, like most other Chinese companies, ByteDance is legally compelled to establish an in-house Communist Party committee composed of employees who are party members.
> In 2018, China amended its National Intelligence Law, which requires any organization or citizen to support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work. > That means ByteDance is legally bound to help with gathering intelligence.
I would say yes.
"Another way the Chinese government could assert leverage over a deal involving TikTok would be by exercising its “golden share” in a unit of ByteDance. In such an arrangement, the Chinese government buys a small portion of a company’s equity in exchange for a seat on its board and veto power over certain company decisions.
In 2021, an investment fund controlled by a state-owned entity established by a Chinese internet regulator took a 1 percent stake in a ByteDance subsidiary and appointed a director to its board."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/17/us/tiktok-ban-suprem...
https://www.seafarerfunds.com/prevailing-winds/party-committ...
You can read the full "Opinion on Strengthening the United Front Work of the Private Economy in the New Era" here[1] in English, though I suspect you don't need the translation.
Excerpts from what the Party says openly:
> Strengthening united front work in the private economy is an important means by which the Party’s leadership over the private economy is manifested.
> This will help continuously strengthen the Party’s leadership over the private economy, bring the majority of private economy practitioners closer to the Party
> Strengthening united front work in the private economy is an important part of the development and improvement of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics.
> Educate and guide private economy practitioners to arm their minds and guide their practice with Xi Jinping’s Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era; maintain a high degree of consistency with the Party Central Committee on political positions, political directions, political principles, and political roads; and always be politically sensible. Further strengthen the Party building work of private enterprises and sincerely give full play to the role of Party organizations (党组织) as battle fortresses and to the vanguard and exemplary role of Party members.
> Enhance ideological guidance: Guide private economy practitioners to increase their awareness of self-discipline; build a strong line of ideological and moral defense; strictly regulate their own words and actions
[1]: https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publi...
Imagine if all Fortune 500 companies were required to have Trump appointees on their boards. That would sound crazy here, but that's how things still work in China.
In the future, the owners of a free press will be permitted to operate if and only if there is board seat made out to a CIA member. Unions will be permitted to congregate as long as they register with the Office of Trade Security
All in all, a huge blow to the potential power of individual rights (essentially goes to the Founding Fathers' point that having a list of rights set in stone is NOT the end-all, be-all, it's who decides the rights that count)
> Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
That was explicitly brought up in oral arguments by the court, and the response by the US Gov was: "The act is written to be content neutral."
The court's opinion explains that they agree the law is "appropriately tailored" to remain content neutral. Whether it's "enemy propaganda" or not is, in their view, irrelevant to the application of the law. TikTok can exist in America, using TikTok is not banned, the owner just can't be a deemed "foreign adversary", which there is a history of enforcement (to some degree).
Then how do court justify that it stands in the case of an app.
In order to comply with the law, Apple and Google cannot distribute the app because it is deemed to be unlawfully owned by a foreign adversary; that's the ban. But anyone who wants to get it through other means can still do so. Presuming that's how it works, it doesn't seem to be logically different from radio/print media.
According to Wikipedia (yes I am linking directly to it and not a source, sorry to all of my teachers.) it seems that the magazines were distributed by news stands in many major USA cities, you did not need to go to the Embassy. But it also go on to note that this was because of an inter-governmental agreement which muddies the water. E.g. "Was it because of the agreement or because of the constitution and we just _said_ it was because of the agreement."
So whatever the exact legal situation was the time, a free speech utopia where even enemies of the US had free reign did not exist. De-facto free speech was significantly more restricted on this topic.
In that particular case, it was a result of an agreement with the Soviet government that allowed us to publish Amerika magazine in the USSR.
If the law and acts calling for their divestiture were deemed "content neutral" then they could. But an app, with algorithmic profiling, delivery, and data capture, for the purposes of modeling and influence, is not the same as a radio station or a publication, so it would probably not be easy or even possible to the SC's standards to write a content neutral law in that way. But they have deemed that with apps like TikTok, when done so carefully, it is possible and divestiture can be enforced neutral of content.
We don't need to stick our head in the sand and act like TikTok is the same as a print publication.
The SC's decision, and Gorsuch's opinion in particular, is carefully written to not fundamentally rewrite the First Amendment, I'd urge you to read it.
> We need not decide whether that exclusion is content based. The question be- fore the Court is whether the Act violates the First Amend- ment as applied to petitioners. To answer that question, we look to the provisions of the Act that give rise to the effective TikTok ban that petitioners argue burdens their First Amendment rights...
The "exclusion" referred to in this quote is not the exclusion of tiktok. The court is responding to one of the arguments that tiktok made. Certain types of websites are excluded from the law, and (tiktok says) if you have to look at what kind of website it is, then obviously you're discriminating based on content.
the court is saying that this would be an argument that this law is unconstitutional, period. That's a very hard thing to prove because you need to show that the law is bad in all contexts, and to whoever it applies to, very hard. So tiktok is not trying to prove that, that's not how they challenged the law - instead tiktok is trying to prove something much more limited, ie that the law is bad when applied to tiktok. It's an "as-applied" challenge. In which case, the argument about looking at other websites is irrelevant, we already know we're looking at tiktok. As the opinion says "the exclusion is not within the scope of [Tiktok's] as-applied challenge"
> At what point in the ruling did they wonder what motivated the effective ban? "5 why's" it, so to speak. Did they ever say, "because X, Y, and Z, it is clear the intent of the law is not to prevent speech of certain parties"?
ie what you're saying...the Court replies:
"the Government need not address all aspects of a problem in one fell swoop...Furthermore, as we have already concluded, the Government had good reason to single out TikTok for special treatment"
Congress can solve one problem without needing to solve all problems.
At what point in the ruling did they wonder what motivated the effective ban? "5 why's" it, so to speak. Did they ever say, "because X, Y, and Z, it is clear the intent of the law is not to prevent speech of certain parties"?
Sure, although they do discuss TikTok's challenge to the motivation ("Petitioners further argue that the Act is underinclusive as to the Government’s data protection concern, raising doubts as to whether the Government is actually pursuing that interest"). I just don't think the quote you had stands for what you were saying.
> At what point in the ruling did they wonder what motivated the effective ban?
Above is at page 15. Also, I think you're probably looking for the paragraph starting with "For the reasons we have explained, requiring divestiture for the purpose of preventing a foreign adversary from accessing the sensitive data of 170 million U.S. TikTok users is not 'a subtle means of exercising a content preference.' Turner I, 512 U. S., at 645." (at 12).
I saw elsewhere you likened this to the Trump muslim ban. I don't think that comparison is apt. The First Amendment issues there were not decided by the 9th circuit in the first one (“we reserve consideration of [First Amendment religious discrimination] claims until the merits of this appeal have been fully briefed.” State v. Trump, 847 F.3d 1151, 1168 (9th Cir. 2017)) the stay there was issued due to likelihood of success on the merits wrt due process issues; I don't know offhand about the second one; and the third attempt was upheld.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42742762 for this same thread
I would be a bit careful about trying to liken motivation for something like an EO to a law though; many members of congress voted to pass the exact language in the final bill, and they might not all have agreed with _why_. So I would put to you that the text itself is the primary thing one should consider, especially more in the legislative case than the executive one.
Read the decision. They thought the act was content-neutral, and they thought that the espionage concerns were sufficient to reach a decision w/o having to involve the First Amendment. Gorsuch and Sotomayor weren't quite so sure as to the First Amendment issues, but in any case all nine justices found that they could avoid reaching the First Amendment issues, so they did just that.
It absolutely does. (It’s in the opinion.)
It just isn’t the Wild Draw 4 some people imagine it to be. You can’t commit fraud or libel or false advertising and claim First Amendment protection. Similarly, there are levels of scrutiny when the government claims national security to shut down a media platform.
The opinion actually assumes without deciding that First Amendment scrutiny applies, so I don't think it "absolutely" does. (But yes, it probably does and Sotomayor and Gorsuch would decide as much)
So question if government has power to do so.
Can they ban RT? Or even the BBC, if the government found it wise to do so?
Apparently the owners of the operation are not US citizens operating in the USA and don't have any first amendment rights because that's part of the US Constitution and doesn't apply to other countries.
Read the opinion, the law was upheld on intermediate scrutiny. It doesn't ban based on content, it bans based on the designation of the foreign parent as an adversary. Since it's not a content ban, or rather because it's a content-neutral ban, strict scrutiny does not apply.
Without strict scrutiny, the law merely needs to fulfill a compelling government interest.
The motivation is largely irrelevant to the analysis of this case. What matters is what effects the law has and what services it provides the government.
So for example, the law technically doesn't ban TikTok at all, but rather mandates divestiture. However, the timeline wasn't realistic to manage such a divestiture, so the court recognized that the law is effectively a ban. The effect is what matters.
Similarly, the law provides a mechanism for the President to designate any application meeting a set of criteria a "foreign adversary controlled application". The court recognizes that the government has a compelling interest in restricting foreign adversaries from unregulated access to the data of US citizens, and the law services that interest.
The law represents a restriction on freedom of expression, TikTok is banned, but the law also represents a compelling government interest. To determine the winner of these two motivations, the court has established various thresholds a law must overcome. The relevant threshold in this case was determined to be Intermediate Scrutiny, and a compelling government interest is sufficient to overcome intermediate scrutiny.
Let's agree to disagree.
You can say whatever you want on a telephone call.
BUT:
The telephone network is regulated. Your cell phone must comply with FCC regulations. You personally may have a restraining order that prohibits you from calling certain people.
IE, if a phone is found to violate FCC rules, pulling it from the market has little to do with the first amendment.
> US bans sale of Huawei, ZTE tech amid security fears
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63764450
This was an FCC rule
This decision doesn't tell people they can't speak any more than, say, shutting down a specific TV station or newspaper which has been used for money laundering or which is broadcasting obscene content.
The issue here is that TikTok "content" (aka the algorithm that decides what content you get to see) is created abroad and controlled from abroad. The data collected by the app goes abroad. So then it becomes an import/export issue, and the government can and does regulate that.
This is why the government has already agreed to letting TikTik be run by a US entity. You can have the same content and same algorithm, just kept within the borders of the USA.
The decision was balanced on strict or intermediate scrutiny. At the distict court level it was observed that the case should probably be decided via intermediate scrutiny, but they upheld the ban under strict scrutiny due to "national security concerns".
The SCOTUS didn't bother with strict scrutiny or national security, and decided that the correct analysis was intermediate scrutiny and that the ban merely needed to serve a compelling government interest (which regulation of applications controlled by foreign adversaries meets).
It's entirely about speech, the only question in the entire case as decided at the district and SCOTUS level was speech. Whether the government should be allowed to violate the 1st Amendment due to compelling interest is everything the case turns on.
Personally, I think using intermediate scrutiny here is wild.
You are more removed from the content because everything is in the physical world. And even within a single newspaper there are so many different topics that it is hard to be in a bubble.
The Internet automatically leads to bubble creation, 200 character messages and indoctrination.
It is more like loudspeakers they had in villages during Mao's tenure blaring politically correct messages. Or like the Volksempfänger (radio) during the Nazi era. Interestingly, many of the most destructive revolutions happened after the widespread use of radio.
Of course the Internet isn't nearly as bad, but most people are completely unable to even consider a view outside of their indoctrination bubble.
If the option wasnt there, it would have stricter first amendment scrutiny
They could have still banned it other ways though
and the first amendment aspect is also torn apart in other ways in the court ruling
The first amendment doesn't have any provision regarding the potential reach or enablement of distribution of the speech of the people.
For anyone who does consider these algorithms speech, I challenge you to share a single person at any social media company who has taken direct responsibility over a single content feed of an individual user. How can speech exist if nobody is willing to take ownership of it?
It is, and the court acknowledged that editorial control is protected speech.
The ruling was made based on data privacy ground, not First Amendment Speech ground.
They could have a week of the teacher repeating that single sentence for the entire period
It seems incredibly logical from a state perspective. Sucks for users who can't choose to use a major highway without it being owned by an technofeudal oligarch. That statement holds true regardless of any platform. What were those blockchain people up to again?
Like the CCP?
> 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.
Speech is in no way being limited or compelled - you can say the exact same thing on dozens of other platforms without consequence. You can even say it on tik tok without consequence. You can even publish videos from tik tok in the US just fine.
This law is about what types of foreign corporation can do business in the US, and what sorts of corporate governance structures are allowed.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/post/what-the-first-amendmen...
Any person that has ever gotten a security clearance has given up some of their first amendment rights to do it and if they talk about the wrong thing to the wrong person they will absolutely go to jail.
And as always the classic example of free speech being limited still stands. Go yell FIRE in a crowded movie and see how your dumbass 1st amendment argument keeps you out of jail.
It almost seems like any hazard or danger from a false alarm (intentional or otherwise) should be the liability of the owners or operators of a property for unsafe infrastructure or improper safety briefing.
Anyway, I don't expect that to appear as a major legal issue, given this is primarily used as a rhetorical example.
Just look at US social media sites. It’s not like they push MINT content, do they?
First ammendment protections have no National security caveats.
A classic example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_president_of_t...
My point is, the First Amendment tells Congress not to do that.
What exactly does "shall make no law" mean to you? Be specific.
It doesn't say "Congress shall make no law regulating any kind of speech"
The difference between these two, if it isn't already obvious, is that people do not have a right to all types of speech.
Congress can, always could, and always has regulated speech for which people do not have a recognized right to make. Things like fraud or threats are not legal, and Congress is absolutely within their right to make these types of speech illegal, and it would be silly and unfounded to suggest that they couldn't.
Furthermore, your personal interpretation of the text is irrelevant. The Constitution itself delegates the judiciary as the body which can interpret it. And they have, many times, ruled that the 1st has exceptions.
So you may have a strong opinion about what you want the law to be, but you are not correct about what is actually is.
For the last 4 years, TikTok has been my primary music discovery engine. Probably is for a large chunk of users.
What effect will this have on the music industry?
And I agree, even for me, music discovery is (was) via TikTok.
I'd love to be corrected, but I haven't been provided any evidence or information that suggests this ban was justified at all.
They said ByteDance is as disorganized as any other big tech company, and it would be approximately impossible for them to discretely pull that off.
It's easy to see "CCP" and think bogeyman, but it is interesting to think about how achievable it would be to pull off something shady at Google or Facebook, and apply that same thought process to ByteDance.
The CCP could mandate that the TikTok algorithm display certain types of political content, then further mandate that any criticism of the CCP be limited, especially discussion of the said censorship. Most users wouldn't know about it and leakers at ByteDance wouldn't be able to change that. It's not the US - they are punished in China in a way that doesn't happen in the US.
I've worked for AT&T, and letmetellyou about disorganization and corporate ineffectiveness.
There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China, then Britain introduced stronger, more disruptive versions, forcing a stronger social reaction.
Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that social media is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
1) Influence- TikTok gives the CCP significant direct influence over the views of Americans.
2) Data- TikTok collects massive amounts of data on 100s of millions of Americans. Opens many avenues for spying, extortion of influence, etc.
3) Reciprocity- Foreign tech companies are essentially banned from operating in China. Much like with other industries, China is not playing fair, they’re playing to win.
Insofar as TikTok has offered a “superior” product, this might be a story of social media and its double edge. But this far more a story of geopolitics.
There is no credible argument that the CCP doesn't directly control the alg as it's actively being used for just that in tawain/etc.
Does the US really want a (hostile?) foreign govt to have clear direct access to influence 170m americans, an entire generation - completely unfettered? Incredible national security implications. Bot farms can influence X/Meta/etc, but they can be at least be fought. TikTok itself is the influence engine as currently constructed.
Apparently, American users want this? Approximately 700k users have joined RedNote, a Chinese platform. It's out of the frying pan and into the fire for Americans.
As the SCOTUS said itself:
“At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.” Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC
2. A core principle of the constitution is that those rights apply to noncitizens as well as citizens. They are human rights, not citizen rights. It's significantly more ridiculous for corporations to have free speech than a government. They don't have less of a right to free speech because we don't like them.
2) yes, that is an issue.
3) fair point.
*Source: https://www.emarketer.com/content/political-ad-spend-nearly-...
The huge difference is that while foreign adversaries run influence networks on other social media platforms (and are opposed and combatted by those platforms) TikTok (the platform itself) is controlled by the foreign adversary (the CCP).
And elections are decided by margins, pushing them even slightly has massive, irrevocable consequences.
More to the point: it removes the ability of the existing American establishment to monopolise the viewpoints presented to Americans.
The key point here is that an algorithm can invisibly nudge those viewpoints, and a foreign adversary controls the algorithm.
Insofar as your claim is that powerful people and institutions care most about power, I agree. It’s very telling that TikTok would shutdown instead of divest. (Meanwhile, U.S. companies have routinely taken the other side of the deal in China: minority stake joint ventures in which “technology transfer” is mandated. AKA intellectual property plundering.)
The reality is they live in an establishment controlled media bubble, that is itself full of propaganda.
Being free does not mean free to live in a lie constructed for the benefit of someone else, it means being free to live in reality, and that freedom is being denied to Americans. At least the Chinese are aware of their reality.
That’s to say nothing of censorship. I can post “f** Joe Biden” on any social platform in the U.S. Meanwhile, a Chinese netizen compares Xi to Winnie the Pooh and gets a visit from the police. And their post never sees the light of day.
These aren’t differences of degree. They are differences of category.
The reason you can is that very few people actually do. As the Tik Tok affair shows, the moment the US suspects it might have some real competitor in controlling the narrative, it shuts them down. Maybe it's the right thing to do, but it's worth taking note that it's how things are.
The whole point is to remove anything that may cause a passive media consumer to question what is presented to them.
They’ve each run ads on billboards in New York. I distinctly remember Xinhua’s in Time Square.
Al Jazeera America closed down some years ago. (2016 apparently).
My parents used to be addicted to Al Jazeera, then some unspecified incident occurred and we were never to speak of it again. All very strange.
Al Jazeera is widely known across the country, and during the time I had cable television was available in every city in which I lived.
RT is available over-the-air on free regular broadcast channels in some American cities. You can't get less restricted than that.
You speak like someone who's never even been to the United States.
RT America was removed from most services as of 2022 and hasn't been broadcasting since.
This is changing in the wrong direction and you are getting less free over time.
> You speak like someone who's never even been to the United States.
You speak like someone who's never left it.
In fact, even the idea of allowing CNN or BBC to broadcast into people's homes in Russia is so laughable, I don't know why you even brought it up, or what your point is.
No one's talking about availability in Russia except you.
And to add some substance about why AJ and RT can be accessed I will quote another commenter who put it better than I did: "The reason you can is that very few people actually do. As the Tik Tok affair shows, the moment the US suspects it might have some real competitor in controlling the narrative, it shuts them down. Maybe it's the right thing to do, but it's worth taking note that it's how things are."
That's the other side of the coin. Why do you expect one country to be totally open and allow the other to be totally closed? How is that a standard that makes any sense?
> "The reason you can is that very few people actually do."
I don't see what consumption habits have to do with anything. This is also contradicting what you just said, that people in the US don't have access to this content.
> As the Tik Tok affair shows, the moment the US suspects it might have some real competitor in controlling the narrative, it shuts them down.
Who is the "US" here? The U.S. government? A specific company? Without specifics you aren't really saying anything at all, just implying some greater unfalsifiable conspiracy.
The point is that their other media so promotes a lack of curiosity by providing a false impression of being comprehensive. If you risk bursting that bubble suddenly you are first mocked, then they try to buy you, then they block you, and tell you it is your fault.
The US is held to higher standards because that is how it promotes itself. Many of us outside the US are actually saddened by a betrayal of these values, because we are all too aware of how lacking many places are, and we need the US to be better than this.
I'm not being funny but I honestly couldn't follow that.
> The US is held to higher standards because that is how it promotes itself.
You are right, they are. That's why they didn't prevent TikTok from operating and growing domestically for years. Then the Chinese government starting using it as an asset of their espionage apparatus, so in response the U.S. STILL didn't ban the content in contains, but rather told the (apparently) independent company operating TikTok that the content is free to remain as long as it's not controlled by a hostile foreign government. The refusal to sell is the most obvious public facing proof that they are in fact Chinese government controlled.
All of that is how the U.S. is different, but as evidenced by this conversation and multiple other threads, no one really cares about the nuance.
And the greater context to this discussion is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.
The application of this principle can be seen when closed societies maintain complete control over their domestic media, while spreading as much toxic nonsense as possible abroad[1].
At the same they are completely intolerant of speech at home, they exploit the openness of the west by pushing disinfo they know to be wrong (and harmful) aboard. They continue to muddy the waters by pretending their information warfare is "just asking questions" (RT's moto is "Question More"). It's an extension of their hybrid warfare efforts, and shouldn't be seen as anything less.
[1] For example, domestic Russian media encourages citizens to get vaccinated against COVID19, while promoting anti-vaccine conspiracies abroad. This is one of thousands of examples. https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/russia-china-iran-covid-...
Darn it, then decade I spent in Asia and the 100+ trips to Europe and the Middle East didn't prepare me for the rapier banter of some rando on the internet.
How appropriate.
You have to accept that the era of American exceptionalism is over and we’ll all be measured by our actions rather than the dreamy stories told.
Compared to all the other algorithmic social media in which domestic adversaries control the algorithm.
TBF; The CCP passed laws that likely make it illegal for TikTok to sell/export that kind of information (the algo). They can't divest without also neutering the sticking power of the service.
He can just blame it on Biden and use his time productively.
There is no evidence this exists.
This is not new behavior between the two countries, the only thing new is the direction. US is finally waking up to the foreign soft power being exercised inside our own country, and it isn't benefiting us.
Google was operating in China until 2010 when they got banned because they stopped censoring search results. Other Western search engines like Bing continue operate in China.
The domestic companies lost some attention share to TikTok sure, and a ban or domestic sale would generally be in their interests, but it's not like they were about to be Myspaced. They've remained among the most valued companies -- presently and in forecasts -- even while it was "eating their lunch"
It hasn't been an overnight switch, but the trajectory did not look good for US companies. TikTok was even eating into TV viewing time. There's a fixed amount of attention and TikTok was vacuuming it up from everywhere.
Where? Stockholders have been vocally livid about it.
We should treat social media as the addictive, mind altering drug it is, and stop acting like a free market saturation of them is a good thing.
China having their more potent mind control app pointed at the brains of hundreds of millions of people is not something to celebrate.
you can buy all of that from data brokers
> If, for example, a user allows TikTok access to the user’s phone contact list to connect with others on the platform, TikTok can access “any data stored in the user’s contact list,” including names, contact information, contact photos, job titles, and notes. 2 id., at 659. Access to such detailed information about U. S. users, the Government worries, may enable “China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf
It seems farcically ridiculous to me to ban the app because it somehow could let china blackmail CEOs.
What ZTE were up to was way more nefarious, but couldn't be done with just apps.
It'll be revealing to see which political actors come out in favor of keeping tiktok around.
At some point, I realized that I avoid social media apps, and the people in those marches certainly don't.
I know that there's more to the Israel:Palestine situation than the attack on the music festival, but the fundamental contradiction that the side that brutalized innocent young people seems to have the popular support of young people is hard to ignore. I wonder to what degree it's algorithmically driven.
>that the side that brutalized innocent young people
…
Now if you wanted to compare atrocities—which honestly you shouldn’t—you would compare the Palestinian children that were brutalized both in the Gaza genocide, and in any one of the number of IDF incursions into Gaza and the West Bank before and after oct 7. That is compare victims to one side, to the victims of the other side.
But people generally don’t pick sides like that. They don‘t evaluate the atrocities committed by one armed group to the atrocities committed by the other and favor one over the other. And they certainly don‘t favor one civilian group over another based on the actions of their armed groups. People much more simply react to atrocities as they happen. And Israel has committed enough atrocities during the Gaza genocide that social media will be reacting—both in anger and horror—for a long time to come.
3. Then what is Microsoft doing in China? What is Apple doing in China? Etc. No tech company is banned from China, the only companies that choose not to operate in China are those that do not agree to follow Chinese laws.
Source? I could only find this.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...
Limiting use to 40 minutes is not a ban but it still shows a view that extended exposure to it is harmful. To turn it on its head, if more than 40 minutes is viewed harmful for Chinese youth, why not American?
https://apnews.com/article/gaming-business-children-00db669d...
What more do you need to know?
Anecdotally, I have heard from people who lived in China at the time that there was a significant shift in content a few years back.
Because it was never there. Bytedance never launched TikTok in China.
It’s a similar product. We don’t have any server-side code so we don’t know.
You chose a bad analogy, that's all.
I think it is form of compartmentalizing Internet and social networks, to keep Chinese internet and social media separate from the US.
the red book app, where tiktok refugees are flocking to right now, also want to introduce geofence and compartmentalize Chinese users and US users separately
Do you believe that all Chinese media is part of a propaganda machine?
Do you believe the same of American or French media?
Every social media app or website in China is required to ask for your real name and ID number, and implement any censorship requested by the party. If you post something that rubs the government the wrong way, your identity is readily available.
I don't believe this level of content control, censorship and user prosecution is there for all American media. And if it were, you are allowed to set up your own channel or social media app in America to be the exception.
I didn't know this. Do you have any reading on the subject you can recommend?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_real-name_system_in_C...
- https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/10/1086366/china-so...
- https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202310/31/WS6541068aa3109068...
(Although that No is getting a bit blurry with US social media bending over for commander cheeto)
"It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,”
The same algorithm in US possession isn’t a problem.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tiktok...
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/3/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-ha...
"enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health ... capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”
Source?
> Source?
The same source as everything Covid related: Trust me, bro.
Are you referring to the completely scientifically-untrained "bros" who were touting ivermectin and other treatments or cures with little to no scientific evidence of efficacy?
Yes, you could say Douyin is available in place of TikTok, but have you asked yourself why they have 2 separate apps? One for mainland China, and another for everyone else?
Another source (see the section "How is Douyin different from TikTok?"): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/business/china-tiktok-dou...
There are many reasons why there are two separate apps and not necessarily related to how addictive the algorithm is. The "source" you linked gives one such reason:
> Like other social media services in China, Douyin follows the censorship rules of the Chinese Communist Party. It conscientiously removes video pertaining to topics deemed sensitive or inflammatory by the party, although it has proved a little harder than text-based social media to control.
Also have you used Douyin? It's really feels like basically the same thing.
Respectively, heavily regulated, heavily regulated, poorly regulated but really has to toe the line to not fall into the first bucket, fairly regulated (with shifting attitudes about what they should be, but definitely not unregulated), probably only a problem because this is "gambling" again lately and has been regulated in the past and I suspect may well be more heavily regulated in the near future, and people probably would not generally agree this belongs in the list.
Another way could be limiting feed algorithms to chronological order only.
Another could be limiting what data can be collected from users on these platforms. Or limiting what data could be provided to other entities.
Who knows if these are the best ways to regulate social media, but they would like help mitigate some of the clear harms.
Gambling, alcohol, and gacha games are clearly addictive and frequently are not set up to be in the best interests of the users.
There are billions of casual drinkers / gamblers / gamers who do not show any sign of addiction. I’m really tired to hear the same nonsense repeated again and again. Do a pyschology study of any casino employee that spends 40 hours a week in a gaming venue, or any manufacturer of gaming devices that professionally play games 40 hours a week, and none of these employees exposed to so much gambling / drinking are addicted.
Psychology studies have not established that these items are “addictive”, because if they were, they would be banned all over the world. Nowhere in the western world are they banned, ghey are regulated for “fairness”. There are some individuals that throw the word addiction around without justification, please dont be one of them.
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/cycle-alcohol-addicti...
You also basically observed that the people selling the addictive thing don't get addicted, which is sort of obvious. You don't get addicted by being near e.g. alcohol and providing it to others. You get addicted by regularly drinking it.
Scientific studies have established nicotine is addictive yet purchase and smoking of cigarettes is legal in most countries.
Those two types of content are about the cheapest TV to produce. Per second of video produced (counting all the unpopular content), short videos might be more expensive, but the costs are very distributed.
> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that gambling is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
Not really. TikTok isn't a gambling app.
Here, the payment is your attention, you swipe to the next video to play the game, and the prize if you land on a good video is a small hit of dopamine.
Where are they being regulated at all?
There was a bill introduced in the US that didn't go anywhere. Of course gambling has recently been heavily deregulated in the US so I suppose we can't expect much to be done about gambling in video games right now. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/162...
I vaguely recall it in at least one of those state bills to regulate social media for kids (listing it as an addictive behavior that's "harmful to minors" or whatever), but can't find specifics. I don't know whether something has passed anywhere in the US.
https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~hchsiao/pub/2024_ACSAC_lootbox....
"Verifying Loot-box Probability Without Source-code Disclosure"
Just read the abstract
Justice Gorsuch in his concurrence specifically commended the court for doing so, believing that a content manipulation argument could run afoul of first amendment rights.
He said that "One man's covert content manipulation is another's editorial discretion".
EFF's stance is that SCOTUS's decision based on national security ignores the First Amendment scrutiny that is required.
> The United States’ foreign foes easily can steal, scrape, or buy Americans’ data by countless other means. The ban or forced sale of one social media app will do virtually nothing to protect Americans' data privacy – only comprehensive consumer privacy legislation can achieve that goal. Shutting down communications platforms or forcing their reorganization based on concerns of foreign propaganda and anti-national manipulation is an eminently anti-democratic tactic, one that the US has previously condemned globally.
I think it's more about the fact that users of platform are able to connect and share their experiences and potential action for resolving class inequality. There's an entire narrative that is outside of US govt/corp/media control, and that's a problem (to them).
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-fentanyl-pipeline-and...
To be fair, trying to consider the other way around, I wonder what Chinese people could point to as disastrous stuff (in terms of the well-being of their population) coming from the US.
Nicotine being legal but TikTok is not tells you everything you need to know about government wanting to control the "addictiveness" of social media.
The US social media billionaire class is ostensibly accountable to the law, but they're also perfectly capable of using their influence over these platforms to write the law.
One plausible theory for why the politicians talk about fears of spying instead of the real fears of algorithmic manipulation is because they don't want to draw too much attention to how capable these media platforms are of manipulating voters, because they rely on those capabilities to get into and stay in power.
We can't really jail the CCP. Additionally, Zuck and Musk don't have armies to back up their propaganda. We shouldn't let foreign powers own the means of broadcast...
The people who can do something about it are the people who are already in power in the US. They understandably don't want to share with the CCP, but most of them came to power by manipulating enough voters into voting for them. They stay in power by ensuring that enough voters continue to want to vote for them. Which means that someone like Zuckerberg or Musk has an insanely inordinate amount of influence over whether these people who are in power stay in power.
Yes, I think it's marginally better that that influence remain out of the hands of the CCP, but I would rather that that influence not exist at all. It's too dangerous and too prone to corruption.
Isn't this true for literally all problems in a democracy? Do you have a better solution?
Hopefully we'll get AGI soon and it'll take over and rule as a benevolent overlord. Short of that, everything in your comment feels like it has always applied to every societal problem, and always will.
Create a level playing field where money does not amplify speech. Our existing democracy is basically a spending contest with a very small component of eloquently persuading voters to vote against their own interest. The richest of the rich have voices and can manipulate the platforms on which others express their voices, and so those rich people either pick the victors or become them.
For democracy to survive we have to get past the idea that a "free market" approach to speech leads to democratic outcomes. It doesn't, it leads to plutocratic outcomes, which is painfully obvious on both sides of the aisle right now. Americans haven't had a true representative of the people in generations.
- the electoral college where winner takes all, so minority opposition vote is always suppressed
- gerrymandering that dilutes and suppresses the minority opposition vote
- oligopoly of two parties
- unchecked financial influence by allowing unlimited funding via PACs
- legalized lobbying/bribery
- influence of special interest groups
- the influence of legal system with expensive lawyers (that only rich can afford)
But they're about to have all three branches of government to back it up.
We can? Like what? What's the chance of that happening?
> Zuck and Musk don't have armies to back up their propaganda.
I'd like to note the seating arrangements published for the upcoming presidentia inauguration ceremony.
Unlike Zuck, Musk, and Bezos, Chew did not found the company with which he is most associated, and his net worth is somewhat less than a billion dollars.
I, personally, have views that would lean towards being labeled by HN users as supporting a “nanny state” (at least far departure from younger libertarian phase), but even I struggle with a “why” on banning these platforms in general.
I think the government could fix it with a screen time limit. 30 mins for under 18's, and 1 hour for everyone else, per day.
Maybe allow you to carry over some.
After that, it's emergency calls only.
What's happening to TikTok is not a good proxy for the trajectory of social media companies in the US, esp Meta. They've got plenty of tailwind.
Come on. We all know that TikTok was banned because the US regime couldn't control it.
If they really wanted to ban vice, they would have banned Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and their kin a long ago.
The law is fine with TikTok being owned by a Nigerian.
Take a step back and consider how ridiculous this is. Every country in the world other than these six [1] is controlled by the U.S.?
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII...
Like Facebook, the "algorithm" is nothing special. TikTok made some smart design decisions that collect more interaction data that legacy social sites like Instagram and YouTube. They use that data to effectively recommend content.
I don't think this is true. Everyone that is reading this forum might even be too strong. The majority of people happily eating the pablum up as the users of TikTok can't even tell the blatantly false content from just the silly dancing videos.
And generally speaking as a culture we are too liberal to ban things for being too addictive. Again, showing that it is not relevant in this case since it will not inspire bans of other addictive (pseudo) substances on those grounds.
It's hard to see how the government would tackle algorithmic addiction within running afoul of First Amendment issues. Such an effort should also apply to Meta and Google too if it were attempted.
IMHO reciprocal market access was the most defensible position but wasn't the argument the government made.
That being said, the government did make a strictly commerce-based argument to avoid free speech issues. As came up in oral arguments (and maybe the opinion?) this is functionally no different to the restrictions on foreign ownership of US media outlets.
The hard part is de-googling.
I do have some hopes for a digital euro and, maybe, maybe, even Wero. But i fear it will never take off because too many players are involved and there is no clear marketing strategy to get it to people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(payment)
What is China for Americans, for us Europeans, is the USA.
Some argue that it's even worse for Europeans because the Chinese military and government can't reach you while in the USA. And there is no safe place for Europeans from the US government, unless they move to China or Russia.
But it's a problem when your biggest ally treats you like an ally, says you're living off him militarily and spies/hacks you non stop.
China is not a military threat to Europe, it's literally on the other part of the globe. It's only a threat to US geopolitical ambitions.
Is that correct?
They're saying (that other people are saying) that in the US, you are safe from the Chinese government/military. In the EU, you are not safe from the US government/military.
Also note that the claim is not that the US is worse than China for Europeans. The claim is that the US is worse for Europeans than China is for Americans.
The last part about relocating is saying that you can only be safe from the US government/military in China or Russia.
Based on extradition agreements, this conclusion seems true enough on the surface. And maybe US military bases in Europe play a role as well. But this is a thread about national security concerns via social media, and I think it's hard to make a broad and definitive conclusion due to the wide variety of soft and hard powers that countries exert internationally.
But it's worth the effort.
I think politicians have scrutinized american social media and they're 100% fine with the misery they induce so long as they are personally enriched by them.
> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China
TikTok isn't anywhere near as destructive as opium was. Hell, purely in terms of "mis/disinformation" surely facebook and twitter are many times worse than TikTok.
Surely the appropriate modern parallel is fentanyl.
See this for more https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855
EDIT: the link above doesn’t work for others for reason, so here is the source story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
Could not be more wrong. "Society" is not deciding anything here. The ban is entirely because of idelogical and geopolical reasons. They have already allowed the good big tech companies to get people hooked as much as they want. If you think you are going to see regulation for public good you will probably be disappointed.
In a democracy, this is how "society decides" what's in the "public good." This is not a case where legislators are going behind the public's back, hiding something they know they public would oppose. Proponents of the law have been clear in public about what the law would do and what the motivations for the law are. There is nothing closer to "society decides" than Congress overwhelmingly passing a law after making a public case for what the law would do.
Yes, they're doing it for "ideological and geopolitical reasons"--but those things are important to society! Americans are perfectly within their rights to enact legislation, through their duly elected representatives, simply on the basis of "fuck China."
One could take the position that this process is so flawed as to be illegitimate. In this case it would be a valid position to believe that society had not fairly decided these things, and they were instead decided by a certain class of people and pushed on to the rest of us.
See: A Propaganda Model, by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky: https://chomsky.info/consent01/
Sorry but I don't believe this in the slightest.
As a tech person who already understood the system, it's refreshing that I now often see the comment "I need to change my algorithm"- meaning, I can shape the parameters of what X/Twitter / Instagram/ YouTube / TikTok shows me in my feed.
I think there's growing meta-awareness (that I see as comments within these platforms) that there is "healthy" content and that the apps themselves manipulate their user's behavior patterns.
Hopefully there's momentum building that people perceive this as a public health issue.
The mental health angle of support for the bans is a way the change gets accepted by the public, which posters here are doing free work toward generating, not a motivating goal or direction for these or next regulations
You want a political body to make decisions apolitically?
> mental health angle of support
This was de minimis. The support was start to finish from national security angles. There was some cherry-on-top AIPAC and protectionist talk. But the votes were got because TikTok kept lying about serious stuff [1] while Russia reminded the world of the cost of appeasement.
[1] https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/services/files/76E769A8-3ED...
BTW you're the one who cast doubt on me for suggesting UnitedHealth is incentivized to raise prices to get around profit caps, which turned out to be exactly the case despite your sense-making of the rules in place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716428
Sorry, could you link to my comment?
THis situation is another data point and is a net good for society (whether or not the ban sticks).
Discussion around (for example) the technical implementation of content moderation being inherently political (i.e., Meta and Twitter) will be good for everyone.
While many have a love hate relationship with it, there are many who love it. I know people who aren’t too sad, because it’ll break their addiction, and others who are making really decent money as content creators on it. So generally, you’re exactly right. “Society” is not lashing back at TikTok. Maybe some are lashing back at American social media companies (eg some folks leaving Twitter and meta products).
But if we wanted to actually protect our citizens, we’d enact strong data privacy laws, where companies don’t own your data — you do. And can’t spy on you or use that data without your permission. This would solve part of the problem with TikTok.
Which is why a viable solution for TikTok was selling it to a US company. If it was just about the population "being hooked", a sale would not be an acceptable outcome.
To sell you shoes. Not for whatever nightmarish future application of this technology and relationship between private sector and the state represents: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/15/documents...
This is evidenced by the fact that ByteDance could've sold TikTok in the US for a huge amount of money to comply with the recent legislation, but the Chinese government won't allow the sale. They aren't interested in the money, which to me sounds like they only ever cared about the data and influence.
Side note: I used Perplexity to summarize the recent events to make sure I'm not totally talking out my butt :). Just a theory though, happy to be proven wrong!
If it was a business they would have sold it.
Second, how does your comment change the fact that there are multiple politicians on record saying this is why they are going after tik tok?
some US oligarchs wanted to buy tiktok at deep discount while it was private, and make money off of making it public company
About 45% of the US population uses TikTok and 63% of teens aged 13 to 17 report using TikTok, with 57% of them using the app daily
Hell of a product, there would be a crazy bidding war for that kind of engagement
The sell or be banned part, instead of just banned, was most certainly lobbied for by the US social media companies hoping to get it on the off chance it had served its purpose, wasn't as useful as China had hoped, or the slim chance they really did just want Americans to copy dance trends.
For me, it's very hard to conceive of any concrete way that would work. It's a brand, some partnerships, and a network of users that would all go to whatever buyer, and would give that buyer a huge benefit over their existing domestic competitors. So under what circumstances would those domestic competitors allow that instead of aggresively trying to secure it for themselves?
I'm open to believing you, I just don't see what you have in mind.
Campaign with the president, offer large amounts of money to the presidents campaign, donate huge sums to a small inauguration party, and then just be picked to get it at a deep discount. The entire point of bribes is that corruption let's you get away with things at a lesser cost. You just screw over everyone else except for the bribe receiver.
Larry Ellison (since he is CIA/MIC friendly and tiktok is already running on Oracle cloud)
Zuck has too much conflict to acquire tiktok, but other oligarchs like Musk/bezos/gates can pull it off, given their recent meetings with Trump
Why do you assume only a natural person can buy TikTok? Why do you assume you need political capital?
The law doesn’t provide that much executive deference in enforcement.
Plus FTC will review the acquisition process as well.
Do you have a counter example?
Why?
> Political capital is needed because the tiktok question is politicized heavily (national security as a reason)
This is entirely meaningless. You don’t need political capital to maintain the status quo.
> Do you have a counter example?
To your hypothetical? My example is the law. FACA is tightly defined. Bytedance needs to divest to a non-FAC to return to the status quo. Trump could do something else to fuck with them. But that’s true of anyone anywhere.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
It doesn’t. The courts do. TikTok could be sold to a Hungarian businessman. As long as it can’t be proved they aren’t controlled by China, they should be allowed to reënter app stores.
Generally speaking, we tend to refer to governments in countries with independent judiciaries as being separate from their courts. The same way we refer to the government in parliamentary democracies separately from their parliaments. (Or governments separately from a country’s people, even though one is a subset of the other.)
> Do you think there isn't any collusion between Supreme Court and the other branches of government?
Not super relevant here. This SCOTUS barely upheld the ban with Bytedance as the owner.
As a rich person I’d rather get 30% of tiktok with 99% certainty by committing 30% of capital needed, rather than 100% of tiktok with 30% certainty and committing 100% of capital needed.
Apparently?
What's the obvious about it?
I don't buy it.
China is wise to have such laws to protect their citizens.
1) I sell to you my special and cherished resource. You may live in the fever dream of "market rules all", but a cold surprise may come that not everyone does.
2) You can afford what I sell - especially if political winds blow so that your benevolent rulers choose to impose 1000% tariffs on my good tomatoes
3) That you even _know_ there's a difference, and that tomatoes come from a farm and not the store or a can.
Also, even if they were differently monetizing by region, you are also missing the non-monetary reasons this might happen: Manipulation & propaganda. Even aside from any formal policy by the Chinese govermnent self-censorship by businesses and individuals for anything the Party might not like is very common. Also common is the government dictating the actions a Chinese company may take abroad for these same efforts in influencing foreign opinions.
Legally, there is no issue with TikTok being Japanese, Korean, Indian, Saudi, Polish, Ugandan, Brazilian or Mexican. Just not owned by a foreign adversary country.
Which politician argues China is a friend?
We bought Soviet oil in the 1970s [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_Soviet_...
As you said, we trade with them extensively. We didn’t tighten the screws on Russia until it actually invaded Ukraine. Until Xi actually invades Taiwan, it’s profitable to pretend.
From app stores and American hosting. Only if Bytedance doesn’t sell TikTok to e.g. a French or Indian or American owner. TikTok.com will still resolve (unless Bytedance blocks it).
China literally blocks information.
2) Multiple agencies investigate and make a determination that a real threat exists, the threat and measures to resolve it are debated strongly in two houses of Congress between strongly opposing parties, an passes with bi-partisan support, the law is signed by the President, then the law is upheld through multiple challenges in multiple courts and panels of judges, finally being upheld by the Supreme Court of the country. And no, this is not yet a situation where the country has fallen into autocracy so the institutions have all been corrupted to serve the executive (I.e., not like Hungary, Venezuela, Russia, etc.).
If you think these are the same... I'll just be polite and say the ignorance expressed in that post is truly stunning and wherever you got your education has deeply failed — yikes.
Sounds like they tried.
What nonsense.
> The algorithm used in the US was apparently banned in China for being too addictive.
"Apparently"? Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok.
> There's a certain historic symmetry with how opium was traditionally used in China, then Britain introduced stronger, more disruptive versions, forcing a stronger social reaction.
There is no historic symmetry. Unless china invades the US and forces americans to use tiktok. Like britain invaded china ( opium wars ) and forced opium on china's population.
What's with all the same propaganda in every tiktok/china related thread? The same talking points on every single thread for the past few years.
You're talking about Propaganda but you are spreading straight up fake news.
ByteDance initially released Douyin in China in September 2016. ByteDance introduced TikTok for users outside of China in 2017.
There was no "split", let alone one "forced by the US".
There was no split? You wrote: "ByteDance initially released Douyin in China in September 2016. ByteDance introduced TikTok for users outside of China in 2017."
You say there was no split while explicitly proving that there was split? You're not that stupid are you?
Why do you think "tiktok" was created in 2017 when bytedance already had douyin( aka tiktok ) in 2016?
Why is there a "tiktok" for china and a "tiktok" for everyone else? Because the "tiktok in china ( duoyin ) was influenced by the chinese government and to appease the US, bytedance branched off tiktok from "douyin".
And it obviously is not a split if they are seperate apps from the beginning. Why do you lie so much btw?
No. It had everything to do with it. How can you say that when tiktok is getting banned? Even after bytedance bent over backwards to appease the US?
> the Chinese version is heavily filtered and tilted towards CPP prefered activities and worldview, such a platform would never work on the international market and they know it.
Sure. But nothing prevents tiktok from catering their app to other nations differently. You do realize that most nations get different versions of tiktok, facebook, youtube, etc right?
> And it obviously is not a split if they are seperate apps from the beginning.
But they weren't separate apps from the beginning. Your fellow bot/propagandists wrote: "ByteDance initially released Douyin in China in September 2016. ByteDance introduced TikTok for users outside of China in 2017."
If someone is born in 2016 and another person is born in 2017 are born in the same year? Are they the same person?
> Why do you lie so much btw?
Everyone can read this thread and see that you are lying. Not me.
That statement is misleading, as the differences between these platforms across various countries are typically minor—mostly due to copyright restrictions—so users can still access roughly 99% of the same content. This situation isn’t remotely comparable to TikTok’s China-only counterpart, Douyin, which exists in a separate and completely different ecosystem. I suspect you’re aware of this, yet you brought it up anyway. What is your motivation for such dishonesty?
> “No. It had everything to do with it. How can you say that when TikTok is getting banned? Even after ByteDance bent over backward to appease the US?”
Could you explain exactly what the United States did before 2017 that caused ByteDance to launch a separate app for every country outside of China (not just in the US)? You seem to be muddying the waters by referring to this potential 2024 ban, but that obviously can’t be the reason ByteDance created a separate platform for every non-China country back in 2017.
> “But they weren’t separate apps from the beginning.”
Actually, they were. Douyin is geo-restricted to China (requiring a Chinese phone number to register) and was never accessible to users outside the country. This restriction was put in place to limit the information available to Chinese users, clearly separating Douyin from TikTok right from the start.
> "Everyone can read this thread and see that you are lying. Not me."
Well, I certainly agree that everyone can read this thread and make a judgement on who is more honest.
> Even after bytedance bent over backwards to appease the US?
In 2017 when TikTok was launched, there were no US government rules towards it, there were no demands made by the US government about TikTok - that part is the absolutely wrong part of your argument. You either didn't know that, or you are lying about it. Either way it's misinformation.
ByteDance didn't do anything to appease the US in 2016 or 2017. Bytedance offering Douyin for China, and a separate app TikTok for other markets is specifically about controlling the content that people see in China. TikTok is banned in China because content on TikTok isn't as filtered and strictly controlled in the same ways that China's government wants it to be for their own people - TikTok was specifically made for markets outside of China for this reason. The US had NOTHING to do with that, it is strictly about China controlling China's population with Douyin, or more specifically, not losing control of Chinese people by allowing anti-China videos to appear in Douyin. It's far easier for China to control the narrative they want if there are two separate apps that essentially provide the same user experience. The Chinese government controls TikTok, and I have not seen a single anti-China video in my wife's TikTok feed, so I'm willing to believe that they do have some control over content in the US too.
I hope that's not too complicated for you to understand.
>> Why do you lie so much btw?
>Everyone can read this thread and see that you are lying. Not me.
The other person is not lying. You may not be lying, but you really don't have your facts straight.
No. TikTok was forced to put its data on American servers [1].
Douyin was launched in 2016 as musical.ly, and is unrelated to U.S. pressure. (EDIT: Douyin was launched in 2016, TikTok in 2017. Musical.ly was acquired in 2017 and merged into/basically became TikTok. TikTok has never been in China.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-moves-us-user-data...
Musical.ly was acquired by Bytedance in 2017 and merged into TikTok in 2018 [1]. TikTok itself “was launched internationally in 2017” [2].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191005154207/https://beebom.co...
> What nonsense.
Obviously experiences will vary, but I think this is actually pretty well-established.
Not many studies, but here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9486470/
What is very well established is that the british fought a war , literally called the opium war by Western historians themselves with the main objective of keeping their opium distribution into China open after the emperor banned it
Their action was akin to if some majority owner of Purdue pharma invades US and forces US government to "keep the oxy market open" while letting "people make their own decision".
>> Like britain invaded china ( opium wars ) and forced opium on china's population.
> how did Britain force the Chinese population to consume Opium?
I'd argue that it is an emotional decision for both, and it does seem ironic that the US would be following China in restricting a platform that people see as a major tool for free speech. Whether you agree with that or not the optics are terrible, and the users are very aware of it. If this is really a big concern then they would also ban facebook/instagram/snapchat, but they aren't being included in this, despite having a worse track record.
I think there would need to be some basis in fact for these claims, right?
"enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”
Incidentally, I feel almost controversial for seeing more ads for alcohol and gambling than anything else, and thinking "when did we agree it was a good thing to be more permissive about encouraging objectively addicting risky behavior?".
(Also later Didi got kinda screwed imo right after their IPO in IMO a retaliatory move by the Chinese gov). So, is this TikTok ban one more shot in a new form of economic warfare? Is this type of war even new? Again, IMO, I think in instituting this law, this kind of stuff was on at least some of congress' minds.
At a high level, chinese tech culture is an insane no holds barred cage match with very little legal structure to protect IP or employees or anything and most companies who enter fail at participating in this.
Didi did a lot of corporate espionage and sabotage at uber china. They'd have "double agents" working for uber they'd pay to f stuff up. This type of thing is not practices in america because it is extremely illegal, but it was fine in China at not something that uber could do "back" to didi. There were people on the uber china fraud team paid by didi to tip off fraud networks on how to fraud. In the last year in china, they moved a ton of important work back to US offices because the china office was "compromised".
Instead of banning TikTok, we should be trying to compete with them and make a better product that wins customers over. It's sad to see the US becoming more authoritarian and follow China's example.
Have witnessed first-hand the threats by foreign state actors penetrating US-based cloud infrastructure. And it’s not like any of our domestic corporations are practicing the type of security hygiene necessary to prevent those intrusions.
So idk, the whole thing feels like a farce that will mainly benefit Zuck and co while doing very little to ultimately protect our interests.
We would be much better off actually addressing data privacy and passing legislation that regulates every company in a consistent manner.
You obviously don't mean "democracy," but some other word. We don't see mass data collection as a problem because most Americans don't care about privacy. The only reason this Tik Tok thing is even registering is because of the treat of China, which Americans do care about.
LOL
Not defending what FB did in your example, but when you have to start redefining terms in order to make your argument, you're on shaky ground.
The US government, on the other hand, desires to control all narratives widely disseminated among its citizens. They can do that with Facebook. They can do that with Twitter. They cannot do that with a foreign company. So they shut it down.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
The EU has been trying to ban encryption for the last 3 years so that it can read all your text messages, listen to your conversations and monitor the images you send to your loved ones/friends without requiring a warrant from the authorities, therefore granting them an unlimited access to everyone's private life without offering any possible recourse.
The EU's pro-privacy stance is a just a facade, they want as much data as the US government, they just don't want to admit it publicly.
I still think having something on the books for general data protection is a net good, as it forced all the biggest US-based companies to at least start implementing data privacy controls.
Textualism might give the court some useful definitions, but it is after all still called, quite literally, an opinion.
Another example that highlights the distinction: Justice Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court's preeminent textualists, is also one of the biggest proponents of criminal rights. Those cases similarly involve defining the contours of pre-existing legal concepts, such as "unreasonable search or seizure." Nobody denies that such questions are subjective--in referring to what's "unreasonable," the text itself calls for a subjective analysis.
Common law is basically just the US, UK, AU, and NZ. Outside the anglosphere it's mostly civil law.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
I guess civil law gives you less room to explore ideas like "living" statutes and laws that gain and change meaning over time; if there was such a change, you'd write it down?
Regardless: whether you're a textualist or realist, in the US you're still operating in a common law system.
No, that just highlights the hypocritical picking-and-choosing they do to justify it. Gorsuch is a textualist when he wants to be, just like the others.
Textualism in modern context is a tool used by conservative justices used to uphold laws that serve business interests and conservative causes.
Much of the decision is indeed based around an analysis of the words written by the legislature.
For example, Chinese nationals can enter our country and gather information on our infrastructure, corporations, and people with relative ease because English is prevalent, and foreign nationals have, with the exception of certain military/research areas, the same access that US citizens have. On the other hand, foreign nationals in China are closely monitored and have very few rights, assuming they know Chinese, are physically in China (Great Firewall), and know how to get around in the first place.
China has unfettered access to our media ecosystem, research, patents, etc., and they do their best to create an uncompetitive/hostile environment for any other country to attempt the same on their territory. Some of this has to do with trade—to be fair, these are intertwined—but the situation regarding intelligence is bleak.
>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; . . .
This is foreign commerce. It falls under the explicit jurisdiction of Congress.
However, this case is about something else. The opinion states that there is a first amendment interest, but that interest is secondary to a compelling national security interest that, in the court’s view, is valid. That may or may not be correct - but it is a subjective interpretation.
Yeah, it's the perhaps most powerful clause in the constitution. A large number of laws are formed like "[actual law ...] in commerce." That is the hook needed for a lot of laws to be constitutional. Technically those laws only apply to interstate or international commerce.
There are even supreme court cases discussing this:
>Congress uses different modifiers to the word “commerce” in the design and enactment of its statutes. The phrase “affecting commerce” indicates Congress’ intent to regulate to the outer limits of its authority under the Commerce Clause. [...] Considering the usual meaning of the word “involving,” and the pro-arbitration purposes of the FAA, Allied-Bruce held the “word ‘involving,’ like ‘affecting,’ signals an intent to exercise Congress’ commerce power to the full.” Ibid. Unlike those phrases, however, the general words “in commerce” and the specific phrase “engaged in commerce” are understood to have a more limited reach. In Allied-Bruce itself the Court said the words “in commerce” are “oftenfound words of art” [...] The Court’s reluctance to accept contentions that Congress used the words “in commerce” or “engaged in commerce” to regulate to the full extent of its commerce power rests on sound foundation, as it affords objective and consistent significance to the meaning of the words Congress uses when it defines the reach of a statute.[0]
[0] Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, 532 U.S. 105 (2001) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/532/105/case.pdf
Only because the Court wants it to be, so they can play Calvinball.
Marijuana grown, sold, and consumed entirely within one state? Still interstate commerce! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
It's worth noting that many conservative lawyers and activists have been calling for a more limited interpretation of interstate commerce, as a way of shifting power away from Congress to individual states.
>We granted certiorari to decide whether the Act, as applied to petitioners, violates the First Amendment.
>Petitioners argue that such a ban will burden various First Amendment activities, including content moderation, content generation, access to a distinct medium for expression, association with another speaker or preferred editor, and receipt of information and ideas.
Sotomayor expands on this in her concurrence:
>TikTok engages in expressive activity by “compiling and curating” material on its platform. Laws that “impose a disproportionate burden” upon those engaged in expressive activity are subject to heightened scrutiny under the First Amendment. The challenged Act plainly imposes such a burden: It bars any entity from distributing TikTok’s speech in the United States, unless TikTok undergoes a qualified divestiture. The Act, moreover, effectively prohibits TikTok from collaborating with certain entities regarding its “content recommendation algorithm” even following a qualified divestiture. And the Act implicates content creators’ “right to associate” with their preferred publisher “for the purpose of speaking.”
That might be technically true, but if (1) you're the lawyer representing a party in an important case, (2) you've already appealed that case up to the highest appelate court and lost, and (3) you think there's any chance that the Supreme Court might change the ruling in your favor, then wouldn't it basically be professional malpractice to not petition for certiorari? Of course, they only accept a tiny percentage of the petitions they receive.
Because obviously changing the owner-editor of a media outlet has everything to do with their editorial policy. The SCOTUS just said that censorship is ok (and forcing the change of the editor is censorship, there is no doubt about it), as long as it's against another state's editorial preferences potentially having a significant audience in the country.
I know there's court precedent, but corporations aren't people. It's yet another Chinese platform that Americans use to communicate with other western companies.
Corporate personhood is irrelevant to this case.
> Corporate personhood is irrelevant to this case.
Further more, "Corporations are people" implying corporations have rights isn't related to corporate personhood and is based on a (often deliberate by opposing politicians) misinterpretation of the phrase, as spoken by Mitt Romney.
What Romney was saying and what is true when he said "Corporations are people" is confusing because people interpret it as "Corporations are persons" which is not what he, or the case law he was referring to implied. The singular of the phrase is much more clear, a corporation is people.
The whole case was about a group of people pooling their funds to make a movie about Hilary Clinton being bad and the court found that the people still had free speech rights when acting through a corporation to pool their funds and so political donation limits didn't apply as long as no political campaign was involved. Hence, Super PACs having to say that the campaigns their supporting aren't involved with the campaigns.
It's actually an incredibly complicated and nuanced situation and the decision is equally so.
You can’t marry a child or your cousin (in most states), that doesn’t mean they aren’t people.
Isn't that obviously foreign commerce?
SCOTUS didn't have much to work with aside from level of scrutiny. They defer to Congress regarding national security.
I keep seeing this claimed, but these aren't hypothetical risks. China has managerial control over ByteDance. China has laws that require prominent companies to cooperate in their national security operations, and they've recently strengthened them even more. China has already exercised those powers to target political dissidents. This is the normal state of affairs in Chinese business; this is how things work there. It isn't like the west where companies have power to push back, or enjoy managerial independence.
But China is a bit different in that they don't simply have the authority to request data, they have the authority to direct management of the company.
Regardless, "someone associated with the government got a job at your company" is entirely different in consequence than "the government requires you to have government interests on your board"
I don't think you understand SCOTUS' decision here. They are not banning TikTok. Congress is doing so (actually forcing a sale of TikTok or be banned). They are simply ruling whether Congress acted unconstitutionally by doing so. In other words, if they overrule Congress, they would have to show how Congress' ruling contravenes the Constitution, when the Constitution grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce and decide matters of national security.
I think it's understandable, in a Chesterton's Fence sort of way - they better make sure that if they're going to start using a new methodology, it works better than what they use now, (these weird judge-created levels of scrutiny), but there's so much 1A precedent that is hard to be confident.
For 2nd amendment, they have used 'originalism' already. There isn't nearly as much precedent in that area, and so they were able to start more or less from scratch.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
Lmao these people are rubes. It's like every other bs "national security" argument.
Expect Yandex, VK, RT, Sputnik, SCMP, etc. to be banned as well under similar pretenses.
"Comrades! We can not let these Western dogs infect our proud Soviet minds with this 'Radio Free Europe'!"
Legal precedent holds that source code (the expressive part of software) is speech, but that executing software (the functional part) is not speech. Even when the operation conveys speech, the ban is on the functional operation of the software, so the First Amendment doesn't apply.
> Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
It's not an erosion because it was already true and has been true for centuries.
Isn't the inquiry made MORE subjective by incorporating extratextual considerations?
Or do you just mean that textualism is oversold, and delivers less than it advertises?
First, the court was not asked to reconsider the meaning of the First Amendment. In the US, we generally hew to the rule of "party presentation," which generally provides that courts will consider the parties' arguments, not make up new ones on their own.
TikTok's claim was that application of the statute in question to it violated the First Amendment's clause that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The Supreme Court has considered the interpretation and application of that clause in...well, a whole lot of cases. TikTok asked the court to apply the logic of certain of those precedents to rule in its favor and enjoin the statute. It did not, however, ask the court to reconsider those precedents or interpret the First Amendment anew.
Since the court was not asked to do so, it's no surprise that it didn't.
Second, as noted, the court has literally decades' worth of cases fleshing out the meaning of this clause and applying it in particular circumstances. Every textualist, so far as I'm aware, generally supports following the court's existing precedents interpreting the Constitution unless and until they are overruled.
Third, even if one is of the view that the Court ought to consider the text anew in every case, without deferring to its prior rulings interpreting the text, this would have been a particularly inappropriate case for it to do so. A party seeking an injunction, as TikTok was, has to show a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That generally entails showing that you win under existing precedent. A court's expedited consideration of a request for preliminary relief is not an appropriate time to broach a new theory of what the law requires. The court doesn't have the time to give it the consideration required, and asking the court to abrogate its precedents is inconsistent with the standard for a preliminary injunction, which contemplates only a preview of the ultimate legal question, not a full-blown resolution of it.
Fourth, what exactly was the court supposed to do with the text in question, which is "abridging the freedom of speech"? The question here is whether the statute here, as applied to TikTok, violates that text. Well, it depends on what "the freedom of speech" means and perhaps what "abridging" means. It's only natural that a court would look to precedent in answering the question. Precedent develops over time, fleshing out (or "liquidating," to use Madison's term) the meaning and application of ambiguous or general language. Absent some compelling argument that precedent got the meaning wrong, that sort of case-by-case development of the law is how our courts have always functioned--and may be, according to some scholars, itself a requirement of originalism.
>[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;[0]
(The actual law may not have relied exclusively on the Commerce Clause, you would have to read it to find out. But from a high level there is nothing stopping congress from regulating any instance foreign trade.)
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
Democratic outcomes that don't agree with our politics are officially deemed illegitimate, even if the elections are certified as fair.
It would be crazy to believe the US is somehow shy about running psyops when we openly arm rebels and bomb countries.
I'm a Canadian. Almost every major Canadian newspaper is owned by American ideologically-conservative hedge funds, the only variance is how activist they are in their ownership. Our social media (like everyone's) is owned by Americans, men who are now kowtowing to Trump.
And meanwhile, Trump is now incessantly talking about annexing our country. The Premier of Alberta is receptive to the idea.
So, how should a Canadian federal government responsibly react to that?
They have a web version that's surprisingly capable. Not sure if tiktok.com will be blocked on Sunday.
But there is also lot of OC rage-bait.
Edited for word choice.
…same as TikTok. Removed from app stores.
Fake news.
Chinese users are starting to caption their videos in English. American users are posting regularly.
It is the number 1 app in my country right now, because of the TikTok ban.
Look up the playstore and you will see. Download it for yourself and you will see.
Meanwhile, YouTube’s user numbers in the U.S. are estimated at 240 million, but it’s unlikely to gain many new downloads since almost everyone already has the app.
In my view, it’s unrealistic to think Rednote will replace TikTok.
700k in how much time? RN tops the (Play Store) charts here (EU/Croatia) as well, and anecdotally there's a lot of word of mouth growth. Even though TikTok will not get banned over here.
> It’s unrealistic to think Rednote will replace TikTok.
Possibly, but it does have a foot in the door. It doesn't look like they were ready for western audience so remains to be seen if they can seize on the opportunity.
But it illustrates the general dissatisfaction among TikTok users with the other mainstream US social content platforms.
Also, having tried it myself, the algorithm works much like TikTok whereby it learns to show English speakers English content pretty quickly.
Also the general consensus among people who have used IG and TikTok (I personally don’t use IG) seems to be that the former does not at all substitute for the latter, particularly in terms of the subjective “authentic” feel of the content (IG often said to be lacking the community feel of TikTok).
The interesting aspect here is rather the magnitude of dissatisfaction that a large percentage of users feel towards the other mainstream US social content platforms.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
Something I read that’s interesting - RedNote changed the English name to cover their actual name - the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true).
That is the Chinese name of the app (although I've heard mixed reports on if "little red book" as a term for the book actually common in China). The founder claims it's because of the founder's "career at Bain & Company and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business" which both use red, but I'm pretty sure it's a pun on his name also being Mao.
I keep coming across elected officials who are apparently briefed on something about TikTok, and they decide there’s a reasonable threat regarding the CCP or some such. The idea that the CCP could drive our national conversation somehow (still murky) bothers me.
My wife feels like this is the US Government trying to shut down a communication and news delivery tool.
While I don’t agree with her, I don’t think she’s wrong. It seems all the folks who “have it on good authority” that this is a dangerous propaganda tool, can’t share what “it” is.
One, he's not. Two, there is a massive difference between the owner of X being in the government and the government being in X. Three, the owner of every media platform is not in the government.
Even if all the CCP can do is modify how often some videos and comments show up to users on tik tok, there's a chance that level of control could have been enough to instigate the whole jump to red note we're seeing. After all, the suggestion originated within tik tok itself as the videos talking about it (and the comments praising it) went viral. Sure everyone was primed to do something with the deadline approaching, but it's entirely possible that the red note trend isn't an organically viral one, but a pre-planned and well executed attempt to throw a wrench in the works.
red note's infrastructure seems to have had no problems absorbing millions of new users at the drop of a hat, cloud scaling is good, but that kind of explosive growth in mere days, when unexpected, often results in some visible hiccups. Maybe the engineers are just that good, or maybe they had a heads up that it'd be happening.
Utter speculation on my part, but I've found it interesting I've not come across anyone else mention the possibility.
No need to speculate too hard here, there are plenty of examples of censorship on TikTok: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok
Censorship is a form of propaganda, and even the very obvious/reported examples we've seen reported over the years are pretty bad. And you have to assume that there is more going on than is actually reported/noticed, especially in subtler ways. It's also just obvious it's happening in the sense that the Chinese government has ultimate control over TikTok.
I don't see a section on their main wiki either, even though YT is pretty notorious for deleting stuff, even political stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
It's just theater.
I do wonder what will happen if TikTok users migrate to YouTube shorts, and if that will change this.
Essentially, Trump started the TikTok ban, Biden continued it, and Congress finally put it into law. And now both Trump and Biden, as well as Congress, are shying away from actually enforcing the ban.
• In August 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order finding that “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in [China] continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
• President Trump determined that TikTok raised particular concerns, noting that the platform “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users” and is susceptible to being used to further the interests of the Chinese Government.
• Just days after issuing his initial Executive Order, President Trump ordered ByteDance Ltd. to divest all interests and rights in any property “used to enable or support ByteDance’s operation of the TikTok application in the United States,” along with “any data obtained or derived from” U. S. TikTok users.
• Throughout 2021 and 2022, ByteDance Ltd. negotiated with Executive Branch officials to develop a national security agreement that would resolve those concerns. Executive Branch officials ultimately determined, however, that ByteDance Ltd.’s proposed agreement did not adequately “mitigate the risks posed to U. S. national security interests.” 2 App. 686. Negotiations stalled, and the parties never finalized an agreement.
• Against this backdrop, Congress enacted the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
Then Gaza happened.
-----
(3) FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—
(A) any of—
(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(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 way I read this is that Congress is bootstrapping the law with its own finding that ByteDance, Ltd/TikTok are Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications, but then, in (3)(B), the President is responsible for determining any other entities this law should cover given previously stated parameters (what they mean by "covered entity" here), using the procedure it then provides.
I believe that addresses the concern about this being a "Bill of Attainder".
Edit: Obviously IANAL, but it also doesn't appear that this issue of this being a Bill of Attainder was raised by TikTok, nor was it considered in this opinion. Perhaps they will do so in a separate action, or already have and it just hasn't made its way to the court(?), but if it were such a slam dunk defense, you think their expensive lawyers would have raised it.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
To me this bill seems problematic on that front in two directions. One is that it explicitly names a target of the ban. Secondly, it grants the president power to arbitrarily name more. Similar to how a King can declare certain Subjects be Attainded on His Whim.
But the petitioners (TikTok) did not raise this issue so the court did not have to decide on it. Instead they focused on the first amendment issue, which seems like a loser -- there is no speech present on TikTok that the law bans; any content on TikTok can be posted to red-blooded American apps like shorts or reels so the speech itself is not affected.
The definition of "foreign adversary controlled application" in the bill is explicit in including either (a) this specific list of organizations, OR (b) other organization that might meet certain criteria later. I'm not sure how the existence of (b) addresses the concern that (a) amounts to a bill of attainder.
I mean, that's true of basically all administrative agencies.
This may be a bit of relevance when talking about how banning a website get applied through the legal system.
The law levies fines against distributors of the app, it doesn't ban possession or block the operation of the app itself.
Ie, Google and Apple are forced to delist TikTok or face heavy fines
Maybe we will finally get the decentralized computer network we thought we were building in the 1990s (as a combination of software overlays and point to point unlicensed wireless links).
We're not (yet) like the UK or EU where rights holders can click a button and have IPs blocked without due process.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
You may want to read more than the headline next time.
> I don't think that's going to happen. The party official seems to be positive about the event overall based on their press release recently. IMO it's going to the opposite direction, where they try to get more foreign users on the platform and have them stay there. If I were a CCP official, I would love to have more soft power by having everyone on a Chinese platform.
But in a nut shell I think we're seeing outcome #2 play out, which has huge ramifications for the Chinese internet. Essentially this could become a precedent for all Chinese apps moving forward, and essentially the great firewall slowly dissolving. Trends have been slowly going that way with Bilibili, Douban, Kuaishou, etc, being more open to foreigners. There's still a lot to play out over the next few weeks as Trump assumes office and Tiktok CEO attends the inauguration. But there is just too much to comment about this entire situation, and most people who aren't Chinese or have experience with the great firewall are not going to comprehend just how monumental this whole ordeal has already been, and will be.
1- It's in the interest of the US government to protect its interests and citizens from governments that are considered adversarial, which China is. And unlike other countries, the Chinese government exercises a great deal of direct control over major companies (like ByteDance). If TikTok was controlled by the Russian government would we even be having this conversation? (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
I think social media in general - including by US companies - does more harm than good to society and concentrates too much power and influence in the hands of a few (Musk, Zuck, etc.) So this isn't to say that "US social media is good". But from a national security standpoint, Congress' decision makes sense.
2- If China allowed free access to US social media apps to its citizens then it might have a leg to stand on. But those are blocked (along with much of the Western internet) or heavily filtered/censored. TikTok itself is banned in China. So there's a strong tit-for-tat element here, which also is reasonable.
Yandex got fragmented into EU bits and Russian bits. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/russia-yandex-...
The head of VK is subject to sanctions https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22951307/us-sanctions-rus... (but it appears that Americans are still free to use VK if they want to?)
> (Ironically most Americans are freaked out about Russia, but when it comes to global politics, China is the much greater threat to the U.S.)
American-backed forces are fighting the Russian army itself in Ukraine. Implied in all of that is a desire to not have US forces fight them directly in Poland.
China benefits greatly from the rules based order that America spends considerable effort to maintain and uphold. They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer, but they're better off with than without and recognize that.
OTOH, Russia does not. They prefer chaos.
China is definitely the stronger threat. But Russia is a greater immediate threat because they're only interested in tearing things down. It's easier to tear things down than to build them up, especially if you don't care about the consequences.
I disagree; and it's the dismissal for the past 13-14 years of China as an immediate threat which is what has in part allowed China to become such a large longer-term threat.
> They would prefer a different rules based order than the one America would prefer
I would put it differently: China wants its own global hegemony instead of the U.S.' -- and that's understandable (everyone wants to rule the world). But if the U.S. doesn't want that to happen then it has to take steps to counter it.
For point #2, this seems like you're saying "they don't have a leg to stand on, and we want to do the same thing". If we don't support the way they control the internet, we shouldn't be doing adopting the same policies. I don't think governments should have any ability to control communication on the internet, so this feels like a huge overstep regardless of the reasons given for it
The problem in China is that there weren't strong safeguards to prevent a totalitarian control (CCP is supposed to be democratic within itself in that leaders are elected, though it's all restricted to party members, of course), and when Xi came into power he was able, within a few years, to sweep aside all opposition, primarily through "anti-corruption campaigns". So he now has a degree of control and power that would be a wet dream for Trump. (And you should see the level of adulation in the newspapers there.)
Now in the US we have a separate problem, and that is we have a system where unelected people like Elon and Zuckerberg, Murdoch, etc., exercise a tremendous amount of influence over the population through their policies and who are pursuing a marriage between authoritarian politics and big business (by the way, there's a term for this, it's called "fascism"). That is a serious problem -- but it's separate from the TikTok issue and shouldn't be used to discount the dangers of the CCP having control over a highly popular social network in the US.
The US companies continue to feed the same information to the Chinese, even though the Federal government has been trying to get them to stop for almost a decade (I cite sources elsewhere in this thread).
So, all of your arguments apply equally to the big US owned social media companies.
Since the ban won’t stop the Chinese from mining centralized social media databases, the important part of the question is:
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
that's not the issue; the issue is control of the network
> Wouldn't the right solution be to protect the citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic?
No. In the US government's view, its responsibility is to counter potential foreign threats -- and not just foreign, but adversarial (this wouldn't be an issue for a social network controlled by the UK or Japan, for example) -- which would include a highly pervasive social network controlled by a foreign government that is the US' largest adversary.
As for whether social media companies in general are good or bad for American society, that's a completely separate question. (I tend to think they do more harm then good, but it's still a separate question.)
So now the US should just do everything China does? What happened to American ideals protecting themselves? If free speech really works, it shouldn't matter that TikTok exists.
That's the exact reason why Communist China setup the firewall in the first place. Good luck.
The GFW doesn't just block websites/networks/content that is controlled by adversarial foreign governments, but all websites/networks/content which the CCP is unable to censor. The GFW is about controlling the flow of information to its citizens from __any__ party not under the CCP's control.
2) This is not about protecting users of the app, this is about preventing a foreign state from having direct influence on public opinion.
It is obvious to me why this is necessary. If you allow significant foreign influence on public opinion, then this can be leveraged. Just imagine Russia being in control of a lot of US media in 2022. Or 1940's Japan. That is a very serious problem, because it can easily lead to outcomes that are against the interests of ALL US citizens in the longer term...
So I read it like they didn't interpret this as a free speech issue at all.
As we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks, social media companies based in the US are also vulnerable to US government interference — but that’s the way they like it.
They released a Marty Rimm-level report citing that pro-Palestinian was mentioned more than pro-Israeli content in ratios that differed from Meta products. This was the 'smoking gun' of manipulation when it's more of a sign Meta was the one doing the manipulation.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/6/7/china-spied-on-ho...
Every major social media and dating application has a law enforcement portal. This was documented in BlueLeaks.
But, this is done under the guise of commercial interests, usually advertising, so it's okay?
The only problem with democracy is that it's so fragile and susceptible to bad non-democrat actors intervention, which is more of an awareness problem.
I’d argue the TikTok remedy should be applied to X, too.
Companies in China (and especially those of prominence) have formal structures and regulations that require them to cooperate with the government, and sometimes require the companies to allow the government to intervene in operations if necessary.
It is not possible for a CCP official to show up to a board meeting at X and direct the company to take some action, because that isn't how US corporations work.
But regardless, there is a huge difference between a request and actually having managerial authority -- the most obvious being that someone with managerial authority can simply do whatever they want without trying to compel someone else. Also, X, being subject to US law, must comply with that no matter what consequences Musk is threatened with. So, any threats may have limits in what they can practically accomplish.
My interpretation of the parent’s comment is that we have pretty serious (and dubiously legal) overreach on this in a purely domestic setting as well.
As someone who has worked a lot on products very much like TikTok, I’d certainly argue that we do.
There is an adjacent point that many of us feel is just as important, which is that there is evidence in the public record (see Snowden disclosures among others) that there is lawbreaking or at least abuse of clearly stated constitutional liberties taking place domestically in the consumer internet space and has been for a long time.
Both things can be true, and both are squarely on topic for this debate whether on HN or in the Senate Chambers.
- China can access military personnel, politically exposed persons, and their associates. Location data, sensitive kompromat exfiltration, etc.
- China can show favorable political content to America and American youth. They can influence how we vote.
- China could turn TikTok into a massive DDoS botnet during war.
- China doesn't allow American social media on its soil. This is unequal trade and allows their companies to grow stronger.
- China can exert soft power, exposing us to their values while banning ours from their own population.
American culture has been such an influencing force on the world due to our conduits, movies and music. TikTok is a Chinese conduit, and I do believe this is happening. Our culture can be co-opted, the Chinese had John Cena apologize to ALL of China. They can easily pay to have American influencers spin in a certain way, influencing everything.
As an aside, TikTok itself is banned in China.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica...
Edit: Apparently it’s not common knowledge that this is still happening. Here’s a story about a congressional investigation from 2023:
https://www.scworld.com/analysis/developers-in-china-russia-...
And here’s a story about an executive order from Biden the next year. Apparently the White House concluded that the investigation wasn’t enough to fix the behavior:
https://www.thedailyupside.com/technology/biden-wants-to-sto...
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/americans-person...
Edit 2: Here’s a detailed article from the EFF from this month explaining how the market operates: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-...
I’m not anti-vax. I’ve been shot up with Covid vaccines more often than I can count and I was early in line for the J and J one shot and I took an mRNA booster before it was recommended by the US once I started reading it was recommended by other country’s health departments.
But where we are now is totally the fault of Biden and the Democratic establishment.
They can claim this is not a sale if they want, but it’s still a sale. Drug dealers make similar arguments about similar shell games where you hand a random dude some cash, then later some other random dude drops a bag on the ground and you pick it up.
Since Facebook was first caught doing this during the Obama administration, it’s hard to argue they are not intentionally selling the data at this point.
I'm not sure they do that anymore, not in the current geopolitical climate and not with the DC ghouls having taken over the most sensitive parts of Meta the company (there were many posts on this web-forum about former CIA people and not only working at the highest levels inside of Meta).
Major social media apps? Chinese apps are still in our app stores, just not TikTok (as of Sunday).
Edit: related https://hate.tg/
There are no Russian apps that collect extensive data on hundreds of millions of Americans. (And if I'm wrong about that, the US should absolutely force divestiture of those apps or ban them).
If it wasn't ratified by the senate then we didn't enter into a treaty, I really don't understand why this is so hard for people to understand.
Let them collect and ban this. Difference between Meta and TikTok is you can prosecute the former’s top leadership.
This banning of TikTok because of "national security" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Might the next application banned on these ground be domestic? It's unsettling, in my opinion, to see this precedent set.
As if this would get banned.
Define the US here. Is it the government, the people, the business interests of the private sector?
Each one of those has different interests, often competing ones.
In any functional nation the people's interests should prevail, and it seems to me that any information capable of swaying the public's opinion is informing them that their interests are being harmed in favor of other ones.
The interest of the people is to have a peaceful coexistence and cooperation with China, while the interest of the military-industrial complex is to keep the tension high at all times so that more and more money is spent on armaments.
Who do you think the US government will favor in the end?
Who has more power to determine the result of the next elections, considering that to run a presidential campaign you need more than a billion dollars?
No citizen gains from war except the few that sell weapons and want to exploit other countries.
I wonder how do you know "the interests of the majority of people" is to ban Tiktok...
Nobody wants China to take Taiwan, that's not something its possible to convince people of
It's not about convincing them to want it but rather about sowing doubt and confusion at the critical moment.
David French's NYT column last week starts with what one might call a "just-plausible-enough" scenario: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/opinion/tiktok-supreme-co... (gift link, yw).
What is the list? Does WWII count as one war, or do we could belligerents individually?
Ironically, the "good" guys here allow you to talk shit on the internet about them while the "bad" guys would catch and harvest my organs someday for writing this comment.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_... [1] https://chinatribunal.com/ [2] https://theowp.org/reports/china-is-forcibly-harvesting-orga...
And funnily enough, just had a state try to pass a law making prisoners get to "choose" to donate organs for a reduced sentence https://apnews.com/article/organ-donation-massachusetts-stat...
But point is, no love for the CCP but this sort of jingoistic take sucks. China is not "literally hell"
And domestically in the US - citizens should be demanding the dismantling of the big powerful players - which ironically the US government is against because of it's usefulness abroad..... ( let's assume for one moment, despite evidence to the contrary, that the US government doesn't use these tools of persuasion on it's own population ).
They are and have been.
Social media is a legitimate threat to any countries democracy if used wisely. It is dangerous to have one of the biggest ones in the hands of your enemy when they can influence your own countries narrative to such an extent.
Note that from the little I know about both Sosaca and Georgescu, they both look like dangerous nutjobs that should not rule, but if I were a Romanian I would be more worried about a democracy that removes candidates it doesn't like for purely political reasons (not for having commited a felony or anything like that) than about them.
If they aren't already prosecuting him on this I guess technically it's legal but such a weird loophole in the law. Any spending towards promoting a candidate should be public knowledge imo. EDIT: he was claiming bullshit like GOD chose him and that's how he got that good of a result. I guess his God is the people in the shadows that made his tiktok campaign lol
> For me the biggest scandal in Romania is that they threw the people's choice to the trash just because he didn't show up in polls
I think they did it for many reasons but not because he didn't show up in polls.
Top ones are:
- PSD didn't advance in the second round and they had the leverage to pull it off
- Georgescu was clearly anti-NATO so maybe the US pulled strings
- Danger of having a president with Russian sympathies
- He was claiming that he didn't spend a single dime on the election while everyone in the know knows that his tiktok campaign cost sever million euros
Out of the fourth reasons you list at the end, only the fourth is not pure authoritarianism (why wouldn't people in a democracy be free to elect a president that dislikes NATO or likes Russia if that is their will?). Campaign funding fraud has happened in many Western countries but typically it's handling by imposing fines, maybe some jail time, but definitely not cancelling the result of an entire election.
And considering the level of education of most of the Romanian population I believe having "true" democracy would destroy the country. I understand this may not be a popular opinion but I'm trying to be realistic here lol
I just wish the Western world would drop the hypocrisy in this respect, and stop claiming to defend more democracy than it actually does. A relevant problem is that democracy is often used as an easy excuse to keep people content. Singapore is a hugely successful country in most respects, with better quality of life than most Western countries, but we shouldn't take example from it because we have democracy! China is constantly growing and improving the quality of life of their citizens, is still behind most of the West in that respect but on the path to overtake us, but it doesn't matter, we have democracy! Maybe if we weren't constantly claiming the moral high ground, when as you mentioned our own democracies are at most relative and the difference with more authoritarian countries is a matter of degree; we could be more self-critical and focus on actually fixing things.
If China could effectively influence the American populations opinions, how would that not be bad?
Do you prefer Americans to be ignorant about certain topics, or to be informed even if that comes at the cost of reduced approval for the government?
That trust wasn't lost because of foreign propaganda, but because of the government own lies.
Note: I'm not saying I either agree or disagree ... just pointing out the dynamics in the case being made.
FTA
They do, and they did. From the ruling:
The Act’s prohibitions and divestiture requirement are designed to prevent China—a designated foreign adver- sary—from leveraging its control over ByteDance Ltd. to capture the personal data of U. S. TikTok users. This ob- jective qualifies as an important Government interest un- der intermediate scrutiny.
This isn't a consumer data privacy protection.
The concerns here are obvious: For example, it would be trivial for the Chinese military to use TikTok data to find US service members, and serve them propaganda. Or track their locations, etc.
First, it's a national security issue for a company controlled by the CCP to have intimate data access for hundreds of millions of US citizens. Not only can they glean a great deal of sensitive information, but they have the ability to control the algorithm in ways that benefit the CCP.
Second, China does not reciprocate this level of vulnerability. US companies do not have the same access or control over Chinese users. If you want to allow nation states to diddle around with your citizens, then it ought to be a reciprocal arrangement and then it all averages out.
I keep seeing argument regarding "China bans social medias from other countries". It's not an outright ban saying that "Facebook cannot operate in China", but more like "Comply with the censorship rules or you cannot operate in China". It's not targeting "ownership" or "nation states". e.g. Google chose to leave, while Microsoft continues to operate Bing in China.
• US data brokers can still sell data to foreign companies (out of control of US and thus indirectly to Chinese companies).
• Chinese companies can buy US companies (thereby obtaining lots of data).
If we killed user-tracking, then that would solve a LOT of problems.
This is false. It was made illegal in April, 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520
This is very limited and will not prevent indirect sales (like we now see happening with Russian oil for example).
It is also why I said "indirectly".
Keeping the data securely inside our country is never going to work if China can simply open their wallet and spend billions of $ to obtain the data.
It is obviously way better on this matter than China, but in principle, liberties are selectively granted in US and in China.
The TikTok ban topic has been stale for long time before it became the main harbor for Pro-Palestine content after it became under censorship by US social media thus depriving anti-Palestine from controling the narrative, effectively becoming a major concern for AIPAC et al.
Data collection is more of a plausible pretext at this point.
China blocks facebook/twitter/instagram/pinterest/gmail/wikipedia/twitch and even US newspapers.
So clearly they don't think it's okay for a US-company to do it (and are at least an order magnitude stricter about it)...
The ideal world order isn't the one where Chinese can't find out what happened on Tiananmen square and Americans can't find out what happened in Gaza. That's a very shitty arrangement and I am shocked that the Americans are picking that as their future.
I don't see how this law banning a social media site brings us at all closer to a world where Americans cannot get access to accurate information about major global conflicts. This is so far down the imagined "slippery slope" as to be absurd. In fact, I'd strongly argue that this law would achieve the opposite. If you're relying on Tik Tok for accurate information like this, then you are opening yourself to echo chambers, biased takes, and outright propaganda. There are many excellent sources out there in America freely available and easily accessible.
Remember how Musk decided that after the elections Twitter will prioritize fun instagram of politics?
I fail to see how anything going on at Twitter is relevant to what I mentioned. Does Twitter shifting its content priorities somehow make the plethora of excellence sources unavailable?
Twitter and Meta are foreign everywhere else, everywhere else except China TikTok is foreign as well and apparently they all lick their respective governments.
Whatever you think of the law of the PRC, they applied it consistently, Facebook was blocked for doing something that would get any Chinese company shut down.
Tiktok is getting blocked in America for doing what American companies do.
Chinese courts are explicitly subservient to the party.
Edit:
Obviously, China has a constitution, but the freedoms enumerated there are not the same as those in America's. And those that are enumerated are pointless (like North Korea's constitution).
My point is that there's an inherent hypocrisy in saying we're more free than them, but then doing a tit-for-tat retaliatory measure. How can we be more free when we're doing the same things the other side is?
The Chinese constitution, in addition to endowing rights, also endows obligations.
So while you have things like: > Article 35 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.
You also have things like: > Article 54 Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall have the obligation to safeguard the security, honor and interests of the motherland; they must not behave in any way that endangers the motherland’s security, honor or interests.
Compare this to the Supreme court, which is supposedly in Trump's hands, ruling against Trump twice on this tiktok ban alone (the first to kill his executive order, and the second to not pause the law to wait for him to take office).
America is ridiculously pro free speech. That doesn’t mean we must then tolerate libel, slander, fraud, false advertising, breach of contract, et cetera because someone screams free speech.
The Bill of Rights exists in balances, and the First Amendment is balanced, among other the things, with the nation’s requirement to exist. That doesn’t mean the Congress can ban speech. But it can certainly regulate media properties, including by mandating maximum foreign ownership fractions.
Except for one group of people which have made any criticism of them carry legal consequences
Jews? You know we have other federally-protected classes, correct?
If you’re referring to Israel, no, there aren’t legal consequences for criticising Israel. Half of the vocal minority of the internet is constantly up in arms about Israel.
Say, for example, congress passes and the president signs a law that says that product sponsorships in videos need to be disclosed. If a US company (or a European, Australian, Japanese, etc) country violates that law, we're pretty sure that a judgement against them can change that behavior.
China? Not so much, given their history.
If you want to convince someone they're not good answers you would have to at least engage with them and show how they fail to be correct/moral/legal or something. Pretending they don't exist does nothing.
It's not perfectly fine, but you need to start with companies of foreign adversaries first.
The details specific to China and TikTok are kind of moot when talking about broad principles. And there is a valid discussion to be had regarding whether or not it does pose a legitimate national security threat. You would be absolutely correct in pointing out all of the trade that happens between China and the USA as a rebuttal to what I'm about to offer.
To put where I'm coming from into perspective, I'm one of those whacko Ayn Rand loving objectivists who wants a complete separation between state and economy just like we have been state and church and for the same reasons. This means that I want nothing shy of absolute laissez-faire capitalism.
But that actually doesn't mean that blockades, sanctions and trade prohibitions are necessarily inconsistent with this world view. It depends on the context.
An ideal trade is one in which both parties to that trade benefit. The idea being that both are better off than they were before the trade.
This means that it is a really stupid idea to trade anything at all at any level with those who want to either destroy or harm you.
National security is one of the proper roles of government.
And I don't think you necessarily disagree with me, because you're saying "we should also be protected our citizens from spying and intrusions into our privacy" and yes! Yes we absolutely should be!
But that's a different role than protecting the nation from external threats. You can do your job with respects to one, and fail at your job with respects to the other, and then it is certainly appropriate to call out that one of the important jobs is not being fulfilled. Does that make it hypocritical? Does it suddenly make it acceptable for enemy states to start spying?
By all means criticize your government always. That's healthy. But one wrong does not excuse another. We can, and should, debate whether TikTok really represents a national security threat, or whether we should be trading with China at all (my opinion is we shouldn't be). It's just that the answer to "why its bad when China does it but it's right when it's done domestically" is "it's wrong in both cases and each can be dealt with independently from the other without contradiction"
You are just seeming to ignore them for whatever reason.
Douyin (The Chinese Tiktok version) limits users under 14 to 40 minutes per day and primarily serves educational content, while TikTok's algorithm outside China optimizes for maximum engagement regardless of content quality or user wellbeing.
US tech companies pursuing profit at the expense of user wellbeing is concerning and deserves its own topic. However, there is a fundamental difference between a profit driven company operating under US legal constraints and oversight, versus a platform forced to serve the strategic interests of a foreign government that keeps acting in bad faith.
This isn't true, at least not for adults' accounts. I've watched my girlfriend use it and the content was exactly what she watched on TikTok, mostly dumb skits, singing, dancing, just all in Chinese instead of half in Chinese. It also never kicked her off for watching too long.
I was told a similar story about Xiaohongshu, where it was supposedly an app for Chinese citizens to read Mao's quotations (through the lens of Xi Jinping Thought) to prove their loyalty. Then I saw it for real and it's literally Chinese Instagram.
Regardless, assembly of an iPhone with Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese components in China is not the same as mass surveillance as a service.
In terms of algorithms, most US companies refer to that as intellectual property. Google doesn't sell their search algorithm to other search engines so I don't think your point makes any sense. Companies keep their IP secret for a reason, they don't want competition digging into their profits. What US company isn't engaging in the same completely legal behaviors?
My point about the phones is that China like America can target any electronic like the US was doing 20 years via interdiction. If we look at the NSA ANT catalog, specifically DIETYBOUNCE, everything they accuse China of is stuff we practically invented.
edit: Also I just purchased a M4 Mac mini, shipped directly from China.
Maybe. But there is a huge constitutional distinction between foreign and domestic threats. And the supreme court was pretty clear that the decision would be different if it didn't reside with a "foreign adversary".
Meta, Musk, and others have no right or grant to operate in the EU, Canada or elsewhere. They should be banned.
Not sure why this is a hard one to understand but with the ability to individualized media, you can easily feed people propaganda and they'd never know. Add in AI and deep fakes, and you have the ability to manipulate the entire discourse in a matter of minutes.
How do you think Trump was elected? Do you really think the average 20 something would vote for a Republican, let alone a 78 year old charlatan? They were manipulated into the vote. And that is the most innocuous possible use of such a tech.
Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Everybody forgot already US spying on Merkel's phone?
But that's okay, because America is not bound to any rules I guess. Disgusting foreign policy with a disgusting exceptionalism mentality.
Because China's political system applies absolutely no pressure for transparency.
> Whereas we have proof and evidence that US agencies can access data about citizens from anywhere else in the world without even needing a court order.
Something we know about because the US political system has levers that can be pulled to apply pressure for transparency.
You'd have to be very naive not to think that the Chinese government has an interest in controlling what US users of TikTok see. Whether they actually have or not is a somewhat useless question because we'll never know definitively, and even if they haven't today there's nothing saying they won't tomorrow.
We can say that they have both the motive and capability to do so.
Just because something has been repeated in the news 20000 times, it doesn't make it true without evidence. Speculation is just it: speculation.
As far as I've seen, it's not Chinese company spying on me, it's US ones, it's not Chinese companies hacking Wifis in all major airports to track regular citizens, it's US ones, it's not Chinese intelligence spying on European politicians, it's US ones, it's not Chinese diplomacy drawing the line between rebels/protesters, good or bad geopolitically, it's always Washington, it's not Chinese intelligence we know of hacking major European infrastructure and bypassing SCADA, it's US one.
The elephant in the room is US' fixation for exceptionalism and being self authorized to do whatever it pleases while at the same time making up geopolitical enemies and forcing everybody to follow.
I don't buy it, I'm sorry. I don't particularly like the Chinese system, I don't particularly love their censorship, and I don't particularly like their socials on our ground when our ones are unable to operate there (unless they abide to Chinese laws, which are restricting and demand user data non stop, something they are very willing to do in US though).
My beef is with American's exceptionalism and with the average American Joe who cannot see the dangers posed by the foreign policy of its own country. The US should set the example and then pretend the same, instead it does worse than everybody and cries that only it can. It's dangerous.
We know most of it because of whistleblower leaks.
No free press, no whistleblowers.
Yes there has been. TikTok admitted to it. They were tracking journalists.
This is not a mere accusation. Instead the company admitted to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-by...
I care becsuse I hate hypocrisy. Simple as that. They'll sweep Russian activity under the rug as long as it's done in an American website. This mindset clearly isn't results oriented.
This amendment to the constitution was rewritten a few times, each time more clearly stating that it applies to “the people”.
From: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-7-1/ALD...
All of the congressional hearings over the past ~15 years demonstrates how business in the US is still pretty much governed by the rule of law. I’m of the opinion that there isn’t some shadow cabal working with Musk and Zuckerberg to control our minds. However we know that the CCP absolutely manages what the public can consume, so personally while I’m no fan of heavy handed government intervention in business, this ban seems like “a good thing” to me. We must protect the short, middle and long term prospects of our population — it’s a fundamental duty of the federal government to do so.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/07/google-faceboo...
This is a very weakly held opinion, and I don’t know if the opinion addresses this.
No idea if this applies to companies, but foreign visitors do get protections.
Minor clarification that some parts specify "citizen" (e.g. voting). Others specify "person" or "resident" or the like, which would be anyone within the border.
You will not find anywhere in the text that limits this to citizenship (with the sparse examples of the concept of citizenship coming up being things like eligibility for presidential office). The purpose of the Constitution is to spell out the abilities of the government, and one of the things it is expressly forbidden from doing is passing laws that curtail peoples' ability to communicate or associate.
If they want speech, they should reside in the US, not just own a piece of a company that does.
The rights enforced inside the US are very generous compared to most countries and many apply to both legal and illegal residents, but restricting some rights, especially political ones, is crucial to have a sovereign state
I don't know why realpolitik is so hard for technologists to understand, perhaps too much utopian fantasy scifi?
Nothing but lazy disingenuous arguments who's only purpose is to bait conversations for replying with even lazier whataboutisms.
Either the brainrot has really set in for these people or we are being flooded with ai/bots.
(a) American companies’ business interests don’t fully align with the needs of their users or the general public,
and that
(b) the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives —which include weakening, destabilizing, and impoverishing the United States— are even less aligned with the interests of American citizens.
Indeed, but at the point we are in history the steps to get that done - aka, copy the EU GDPR and roll it out federally - would take far too long, all while China has a direct path to the brains of our children.
It's a national security concern. I get that there's a lot of conversation and debate to be had on the topic but the answer here is very straightforward and I don't understand why people are so obtuse about it.
You don't have to agree that protecting those interests is worth the disruption to the global market, free speech ideology, etc. But to engage in the debate, you need to recognize that this is the core concern.
I share the exact same concern about "deep, adversarial manipulation of public sentiment" from US-based corporations running algorithmically-generated designed to addict consumers, and also believe that everyone needs to recognize that core concern as well.
ALL of it needs to die.
You mean letting U.S. citizens see the flour massacre video on a platform where the security state can’t ban it.
This bill languished for years until that happened.
You have an interesting and unique definition of "state censorship". Almost like one defined by a bias inherently interested in letting specific foreign interests continue to proliferate under the guise of an emotional appeal.
Right, and silver is better than nothing.
I think many of us on HN would agree that US social media companies having the means to manipulate user sentiment via private algorithms is a bad thing. But it's at least marginally better than a foreign adversary doing so because US companies have a base interest in the US continuing to be a functional country. Plus it's considerably more difficult to pass a law covering this domestically, where US tech giants have vested interests, lobbyists and voters they can manipulate.
So yes, a targeted ban against a foreign-owned company isn't the ideal outcome. But it's not difficult to see why it's considered a better outcome than doing nothing at all.
The influence is what law makers care far more about. Remember what Russia was doing on facebook in 2016? Now imagine that Russia actually owned facebook at the time.
C'mon, we can have a more informed conversation than that.
TikTok is an entertainment platform the average young American watches for more than an hour a day. Videos cover just about any topic imaginable. We just had an election. Is it really so impossible to imagine a foreign power adjusting the algorithm to show content favorable to one candidate over another? It's entirely within their power and they have every motive.
The TikTok ban would have been the perfect opportunity for any number of competing US social media apps to swoop in and offer TT's current users a replacement, but they seem to have all failed to address that market.
Just at a base level, Facebook, X, etc are staffed by Americans who have a vested interest in the country remaining functional. The CEOs of those companies are, though it's very unlikely, arrestable. Can't say the same for TikTok.
I suspect this is our fundamental disagreement. I disagree with both of these statements. Facebook's & X's executives have a vested interested in power and money for themselves and their peers. These oligarchs are in practice above the law, just like China's and Russia's oligarchs are. This decision only gives them even more control. It's bad for those US citizens who are not in the oligarch class.
Put another way, I think China & Facebook's execs are about equal in terms of danger to US citizens (I'd probably give the edge to Facebook's execs, since they have direct control over US policy, but we're splitting hairs here). So banning one but not the other is a crappy situation, because it concentrates that power even further.
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
https://www.politico.eu/article/calin-georgescu-romania-elec...
The US is happy to invade countries and turns a blind eye to Israeli aggression but Russia or China want to do it and they are met with sanctions etc. The last bastion of American exceptionalism was how it’s a free market and values free speech and free competition.
There was a national security threat but the US walked right into it: China is making a move for the top spot as global hegemon. It’s recruiting other countries to say don’t work with the US, work with us instead. The US flinched. Ralph blew the conch and all the kids just installed RedNote .
That's a blow to hegemony that will have lasting consequences.
If I understand correctly how it works, it’s a propagandist’s dream, building personalized psych profiles on each person. You could imagine that it’d be the perfect place to try generating novel videos to fit specific purposes, as well - the signals from this could feed back directly into the loss functions for the generative models.
I think politicians’ efforts to regulate tech are generally not great, but I think this one is pretty spot-on.
Sally stole a cookie from the cookie jar and now the teacher is pointing at the fat kid and not letting him be in the classroom alone with the cookie jar. Just bc he is fat.
The allegation is that it's used to spread misinformation and affect public sentiment, not for infiltration.
I suspect that it's not about data being transferred, but the fact that TikTok can shape opinions of Americans... which US companies do a lot, without any oversight.
If the US was going to get into a legitimate hot "soldiers shooting at soldiers" type of war with any country, China is extremely high on that list. Maybe even #1. Pumping data on tens of millions of Americans directly into the CCP is bad. Putting a CCP-controlled algorithm in front of those tens of millions of Americans is so pants-on-head-retarded in that context it seems crazy to even try to talk about anything more general than that.
So where exactly is the meaningful difference here? I don't see it.
The actual difference is that US does not see the money from Tiktok, and blocking tiktok is a convenient excuse to give their propaganda platforms a competetive edge.
Actually doing something about the fundamental problem of foreign influence through the internet would basically destroy sillicon valley, and no politician wants to be responsible for that.
So what's the issue? That people living in the U.S. and using TikTok might be influenced to act differently than how the powers that be want us to act?
Which makes it seem far more plausible that the real national security capability that is being defended is that of the US gov to influence narratives on social media. And while even that might be constitutional, it’s a lot less compelling.
However, there is another law that made sale of data to foreign adversaries illegal, passed in April 2024: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520
Except:
• the US performs these activities (data collection, algorithm manipulation allegedly, etc) for US interests, which may not always align with the interests of individuals in the US, whereas
• adversarial foreign governments perform these activities for their own interests, which a US person would be wise to assume does not align with US interests and thus very likely doesn't align with the interests of US persons.
If a person's main concern is living in a better United States, start with ensuring that the United States is sticking around for the long run first. Then we can work on improving it.
[1]: https://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=news.ycombinator....
International Steam is also banned in China yet we curiously see the majority of users nowadays use simplified Chinese.
In the context of a discussion on a US-specific ban on TikTok I'm taking the "us" in OP's post to mean people in the US. If you aren't in the US the ban doesn't apply to you so the discussion is irrelevant.
In a way, this thread could very well be monitored and commented on by a non US nation state
It'll come back as an issue in a less obvious manner next time, and every time until they pass such a law.
Which, imho, won't happen while our overall political environment remains conservatively dominant.
It seems there are indeed things that can override citizen's free choice even in the "lighthouse of democracy and freedom", and CCP didn't make a mistake for building the firewall. My need to use Shadowsocks to use Google instead of Baidu or some other crap was simply a collateral damage.
Of course, the Chinese censorship is way more intensive, but this act makes a dangerous precedent.
tiktok.com links were available in China.
Obviously the USA doesn't have a GFW, so they can't actually block tiktok, just ban it from the app store and prevent business from resolving in the US around it (e.g. paying content creators).
Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.
6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".
This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.
ByteDance is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party.
What facebook and ByteDance want at their core are very different things.
More dangerous to the US government? Yes, that's true.
Because people are writing Orwell fanfiction?
Imagine you're a country with natural resources. Private industries want those resources. Suddenly the US media is flooded with fabricated or exaggerated stories about the country written by NGOs and Think Tanks. Suddenly, out of nowhere a coup happens in the country with the stated intention of "liberalization" and "democratic reforms". The country goes through shock therapy and structural adjustments as it takes on mountains of IMF loans to enter the world markets-- it has to sell off control of all its national resources and industries to American companies. The life expectancy plummets.
Oh wait this isn't a hypothetical this is just actual US foreign policy.
Not even in Europe we have such crackdown on freedom while Americans scream censorship because nazi symbols and certain phrases are illegal in Germany.
Telegram?
The distinction between apps and websites seems arbitrary to me... especially since a huge fraction of apps seem to be effectively just a browser window with a single website locked in full screen.
I have never before used tiktok, but just now as an experiment I opened it in a browser and scrolled for a minute- I had no problem accessing an apparently endless stream of mostly young women jumping up and down without bras, and young men vandalizing automobiles.
There are countries other than America.
Personally, I still need to be deliberate in limiting my use, so I wouldn't be sad to see it disappear, even though I do find some value in it.
None of us have more than 24 hours in our days. That time is precious. Products that are specifically designed to suck up as much of it as possible must be avoided.
I'm really bored at this point by the political discussions around this. We've heard it all a million times. As far as I'm concerned, that's missing the point.
Because, at the end of the day, and ignoring for a moment the practicality of the notion, the world would just be a better place without them.
Seriously, go read a book. We'd be living in a different world if that scaled.
HN provides the same basic neophilia.
In the way that Gorsuch wrote a separate concurrence, I expected Alito or Thomas to want to broadcast a particular message to their audience.
What's stopping another version of TikTok from being created, effectively defeating the purpose of banning a single app?
From the decision:
> Second, the Act establishes a general designa-
> tion framework for any application that is both (1) operated
> by a “covered company” that is “controlled by a foreign ad-
> versary,” and (2) “determined by the President to present a
> significant threat to the national security of the United
> States,” following a public notice and reporting process.
> §2(g)(3)(B). In broad terms, the Act defines “covered com-
> pany” to include a company that operates an application
> that enables users to generate, share, and view content and
> has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users. §2(g)(2)(A).
> The Act excludes from that definition a company that oper-
> ates an application “whose primary purpose is to allow us-
> ers to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel in-
> formation and reviews.” §2(g)(2)(B).
So would that mean Red Note would get banned as well?
Edit: assuming they, like tiktok, refuse to divest to a company based in the US
Edit: also assuming it is a foreign company. I’ve never even heard of it prior to this comment section
He probably should let it stand for a day or two, and then drop an executive order to make it not banned and thus be a hero to all those who use it.
However, there is an open question as to whether Trump will choose to enforce the law.
Glad to see when it comes to protecting tech monopolies the wisest among us are in full agreement.
Silly things like a right to a speedy trial are up for debate though.
I think this is a massive over reach. You can argue to restrict social media to those over 18, but Americans should have a right to consume content they choose.
What's next, banning books by Chinese authors? Banning Chinese Americans from holding key positions in social media companies, after all they might have uncles in the CCP!
Follow the money. TikTok is an issue for Facebook, BYD cars are an issue for Tesla.
Yes, that's precisely the argument of the pro-ban faction. China doesn't allow TikTok in China. It's not about the money, it's about control over a medium that can be exploited for influence, or at the very least the effects of that platform on its audience.
It's silly to pretend like ByteDance are acting on principle. Go post an LGBT meme or refer to Lai Ching-te as the "President of Taiwan" on Red Note and see how long that lasts.
edit:
<< Go post an LGBT meme or refer to Lai Ching-te as the "President of Taiwan" on Red Note and see how long that lasts.
China does not pretend to give lipservice to freedom of speech. US does. That is why its population needs to hold its government accountable.
The last time we had two smart candidates was 2012.
The Democrats lost strongholds like Miami of all places. The dumbest thing they did was go against the tech industry who have always been their biggest supporters. Would Republicans go after Evangelical Christians or the NRA?
They gave people no reason to support them.
Yes, because of how ignorant much of the population is, correlating lower grocery prices with whoever was in office at the time.
> They gave people no reason to support them.
Given how bad the alternative was they were the only rational choice.
Do you think the population got more ignorant in 4 years? This is all on the DNC and Biden. Biden should have either voluntarily not run or stronger Democrats should have had a primary and crucified him.
The DNC lied to the American public for years. They knew that Biden wasn’t all there. They basically tried to do a “Weekend with Bernie” on them.
Not to mention that strategically for the first time in modern history they had the new industry titans in their back pocket - BigTech - and threw them under the bus.
The American population doesn’t care about going after BigTech like HN does.
No, but frankly if it was that should have been enough.
> Do you think the population got more ignorant in 4 years?
Yes, obviously. Or at least more ignorant people decided to vote this time.
Any other Democrat could have distanced themselves from Biden. But his own VP couldn’t.
Democrats lose due to significant ignorance in the population and successful propaganda by hostile entities. It's not an accident that the reddest states at the least educated and least literate. If you doubt that I'm happy to support the claim, but I think we both know it's true.
> They are completely out of touch with what the mainstream wants.
Democrats are the only party actually offering to give the majority what they want, but due to ignorance and propaganda the majority have become emotionally hostile to the means necessary to accomplish implementing what they want.
Despite Trump's promises that gullible desperate people fell for, his policies are likely to make things much harder for hid voters and not only not give them what they want, but give them what they explicitly don't want. Well, they'll still get bigoted policies, at least.
> Any other Democrat could have distanced themselves from Biden. But his own VP couldn’t.
There should have been no reason to. Trump is a rapist felon who literally advocated for injecting leach as a cure to a pandemic. That people voted for him at all shows just how bad things are.
Democracy can't function with such a gullible population. At the least I have a front row ticket to the fall of a modern empire though. That's something.
I am trying to be charitable in my interpretation, but you are not making it easy. One could easily argue that given that Trump won, majority got what they want already. Please tell me that you understand what I am telling you now. I did manage to hear some people drawing appropriate conclusions from this cycle, but I am not certain you did.
<< Trump is a rapist felon who literally advocated for injecting leach as a cure to a pandemic.
Yeah.. a felony in this case being the equivalent of a parking ticket in business; not to mention national level politics. It is hard for me understand why people have a hard time grasping that and/or why this was not a useful label for this election cycle. Hell, the moves taken ( including mug shot ) did the exact opposite of the desired effect.
<< At the least I have a front row ticket to the fall of a modern empire though. That's something.
Enjoy the ride man. It is gonna get wild.
If the DNC was trying to win, they would have never let Biden run for re-election, and then they would have never let Harris become the candidate without a primary.
The Democrats literally told the US population Trump was going to destroy democracy in America, and then created a situation that enabled him to win in a landslide.
From a left leaning publication
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/12/opinion/opinion-renee...
And from the WSJ (I don’t know how the paywall bypass works. I pay for Apple News and read the entire article).
The WSJ is right leaning when it comes to business. But I find it to be fair and not Trump worshipper
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bidens-bitterness-came-back-to-b...
When it all comes down to it. Biden was no better than Trump. They both are old folks who put their own desires above what is best for the country.
Democrats lost because they keep triangulating and trying to appeal to centrist Republicans who either don't exist, or would never vote for them regardless. If Harris had distinguished herself from Biden by taking a firm stance against the Palestinian genocide - which was the single issue much of her base cared about - she would have won.
Also, Trump didn't win in a landslide. It was a close election, and Trump definitely won the popular vote, but the margins were still about 51% to 49%.
The point is Harris would have been replaced in a primary. Democrats needed a candidate who could call Biden out on his failures, namely, not taking inflation seriously (Manchin said so!) and completely flubbing it on the border.
> If Harris had distinguished herself from Biden by taking a firm stance against the Palestinian genocide
She would have lost worse in Pennsylvania and maybe picked up Michigan and had absolutely zero effect anywhere else because foreign policy wasn’t a material factor in this election. (It was a loud factor. But not in an electorally relevant way.)
I get the impulse to do this. My pet war was Ukraine. But neither was actually voted on because Americans don’t tend to think about foreign policy unless we’re actually at (or about to go to) war ourselves.
Everyone thinks that their one particular issue was the crucial one, but all the data shows that the issues that actually mattered were A) inflation and B) the border / immigration / crime / perception of disorder.
The only two Dem Senators that underperformed Harris were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The rest of the downballot had been running hard centrist on the border for much longer and with less baggage, and guess what, they did better.
I can't tell if this is some weird cope, satire or honest to goodness opinion.
<< It was a close election, and Trump definitely won the popular vote, but the margins were still about 51% to 49%.
Just like the previous sentence fragment. Narrow facts are true, but manage to completely miss the picture.
Kamala didn’t lose in Miami of all places because of her stance on Palestine. Nor did she lose every swing state for that reason.
This might be another step in the US journey of losing their role as a superpower nation to become just another country.
The idea that this will diminish our power globally is beyond laughable.
I already do that. It's the most alienating and pessimism-inducing thing. I'd just love to see a world where people aren't hunched over, staring at a screen for 90% of their waking life.
Not using a smart phone makes you feel like that?
What you describe fills me with really bad feelings. I truly feel bad for all that the younger generations are missing, and what we're losing as a species.
I'm still holding out hope that we'll see a bit of a social antibody reaction to the corporate takeover of the social sphere. I see some hope amongst younger folks, but it's pretty dire, and your descriptions make me less hopeful.
Tech is fun to play with, sure, but if the cost is that we lose our humanity when in each others presence - well I'd rather throw most of it in the trash. We're unconsciously throwing away much of what it means to be human - and all for the sake of some corporate profit. It's like a social suicide.
I'm truly worried for us.
Instagram/X/TikTok: Hot garbage. Good riddance. Ban them and this country is a better place.
Whatsapp/YouTube: Actually quite useful. The former for real-time global communications. The latter for visual how-to's of all kinds (bicycles, home maintenance).
Overall, I view this is as an admission to US populace and the world that the US is a weak-minded country that can easily be influenced by propaganda.
That is quite a silly assumption to make
Here's what recently happened in Romania, all through TikTok.
Turns out China (or here, Russia) infiltrated the country, waged an enormous disinformation campaign and succeeded by getting their chosen candidate elected. Without TikTok, this would not have happened. I have talked about this with Romanians who concur.
In the real world, there are two responses to this.
1. "Tough luck, it's too late now, should just stand by and watch the country get taken over".
2. "Ban it and future popular big platforms controlled by a foreign adversary".
That's it. We'd all love for something inbetween. It's not happening, all such options would end up becoming 1). That's the state of the modern day world.
The facts that
A. They seem to rather abandon the app rather than receive tens of billions by selling it
B. "The Chinese government also weighed a contingency plan that would have X owner Elon Musk acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations"
C. The remaining mountains of evidence that it is a CCP tool
Mean that the arguments of Congress here are valid and this is the right decision. It is a tool directly controlled by a foreign adversary, for geopolitical, not profit-oriented, purposes. This is nothing like the PATRIOT act or other moves by governments that claim "protect the children" or "protect against terrorism" for some ulterior motive of surveillance or worse. It might be a rarity, but in this case the claims by Congress are factual and a sufficiently good reason.
But in the US, Russia also has waged enormous disinformation campaigns on US-based social media networks. Taking the problem of foreign (dis|mis)information, election interference, etc seriously requires that we do more than ban one network based on the ownership of that company. After TikTok gets shut down, Chinese influence operations can still use Twitter/X, Meta, Reddit etc. We need better tools and regulations to make these campaigns visible stoppable in real-time, rather than just banning one network while leaving up multiple other vulnerable networks. This ban is political theater, where the US can act like it's doing something while not having to address the harder parts of the problem.
> A. They seem to rather abandon the app rather than receive tens of billions by selling it
I think this is weak evidence of them being a mostly political tool. Valuations based on their actual use are well above what anyone has actually offered to pay. And disentangling US operations from the rest of TikTok would not be straight-forward; do you merely cleave it in two? Given network effects, would cutting off the US component to sell it make both the US and non-US portions less valuable?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/15/tiktoks-us-unit-could-be-wor...
in my mind none of these reasons add up. if this were truly about influence ops on social media we would not have blinders on for our own platforms' role in them. remember Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 campaign, or Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide? or more-recently the ops Israel ran? furthermore if this were really about our data, we would again not have blinders on. the CCP can still purchase our data as we're all up for sale given our lack of data privacy/protection laws.
as such i tend to side with my Rep: this is bunk, and the pretexts flimsy. i believe the answer is to focus on education - critical thought particularly - and enacting data privacy/protection laws. i do not believe that would lead to 1).
now will that happen? i'm doubtful tbh. our own govt loves the fact that we're up for sale, for it allows them to side-step the need for a warrant. have a great weekend.
[0] https://www.ctinsider.com/columnist/article/tiktok-ban-jim-h... [1] https://himes.house.gov/2024/3/himes-statement-on-protecting...
They were so busy banning Șoșoacă and demonizing the best candidate (Simion) that they forgot about Georgescu.
We were already a laughing stock for banning a candidate (Șoșoacă). Now we've suspended democracy and postponed the election 'til kingdom come.
Thrilling
He was, however, opposed to further expansion of NATO.
If these ideas are too scary to let general public even consider, then democracies have to step in and censor the media. And that begins by banning TikTok, the largest platform where a narrative like this can bypass the existing power structures.
1) People have valid concerns about TikTok. TikTok will remain, and those concerns will remain.
2) People have valid concerns about free speech. The law that tramples free speech stands and is upheld by the court.
3) People have valid concerns about unfair and unequal enforcement of laws. The law will be blatantly and openly ignored for political reasons.
Literally everyone loses. What a clown show.
We're supposed to be better than them, but we stoop to their level.
Is this the same guy who wanted to ban TikTok 4.5 years ago? Just asking.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/900019185/trump-signs-executi...
Imagine the US legalized and exported meth. All of a sudden, the US is "competing" because everyone is hooked on drugs. We had Opium wars in a somewhat similar vein as the social media wars.
Attempts at intervention by legacy states over the evolution of the internet (which will obviously fail on sufficiently long time-scales) are also a net negative.
Two net negatives do not make a net positive.
But this? Just because some... not so bright soldiers use tiktok to upload videos of their base? What else is there so bad it requires a total ban? It seems like hypocrisy to me, when Meta, Google, X also have similar data available and also don't want to adhere to for example EU laws.
This is theft, pure and simple. The government-industrial complex is trying to steal this app. The private side wants to make money and the public side wants yet another way to control narratives on social media much the way President Musk does on twitter.
Like everything else that is commercialized on the internet. It has a lifespan of a few years before it becomes unusable to all but the meek and the ignorant.
A new service will emerge and replace it within months. The truth is their algorithm is about as complicated as a HS algebra test.
Having a completely decentralized solution also comes with the issue of future governance. If a single entity controls the direction (even if the spec is open and you can host it yourself), then it's not decentralized. If you end up with a consortium then you'll face the same issue of email, innovation is hard to spread as you need multiple actors with competing interests to agree.
If your vision is having multiple entities providing different experiences tailored to individual taste, they might start consolidating and effectively forming several disjoint platforms.
p.s.
The web can be said to be decentralized but it's dominated by large players all the way from hosting to browsers. If all three major browsers don't agree on your proposal, it's effectively dead. Who's to say entrenched players won't arise in your vision of a decentralized social media?
Email for example can be thought of as a social networking app but it's really decentralised.
While you can ban Gmail, it's really hard to ban Email.
Something like AT Protocol would be what it would like like or activity pub.
But so far, they are all so bad.
Email is a bit of an outlier because it gained critical mass before the web was predominantly commercialized.
So a fountain of child sexual assault material?
We all walked into the walled gardens and went "ooh, looks mighty nice in here!"
0. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
Maybe then we will see we are all more alike than we are different
No need. If it’s Chinese and has more than 100mm (EDIT: 1mm) users, Commerce can designate it a foreign-adversary controlled application and designate it for app-store delisting.
Also, I wonder who is the foreign-based "reviews" site that lobbied for the exclusion clause immediately following that?
https://www.congress.gov/118/plaws/publ50/PLAW-118publ50.pdf
[1] https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7521/BILLS-118hr7521ih....
As in Mao's Little Red Book - https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34932800
Anyways, those alternatives are not so algorithmically driven, and especially if it's forcing actual user interaction and discussion that certainly would be good for Americans to understand what the mainland Chinese are really thinking and saying domestically. Because if you go to the actual main discussion forums like Weibo, oh boy it's not going to be pretty.
The irony is that China bans essentially all US social media. I guess these users don’t care a ton their selfish bans?
As per Mitt Romney, it was banned because TikTok contained too much anti-Israel content (remember, the push for the ban became really strong very soon after Oct 7 when the genocide began)
Source: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1787288209963290753
Americans want freedom of speech without interference from the US government.
TikTok was banned because of sharing anti-zionist videos documenting the genocide of Palestinians.
I call bullshit.
Americans on red book are surprised to see the actual life in China and are shocked how different it is from american MSM propaganda about China, you can find plenty of these threads on Twitter how tiktok refugees are amazed by how brainwashed they were by US mass media
What in the actual hell, why wouldn't they go to one of the various other free sites that isn't controlled by such an obvious bad actor? Unless of course they don't care at all about that and they're really being quite dumb.
And yes, of course real life in China is different than that displayed in corporate US media. Real life in France, Australia, Nigeria and Svalbard are all different than what is displayed there too. None of that makes it a good idea to be so outrageously stupid as to adopt such a platform.
US however, if it has data on US users, has all the means to cause harm to US users, starting from censorship and persecution.
UK and Germany for example are jailing people for social media posts
https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2024/08/think-before-you-...
More like jailing people for inciting riots by repeatedly and vehemently posting proven wrong information. Freedom of speech is great and all, but you are advocating for freedom from consequences
You cannot jail people for their thoughts. Unless a person is physically present in public and is inciting violence in person, they do not violate anything
It feels like a joke, and if you can somehow create enough space to actually see the humor in it, its kind of funny.
there should be an easy pivot to an American equivalent but there hasn't been?
Or has there?
The U.S. national security angle identified is "mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions". And give me a break that they actually care about "young Americans’ mental health". This bill was about pro-Palestine content ... "being mobilized by CCP" that was harming "young people's health".
The fact that none of this was put forward by the lawyers makes me think the tiktok lawyers were incompetent. I went through the testimonies given and it was DAMMMMMNNNN weak. Three issues were identified by me: The Bill suddenly declares "non-aligned countries" to be "foreign adversaries" but there is no declared war so how can they be adversaries already; The Bill declares anyone facilitating the company including through the transfer of communication is in violation of the bill but that is a freedom of speech issue which they did not bring up but instead brought the ban as a FoS issue; The Bill labels TikTok and ByteDance as companies to be sold [to an aligned state] or banned entirely but that is the only company being single-handedly called out and I don't know how to say this but that sounds like some form of discrimination and unsubstantiated claim of threat. They could have done a better job at the SCOTUS.
[1] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mcca...
Public disagreement with the TikTok decision could lead to legislative pressure, which would add support to the pressure campaigns of Chinese lobbyists and diplomats, or of other organizations that are funded or donated to by Chinese people or people of Chinese descent. This could either result in new legislation being passed that nullifies the ban, or pressure the Executive into failing to enforce the ban.
Either of those outcomes would, in effect, allow the user data of Americans to be accessed by the government of China. Disagreement with the TikTok ban would in and of itself aid America's adversaries.
Besides, disagreement with it implies that America unduly restricts speech, when we're supposed to hate China because China unduly restricts speech. That's a clear case of creating a false equivalence in order to foment discord, which again is material support to China's goal to monitor American's communications and corrupt the minds of America's children.
Trump has signaled he doesn't support the ban, and wants tiktok under american ownership. The legislation allows the president to put a 90 day hold on the ban too.
So my guess is that this isn't over yet.
Trump initially championed the ban during his first term
Apparently Trump did well on tiktok during the last election, and ByteDance (and everyone else) knows that Trump plays favorites.
Only if there is an in-progress divestiture and only before the ban goes into effect.
Aka, TikTok/Biden would have to announce a sale is in process and Biden would have to enact the extension before the 19th.
The law targets other companies that would be breaking the law if they continue providing services for a China-owned TikTok past the ban date. The statute of limitations is five years, past a Trump presidency. No, an executive order can not cancel a law. Google, Apple & co would be exposing themselves to a lot of uncertainty and risk, and for what?
I think that covers it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/s/hXe9HsWslW
The GenZ folks (including my kids) that I interact with on a day-to-day basis are much happier on that application and they’re starting to realize that the US is not what it pretends to be
That doesn’t mean any place is better (though possible) it simply means people started finally realizing the truth of the United States
Who pays Trump most, wins. Who does what Musk wants, wins.
From what I know, there is no second Oligarch-run corrupt country that would come close to this. This is worse than China and Russia combined.
Sorry, not meant to bash our US HN friends at all, just an observation from another western country targeted by MuskTrump that has yet to follow the US lead (which they will), so we still have some time left to be in shock and awe about what is going on on your side of the pond for a while.
FFS.
The current status of insanity is that the US is threatening to invade a EU country by force to annex it to be able to exploit natural resources and gain a strategic military position.
Again, let me repeat, as very clearly a lot of people are now completely numb to insanity and just filter it out:
THE US IS THREATENING TO INVADE A EU COUNTRY. YES. SERIOUSLY.
Was US Headlines for one day, now drowned in other madness already.
Anyway, you won't have any democratic say on this anyway, so let's just gamble:
Jeff Yass will bribe Trump heavily, and Trump will then lift the ban next week, no matter what his Supreme Court sock puppets want.
I don't love that TikTok is run by a Chinese company (thus giving way too much control to the Chinese government), but Meta builds such garbage experiences in their apps. There really needs to be a real competitor to Meta.
A different issue is whether doing it is the right decision or not.
And another issue is the hypocrisy. When China did it, the unanimous opinion from the US (both the official stance and what one could hear/read from regular people, e.g. HN comments) was that such bans were authoritarian and evidence that there was no freedom of speech in China. But now suddenly it's a perfectly fine and even obvious/necessary thing to do...
Being neither from China nor from the US, this paints the US (who have benefitted a lot from riding the moral high horse of free market, etc. for decades) in a quite bad light.
Should the EU ban US social networks for pure economic reasons (so we roll our own instead of providing our data and money to US companies, which would almost surely be good for our economy)? The argument for not doing it used to be that freedom should be above domestic interests, one embraces the free market even if some aspects of it are harmful because overall it's a win. But the US is showing it doesn't really believe in that principle, and probably never has.
They take as much data as any of the various other manufacturing processes we outsourced over the decades.
I am not sure that banning forms of media feels good. The point of free speech is to let everyone say their thing and for people to be smart enough to ignore the bad ideas.
I am not sure the general population of vertical video viewers does part 2, however, so I get the desire to force people to not engage. The algorithmic boosting has had lots of weird side effects; increased political polarization, people being constantly inundated with rage bait, and even "trends" that get kids to vandalize their school. (My favorite was when I asked why ice cream is locked up in the freezer at CVS. Apparently it was a TikTok "trend" to lick the ice cream and then put it back in the freezer, so now an employee has to escort you from the ice cream area to the cashier to ensure that you pay for it before you lick it. Not sure how much of this actually happened versus how companies were afraid of it happening, however.)
With all this in mind, it's unclear to me whether TikTok is uniquely responsible for this effect. I feel like Instagram, YouTube Shorts, etc. have the potential to cause the exact same problems (and perhaps already have). Even the legacy media is not guilt free here. Traditional newspapers ownership has changed over the years and they all seem pretty biased in a certain direction, and I am pretty sure that the local news is responsible for a lot of reactionary poor public policy making. (Do I dare mention that I think the whole New Jersy drone thing was just mass hysteria?)
Now, everyone is saying that regulating TikTok has nothing to do with its content, but I'm pretty sure that's just a flat-out lie. First, Trump wanted to ban it because everything on there was negative towards him. Then right-wing influencers got a lot of traction on the platform, and suddenly Democrats want to ban it and Trump wants to reverse the ban. It's pretty transparent what's going on there.
I agree with the other comments that say if data collection is the issue, we shouldn't let American companies do it either. That seems very fair to regulate and I'm in favor of that.
The best effect will be someone with a lot of money and media reach standing up against app stores. I can live with that.
Trump will get a bribe from them and it will be opened.
It is like “Does America have laws?” is a 3 minute section of Good Morning America between low-carb breakfast recipes and the memoir of a skateboarding dog.
In some cases, they are enforced ruthlessly on one group of people, and not on others. This is a feature, not a mistake, by the way. Well, a feature for those with power, not normal citizens.
The real question is:
"Does America have justice?"
It's not a recent one either. The issue of select enforcement of our laws has been around as long as I can recall, and before I was born. It's not even unique to the United States.
What I find most upsetting as part of the normal citizenry, is that rather than taking things to court and finding that the laws need changed, they tend to go the route of charges dropped or pardons when the laws affect them.
I would have less of an issue with the rich and powerful folks avoiding prosecution if they at least did it in a precedent setting way for the rest of us.
That's the injustice.
You're Apple or Google's lawyer - the CEO asks, should I take Tiktok down from the app store. What do you say?
Otoh there's a law and civil penalty. On the other, Trump says he won't enforce. Statute of limitations is 5 years, and the liability will exist whether Trump enforces or not. In 5 years, there will (may?) be a new president. On the other hand, trump saying he's not going to enforce may give us an out if we're ever sued over this (we just did what the Pres told us to do...).
Hard call, I give > 50% that they take it down whatever Trump says.
Are you talking about a presidential veto? What are you saying?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/tech/congress-tiktok-ban-what...
He had more than that during his last term, so this term should be harder to get things done then last time.
I say this as a registered Republican since the Bush era who has never voted for Trump. I don't feel like anyone in the party represents me anymore.
He only has a couple of years to pass bills also, it is unlikely that the Republicans retain control of the house after the next midterm (unless Trump is popular).
Some problems such as LA fires require immediate response, some problems require an escalation mechanism and many others can be dealt during regular business hours.
Stop.
Is there a section in the text of the law that says that enforcement has to happen outside of normal office hours or do you just assume that’s the case because the law is being talked about in the news?
I am glad that we are on the same page that the answer to “why don’t they enforce the law that they can’t enforce” is in the question.
> I don’t understand, why wouldn’t they send it out on the 19th?
> "Given the sheer fact of timing, this Administration recognizes that actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
> Although President-elect Donald Trump could choose to not enforce the law...
Which is ridiculous. It's the executive branch's function to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" [1]. The president's DOJ can't simply refuse to enforce the law. There's some debate over whether this applies to 'enforcement discretion', in that the president doesn't have infinite resources to perfectly execute the law and some things will slip through, or whether the president can decline to enforce a law that he believes to be unconstitutional before the supreme court declares it to be so.
In theory, no, the president can't simply decline to enforce a law, congress would then be able to impeach and remove him. In practice, though it happens a little bit all the time. And even if this was black and white, I don't know that there's anything that the incoming president can do that the incoming congress would impeach him for.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S3-3-5/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
I had to look up how they handle marijuana laws since that has the _look_ of the DOJ doing just that.
'In each fiscal year since FY2015, Congress has included provisions in appropriations acts that prohibit DOJ from using appropriated funds to prevent certain states, territories, and DC from "implementing their own laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession, or cultivation of medical marijuana"'[1]
So in that case it's Congress that prohibits the DOJ from enforcing a federal law. So your point stands in that the DOJ may not be able to unilaterally decide not to enforce a law, but apparently congress can sort-of extort them into ignoring laws? Oh America.
When he first took office in 2017, I figured that it would happen within six months. Given that he was impeached twice, I was almost right, but it didn't happen until Democrats won the House. Even most of the "old establishment" Republicans ended up backing him. Now there are none of those remaining.
Maybe they only learned from the aforementioned Schoolhouse Rock video, because they seem especially bad at understanding anything outside of the legislative branch. Not only does the legislative branch need to pass a bill into law for it to become a regulation, without objection by the judicial branch to its constitutionality, but the executive branch needs to write that law into a federal regulation, and the legislative branch can reject any new regulation they believe doesn't comply with the law, as can the judicial branch, who can also reject the regulation if it isn't constitutional as written, even if the original law that created it was.
It's no wonder that legacy media's wild misunderstandings of how laws and regulations work only get a small snippet of time, between their more entertaining and feel-good stories that drive viewership and revenue.
Fortunately we are no longer stuck with just legacy media, so I recommend finding a news source that actually knows what they are talking about. I've found the best bet is to get news from outlets and aggregators that specialize in a specific topic, shielding them from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, and forcing them to publish news that is actually correct.
This is why I come to Hacker News for my tech news aggregation. For political news, my favorite so far has been The Hill, especially for videos like their Daily Brief and Rising videos published on YouTube. I'm open to more, so if anyone has any recommendations, let me know.
The legislative branch can try again with another law, but if it doesn't change whatever made the law unconstitutional or detrimental to enforce, than the relevant branch will keep it dead.
The only condition in which the judicial branch regularly forces the executive branch to enforce laws is when the executive branch tries to legislate through selective enforcement; then the judicial branch will give an all-or-nothing ultimatum, but even then not enforcing is an option, just not selective enforcement.
[1] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mcca...
U.S. national security: "mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions"
And give me a break on "young Americans’ mental health".
This bill was about pro-Palestine content ... "being mobilized by CCP" and was harming young people's health.
The fact that none of this was put forward by the lawyers makes me think the tiktok lawyers were incompetent.
Or they knew it would get them nowhere because they understand precisely how unpopular pro-Palestine sentiment is among lawmakers.
Everybody knows the fearmongering about Chinese control and manipulation is a smokescreen. The real reason is that Tiktok doesn't fall in line with State Department propaganda [1].
It's noteworthy that SCOTUS sidestepped this issue entirely by not even considering the secret evidence the government brought.
That being said, it's unsurprising because you can make a strictly commerce-based argument that has nothing to do with speech and the First Amendment. Personally, I think reciprocity would've been a far more defensible position, in that US apps like Google, FB, Youtube and IG are restricted from the Chinese market so you could demand recipricol access on strictly commerce grounds.
The best analogy is the restriction on foreign ownership of media outlets, which used to be a big deal. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, US companies would defend themselves from foreign takeovers by buying TV stations, for example. That's basically the premise of the movie Working Girl, as one (fictional) example.
Politically, the big loser here is Biden and the Democratic Party because they will be (rightly) blamed for banning a highly popular app (even though the Congressional vote was hugely bipartisan) and Trump will likely get credit for saving Tiktok.
- Mao's Red Book, and
- the BLM/metoo/woke thing in the 2020s?
It's known to use facial recognition to boost videos of "beautiful people".
https://www.dexerto.com/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-prioritizes...
I'd still be surprised, but less so, I'd auto insurance adjusters are taking the time to make short form content aimed at the 40+ audience.
Can't say I have insurance adjusters on my FYP, but I think that speaks to the power of the algorithm's targeting far more than it does the lack of content.
- Law by Mike (10M subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/meJA30cglvo
- Legal Eagle (3.5M subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lgT4iZ9BYF8
- Ugo Lord (1.9M subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I77J6n72Oto
- Attorney Tom (500k subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kgLTqx2UFUk
- Mike Rafi (300k subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/znQgK6God2w
- CEO Lawyer (24k subs): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RzqBiKLZNy4
Law by Mike puts some pretty incredible production value into their videos.
Sharing YouTube links because TikTok web isn't great and the links will likely stop working in a few days.
Using Chinese social media is cool now.
Fortunately, I think you're wrong about this. American children will be saying mandarin catchphrases before they start using Instagram Reels.
Tiktok algo is nothing special: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-alg...
The volume of interaction data from good interface design and huge user base is the core of the success.
What makes you think the Bytedance chefs who cooked the sauce wont join the Redbook company? Their HQ were both located in China anyway.
And yes, this begs the question of "when does something become a matter of national security". 10 million? A million moving over before the day of reckoning isn't a small thing.
There's gotta be a joke in there about the communists selling the capitalists the rope the capitalists eventually hang themselves with. But, I digress.
Don't get me wrong, I consumed American media and played American video games before I understood English, so clicking around eventually led you down some path.
But isn't most of that content meant to be consumed by people who understand the language said content is made with?
The posts are largely subtitled in both Chinese and English regardless of the spoken language. Comments are often in both languages, but if not you can click Translate.
It's to spite the United States Government. And it's hilarious.
Culture thrives when the people are able to live meaningful lives.
But secondly because Red Note is subject to exactly the same regulation as TikTok, for exactly the same reason. There's no protection or loophole there, this app is just a district court injunction away from a ban too. Literally no one cares, they just love to meme.
On a more amusing note the Chinese did NOT expect a bunch of Americans to show up on RedNote, and they're not thrilled so far. It seems that sharing details of how to organize labor unions, protest against your government, 3D print weapons, and so on wasn't what they were hoping for either. There's allegedly talk of them siloing off the new joins from abroad.
don't be like us
Good grief.. I clearly wasn't following it closely, but even the fact that this could have become a thing ( SCOTUS ruling using 'redacted' as evidence ) is severely disheartening.
So you're upset that the Biden admin attempted to sway the court with secret evidence. But any admin always could behave in that way, and nothing you can do can stop that. The fact that the court decided to ignore that secret evidence should be comforting. Sure, nothing forces the court in the future to stick to that, but this is always true as to everything.
If that is the case, why would you start the sentence with a 'so' suggesting you made a leap of logic, where nothing of the sort actually occured given that it is almost a complete non-sequitur.
I am open to a conversation, but I think, and please correct me as needed, that your political bias blinds you in ways that affect any and all discussions.
I'm quite sure my reply evinced no political bias. I was saying that any administration could do this sort of thing at any time, and any SCOTUS could accept it when the administration does it. We can expect political animals to do this, so it's not surprising when they do it, but we can also expect the SCOTUS not to go there, and they didn't, so what exactly is disheartening? That politicians are so fallible?
Whereas I would think it disheartening only of the court actually used the secret evidence. But they didn't.
We have their word for it, don't we. I am only half-jesting. If they saw that evidence, it entered their calculus whether they admit it or not, and that is assuming they didn't simply pull a Snowden ( one document for public consumption; one for IC ). Isn't it fun when you can't trust your own government?
But I digress.
<< I'm quite sure my reply evinced no political bias.
Hmm. It is possible that I jumped to conclusion myself. You opened your position with Biden, where he was not mentioned suggesting you have a political axe to grind. Biden is not a SCOTUS member. But I am willing to assume it was a mental shortcut.
<< I was saying that any administration could do this sort of thing at any time, and any SCOTUS could accept it when the administration does it.
I accept that.
<< Whereas I would think it disheartening only of the court actually used the secret evidence.
Hmm, I don't accept this. Even mentioning this as a thing undermines the existing system the same way parrallel construction undermines it. You might not see it as an issue, but I see water slowly chipping away at what was once a solid wall. And I see it, others can see it too.
This is balkanization.
The bizarre episode with Elon this week really didn’t help given it appears his whims trump any sense of rules or basic decency.
Even if it where, such a company would not find the same obstacles in entering the American market as in would in China.
what percentage of americans vote for a given president? hint: it is less than 32%.
Half joking, but the US performs corporate espionage in the EU and certainly takes compromising material on EU politicians whenever it can get it.
The slavish adherence from EU NPC politicians (they are mediocre and no one knows how they manage to rise) to US directives has to have some reasons. Being compromised is one of those.
The reason that the EU "adheres to US directives" is mostly just a legacy of WWII and the Cold War, you don't really have to posit any kind of nefarious espionage scheme to explain why European countries want to stay connected to the US economy and military.
From the US side it may look like that, but the EU doesn’t see it that way.
Lovely precedent we just set here.
I'd never heard of it, and from what I understand, it's a hashtag people use to share stories of how they found out they were pregnant late in the pregnancy because they didn't have pregnancy symptoms. But I don't understand why that would be bad for people to share/consume.
at least in the facebook groups i have seen, this ^ describes the majority of participants
I download all my favorite YouTube videos because inevitably some disappear.
The number of times I had to correct my step-son when he repeated something he "learned" on TikTok is disturbing.
Unimportant example: He "learned" from a TikTok video that the commonly repeated command of "Open sesame!" is actually "Open says me!". That's not true, and all you have to do is read the story "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" to know that the story actually hinges on the fact that the secret word is the name of a grain/plant.
Another example: He "learned" that the video game character, Mario, is not saying "It's a me, Mario!" with an Italian accent. He "learned" that he is actually saying some Japanese word, like "Itsumi Mario!".
One more: He "learned" that "scientists" now think that "we" originally put the T-Rex fossils together incorrectly and that the animal's arm bones are actually backwards, and should be reversed to reveal that the T-Rex actually had little chicken wings instead of small arms. Anybody who has seen how bone sockets fit together knows that's nonsense.
Forgetting the political theory and morality of the ban, I say good riddance to the constant firehose of bullshit and lying morons on that app.
It's a mixed bag. It has no more to offer than any other social network. Less, some might argue, because of how easy it is to crosspost to the other video networks.
The only way this is different from the loss of other social networks, Vine most closely, is the government is shutting down the site and collapsing the ecosystem rather than private equity.
Seriously, even in Germany the public opinion about tiktok is so much influenced by people not even having used the app even once (seen some of the good parts of it).
The core factor in the law is control by a foreign adversary, it's not a law that outlaws data collection.
I support any ban on social media platforms because control of the public's data belongs in the hands of individuals.
The law actually skips this step for ByteDance / TikTok and directly adds them to the list of "Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications" along with the enactment of the law.
(I don't know if that's true, but it strikes me as plausible)
edit: you can make an analogy to e.g. Meta - Zuckerberg doesn't strictly own a majority, but he does have very strong control because of the particular corporate structure.
- Frying teenagers' brains with short attention deficit videos. That one seems logical, but others are doing it, too.
- Political indoctrination.
- Compromised politicians who can be blackmailed: The big one, but a certain island run by the daughter of a certain intelligence agency operative was largely ignored.
- Corporate espionage: Probably not happening on TikTok. Certainly happening in the EU using US products.
It's possible that we all wrong or we all right about it, or one of us are right
Content relating to the genocide happening in Palestine for example, is much more restricted on US sites.
It’s not entirely unprecedented either. There was the case of FB and Myanmar/Burma which strongly promoted military propaganda. This unfortunately lead to violence against Rohingya.
But the argument is very weak in my opinion, and wouldn’t be a reason to outright ban it. Prohibition never works.
The only thing that does work is fixing our society. In the USA, we have increasing wage disparity, increasing homelessness, increasing poverty, food scarcity, water scarcity, worsening climate change related events (see Palisades fire…), and a shit ton of other issues that will remain unsolved for at least the next 4 years.
Yet leadership is doing almost nothing to address this. Neoclassical economics and neoliberalism have outright ruined this country. Fuck the culture war the billionaire class is trying to initiate.
You could say this about Fox News, scratch-off lottery tickets, Cocomelon, or anything you don't like.
Doesn't seem to matter which clown flaps about in the wind at the oval office, control of the narrative holds a steady keel for decades. This is the same story, in a new medium. Sure, as the "sides" in culture wars take turns "ruling", certain things are allowed or disallowed. The real consequential stuff, ideas and patterns that would lead to the empowerment of the working class vs hoarders of capital -- all the back to basic education, critical thinking, civic engagement, and the implicit/explicit deprioritization of any and all that in favour of obedient consumerism.
With the "new" tech they've discovered they can really shape people's opinions, tweak the emotional charge to make people act in such unconsidered ways, en masse, against each others' and their own best interest -- of course they'll hold on to that at any cost. It's unprecedented, though not unimagined.
I wonder what will fill this space. Over all the rises and falls of the various blinking nonsense, I've never really seen people go -back- to an app / service / etc. They all just wither away as the next new things comes up.
Do you find the natsec argument to be compelling considering:
> TikTok I think has the largest share of American's attention out of all the social media?
Ah, clever to leave it up for bribes from ByteDance.
> The nation’s highest court said in the opinion that while “data collection and analysis is a common practice in this digital age,” the sheer size of TikTok and its “susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects” poses a national security concern
What is the point of these "rules and regulations" and "the nation's highest court" when the president could decide just not to enforce them?
What is the point of freedom of speech and freedom of press when we can just shut down any apps not touting the mono-party lines?
people in the us finally found a real public square to talk, and it is being shut down against the spirit of everything the US purports to stand for.
I agree with you, and wouldn't agree with a TikTok ban either if it affected me.
But how does that change anything about what I wrote?
The enforcement of law being separate from the passage of law is a key plank in a functioning democracy, it's one of the safety valves against tyranny.
Does that mean "If foreign companies don't like our laws, they can pay to have them adjusted"? Seems not very faithful, but I hardly understand that word anymore it feels like.
Does the US have a different definition for everything?
Apparently, committing crimes with absolute immunity is a necessary part of the presidential office. Without such protections, they'd be afraid to do things like extrajudicial drone strikes (Obama) and internment camps (FDR). Oh, wait.
I hate to "Poe's Law" this tangent, but most people forget that Hitler's rise to power was also completely legal. Just change the constitution and get the judiciary to side with you, and you can do anything. It's terrifying.
Good question actually.
And this ultimately puts it in a place where you have to assume that it will be enforced against you. Right?
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
I agree. And the bribery already started when the Trump campaign found itself doing very well on engagement in TikTok. The CCP had already started the bribery before the election in a bid to maintain influence over the US while halting American influence in China.
The Biden administration I believe said they won't enforce the law starting Sunday, leaving it to the incoming administration to enforce. It'll be wildly popular for Trump to save TikTok, so I expect he'll do it without forcing a sale.
News story from yesterday, "TikTok CEO expected to attend Trump inauguration as ban looms":
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/...
"A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" "71.93% of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck Have $2,000 or Less in Savings" https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-pa...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/bannon-second-trump...
A couple of Trump forums focus on distractions like the California fires and delete comments about working class rights. The same forums that were full of workers' rights just until before the election.
Breitbart has nothing on immigration and displacement of US workers. It celebrates the (alleged, Trump claims a lot) phone call between Trump and Xi.
So unless the MAGA crowd goes to the capitol to protest against Trump this time, you won't hear anything anywhere.
No Chinese ever banned the sitting president of the United States.
> The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!
> To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.
Twitter said the first tweet "is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an 'orderly transition'" and the second is "being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate".
So they banned him because they wanted to not because of TOS violations. If you can interpret "I will not attend" as "It's illegitimate" you can interpret anything as anything and ban anyone for any TOS provision.
As usual, the digital crack / cocaine addicts of this generation are now running to Red note for their next fresh hit in less than 48 hours.
Nothing's changed. Just a new brand of digital crack / cocaine has overtaken another one who's supply is getting cut off by the US.
Although a fine would be better than an outright ban as I said before.
Instead when you cut so hard on education that you get millions of flat earth believers, you got to protect them from their own behavior with law. But as far as I know, no law can prevent little Jimmy from putting crayons up his nose.
Blocking TikTok won't just make its user look for better privacy, or at least more independent alternative. They will use something else just as bad or worst.. little red book for instance.
