TikTok collects data for an adversary at scale. Many complain that the US does the same but that doesn't change the fact that I live in the US. The Chinese government is an adversary of the West whether we like it or not.
With that said- It's pretty telling that the FCC only needs to go to Apple and Google. It would be really nice to have some antitrust regulation so that the FCC doesn't have this power.
However, one could argue that geopolitical matters are a lot less interesting for you, private citizen. If you're not a world leader or someone involved in said geopolitical events, you will live the consequences of "the enemies of the West" from a mostly economic perspective.
On the other hand, the same cannot be said about your own government. They collect data on you and your fellow citizens and they use it. And they can mess up your life much more than what China will ever do. One recent example: the worry over period tracking apps and the recent decisions of the US Supreme Court. Those apps are a weapon against citizens who, until yesterday, were not doing anything illegal.
All tracking is bad, and the FCC should do something about it all.
> you will live the consequences of "the enemies of the West" from a mostly economic perspective.
Did we already forget about political interference by "enemies of the West"? I mean, not just brazen election / referendum interference, but driving political narratives to stoke up internal conflicts? That is usually achieved by funding political extremists, but controlling the feed algorithm will work even better.
This isn't just a US problem either, other western countries have also been affected.
At least our own governments have some accountability to us. Foreign governments don't even have that, so I'm ok with them being the first ones to give up the tools of influence. Of course I would prefer if such tools did not exist at all, but it will be a while until we get there.
I truly believe that this is the root cause of the ever increasing division amongst Americans today. I think it's been at play for years and we're just approaching it's crescendo.
China does a lot more than the US government in terms of tracking and surveillance. Most tracking in the US is likely done via Google/Facebook/etc which makes it technically opt-in.
It's done by telcos and data brokers. Every US citizen has a detailed profile compiled about their personal lives that the US government can access at will. Google and Meta are the new kids at the table of a long running game.
You don't need a warrant to get data from a third party. The government just asks and if the they enjoy receiving special treatment and other favors in the future they comply. That's why the USG likes to have this collection devolved to private entities.
Google isn't the one holding the keys to the castle. Data brokers predate them by decades. The primary reason why the US has weak data protection laws is because the government doesn't want their activities to be encumbered.
partially true but fodder for schizophrenics and compulsive obsessions.. A truer picture is harder to convey in a few sentences.. however as a US citizen I believe that an uneasy truce has been established via law in the USA since inception, between those casually referred to as "Law and Order" who genuinely believe that governance means record keeping and monitoring, and others who do not. Unfortunately for the "others" that includes genuinely bad actors who seek to use rights to evade detection, or those too stupid or simple to think about these things at all. Meanwhile, the Net has given magnificent, grandiose power to build and use surveillance, which they have done. ill wind blows
While I agree Apple & Google have a near perfect duopoly on the mobile space, the addition of more companies wouldn't give the FCC any less power. The "Federal" part of FCC still gives them jurisdiction over electronic communication happening in the US federation; whether they have to enforce it through 2 entities or 2000 doesn't really make a difference
Depends on the goal, PGP sure. Anyone who wanted could get it but it was still a hurdle. A hurdle that for sure would kill tiktok, or at least enough for it to be irrelevant.
There's likewise a conflict for Google, which runs a TikTok competitor/clone in the form of YouTube Shorts. "Well, if we have to ban our competition... I guess..."
The point is, without antitrust regulation, the FCC only has to go through two giant corporations.
After trust busting Apple and Google, we would theoretically have many more competing stores. The FCC would have to then ask each individual store for a takedown, perhaps even across different legal jurisdictions (read: outside of the USA) and therefore be unable to take down TikTok in such a centralized fashion
But in this case, it's working in society's favor. Banning TikTock is a good thing. We should then turn around and ban all of the social media platforms regardless of nationality that does any sort of harvesting/manipulation of the data that their users are sharing in any other form than to display that information in the expected ways for the site to have purpose. Any social platform doing things in the shadows with user's info directly input by them or scraped,tracked,inferred,gathered,etc should be banned from existence.
You could argue the FCC has less power since both Apple and Google need to comply to make a meaningful difference. And the FCC can't just ban iphones tomorrow, given the impact to the populace - and that's the basis of the duopoly
I meant there would be a more diverse cast of characters and sources of software for mobile devices so that the FCCs power would be diluted. In theory.
I think it’s really important to note this isn’t “THE” FCC making the request. It’s one FCC Commissioner expressing their opinion. It has no legal authority. It’s basically meaningless. Nothing will come of it. It’s just complicated air flow that will briefly spark internet outrage on “both sides” of a debate over an issue that doesn’t even actually exist because the FCC hasn’t even done anything.
> The Chinese government is an adversary of the West whether we like it or not.
I'd like to se a source on this. I don't think different political ideologies imply adversarial intentions. China has been as friendly to the west as it can be while still protecting its own cultural and economic interests.
If western leaders would stop seeing China as the enemy and instead as a partner we would see a rise in infrastructure and economic opportunity globally.
China is not trying to do global charity work, they have their own motives as well. They are also not the devil incarnate. I would argue that their intentions in foreign policy are still _generally_ more morally palpable than most western nations.
>I don't think different political ideologies imply adversarial intentions
Your source could be human conflict for all of recorded history.
It's not primarily ideological, it's geopolitical realism. They are a growing economic and military power in a different geographic sphere, competing over global influence and power. The history of civilization is conflict over scarce resources, space, and power. China is a cohesive ethnic and political collective and nation that exists separate from the US, it's government and citizens.
Of course there is and will always be room for co-operation in many areas; economic trade is a big one. But conflict over competing interests is a fact of life and where that comes into conflict global adversaries and enemies are created.
"Morality" is not a good metric to guide geopolitics, where material national interests and power dictate more than anything.
There's literally a category of diplomacy called 'wolf warrior diplomacy' because of the recently aggressive nature of China towards foreign nations. I'm not sure they have been "as friendly to the west as it can be while still protecting..." unless you believe that to protect their cultural and economic interests they need to expand.
Can you help me understand the logic of "generally more morally palpable than most western nations?" When I look at China's global activities, I see lots of IP theft, aggressive trade deals, debt diplomacy, investing in infrastructure yes... but then bringing in their own people to staff the projects (I saw this firsthand last year doing work in both Kenya and Cameroon and traveling through Uganda), bullying governments and organizations to toe the CCP party line (e.g. Houston Rockets), taking over Hong Kong and shutting down the free media there, basically paying off Muslim nations to keep them quiet regarding the Uyghur genocide.... and this is just off the top of my head!
> China has been as friendly to the west as it can be while still protecting its own cultural and economic interests.
I'm not implying you're doing it, but whenever I hear people defend China, they always use the word "culture" to defend totalitarianism/communism, as if they're part of Chinese culture.
I’m not sure if “palpable” is the word you want, but in any case: China’s foreign policy intentions include making independent, sovereign nations part of China against their wishes and asserting military control over a huge part of the oceans far beyond any internationally recognized limits. The former is a done deal with Tibet, because the world grew weary of complaining about it, and Taiwan is next. The South China Sea is also basically a done deal. I can’t think of a Western nation right now that‘s behaving in this way, or anything close to it. This is not even to mention the ongoing genocide of at least one population within China.
I would prefer we focus on making real data privacy possible. Instead of singling our foreign companies that collect the same data domestic companies are collecting, I advocate that we make data collection harder for everyone. That would mean passing real privacy laws with teeth in the USA that make data collection much harder, and interoperability laws that require Facebook and others to interoperate with other providers which may have a better security profile.
Instead of being xenophobic we can be privacy focused.
I just want to reiterate this point because I feel like people of a certain level of sophistication miss it all the time. Knowing which side of a conflict you’re on isn’t hypocrisy. I don’t want my adversary to have weapons. I don’t mind me having weapons. I like it in fact. There is ultimately no referee to cry foul to in geopolitics.
Well, there was this guy a couple of thousand years ago who made some remarks contrary to your point: turning the cheek and loving your neighbor. He also went as far as saying to resolve conflicts before you're put in front of the judge.
Many millions of people follow his words & think it still relevant today.
He also had a special way of recognizing & calling out hyprocrisy.
It seems odd to me that the FCC should be doing things regarding trade and geopolitics. If they've got a need to create regulations based on technology or other matters relating to, you know, Communications, that's one thing. But trying to get a seat at the table for international diplomacy seems quite a stretch.
It's kinda like the FDA earlier this year declining to approve a covid-19 vaccine not because it was ineffective (it wasn't!) or because it was dangerous (it wasn't!) but because they thought that saying that one brand was OK for kids but the other wasn't (yet) would be confusing and send a bad "message". The FDA's job is to help us identify what pharmaceuticals are safe and effective, not to worry about messaging.
It’s all moot. Facebook was happy to rake in the bucks to be a tool of Russian propagandists.
If anything, TikTok is a national resource as at least you know that the propaganda bias will be towards whatever the PRC wants. Facebook will sell itself to anyone - KGB, prostate pills, whatever.
And if they want your kids to smash up their schools, does it help you with your geopolitical battles to know that's what 'they' want? Or would it be more helpful if that didn't happen?
You live in the US but that doesn't mean your interests are aligned with those in power there. Personally I feel far more threatened by what US parties might do with my personal information than by what Chinese parties might do with it.
It's not actually a "lot" of power - it's just enough. If there is evidence that an actor is doing something bad, we shouldn't have months in court to stop it. It should be immediate. It's better to have it stopped and then spend months in court trying to get it back.
Antitrust would be good, but that wouldn't affect the FCC, they'd just issue the same request to as many app stores as they deemed necessary. Technically, Microsoft will also probably have received the same request, but really who cares.
>The Chinese government is an adversary of the West whether we like it or not.
Is it? I feel like it is an adversary of the Western governments. I don't feel like they are my adversaries. We could be friends if our governments wanted to.
The CCP at a minimum abets the shipment of fentanyl to the US. It aggressively collects personal information on every US citizen and resident. It relentlessly steals private and corporate intellectual property from the West and provides it to its own state-owned enterprises.
If you’re a citizen of the US or Europe, the Chinese government is most definitely your enemy.
> The Chinese government is an adversary of the West whether we like it or not.
It's not like they became an adversary overnight, China's economic success was predominantly sponsored by the West; Their abysmal human rights regulations were favorable for Nike to Apple for employing child labor and they in-turn used that economic growth to increase their defense budget 6-fold in just two decades.
Of course autocracies and democracies would be adversaries; But the sabre-rattling without holding the West's capitalist interest in China accountable seems disingenuous(In general, not your comment).
The commissioner points out how they are breaking privacy law around the world and damaging US security. This is not the same as facebook or twitter. Please don't equate them. Also CCP doesn't have free access to user data on either of those.
> “Everything is seen in China,” said a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department in a September 2021 meeting. In another September meeting, a director referred to one Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” who “has access to everything.” (While many employees introduced themselves by name and title in the recordings, BuzzFeed News is not naming anyone to protect their privacy.)
A US companies' internal employees were conflated to China? And who the hell allows TikTok to operate in US in the first place. If someone working at MSFT has access to MSFT's China user data, is that a problem?
1) Data collection and algorithmic manipulation. This has been discussed to death, but why you'd let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population is beyond me. This is obviously a national security issue.
2) Fairness in the marketplace. No, I'm not talking about the U.S. marketplace. U.S. tech companies have had their IP stolen and unfair regulations placed on them in China. Why should the U.S. let Chinese tech companies compete in the U.S. marketplace when China doesn't let U.S tech companies compete in their marketplace?
> Data collection and algorithmic manipulation. This has been discussed to death, but why you'd let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population is beyond me. This is obviously a national security issue.
I understand your concern, I honestly do, but Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU, put measures in place to curtail the amount of data collection that happens by US firms (you even made that complaint about China yourself). At least in the EU we're not advocating the complete removal of access to foreign social networks. And that's the real crux of the issue here. You want a borderless internet but only when it's US companies in control. And you don't want government intervention just so long as it's only US companies abusing their position. From an outsider looking in, it all looks a little hypocritical. Which is why I Personally feel the EU approach is a lot smarter: allow other nations to operate equally but put legislation in place to protect consumer rights.
> Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU, put measures in place to curtail the amount of data collection that happens by US firms
Who complains? FAANG shills? I haven't heard anybody outside of this site complain about such a thing.
Privacy nhilists, mostly. If Facebook has all my data, and I want to keep using Gacebook, I'm forced into some position about their information policies. I've heard if from a lot of guilty-pleasure Tiktok users, many of who are also Facebook users.
Saying Facebook and Google are good at privacy now is like saying fast food has better nutrition in recent years.
Meanwhile in countries that actually care a lot about privacy with good historical reason, like Germany, have no problem using open source and self hosted services whenever possible, especially at the state level.
Mastodon seems to have a dramatically higher European userbase than US. That much seems clear from my time on it.
Also the German government, French government and others are using open chat systems like Matrix and favoring open source privacy respecting office and documents systems, forgoing giving the US government controlled FAANG companies, who happily have the CIA/NSA as customers, too much control of their internal affairs.
My favorite evidence of the radically different culture is going to hacker conferences.
Go to Defcon and everyone has a stock Chromebook or a Macbook. The Privacy Village asks everyone to accept the ToS of Discord, Twitch, and Google to participate. It would be a funny joke if it were not so sad.
Meanwhile at CCC in Germany... you are hard pressed to find anything proprietary at all from running the conference to the tools of choice of those that attend it. Germans remember well the cost of giving too much control of information to a central party. They have no problem making some UX tradeoffs to have freedom.
It depends on which social media you use but reddit and twitter both have such comments. But of course it also depends on whom you're following/which subreddit you're in.
Yeah, this isn't something most people even have on their minds. The only complaints I typically see are about all the dumb cookie banners on websites. In terms of the actual protections themselves the only opinions I've encountered are either near total ignorance of the subject or envy that the EU has at least something protecting them while here it's a free for all on your data.
In the beginning a lot of people were concerned about GDPR, because it could open any US business with a website up to liability. FAANG has lawyers to deal with this, but a small business or startup does not. But, I think those fears have calmed down.
It's just yet another step towards a two-tiered society. Those laws are in place and will be selectively enforced as the burden is too high for government departments to proactively monitor / investigate. The small companies least equipped to fight a lawsuit / investigation / fine are more vulnerable than the large companies that have their own lawyers.
> I understand your concern, I honestly do, but Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU
Even if this statement is true(likely isn't based on the support at least seen online), aren't you supporting the GP? If EU blocks data transfer to US, US would cry and not EU. It is a positive outcome for EU. Similarly, here China could cry and it would be no harm to US.
The problem though, is that that kind of thing doesn't solve problems like those with Reddit and Twitter-- bots, algorithmic manipulation as you mention, hand-picked moderators for critical subforums, or just generally hand-picked moderators can be a tremendous tool for political manipulation.
I've heard the unsubstantiated claim that /r/india is covertly run by Pakistanis, which of course, would be a pretty big problem considering the relations between those countries-- but whether or not it's true it's a claim that people can make because it's entirely possible for it to in fact be the case.
The problem is that solutions that are in accordance with security needs would interfere with free speech. I see the only path where both free speech and security needs are maintained as some kind of genuinely distributed social network with no central control facilities.
> I've heard the unsubstantiated claim that /r/india is covertly run by Pakistanis, which of course, would be a pretty big problem considering the relations between those countries-
Assuming that it's actually true (and that's a huge assumption since pretty much everyone with an unpopular opinion makes those kinds of accusations), is it really a big problem? The reddit solution would be for someone to create a new subreddit (/r/TrueIndia?) with more diverse moderators or at the very least a moderation style less likely to invite the accusation. Repeat as often as necessary until you get the community that you want. Name recognition/discoverability is a bit of a problem, but not an insurmountable one. There are thriving communities with names that have almost nothing to do with the topic (/trees being a perfect example).
When it comes to reddit at least, the biggest problem is the admins. They've demonstrated a willingness to ban things they don't like, their ban process is not transparent, and there's zero oversight or veto power in the hands of the users. If reddit admins target your message or your community you're only option is to rehome at a new site.
The issue there would be about the information on an “official” subreddit being shaped by a hostile country, or loyal members of a hostile country. The public perceives certain subreddit names as being “of record” and subscriber numbers tend to reflect that. I’m not from either country.
Subreddits with ideal names got an early advantage which helps boost the subscriber count, especially because reddit's search has always been terrible. Like I said, discoverability is tricky and not every subreddit that tries to fork off from a popular one is successful, but if people think that /r/india is more "official" than /r/india2 or even /r/india4204eva it's because they don't understand how reddit works.
The closest thing reddit had to official public subreddits were the defaults. For just about everything else it was 'first come first serve' to get a good subreddit name and then you're still at the whims of the current moderation team. People have the option to take over subreddits and change the culture through mod replacement, convincing the admins to give it them, or by brigading.
I think reddit could do a better job letting people know that the subreddits with the most obvious name aren't necessarily the most active, the most fairly moderated, or the highest quality. Even better, I think they should go back to having defaults and letting the community choose who gets them with a means to vote to put them under new management so that people can put more faith in a documented subset of subreddit names.
You identified the issue in the first paragraph, which is that the public doesn't understand how reddit works so the default named subs have that advantage, which in the case of nationally-oriented subs makes some members nervous about the moderation team.
I participate in reddit and appreciate the endless forking of True____ communities to preserve discussion quality, but it's a different issue.
Imagine if a major American newspaper, let's say the New York Times, was secretly run by Russia for example. I'd go as far as to say that if the India subreddit were run by Pakistanis, then it might even be a more severe problem than if the NYT was secretly run by Russia.
> I see the only path where both free speech and security needs are maintained as some kind of genuinely distributed social network with no central control facilities.
You need some central control, otherwise the malicious take over. There are all sorts of malicious behavior that need to be dealt with: spammers, libelers, disinformation spreaders, hackers. You can't expect to offload the responsibility of neutralizing all of that to the users. (We already do enough of that with our centralized networks) The only thing users seem to be able to do is identify out-groups and segment themselves into echo chambers.
I'm not thinking of you specifically when I say that I don't understand the fetishization of lawlessness among the tech crowd. You see that with anonymity too: perfectly anonymous systems also give the attackers an advantage. You can go too far in the other direction too though. Nobody wants some bureaucrat approving everything and giving advantage to the well-connected or persecuting based on the opinions expressed.
I just wish more thought went into thinking of what rules we actually want than continuously rediscovering why we had rules in the first place.
> I don't understand the fetishization of lawlessness among the tech crowd
I think most people just want technology to work for them instead of being used to constrain them. When technology doesn't do what we tell it to, and restrictions are put on us artificially that power often ends up getting abused, we become vulnerable to threats and issues we're not allowed to see or address, opportunities for research and development go away, etc.
When it comes to the internet some of it is simply practical. Laws don't fix much because no government can force other nations to comply. Attempts to restrict the freedoms of "bad people" also impact everyone else on the internet and "make the internet less useful and less powerful for everyone" is a hard sell.
That said, very few people want lawlessness either. We want ISPs to keep their networks from causing problems for the rest of us. We want them to take internet abuse issues seriously and things like BGP hijacking are very much frowned upon. When networks routinely misbehave we even build and share blacklists to exile them from our global community.
> perfectly anonymous systems also give the attackers an advantage.
Again, you can't restrict the anonymity of attackers without hurting every single user in the process. Putting everyone at risk and causing people to fall silent out of fear just to make things marginally more difficult for attackers doesn't make a lot of sense. That said, I've yet to see a perfectly anonymous system, if one did exist, I'm pretty sure we could choose to opt out of using it.
All good points. I think we have a lot of common ground.
> I think most people just want technology to work for them instead of being used to constrain them.
People don't want constraints on them, sure, but they also don't want others to be unconstrained. "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins." There's a balancing act. A system that is fully unconstrained is one that nobody will want to use, and/or facilitates behavior that is rightfully illegal.
Let's take the spammer for instance. The opposite is true: people are perfectly happy to have technology and/or laws constrain the spammer. Those constraints on others is how the system works for them!
> Laws don't fix much because no government can force other nations to comply.
But also
> When networks routinely misbehave we even build and share blacklists to exile them from our global community.
Even if laws aren't being drafted by a government, they still happen organically. In this case, the ISP is acting as the government. A system where blacklisting can't happen isn't one that users will benefit from.
Maybe it'd help if we started thinking of laws as another piece of technology. They're imperfect but serve a useful purpose.
>>>>You can't expect to offload the responsibility of neutralizing all of that to the users.
You dont need to neutralize all. Just enough.
Our system of jury by peers seems to work incredibly well. There is no reason why big tech cant implement a big system at scale to rely on users to police itself, except of course they would lose control themselves.
What is malicious/spam/libel/problem du jour?
Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about obscene:
A jury is capped at 12 plus some alternates. A script kiddie can spin up hundreds or thousands of "users" overnight and quickly the spammers/bad actors ARE the police.
There is no reason why big tech cant implement a big system at scale to rely on users to police itself, except of course they would lose control themselves.
Web3 and crypto already exist and HN overwhelmingly hates them. This is like crocodile tears.
The way I see it, central control allows malicious takeover.
Spammers are certainly a problem, but they are generally controlled by distributed moderation, rather than by centralized moderation. Furthermore, I believe that it is more interesting to know who moderates what how, in order to deal with hostile meta-filtering. Libelers I don't see as a problem. If it is interesting libel, what concern is it to me that it is libel?
Disinformation spreaders can't be controlled by a centralized mechanism. Whoever wants to spread important disinformation will acquire control of these mechanisms, and will be willing spend a great deal of money to do so. This in fact the primarily problem I see distributed forums as addressing, and the most important problem.
The most important thing is that no one can spread his view without everyone having the ability to contradict him, even the most important and highly person should not be able to so.
This is not a view that places hope in lawlessness. It is a view which places hope in order, and an order belonging to ordinary people and not to centralized institutions.
Just to set things straight: central control doesn't have to mean that there is only one authority. We'd say that Twitter and Facebook both exercize central control today for example.
Re "central control allows malicious takeover.": Decentralized or no control also allows for malicious takeover. Bad actors are a force that has to be actively pushed back on, and individual users shouldn't have to, don't want to, and don't have the capacity to do that on their own. It's a specialized skill that the average person doesn't have. They can do it to a limited extent, sure, (I like this post!) but do you expect your users to do the research to detect the meta patterns being used by attackers? To look at horrifying images? How would you grant them the authority to do something about it while restricting that power from the attackers? How do you give them the detailed information that they'd need to assist them in their quest while also preserving users' privacy?
You could probably stop reading there and get the point of this comment.
Every time you go into your email inbox, do you want the responsibility for training your mail filters? When some new type of fraud starts happening, it'll be up to you to catch it on day 1. I'm sure that you want to offload that responsibility to some central system that can react to threats like that across all its users at once, and that has people paid to do so. Maybe I'm missing something -- what is the distributed moderation system that is generally used, and how is it goverened?
Re: Libel, sure, you might not care that something is libel when you're reading about someone else. What about when someone else is saying false things about you? What if they have a bigger platform than you and you start experiencing real-life consequences from something that you can prove is false but you don't have the ability to get the word out? If you want it stopped in that case, then it's a classic case of "rules for thee but not for me".
Disinformation definitely can be controlled by a centralized mechanism. Twitter, Facebook, and others have blocked disinformation networks. Are you saying that it can't be blocked 100%? I don't think that's a useful point to make, unless you have an example of a system that would be capable of blocking 100% of disinformation. I don't see what decentralization changes in the face of attackers willing to spend a great deal of money to get their way, only that in the decentralized system, the targets are weaker.
re: "The most important thing is that no one can spread his view without everyone having the ability to contradict him, even the most important and highly person should not be able to so." I don't know what the argument is here. Chinese-style censorship is wrong, yes. Other centralized systems don't have that problem though, so let's go with them instead. Decentralized systems have a similar problem: if enough users (and they might be malicious) don't want to hear what you're saying, what is the mechanism for getting your message out? If you're showing messages that your users don't want to see, how do you pick?
I don't think Americans would have the same complaints about national security for the EU, nor do Americans have the same level of concern with regards to market fairness in the EU. American relations with China is very different from the EU.
Also, I'm not sure the public at large cares much about the competitiveness concerns that big tech companies have with the EU. It's not really a story in the sphere of public conversation.
Which Americans are crying foul? I don’t think many everyday people really care about how the EU regulates tech companies. Ask your parents how they feel, or the bartender next time you’re out.
Also the US isn’t an adversary, so it’s different. The stakes are different.
The main issue with the EU approach is that they only view surface level compliance.
>Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU, put measures in place to curtail the amount of data collection that happens by US firms
I think Americans cry foul at how feckless the regulations are. Is forcing me to accept cookies really making my life better or the Internet worse?
Given that the regulations don’t require that, it’s mostly that companies that choose to do it are making the internet worse because they believe they have the right to harvest personal information.
Yes, good for the EU. It's good to approach new problems with new solutions. Americans worship a decrepit ~250 year old document that was never meant to last that long, and will be left behind because of it.
GDPR isn’t the only set of data privacy laws in the world.
On top of that, many companies are doing a fantastic job at procuring PII through these consent notices. Some of them are downright predatory and give hundreds of companies around the world a mandate to process, store, enrich and sell your private information, including but not limited to things you buy anywhere offline or online, your web history, your location history, your health records, all your social media posts, all your instant messages, everything you’ve ever typed on any of your phones or other mobile devices (except laptops — maybe), and of course any leaked information about you that may be gathered or bought online.
EU vs US GDP growth over the past 15 years, and in fact vs most countries, would strongly suggest Europe is being left behind due to overregulation during an aging crisis.
But hey, why argue in the internet. Let’s let things play out and see where the cards fall
If you give healthcare to all, but the economic burden is too much for your weak economy to support, then your people might be worse off than they would be living in a strong economy but having to buy their own healthcare.
The richest country in the world (ie. USA) have the worst healthcare metrics due to private healthcare (poorer country that have universal healthcare like Italy, have far better metrics). So I suppose it's better to be poor but healty, then dead.
Metrics that take into account cost can sometimes be misleading, because you have to consider more philosophical points like whether a lower or higher cost is actually better?
Remember that from the countrywide economic perspective, most of the cost of healthcare stays within the country, so the cost of healthcare really is just a wealth redistribution effort. Free healthcare means 'redistribute very little wealth from the sick to the healthy' while expensive healthcare means 'redistribute lots of wealth from the sick to the healthy'. Social support schemes like sick pay or disability allowance are doing the reverse.
Countries already have millions of ways of moving wealth from or to people - and schemes like income tax or sales tax tend to be an even bigger dollar amount of wealth redistributed than healthcare costs.
It isn't obvious that there is an 'ideal' number, and comparing some metric like "years of life per dollar spent on healthcare" might therefore be meaningless.
Most standard bodies have published reports confirming that universal healthcare is cheaper for the economy rather than privatized healthcare. Yes, there are less profits for private businesses in universal healthcare and some vested interests will keep representing that angle (with or without a veil).
> I understand your concern, I honestly do, but Americans are always the first to cry foul when others, such as the EU, put measures in place to curtail the amount of data collection that happens by US firms (you even made that complaint about China yourself).
What? Why do you think American people care that Europeans have better digital privacy laws? And why do you think that those that do care are angry at Europe??
Where do you get your information? This is not even remotely close to being a true statement.
The average European doesn't know what Taiwan is, where Taiwan is, and couldn't care less if China invaded it, as long as they keep buying expensive German cars and luxury French handbags.
The EU has no interest or capability to do anything in China except make more money. To bring my point home, no EU country even has a navy capable of doing anything in the pacific without extreme US support.
US is the only country in the world that cares or has any chance of keeping China in check. It will be a success if EU nations can prevent the EU from collapsing and try not to insult and backstab the US all the time, just like most Europeans are currently trying to do to Ukraine, because Russian gas & oil is more important to them than Ukrainian lives.
> The average European doesn't know what Taiwan is, where Taiwan is, and couldn't care less if China invaded it, as long as they keep buying expensive German cars and luxury French handbags.
How many Europeans have you met personally? Just trying to figure out the sample size for your ”average”, lol.
Your comment reads like Russian jealousy. Russians really like expensive German cars and luxury French handbags… :)
I do see risk with the algorithm being manipulated in the future, but right now it seems like I have the most personal control over the Tiktok feed than any other social media app.
If I click the not interested button, it stops sending me videos of content similar to that. Youtube, Facebook, Google News, and Twitter all seem to ignore me when I click their equivalent buttons. I have been attempting for years to get Google News to stop showing me Meghan Markle drama, and have blocked half of the news outlets in the UK.
The videos are attached to the sounds used in them.
Anyone can literally stick a totally false political statement or whatever they want over "OhNo" by Creeper and it's highly likely to trend. It's also why the song OhNo, and many variations of it played so often on the platform. There is always a limited and interchangeable pool of songs designated by the platforms to trend, in order to make the ruse less obvious. The designated sounds can also be muted so that uploaded video sound can only be heard as well, but plays of the original sound still get the royalties.
On the back-end of that, Creeper makes royalties from each stream, and gives a cut to sponsors and TikTok... Literally millions of dollars each day are generated by any associated video plays... The entire music industry is looted by this too.
This is the BS involved with the algorithm on TikTok, it's not mostly AI driven recommendations, it's driven by a pre-designated sounds that make a lot of money because of royalty plays. TikTok gains popularity and money each time these trending sounds play picks the songs that trend. Other musicians, thinking they have a chance (without being endorsed by the platform) struggle fruitlessly to get their sounds to trend, but undercover they can't because they are not aligned with the right brand partnerships that lobby TikTok and pay heavily for advertising.
It's primarily not the algorithm in charge based on my observations as a developer, and the idea of content "choice" on TikTok is mostly a fallacy, though taxonomy does play a minor role in the mix, user accounts also manipulate their taxonomy to insert their content regularly into your feed.
> The designated sounds can also be muted so that uploaded video sound can only be heard as well, but plays of the original sound still get the royalties.
I'm not sure I'm parsing this correctly: Is the implication here that TikTok is using popular music in a similar manner to a scrambler [1], allowing them to descramble and extract a "clean" version of whatever was recorded from the user's environment? If so, it's not clear to what purpose, and how that ties in to nefarious royalty games.
No, you make a video with your own audio but when preparing it for publish, you add a popular audio track and set its volume to zero. This means your video will be associated with the track and may show in more feeds or searches and royalties will still be paid even though no one heard the track.
This seems very much like a tangential side rant but I one hundred percent agree with you. I was even thinking of writing an extension to block any links and mentions of the royal family. I'm British and I can't stand the amount of media coverage they get.
> Why should the U.S. let Chinese tech companies compete in the U.S. marketplace when China doesn't let U.S tech companies compete in their marketplace?
That is a point that very few people grasp. I've found that it's a bit easier to explain how the policies impact the technical side. You can extrapolate other facets from there (say, sales, for which I don't have direct expertise, although from what I hear, it's worse).
Let's say you want to sell stuff over there. Given that it's 2022, maybe you want a website to go with that? Possibly using some AWS services?
Ok let's do this.
Maybe you just want to translate your stuff and continue hosting from the US(or anywhere else really). Well, even if the traffic was allowed(it probably will be, at least initially), the firewall will make the experience miserable (ranges wildly, down to single digit bytes per second). The first request to anywhere is usually blocked. Geographical distance doesn't matter. Cross the border and the experience is terrible. So, that's not really an option. You really need to host from there.
First of all, your website needs a license. Even if all it says is "coming soon". Doesn't matter. Port 80(and 443) will be blocked until you get your ICP license. If you check wikipedia it talks about a 'grace period'. I'm not sure that is accurate. Traffic is usually blocked by providers regardless.
As a foreign company, you can't get one. You will need boots on the ground. And a lot of documentation. You cannot have non-Chinese DNS servers pointing to IPs in China. Yes this is scanned for and flagged and you better fix it otherwise you can lose your license. No it does not matter that these are automation/internal use domains.
This license thing takes at least a month in a happy day scenario. Potentially more.
You also need your 'AWS' account. It's in quotes because it's not really AWS. And no, it's not like "Amazon", the parent company, has an overseas "branch" or "affiliate" which, even though it's registered locally with the host country, it is effectively also Amazon and controlled by Amazon. No. The Beijing region is operated by Sinnet, Nginxia is operated by NWCDD. They are not Amazon, they are third parties. One wonders why Amazon went that route, since it seems suboptimal.
The process to get this account may take months.
Once you get your account, _you do not get the root credentials_. Those companies have it. They will tell you "there's no root user concept". That's not true(even though this is in the documentation now!). It's still basically the same AWS software, it has a root account. But they hold it, then use it to create an IAM user for you, and hand off that one to you instead. Over email.
Ok you have signed off on all those things. Now let's import some AMIs like we do everywhere else on the planet and start the services? No, you cannot do that. AWS China is a different 'partition'. Just like GovCloud. So they cannot be transferred. Same goes for just about everything else. Even S3 buckets. The one silver lining is that you can reuse the same bucket names. So let's just rebuild those images right? Well, remember the firewall thing? It's going to hit you here too. You will be using unbearably slow links that barely compete with dialup _unless_ everything you need is already mirrored over there.
Containers for the rescue. Or not? Your k8s cluster takes 5 minutes to download all containers in the US? It's going to take hours or days for you. Assuming it's not blocked - I hope none of your stuff uses gcr.io, for example (like K8s own components like to do). If they do, better mirror everything.
Money can help some of these link issues. You can pay companies to get around the firewall(but not around the regulations – if a destination is blocked it will stay blocked). If you do so, you will also have to provide a list of IPs that you will be talking to and what their purpose is. They will be vetted. If you have anything serious there, go that route(but be prepared to pay 5 digits for a link that's slower than your average Comcast business DSL).
"AWS" to AWS connections also seem to have some special rules, because the bandwidth is consistently better(not amazing, but better). So maybe setup your command and control that way. Can't do that via IPSEC tunnels though, that's not allowed. Unless done by "approved" vendors, to approved destinations. If try to do that by yourself, you risk your services getting shutdown, if not your entire account. SSH may or may not work.
Some of that affects local companies too (they all have to get the ICP thing) and can be, charitably, be blamed on excessive bureaucracy. Some of that may be due to decisions made specifically by AWS. But not everything can be explained that way.
I’d assume so. How would one discover their IPs? Also, I wonder if there are technical countermeasures, similar to how sites like Reddit and HN can detect upvote rings.
If you go through the process of standing up assets in AWS China regions and using them, you will run into everything the OP has stated: local affiliate, ICP license, GFW, constrained bandwidth, IP escrow agreements, etc.
Anyone who has had to do business in China will be familiar to one degree or another. When I worked anti-piracy, we had to secretly operate in-country servers to track video websites and certain bit-torrent traffic originating there.
Getting everything stood up, and staying functional was a truly abysmal experience.
Yes, living in a country with free speech is a national security issue. This should be obvious to a child. It's one of the tradeoffs of freedom of speech. Sometimes, people will use it to lie.
Sometimes, malicious foreign actors will use that freedom against it. But here's the problem. Sometimes, malicious domestic actors will use that freedom against it.
If we're going to pick and choose who gets to be the gatekeepers of information, why are you only singling out malicious foreign actors? There's no shortage of malicious domestic actors.
You can't say that you have freedom of speech, if you're not allowing speech that doesn't serve the interests of the state.
Because the scale (resources) of the foreign actor, combined with the reality that they are competing in what they perceive as a no rules zero sum game, make for an exceptional situation.
I don’t read the first amendment as protecting the propaganda of hostile foreign state actors. Do you?
I believe a tax paying citizen has the right to expect our government protect their speech. I don’t extend that right to the PRC army intelligence branch.
If the scale of influence is the problem, the same restrictions should be applied to billionaires or corporations pushing paid speech.
> I believe a tax paying citizen has the right to expect our government protect their speech. I don’t extend that right to the PRC army intelligence branch.
Is there anyone else who shouldn't expect this protection? Fifth columnists (however you define them)? Immigrants? Criminals? Permanent residents? Visitors? Non-tax-payers? Bad people in general? Corporations? Traitors, wreckers, and saboteurs?
These same arguments are the fig leaf used in modern day Russia, to justify its crackdown on speech. The people saying bad speech are subjects of foreign powers acting against the interests of the nation, etc, etc.
> 2) Fairness in the marketplace. No, I'm not talking about the U.S. marketplace. U.S. tech companies have had their IP stolen and unfair regulations placed on them in China. Why should the U.S. let Chinese tech companies compete in the U.S. marketplace when China doesn't let U.S tech companies compete in their marketplace?
The lack of regulatory reciprocity has always bugged me about US economic policy: e.g. if it is unlawful to pay a worker less than 7.50$/hr then shouldn't it be unlawful to import goods made by someone making less than that? Ditto for environmental regulations, privacy requirements, etc.
>let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population
It is mind-numbing that we made it this far without very serious consideration of this point. I've frankly just never understood it, especially given what we know about the power of algorithms to define reality at scale.
The EU is partially reining in the abuses of those companies (and more should be done), but this shouldn't be equated to TikTok and what China is doing.
FAANGs aren't state-controlled and Europeans do have access to the American market.
Personally I think whether something is state controlled or not matters less and less the larger corporations get. At the end of the day it still comes down to a large power imbalance between these entities and average consumers and citizens.
> Personally I think whether something is state controlled or not matters less and less the larger corporations get.
Except in China where the CCP (the only party that can control the government) has seats on the governance boards of every large company or outright owns others. Companies only exist there with the approval of the CCP (the government). There's no court in China that can overrule the CCP's leadership so effectively the CCP is the final arbiter of what is legal or not.
The US government doesn't sit on the board of Apple or Google. If Apple sued the government over something they could actually win their case and the government would be bound by the court's decision and both parties could appeal that decision.
I'm not saying the system in the US or EU is perfect but it is a very far cry from the system in China. Large companies are literally state controlled no matter how big they are.
And as an average citizen, how does that change anything to me? Whether some government stooge or some corporate stooge tells me to go fuck myself, it makes not one bit of difference in the end. Both are far too powerful for me to fight and take on. Especially when government policy is mostly decided by corporate money these days anyways.
FAANGS took part in illegal surveillance programmes in the past and they are required to share data with the american government. It doesn't make any difference if they're state owned or not, their complicit.
> FAANGs aren't state-controlled and Europeans do have access to the American market.
When it comes to war-related issues they might as well be controlled by the US Government, the "private entity" thing is just a cover. Yes, in essence, Putin was right a few years ago when he said something like "the Internet is a CIA project".
As a US business, they are required by law to share any data they have with the us governement. They were also part of PRISM so they have 0 credibility about protecting EU citizens' data.
What law are you referring to? I'm pretty sure no such law exists. The US government can't request any data as they please. EU governments can and do request data as well since US companies operate in EU countries.
On the first point, EU courts overturned the ruling on the landmark apple tax decision (that said, I also agree the global tax system is awful and favors bigco's). What phone is made in the EU? When I lived there the most popular devices were Apple and a variety of Chinese and Korean brands, none of which were produced in the EU. Which are made within EU human rights standards? I've never heard this claim before about Apple products.
Absolutely. Any country that doesn't ban foreign social media is behaving foolishly. This is true whether it's American social media in Europe, Chinese social media in America, or American social media in China (actually, they're ahead of the curve in this regard.)
> It is mind-numbing that we made it this far without very serious consideration of this point.
Simple: because no one want(s/ed) to piss off China too much.
Effectively, the West has been at war with Russia and China for years now. Industrial espionage, rampant IP theft, frauds and forgery in supply chains that yield no intervention by the Chinese government, cyber attacks by actors at least supported if not outright financed and ordered by the governments, holding people hostage [1], undermining of democracy by financing and supporting far-right and separatist movements, undermining of free speech by extortion [2] or by threat campaigns [3], threatening and following through with sanctions on anyone willing to support Taiwan [4], the list is long and doesn't even include the crimes both nations have committed against humanity both domestically and on foreign soil.
But since China has managed to grab up a lot of the world's cheap production and the politically extremely well connected automotive industry has their largest growing market in China, politicians have long been way too silent on even calling China (and Russia) out, much less actually punish them in return or declare the official state of war that both countries completely deserve.
Aside from Taiwan, and Xi, are there other formal restrictions to placate Chinese government?
Of course, commercial companies always need to please their customers, so that's an entirely different topic. You cannot blame the firms who avoid stereotyping Chinese people. Because the customers are going to be mad.
It’s not OP’s point at all. Americans want sovereignty over their own social media but gladly benefit from pushing Facebook and google dominance over the world. Big tech / Silicon Valley wouldn’t be the same if it would just be US only
There exists a policy that avoids hypocrisy: reciprocity.
Treat the EU companies the way the EU treats American companies and treat Chinese companies the way China treats American companies.
China doesn't give American social media companies access to China, so we shouldn't give Chinese social media companies access to America.
The EU imposes all sorts of privacy requirements and data locality restrictions on American companies. Impose those same restrictions but only on companies from the EU.
Any company in any country that over-collects and/or misuses the personal information of its users (or anyone) should be penalized in the same way.
Where are the Americans claiming otherwise? It's perplexing to see all this shadowboxing with a made-up argument that we shouldn't hold FB to the same standard as Tiktok.
Good. US dominance and oligopolies, at least in the tech sector, have stifled competition and innovation in the global economy. Everyone, including people in the US, would benefit from increased competition that monopolies have snuffed out for years, now.
I encourage the rest of the world to do everything they can to weaken the grip of social media companies with >100M users. All companies that big, really.
None of these are banned. They simply choose to not operate in China, because the laws require them hand over user data. So they choose to monopolize those data themselves, which is allowed in US and so called "free" nations. Go figure how ridiculous that is.
Yes, some of those are banned. Banned means to prohibit, especially by legal means. These websites are not reachable from mainland China, so they are banned in mainland China.
Their operation wasn't suspended for a compliance reason. This article lists some of those, and their (suspected) reason for the ban:
Banned in china:
Google
Gmail
Google Play
Google Maps
Google Drive
Google News
Facebook
Facebook Messenger
Instagram
Twitter
Reddit
Tumblr
Pinterest
WhatsApp
Snapchat
Slack
Viber
Line
Discord
Telegram
Signal
Wikipedia
Dropbox
OneDrive
Blogger
WordPress
Medium
Quora
BBC
The New York Times
The Guardian
The Washington Post
Daily Mail
CBC (Canada)
ABC (Australia)
Spotify
SoundCloud
Amazon Music
Pandora
Tinder
Pornhub
XVideos
Chaturbate
Twitch
PlayStation
Coinbase
Binance
You should edit your comment, it comes across as being in poor taste. There's this idea that people of one race have a very hard time seeing differences in other races:
Dear Europeans; Please stop threatening that and start actually doing it. Please. Americans taking these American companies down a peg seems completely intractable. Please Europeans, you are the best hope we have. Ban American tech companies!
And what, you think the chinese government never censors anything in their black-box algorithmic-feed app?
Censorship is going to happen, on all platforms, no matter what. Call it "moderation" or "upvoting" or "algorithmic recommendation", doesn't matter, the censorship is there, like it or not.
Instead of knee-jerk opposition to anything that reminds you explicitly of the abstract idea of "censorship", consider instead what forms censorship can take on any particular platform and whether you trust the people with the ability to leverage those forms to use it responsibly.
I've just developed such a hatred for Facebook and Instagram at this point, really all of the US social networks, that I like TikTok out of spite. and it's fun, to me, in a way the others just aren't.
I see the national security angle, but I want Meta to burn.
This deserves it's own thread, but just read this piece after this thread thought it was worth chaining to this comment as relevant.
"China lured graduate jobseekers into digital espionage."
Sure all governments spy. But you can't discount the massive digital dragnet (targeting their entire own country and us as well) and huge mechanical turk of p2p spies they have built.
1) TikTok is a powerful platform, but for privacy is the least offender amongst all social apps because of its nature. It doesn't have personal information from your and your social circle.
2) Didn't US just take Huawei out not only from its market, but also forced its allies to do the same? There is nothing about fairness in the marketplace, just different interests.
US wants to kill its competitor, I am fine with it. It is expected to happen, just our nature.
The notion that imaginary property can be "stolen" is so ridiculous and dystopian to me. Information isn't ownable, and the assertion that it can be was dreamt up by and for lawyers. We finally invent something - The Internet - that lets information be free and available to everyone, and computers that let people share copies of thing at effectively no cost, and rent seeking lawyers go and invent some bullshit to fuck it all up by bribing congress to make it law that benefits them immensely to everyone else's net detriment.
China doesn't recognize dystopian American copyright laws. Why should they? They're not China's laws, and they're detrimental to China.
Asserting "fairness in the marketplace" and copyright infringement (and calling it theft) in the same paragraph is absurd. In a fair marketplace, copyright infringement isn't a thing, and neither is "Imaginary Property" law. And don't get me started on software patents.
That said, I also feel no pity for TikTok and I'll never install it. I don't have the facebook app either.
I wish there were no software patents, and I can even understand why someone might cheer on countries that don't respect their IP treaty commitments[0] as a sort of anarchist burn-it-down position.
But as long as IP is a thing in the world economy we shouldn't be surprised that the countries where it's protected take issue with the countries where it's not.
The original "imaginary property" is land. There are people who make the same argument against the legal fiction of "owning" a piece of the ground. I'm not sure they're wrong, but I'm happy to "own" my house (subject to the continued good graces of the government in the country in which it's located, etc, YMMV).
> but why you'd let an adversary control the information flow to a huge portion of the population is beyond me.
Because the US has freedom of expression and free publishing, regardless of nationality of the publisher.
Once you start doing the same "foreigners can't publish here [and the local ones are under our influence]" nonsense that China does, it becomes indistinguishable from the adversary.
A state controlled data harvesting and algorithm propaganda machine is not the equivalent of a private market app.
You could easily even argue this doesn’t come under any first amendments rights because it’s obvious TikTok is an adversarial foreign government controlled entity.
It looks like you're writing that you don't understand why adversaries and friendlies/neutrals should be treated differently.
If you can confirm that's the issue you're not understanding I can put together some examples of the typical/possible consequences of treating enemies like neutrals/friendlies.
Because domestic corporations agree to work under domestic law, which a country created for a reason, in the US's case pretty democratically, and those laws align with things like individual rights, tort law etc.
An app owned by a foreign government that in no way subscribes to these values gives them freedom to do a lot more shady shit that would have consequences domestically, but don't as a foreign government.
But judging form your comment you don't really see any value difference in Chinese Communist Party values (and laws) vs say Facebook's values (and laws it obeys), so perhaps there's not much to talk about. I do see a difference.
> An app owned by a foreign government that in no way subscribes to these values gives them freedom to do a lot more shady shit that would have consequences domestically, but don't as a foreign government.
If they're breaking the law then they should of course be prosecuted for that. But to argue the law should treat them differently because they're more likely to break the law by doing things that would be legal for a corporation is purely circular reasoning.
> But judging form your comment you don't really see any value difference in Chinese Communist Party values (and laws) vs say Facebook's values (and laws it obeys), so perhaps there's not much to talk about. I do see a difference.
I don't see any difference between e.g. Facebook advertising to advocate for law changes that would suit their interests vs the CCP advocating for law changes that would suit their interests. Facebook has their own values which are by no means representative of the US, and could be just as different from those of regular American citizens as the CCP's.
And if Facebook was handing data over to Chinese government officials and three letter agencies you’d be damned sure they’d be slammed over it. TikTok is doing it, and god knows what else, and again, there is no oversight.
And yes, I know facebook hands data over to the us, but that is done with oversight and warrants
So I agree with you, I just think TikTok is basically above the law right now
> And yes, I know facebook hands data over to the us, but that is done with oversight and warrants
Is it? Don't they have their own secret courts where those warrants can't be challenged? Didn't the NSA head lie to congress about what they were doing (with no consequences)? I'd bet the PRC has some kind of "oversight" when getting data from TikTok too, just not the kind where regular people can see or object - but that's no different from what the US is doing.
FYI: these kind of patriotic comments is why we are in such a divided world.
First, if we saw China as another state that was part of the US, 1 would sound like a ridiculous claim. 2 would still be an issue, but this is why we have international regulations, trade agreements, and so on.
An all-American clone of an app like TikTok is not much better than TikTok itself imo, all things considered
There are deeper and farther-reaching issues here than competition between nation-states for information supremacy
Effects of regular use on cognition and attention span, data harvesting, pervasive advertising, etc
This affects humanity at large and the US particularly profoundly, as the US is friendlier to the most pernicious media business models than nearly anywhere else, and we are among the world's most addicted to new media
National sovereignty/security concerns are understandable and legitimate. This is a criticism many outside the US have been leveling at relentless American cultural export for decades
that's a big and messy bag of worms and given the contextual ambiguity I'm having a hard time agreeing or disagreeing with any conviction, although I do agree American identity is in many of its deployments a pretty empty concept
is there anything in particular about my comment that makes you say so?
Except every US tech company has some Chinese personals, H-1B or not?
Suppose there is a US company that builds and runs a Tiktok alternative. Should the staff be screened by race and birth certificates to make the company "pure American"?
maybe one relevant factor is proximity to a nation's power centers or governing bodies, i.e. a company might be judged more or less "American" or "Chinese" not on the basis of its staff's diversity but on the influence of the state in its operations and strategy
my intention wasn't at all to suggest some notion of nationalist purity, it was to emphasize the social and psychological effects of new media platforms on the human mind regardless of country of origin or affiliation
>Why should the U.S. let Chinese tech companies compete in the U.S. marketplace when China doesn't let U.S tech companies compete in their marketplace?
The final purpose of the market is not to serve producers. It is, rather, to serve consumers through producers. You might protect U.S. companies by preventing U.S. consumers from choosing the best and cheapest products they can find abroad, but you are not protecting U.S. consumers by expecting them to use inferior products. Because TikTok is in a leisure market, neither a self-consistent imperialist philosophy, nor one focused on the happiness of US citizens, can justify favoring it over domestic competitors. Of course, it is in our interest to ban the importation of all products of the labor that we ourselves perform, but let's not pretend there is anything but self-interest behind the desire to do so.
> TikTok and Douyin do not appear to exhibit overtly malicious behavior similar to those exhibited by malware. We did not observe either app collecting contact lists, recording and sending photos, audio, videos or geolocation coordinates without user permission.
And if there's any organization I trust about this sort of thing, it's Citizen lab, owing to their groundbreaking work around Pegasus and other APTs.
This is a weird take. Americans are free to not support military interventions planned by their country. To imply that this stance is only possible with brain washing by China is something I wasn’t expecting to see on HN. Heck, it is usually the opposite. People become avid supporters of current war/invasion/intervention due to intense propaganda by traditional and social media.
I would applaud the American youth if your post ever becomes reality.
You would expect resistance the same as any other military intervention has. However the magnitude of the that resistance given what is at stake is what would be telling.
I mean, why would the USA get into it? It’s an off topic question, but what do we gain from an independent Taiwan that’s worth getting into a war with China when we have so many issues domestically that need those resources?
The USA has an agreement with Taiwan which promises that we help them in some way.
The act further stipulates that the United States will "consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States".
The act requires the United States to have a policy "to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character", and "to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan." Successive U.S. administrations have sold arms to Taiwan in compliance with the Taiwan Relations Act despite demands from the PRC that the U.S. follow the legally non-binding Three Joint Communiques and the U.S. government's proclaimed One-China policy (which differs from the PRC's interpretation of its one-China principle).
Obviously, it's not something as strong as NATO but we will definitely get involved.
Traditionally nothing. However Taiwan became the centre of semi-conductor manufacturing and research such that it is now crucial to the national security of almost every nation, not just the US.
However the real reason why Taiwan can't either fall to China militarily or re-unite with China peacefully is that Taiwan forms the centre of the "Island Chain Strategy" which is a containment strategy established by the US after the PRC came to power in the Chinese mainland and ROC was relegated to Taiwan.
The Island Chain serves to contain the PLA Navy such that China can't operate as a Blue Ocean navy, i.e operate in international seas/oceans. Additionally it sets up a small number of chokepoints that can be used to completely isolate shipping in/out of China so they will alway be able to apply economic pressure through blockade.
This is the -real- source of tension between China and the "West" (even though it's really just the US/Australia/Japan in this case, China is relatively friendly with European countries etc).
If China was able to do the same thing to the US you can imagine the US would be pretty uncomfortable with that situation too.
Without being able to operate freely in the Pacific China's own nuclear deterrence is less effective as they aren't able to move nuclear ballistic subs without detection outside of the containment. This generally means needing bigger, more capable (read MIRV) ICBMs. Also generally means development of containment busting weapons, namely hypersonic nuclear tipped carrier-battle-group destroying missiles. They need effective nuclear deterrence to ensure their nuclear capability can't be disabled in a first strike. Specifically because their main adversaries are the US and Russia (yes, Russia is traditionally a Chinese adversary) both of which have significant nuclear assets so they need their own to ensure MAD is in place.
TLDR: If Taiwan was to come under Chinese control either by force or peacefully it would break a decades long containment strategy by the US, securing Chinese access to the Pacific for both trade and the PLAN.
But if we're not being sardonic a holes, we should be fighting with a Democratic and free government against an autocratic dictatorship whose stated goals are to restore the 'righteous' historical vision of China as the center of the world (it's even the name as far as what I've read, not a speaker of the language: 中国).
Not only is it critical geopolitically and militarily (as in ability to control important & huge swaths of seal / trade routes), ceding ground or worse not putting up a fight at all, would be the death knell of the push for more liberal governments and more freedom.
As always on any topic of Xi or CCP there are a whole bunch of 'but whatabout america.' It's just tiring.
Then you should find some people that voluntarily (ie, not at gunpoint) want that society, and live there. That's actually one of the great things about modern western society, it's very tolerant of people who want their own societies (as long as they aren't trying to impose them on everyone else).
Obviously the Taiwanese aren't interested in living under the boot of the CCP. It's an interesting question what mainland Chinese would want if they didn't have the gun pointing at their head.
Also, what on earth is traditional western society? Like, Greek?
> Also, what on earth is traditional western society? Like, Greek?
There is some question as to what constitutes "Chinese society" too.
Do you use simplified or traditional characters? Must you simply respect your elders, or do you also need to be subservient to them? Can you trade with the west? Become successful without prior approval? Protest peacefully? Own property?
Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, etc. would all turn their backs on the US if the US lets a liberal democracy fall to an authoritarian state LARPing as Communists.
All videos get assigned a 0-1 anti- vs pro-CCP score.
Videos with a >0.5 score get a slightly (~5%) better chance of being shown, and <0.5 is slightly penalized.
This would be undetectable if the algorithm is run off device. Anti-CCP content would still play often.
But on the massive scale TikTok runs, this would still tilt opinion favorably towards CCP.
Yeah, I'm aware of the any number of infinite Evil China (TM) hypotheticals. Let's put the sinophobia on hold for just a second, and answer my question: what are the practical (meaning documented) privacy/security concerns with TikTok? I linked to a report from a (gasp, Western) group showing that there weren't any, but I'm aware that the report is a year old, so I'm very interested in documented recent information, not just mindless anti-China ranting.
"documented". Unfortunately TikTok is closed source & proprietary. Though some privacy/security concerns can be gleaned via inspection of the binary and by viewing its network packets and such, it is still a black box running inside everyone's pocket.
>> could push propaganda or other material to demoralize the West.
>Not necessary. Our governments are doing a great job of this already.
I'd say it's a bit more nuanced than that - foreign countries are already quite active even when most don't realize it. Major political moves have been influenced by foreign country/ies, regardless of which side of the Atlantic you are - see both Brexit and the 2016 US elections.
There is zero to worry about privacy because out of these social network apps, TikTok is the least invasive and doesn't really have much private information about users at all.
About security, US may worry about what such a powerful platform can influence users. Think about how people were saying about Facebook when Trump was elected. And how US has been using Facebook in other countries to influence people.
Not all malware is the same. If there was a malware bit of code that did nothing that brought attention to itself as it silently sat there retransmitting every piece of data you entered, every interaction with every website, every document created, etc, the owner of that malware would have access to so much information that they could so so many things with that data that may or may not directly affect the user of that device. That would not make that malware any less vile just because it didn't encrypt user data or something obviously hostile to the user like that attracting attention to itself. That type of malware is almost there with social media SDKs used in websites, apps, etc.
There are ways that I can't even imagine that other people can imagine how to use that data for nefarious means.
To me, the interesting question is why a foreign company is doing a better job of understanding what American teenagers wanted than domestic firms with seemingly infinite bankroll to work with.
Nobody forced anyone to install TikTok at gunpoint. Presumably, if there was a more compelling domestic product, the kids would go there instead. Why has that product failed to materialize?
I know, you can't really set out to manufacture "cool", but maybe we need to get back the spark in this sector. I don't think the existing players are capable of creating an appealing blank-slate social platform. They might have the cash and technical chops, but they have negative social currency. Facebook/Meta's brand is hopelessly tainted: if it's not creepy spying, it's still where Mom and Dad hang out to swap antivax memes. Google might have a little more cool left-- not much-- but they're also attached to such teen favourites as "crappy limited school-provided Chromebook" and "we have 92 chat apps on our phones and still can't reach each other".
These things come in waves. Myspace - Facebook - Snapchat - Tumblr - Vine - Tiktok. There will be something next, and it will come from somewhere new. Don't ask why, just ask when.
Forgive me if I'm totally wrong, but it's copyright law, right?
TikTok lets you put current popular music on the videos without a care for copyright, correct? As they are Chinese, they don;t really care about any lawsuits. The same is not true for US based companies, thus they don't have as good of music on it.
TikTok pays a lot money for the popular music, they are all licensed so users can use them for free. New artists make more money on TikTok than other platforms.
I'm pretty sure ByteDance does license music. I don't know if they license all of it, but I'm pretty sure the RIAA or ASCAP could easily get an injunction if they didn't license any music that was theirs.
They do license the music, it's very ham-fisted though. They just pay out huge lump-sums to keep PROs happy. I've heard they're trying to build something more sophisticated like YouTube's Content ID system to get more accurate numbers on who/how much they should be paying.
> Nobody forced anyone to install TikTok at gunpoint. Presumably, if there was a more compelling domestic product, the kids would go there instead. Why has that product failed to materialize?
TikTok had zero qualms about making their algorithm favour pretty people, rich people, people with lighter skin.... What American product manager would dare suggest doing that?
I agree with you - the less inhibitions they have, the more popular they can get. From this standpoint, morals and sensitivity to certain things just add friction to popularity. If someone does this in polictics, they call it populism.
Now, of course, this isn't a holy grail for success. But it's a factor.
Exactly this. China doesn't allow TikTok as it exists in America to also exist in China, because they believe American TikTok is harmful to America and would be harmful to China as well.
I am curious about this. Has there been an analysis comparing the contents in the two respective countries? Something that would be illustrative of this claim. I am not doubting you or your statement. Just looking for information to back it up.
My search consistently yields marketing stats. Perhaps I am using the wrong key words?
Sorry, what? Bottom of America can't afford (actual) education nor nutrition nor healthcare nor housing. And upward mobility? What an outdated concept. This is unprecedented for "developed" countries that aren't wartorn.
Please tell me you did not just travel to a tier-1 city like Beijing or Shanghai, and extrapolated what you saw in the CBD to all of China. There is a reason that they're still desperately clinging to zero-COVID policies when the rest of the world has moved on, against seemingly all common sense.
It became against common sense when Omicron became a thing, and if you understand what the average Chinese person has to go through now to visit relatives in a neighboring city, shop for groceries, or really just to go anywhere... I hope you get the idea. It relies on totalitarian levels of AI + big data surveillance, internal passports, lockdown measures, and completely untenable long term.
If I wasn't being clear, there are 2 major reasons why China refuses to open up: ineffective domestic vaccines and few hospital beds per capita. The CCP fears a total healthcare system collapse and subsequent discontent from its citizens.
yeah, i use tiktok a lot and i think about this all the time. it's so odd that this isn't the first thing people are discussing. imagine if the russian government sponsored a social media application, all we would be talking about was political meddling. it's almost exactly the same thing here.
This also applies to the U.S. too, we see it today how the US influences the entire world using its Tech hands, an example would be how Facebook always try to silence any activists in Palestine against the Apartheid state.
Curious what this app does that other apps don't. In other words, applying the same criteria to other apps what other apps should be removed from the store because they do the same things?
You post video in it so the app gets camera and mic access, assuming you give it permission. Can you use it without giving permission? IIRC Apple requires apps to work without permissions?
I tried installing it and it requires an account so uninstalled. Not really into TikTok but was able to view in a browser without an account.
The way I see it is that TikTok is basically a psyops app. We can argue all day whether it is controlled by the Chinese government, by advertisers, by both, whether it is intentional, what its purpose is, etc. But anything that is free and funded by ads is at the end of the day trying to sway the mind and behavior of its users, that is the name of the game.
So to answer your question, it doesn't /do/ anything that other apps don't. But what it does it does rather effectively, and it isn't controlled by a company that is ultimately beholden to the US government. So from the gov's perspective, TikTok somewhere between a nuisance and a threat to national security.
That's kind of the value add. TikTok's recommendation system is miles ahead, I mean incomparably better than any social media competitors. This is largely responsible for its market growth and staying power, but ultimately it relies on extraordinarily in-depth understanding of user behavior.
> it isn't controlled by a company that is ultimately beholden to the US government.
The issue isn't so much that TikTok isn't beholden to the US government. The issue is that TikTok is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. If TikTok were Japanese or Korean or something, this wouldn't be a problem.
I would say that their recommendation algorithm and speed of delivering content is so good that it's almost dangerously addicting. I can't trust myself to have the app installed on my phone because I'll scroll it endlessly. I wouldn't be surprised if you could measurably impact the behavior of American teenagers with some clever content weighting... though one might be able to say the same of Facebook with the middle-aged.
The psychological profiling that can be done with the data is likely somewhat scary, and the feds are going to be doubly terrified considering Beijing is ingesting all that data. The latter is probably the primary motivator of a ban.
People are using this app to doxx the supreme court judges after the anti-abortion ruling. Hence the sudden and hasty desire to block the app on "privacy concerns"
Take formal action or don't, but public intimidation is a bizarre action for a government to take. We can't get them to regulate when there are rules, but when there aren't, and US diplomacy has decided to punish a country for some episode of disobedience, a media blitz of press releases.
It's hard for me to interpret all of this ill will toward TikTok as anything but sour grapes from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (cough Vine) for getting fairly out-competed by an app that's way more fun and innovative than any of their social efforts have achieved in over a decade.
Not just from them. I really despise the short video format and the culture that surrounds so I can't take an unbiased view on this. I'm sure there are many others like me.
For the sake of clarity, shouldn't the title really be "One FCC commissionerrequests Google, Apple remove TikTok
As written, the title makes in look like the whole commission is asking for this, and "ask" isn't always a request, sometimes it can be a command (for example a police officer asking for your license and registration when they pull you over).
> For the sake of clarity, shouldn't the title really be "One FCC commissioner requests Google, Apple remove TikTok
I think you're the only poster who actually caught this.
Brendan Carr comes out of a firm that owns a major DC lobbying hydra (Signal Group). His FCC history is all about parroting the (often anti-consumer) talking points of last administration.
He's indistinguishable from Ajit Pai. Carr is endlessly supportive of ISP monopolies. He rails against net-neutrality and Section 230. He's everything the FCC ought to protect us from.
As far as TikTok+China goes, I tend to be way more concerned about govs that can imprison me.
Past that, is TikTok a problem? We don't actually know because we never, ever, ever get meaningful specifics about what's being collected or what how that manifests as an actual risk to us.
Personally, I've never had an officer ask for license and registration. It is always phrased as a demand. It's never been "may I see your license and registration?". It's always "license and registration". No please added either.
I'm not a TikTok "apologist" but I think these kinds of concerns about data privacy aren't very useful. At best you're just picking which terrible relationship to be in and which company you're okay with harvesting your data - for whatever purposes.
IMO a better use of time and effort would be to create mechanisms that make these kinds of tracking less impactful. We have avenues for technical solutions to these kinds of problems and decentralized systems. Whenever we attempt to spread adoption to them we are often met with the argument that "just using X big company platform is easier".
Can someone put into succinct evidences of this statement?
To the typical talking point:
* IP infringement: there is not much unusual rate of IP stealing from China. Considering the size of Chinese economy and foreign trade ties between China and the rest of world, absolute number of IP infringement cases are not a good indicator of the government's policy.
* Coercion of South East Asian nations: This one is a natural demand of a rising super power. Putting it in the perspective of any historical rising of superpower, China has been relatively much more peaceful. Again, the sheer size of China make the absolute number terrifying, but please stay rationale, and don't try to paint China as some sort of arch evil of the west Civilization. After all, the West has been nourished by the Oriental civilization, among them China particularly contributed to the advancement of knowledge and inventions (gun powder, magnet etc.).
* Confrontation with US over Taiwan: If you are OK with Texas leaving the union, then you are entitled to support Taiwan independence. Enough said. Pick your side, and stick with it.
PS: I am Chinese living in US. And I support the peaceful cooperation between China and US. The 2 nations are the most refined examples of the oriental and western civilizations. It's indeed a tragedy that the finest human civilizations cannot work together. We Chinese living in US, as well as the US people having good exposure in China, are in a good position to amplify the cooperative ties between China and US.
> * Confrontation with US over Taiwan: If you are OK with Texas leaving the union, then you are entitled to support Taiwan independence. Enough said. Pick your side, and stick with it.
I'm sad that you don't realize Taiwan is already functionally autonomous, and wants to remain that way.
It's also telling how you imagine that a typical American wouldn't "let" Texas leave the union.
As far as I (or anyone else I know) cares, if Puerto Rico or Guam or Texas wanted to leave the U.S. (which they don't), and they held a vote, and a supermajority voted to leave, why wouldn't we let them leave? It isn't the 1860s anymore. The world is much more democratic now, imperialism is over, and if a group of people want to go it alone, we should let them.
Scotland had a vote to leave the U.K., and they decided to stay, so they stayed. If they had voted to leave, they would have left.
The U.K. had a vote to leave the E.U., and they decided to leave, so they did.
Would China recognize Taiwan's independence if Taiwan held a vote? Of course not. The reason for this is not merely because China doesn't sympathize with the desires of the Taiwanese people, but because China doesn't even believe in democracy in the first place.
> if Puerto Rico or Guam or Texas wanted to leave the U.S. (which they don't), and they held a vote, and a supermajority voted to leave, why wouldn't we let them leave?
Texas has a 2 trillion dollar economy with shipping, electronics, manufacturing, oil, electronics, etc, 28 million taxpayers, a lot of military bases and assets and miles of coastline and ports. You don't just let that leave.
We're not the UK or EU - if Texas tried to secede they would just learn what it's like to be on the business end of an American military "liberation."
No, they really couldn't, it isn't the nineteenth century anymore. And no, there isn't a special provision allowing Texas to secede from the union, this is a popular myth[0]. And as much as Texas likes to believe in its fierce independence, the state is politically, culturally and economically enmeshed in the rest of the Union and without the resources, finances and status of the US (much less the USD,) Texas would be better off rejoining Mexico than trying to survive on its own[1].
I really have no skin in this game, but there are a lot of perfectly functional countries with fewer than 28 million people, and it seems kind of silly to assert that an energy-exporting rich country of 28 million could not survive on its own.
> If you are OK with Texas leaving the union, then you are entitled to support Taiwan independence.
Are these similar? Texas is part of the union and WANTS to stay in the union. Taiwan is independent does NOT want to be part of China. They don't seem similar to me.
They are similar in that there are laws reconigized domestically and internationally to block Texas and Taiwan from becoming independent from their home country.
Confrontation with US over Taiwan: If you are OK with Texas leaving the union, then you are entitled to support Taiwan independence. Enough said. Pick your side, and stick with it.
1. Those are not even close to equivalent. For so many reasons.
2. Sure, Texas can leave if they want. Florida and California too. Definitely Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
You dismiss the theft of trillions in IP over decades as "some online hacking". You bring up NSA domestic surveillance as a straw man to distract from what the Chinese Gov does to other countries.
Fine, I'll take a second to engage your straw man: The NSA didn't feed their surveillance data to DHS to round up undesirable ethnicities into concentration camps.
This is just pure propaganda.
If one can accurately count for the IP theft and come up with a value number. And argue that it's trillions theft from the US business man, without those business man not refarining from doing business in China, then the basic profit-seeking behavior is not working in the US China bilateral business dealing.
You can claim that US businesses lost trilliones which are larger than the profit they collected, and assume that the business men are stupid and not knowing the value of their IP.
That's just senseless argument.
> the theft of trillions in IP over decades as "some online hacking".
Online hacking is very small part from China. And they are usually backed be global hackers from compromised hosts located in Chinese territory.
Every power is an adversary of each other on the world stage. It's not something special that exists between China and the US, each and every power is in a similar relationship. Since there's no higher power to govern it all, the only thing that keeps the adversarial relationships somewhat peaceful is the balance of the power. Otherwise one would assimilate the other. The rest, like the particulars you listed, are just details.
Absolutely not. It's just people in large, complex groups, with history. Also, it's not about war at all - rather, it's about power. Which can be, and is, achieved in a good many not-war ways.
- the IP infringement is very real (see Nortel vs Huawei), but it's more the actions of individual companies than industrial policy.
- Taiwan is technically the legitimate government of China, so it's really more appropriate to say that the mainland broke away from China instead of the other way around. Realistically though, they've been defacto independent for decades during which there has been peace. The KMT is no longer the dominant party in Taiwan and the CCP has moved on from Mao, the two sides should drop the charade and normalize relations, but it's unlikely to happen with Xi at the helm stoking Chinese nationalism.
That said, I don't think any of this should automatically make the US and China adversaries. The US has a number of allies that are worse on the human rights front, and has historically propped up dictatorships as long as they were aligned against communism.
imo the real reason for the conflict is that there is a resurgence of nationalism in every major country. Both the US and China has become more fascist compared to 20 years ago, and this trend is likely to continue.
Add constantly being belligerent to US and other nations ships on international waters, claiming they can build artifical islands and lay claim to all of the waters of South China Sea and control who travels there.
Despite areas of friction, China and US are each other's #1 trading partners. We are literally allies. I suggest we try to build upon that already productive relationship.
Trading is of a mutual benefit. Sea creatures do this as well with hygiene.
In case it wasn't obvious, Western influence (individualism and democracy) is an existential threat to the CCP -- This is why see western media censored and/or outright banned in China. Tiananmen Square Massacre is another example of CCP's response to western influence in China.
Trading partners is not the same as "literally allies". Germany was trading partners with the rest of Europe before both world wars, that doesn't mean Germany was allied with France and the UK. There is no mutual defense pact between America and China, nor will there be in any foreseeable future. America and China are not allies.
Nobody is obliged to tailor their beliefs to your whims. It doesn't matter how logical you think you are. It doesn't matter if you think other people are being hypocritical or illogical. The simple fact of the matter is that I support American interests and oppose Chinese interests, and I don't care if you think that makes me hypocritical.
It'd be great if this could be codified in a proper regulation (that also has to be obeyed by US companies, not just Chinese ones).
But that's hard - it's easier to demand that private corpos play the enforcer (and corpos themselves were dumb to even get themselves into a situation of playing the moral and political arbiter).
But in terms of potential harm, unquestionably China, unless I'm actively breaking US law.
My hostilities with the United States government are an edge case, a risk to be managed. The government, for 9 in 10 people, is a good actor.
China is a foreign actor. Unlike the US government it has zero checks and balances which I control, and should it use this data to compromise our government or fool the people I live with I expect the consequences to be far more damaging.
They were caught not too long ago actually spreading environmental causes in Texas against rare earth mining. They were trying to leverage our political process to make us dependent on them. Tools like TikTok make them far more effective at these sorts of operations, and it would be incredibly foolish to trust them.
> They were caught not too long ago actually spreading environmental causes in Texas against rare earth mining. They were trying to leverage our political process to make us dependent on them.
Do you have a source for this? I did some quick searching but couldn't find anything concrete. Super curious to learn more about this case if it's true.
If Cambridge Analytica has taught us anything, we should be thinking from the perspective of what's in the best interest of society rather than best interest of an individual.
I don't think CCCP data collection from TikTok would be very useful at targeting specific individuals. But the data set as a whole could be the equivalent of a nuclear bomb if exploited in pursuit of some nefarious goal (e.g. an outside country influencing the results of another country's political election)
The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" was just marketing by Facebook. It's no different than a billboard company putting something outrageous (e.g., advertising bull fighting) to prove that people actually pay attention to their ads.
Well I think in general you have more personally to worry about from your own government (which can legally apply coercive force against you), vs. any foreign government, particularly an adversarial one, with no extradition treaty.
Which is not to say that your own government shouldn't worry about national security- maybe the ban on TikTok could be more targeted, for example members of the government and military should not use it.
Anyway I was thinking more about the spying, and not so much about the influencing.
Till this day, there has been no hard evidence of tiktok collecting data on behalf of Chinese government. Yet, it's routinely connected to CCP without a trace of backing.
So CCP is so bad that mere association is enough to deter any meaningful defense?
I'd imagine most people happy about this would also be happy about the same thing happening to the US tech companies too. I don't see what your point is?
It's not an either/or choice. I don't want USA having that data either but that's not what this conversation is about. The CCP actively is genociding the Uyghurs and disappearing political dissenters. We are not the same. You do not want the CCP to get blackmail information on you especially if you work at a company they could potentially steal IP from.
>The US government, imperfect as it is, is democratically elected by US citizens.
Because of so much social media influencing, this is very much up for debate at this time from those that have been heavily influenced. That's just one example of how all of the social influence is just not good for society at large.
You failed on first line. They aren't democratically elected if there are only two choice: dems & republication. Both don't care about people, and constantly blames each other to divert people interest.
Survey says most Americans don't think they live in a democracy, while vast majority of Chinese think they do. It's easy to see why when you think about how little the average Americans' interests are represented by their government. Not to mention the totally gerrymandered districts, voter suppression and absurd legalized corruption that says money=speech.
https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democr...
What anonymous public opinion polls are EVER permitted in China? Where are polls on the popularity of various state leaders? On the Shanghai covid lockdown? On the investigation of the imprisoned Anhui woman? On continual WeChat censorship? Etc.
Because as Milton Friedman pointed out, don't do to yourself what you do to an enemy in war. China banning American services is to the detriment of Chinese users and competition in China, there's no reason to emulate censorship.
If data harvesting was a genuine concern you might as well ban Facebook and every other social media app while you're at it. It's just hysteria and nationalism.
But China already bans tons of American services from Google to Twitter, no? And otherwise makes the regulatory burden so incredibly onerous it's very difficult to operate (e.g. LinkedIn) for some tech companies when they want to build up domestic champions
>China banning American services is to the detriment of Chinese users and competition in China, there's no reason to emulate censorship.
This is not true. China financializes everything, and pumps capital into projects at rates unseen and unmatched in the history of the world. There is plenty of competition, as evidenced by the fact that China has apps that are fare more efficient and feature rich than anything in the US. See: WeChat.
> as evidenced by the fact that China has apps that are fare more efficient and feature rich than anything in the US. See: WeChat
You just confused a claim of fact with a personal opinion.
"Efficient" and "feature rich" are close to meaningless when thrown around like that. You can't actually support what you said because it's very heavy on being subjective.
Feature rich is corporate speak for: bloated with garbage that's unnecessary.
"""
Such processes of capital market development are often described as important characteristics of financialization processes. And while not yet on par with highly financialized economies such as the United States
"""
So this means China's financialization is unmatched? Yet the statement suggest US financialization is superior to China?
Nah, the title itself is too propagandist. What the hell is "authoritarian capitalism"?! Corporations are all authoritarian, to facilitate individual control of large resources owned by the corporation. Capitalism is just a nice term to coat the brutal underlying profit seeking gangster. Corolally, there is no such idea of liberal capitalism.
WeChat has more features than WhatsApp but probably not the Facebook ecosystem. It's also far-fetched to say it's "far more efficient", given Facebook has to serve many more users and doesn't seem slow.
>but the fact that China bans so much US internet like Facebook
This seems like a poor reason to ban an application/website/whatever. Reminds me of elementary school drama. Find a legitimate and/or legal reason (e.g. the mass harvesting of biometric data, unbeknownst to the users, being fed into some opaque government-ran database) or it should not be banned.
> This seems like a poor reason to ban an application/website/whatever. Reminds me of elementary school drama. Find a legitimate and/or legal reason (e.g. the mass harvesting of biometric data, unbeknownst to the users, being fed into some opaque government-ran database) or it should not be banned.
Um, no. Reciprocity is a pretty key concept in international relations, and a legitimate reason to take retaliatory measures. Also "we would rather not grant our adversary this advantage" is another legitimate reason to take action.
>Reciprocity is a pretty key concept in international relations
This makes much more sense in the context of physical goods and materials and international trade. It makes much less sense (I argue near-zero sense) in the context of some random non-lawbreaking, legitimate application or website.
Edit to clarify:
Refusing to export X to country Y hurts country Y, assuming they want X.
Banning legitimate application X developed in country Y does not hurt country Y (unless the majoity/all revenue is from your country), it just hurts your own citizens who may rely on application X. "Cut off your nose to spite your face"
> This makes much more sense in the context of physical goods and materials and international trade. It makes much less sense (I argue near-zero sense) in the context of some random non-lawbreaking, legitimate application or website.
I'm sorry, I'm not seeing the difference. Even if the context was only business/trade (which it isn't), the American company is not able to operate in or make money from the Chinese market, while the Chinese company is currently has free reign to make money in the American one. The obvious thing to do is to reciprocally restrict the Chinese company to incentivize the removal of restrictions from the American company.
>the American company is not able to operate in or make money from the Chinese market, while the Chinese company is currently has free reign to make money in the American one
I think this is our disconnect. I don't care if some random American company can't make money in China. Nor do I care if a legitimate application that happened to be developed in China is able to make money in America. Why should I care?
And assuming I use that application or website, why should I be the one to be punished? Just so some other company can gain some market segment? The context here isn't war or something else severe like that, my point is and has been only in the strict context of legitimate websites and applications (i.e. they aren't breaking American laws, they aren't siphoning American data, etc.).
But hey, maybe this is why I'm not a foreign policy expert and instead I'm just some guy on the internet, enjoying what people all over the world have developed and hoping that my government doesn't ban them because of spite.
> I think this is our disconnect. I don't care if some random American company can't make money in China. Nor do I care if a legitimate application that happened to be developed in China is able to make money in America. Why should I care?
You or I might not care personally about the specific case, but I was speaking from the perspective of the government. They certainly care because they have responsibilities for the economy. I care too, indirectly, because I have interest in the economy doing well (e.g. if Facebook hires a bunch of American developers because they're making bank in China, that's a better for me because the increased demand makes some things a little better for me).
But the trade/economics thing here is a distant second to the national security concerns at play. It's significant that TikTok is under the control of a geopolitical rival, not an ally.
> I care too, indirectly, because I have interest in the economy doing well (e.g. if Facebook hires a bunch of American developers because they're making bank in China, that's a better for me because the increased demand makes some things a little better for me).
Valid point, although I still think that banning a non-related, legitimate application that is used by Americans is a poor way of approaching the issue. But I concede that there is more variables at play than I had in my head during my initial comment.
>It's significant that TikTok is under the control of a geopolitical rival, not an ally.
I never disagreed with this point, and tried to make that clear in my initial comment where I specifically used the mass harvesting of biometric data as an example of a reason I would consider legitimate.
It's quite the opposite. Reciprocity hurts more with physical goods.
In a trade war, if a country bans export X in retaliation, the citizens of the country also hurt because they have to pay more to buy from other sources.
But with a social web site, citizens lose nothing by having to switch to another data-sucking web site, especially since their contacts are now less fragmented across social media sites due to the ban.
The reason China bans Facebook, I think, is about stifling competition because they know these internet platforms are about creating global monopolies and they want to win or at least not lose.
> My understanding is that Chinese bans on US technology have reasons clearly codified in law and would not be banned if they followed the regulations.
My understanding is that Chinese law is usually pretty vague and unclear, especially in areas like this, and in any case doesn't actually bind the government.
Yeah, my understanding is a lot of Chinese laws are vague on purpose so that they can be interpreted to benefit companies the state likes, while punishing those the state does not like
The regulations include being completely subservient to the state.
The US could make something similar to eliminate Chinese companies in terms of democracy vs dictatorship: pass a law saying that social media websites can only operate if their employees have the right to vote in their own countries.
Then TikTok would be banned because it does not (/could not) follow the law.
Because China doesn't ban US internet platforms, US internet platforms choose not to comply to PRC laws, which domestic PRC companies has to abide. Facebook/Twitter left because they couldn't/wouldn't censor calls of revenge killings during 2009 minority riots in PRC. It wasn't until NZ shooting and FB role in Rohigya genocide years later that political culture changed globally/domestically in US enough for FB to up the moderation game, around the time they wanted to re-enter PRC market. Except their employees protested and killed the initiative.
Flip side is Bytedance/TikTok bending backwards to follow US laws, because Douyin is used to dealing with PRC regulatory bullshit, meanwhile their employees just want to make money instead of undermine company expansion plans with geopolitical culture wars. Like it's not hard, follow the law in the country you operate in and be competitive. TBH that really leaves some Google services, a lot of western platforms simply can't hack it against PRC competitors for domestic PRC market.
And when US companies attempt to obey Chinese law and are banned anyway? Nice to know that Apple was given "equal legal consideration" in China in 2016 when its iBooks store and iTunes movie store were suddenly ordered shut after six months of operation. Oh, wait. . . they weren't given any legal recourse at all and the Obama administration did nothing about it while Silicon Valley grandees kept conspicuously silent.
And? Laws change... PRC updates law to ban foreign publishers, ergo ibooks/itunes got killed. US also has national security negative lists that they use to kill China Telecom in US.. who followed US laws until it got updated. But Apple rolled with the punches are still doing great in PRC. If US laws wants to mandate TikTok to remove some service segement, Bytedance will also comply. Like they're doing with Oracle data siloing under CIFIUS. TikTok is rolling with the punches like Apple did in PRC because you know... they understand following local laws is business 101.
>But Apple rolled with the punches are still doing great in PRC.<
But not allowed to sell books or films, apparently too corrupting of the delicate moral sensibilities of the Chinese people.
You make a good point about how laws might and should change. A return to the wisdom of the Ming period trade with Japan seems in order: a strict tally-trade quota system, based on transparent reciprocity.
One university student for one university student. One streaming service for one streaming service. One telecom for one telecom. One chip for one chip. Disruptive at first, perhaps, but eventually both fair and salutary.
The days of casual forbearance of 骗老外 attitudes belong to a halcyon past for China.
Why sponsor foreign propaganda? No surprise foreign NGO crackdown, dismantling of CIA network, exposing how many CCP bureaucrats were being bribed by US intelligence around this time.
> strict tally-trade
Is this going to be a "fair and salutary" arrangement where PRC high tech exports don't get sanctioned on geopolitical whims and US networks has their portion of huawei gear, roads their portion of Chinese cars, US tech stack has their portion of Chinese IP. If so, sign PRC up. I imagine limiting outbound students alone is good for PRC brain drain.
They didn't. The entire Project Texas / Oracle / CFIUS agreement is in process of implementation. The drama is over China-based staff accessing data while working on Project Texas (to silo US data/traffic), even though Chinese nationals were not on the United States Technical Services team. The ultimate concern is China-based staff will have access to protected US data/traffic after and the effectiveness of implementation. No laws were broken, but doubt whether Bytedance efforts would effectively prevent access. No laws were broken.
We should start with banning TikTok, and then move on to banning all forms of algorithmic content feeds and behavior tracking for advertising.
The reason we know that manipulation via algorithmic content feeds is effective and harmful is that numerous bad actors exploiting the Facebook algorithm have used it to cause real harm worldwide.
For the sake of argument, let’s take Facebook at their word that they are merely optimizing for engagement, and the well-documented radicalization spirals that manifest on its platform are the result of clever exploitation.
Now imagine that the bad actor wanting to manipulate large numbers of people also had control of the algorithm and all the data.
The risk here is blindingly obvious, and we should do something about it before it becomes an even bigger problem.
This is the result of a request in 2020 by two senators to the FTC to investigate TikTok for collecting MAC addresses on mobile computers with corporate OS, e.g., iOS and Android. (Another reason these OS are inferior, IMHO. We cannot chose our own MAC address. Randomisation of MAC address for WiFi is a poor substitute for having the ability to set MAC address to whatever value we choose, random or non-random, i.e., control. "We'll do it for you", with no option to DIY, may be providing a convenience, and only in response to user complaints, but it is also taking control away from the owner of the computer. Corporation controls the MAC address, not the owner of the computer.)
The senators were alerted to the issue by the WSJ:
TikTok (Musica.ly) was caught violating COPPA rules in 2019 and fined more than double the amount that Disney was fined in 2011, which was the highest fine ever issued for COPPA violations:
There were allegations after 2019 that TikTok was violating the terms of the 2019 injunction and were still violating COPPA.
Like Google and Facebook have done in their communications after being caught acting unethically and/or illegally, TikTok rolled out the cosequent changes to their website/app with the accompanying phrase "You are in control".
Nothing could be further from the truth. If you were in control, you would disable advertising, for starters. :)
When you thought you were controlling tracking by changing your advertiser ID in Android, you were being misled. TikTok had stored your MAC address and could link it to the prior advertiser ID. MAC addresses are PII under COPPA.
In 2021, the Dutch DPA also fined TikTok for violating online privacy laws protecting children:
I know that in the iOS 14 beta Apple implemented MAC address randomization to help prevent organisations identifying you in places like retail stores where your MAC address could be obtained when left on.
For the average user and I'd say the absolutely majority of users, this is a better alternative than being able to set your own. Only hardcare security enthusiasts would have an appetite for setting their own MAC addresses and knowing what to do with it.
The idea of China as adversary as logic for nixing TikTok is funny to me. But when we want a microwave for $29, well there are some things that we can live with.
What bewilders me is that an FCC commissioner is weighing in on this at all.
FCC's mandate is to regulate telecom infrastructure - devices, bandwidth allocation, licensing, etc. Nothing at fcc.gov mentions anything about a mandate to regulate content being distributed over that infrastructure. There is a long history of debate over whether FCC using broadcast licenses to enforce decency standards, but this is the first I've heard of them implying that iOS and Android are subject to the commission's authority.
If it's a national security issue, it seems that Homeland should be addressing it; if it's consumer fraud over privacy violations, it would be FTC.
The letter (which is not on the FCC.gov website, so I found it through the commissioner's Twitter post) doesn't go into that at all, and it seems like pretty significant overreach that a commissioner can demand software companies to choose their customers according to his will.
The headline is misleading. They’ve been asked by a Trump-appointed commissioner to “consider removing” TikTok.
I think TikTok is a giant human rights violation for being utterly stupid, but that doesn’t mean the arguments presented here make much sense. This comment is going to be fed as training data to some stupid AI to spit out comments that sound like I wrote them, which I find much more troubling from an intelligence community perspective. I never agreed to this when I joined Hacker News. TikTok users, on the other hand…
Could someone please share some articles on what data TikTok actually collects? In the last year or two, I've seen a lot of concerned commenters, a fair number of news articles have popped up on the topic stating the bad state of affairs, but nothing explaining what exactly this is all about.
And I don't know, this crap is so sad, this all is such a misdirected effort. The operating systems must provide the users means to regulate the access to data and device functions instead of laws and committees deciding what apps are not hostile enough to be distributed. What laws and committees must enforce is properly equipped operating systems. Legally enforce full control of the devices, sand-fucking-box everything. Not on this planet, huh?
Is this actually an official request from the FCC? The letter[1] makes it sound like personal grandstanding on the part of the Trump-appointed commissioner rather than an official action by a regulatory agency. If it's the former, the headline is misleading.
Brendan Carr is also notably anti Net Neutrality. Reading the screeds of the supposed cypherpunks of hacker news begging the federal government to BAN access to an app by private individuals is hilarious.
Seriously. And I can't figure out how the CCP having information about me is worse than the US government having that same information when I'm likely to interact with the latter but not the former. I'd love for the FCC/FTC to enforce some kind of privacy standards on all apps, but that's not what's happening here.
This info is extremely telling in more ways that you are giving it credit for, and if maybe you really don't do anything more than watch cat videos, other people are watching more than that. Lot's of data can be inferred based on your browsing history.
maybe which profiles or link trees people are looking at. Any questionable content anyone likes. They might be able to use it to deploy 0 days to specified users they might be interested in. Maybe users who work for the gov, or companies they're interested in getting information about.
Hard to know without having them spell out their specific security concerns.
TikTok's privacy policies include the ability to store biometric information. They have been caught bypassing privacy controls on iOS and Android before to collect data that they're not supposed to have access to, and they even settled a lawsuit a couple of years ago for illegally storing data of minors.
TikTok has access to your camera and microphone, and facial recognition and voiceprinting are considered biometric information.
You can block the permission in settings, but as explained in the FCC letter, TikTok has a documented pattern of bypassing system permissions and accessing data that they shouldn't actually be able to access (which is malware-like behavior).
If TikTok can actually access the camera and microphone after permission has been denied, then Apple and Google have a much bigger issue on their hands and need to fix that ASAP.
Read the letter. It's talking about past issues. Yes, security exploits are a problem for the platform, but that's no excuse for apps to exploit them maliciously, against the user's knowledge or wishes.
that's fair, I denied the app permission to access my camera since I just watch videos on it
it would be really helpful for the FCC to explain to content creators why and how their biometric information can be used against them, tiktok is just one of the companies scanning their faces in that regard
Curious what people think the consequences would be if the US was the only western country locked out of TikTok. Is it a big enough market that the app would lose its influence? Or is the app so popular globally that US entertainers would lose out on the opportunity to build their careers (thinking of the various TikTok “celebs” who have built businesses of varying sizes around the app)?
Carr is against net-neutrality. [1] He's a Trump appointee.
It's clear that this is not a principles-based ask to remove a data-hungry application. Carr isn't saying that applications shouldn't harvest this data. He's saying a Chinese company shouldn't be playing the same game that American companies do.
Thus, the logical conclusion to "why is Carr making this statement?" isn't necessarily "it's because TikTok does something abnormally bad," but rather political: it's anti-China propaganda.
I disagree with the premise. Supposedly, Carr continues to run Trump's agenda, but then it would banning TikTok for the reason that the social network was used to organise anti-Trump activities during the last elections.
> Supposedly, Carr continues to run Trump's agenda,
Trump's most clever political tactic is to be a hypocrite and exceptionally effective liar: his agenda is always a superposition of contradictory claims. Even the GOP couldn't keep up and decided to forgo any semblance of a political platform for 2020 [1].
Despite the lies, there's a few consistent policy themes that emerged from his presidency. Notably, is a broad, across-the-board, blanket opposition to everything China. This includes decidedly not Chinese things, such as racism and condoning violence against Asian Americans [2] It also extends to economic opposition at all costs.
*Here* is the central truth behind Carr's statement. It's a continuation of the Republican party's current strong anti-Chinese policy.
> He's saying a Chinese company shouldn't be playing the same game that American companies do.
In America, yes (just like Facebook is banned in China). Will you next complain that Carr is okay with American troops marching in Washington, but doesn't like it if Chinese troops do the same?
While Facebook and surveillance in general are anything but a boon for common Americans, it's understandable that those pulling the strings would get worried when a foreign country moves in on their turf.
> it's understandable that those pulling the strings would get worried when a foreign country moves in on their turf
So you and I are in an agreement then!
His motivation is only that the collection is done by a Chinese company. Not that data collection is bad, but rather that he wants the US government to have the authority to access the data via a National Security Letter or through the opaque, secretive FISA court system. [1]
Perhaps not fully. I meant my analogy with troops - though it is not to American's benefit, they should be even more worried when a foreign power is spying on them.
I think the appropriate action is to force them to fix their privacy policies if there's something incorrect there, and to be clear about what data is collected.
After that anyone should be free to know what data is collected and decide to use or delete the app. I mean, if someone wants to use the service, just let them use, it's their personal choice.
It is a mistake for people in the EU and US to think of Chinese-based data collection companies as the same as EU- and US-based companies.
TikTok in the US is not the same as Google in France, and even they were recently fined for signifcant privacy concerns.
It is important to protect citizens. People often don't have enough information about sharing their data to make the best privacy decisions without legislation to protect them.
Well, education is the key then. Instead of banning people from using it, they should educate the public about potential followups of sharing on/using TikTok.
Banning use is never an answer. If I want to share my data, it should be my choice, not the government's.
I just don't see the issue. This isn't how US companies want to be treated, even when the US govt is acting badly. TikTok doesn't appear to be uniquely different.
I also struggle to view China as an adversary. US and China are each other's number one trading partners. We are allies. Why not try to build on that productive relationship?
100% for it - but afraid of the political ramifications. It will be spun as 'cancel culture' and potentially piss off young voters we especially need to turn out.
I liked the previous idea of a transfer of ownership which would grant actual legal protections and oversight.
1) There are lots of American soldiers, the majority of these are young people. TikTok could have a real effect on American opsec, in these times.
That, of course, also goes for other apps - and should / is probably regulated by the military itself. But it is more worrisome when the app used is owned not only by a foreign company, but a foreign company that's friendly with your current enemy.
2) Influence. In the case of any big conflict, the propaganda machine will run at full steam - this means controlling opinions. China has rightly observed that TikTok is influencing on steroids, and at a much higher velocity.
When you're very young, and living the dream life by being TikTok famous - getting that rug pulled from under your feet can make you do irrational and desperate things. Such as promoting whatever agenda the owners tell you to.
They may not tell this explicitly, but by what content will be shadow banned, and what will be promoted heavily.
> What data is tiktok collecting that google isnt? Is there a fairly applied rule here, or is sinophobia driving this?
While I agree that sinophobia plays into discourse around TikTok, TikTok has an established pattern of collecting data against the user's wishes (even bypassing system permissions), and of collecting and storing data about minors in direct violation of the law[0].
They are not an unknown entity; they are an established bad actor when it comes to Dara collection and storage.
The only concrete claim in that article that I see is insufficient age verification. How does youtube age verify users who are under 13 and trying to create an account? Does google search/ad tracking have a mechanism to avoid tracking < 13yos?
I suspect they just say "its against terms" but allow it to happen, because to verify children they'd need to collect information on them...
> Is there a fairly applied rule here, or is sinophobia driving this?
Don't hide behind sinophobia to defend China's communism. This has nothing to do with ethnicity.
China is using its laws to effectively ban competition from foreign companies which don't want to cooperate with its totalitarian form of government. The US should do the same and not allow competition from totalitarian countries.
restricting the free flow of information between citizens of countries whose corrupt leaders are engaged in a dick measuring contest only benefits the corrupt leaders.
advocating that we need to impose blinders on ourselves as well to punish them is just short sighted self-punishment
How so? Western platfroms bailed PRC after they were unwilling to handle PRC legal requirements that every PRC company has to deal with. Reasonable requirements like media filtering that western companies were eventually forced to adopt a few years later because it's obvious PRC was precient that attention driven platforms caused violence/destability if left unchecked.
Ergo both FB and Google had internal initiatives to re-enter PRC market after domestic pressures to improve moderation capabilities enabled them to comply with PRC laws. Until internal FB/Google drama killed the effort. It has very little to do with "totalitarianism" because FAANG + co. was eager to compete in PRC market, until they realized they couldn't, or their employees wouldn't let them. Meanwhile Bytedance/TikTok keeps operating in US because they don't mind working around bullshit like Trump's EO. At the end of the day, it's US corporate incompentence and broader political culture that thinks US companies should operate in other markets with impunity that flunked them out of PRC market while dealing with regulatory push back else where.
If US wants to pull national security card to keep down PRC platforms, they have a right to. But don't pretend it's about competition. Bytedance/TikTok flourished in the west for the same reason FB/Google/Twitter failed in PRC - Chinese platforms know how to put up with regulatory/political bullshit and become more competitive because of it. Like TikTok isn't huge in US because domestic US laws is keeping FB down. It's huge because the kind of content that survives Chinese censorship designed to mitigiate political divisness is the kind of opiate that most people would rather consume.
This could end up being an interesting case study for the "that app is so simple, I could build it in a weekend" crowd.
People ask why Elon Musk is willing to pay so much for Twitter when the software could be replicated at much less expense - the software isn't the point, the network effect is. It doesn't matter how good your Twitter clone is, if no one is using it, then no one will use it.
If TikTok is banned (or can't grow in the US due to being removed from app stores), there's actually an opening for a clone. I wonder what sort of TikTok clone would succeed - one backed by existing social media companies? One that's just like TikTok, or one that introduces some killer new feature?
This is dumb. Don't "remove it from app stores" these are companies doing business is the US and Canada - pass privacy laws that protect people, and then fine the living crap out of them until they comply.
The true reason is that tiktok has triumphed US companies and now US government is getting involved to handle this capitalist debacle. US is doing anything in it's power, even involving government now to somehow overthrow Tiktok's dominance.
Same as what happened in Mexico with united fruits company.
I've used TikTok for the past year, it's really not as smart or brilliant as all the hypemasters would have you think.
The data it gathers (outside of location, facial recognition, and speech capture) has been really off target for being matched to content. The algorithms across most of these sites are really not useful in building a valid service from what I can gather... Most of the people that use social apps wear out quickly once they realize the level of free work they are doing, and how it goes unrewarded.
I personally can do without it, because youtube and other things still exist to host the same exact type of video content, but the entire social app landscape is frought with platforms that are too big to really reward creators with any real growth, and it's overrun with deceptive advertising. I know I sound like I'm jaded, but I've learned some valuable skills in film and editing, so I'm really not.
Apps that will win from this point forward will realize that they need to be more niche based, while also integrating into a larger eco system that allows for content to be shared across the Internet, the way the Internet was meant to work... The common tactics of limiting content reach and squeezing creators for ad money are short lived, most of these apps have a huge amount of inactive and outright abandoned user accounts...
TikTok is in essence just another video "doom scroller" app, that allows pretty much useless likes follows and shares, it's really put a bunch of suggestive psychology on top of that, but in essence it's the same thing other platforms have been doing just with vertical video and a different UI. It's not replaceable, especially when it takes it's user base for granted and works hard to gather data on users and to manipulate the majority into doing lots of work for them for free (with a really weak creator fund). We can live without it.
If there are a hand full of people on the platform that have millions of followers on the same platforms where most of the user base has only hundreds of followers, it's pretty telling that it's a free work exploitation scheme, and it's really the first indication that it's really not going to survive the long haul.
As far as the data gathering debacle goes, there is also nothing different happening with many other major social app platforms we all use, instead though, our data is being collected and used against us by private companies across the world instead of by foreign governments. Removing one app won't solve the problem of personal privacy violation. We each need to be a lot more careful about the level of information we share online, and we need to stop being so eager to work online for these greedy and abusive operations for free or it's our own damn fault.
>TikTok is in essence just another video "doom scroller" app, that allows pretty much useless likes follows and shares
Absolutely this. When I finally bit the bullet and downloaded TikTok, I was on it for maybe half a day before I gave up because content discoverability on the app is absolute garbage.
One of the reasons I've stuck around on Twitter so long is that their search features are incredibly useful compared to most modern social media sites. They allow users to get a much broader picture of what's actually happening as opposed to feeling like you're just silo'ed in your own little bubble. I think that has further effects on the ways that community is created and content is gamed. I've noticed the same thing happened on Instagram as it grew more popular. The explore feed is full of content that is obviously designed to play the algorithm rather than being actually useful to users.
Agreed, I did notice though that Twitter can adjust, and even skew search results and even trending topics any time they want to reflect any ideal they want.
We think of algorithms just being tailored towards our needs, but algorithms now are also tailored towards generating company profit, to limiting negative topics, towards censorship, and towards many other things that protect platforms first...
When bitcoin crashed for example, on Twitter there weren't a lot of people prominently screaming and cursing trending online, even though many lost their shirts, and were upset ant irate over the crash... They WERE cursing and screaming at a brick wall on Twitter though, the algorithms and moderation surgically muted and ratio'ed many of those users in order to "temper and quell" public outrage from developing against the crypto world, which Twitter is invested heavily into (rather coincidentally)....
This is the kind of modern world we live in now... We had a few years where apps were truly "social" but now, most things are carefully monitored and curated by the time we see them. This is also why you often don't directly (and consistently) see content posted from the people you follow now, on a consistently ordered time line, as well.
The headline is inaccurate. This is not an official action of the FCC. NYT phrased it more honestly: "An F.C.C. commissioner pushed Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/technology/apple-google-t...
Agreed. The CBC story actually gets it right too: "A commissioner with the U.S. communications regulator is asking Apple and Google to consider banning TikTok from their app stores over data security concerns related to the Chinese-owned company."
But the headline misleadingly refers to Commissioner Carr as "U.S. communications regulator." One would normally think that this referred to the FCC (THE U.S. communications regulator), not just one of its commissioners.
Trump did apparently want to withdraw the US from NATO entirely so what does right mean?
That German buying of Russian gas is a problem, of course, but what is Stoltenberg supposed to do about that.
Also German gas imports are something like 30% Russian which in turn makes up I think 13% of power generation, since the information trump states is vague.
And Apple? More like China invoking a variety of "white peril" in 2016.
I have yet to see a single China defender on Hacker News explain the treatment of the iBooks and iTunes stores in China after they were suddenly ordered shut after six months of operation, given no legal recourse at all. The Obama administration did nothing about it while Silicon Valley grandees kept conspicuously silent as well as all my Chinese friends here in the US. The were afraid of Xi Jinping and the Gonganju and still are.
I spend way too much time on TikTok, and have noticed that the Chinese propaganda is about 2-5% of my feed. It should be removed for that reason alone.
1. Google benefits from Android, but ios is apple. Google has other games.
2. Google doesn't make most androids. China would have to ban any company from making hardware designed to run android, not just ban Google from operating in the country, which would affect a bunch of non-google (even non-us) companies at least as much as it would affect Google itself.
That's a two way street. It's not that China has Apple over a barrel. There is a MAD aspect to the relationship. Apple is definitely trying to get out of China as a manufacturing dependency. They'd rather not be banned from the market, but they are preparing for that. Let's rip the band-aid off, I say.
Other android phones are also other companies, wouldn't exactly call that deep connection, but a connection nonetheless. Re pixel, that's a pretty small business relatively speaking.
If anything Google probably has more to gain as TikTok is eating an increasing part of the ads & entertainment pie, a business which is much more crucial to Google as of now.
TikTok collects data for an adversary at scale. Many complain that the US does the same but that doesn't change the fact that I live in the US. The Chinese government is an adversary of the West whether we like it or not.
With that said- It's pretty telling that the FCC only needs to go to Apple and Google. It would be really nice to have some antitrust regulation so that the FCC doesn't have this power.