Why not regulate how the data is used or stored, like the EU does, but ban?
I'm really hoping this doesn't become a reality because if it does, we will end up with partitioned internet and stagnation.
People often forget that the US companies are foreign entity for most of the worlds population and with the WikiLeaks revelations we know for a fact that the US government has access to the data of American tech companies.
Because China is not a good example to follow. It is a dystopian state with full control of what their citizens have access to. Why would you want to have your government to choose the apps for you?
I'm fine with banning all apps from countries that require their app-makers to share data with the government. If that requires an international treaty to codify when a company must share data (e.g. only with a criminal warrant), then great, let's do that.
China would refuse to sign that treaty? Even better.
You do realize that this would effectively ban American apps outside of the US? I live in a country that is quite cozy with the US, yet our governments usually have to reject American software since there is no protection for our citizens. Now imagine that applied to the population as a whole.
The US government obviously won't ban apps for cooperating with the US government, that doesn't make sense.
But other governments should ban such apps. The CLOUD Act drafts all American tech companies into the US intelligence gathering apparatus; all American companies providing services to foreigners are legally compelled to be spies. EU laws that require EU data to be stored in the EU? Nullified! The CLOUD Act undercuts any foreign data residency laws by requiring US companies to hand over even that data which is stored in other countries. All US tech companies are required by law to participate in espionage. The EU should respond by banning all American apps in the EU (but won't, for obvious realpolitik reasons.)
Agreed, the USGOV needs to expand this and just like with tariffs respond symmetrically to China's hostile laws against american companies there. Any restrictions they place on american companies should translate to similar restrictions against their companies in the US (actually more restrictions since their companies are CCP controlled to the most part).
Certainly Europe would be better off if they took this approach and banned all American apps. American techies have no respect for European privacy laws and will never faithfully follow the spirit of such laws, or even the letter.
I think the longer they wait, the worse it will hurt.
They're caught in a bramble bush and getting themselves unstuck is going to get them scratched up. But the longer they put off freeing themselves, the more the bramble grows around them. They should have done it years ago. They should do it now, before the "Trusted Computing" trap slams shut forever.
Being in the US, I don't think that would affect me too much, except for, of course, TikTok, which I don't have anyway.
Finally, this hypothetical would say "a recipient country may ban the app." It wouldn't say "shall ban the app." So your country can just decide to keep using whatever they like.
if you believe China is a dystopian state why would a Chinese tech product that isn't even allowed in it's international form within China not itself "dystopian"
imo the most dystopian thing about TikTok is the fact that China intentionally exports a highly addictive product that they don't allow their own people to use
TikTok does exist in China. It is called Douyin. The reason that they have a separate service domestically is most likely not the addictiveness of it. From the introduction section of Wikipedia's article on TikTok:
TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available.[11] The two products are similar, but their features are not identical. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them and other features such as buying, booking hotels and making geo-tagged reviews.[12]
This is not true. The recent 60 minutes story specifically says the type of content is completely different because it is heavily moderated in China which is the total opposite of what we see in the US or elsewhere outside of China.
I'm consistently surprised that many people in the tech community treat China as some unknowable country that we only get a few snippets of insight in from our media.
If you work in tech, you most certainly have a few Chinese citizens as coworkers and colleagues. Talk to them about what life is like if you're curious, don't rely on "60 minutes".
TikTok in China may be moderated but only to keep anything controversial from the government perspective off. I've seen this myth floating that somehow tiktok in China is much more wholesome, which is ridiculous. As far as the ill effects of social media, TikTok is arguably worse in China as it's almost entirely people trying to sell things and make a quick buck, flooded with get rich quick schemes and scams.
All of the things mentioned in that 60 minutes video can be found in the US version of TikTok, there is plenty of educational content. The idea that everyone in China is watching scientific experiments on tiktok while its corrupting American youth is ridiculous.
You're saying China doesn't have a time limit on daily use for children? Or the content that is available to kids vs adults isn't different?
There might be some half truths to the 60 minute story but AFAIK the time limit is real and the content available to children is different which is what the piece is referring to. It might be more similar for adults.
Do you know if it is possible to access Douyin outside of China?
I think it would be an interesting experience to see it first-hand and also I guess the language barrier would no be a huge issue if the content is similar to TikTok.
Do you have tiktok? You can clearly tell that it promotes inflammatory content if you use it for a few days/weeks. This is legislation against the CCP, not against the people of China.
China isn't some monolithic automaton. It's a complex society with multi-faceted incongruities and contradictory rationalizations for conflicting piecemeal systems Just Like Every Other Society that has ever existed.
Maybe I'm misreading things ... let me try again based on your initial comment:
> if you believe China is a dystopian state why would a Chinese tech product that isn't even allowed in it's international form within China not itself "dystopian"
^^ The classification here as "chinese" tech product is the first issue
> imo the most dystopian thing about TikTok is the fact that China intentionally exports a highly addictive product that they don't allow their own people to use
^^ second issue is "china intentionally exports"
At least I read this as if there's an assumption there's some centralized bureau of dictats speaking with one voice in orchestrating policy as opposed to an $18 trillion economy with 1.4 billion people consisting of 43 million companies and a parliamentary system with 3155 members representing 10 political parties including 480 independents.
Everything is actually a confusing complicated hot mess and I reject such attributions and framings.
That's not to say there aren't policies, of course there are. It's more to say that if you are not only describing but also attributing intentionality and goals to an international policy in a way that takes under say, 10 words, I'm going to be suspicious of the accuracy.
TikTok's main power is creating associations. For example, CCP may dislike some US politician because he is a trouble for Huawei, so TikTok starts subtly pushing videos that associate that politician with bad stuff. In a few weeks 150 millions US citizens have a strong negative reaction to that politician. TikTok may do the same for targeted high-profile individuals, e.g. family members of congressmen or high rank CIA officers. That is an immense power.
Have any direct, verifiable, falsifiable and testable evidence with clear a audit trail?
I'd love to see it
Sorry for the high bar. Remarkable stories of secret vast networks of communist mind control have a long history. I claim aggressive skepticism of supposed international plots by a cabal of communist puppetmasters is warranted.
I mean Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, real spies. Not saying this stuff is impossible, there's just a lot of noise here.
Hell there's the long forgotten 1980s espionage by the Japanese stealing stuff from IBM https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/02/09/Hitachi-pleads-guilt... stuff does happen... Espionage in the Silicon Valley, a book published in 1984, is a pretty good summary of them if you're really interested. You'll have to toss about $20 on the used market to get a copy though. (I should send mine to internet archive)
Proof of having a capability and proof of using said capability is not the same thing. Your line of reasoning is no different from people who bitch about security patches costing performance when there is no evidence of exploits in the wild.
Why ban TikTok by name and not by legislating away the specific bad things it does? I don't see anything in this legislation that would affect Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, both of which are using their own engagement-focused algorithm for recommending content. If being addicting is the reason we don't like TikTok, then why are we OK with it when a domestic company does it?
Because Facebook lobbyists don't want that, they just want to eliminate the competition.
We don't need to regulate TikTok, we need to regulate Social Media as a whole.
> [prohibits] all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern.
(After a quick read of the bill, it sounds like it may also ban VK. Although, it is already sanctioned.)
Check page 4. This legislation provides a list of companies which are social media companies. TikTok, Bytedance and any company that may be owned by either of those are the companies listed.
What other social media companies from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela might they have explicitly listed as a social media company? There are probably some.. maybe Yandex has some social media? WeChat? Regardless, only TikTok/Bytedance are explicitly named as examples. Obviously they have it in for TikTok specifically.
On page 7-8 they explain how "social media company" is defined. It's common for laws to have some examples along with the general rule. It doesn't mean it only applies to TikTok.
> Because the biggest concern is still Chinese ownership of US customer data.
This legislation doesn't ban all Chinese government controlled apps that users might share their data with, only those that are social media specifically. If users cannot view content generated by other users, then it isn't social media and isn't banned by this bill. If the app doesn't sell digital advertising space, then it isn't social media (according to this bill) and isn't banned.
A Chinese government "backup app" that lets you upload all your documents to a server in China would presumably not be banned by this bill because it lacks those social media features. Maybe it would be banned by another law, but not this one. Or consider a Chinese "keyboard app", that logs everything you type. That's not social media, so this bill doesn't ban it.
That this is not the real motivation of the bill: "the biggest concern is still Chinese ownership of US customer data."
The bill doesn't address Chinese ownership of US customer data. The bill is specifically about social media, and doesn't apply generally to other Chinese companies that also suck up US customer data.
It would be a tough sell. Think of the children works so much better.
Yet you admitted, another kind of services would "presumably not be banned by this bill because it lacks those social media features. Maybe it would be banned by another law, ..." which is in agreement with comments saying that this bill is targeted at Tik Tok.
The irony is that the pedagogic aspect is secondary if those comments are right, but because data which documents how much the people are lacking impulse control is at ridiculous levels, if I am projecting myself for a second. The why you don't face book and study meme applies.
Basically, I don't think these US legislators are (as of yet) serious about combating the privacy and national security concerns centered around foreign apps. They're mad about TikTok specifically, probably because their own children have been watching/producing cringe on TikTok specifically.
On the surface it's about the kids. But congress is a social network with thought leaders and lobbyists, too. They ought to know the power those even bigger networks can have.
Ok...so the solution is to allow China to own the data and not more closely regulate how data is stored and used at any social media company that stores US customer data?
> imo the most dystopian thing about TikTok is the fact that China intentionally exports a highly addictive product that they don't allow their own people to use
This comment made me think that TikTok (and Facebook before it) are somewhat like an attempt at hacker attack on the simulation we live in, where the analogue to the "simulation" is the system where freedom of speech is an absolute law, but the system is running on susceptible components: people, and is therefore vulnerable.
When you make up 25% of the global population - it's pretty hard for companies to compete when 25% of the global market is locked out.
The idea that we can allow China to ban all non-Chinese companies and then let Chinese companies "freely compete" with other global companies is insane, and I'm not sure why it's been going on for 30 years.
I guess because China was starting from so far behind that it took 20+ years for any Chinese companies to get to a point they are literal threats to western companies.
If we follow down this path of allowing China to gate access to 25% of the world and having our companies compete with theirs - there will mostly only be Chinese companies left...
because digital assets have a fundamental difference with material ones.
I'm referring to how digital assets can be owned non-exclusively, i.e. we can both have the same data.
In contrast material (or physical) assets are exclusive. Either I have it xOR you do, we cannot both own the same thing.
Stocks (and other sophisticated goods) are interesting because they mean we each own a fraction of something, even when that object cannot actually be easily split. But notice how there's still a sense of exclusivity; the same stock cannot be owned by multiple people at the same time.
clearly I need to learn more about stock ownership; but that would require the opportunity to own stock. And I'm from a secondary/lower socioeconomic-tier from a 3rd tier (third world country). So those opportunities aren't readily available to me.
regardless,
the restrictions on trade of physical goods exists due to matters of ownership over government-level permissions (licenses?) for import/export, taxation, an other such kinds of things. It's ownership over whole countries; that's the ownership at play when considering digital trade restrictions.
trade restrictions exist for many other reasons than 'ownership': political reciprocity, agricultural security, product health and safety, national security, etc. When these types of products come through customs, it doesn't matter who owns them, they're prohibited because of the inherent qualities of the items themselves.
This isn't following china but responding symmetrically to a hostile economic action. The government regulates commerce so just like they can ban Google from operating they can ban bytedance. If the apps you use only affected you, I wouldn't care bur China is using this information as a strategic intelligence source to influence and harm american economic and political entities.
What does that even mean? You think tiktok will lead to Chinese invasion? What a complete hyperbole, might as well restrict every civil liberty then since they will obviously all help our future Chinese invaders! Maybe I didn't understand your comment though.
GP asked what shade of gray goes with US gov running appstore. I responded with a fascist imagery - gray uniforms and black boots. [Those would be certain Americans wearing boots ..]
I agree with GP that taking a totalitarian regime (CPC's China) as a role model is not the right choice for us, at all.
Keeping our markets open is the American way and it's how the US became the preeminent trading nation and the cornerstone and chief architect of the global economic system. The US always pushes hard for other nations to open their markets as well (for better or worse), but it also leads by example.
Income and wealth inequality, but some studies have shown that consumption inequality hasn't changed much, and that the trend is the opposite when you look at leisure time inequality.
Probably >50% of consumer purchases are imported so it's hard to argue it doesn't benefit them. Imagine suddenly not having access to 50% of the things you buy (or at least having to pay substantially more).
I don't think that is a totally different take. I don't buy the narrative that there was some conspiracy, I just think that business and political leaders in Western nations truly thought what they were doing was right, both for themselves and for developing nations. No conspiracy necessary when self-interest and arrogance explain it sufficiently. Haven't read the book though, so I don't know how conspiratorial their take actually is.
The nations that best bucked the trend were the Eastern Asian nations that engaged in protectionist policies despite the desires of the West. Much like China continues to do today.
It’s a bad argument when China has blocked most foreign companies from entering its domestic market. Why can’t we block their companies from operating in our market?
mrtksn/OP [1] is arguing that you shouldn't just do a tit-for-tat ban on China.
You should figure out what part of what the Chinese apps are doing that you don't like and ban that behavior. Otherwise this year its Tik-Tok from China and next year it's Click-Clock from UAE. Instead ban a behavior and you don't have to play whack-a-mole with countries/apps.
Ultimately US tech firms didn't make effort to follow PRC regulations while PRC tech firms tries to follow US regulations. If goal is to kick PRC platforms out of US i.e. when current rules doesn't generate desired outcome, change the rules to at least uphold the pretense that US cares about "rules based order". It's an optics issue. If US wants to ban tiktok, better to proceed via a less authoritarian lawfare route, because unilateral sanctions (which even PRC hasn't done on US platforms) are more likely to invite blowback down the line when other countries want to curtail US platforms in the future. But short term it's the optics, US going HAM on sanctions/export controls, especially ones that affect rest of world - which I'm guessing longterm goal is to get TikTok off Android/iOS - makes US behaviour much worse than PRC in terms of extraterritorial shenanigans.
China banning US social media is bad for Chinese citizens. US banning any social media is bad for US citizens. TBH, I'm more worried about the rights of US citizens.
Is that really true? I am pretty sure that as long as the data is in China and your tech doesn't connect to other countries you are free to use US tech to do business in China. I think this is how Google and Uber did it when they operated in China, they used the same code but had different infra.
Which is why this seems quite strange to me because TikTok China content doesn't show up on the western TikTok because they are completely separate.
Because it would distort the market for digital identity information even more? When it comes to commodifying online behavior and selling it in digital marketplaces we need less market interference, not more.
> Zuckerberg even married an ethnic Chinese woman in order to get a leg up on accessing the Chinese market.
Do you have a credible citation for this, or are you making an assumption that there would be no more compelling reasons for Zuck to marry someone who's ethnically Chinese? (Asking for my ethnically 3/4 Chinese wife, my cousin's ethnically Chinese husband, and plenty of other European/Chinese mixed ancestry marriages in my social circle.)
I think that claim is probably not true; they met in college many years before business in China was realistically on Zuckerberg's radar. However it is certainly true that Zuckerberg has sucked up to the CCP, going so far ask to ask Xi Jinping to name his unborn child. Nauseating servility on a personal level.
In addition, ethnicity wouldn't gain him any measurable leverage. His wife or his in-laws would need to be senior party members in order for a political marriage to have any advantage.
As a gweilo who lived 10 years in Hong Kong, roughly half the time single and half the time married, my perception is that speaking Canto/Mandarin is a much better leg up than marrying someone who looks local.
(Funny, though, conversations with strangers would generally start with Canto being spoken to my wife, who would give a blank look and point to me, and I'd reply in Mandarin, followed by the stranger speaking Mandarin at my wife while I replied in Mandarin and occasionally dropped English bread crumbs for my wife. So many people just found it too awkward to speak Mandarin with a gweilo and preferred to speak Mandarin at my obviously-non-comprehending wife. That being said, I have a deep affection for Hong Kong and its residents, and it's pretty easy to get around just speaking English.)
Tit-for-tat with an authoritarian regime is a bad idea on several dimensions.
A far better reason is that a nasty authoritarian regime is using Tiktok to gather intelligence in anticipation of doing nastier things. Just one example: one of the obvious things to do with Tiktok data would be to correlate it with the OPM hack[1]. Who knows what kind of insights into people's character you might find? I'm sure a trained handler who actually understands their capabilities can come up with far more interesting uses than that.
And note that in that context, stopping US citizens from foreign exploitation is a legitimate role for government.
SV failed to build social media products that appeal to Gen-Z so this is the "plan B". The only reason why TikTok is getting banned is because its popular. And the only reason why its popular is because US-based entrepreneurs seem to struggle building products that connect with users under the age of 30.
The irony is there was a product, Vine, that filled this niche but it was ultimately killed by Facebook (who promoted Tiktok because they didn't want Vine making inroads with their users) and Twitter (by not developing it further).
> Vine [...] filled this niche but it was ultimately killed by Facebook (who promoted Tiktok because they didn't want Vine making inroads with their users) and Twitter (by not developing it further).
Agreed on the twitter part, but the FB part feels like a pure conspiracy at best, and is just factually provable to be false. For one, Vine was killed off in September 2017, which is the same month that TikTok became available internationally.
No, that wasn't the case. Tiktok already existed as Douyin within China. Musical.ly was an entirely separate company and product. Douyin went truly international as TikTok after acquiring musical.ly.
To add, the acquisition happened in november 2017[0], which is after Vine had already been killed off. Vine had 200mil users as of 2015, while it took musical.ly until May 2017 to get there. Which is also, months after Vine had already been dead, and over half a year after Vine had announced the upcoming shutdown (those numbers and dates are all from the wikipedia pages of the companies mentioned).
TikTok is an international version of Douyin, which was released in the Chinese market in September 2016.[10] It launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018.
From the links above Vine was already dying if not completely dead before TikTok was ascendent.
That's what I'm saying, the article lacks information. Before being Doyin, TikTok was Musical.ly, which came out in 2014. Bytedance acquired Musical.ly, made TikTok from it, but only merged the two later on.
China doesn't ban US tech that obeys the CCP's surveillance laws, like Apple does. This targeting of tiktok is pretty specific by US government, because it singles out a company rather than act as a law.
If China is able to ban all western social media because of “law” then per definition any law that stops Chinese social media is also “legit” if we go by the argument that it is okay to ban things if the law says to ban them.
This has nothing to do with user data. People are influenced by the content they see on social media. Allowing a foreign adversary to run the main information network for an entire generation of the population is not a wise move.
I don't think you realize how widespread Tiktok usage is. I can reliably predict what Tiktok users will talk about in social events just by a few minutes of browsing that week's top.
What line has TikTok crossed, specifically? Is it just the content? Global reach? Data governance? User count?
I too can predict conversation topics based on what's trending in Twitter. But Twitter is now owned (in part) by investors representing foreign interests, including KSA [1]. Recent editorial changes at Twitter have amplified "unamerican" rhetoric [2]. Does Twitter cross the same lines as TikTok?
Any "solution" that bans TikTok would leave behind a far-reaching precedent, one that is completely ineffective at dealing with the core problem. Trying to stand up a virtual iron curtain won't sit well with an american userbase that's accustomed to choosing the content they want.
Also, if there's one thing you can do to make young people more captivated and curious about something - make it forbidden.
TikTok has 138 million MAU (in the U.S.) and the average TikTok user spend 95 minutes per day in the app. I'm unaware of a podcast that has that type of reach.
HN posters are in love with the "people are too stupid to think for themselves and need me to protect them" narrative. Nowhere else do I see that line of thought as frequently as I see it here. Not even Reddit pushes that justification for controlling the ability of others to access whatever media sources they want as much as it is pushed here. We truly must be the intellectual giants of humanity to know so consistently what is best for everyone else.
Let's say that the nation of Lalaland is has a state-owned company whose product is a social network that's popular among Americans. Lalaland decides that one particular candidate in the next US election is beneficial to their country's trade/security/etc. The social network strategically shows "go out and vote" content to the demographics most likely to vote for the candidate they would like in office.
Is this ok? Were any of those people on the social network "stupid" if they were more likely to vote after seeing targeted content?
I agree with the overall sentiment. If it's a country in the EU it's valid. In China though, no one has any control or say on systems and controls. You cannot enforce anything there. Even if you force all servers catering to US citizen must be in the US, how do you even enforce that the data is not going to the CCP machinery? When there is a system (CCP) that the government feels is a threat, how do you convince them that the proper controls are in place? That is not a winning battle. It will just be an exercise in covering over the topic.
Did you read the article? ByteDance's headquarters is in Beijing and these leaked audio tapes are talking about engineers in the headquarters logging into U.S. servers.
This isn't some smoking gun about CCP surveillance, but more about how the sausage is made for a global app.
It is hard to imagine this ever passing given how popular TikTok is in the US. Certainly strong privacy regulations are more popular among the people than banning apps.
The vast majority of users are in the <25 demographic, which means they basically don't vote. Also only a minority of Americans even use TikTok. It could easily be more popular to ban it (I have no data though).
> Why not regulate how the data is used or stored, like the EU does, but ban?
That is also a good idea and the US can do that too. In the past, Facebook got a multi-billion dollar fine from the FTC for violating user privacy. The exact same should happen and apply to all social networks worth over $1BN and repeat violations should be in the billions of dollars; not in the millions that the EU is doing.
If that is enough for them to stop these privacy violating operations or even better, to make them leave like what the EU is doing, rather that than companies worse than Facebook to continue their repeated invasive privacy violations just like TikTok.
Totalitarian governance introduced in the name of national security. It's pretty wild how fast Americans move to shred the constitution if scared by a boogyman, real or otherwise.
Internet is already partitioned, especially when it come to China (Great firewall). You say to do like EU but it made things worse; For example, this is what i get when i try to browse yahoo.co.jp:
Not serving a country because you can’t be bothered to comply with their data laws is completely different from banning your people from accessing foreign media products simply because they are foreign of the wrong kind.
China heavily subsidizes industry. The reason they can't compete on EVs is just because they don't make anything that would be viable on the US market. They make a HUGE number of EVs, but they're primarily for the domestic market. Almost half of the EVs in the world are in China.
Partitioned Internet is a foregone conclusion. There was no way that sovereign states were ever going to permanently allow the uninhibited cross-border exchange that characterized the early Internet before anyone was paying attention. It was just a question of when they caught up.
Language like this exaggerates individual-user harms of TikTok by comparison to lethal street drug, conflating them with public, national-interest harms.
This is disingenous, as reported by common-sense. For example, my city does not have sidewalks lined with tents full of TikTok users, but the same cannot be said of the comparand.
This has either or both of the following knock-on effects:
- Undermine trust in the speaker for people who feel the 'seam' in the analogy. American institutions are really good at undermining themselves in this way. Remember DARE? It took me years to trust any authority again after hearing their nonsense about cannabis, back in the nineties. They used to call it things like "herbal heroin", etc.
- Promote stigmatization of TikTok users, and social-media users more generally. It's like taking the Smudge Tool in photoshop and moving some of the stigma from fentanyl to TikTok. This will have the unintended effect of further isolating people who depend on social media because they are disabled and/or shut-in; socially isolated; physically isolated; LGBTQ; autistic; etc. You aren't accessing community now, you're ~high on fentanyl~. Like.
American politicians love lines like this because they feel good in the short term but contribute to the ruin of polity in the longer run. Which is why these quips are the proper analog of fentanyl.
It could certainly be true that a modest harm to 80 million people is comparable to a serious harm to a smaller number. Of course fentanyl is pretty clearly a more serious issue but I think it's plausible they are in the same ballpark.
We already had a partitioned internet for years now
Imo this legislation makes sense because our companies are more or less banned from entering China’s domestic market. Why should we allow their tech companies in when they’ve banned ours
The US is known for involvement in the policies of other nations and even organising coups etc. With documented access of the American government into the American tech giants, I don't have reason to believe that Instagram is any different than TikTok. What makes you think that CIA didn't infiltrate Meta or made a deal to manipulate political situation in its friends and foes? What makes you believe that they won't work with Musk to achieve their goals?
The TikTok situation is new for the USA but it's nothing new for the rest of the world.
Yes, and the CCP has banned Instagram and Facebook because they understand that those are ultimately tools for subtly shaping mass opinion, regardless of whether it's clear that they're used for that purpose. Why would the US not do the same with TikTok?
Millions (?) of Americans have freely chosen to receive and interact with the app, wouldn't their freedom of speech allow them to enjoy the content they choose?
Freedom of speech doesn't mean consuming content. Indeed there appears to be no such right in the constitution. The only protections would be for the publisher of the content, so I suppose Bytedance could challenge this law on free speech grounds.
Millions (?) of Americans have freely chosen to use cocaine, wouldn't their freedom of doing what they want with their bodies allow them to enjoy the drug they choose?
Who specifically is in charge of the algorithm at Twitter? Keep in mind the recent foreign interest financing and editorial changes. How are we certain they have our best American Interests™ at heart?
I'm not trying to play the whatabout card, I'm trying to understand how we would legally articulate what TikTok has done to justify banning by congressional decree. The senate bill [1] doesn't appear to have any measurements or values or clarifications, it's just a few paltry pages that never specify what line TikTok crossed. The only argument I'm hearing is China=Bad.
And who knows, maybe China is nefariously manipulating the TikTok algorithm, but for the US government to step in and say "these ideas are too dangerous, you can not access them," seems like the cure is as bad as the disease. It's using blatant authoritarianism to try to stop the spread of potential authoritarianism.
Facebook and Instagram were banned because they wouldn't obey China's censorship and surveillance laws, not because they were western tools of influence or whatever.
If other countries feel that way, they should probably ban Instagram.
In my opinion, the difference is that insta (Meta) controls US government more than the government controls insta. I don't believe that's the case with tik tok and the CCP.
With that logic the EU should ban Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/Twitter
Legislation how data is acquired/stored/used will solve every problems, banning the people you don't like only solve one specific problem and makes you look like a fool
The US built a monopoly on online social media and communications, this move is another evidence that it wants to remain the sole big eye
This is true! But also much worse; agents from the CCP appears to have infiltrated Google and META and have injected primitive versions of TikTok into both the YouTube app and the Instagram app. No one is safe and the communist conspiracy reaches the highest level!
"TikTok is digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans, collecting troves of their data, and censoring their news."
Is the conclusion that all forms of digital fentanyl should be banned or just Chinese ones? Because the reality is there's nothing too exceptional about TikTok's underlying algorithms. Will lawmakers be willing enact legislation against companies marketing similar "digital fentanyl" but that are American or European in origin?
Which is probably why we'll slowly see the slow Balkanization of the internet. South Americans will go to South American properties. North Americans will go to North American Properties. Europeans will go to European properties. I even expect the Africans to see this Balkanization as a way to solve some of their problems with, at once, unemployment and security.
Balkanization is one way to see it. Re-assertion of sovereignty is another. Without this 'balkanization', the EU lacks the practical ability to regulate their own internal affairs. Their data and privacy laws are little more than wishful thinking until they ban American apps (all American software companies are legally obligated by the US Government to flaunt those EU laws.)
TikTok also answers to the United States if it wants to continue operating here. If Congress passed a privacy bill, TikTok would have to comply like all other social media companies.
So "digital fentanyl" is acceptable as long as appropriate privacy legislation has been enacted? It's not an "addiction" problem but rather a "privacy problem"?
Any country with a track record that makes it prudent to keep a watchful eye on whatever it is they're up to, and to defend your population and strategic interests against it. The CCP is openly an opponent of liberal democracy both at home and abroad. You could take their word for it, or you can judge by their actions. Either way, you arrive at the same conclusion. You treat them the way they ask to be treated.
This is a trade dispute. The US no longer feels that China will ever open their domestic market to outside competition, so why should we keep our domestic market open to Chinese companies?
I think it's less about chinese, and more about foreign power.
if russia made tiktok, I think you'd see a similar response.
given what we know about how people's attention works on these apps, and how impressionable people turn out being, I can understand how putting that power in the hands of another state could be problematic.
That being said, it's also problematic for US-owned entities. They just get a by because capitalism, and because we're still figuring out what social media guard rails would even look like. Foreign ownership/control could be an obvious one.
I wish they'd do this via a slightly different criterion, which IMO would be more fair: ban foreign companies from operating in the US whenever American companies in the same field can't operate in the same way in the foreign company's home country (so TikTok would end up banned here since Twitter, etc. is banned there).
> would be more fair: ban foreign companies from operating in the US whenever American companies in the same field can't operate in the same way in the foreign company's home country
This blows up global trade. Different countries value different industries for different reasons. The French aren't going to sell wine like Americans, and Americans don't care enough about the difference to get into a fight over it.
The concrete laws that say things like "you must censor any posts that acknowledge the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened, or that the Uyghur genocide is currently happening" you mean?
I don't think ByteDance would be able to get themselves unbanned under my scheme without the CCP changing its laws, but it's hard to view that as a negative when ByteDance is basically an extension of the CCP.
"national security concerns" and "what about children" have always been used by government to pass useless bills.
Instead of banning Tiktok, how about enforcing proper rules and regulations that every social media should follow? Why not make a proper privacy that every people in US deserves.
Many people are probably glad that they are banning Chinese tech, but at the end it is gonna be superseded by Instagram which supply more data to three letter organization. The probability that three letter organization abusing our data is more than Chinese government.
I totally agree with your main point but it is very wrong to equivocate the three letter agencies to the threat authoritarian governments gaining knowledge and thus power over a nation pose.
Agree - in my opinion, the threat from three letter agencies (if one considers the entirety of the things they get up to) far exceeds the threat from China.
I believe TikTok is a MASSIVE threat to those running the show in the US, as it may be the most potent propaganda tool out there, and the US government has many juicy attack vectors that TikTok as a platform is perfect for attacking.
I tend to keep my feed pretty clean of stuff like that, but it does creep in every now and then, who knows how much anti-US propaganda is on the platform that I never encounter but others do (like the agencies who go looking for it, since "Public Relations" dominance is their job).
Because there's essentially no way to enforce the rules.
All user data is processed in China and de software is also Chinese-made. There's no way in hell you'll get access and you can regulate all you want but in the end they'll simply ignore you.
This has been a MOT (major ongoing topic) for a while (I don't mean Tiktok in general, just the regulation/bannage aspect). Below are the threads I was able to find.
Technical and security issues aside, I wonder how the users are going to take it.
My generation (1992) didn’t have a major cultural phenomenon being attacked in this way, though there was still the moral panic around things like social media and research chems.
The closest comparison I can draw is the crackdown on raves which affected western Gen X youth, but TikTok is more pervasive and more heterogeneous as a form of cultural expression.
Copycats? Underground tiktok? Gen Z influencers calling for action against the feds? Acceptance of the government’s position?
If you think that's bad, you should read up on how the record industry intentionally partitioned music by ethnicity back in the early 1900's. Ever wonder why radio stations break down by race in the US?
It didn't start out that way, but then there was a big moral panic over interracial marriage.
(Similarly, but unrelated to music, check out sentencing law disparities for expensive white collar fresh cocaine vs. cheaper inner-city preserved cocaine.)
I remember vine from my undergrad and cannot see how tiktok is different, yet… I know a bunch of tiktok users and vine went the way of the Harlem shake, side parted hair and tribal print on everything.
If TikTok was to actually get banned I could see IG Reels scooping up most of that userbase. Though they can replicate the functionality, replicating the algorithm is going to be difficult. One of the things that's made TikTok such a phenomenon is that their algorithm is crazy good at figuring out what you like and boosting small content creators.
They filter out everyone the CCP doesn't like. No sex, no politics, no provocative expression.
Just wholesome clips of happy citizens dancing and living joyful lives under the communist regime.
Such content isn't inherently bad of course, but if you're an adult and that's the only media you're consuming, it's a bit like eating fast food for every meal.
The "attack" is equivalent of trying to rescue opioid addicts from heroin. Or like you said, cracking down on raves (because we all know what really fuels and motivates those parties.
I hope more ethical companies take over the void. In fact, I see YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter in a position to fill the void since they've introduced "shorts" and some things similar to tik tok.
There are no ethical companies in the social media space - they're all trying to maximize engagement and manipulate you for economic gain. This is more like telling opioid addicts: "don't take that Chinese heroin, use our home-grown stuff instead".
I agree that there are no ethical social media companies (except maybe the "decentralized" ones like Mastodon perhaps).
By more ethical I mean companies that don't share data with a literal enemy, like the CCP.
I'm all about passing very strong laws and lawsuits against big tech for their continued abuse despite previous wrist slaps.
> more ethical companies... YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter
What do you use as the measurement for more ethical in this case? I see the companies you mentioned completely equivalent(all pretty bad) in terms of making choices that are best for our shared society.
I don’t understand the bi-partisan dislike of Tik Tok. As far as content goes, it’s pretty wholesome compared to what you see on movies and TV these days. It’s much better at giving kids age appropriate content than other sites. There is also a lot less commercialized stuff. Way better than cartoons that peddle toys and junk.
When I first signed up for TikTok it showed me stuff to figure out what I would like. It showed me some of the most racist humor I'd heard since I was a boy in the deep south. If I'd liked it, it would have shown me more and more and more of it. As it is, I don't see it now because the algo feeds me stuff I actually like.
I do think there's a content problem on TikTok, but I think it's hidden away from the people who would point it out due to the way the algo works.
I don't see the problem you're trying to allude to. Sounds like the algorithm worked as intended. TikTok quickly learned what you like and stopped showing you stuff you didn't.
Unless you're implying (not saying you are, just asking for clarification) that we should limit free speech based on words you (or some government official) find objectionable. Isn't that what China already does and what the US wants to avoid?
Should Andrew Shulz be banned because a lot of his jokes are racial? I'm guessing you'd be offended by a number of them, but I don't think that means Netflix/Youtube have a "content problem".
I'm sure some people can use TikTok responsibly but many can't. I also wouldn't want a foreign government (any foreign government) to have such a powerful psyop tool under their control. The extremely rapid feedback loops allow beliefs to coalesce so quickly that I imagine many people will get stuck in harmful local minima.
Some content may be wholesome, but the dopamine-stimulating AI algorithms that abuse human psychology are never wholesome. And we should never justify the dopamine abuse with "people have the power to choose" because that never worked out with cigs, opioids, crack, gambling, or any other addictive activity or substance.
I agree with this but I don't think the solution is banning by law. The solution for all of these substances you mention is education, prevention, and treatment. Just like with banning alcohol, people will get around it and find even less healthy ways to feed their addictions. I mean Instagram already stole tiktok's functionality, now they just need to tune their algorithms to match the same level of dopamine drip that tiktok supplies.
Trust me, I'm aware of how addictive tiktok is, I had to swear off it after finding myself multiple hours deep in scrolling holes multiple times. But banning one platform (over something unrelated, privacy/data concerns) will do nothing to stem social media addiction.
For me it started wholesome, it used to make me happy when I used Tik Tok. Comedy, music, interesting self development content. All of it from clever and innovative independent content creators. Then it slid into exclusively red pill and relationship content that pushes a deeply cynical and pessimistic view of relationships. It appeals to something in my brain the same way a car crash or train wreck does. I know it's a distortion and will poison all of my healthy relationships if I really let it sink in, yet I found myself not wanting to look away, so I uninstalled the app.
If Tik Tok stayed the way it was when I first got into it I'd say it's fine, but the content it pushes now makes me concerned it will poison our culture with apathy, pessimism and cynicism.
> I don’t understand the bi-partisan dislike of Tik Tok. As far as content goes, [...]
The quality of the content is the reason. It's excessively cringe.
If it were simply "because China" then this bill wouldn't be targeting social media specifically. But it does, and other Chinese apps aren't addressed. If it were because of foreign social media influence, this bill wouldn't be calling out TikTok solely and specifically, and would presumably also mention WeChat, etc. But it doesn't. It's about TikTok specifically, and I think the reason is a visceral disgust for the content on TikTok.
Exactly. They can use it to boost the opinions that they favor. The feedback loop of "I talked about opinion X and got tons of love" and "I talked about opinion Y and everyone got mad / ignored me" is very powerful, especially on young people.
* "X seems to be a pretty big deal because I keep hearing a lot of people upset about it"
* "I haven't seen anything about X. It must not be that big of a deal."
All social media seems to be moving toward individualized echo chambers, but it's another level when it's an individualized black box controlled by foreign interests.
Why not? China doesn’t allow our social media. Why should we allow theirs? We can easily copy the best parts of the platform and let our companies take their users. Plus, social media can be used for mass political manipulation, and what justifies letting them hold that power over our population?
It’s good for our companies, it’s good for our people, and it takes away a dangerous tool from a country that is more and more an adversary.
I truly hope it is banned. Better late than never. Nothing against this rather brain-dead tech. Let Facebook/Google/Twitter have those users on the clones.
> We can easily copy the best parts of the platform and let our companies take their users.
Billions of dollars have been invested by the biggest US tech companies to try to do this, and they all fuck it up by building the product to serve advertisers first rather than users first.
Think about who is being restricted here, because it's not just TikTok. Why are you ok with the government dictating which apps you can and cannot install?
Because we absolutely do not need to even pretend to play fair when it comes to China. The government dictates what kind of content we can consume for the public good all the time. It’s as easy as saying “counties on this new human rights blacklist do not have the right to access our markets and the minds of our citizens.”
>Why are you ok with the government dictating which apps you can and cannot install?
Well, whether you agree with this statement or not. If an adversarial government is basically controlling what information people see.. especially young impressionable people who might not know any better, isn't that potentially a problem that needs to be addressed?
Sounds like the government should have a say when it's literally trying to protect it's own interests and doesn't want a foreign power being able to so easily push their own agenda.
Then pass a law that applies to all social media companies algorithms if it is so important to protect your citizens from whatever issue you see. So far, no one has been able to point to TikTok doing something horrible. I mean, we have more actual examples of malfeasance from basically every other social media company.
I don't think US social media companies are per se banned in China. They just have to obey the same Chinese rules for data storage and content moderation and record keeping that Chinese social media companies have to obey.
It's not all that different from US companies that want to operate in Europe having to obey Europe's stricter regulations in areas such as food safety and consumer protection or have to obey GDPR.
It’s pretty massively different actually. Many US companies tried to operate in China, but the theft of trade secrets and uneven playing field was so bad that they eventually all pulled out. The Chinese government very explicitly wanted to grow its own tech companies by keeping out foreign companies and stealing their trade secrets.
And, so what? It was a great policy that lead to a lot of innovation in the Chinese economy and allowed the Chinese government maximum control so it could maintain the delicate balance of its authoritarian system.
So why the double standard? They banned our companies to keep our influence out. Why not do the same? Are we a prisoner to our principles so much that we can’t even take obvious steps to defend ourselves?
Globalism is over as we know it and the West is on an inevitable collision course with China. Time we all got our heads out of the sand on this one.
Because we are a democracy with freedoms protected by the government. If we copy their tactics on digital democracy, where do we draw the line? Should we also start locking people in their houses if they have covid?
The people who have access are making boatloads of cash. Full stop. Trade is a little different, enable equal access to markets or reply in kind. I fail to see why it's in the interests of the West to do any trade with nations that don't share values. Why enable these authoritarian countries? Would this be a compelling argument for 1930s Germany? "Well, we may not agree with how they're doing things, but the prices are unbeatable!"
When ever has “being a democracy” meant, “we need to give our adversaries unlimited ability to feed propaganda and disinformation directly to our citizens”?
Our rights apply to our citizens, not to foreign governments. They should have no right to speak to us. They should have no right to do business with us. Our elected representatives can and should regulate this international trade.
> It’ll be fun in 10 years when you need the equivalent of calling cards to access foreign sites.
The world was headed that way a long time ago, and this wouldn't significant change anything. Assuming it could ever pass, it looks like typical political theater to me.
> thinks of its citizens as being so clueless to need such a paternalistic policy.
Half the US voters in 2016 voted for Trump. So ... yeah. Am I taking crazy pills? Why is it suddenly okay in modern times that a geopolitical rival controls a major communication medium for your own population? It's as if people still haven't learnt anything from Russia invading Ukraine (or really, all of history).
A friend of mine's wife is a paramedic/firefighter and I always ask her about crazy stories from when she's on duty. This past weekend, she told me about one where a teenager saw a challenge/trend on TikTok to report a fake fire. She said they showed up with multiple fire engines, ambulances, and a squad car to no fire. The girl who called it in just said she saw it as a trend on TikTok and wanted to post a video.
A ban wouldn't be the worst thing (especially when you consider that it's a covert foreign state attack—ideological subversion—by the CCP).
You might as well be right and TikTok could just be ByteDance's Facebook, only reason for it being separated from its Chinese version is the desire to capture market with content which China would ban otherwise.
However, as a user of VK, I can tell you it went totalitarian rather quickly after the Russian government decided it is time to exercise its power as the indirect owner of the company.
Hell, even Yandex, formerly famous search engine was forced to sell user facing bits out when puilo ramped up repressions. Can you imagine having a search engine like Google where the side news feed were forced to be sold and now belongs to a separate company wholly owned by pro-government or state entities, and they still had to continue showing it exactly where it were on their search page?
Yes, but I stopped about two years ago once I realized what it was/who was creating it (I though it was U.S. based at first). It was very clearly a vehicle for demoralization.
They need to be marketed to the public and lawmakers to get passed and like a cve with a catchy name and brand they get more attention with a good name. Eg 1200 page bill which includes the governments entire platform summed up as inflation reduction act
“The [Inter]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore, 1993
“Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall.” — Bill Clinton, 2000
The message this sends if it passes is not “don’t spy on people”. The message is “play ball or get banned”. It’s hard to come up with a principled justification for allowing Facebook to operate with impunity while banning TikTok, unless those principles are highly aligned with those of three letter agencies.
This leads me to the cynical interpretation of “national security” objections. The spying was never the issue. It’s who can access the data afterwards that’s the problem. If the US government can’t, then it’s a security concern.
It makes a lot of sense for one gov to not want their BYOD policies affected by foreign (read adversary) countries. Cool.
It doesn't make sense to cut TikTok from US civilian devices because: Land of the free, free speech etc etc etc.
The other guy you replied to is correct, CIA/NSA et all don't like they can't swing their ducks into Bytedance servers and doctorate the content without exposing intelligence agencies MO to the Chinese.
Every American should be fighting against such bill because when domestic cronies own all domestic media, you guys are in a virtual China. Media plurality is the beacon of a healthy democracy, so suck it up Rubio
Skipping all the baggage that's formed around the TikTok ban/no-ban, do you think nothing should be done about a powerful foreign country with ill-will having direct access to an incredible amount of US citizen data? Even if you don't think a ban is reasonable, the current state of affairs in this regard can't continue, or do you think otherwise?
Probably a lot, but it's also not an absurd policy direction. Folks from all over have floated the vague notion that Tiktok is bad, independent of Meta. Rs tried to do it a few years ago, but implementation as a disaster.
I'd imagine the lobbying effort would be less "briefcase full of cash" and more "can we hire smart people to think through policy mechanisms, in a way that's productive for both Rs & Ds"
Though there's probably also a couple briefcases lmao
It is when you forget where the collected data ends up, and just focus on the hoovering of the data. FB is the OG of this realm, but because they are US based instead of Chinese based, they get a pass?
In the evils of data hoovering, I'm much more perturbed what theZuck knows about me much more than caring what winnie the pooh knows about me. All politics are local. If I lived in Beijing, then I'd have those concerns flipped.
Huh? How does banning tiktok make jobs? Are you assuming a US based company will spring up with a clone? You really believe that? Isn't it much more likely Meta will use it's power to gobble up any upstart to avoid the competition?
But Meta already has people employed now building their version of tiktok. How many more jobs would Meta need if there was an influx of users because of no tiktok? The recent round of layoffs implies they think they can do it with fewer and not more.
If they are, this could backfire spectacularly. Planting the idea that social media can be manipulated by the owners to persuade a population moves social media closer to traditional media companies and further away from mere "platforms" eligible for section 230 protection.
I see teenagers overthrowing the US government as more likely than this bill passing. Cats out of the bag - the only possible course is mandating the physical location of the data and preventing it's transmission to china...but good luck with that.
Kind of a tangent question but what's worst case scenario on what TikTok can do with the level of data they have?
Let's say I'm the average TikTok user and I grant it all permissions on my phone that the iOS app store approval process has allowed them to do.
How... predatory are those?
They know who I am, where I live, who my friends are, where I go, my "habits/interests". Worst case scenario my job, my wealth level.
What can China/the Chinese government/Bytedance go with this information that is so "scary"?
Say Meta + Bytedance have the same information on me. One company is American, one company is Chinese. Why is the Chinese one having that level of information bad?
Can China force Bytedance to do something with the app's algorithm to influence millions of people to think a certain way? Are people just puppets that don't think for themselves? It's ok if Meta influences us but not Bytedance? Why are we assuming we're easily influenced and need to be protected from... ourselves?
TikTok’s popularity is already waning in the U.S. Installs of the app are down 33% YoY in November, from 6.6MM in November '21 to 4.5MM in November '22. -0.3% YoY worldwide.
In fact, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outgrew TikTok and even YouTube during this period:
It's down across the board except for Facebook apps, meaning Meta probably increased their advertising budgets during this timeframe relative to the others.
Addictiveness is a poor argument to use here because the hypocrisy will immediately be exposed. If that's the standard, why not take action against online gambling, sports betting, etc? Aren't US-owned platforms also addictive?
The best argument is reciprocity. China is largely a closed market to US companies. This is intentional policy by the CCP. the CCP dangles the 1B+ market to extract concessions from Western companies that I don't like (eg making movies more palatable to the CCP even released elsewhere). More importantly, Western companies will never "win" in China. It's Lucy and the football. The CCP will guarantee that doesn't happen.
Trade is predicated to open and equal access to each other's markets. Obviously the reality isn't quite that but that's the starting principle: reciprocity. China is clearly not reciprocating the access Chinese companies have in the West and that's a good a reason as any to ban things like Tiktok. It's also justifiable.
There's also the issue that Chinese companies are tools of the state without any adequate separation or rule of law to stop that in a way that just isn't true for US companies. But that's a lesser issue than the recipricoal trade issue.
We can't ban gatcha games which are actually predatory towards children in the US, but sure, let's ban an app where people share 3 minute clips. Makes sense.
I won’t cry if TikTok disappears forever but you’re deluding yourself if you think TikTok is anything more than an iteration on a whole ecosystem of addictive digital content apps, that just happens to be owned by a Chinese company
Nothing wrong with playing protectionist games and fighting to remain the home of the worlds most influential tech companies, but let’s be honest that this is what it is. We’re not doing this to protect the children.
Well the world is catching up to how social media apps / sites can be used as tools of statecraft by the countries that control them.
If you were in charge of national defense would you allow a potential adversary unfettered access to map out and leverage the social networks of your citizenry for their information operations? No one in their right mind would do that. If I were a country not aligned with the US, I would ban all US based social media apps / sites.
I think that there is an argument to made for a culture of free access to content / information in the US. But one must also keep in mind that (a) unlike broadcasts or pamphlets the flow of information here is bidirectional, (b) entities outside the US are certainly not entitled to information about US citizens, and (c) entities operating outside of the US are not necessarily subject to US laws which includes first amendment protections.
Interestingly, the bill gives a definition of a "social media company", that's fairly specific [1, pages 7-8] and fun to ponder on its own [2].
The flimsiest bullet point in the definition might be that the company "sells digital advertising space". If TikTok started gating access to paid accounts only, I wonder if they would no longer qualify be a "social media company"! And therefore not be a "threat". (:
China is not ban Apple, because Apple willing to store data inside China. BUT, why did US ban tiktok although they were willing to store data inside US. You can ban a company that not obtain the law, but can not ban without any advice.
Legislators can dress this however they'd like but there's no hiding who stands to benefit from this the most[1].
Also, be careful emitting hate for individuals or groups of people based on an identity. You would look very silly recorded on the internet being xenophobic and racist.
A ban is not the answer to the problem of addictive social media platforms. A new platform will likely take its place, and then we will be having the same problem. The solution is for all of us to be aware the danger that social media has on us and our children, then adjust our behaviors so as to not let social media have a negative, but positive, effect on our lives.
Of course that won't happen bc that would take discipline and personal responsibility.
This is sad. I don't have a tiktok account or interact with it in anyway, but are we trying to beat china by becoming them? This seems like the wrong approach
What does "banning" an app mean, in the practical sense? I guess Apple and Google would remove it from their stores; how about side-loading? Would ISPs be responsible from blocking the website? Mobile carriers? Would we prosecute VPNs? Would it be illegal for individuals to engage with it? Are we going to put all of gen-z into jail?
I believe the idea is to make it illegal to do business with the entities running the social media app. Apple and Google would have to remove it from their stores. Buying advertising on it would be illegal. Receiving money as a creator from it would be illegal. Etc.
I love how it forces them to say the quiet part out loud: "The kind of tracking that all of these companies do is against your interest and should be considered a threat".
In this case they are implying that China having my data should scare me more than google but google has much more ability to ruin my life than China as an American
ByteDance is the company. tiktok is a global App. And Douyin is Chinese Special version. Chinese government asked Douyin's data (Chinese users), Not the tiktok(already move its data to US,UK,German and Singapore.. in 2020)
We just had record youth turnout for a midterm election. On the way to his 18 point winning margin, bill sponsor Marco Rubio won the majority of the 30-44 vote. He won a healthy 41% of the Zoomer vote too: https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls
On the same day one part of the government announces breakthrough scientific research another part says “The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok.”
I hope they turn this into a more agnostic data residency and privacy bill. I dont see much merit in targeting just tiktok or even just social media companies.
I know a few ex-Twitter and ex-Facebook engineers who went straight to TikTok. Feel sorry for what they must be thinking about and going through reading this.
Agreed, there should be rules for all of them. This is not startups trying stuff out anymore, these apps have huge influence on the course of civilization.
There should be rules on what they can put into news papers or on the air. Needs to go through some review process where actual sources must be provided and verified. Not the trash we have today where “sources say” “polls say” lol what f*cking sources? Prove your BS!
That's taking it a bit too far. While there's definitely some truth to McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message", TikTok is a tool, not a statement. As an analogy, we can have free speech while enforcing noise ordinances prohibiting people from yelling through megaphones in residential areas.
Anyone aggrieved by this would move on to the next social fad and forget that TikTok even exists as quickly as they forgot #kony2012 three months later.
And my guess is that they're not exactly enthusiastic participants in the electoral system anyway.
Do we actually know that for sure now? It would be hugely newsworthy if young voters finally actually showed up in large numbers. People have made this claim ever since Obama's first term and it's usually not actually panned out in the data.
(edited to add: I don't support banning TikTok. This is actually a free speech issue. I didn't like it when Trump did it by executive fiat and I don't like it now. If the content there is truly that corrosive, implement punitive measures short of a full ban. The bar has to be much higher than "I don't like it" for the government to fully censor something.)
> Snapchat (96%) , TikTok( 91%), Youtube (87%), and Instagram (83%) are the top three social media platforms used by Gen Z, according to a new study done by National Research Group.
For comparison banning TikTok would have a wider impact on Gen Z than banning them from YouTube.
If that's true, then didn't the cold war of banning each other's apps start when China banned youtube, facebook, instagram, google, twitter, whatsapp, snapchat, amazon, messenger, and twitch, just to name a few?
Google and FB famously pulled out, if they didn't they would still be there. It's the US that is stopping google, etc from operating there, remember project dragonfly that the prevented from going into china?
What? How are they lies, they were operating fine until they decided to not follow the laws one day. That was their prerogative and not the CCP deciding to block them from the market. Unless you can point to laws tiktok is violating it's not a remotely comparable situation. The way that Chinese companies work they explicitly create distinct entities that can meet the requirements of any territories that they operate in.
If you think Google and basically every other Western tech company choose to leave China on a whim despite massive profit that could be made I have a few crypto exchanges for you to deposit your money in.
"They weren't following the law"
The law:
"You have to give a chinese company all your technology and 51 percent ownership"
China is a flat out enemy of the United States. We should treat TikTok as an arm of that enemy as a result of how China demands state control over every company operating in the country.
That's flat out false, there are no such demands. You should actually look these things up instead of listening to reductive memes. The joint venture system was an anti-colonial idea that was proposed first by the US. It only ever applied to specific strategic industries like banking and autos. Tech companies like Microsoft, apple, etc wholly own their subsidiaries in China.
What about it? It was wholly owned until Softbank decided to sell half of it in 2018. You can just google this. Now it's wholly owned again after the whole kerfuffle.
Oh, sure, ARM just happened to decide to sell 51% of their Chinese subsidiary. I assume they really needed the money, and sold 51% instead of 49% because that 2% was a chunk of change they really needed.
Because they didn't 'pull out', they were banned. And Dragonfly wasn't stopped by the US, it was cancelled by Google after their employees protested.
Anyway, if Google and Facebook need to follow censorship laws in China, then maybe TikTok needs to follow not-being-based-in-China laws in the US. After all, they can't just decide not to follow the laws.
> In 2018, media reports that Google was working on a prototype for another censored Chinese search engine surfaced, which was met with backlash from some Google employees. The development, called ‘Project Dragonfly,’ was shortly after suspended, according to The Intercept.
The US government did not force Google to stop Dragonfly.
Congress called multiple hearings on Dragonfly and many politicians criticized it. China only ever enforced its consistent censorship policies without targeting any foreign company. Doing this you would admit is an aggressive move to target a Chinese company rather than a reciprocal action as the parent insinuated.
> China only ever enforced its consistent censorship policies without targeting any foreign company.
That is patently untrue. China's enforcement of its GFW ban list (which is still an unpublished state secret) has been very focused at specific companies, especially in the earlier days when they didn't just ban everything. CNN, for example, was on the s-list for many years due to Tiananmen Square (ironically, being unblocked later while NyTimes would get on the s-list for publish an at article about Xi's family wealth).
China's censorship policies (again an unpublished state secret) are anything but consistent. They are mostly applied for personal retribution (don't publish articles about the leader's family financial assets) or business advantages (don't let in competitors that would challenge domestic champions).
I'll stick with my formulation of politicians in the US forced China to end Dragonfly, thanks.
America can do anything it wants, I just wanted to dispute the idea that it would be a reciprocal action. I think it would be a pretty big uncalled for escalation.
This is one of the more egregious examples of the complete infantilization of Gen Z human beings by older generations.
No, the kids will not throw a temper tantrum and vote for $THE_OTHER_GUY because you blocked their access to an app. The kids, in fact, stand for more than just politics-as-sports.
Wow - jumping to a lot of conclusions! My only point is that an old guy attacking the most popular platform used by millions of users as their primary entertainment and self-expression will have some repercussions. $THE_OTHER_GUY will build a whole campaign around a hamfisted approach and not just for GenZ.
This is going to be popular with the MAGA base and unpopular with the young voters that are critical to the left. It doesn't matter if it passes, or even who the credit/blame gets assigned to, there's no scenario where this is good for Joe Biden politically.
> The Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act)
No, it doesn't. Truth Social isn't a social media company.
> (3) SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANY.—The term ‘‘social media company’’—
(iii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users for a majority of months during the preceding 12 months;
The digital crack cocaine that TikTok is, was already under extensive investigation and will inevitably be either banned in the US on the grounds of national security or heavily fined to the point where they have to leave the US.
The fines for repeat offenders should also be in the billions, applying to all social networks worth over $1BN if it is enough for them to take user privacy seriously.
“We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections.”
The manipulation of society at scale by a foreign adversary is my biggest concern about tik tok. I imagine they can flip a switch or more likely a long slow push of american values to china’s liking. That and many people stare at it for a majority of their waking hours. Good riddance. withdrawals and who fills the vacuum will be interesting.
I see this as being inevitable. TikTok and ByteDance are secretly mocking us and ignoring our laws. They keep claiming that the transfer of Americans data to the U.S. is "in progress" and I believe the whole thing is an insider company joke. In the meantime they simply keep pilfering and abusing our data.
What's worse, unscrupulous advertisers are actually taking disadvantage of their illegal behavior to advertise to minors and to track and profile them, which is against the law.
The EU is running a risky gambit by attacking U.S. tech giants whilst doing next to nothing against Chinese counterparts like TikTok. They're too afraid their population won't be able to buy cheap Chinese trinkets. And Germany is too afraid it won't be able to sell its cars in China and is blindly selling its soul to keep the exports flowing.
They keep forgetting the U.S. is guaranteeing their safety through our NATO commitments. China will only play them out against each other to benefit itself. They're merely children playing amongst the wolves.
My take: This isn't about China, not really. They're not trying to ban all apps from China, or all social media apps controlled by foreign governments. Chinese spyware apps masquerading as video games are apparently fine, if they don't have users generating and sharing content. And hypothetical manipulative social media owned/controlled by a foreign government isn't banned, unless that government happens to be on the naughty list (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuelan.) If the government of Pakistan makes a popular social media app to manipulate and spy on the American public, that's A-Okay with this bill because Pakistan isn't on that list.
This is really about TikTok specifically. The real reason? TikTok and their userbase pioneered depths of cringe so extreme, revulsion to it cuts across all political boundaries.
I'm really hoping this doesn't become a reality because if it does, we will end up with partitioned internet and stagnation.
People often forget that the US companies are foreign entity for most of the worlds population and with the WikiLeaks revelations we know for a fact that the US government has access to the data of American tech companies.