Maybe someone will scroll all the way down to this comment. Probably not.
For half a decade, I have lived outside of the US, and I've watched as it has fallen to shit in slow motion. I make a decent chunk of income in USD and this terrifies me... but this. This move saddens me.
There are only so many hours that congress has to make real decisions ... and this, this is what they spent their time on? Talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm when they're being influenced every day by how they might get shot up in math class? Come on (wo)man. This shit is fucking stupid.
It's just sad to me, sad to watch the country I grew up in, the one I went to war for ... do this level of stupid shit.
Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children.
This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear. The narrative of child safety, for example the story about the kid who commit suicide because of their "for you" page, is being used as a kind of legal "pretext" so they can ban TikTok.
Dialing up things to cause unrest, dialing down stuff critical of the CCP. It’s not an issue about data, or even an issue about speech, it’s an issue of ownership of a media company by an adversary that will weaponize it against you.
Who controls and owns media companies is a reasonable national security question. The CCP knows this risk, they don’t play fair.
This argument could make sense to me in a world where powerful corporations, PACs, and monied individuals didn't wield so much control over the media and politics. These domestic entities have far more influence than the CCP, and to the average American I don't think they are any less harmful. These entities profit from disunity and a chaotic government the same way a foreign adversary might. The current divisiveness in America is due to the outsized influence of powerful domestic actors. They are a much bigger concern.
I think this attitude is wrong. A strong democracy doesn't need to fight "fake news" legally and doesn't need their own propaganda op in foreign states like Radio Free Asia etc. If you are banning foreign media in your own country, you are doing the same as China in the end. Why not establish a great firewall?
Do you think the USG would have allowed the USSR to buy NBC?
These aren’t new issues, there are certain types of corporations where there is a national security interest in American ownership and capability (see also: Intel). Ownership of airlines is another example, you can’t have a foreign controlling interest in a domestic airline (Richard Branson couldn’t save Virgin America due to this).
There are good reasons for a nation to have rules about foreign control in certain types of companies that carry a national security risk.
In the case of airlines it is just straight up protectionism. There's no national security risk there: if push came to shove in time of war the government could simply seize the assets and operate them as they saw fit.
If that’s your view, then it seems better to be up front about the ownership limitations than pretending otherwise until a war comes along and pulling the rug.
It is already law in the United States that companies may be compelled to act in certain ways during emergencies. There is no pretending, it's all there in plain writing in the USC. Look up the Defence Production Act.
> A strong democracy doesn't need to fight "fake news" legally and doesn't need their own propaganda
your argument to me sounded like :
> Brave people don't fear heights, you are brave and hence you should jump from empire state building. And you don't need protection, remember you are brave.
Since you are straw manning the argument, brave people should be protected from their foolishness by banning rock climbing and base jumping. How does that sound?
A well-informed electorate isn’t a prerequisite to democracy. This is precisely why fake news proliferates - it’s relatively easy to elicit an emotional response, and that tends to win over critical thinking.
While fake news and undue outside influence absolutely must be protected against, the line is hard to draw. For instance, would Snowden have been considered undue influence, would Wikileaks have been considered fake news, at least sufficiently enough to cross the ban threshold?
There are pros and cons to both approaches, and it really doesn’t come down to whether or not people agree with a statement that contains such vague terms. It comes down to interpretation of those terms.
Of course the clear meaning of this paradox is that everybody who disagrees with me is intolerant of me, therefore it is my moral imperative to be intolerant to everybody I oppose. /s
Or here's a better idea: The Golden Rule. Eye for an eye is how you run a war, not a civil society.
That doesn't always work so well. If some Viking expedition is coming to pillage your "civil society," for example, there's really not much you can do except to fight. Of course, you can decide who to support or oppose as your moral imperative, but don't be surprised if it has negative consequences to you.
If a war comes to you, then you've got to fight a war and an eye for an eye is the way to do that. But that's no principle on which to organize a civil society.
> The United States does not have a strong democracy. Half (more or less) of the population believes the election was rigged.
From various recent polls, it looks like somewhere between 30-40%, somewhere under 2/3 of Republicans and Republican-leaners and basically no one else.
30% is about par for the course when it comes to contemporary controversial POTUS elections [1][2].
It seems to ebb and flow: each side takes their turn being the aggrieved party and then alternate next go around (2000, 2016, 2020).
Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.
The tapestry of dysfunctional patchwork that make up the American Constitutional Republic, while tattered and frayed before, has found ways to persist.
> Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.
Is that not what we're experiencing now?
It's hard to 'both sides' this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?
> It’s hard to ‘both sides’ this issue with a straight face, when the biggest election denier in America is a former president and current presidential candidate. When was the last time that happened?
The closest parallel was probably Aaron Burr and his…whatever exactly he was trying to achieve in 1806-1807 in the Southwest after being dumped as VP in 1804 in part resulting from Jefferson’s suspicions that he was trying to pull electoral shenanigans in 1800. But that’s a long time ago, in very different circumstances, and not a particularly close parallel. So, never anything really similar.
For better or worse, I've found reading (deep dives) US history adequately anesthetizes one to modern day shenanigans.
But you raise a good point in that Al Gore was far more gracious when aggrieved. He comported himself with the norms established in the last 60 years during the modern mass media era.
For the most recent presidential election maybe. For the previous one a majority of Democrats including many high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.
Clearly you aren't going to have a large contingent of deniers of elections that your favored party won.
When push came to shove, how many Democratic leaders (Reps and Senators) voted against or objected to the electoral college results in 2017? It was less than 10 Representatives and no Senators, meaning none of the objections were even put to a vote[1]. That is a far cry from what occurred in 2021.
Talk about clutching at straws and trying to find any possible metric to deflect from the dangerous 2016 election deniers and conspiracy theorist lunatics.
You can't just pick out some other thing and claim that is what is matters most. Just saying "when push comes to shove" doesn't mean anything. How many times did the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee lie about something like having evidence for the delusional conspiracy theory that "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", dangerously fueling election denial and undermining confidence in the democratic process, like Adam Schiff did? Aside from rhetoric and assertions by partisans and conspiracy theorists involved in the whole mess, where is the evidence to say what one side does is better or worse or more or less "damaging to democracy"? There isn't any.
If you in denial of the reality that both sides question elections and make up conspiracy theories when it suits them, you are incapable of anything approaching an objective understanding of the topic. Sorry.
> For the most recent presidential election maybe.
Yes, that’s generally what “believe the election was stolen” without further qualification means; its not a reference to the total sum of people who believe at least one election in the history of the US was stolen.
> For the previous one a majority of Democrats including high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.
A large percentage of Democrats believe Russian interference and other improper interference influenced the election results, but that’s different than thinking the actual vote was rigged or invalid.
Yes they were a huge number of election deniers for the 2016 election and a vast amount of irresponsible rheotoric around it that was very dangerous to democracy. Don't try to gaslight on this one. A lot of uneducated morons and delusional conspiracy theorists thought "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election", fueled by dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric from certain anti-democratic election denier politicians and media corporations.
The one question you present evidence of is not questioning the legitimacy and validity of the election; there is a difference between believing (rightly or wrongly, with or without sufficient cause) that improper activity effected the popular vote tally and believing that the election is illegitimate.
You present no evidence relating to actual election denial.
If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you. Therefore could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules? Including, but not limited to: not being snarky, not calling names, not making personal attacks, not posting flamewar comments, and not using HN primarily for political battle.
Yes, if that's what they were doing, but I'd have to see specific links. (For example I don't think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366985 broke the site guidelines although it wasn't entirely un-edgy either.)
I don't have a problem with the comment you linked. But this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 kicked off the snark with the first sentence, and quickly escalated to namecalling, calling me a liar a few comments later.
So yes I should have just ignored them or kept the higher ground, but sometimes that kind of trolling sucks me in.
I don't think the first sentence of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366133 was snarky. Interpretations differ, of course, and often by quite a bit when someone is speaking to you personally, but FWIW that sounds rather neutral to my ear.
They can bitch and whine as much as they like, letting people blow off steam is part of the process by which democracy keeps the peace. Aside from various small and short riots, there has been very little political violence in America since the 1860s.
Attempting to overturn the results of the election as the votes were being counted in the Capitol is quite an escalation, though. Sure, it's not up to 1860s standards, but it's still unprecedented in modern times.
While true, the law has also come down harshly on the participants. It should have a chilling effect for other would-be rioters. It was bad, I agree. But perhaps the silver lining is that its occurrence may help set a firm line on what behaviors are acceptable.
This is an excellent point and I agree. Social media apps are basically brainwashing devices, and whoever controls the knobs and buttons can change how people think. Very easy to get radicalized with propaganda, or in this extreme case, even be convinced to end one's own life.
Maybe we should then pass laws restricting what companies can do with our data? What kinds of algorithms they can run if they want to be treated as a platform rather than a publisher?
New accounts on issues like this always make me wary of the 50cent party (kind of a case-in-point example of the kind of nation state influence operations and risk). [0]
It shouldn’t have gotten to this level, but it’s where we are. Users will move to reels or something else that takes its place without the national security risk.
It's a clone, but you can't directly compare one social network to another like that. There are differences in the culture and community that won't necessarily survive being transplanted.
> like they cant influence twitter, facebook and all the rest?
Well, no, that’s more Maximum Bone Saw’s purview than the CCPs, and that foreign influence isn’t (at least per the initial list written into the proposed law) considered adversarial.
(EDIT: That’s specific to Twitter, not Facebook and all the rest.)
i think the point is, banning tiktok just means influence can move to these other platforms via other means (troll farms etc), it doesn't solve the issue (unless you want to ban twitter et. al)
There’s a distinction between adversaries trying to cause trouble within American companies and a foreign hostile government effectively owning the company and dictating policy in its own interests.
Probably? I think that was one of the options iirc (ownership by an American company via a sale), but I don't really know enough about the specifics to have a strong position on the implementation.
> [The] US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of
China. Yeah, except that any business can just buy that information. I can buy your day-to-day movements for dirt cheap. I own a non-American company (though I'm still an American citizen, but that isn't a factor), and it is insanely cheap to get information about any American you want. Hell, BingBot will tell you all about me, what I do for a living and where I live.
This is about China, but it is a stupid and pointless zero-point game. This bill would get shot down in 30s for being unconstitutional, especially if the company has an American LLC or corporation (making it a legal entity protected by the constitution). Further, you'd think congress would have learned from prohibition that banning something ... hmm, doesn't work? At all? How would you even enforce something like this, stop people randomly to violate their privacy further and search their phone? Will this be another thing to get arrested for when you have a 'broken tailight'?
TikTok disappearing from tens of millions of iPhones overnight (I have no idea about Androids) would probably work pretty well. If I had to guess, almost none of those people can jailbreak their iPhone to get it again, either. Your option would be to switch to Android and learn to sideload apps (which I think is pretty damn easy these days).
The point is not to enforce against individual users, just to remove it from the main distribution channels.
Did anyone else notice this bill includes a provision that requires the department of Commerce to inform the president Quiet partwhen wall street has made such a cockup of gamblingQuiet part that it becomes a national security risk and gives him the power to issue an Executive Order requiring the general investing public sell that particular stock so hedge funds can pay off their debt?
Re-reading, I may be mistaken. S.686 is still in committee and it looks like S.1143 looks to have passed the Senate. I read an article this morning that suggested S.686 is meant to be a rider, can't find it now.
You can freely install apps on your iphone. All you need is an Apple computer. It only can be used for a week? before you have to install it again. I don't pay apple a dime and still develop software for iPhones occasionally without any issues.
Also, websites are pretty powerful. Apple even allowed websites to send notifications now.
If you believe that a significant portion of iOS users are going to set up an Apple development account and manually reinstall TikTok every week then I have a bridge to sell you.
They will just switch to a different social network, which is equally destructive but not Chinese.
I think you are overestimating the tech know-how of the average person and how driven the average teenager is. TikTok a year ago was pretty unique, but now you have YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. I'd bet a hard money that 99% of people will just switch to those in a heartbeat if TikTok was banned.
> Kids will do whatever it takes to get what they want. I’d buy that bridge.
What they want is cheap dopamine hit from the smartphone. It's really close to drugs, make heroin hard to get and people will go to an analog like fentanyl.
I guess many of us underestimate how many teenagers own a smartphone but not a laptop/desktop computer. In older generation it was the reverse, people owned a laptop/desktop before owning a smartphone..
Even if they have a computer, it's not necessarily going to be an Apple computer. Unless you're a developer, interoperability between your mobile hardware and your desktop hardware is barely a concern.
What percentage of TikTok users are you expecting to do either of those two things in order to access the app if it’s banned by the federal government?
Serious question: would Apple and Google allowing users to install their own apps on their phones count as aiding/abetting in this case, when the crime is an American using TikTok?
The bill doesn't directly ban data sharing but instead focuses on foreign ownership in US companies. It would be enforced similar to anti-trust laws today, by preventing Chinese nationals from purchasing or having an ownership stake in certain large technology companies deemed a security risk. I don't like the bill because I think it's unnecessary but it has nothing to do with searching people's phones or regulating actual data in any way.
The federal government has many tools by which they could accomplish this ban. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has a long, successful history of forcing divestiture by foreign owners of domestic assets.
Additionally, app stores and ISPs are a pretty obvious route for blocking 99% of U.S. users from circumventing the ban. Any users who are able to circumvent those measures will be using an app whose network effect has been destroyed.
I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership, but I assume at face value that there is some very embarrassing facts that our local spooks are not keen to share with China.
What does the great firewall of America look like, from the infrastructure & interface angle? Would we want to share that with China? Your Google searches and all your metadata that can likely be accessed with relative ease… is there a similar surveillance capability that we’d wish to share with China in how spooks make data requests?
China has no jurisdiction over you… there’s no real punishing to relate to what you have viewed on TikTok, so why are your viewing habits a threat to national security?
I don’t believe this to be a zero sum game. This is further extension of authoritarianism from a government that is terrified of anything short of pervasive colonoscopy-tier data collection.
>China has no jurisdiction over you… there’s no real punishing to relate to what you have viewed on TikTok, so why are your viewing habits a threat to national security?
I mean, I mostly agree with what your saying above this, but this particular line I disagree with.
People get blackmailed all the time for different reasons. If I'm looking for a person in a hardware/software company that has weaknesses, having a full view of their social media is a great starting place.
"Traditional" hacking is getting pretty rough, basically a gamble to find an exploit, social engineering will be the easiest vector to attack something. Being able to gather data and influence will make it that much easier. I mean even Jeff Bezos got hacked by his Saudi "friends."
>I’m not sure which part of our national security surveillance state apparatus is endangered by foreign ownership,
The propaganda part.
Remember a month ago when everyone's feed had a video in it from the TikTok CEO encouraging people to side with TikTok.
They are scared shitless of not being mostly in control of that kind of power when applied to Americans. They are worried that the next Saddam is going to pay TikTok, or some future foreign competitor to torpedo whatever the next WMD lie is (and this will be done with Chinese blessing because that will be in their geopolitical interest).
The possibility was easy to ignore back when all the social media giants were American and the feds had jurisdiction and soft power over them. Now there's a new entrant that China has jurisdiction and soft power over. They want the status quo back. Hence why all the bill language is mostly about preventing foreign ownership.
The establishment can squash Elon if he gets so far out of line that it pisses a critical mass of them off. He's a US Citizen. His business assets are in the US (mostly). They can get at him so long as some large subset of "they" is ok enough with it.
They can't do that with "hypothetical Chinese Elon" so long as said Elon remains in good standing with the powers that be there.
I don’t really know anything about buying data or whatever, but how would you actually go about buying my day-to-day movements and how much does it actually cost?
I was always under the impression that when people say ‘Google collects all your data and sells it’, or whatever, they really mean that google sells ads which may be targeted based on the data they collect, and it’s only small companies with much less data who might sell it.
Anyone can get your address and phone number from just about anywhere. What you can't purchase are the thousands of data points that Facebook or Google has about your habits, location, and preferences. That's their secret sauce after all.
Seems to be a suspicious number of people in this thread purposefully "point missing" and slinging whataboutisms instead of talking about what the CCP (specifically) can do with that type of information...
Well yeah, ByteDance directly takes orders from the Chinese government. Big Tech can also take orders from the American government, but America is bound by the rule of law and isn't actively imprisoning millions in concentration camps so it's way better
America’s political system also has plenty of problems, so any absolute comparison is easy to pick at or "what-about", as other commenters are doing.
But more to the point here, the American government responds to pressure from the electorate and U.S.-based stakeholders, which the Chinese government by and large does not.
Can you explain what you mean? The USA never had “lockdowns” at all – to some degree because of public pressure though also because for the first year or so of the crisis the federal government flailed around passively/counterproductively due to abject incompetence (plus some grifting) at the top. Meanwhile China’s Covid policy had nothing whatsoever to do with the American electorate or stakeholders, but was instead driven by political pressures internal to China.
If your point is that different American states responded differently despite broadly similar public opinion based on party affiliation of the legislators and governors, that’s true, and part of how our the US system works. Public preferences clearly aren’t the only thing driving policy decisions.
I think fooster's point is that Xi had to eventually give in to pressure from "the electorate and [China]-based stakeholders" as evidenced by the CCP having to eventually abandon its zero covid policy, so there are some constraints from the people on his power.
Though I think it's less that Xi responded to pressure from the people and more that his personal power was starting to become at risk due to the policy from others in the CCP.
In that case they are entirely missing my point. Obviously Chinese politics responds (to one extent or another) to internal pressure. My point is that as an American citizen/resident I don’t have any influence on Chinese politics, so if a Chinese company under influence from the Chinese government infringes on my rights I have no real recourse. Whereas if something goes wrong here in my own country based on action of local citizens or locally based companies/politicians, the residents here can put direct pressure on the domestic political system, bring civil/criminal legal action against wrongdoing, etc.
It reports a greater percentage of prisoners. Other countries may exceed that percentage, but just not report it.
Totalitarian countries like China, with strict controls over what its government and media report is a prime candidate for grossly underreporting its prison population.
That when we talk about China, we see all of their flaws as completely damning them and everything they do as a country, but in the same breath we speak of the rule of law in the USA as if that means something when it comes to mass surveillance (it does not - the USA is a pioneer in illegal mass surveillance). This is a particular problem when it comes to TikTok, because senators look at TikTok collecting data and influencing Americans and they say "We cannot let China do this to us!" while completely ignoring Facebook and Microsoft doing all of the same to us. This leads to harmful bills like this TikTok bill when what we really need are protections from all mass surveillance, foreign and domestic.
But that will never happen as long as the good citizens of the USA continue to pretend that the rule of law has any meaning in the USA when it comes to mass surveillance, and we point at China and chide them for the millions they have imprisoned as if that is not the pot calling the kettle black.
Calling out China will change very little there, and serves mostly to distract the conversation from the problems we really have the power to solve. We only have the power to change ourselves. The people in the USA and around the globe who suffer from US surveillance will continue to suffer all the while.
And what is worse, China will simply start running domestic companies and collecting our data all the same, because these bills aren't solving the real problem.
Blindly pointing the finger at China causes real harm to us.
They both take orders from their respective governments, but the nature of those orders, the nature of the business, the relative power, the domain over which the information is valid, transparency, proportionality etc are all very different.
ByteDance isn't under the direct authority at any given moment of CCP, but, they will, at any time, receive arbitrary orders for any particular reason, and they will follow them. Notably 1/2 of the Western world uses this app.
Google isn't under the thumb of US Gov. but with a court order, the FBI can obtain specific bits of information. Notably, Google does not operate in China.
Now - the more secretive relationship with NSA/CIA/FBI aka national security has with Google is a different question, it's a bit guesswork, but just given the nature of the two regimes, and the fact that again Google has no material presence in China it's plain to see the difference.
The Congressional Hearing was a farce in the wind, but the underlying issues of both security and trade are really serious.
It would have been better to create comprehensive legislation a decade ago about data and corporate ownership so companies could make progress. Even if ByteDance owned 49% of a US company that was 'TikTok' and it was based anywhere but China, that would probably be fine.
>ByteDance isn't under the direct authority at any given moment of CCP, but, they will, at any time, receive arbitrary orders for any particular reason, and they will follow them.
If Musk hadn't bought Twitter, we never would have been able to prove that this is also true for Twitter and arbitrary orders from the American government.
I agree with the concentration camps. But imprisoned… yes. I don’t live there, but I still have to file my taxes. I can’t go back longer than 35 days, or I have to pay taxes like I live there for five years, even if I don’t. Every banking institution that is willing to do businesses with me has to report my activity to the IRS. I’m not allowed to invest because I’m an American, I’m also not allowed to invest in America because I’m not a resident.
If I didn’t have family there, I’d probably give up my passport, because outside of America it is more of a hindrance than a boon.
Of course it is! and storks deliver babies and the moon is yellow because it's made of cheese.
> [The USA] isn't actively imprisoning millions in concentration camps
It's actively imprisoning millions in prisons. What's the difference between a prison and a concentration camp? Perhaps the guards twirling their evil mustache more?
You are able to write your comment criticizing the US government (Congress) because we follow the rule of law and that rule of law includes the 1st Amendment guarantee to freedom of speech and expression.
yeah ask how people who backed trump fared once he lost? ban from social circles, political oponents “tracking” the people who worked with him or under him so that “they never have jobs anymore”. its just one example. just like china, if you are on the bad side you don’t exist anymore. see assange.
There is a stark difference between a sovereign power gagging or stifling perceived dissidents and other citizens (whether they are elected officials or not) deciding you're an unethical asshole others should be warned about.
What happened to Nixon? What happened to OJ Simpson from the victim's family?
> Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children.
This overlooks the "possibility" that those platforms have an "agreement" of sorts with the US Government. The Twitter Files have gone into some of that, but be careful: it is possible for things to exist that each individual/civilian may not have knowledge of, even though most people seem to be strongly under the impression that this is impossible, perhaps because it could be considered (or, has been marketed as) [only] a conspiracy theory.
> This is really meant to be a punch in the fight against China. US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear. The narrative of child safety, for example the story about the kid who commit suicide because of their "for you" page, is being used as a kind of legal "pretext" so they can ban TikTok.
It is plausible that there are certain ideas that they would not like the minds of the American Public exposed to, certain conversations they would prefer they do not have, etc. There is a surprising amount of detail to reality, but we miss out on most of it (and often do not realize it), for a variety of reasons.
The thinking on these sorts of matters one reads in this thread is rather eye opening....I suspect a lot of the styles of logic that are perfectly acceptable in threads on this topic would be very unwelcome when writing software.
This. I had this very conversation today. I dislike applying rules not across the board. I would love if the same argument applied to TikTok, were applied to other social media.
However, this is not about the arguments presented. Those are merely talking points as a way to get an upper hand on China. That is it. It is annoying, because there is actually a dire need to make children a little less addicted to screens ( not to mention the chance to get some privacy ).
Try using Tik Tok in China vs USA. The feeds are very different. The CCP has the influence to only allow more positive and educational topics on their social media. In the USA its the EXACTLY OPPOSITE. Whether you can blame culture, the government, whatevers, something needs to be done. USA media is out of control and if the gov needs to have a hand in it, let them.
Politicsgirl makes the case this is about shutting down marginalized voices, among other things. I’m no TikTok user myself but the argument holds water.
> Sadly, it has nothing to do with "talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm", because if it did, they would be trying to ban Facebook, Instagram, and other social media services that have the exact same effect as TikTok on children.
Do they? My Impression is a bit different here. TikTok is much more focused on the automatically selected content, and has fewer options for letting users make their own choices. The format itself (video) also strongly boosts the connection between people. And both combined let TikTok-Trends move much faster and ingrain deeper in the minds of people. It was quite interesting to see how fast and deep the brainwashing on TikTok was spreading after the CEOs appearance in senat, and also kinda concerning.
> US government does not want any possibility of US citizens' data being in the hands of China and their questions to Chew made that clear.
But isn't that legit concern of any country regarding other countries with even less security than you have yourself? I mean in Europe we also have strong concerns against the USA and their poor handling of data.
Foreign adversaries have learned exactly how to weaponize our free and open internet against our own people. Regardless of the fact that our kids are most vulnerable, China's seemingly made a point of outsourcing their most polarizing algorithmic decisions to the rest of the world but not to their own population, which is essentially a tacit admission of their awareness of the dangers of social media to their own people.
At this point, I'd venture that politicians in the US are trying to grasp at whatever they can to mitigate the risk while still maintaining their election chances. Easier to "blame China" and get re-elected than it is to dump on their own constituents for not monitoring their kids' social media habits.
And frankly, I'm okay with that. Even if a parent does their best, there'll be second-hand influences through all the kids raised irresponsibly through their parents, and nothing can be done about that aside from homeschooling or going off-grid, which is unsustainable for nearly everyone.
I'm fine with a combination of the bill introduced + bills like the one passed in Utah placing curfews on kids since parents have proven to be so bad at parenting their own kids as to present the nation with an emergent aggregate risk to national security.
> China's seemingly made a point of outsourcing their most polarizing algorithmic decisions to the rest of the world but not to their own population
Exactly. We're a decade into the social media experiment now, and it's absolutely clear that it in its current form it doesn't make us smarter, it doesn't make us happier, and it doesn't bring us closer. If anything, it makes people sick and it weakens the social fabric. The proposed solution of "more free speech better" is clearly not working in the face of organized, AI-fueled, nation-state manipulation efforts.
Hacker News is made up of people with a birds-eye view of social media technology. Most of us understand how it works and who operates it. I think it's important to know what an incredible position this is to be in, and to remember that most people aren't like us. Most people can't just say, "screw it, I'll get my information elsewhere."
I think we'll improve over time, but we're at least a generation away from any kind of widespread media literacy. What do we do in the meantime?
Thank you for this comment. I would like to add that social media and foreign manipulation thereof has been demonstrated to be spectacularly capable of affecting peoples' mental states and beliefs and by extension our stability as a country. We haven't figured out how to deal with it yet in a way that balances with our values of free speech and enterprise but a platform with tiktok's pervasiveness taking orders directly from the Chinese government is a huge, bright and shining risk that our government knows it needs to address.
Exactly. We've already seen the damage that foreign manipulation can cause when they're exploiting the cracks of FB, Twitter, etc. It doesn't take much imagination to think about what the art of the possible is when you can control the system itself.
>I think it's important to know what an incredible position this is to be in,
The old saying goes that knowledge is power; everyone here with deep knowledge of computers and the things they enable really are in a blessed position.
Yes, telling parents (who are the voters) that actually they should just be doing a better job monitoring their kids activities online seems like a losing political strategy!
Yes, I think you’re right. Might not be a great strategy for the geriatric politicians to tell a generation of parents who are the first generation of parents who have ever had to navigate anything like this, that they just need to do better.
Maybe it's not a binary choice. Parents can do a better job monitoring their kids and the state can make it mildly harder for kids to spend all day on social media.
We could also educate the parents/adults. I feel like a lot of these issues come from the fact that the newer generation(s) have so much more knowledge of what they're using than their elders. Society has changed things and implemented safeguards in the past (seatbelts, driving laws, etc.) Yet for some reason the social media discussion always ends up only presenting two options: Censorship or anarchy.
It doesn't need to be successful on everyone, and you're right that we should also be teaching the kids in order to eventually have a population that's less susceptible to trickery. That said, there was a point when the average citizen couldn't read. When there were no driver's ed classes or requirements. Hell, attitudes can change among adults and that would do a lot: Look at the approval rates for gay marriage and interracial relationships. The gay marriage jump is notable because it happened in a short enough period of time that it is an indication that people who were already adults changed their minds.
We can educate or change things at the population level, we just lack the political will to do so and it's disincentivized for the people in power to orient their efforts that way. I think it's worth taking a good hard look about why our Overton Window has ended up where it has on these issues.
There are also other ways to cope rather than outright bans or anarchy. We could study the physiology of the harm caused and require algorithm changes to demonstrate they don't cause biological panic reactions. We could require some knowledge in order to access social media rather than gatekeeping by age (for the record, I don't think this would work and it's probably not legal in America, but it's interesting that nobody seems to discuss it), etc. Even something as simple as requiring a representative age sample for groups addressing these problems so that we can have the perspectives of both those of us who grew up chronically online and people who have to adjust to this weird new techno world they don't understand since both groups need to live in society.
We could also go meta and ask why education has a low chance of success in adults. What of those variables could we influence? Would an economically secure population be easier to educate? Etc.
Looking at how the US reacts to a company winning at the media game, China's iron fist regarding foreign companies entering their market retroactively feels par for the course.
And it kinda signals to other countries they really should put critical effort in lowering dependence on the US and chalenging the dominance if they ever intend to thrive.
Possibly. But, many countries are formally US allies, with deep security integration. So an American owned application is not as threatening as a Chinese owned application.
America also generally allows businesses and media from foreign companies to take part, whereas China has no such reciprocity.
Security arrangements are real things that can't be merely handwaved away as something that "should" not exist in one's ideal world.
Western media firms don't operate for 'western' interests. Fox and friends, for instance, are actively trying to undermine western civilization[1], and I'll be damned if they are doing it for my own good.
They operate for their own interests, which are almost always directly at odds with the interests of the people who actually live in the west.
[1] I have exactly as much evidence for this as you do for your claim.
As your former president eloquently explained, "USA first" is the current US doctrine. Why should the other countries accept US influence short of not having the choice as it would have pretty deep repercussions?
The game of cutting off foreign players is a luxury only the few countries can afford right now, making it look like everybody else supports the US is disingenuous.
The current age of global peace is wonderful and pleasant. It is also young and fragile. Other countries can choose who they wish to align with, I hope most liberal democracies will find the United States to be a more reliable ally than China or Russia.
The price of association with the US is, as you say, US influence; however, US influence is much less restrictive and oppressive than many other major players today and historically. Our EU allies regularly criticize us in public forums; North Korea does not have the political freedom to criticize China and Belarus does not have the political freedom to criticize Russia to the same extent that United States' allies do today.
It's high time for global players to wake up from the ideal world where everyone can get along with zero tariffs or restrictions. The United States must do what is in her best interests and other states should follow her lead. I believe it is the US best interest that the world is more free, and should that eventual goal require some restriction of hostile foreign entities' freedom to operate on US soil, so be it.
This is a 'us or them' dichotomy that only makes sense if you need a perpetual enemy.
Most countries criticize the US _and_ China _and_ Russia _and_ North Korea, make trade where they need to and make a balancing act with alliances and relations between all of these countries.
> It's high time for global players to wake up from the ideal world where everyone can get along with zero tariffs or restrictions.
The US have engaged into perpetual tariffs and restrictions from the day it had the power to do so. Are you assuming other countries thought they could stop that ? Or what are you even talking about ?
begrudgingly agree on all points. the gamestop/amc stock manipulation in 2021 demonstrated how vulnerable western society is to a social media campaign that, at first glance, appears benign. even if china wasnt involved with that incident - which began on chinese-owned reddit - it demonstrated that governments are at risk to any social media company with diverging goals.
Really HN? The top voted comment is "this country has gone downhill"? This isn't Reddit. We're supposed to at least say something novel here, and hopefully interesting. How has the country gone downhill? Why is this decision so uninteresting? This comment also completely ignores the very interesting geopolitical aspects of this bill. On the surface it does look like something innocuous, as implied, which is why people might double-take and want to look deeper.
Pathos-heavy comments like this one with no real meat disappoint me. Surely we can do better.
The comment seems pretty clear to me: Despite very serious issues legislators are focusing on unimportant fads.
I increasingly think interesting geopolitics are a trap for a certain type of brain. When I was in high school I followed that sort of thing closely, and felt very smart. But it all had no connection to me, and it didn't matter to me at all. I realized I prefered geopolitics to domestic news because I could feel detached from the tradgedy.
It's a 4 paragraph comment that's basically throw away and everyone will forget exists by tommrow. How much effort should people be putting into these comments. Especially when there's no return. There's no guarantee you'll get a smart responses
Sorry, I'm calling bullshit on this. Look at every single thread that discusses cryptocurrency. If you haven't noticed the Redditification of Hacker News, then I envy you.
I think you are a bit naive and underestimate china’s will to influence US any chance they get. TikTok is not a toy . I repeat . TikTok is not a toy. It is a super app that gets the most attention and time from 150 million Americans. And unlike rich people in US who are powerful, in China, bitedance ( TikTok) CEO is like a dog to the CCP leaders. They asked you eat shit , you will eat it twice to please them. This is a real danger .
Note: I am Chinese
Or, we could go beyond tit-for-tat, and make real laws protecting our citizens and their data. Do people really think TikTok is doing things Facebook, google, etc are not already doing with tracking and algorithms ?
A couple of years ago I would have doubted this. I'm not American so my stance in general world politics is mostly neutral. But seeing what happened with China and Jack Ma (the richest/most powerful business owner in China) I'm sure they can bend the knee of any Chinese company.
Not that the US spying agencies cant do the same with US companies. They surely do. But it's a strong argument for banning technology coming from an adversarial government.
According to Washington Post data, there were 393,289 students enrolled at schools during shootings in the past 10 years[0]. (Note this is total enrollment, not those present or injured)
In 2022, there were ~25.1 million teens[1], of whom ~67% used TikTok[2], for a total of ~16.8 million on TikTok (totally ignoring anyone under 12 or over 17).
I know the numbers are hacky because the first group includes younger children and the second group doesn't (and 1/3 of TikTok's users could be under 14[3]), but I was trying to get a sense of scale for each category. Assume the TikTok user count is probably an underestimate.
My hacky numbers come up with a bit over 40x more teens being first-hand infuenced by tiktok. To make the numbers even more hypothetical, the next step of deciding how many times worse you think being enrolled at a school that has a shooting is for students and plugging that in to get how much more attention/resources should be used on shootings is left as an exercise for the reader.
The person you’re replying to said that the possibility of being shot at school is psychologically taxing. This would apply to all students at all schools, not just ones where a shooting literally happened. It is relevant because of how frequent school shootings are now, compared to say, 30 years ago. Columbine shook the country when it happened, now we’re at a couple Columbine-style incidents per year. You can say “well that’s still a low overall percentage of students who get shot” and be technically correct while ignoring the gravity of the situation and the fact that other first world countries don’t have this problem.
The fact that school shootings have been so normalized that we’re sitting here and discussing the math around whether they’re worse than social media is… so profoundly sad it’s hard to describe.
I agree shootings do large societal harm past the students at the school (though to be fair, I'd say the opposite side could correctly argue that TikTok makes lasting changes to children/society beyond just the ones that use it (and may be correlated with depression/suicide, which is also profoundly sad))
Surely you have to do some kind of math eventually, or else you'll end up prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter (consider people who are more afraid of sharks than drowning, even though shark deaths are 1 in 4,332,817 and drowning deaths are 1 in 1,134)
I acknowledge that the numbers I'm using are not, by any means, conclusive. And I'm not saying we should prioritize TikTok above shootings just because it's more common. But this seems like a reason to get better evidence about the way the world is, not refuse to touch numbers because some harms are too sacred to attempt to quantify.
> Surely you have to do some kind of math eventually, or else you'll end up prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter (consider people who are more afraid of sharks than drowning, even though shark deaths are 1 in 4,332,817 and drowning deaths are 1 in 1,134)
TSA? Or any other "but think of the children"-type bill? Or look at water-scarcity "solutions" in the south west for something different.
I'm serious, "prioritizing whatever sounds the most dramatic instead of the things that actually matter" is literally 90% of the politician's playbook.
I think we can safely say that social media hurts mental health worldwide, and school shootings are also really bad for people. It’s almost like they’re separate issues and we don’t have to pick one or the other to deal with. Does that sound reasonable?
And the ideal number of suicides is 0, and the ideal amount of spyware is 0, etc. All of these are targets, but an ideal doesn't give you further information on how to prioritize
No country has managed to bring the total number of suicides to 0. Which tells you that it’s a harder problem.
But again, practically every country has managed to being the total number of school shootings to 0. Which tells you that it’s not a particularly hard problem.
Many other countries have succeeded at bringing school shootings to zero, providing the fundamental feasibility in principle. That makes the difference.
The difference in America is that Americans really don't want to. By the time Sandy Hook happened, Americans had already long decided as a culture that they were willing to trade the lives of their children to protect their sacred right to keep and bear arms. Hell, many are happy to, as long as the kids aren't theirs.
Sort of. Sandy Hook meaningfully changed polling. Americans broadly support the idea someone should do something. Of course, they get colder feet when it gets more specific.
Regardless, this makes it very different from a 0 suicide or 0 spyware goal. Those don't have a similarly reasonable theoretical solution.
Incorrect. Some do, many don't, unless of course you're racist and don't consider quite a bit of the developing world worth your notice. Is that the case?
The two largest developing countries in the world are China and India, both accounting for roughly 35% of the world’s population. And they’ve both reduced school shootings to either zero or close to zero.
Me too, but from the inside. I spent a lot of time watching C-SPAN and similar “raw footage” sites in my youth. It was fun seeing inside the sausage factory.
The raw footage has changed substantially in recent years.
I watched recent senate hearings and, instead of bringing expert witnesses to educate senators to help them better do their job, it seems hearings (and basically any other chance at being in front of a camera) is an opportunity to PWN the “other side” in a series of 30s sound bites.
Senators yell at each other, talk past each other and their guests, fall back on their pre-written “serious burn!” scripts no matter where the conversation goes, and insult the guests they invite in to speak. Everyone is freaking out about whether or not everything was shared with “their side” prior to the hearing because they need to have pre written burns to score more “points” than the other side.
You see these 30s clips floating around the internet and wonder how they can all come from the same hearing. It’s because they are all rapid firing a bunch of pre-written dribble optimized for 30s sound bites.
Let's not forget at one point in the US senate a senator was nearly caned to death in order to pwn the opposition argument. I don't know how we come back from that.
> There are only so many hours that congress has to make real decisions
That's not how Congress works. We're taught in school that Congress debates bills one at a time, but the reality is that all the real debate and drafting and work happens behind the scenes, massively parallelized.
Time spent during a session of Congress is mostly just the very end of the process, discovering where the votes fall and some last-minute negotiations. Also grandstanding.
There are lots of factors that have been making Congress less "productive" in recent history, depending on how you view it, but the total hours available per year isn't really one of them.
a) The government can do more than one thing at a time.
b) There is zero appetite from the GOP for gun control. Until that changes the status quo persists.
c) Information about US citizens (which can be used to manipulate them) being handed over to the Chinese government is something that the government should be concerned about.
> b) There is zero appetite from the GOP for gun control. Until that changes the status quo persists.
There have been many years of Democratic control where they didn't prioritize gun control. The status quo persists for some other reasons, not just the GOP bogeyman.
I have some hope that a more creative approach to the gun situation would help. The typical blue state approach of "ban everything, except allow a select few people to pay thousands of dollars for a license" definitely won't work. At the same time, the NFA has held up for a very long time and there haven't been any challenges to it yet despite the reputation of today's Supreme Court.
There is always something similar to Texas’ creative approach to solving the abortion situation—outsourcing the trampling of rights to citizens via civil lawsuits. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that SCOTUS would have a change of heart about intervening in such a situation.
They could target an Ammendment, which would seem the proper path to me. And they don't necessarily need to codify abortion; they just need to define Person.
It's not just the data, it's bidirectional. The concern is that by adjusting the algorithm they can influence the population (e.g. to make math and science perceived as uncool). Not sure how seriously to take that but in principle it seems like a large vulnerability that is challenging to close off without actions like what we're seeing.
It's a fair bit more complicated than that. They could choose to show all of the "you're a nerd!" videos to youths in other nations and all of the "look at what I did using science and engineering!" videos to youths in their own nation. It might be considered that such a move would put them in a more competitive position years to decades down the line.
Please tell me where I can purchase information about the sexual preferences of Republican politicians and leading religious figures. I... have... reasons.
There are webcam feeds all over the earth, most can be found by just scanning ip addresses. There are even websites dedicated to finding them. You’d probably have a better dataset than TikTok simply because it is more realistic. The best part: it is free.
I’m not in the business of selling datasets. But it also sounds like you don’t know what problem you’re actually trying to solve yet. That’s a problem I can help you with.
There are people who look at crime statistics to figure out how likely they are to get murdered based on their circumstances and optimize that, and there are people who watch the news.
There are people who look at data to determine how likely they were to die from covid vs. the risk and effectiveness of a vaccine authorized for emergency use, and there are people who watch the news.
You can't have a good argument with people who watch the news because they get convinced of their position emotionally through anecdotes that the news focuses on, not data. You end up arguing with that person's emotional reaction to anecdotes. It's never a good idea to criticize another person's emotions if you expect to remain friends with them or not get flagged on HN.
FWIW, that data is being stored on Oracle servers in the US, with provisions on how it can be accessed as part of some of the agreements reached under Trump.
But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users [1]
It is irrelevant if the data is stored in the US if Chinese government have tools they can use to search for dissidents, journalists etc
My feelings are very much the opposite. Republicans and Democrats can hardly ever work together to get something positive accomplished. Banning TikTok--an app which is perhaps the largest psyop against the US population in history--is a breath of fresh air.
They are spending their time on this because they know that with a divided Senate and House, there is no bill that will pass without extensive negotiation behind closed doors. While that happens, something has to happen on the floor of the house and senate, so they debate stuff like this, which might get traction, or might not.
>how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm when they're being influenced every day by how they might get shot up in math class?
not only that but you have media outfits literally called "Infowars" operating inside the country basically supporting treasonous activities. I find it absolutely hilarious that imaginary threats from TikTok, for which even the US government cannot find genuine evidence, somehow are more relevant than existing domestic ones. Some of the largest news channels in the country openly publish the kind of propaganda that TikTok is allegedly supposed to boost.
From the outside over the last two decades it honestly looks like 9/11 just broke the US flat out. Ever since then it's been a spiral into paranoia and insecurity with 'foreign adversaries' being blamed for absolutely every self-inflicted stupidity.
Oh my gosh, I feel for you. I'm Irish, still in Ireland, a lifelong pacifist, and have nothing but the deepest respect for your duty and honour to and for your country. And from a distance I must agree with you.
Yes, in the supposed Great Game this is simply a mole being whacked, a performative exercise that does nothing to solve any of the problems and shoddily disguises these in puerile emnity.
Yet and all, The US Senate is still and nonetheless one of the most powerful and wayward legislative bodies in our species' history.
You have a direct part in your Senate, albeit at the length of another's arm, and so you still have this power.
I'm at risk of rambling, but you are still a citizen of one of the greatest nations, and you should have more than hope. I take your two bucks and give it to a beggar, as their need is greater than either of ours.
Please, if you are willing and brave, and as you have served your country we know you are willing and brave, get into Politics. Good people working together is the best way of making things better
I think this is exactly the manifestation of social media's influence on a person's view on America. I came from another country and lived in America now. If we watch the news from social media, you will inevitably get the sense that the country is in decline: guns out of control, sky-rocketing house and medical expense, non-functioning government etc.
In reality, you take for granted the freedom that you enjoy here, protected by the US military, constitution and rule of law. People in many other countries would go to great lengths to just have what you have.
I agree that gun control is a serious issue, but this TikTok thing can easily cause many more suicides among teenagers if we don't ban it, the scale of harm is much higher than school shootings.
If you have a problem with that, why limit this to TikTok?
Not that it isn't at least a little reasonable to be wary of adversaries having access to a data collection platform, but the problem also gets meaningfully less substantial in general if you put meaningful limits on these companies' capacity to grow and eat each other in the name of building empires of surveillance capitalism.
Meta in particular is pushing hard on that angle while hand-waving away the fact that Facebook has a history of treating society as a large-scale experiment. It's manipulated users' mental health on purpose, meddled in elections by selling users' data directly to campaigners, and furthered incitements of everything from genocides abroad to the attack on the Capitol. They're feeding into attacks that single out TikTok specifically, as part of a broader pattern that Facebook and Zuckerberg personally have exhibited of trying to buy or clone nearly anything that represents competition. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp. They tried to buy Snapchat. They've lifted the primary functionality of several large competitors, ranging from disappearing messages to basically all of Reels.
Instead of just taking the blunt-instrument approach of banning social media platforms from within the borders of specific foreign countries, we arguably should be having an entirely different conversation about banning the business practices that make TikTok a problem.
1) It's just a lot harder from the legislation's perspective.
2) Other social medias are mainly profit driven, any negative social impact is mainly side effect due to misalignment of incentives. But TikTok is much more likely to intentionally act in a malicious way, so I think the risk not comparable here.
It's worse than you think. This bill isn't really about Tik Tok. Read the fine print: people caught using a VPN could be thrown in jail for 20 years! It's about giving govt unchecked authority to throw people in jail.
Because it doesn't say it. It instead lays out a series of new designations and powers handed to the President. Specifically the President can now designate new kinds of national security threats and demand various mitigations to stop them. Anyone who does not obey is facing fines and prison time.
So for example, President Biden could designate TikTok a national security threat under the RESTRICT Act, and then order VPN companies to block outbound traffic to TikTok. If the VPN companies refused they would be liable.
Don't blame yourself for not finding it, I had the same reaction last night. The libertarians who caught onto this are not very good at explaining themselves to people who don't care.
I've read the bill and while I'm not a fan for more general reasons, it doesn't say anything like this at all. The bill is strictly about foreigners from designated US "adversaries" having an ownership stake in large technology companies operating in the US. The text cherry picked in some of these news articles is just a list of the types of technology companies the bill specifies should be the prioritized when evaluating which foreign owned companies should be scrutinized.
The problem is the bill creates a new secretary's office reporting directly to the president. This secretary is unaccountable to any voters and can designate any party as an adversary. Sure, it starts with only PRC, Iran, DPRK, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, etc, the typical "baddies" but the secretary can change the list to include any entity, foreign or domestic, at any time.
Then they can fine $250K and up to 20 years in jail if a US person attempts to access banned content. If a US person uses a VPN to try to circumvent this ban the fine increases to $1M.
It also enables them to use all devices on your private network, including routers, wifi APs, webcams, video cameras, smart speakers, etc, to spy on US citizens and persons without any warrant and no recourse for people that are spied on. They can spy on you and surveil your entire digital and physical life and you cannot do anything about it.
This is basically the PATRIOT act for the Internet. It makes it so this new, unaccountable government agency, who meets in secret and is not subject to FOIA, can ban any website, content, or entity they want online, then spy on and jail US persons who might try to access it.
It's pure evil and puts us in the same place that China is today.
The intent there is to deal with people trying to get around the provision via intermediary holding companies. At its core there still must be some ownership stake or controlling interest by a foreign national, whether direct or indirect.
Edit: the key parts of the bill that specify it applies only for controlling interests:
> Sec 2-2: CONTROLLING HOLDING.—The term “controlling holding” means a holding with the power, whether direct or indirect and whether exercised or not exercised, to determine, direct, or decide important matters affecting an entity.
> Sec 2-3-a (emphasis mine): COVERED HOLDING.—The term “covered holding”— means [...] a controlling holding held, directly or indirectly, in an ICTS covered holding entity by— [...]
Hm, I think the national security concerns are far heftier here than kids being influenced. ByteDance can be forced to do almost anything by the CCP. Sure, American tech companies might be forced to do things by the American govt but theoretically there are checks / balances / rule of law to prevent misuse.
On the kids' manipulation -- even though that's not the main intent and American social media co's influence kids as well -- I'd still argue it's significant. A foreign adversary can control how your population thinks... it almost speaks for itself.
If you think China controlling the minds of Americans through Tik-Tok is a legitimate threat, do you think American minds aren't already controlled by the US government through every other form of media? And which is the bigger threat?
I mean, at least China might actually criticize American government and policy, which is something America's so-called "free press" is no longer capable of. I say give Americans a healthy dose of propaganda from all sides and let the market decide!
Do you actually want Americans to have their own free will and choice? Hah, you wish. Only thing we can get is propagandized version neatly created by mass media conglomerates.
I don't really understand what it is about you being an expat for 5 years that gives you unique insight into this situation. Do you happen to be an expat in China, where Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, google, et al have all been banned for more than 5 years and tit for tat is long overdue? Are you also aware that the twin app Douyin bans content for domestic consumption that gets promoted in global TikTok?
> There are only so many hours that congress has to make real decisions ... and this, this is what they spent their time on? Talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm when they're being influenced every day by how they might get shot up in math class?
What do you think causes kids to shoot up their math class?
Kids getting pissed off and anyone able to walk into a store and buy a gun, without knowing how to use it or store it properly… but that’s just a guess.
It’s illegal to sell guns to minors in even deep red states like Tennessee. And the percentage of households with guns (where kids can get access to them) has declined dramatically, from 47% in 1973 to 31% in 2014. https://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gu...
Except mass shootings are much more prevalent now than they were in the 1970s. If you see the dependent variable going up as your proposed independent variable is going down, that raises questions about your theory of causation.
Also, America’s current rate of household gun ownership is about the same as Canada, Norway, and Switzerland in the 1990s: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1485564/pdf/cma... (p. 1723). France and Finland were in the low -20s, not exactly disarmed. But our current homicide rate (65 per million) is more than double Canada’s, five times higher than Norway’s, and six times higher than Switzerland’s rates when those countries had similar percentages of households with guns as america does now.
There’s a big difference between gun ownership in those countries vs the US. In those countries, you can’t just toss loaded guns in your glove box (with the safeties off!) like I’ve seen some of my American friends do. Americans have literally zero training on how to use the weapons they own.
The majority of americans agree with this decision. You may not like it but HN audience is very tech savvy and is influenced by popular thinking in tech.
The sentiment against assamge, patriot act, even the iraq war was popular at the time.
Now I have tried to make a rational argument for this ban but all I got was downvotes even bots/people downvoting every unrelated thing I post probably including this post.
You need to engage in polite discourse with others and change their minds not complain about the government.
And believe me when I say, having seen how things are in other countries, as bad as things are in the US I wouldn't trade it for any other country.
You've all chosen to whine in your bubbles instead of a healthy debate. Enjoy the result.
Is it terrifying? How did you feel when the US yanked Grindr away from a chinese holding company? How about when operation chokehold strangled the sex work industry? How about when the US yanked Merck away from its german parent company?
Apathy, learned helplessness, inaction, cult-like fervor, magical thinking, pan-colonial ambitions, and inability to fund or defend itself lead a society to ruin.
The thing is that every 8-12 generations (250+-50 years), a civilization must rework or recommit itself or it slides into decline and decay.
No rampant conservative moral panic crusade, violent upheaval, civil war, or totalitarian junta can rebuild what divides left or right, or rebalances fewer haves and many more have nots.
They're compounding problems, we have alarming increases in teenage depression rates (especially amongst girls), and there's some correlation with the rise of social media as well as other things like school shootings.
I agree with you that there are more important things, but we do lots at once. Honestly if shooting up congresspeople, kindergartners, and kindergartners shooting teachers hasn't changed anything in regards to guns... I don't know what will.
This isn't really about protecting kids anyway though, it's mostly fearmongering about China, which is one of the rare things most of our legislature agrees on these days.
Isn’t Instagram the bigger issue for depression among american teenagers according to scientific research? You gonna ban it as well or not because it’s american company so it can bend over for CIA/NSA/FBI as they please?
To me it’s a beginning of the end of American technology - and cultural - dominance.
Some other country created something we couldn’t: a social media app that appeals to Gen-Z. Our domestic industry tried and failed to clone it. So we banned it.
It's simple for me really. The threat of the nefarious and corrupted Chinese government lurking has caused the US government to react.
Call US government whatever you want in another conversation, but China has a direct line to every user of Tiktok, and we don't know they plan to leverage that against US interests. Their hail mary with Tiktok could cause a social collapse if they engineered it like how the Russians engineered English social media for the last 7 years.
“Why are we talking about X when we could be talking about Y” is some classic whataboutism. You really seem to be trying to push a pro China agenda by discounting the importance of this.
You’re stance on this is actually “I don’t believe that the CCP would try to harm the US population”. I can tell that is your stance because if it wasn’t then you are effectively saying “I believe the CCP may potentially feed the US population mental-illness-inducing content via targeted algorithms, but I don’t think it’s worth caring about and we should be mad that lawmakers are even trying to do anything about it.”
I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about something meaningless here. If you believe that there is a chance of the CCP doing something nefarious with their Golden Shares power, then that’s a pretty big deal.
And now this low brow distraction is on top (at least for me), even above the next comment which has very insightful information about the content of the bill.
But in any case, given that AI and automation will soon make the majority of US workers economically unnecessary, it's more important than ever for the powers-that-be to ban end-to-end encryption and guns and maintain full control over social media. Otherwise, the obsolete workers may resist their obsolescence and cause problems for capital instead of being gracefully attrited from society.
yieldcrv explains the substantive nature of this joke: OP believes that people have their priorities wrong in the face of surprise death matters, pointing out opinionated gender inclusion logic that also has not permeated universally outside of the US would be another example of prioritizing in the face of surprise death matters
The Congressional Hearing was a clown show, but there are hugely material issues of National Security and trade parity to contend with.
China is putting itself on a direct 'war footing' path with respect to Taiwan and the likelihood of conflict is worriesome. That conflict will make Ukraine look like a side show, and will involve Japan, Korea, Philippines, Australia, US - and incidentally Vietnam, Singapore, Canada - and everyone will be affected.
For example the CCP has made deep inroads in influencing Canadian politics along a number of vectors.
Xi's stated policy (and what we can infer from actual behaviour) is that 'all assets are geared towards state objectives) and that will 100% include TikTok - to varying degrees.
Even from purely a 'trade parity' perspective, outside countries would simply not be allowed to have the kinds of influence in China that they somehow expect in other states and that there are bunch of conflating factors there as well.
And most of that applies to pretty much all Western nations, and frankly, a bunch of others that would be powerless to do anything anyhow.
I think the only reasonable solution would be to have TikTok sold off and run separately, from Singapore, US, or any place with commercial, regulatory, judicial transparency etc..
It was hilarious to watch clueless clowns in Congress, but I think that was mostly a populist display for the general population so that the 'creator furor' is tempered to some extent by the headlines they read on CNN, Fox, MSNBC etc..
Yeah, I'd be skeptical that an event like a Congressional hearing with a 5 min format per speaker was ever going to really drill down into nuanced issues, if only by nature of the time limit.
You underestimate the affect of Tiktok (and other social media) on the mental health of kids, not to mention how easily it can spread ideology. The relationship between those things and school shootings shouldn't need any explanation. I think your view on this is extremely narrow.
I had a meeting last summer with some Americans and I jokingly said “meh, it’s a free country.” They all quickly pointed out that it wasn’t, any more.
I still have family there and still visit for nearly a month out of the year. The number of people running red lights has gone up significantly the last few visits. To the point where I feel like I’m driving in Bali and not the US. People are more rude now than they used to be, and scared.
It took months after moving here to brush off the fear you have living in the US. Fear of the government taking your kid because your neighbor gets pissed off, fear of car accidents, fear of getting pulled over, fear of getting stabbed/shot while walking down the street, fear of seeing someone else getting stabbed/shot, fear of getting fired for no reason, fear of going to the hospital or getting seriously sick because even if you survive, you’re going to be broke af.
I’ve had cops plant evidence in my car, I’ve been hit by trucks running red lights, I’ve gotten in a knife fight with a hobo, I’ve been shot at on the highway, I’ve been fired for no reason, I’ve gotten in a motorcycle accident that fucked me over seven ways to Sunday.
I haven’t had to worry about any of those things since leaving. Not a one.
> I’ve had cops plant evidence in my car, I’ve been hit by trucks running red lights, I’ve gotten in a knife fight with a hobo, I’ve been shot at on the highway, I’ve been fired for no reason, I’ve gotten in a motorcycle accident that fucked me over seven ways to Sunday.
While I think I can understand many of your feelings about US culture, I'm a bit lost here. I was married to a US citizen and have lived a significant amount of time there, although never settled permanently. But I never experienced any of these things, nor felt an overwhelming need to worry about them. Is it something about your chosen lifestyle?
(For context, I have also lived and worked in a place where many of my neighbours employed armed guards to sit at their gates. And I watched from my office window as an armed bank robbery took place across the way. It ended with corpses lying in the street. And I was far more worried when dealing with police there than in any of my several US interactions with them. Think the US is bad? Well, in some ways it is... but it could be a lot worse.)
> I’ve had cops plant evidence in my car, I’ve been hit by trucks running red lights, I’ve gotten in a knife fight with a hobo, I’ve been shot at on the highway, I’ve been fired for no reason, I’ve gotten in a motorcycle accident that fucked me over seven ways to Sunday.
Are you quite sure you're not misremembering an action movie for your own experiences? Living in America is not even remotely this exciting for most people. T-boned in intersections not just by a truck, but multiple trucks? Shootouts on the highway and knife fights with bums? Are you Neo from the Matrix?
Your experience is not everyones experience. For example, the country you describe has 0% resemblance to the one I know. Why should your experience matter more than mine?
Are you actually proposing that your experiences are in some way typical ?
Every American expat I know has a similar-ish process where they have to get over the fear/anxiety from living in the US. It’s a proper dinner topic. So yes, I assume it’s typical. Perhaps not 1:1, but there are always similar elements.
Edit to add: everyone says they never noticed it while living there. They only noticed it after the first few months/years when it was no longer present.
I don't think that other countries have had their social fabric broken down quite as far as Americans have. A big part of American fear is knowing that nearly every single person you interact with that isn't a friend of yours doesn't really consider you their "people". No matter what ethnicity or social class you come from, if you leave the house you're going to spend a lot of time around people that don't feel any particular loyalty to you, and you end up always watching your back. Can't trust the cops, can't trust the poor people, can't trust the rich people, don't know your neighbors that well, just keep your eyes on your phone.
(This isn't just a skin color thing, even white people in America have such diverse in-cultures that it feels bizarre to speak to some of them. Go down five houses in a richer white neighborhood and you will not typically find neighbors that share really common understanding among one another.)
Does your anecdote include the immigrant experience? You are perhaps describing the experience of a Lebanese in Lebanon, or a German in Germany. What about everyone else?
> A big part of American fear is knowing that nearly every single person you interact with that isn't a friend of yours doesn't really consider you their "people".
The other side of this coin: America actually accepts people from other places. Most of the world will always see you as foreign if you come from abroad, even if you have lived there your whole life.
I don't think America accepts immigrants; in most places there's a pleasant apathy toward them. You're not really considered "American" by most born here unless you're born here and have the accent, and even then people are understood to belong primarily to their own ethnic group.
The American ideal is now a civic society that's not predicated on the idea of having a "people" who the nation-state is created for. Citizens still often think that they have a "people", but that delineation does not extend to all Americans. As an example a second-gen Mexican person is not particularly likely to consider me part of their "clan" even though we are both American. When everyone's foreign, no one is.
> I don't think America accepts immigrants; in most places there's a pleasant apathy toward them. You're not really considered "American" by most born here
Not been my experience in NYC and other places. Quite the opposite. Also have you seen European integration of foreigners up close? Middle East? Asia?
My guess is no, because these places make it far more difficult to assimilate (if not impossible)
I have seen non-American "integration" of foreigners, in Europe, Middle East, Asia, etc. In these places there are much more distinct mono-cultures relating to race than there are in the US. What is the dominant culture in NYC? Yuppie white Midwestern transplants? Orthodox Jews? Blue collar Italian and Irish descendents? American blacks? Mexican immigrants? All of these groups have very different standards for demeanor and behavior. In this way, these groups of "New Yorkers" collectively permit "assimilation" because there isn't really anything in particular to assimilate into. As long as you follow the law and spend a lot of money, people typically won't be that unkind to you or treat you in a way you'd recognize as a "foreigner", because they already treat everyone as a bit of a "foreigner".
I suspect we're disagreeing over what it means to "assimilate" or "be accepted as" one of an ethnic group. Imagine a stirring speech where a speaker says "I have dreamed of a respite from the trials our people have undergone". When the audience hears "our people", they are going to think of a certain group that they imagine themselves belonging to. In America, a miniscule fraction of the population thinks of "everyone who is legally an American" when they hear the phrase "our people".
However, some other place like Paris, the massive city-state of the white Franks, has a carefully guarded culture that they gatekeep as a majority ethnic group. You can live in France, and you can speak French, but you can't "become French" because many of the people who call themselves "French" think specifically of white Frankish/Gaulish/Roman descendents. That's just not happening in major American cities.
> In these places there are much more distinct mono-cultures relating to race than there are in the US.
So, ghettos. I'm not saying there's not a "little Italy" in most American cities, but a Turkish person living in Germany their whole life is still Turkish. American in Japan, same. These places don't even allow the possibility of assimilation.
Or as my English friend put it, "there's a difference between tolerance and acceptance."
> Every American expat I know has a similar-ish process where they have to get over the fear/anxiety from living in the US.
So your selection bias includes only people that have made the decision to leave. Do you not see the issue ?
Even if you didn't select into people who left presumably for a reason, this is still an anecdote. It's your opinion, your reality. It's not shared.
For example, I have an anecdote of living in the EU. It's cloudy 10 months out of the year, everywhere except in the south. No one told me that. Winters were harsh. Foreigners in general were not accepted, most social interactions were with other ex-pats. Salary was much lower and that limited my ability to buy property and save for retirement.
I could go on. But what I wouldn't do is broadcast all of this as if it's some kind of universal truth. It's just my experience.
I have experienced this every time I go out if the country for two weeks and come back. Main thing I notice is the fear I sense in people whenever cops are nearby, and definitely the sense of this security state hovering over everyone. The feeling of personal freedom I have feels like it gets wrenched away whenever I enter the US. The talk of freedom in America is basically cope for having no personal freedom. Wherever you go there's some security fuck hovering around watching and waiting for you to fuck up.
> Main thing I notice is the fear I sense in people whenever cops are nearby, and definitely the sense of this security state hovering over everyone.
As someone that has lived in a police state before, I can't tell you that your feelings in the US aren't valid. They are yours alone. But perhaps travel somewhere were actual security forces search you randomly, harass you for no reason, etc. Experiences I have never had in the US, not once.
I don't need to hear some bullshit about how hard you've had it in some random country, could not give a shit. At least we are not in Nazi Germany lol is not something I'll care about.
I don't care about the "perspective" of some shithole country, just like I don't care about the perspective of some caveman complaining about how Ugg was mean to him or whatever.
> Main thing I notice is the fear I sense in people whenever cops are nearby, and definitely the sense of this security state hovering over everyone
You should know what that feels like, when it actually occurs. Similarly when someone rushes to declare their country has become "Nazi Germany", they ought to read a history book or two.
Honestly this just sounds entirely made up. It seems surreal to me that you live your life in fear, of what? The United States? Either that or you’re extremely over exaggerating.
You will of course, in the name of gender equality, monitor how many women vote each way on this bill, right? Were you even aware that women are allowed in Congress?
It's more about levelling the playing field. While FB, IG, YouTube, New York Times, etc. are blocked in the PRC, TikTok are allowed to operate freely in the U.S.
My son's cousin (who lives in the US) was talking to him about 'gun drills' and my son asked, 'what is that, do you get to practice shooting a gun? That sounds fun!'
To us, this was a funny question, to my sister-in-law ... she was like 'wtaf.' I can't imagine having my son worried about that kind of stuff and I can't imagine the internal stress. That's why I said 'might' because it 'might' be normalized to the point that it's just background noise; a joke. Until it isn't.
My son and his friends run around in the streets like when I was a kid; they don't stop until the street lights come on. I could never take that away from him, and I feel like if we were to move back to the US, I would be doing that.
And before that it was the TV, and before that it was the radio, and before that it was the newspaper, and before that it was the printing press, and so on. Nothing new under the sun.
Personally glad someone in congress is paying attention to the dangers of surveillance capitalism. Once TikTok is addressed, hopefully it will give them the toehold to expand rights to citizens no matter the company.
Don't worry, it's just a first step. After this, they will more easily be able to ban any public media not accepting direct government requests for censorship (or censorship immunity) and reduction of reach (or artificial boosting of reach.)
That this is auxiliary to US goals to antagonize China is the sugar. The real goal is to continue the progress made when when breakaway Trump-supporting networks like Parler were directly attacked by Congress, and app stores informally threatened if they wouldn't ban them. Twitter is being continuously threatened by Congress just because they changed ownership from movement Democrats to an "independent" rich guy.
TikTok will be the precedent. It's obviously just racist to attack TikTok alone; in order to retroactively make it not racist, it's important to attack companies that amplify Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or Palestinian messages, the alt-left, the alt-right, or anyone that might inspire disloyalty to the homeland. Which is why Homeland Security will be overseeing social media.
> they might get shot up in math class?
The safest place that a child is at all day is at school (home and family are far more dangerous), and more people die in a day in Ukraine or (until fairly recently) Yemen, or because asthma inhalers were re-patented in the US through active corruption and their price went from $5 to $75, than have ever died in a school shooting. Middle class paranoia is being exploited by dragging the discussion of 6 deaths in this suburb, 10 deaths in that suburb, over years, with public wailing and gnashing of teeth, energetic and aggressive shaming of dissenters (with state support), and constant press releases from an industry that relies on advocacy for income.
Upper-middle class liberals can only be focused on issues that affect them directly, which is why gun control (and gun rights, classical liberals are liberals too) is an easy way to manipulate them. I wish they could be pushed back to important things, like our failed healthcare system that will ruthlessly bankrupt them with the slightest provocation.
Gun control pandering is just Republican law & order pandering in a Democratic style. It's pretending that there's some magical incantation that will make desperate people both not violent, and also not easy targets for violence and exploitation. The solution is systemic infrastructure, rather than distraction. I'd take a school shooting that kills 6 every week in exchange for a compassionate, functional healthcare system. It's 300 lives versus hundreds of thousands of lives.
edit: Americans live in a country that shut down most public mental health care from 2008-2010.
You don't see anything wrong with all that data being slurped up by the communist regime of China? That's the main reason behind all of this. Nothing to do with "kids attention".
I grew up in a time that there were 0.~ kids per year getting murdered in school. School was a 'safe place' (insofar you weren't a target for bullies). A place to have fun and learn things. The first time that happened, where a school was shot up. It literally (collectively) fucked us up for days/weeks.
I'm not advocating for guns to be taken away, I believe that ship sailed a couple hundred years ago. But Americans need to get their shit together, that's for sure.
I agree with your comment but if you think banning TikTok is about stopping China's psyops you are not paying attention. This is protectionism for the US social media industry. Removing American made content from TikTok will also make it less appealing for other western countries as it will have less of the wealthy empire-grown "influencers" everyone loves, hence giving an alternative to US alternatives by Google/Facebook/Snap to cut into their market.
China can psyops on any social media platform, Tencent owned Reddit for longer than anyone in congress has been worried about this only that no US based Reddit competitor makes enough money to pay for national security lobbyists in DC.
Psyops is fun, and fairly close to some of the stuff I had fun with in the military. But to say I have any political ideology that fits into a box, is rather funny.
Don't worry about the US. It is still the greatest country and will remain so for at least 50 years.
It's reddit/HN who have never traveled or lived outside US that has jaded your view of US.
You know which country released chatGPT? or NVIDIA A100 or made a huge step towards Quantum Computing / Nuclear Fusion?
I'd rather congress focus on irrelevant details, while startups solve / tackle important issues. When it really comes to it, Congress will get their act together, but anything before is pure meddling in one of the greatest systems that is producing unbelievable innovations at an alarming rate.
It’s a pretty decent country. Beautiful even. Very obviously not the greatest country (or were you being sarcastic?).
I have some jaded views. Perhaps my jading moment was when my unit was used as a political pawn by Obama to get re-elected. That pissed me off to no end and broke my rose colored glasses.
I sincerely miss US startups sometimes. I work at a startup here and they actually (somehow) have a work/life balance, 20 days paid vacation, and other perks with no gimmicks, like a chef who cooks us lunch every day, but no shenanigans (like “unlimited” vacations that aren’t actually unlimited).
I (sometimes) miss working weekends and impossible deadlines while devouring cheap pizza and passing out on the couch. But there’s a good chance even US startups have evolved in the last ten years… but the last US startup I worked at in the early teens was like that. My then-girlfriend-now-wife would come hang out with us nerds for dinner before we got back to work. Hell, I fixed a rare database issue on my honeymoon because everyone else was asleep and I wasn’t while my new wife cussed out my CEO on the phone. He ordered us a really nice bottle wine from the hotel, so I can’t complain…
Meh, maybe I don’t miss it, but you make some valuable points.
> Don't worry about the US. It is still the greatest country and will remain so for at least 50 years.
That's a shortsighted and very optimistic viewpoint, dripping with typical American pride.
You're underestimating just how much damage foreign propaganda and misinformation can do and has done to your great country. Trump getting to power, and still being a strong contender for 2024, mass delusion and rising popularity of conspiracy theories (QAnon, pizzagate, etc.), record-high social unrest and division, racial tensions, protests, marches, insurrections, etc.
And this is just starting to unravel.
The ironic thing is that all that great technology built by the US, allowing everyone to join, connecting the world and whatnot, has been the perfect weapon of information warfare. You've essentially built the weapons, and handed them to your enemies, and are somehow still debating if that's the case, and what to do about it. This confused state is indicative of the effects of psyops, where the afflicted adversary doesn't understand the situation they're in, or how they got there. An ex-KGB agent explained this well way back in 1985[1].
The East certainly has an advantage, considering they've been doing this for decades now, and Western influence on their own population is close to zero, because of their isolation from the internet.
Banning TikTok is a good defensive measure, but it's too little, too late, to reverse the damage already done, and to stop the bleeding. The US would have to do a major shakeup and banning of foreign accounts across all social media sites, and judging by the reactions on this well educated forum alone, that wouldn't fly with the general population, who perceive this as an infringement on free speech.
EDIT: Ah, it seems the bill is broader than just banning TikTok. Good, it might be the only playable move. Unfortunately, it requires more government oversight at the expense of some civil liberties, and I can already see how unpopular this will be.
Buckle up, it's going to get even bumpier. I suspect the US in its current dominant position won't last more than a couple of decades, at most. Funny that with all its untouchable military power, it's completely defenseless against this type of attack.
Did anyone notice that the bill doesn't even mention Tiktok??? If it's a "bill to ban TikTok" why doesn't it name the target?
It's a red herring.
This is the Patriot Act for the Internet. Ironically they're copying the CCP playbook and want the same level of sweeping control with the implementation of a Great Firewall. It's extremely broad and includes everything connected to the internet that has >1M users in a year period.
Because it's unconstitutional to make a law that targets a specific person or company. They have to be subtle and use generic terms to describe who is affected by the law in a way where TikTok ends up being the only company that qualifies right now.
It's also good practice because it prevents TikTok from just making a new company that is exactly the same.
Edit: changed illegal to unconstitutional because someone below was confused.
It is not illegal for Congress to target specific products. I do not know where you got that impression. Laws can be deemed unconstitutional upon review, but Congress literally defines what is legal or not.
> The constitution explicitly bans bills of attainder so any law targeting a specific person or company will be struck down.
The law must be both specific and punitive to be a bill of attainder. A law can nonpunitively regulate a “class of one” without being a Bill of Attainder. See, Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977). [0] So, it is not quite accurate that “any law targeting a specific person or company will be struck down”.
OTOH, a “TikTok ban” based on asserted prior misconduct would pretty surely be seen as punitive.
> A bill of attainder (also known as an act of attainder or writ of attainder or bill of penalties) is an act of a legislature declaring a person, or a group of people, guilty of some crime, and punishing them, often without a trial. As with attainder resulting from the normal judicial process, the effect of such a bill is to nullify the targeted person's civil rights, most notably the right to own property (and thus pass it on to heirs), the right to a title of nobility, and, in at least the original usage, the right to life itself.
Within the US...
> In 2011, the House voted to defund Planned Parenthood. Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler called that vote a bill of attainder, saying it was unconstitutional as such because the legislation was targeting a specific group.
With that in mind, calling out a specific company gets dicy.
Thus, they are instead written as:
(3) COVERED HOLDING.—The term “covered holding”—
(A) means, regardless of how or when such holding was or will be obtained or otherwise come to have been held, a controlling holding held, directly or indirectly, in an ICTS covered holding entity by—
(i) a foreign adversary;
(ii) an entity subject to the jurisdiction of, or organized under the laws of, a foreign adversary; or
(iii) an entity owned, directed, or controlled by an entity described in subparagraphs (i) or (ii); and
(B) includes any other holding, the structure of which is designed or intended to evade or circumvent the application of this Act, subject to regulations prescribed by the Secretary.
...
(10) ICTS COVERED HOLDING ENTITY.—The term “ICTS covered holding entity” means any entity that—
(A) owns, controls, or manages information and communications technology products or services; and
(B) (i) has not less than 1,000,000 United States-based annual active users at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President; or
(ii) for which more than 1,000,000 units have been sold to persons in the United States before the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President.
From my cursory reading of the bill, it says (a) if a foreign adversary has control or interest in a piece of hardware or software or IOT (b) and that hardware software IOT touches or has data for more than 1,000,000 persons in any given year (c) the Secretary needs to decide if it should be banned or do something about it.
I understand that any bill can be abused. But IMO this bill reads like common sense.
>(2) INAPPLICABILITY OF FOIA.—Any information submitted to the Federal Government by a party to a covered transaction in accordance with this Act, as well as any information the Federal Government may create relating to review of the covered transaction, is exempt from disclosure under section 552 of title 5, United States Code (commonly referred to as the “Freedom of Information Act”).
Not all records are required to be released under the FOIA. Congress established nine exemptions from disclosure for certain categories of information to protect against certain harms, such as an invasion of personal privacy, or harm to law enforcement investigations. The FOIA authorizes agencies to withhold information when they reasonably foresee that disclosure would harm an interest protected by one of these nine exemptions.
Exemption 1: Information that is classified to protect national security.
Exemption 2: Information related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency.
Exemption 3: Information that is prohibited from disclosure by another federal law.
Exemption 4: Trade secrets or commercial or financial information that is confidential or privileged.
Exemption 5: Privileged communications within or between agencies, including those protected by the:
Deliberative Process Privilege (provided the records were created less than 25 years before the date on which they were requested)
Attorney-Work Product Privilege
Attorney-Client Privilege
Exemption 6: Information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual’s personal privacy.
Exemption 7: Information compiled for law enforcement purposes that:
7(A). Could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings
7(B). Would deprive a person of a right to a fair trial or an impartial adjudication
7(C). Could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy
7(D). Could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source
7(E). Would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law
7(F). Could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual
Exemption 8: Information that concerns the supervision of financial institutions.
Exemption 9: Geological information on wells.
While this is stating that it clearly falls under exemption 3 without any interpretation needed, the various parts of exemption 7 may also apply (consider the question of if a Chinese national provided the information - would it fall under 7F?)
From a layman's reading of the bill, it would require ISPs to set up bans for arbitrary foreign websites, and it would impose harsh penalties on entities enabling any bypass. Whether it is used to its fullest extent cannot be known, but if the President wanted to, this bill would allow them to ban any major foreign website and would require companies to effectively set up a firewall. In theory, it could be applied to be even more severe than the Great Firewall, depending on how you interpret certain sections.
1. Hundreds of bills exist in draft form, like this one, and are never passed.
2. There are countless examples of dissidents in China disappeared that amounts to worse than a 20 year prison sentence, which again is part of a bill that remains highly unlikely to pass in its current form.
I would point to actual cases of authoritarian oppression rather than theoretical ones.
Interesting that the senator from Virginia introduced the bill. After all how many of us have a great portion of our traffic being served out of us-east-1?
The TSA violates the 4th amendment millions of times a day. I think that covers both grossly, and negligent.
Here's the full text of 4a, see for yourself:
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There are no exceptions in there for air travel! It's incredibly firmly worded, and is obviously deliberately meant to be very restrictive on government power.
They don't have probable cause to search every single person, let alone a warrant to do so. And their holding people's freedom to travel hostage to do so, and conditioning Americans to a lack of rights that were supposedly enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
The notion that they need to search every single person flying is not remotely "reasonable". It's one more step towards a police state. It's a shame that the 4th amendment isn't defended as strongly as the 1st & 2nd. The patriot act is the reason why flying sucks now when it used to be fantastical.
This just reads like libertarian erotic fanfic. First you write a bad character that is evil at the core, like the TSA, then you write about how it skirts the law knowingly to exact its evil onto the people, and thats by design.
If TSA didn't exist, and airlines were in charge of their own security, every single accident or incident would be blamed on companies trying to raise their profits by cutting costs, and people would be screaming for government to intervene. Just like they are doing currently with Tesla and autopilot.
Also, you don't have to fly if you are going to US. You can drive most places. Flying is using the services of a private company, on their terms, which without TSA would still include TSA like security. If you are going overseas, then it makes sense for security like the TSA because US laws don't apply to other countries.
As an aside, I see more and more reddit-like posts like this on HN - unsubstantiated, baseless wokeposting. Did you guys get tired of your echo chambers on there?
Yes. Between 2003 and 2006, nearly two hundred thousand National Security Letters were issued to obtain personal/financial history of US citizens without any judicial review. This data was only used for one terrorism related conviction, and it is generally considered that this conviction would have happend even without the act.
Why would you expect NSL’s to be used in criminal convictions? What does that have to do with national security?
Isn’t the whole point of an NSL to get something for legitimate national security purposes that couldn’t be legitimately acquired for criminal prosecution?
Well, yeah. The security of Britain's colonies as a wee bit threatened by the War of Independence. The crown very much considered it a crime. But was it wrong?
The media coverage of this (and the title of this submission, which I argue should be changed to the actual title of the bill) are really confusing everyone - both in here and elsewhere.
There is a Senate bill[1] called "S.85 - No TikTok on United States Devices Act", which is very short and seems to only do one thing, and that's ban TikTok. This bill is in committee.
There is another Senate bill[2], called "S.686 - RESTRICT Act", which is the one linked in this submission and is the one everyone is - imo rightly - quite concerned about, because a bunch of stuff seemingly unrelated to TikTok is getting the Department of Homeland Security treatment. TikTok isn't even mentioned in the text of the act. This bill is also in committee.
I'm honestly left wondering if the RESTRICT Act is being intentionally amplified as "The Bill to Ban TikTok", because of how shitty it is, to give people the means to say "no we shouldn't pass this if the cost of banning TikTok is Patriot Act Part Deux", when in reality we shouldn't pass this bill anyway because it sucks.
1. (D) TIMING.—The term “covered transaction” includes a current, past, or potential future transaction.
2. (I) A group, subgroup, or other association or organization whether or not organized for profit. [like an OSS project on github?]
3. (1) IN GENERAL.—It shall be unlawful for a person to violate, attempt to violate, conspire to violate, or cause a violation of any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued under this Act, including any of the unlawful acts described in paragraph (2).
4. SEC. 5. Considerations. [the star of the show - read it]
Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are definitely touching more than 1M personal records and/or providing "communication". They are all subject to this bill. All their "transactions" are now subject to approval of Secretary of Commerce.
For example:
"State-of-the-art end-to-end encryption (powered by the open source Signal Protocol) keeps your conversations secure. We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either. Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Signal works. Every message, every call, every time."
Isn't Signal also subject to this bill? Or better, who isn't subject to this bill?
Will starting/contributing to an OSS project in any of the Sec. 5 areas require consulting an attorney?
The bill only applies to companies where a foreign national from an adversary country has a "controlling holding". i.e., none of the companies you listed or any other American owned company are subject to it at all.
I think the RESTRICT Act is the one being held up as the ban bill because it's bipartisan and considered most likely to 1) actually move to a vote because of that and 2) creates a legal framework for a ban rather than just implementing one which is likely to be unwound by a court and found unconstitutional without it
Courts (especially the current SCOTUS) seem pretty wary of expanding executive authority granted ambiguously under acts like the "International Emergency Economic Powers Act." Just my 2c.
I agree with the sentiment but just wanted to note that this is a legislative bill. often the courts strike down executive action saying that they should get help from Congress, which they're doing here
Yes, and there is some specific text in there or another bill that has a carveout for platforms that promote speech or enable personal communications -- I believe it was originally to protect newspaper and radio but has been interpreted to also include social media platforms
This is a sinophobic media war conflating several ideas:
1. Games, social media, or other personal apps on government devices is a terrible idea. They shouldn't be there to begin with.
2. Making a big deal of banning them from US government devices is a symbolic anti-China move.
3. Banning US consumers from using a particular transnational app. How exactly would that be enforced? How would it not run afoul of the 1st a.? Will the US gov get into the business of banning apps, books, games, and any particular media it doesn't approve of because it didn't happen to originate in America?
4. Forcing a transnational app to either move its data to the US or sell to a US owner. Russia did this and now they're an international pariah. How exactly does this square with laissez-faire free trade?
If the concern is privacy and security, which apply to all social media platforms, then why not pass actual privacy and security laws that would apply equally to all social media platforms, regardless of who currently owns it or may own it in the future?
That's not what the concern of the bill is and it's completely transparent. Just read the first 2 pages of the bill and you can see the concern is, in the words of the bill, a "foreign adversary" and their ability to "sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology products and services in the United States".
It's quite simple - the US and China don't get along.
It's never been about privacy nor internal (to the US) security. It's very openly about cross pacific adversaries. Only meta-tech commentators have tried to apply some weird narrative of privacy.
1. This is a way of getting memes to the masses that we (the US political establishment) can't fully control.
2. Meta and others are getting their asses kicked revenue-wise by Tik Tok. Like any business, they'd use anything they could to fight back. Turns out they can use China fear mongering, so they are.
3. (Added) Believe it or not, there's nationalistic pride here. There is a reluctance to admit that an app from "the other side" (China) is more appealing to the masses than _our_ social media apps. Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas, even though they're far superior to American cars (but at least they're made by Asians who are _allies_ I guess).
No matter that banning an app is completely against the principles we claim, such as freedom for individuals, competition in a free market, and freedom of information.
Actual #1. TikTok is banned in China, but in their similar app (Douyin) their kids are limited to 40min a day and restricted from a lot of the digital opium drip that US kids are receiving in infinite quantities. Sounds like it'd only be fair to follow suit if China itself is limiting the poisoning of their own citizens:
It is mind boggling, and at the same time not surprising at all, that China is enforcing a humane policy to protect its children when we are not willing to do the same.
>It is mind boggling, and at the same time not surprising at all, that China is enforcing a humane policy to protect its children when we are not willing to do the same.
By whose standards? The United States has never been an ideologically cohesive nation outside some basic principles of representative democracy - and even those have been challenged at moments in our history. The moment you get beyond the basics of a unified military, postal service, weights and measures, and currency, you quickly get into the social issues that have plagued our cohesion since the founding of the nation. Is Uncle Tom's Cabin a seminal work in understanding US history, or subversive and dangerous? We can't even decide that as a nation at the moment, so "how much social media is good for our kids?" would be a very, very ugly discussion to have at a national level.
I don't have Tik Tok installed, my kids only get the "reruns" off YouTube, but frankly I find it a bit extremist that the US government wants to ban an app that looks to me like people doing funny dances in their living rooms.
We need to move past the "TikTok = people dancing" stage of discussion.
TikTok has expanded to be the dominant short form video platform for every interest, niche, and micro niche you can imagine that exists, and even ones you can't imagine.
Please anyone reading this comment replace "TikTok = people dancing" with "TikTok = feed + discovery for short form video tailored to your specific interests no matter how niche". Yes this includes programming, science, education, dancing, gaming, cooking, acrobatics, painting, arguing, politics, news, weather, etc. basically anything you can imagine that isn't against their content policies.
That's fair - but if that's the case, how is that actually different from YouTube, Instagram, or any number of other platforms? It appears in two ways:
1) TikTok is really good at what they do.
2) They are a Chinese-owned company.
It certainly feels like if it weren't for #2, they would be praised for their innovation and held up as a great American success story. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be skepticism in the name of national security, but of all the things threatening to destroy the planet on any given day, this feels low on the list.
While I think some of it is the UX, the main thing in TikTok's favour is the massive number of people creating concise, interesting content for it.
YouTube videos are frequently 30-120 seconds of relevant content padded to 10-15 minutes. Most TikTok videos are close to just those 30-120 relevant seconds.
If Congress bans it, they'll probably lose the trust and interest of a massive percentage of Americans under the age of 30.
> feed + discovery for short form video tailored to your specific interests no matter how niche
It is this and also that young people are especially malleable, so content that they see can cause long-term psychological and emotional damage, or--more pertinently to governments' interests--can introduce ideological change that they don't control.
> I don't have Tik Tok installed, my kids only get the "reruns" off YouTube, but frankly I find it a bit extremist that the US government wants to ban an app that looks to me like people doing funny dances in their living rooms.
There is a wide variety of content on TikTok. One category is (tens/hundreds of) thousands of people who watched the Congressional "democracy" theatre on the TikTok ban realizing that their so-called democracy is fake, a laughing stock, pick your pejorative. Millions of people who formerly had no clue, now realize absolutely that what is on the label does not match what is on the tin.
Of course, they could have realized this via other means since it has been the case for ages, but whether they would have is another story.
If I was running an illusory regime, I'd take out TikTok too, it's just old fashioned common sense.
True, I think the political elite made a big mistake, revealing the clowns behind the curtain. The younger generation, even with their default disgruntlement with the system, still might've taken another decade to figure out just how much the emperor has no clothes.
It is also surprising to realize that China and the chinese actually think as a nation and have a sense of collectivism, whereas the US is to each their gun and their million dollars in the bank. China has always had this sense of being one thing, historically, and even the atrocious regimes, emperors, and dictators are always representative of a populace wish to centralize and control things fluidly and efficiently. Who knows, maybe it will work out, even with the price it has that westerners won't ever consider, or ever let go of a philosophical individuality.
...because they killed or chased away any dissenters, now and historically. Look at Taiwan, or Hong Kong, the revolution, or Xinjiang. It isn't some innate characteristic of the Chinese, it is intentional.
Humane by who's standards? Should the government be mandating how to raise children? Maybe the government would think compelling church attendance is a humane policy to protect children. Or we could let parents decide how to raise their kids.
Never mind that the policy here is actually not about protecting children at all, since its banning an app entirely where the vast majority of users are adults.
USA and China have very different societies so the best you could expect in the former is an opt in facility for parents to limit time in an app. Much as I think these apps are the junk food of tech, I still prefer a less authoritarian state.
and b) TikTok is notably worse than American social media.
I, for example, disagree with both. I think the Chinese government is wrong about a lot of things, including the right way to raise kids. And I think TikTok is no worse than Instagram.
> "Only if you think the Chinese goverment is right"
Germany dropped bombs on the UK. The UK responded by dropping bombs on Germany. By responding in kind, was the UK therefore asserting that Germany was 'right' to drop bombs on the UK?
You're taking my statement out of context. I was refuting the claim that China's restrictive social media policy is a justification for a similar US policy.
If the UK justified their actions solely on the basis that because the Germans did it it must be ok that'd be unreasonable. (This isn't the right forum to get into it, but the ethics of civilian saturation bombings are much more complicated and I'm not saying either was in the right, though of course in total Germany was far far worse).
Tit for tat is how wars are fought, not by finding a moral high ground. Like it or not, we are in a economic and information war with China. Bury your head in the sand if you want to lose it.
> Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas, even though they're far superior to American cars (but at least they're made by Asians who are _allies_ I guess).
Both Honda and Toyota build a lot factories in the US, creating a lot of jobs for US Citizens that actually show up to vote. All while American brands move to Mexico, Canada etc.
TikTok might as well be the same as "BigTech" but with the bonus of being Chinese—that is something politicians can work with. I think the root of the problem, though, is we (humans) are easy to manipulate, but I dont even know how we can even begin to tackle that.
I think you're conflating the reasoning of the ban to be against Asians, when in fact it's purely against China. Japanese car manufacturers have done absolutely nothing wrong.
Note that the Reagan administration negotiated “voluntary import quotas” with Japanese car manufacturers in the 1980s when US car manufacturers were being beaten by Japanese brands
You are also ignoring the fact that China does not allow our social media companies to operate in their jurisdiction. So part of this is a sense of fairness. Why do they get to operate here if we can't operate there?
Besides, the problem is already solvable. People could simply stop using TikTok if they agreed that its disadvantages outweigh its benefits. No one is forcing them. This is a vote with your feet issue, plain and simple.
Exactly and young people lack the life experience to comprehend the long-term risks associated with surrendering their private data to the CCP or being exposed to sophisticated disinformation campaigns over time.
So it is incumbent on the govt to protect their long-term interests.
And to also ensure that trade relationships are fair and equitable (which it currently isnt).
I'm a parent, I guide my kiddos when rationality escapes them. The process itself, parent-child, teaches them how to make their own decisions. Governments can't teach people how to make their own decisions.
The statement that trade relationships must be fair is some sort of neoliberal mumbo jumbo. I don't accept it as an assumption or a consequence. You can accept it as axiomatic if you want, but I don't see it as a consequence of any valid logical train of thought.
The idea of open markets is that no player is given favorable treatment by the government. If you allow a player that comes from a country that treats its citizens as human farms, I wouldn't call that open markets.
The two statements just don't logically follow. A better argument would be that the US, in an effort to improve human rights, sets a minimum threshold for market participation at the level of nations. Unfortunately, that's not the argument being made.
Open markets mean what it says on the tin - markets without barrier. Saying, "We're barring actors for entering the market for reason X," means closed markets even is X is "treating people poorly."
China never claimed that they value freedom, (whatever you define as freedom). They value harmony instead, (whatever you define as harmony).
By US banning TikTok, US is acting against claimed values, turning out to be hypocrite. China, by banning US social media, doesn't. Might be seen unfair, but it is a dead end that US painted itself into.
For the sake of argument, _if_ we agree that banning is OK, EU should ban social media from both, and subsidize their own the same way as US subsidized theirs.
>Meta getting its ass kicked is a happy bonus for both political parties.
Frankly, it should get this treatment. Its executives have been consistently hostile toward government inquiries and in public statements about its users. The hubris it has shown in its treatment on political speech and disdain for paid advertisers is revolting. The stock structure of the company is a physical manifestation of everything wrong - we can treat the public and the law with disdain and you can't touch us.
Those aren't really relevant to the topic of Chinese ownership, unless you believe the government told TikTok to actively promote those videos. The stupid destruction trends seem organic to me, and did not require CCP interference.
Tiktok is not just a dumb video host. They chose the content they show to users. And the content their system is shoving in users faces is destructive.
Are you saying there are engineers sitting behind their laptops who upvote the "bathroom destruction" trend in some kind of global dashboard? You sound very certain about the degree of control they have over recommendation systems.
We have proved time and time again that governments have propaganda and astroturfing teams deployed on all major social media, why is it so hard to believe that CCP through TikTok has a mechanism to promote some content over another?
I am no conspiracy theorist, but at some point we need to accept the countless proof we keep reading about tech used maliciously once your app reaches a significant mass of users, especially if those users live in a country you are in a bona-fide economic war with.
Some degree of skepticism is healthy, but propaganda thrives any time a skeptic dismisses valid concerns.
Make no mistake, they let everything sensational trend until it makes the news because it makes them look edgy to a younger audience and that makes them lots of money... Covering your tracks is easy when there's no algorithm/operational transparency.
Social media is the puts when it comes to moral bankruptcy... It is a casino based on popularity, and so many people are dumping money into it on a regular basis that it's really too late to do anything to stem the way it manipulates our world. Congressional action is far too late and futile to the maximum in encouraging any sort of ethics, they did nothing with all the damning evidence presented about Facebook, The only reason they'd ban TikTok is to satisfy the anti-competitive lobby of US competitors if you ask me.
TilTok is a corrupt platform nonetheless, and I really wouldn't be sad if it got banned, the basis of it has already infected everything else, including YouTube to the point of useless overload, so the entire ideal of going viral and getting paid on platforms is actually way past anything meaningful any more.
I’m not saying they specifically coded in a “bathroom destruction” function, but they coded a function which results in promoting destruction videos more than any platform before it.
The amount of brainrot content that tiktok pushes is staggering. The other video platforms don’t come close.
Toyota and Honda both assemble cars here in the US and have a huge network of US-based suppliers. No one believes that those companies operate under Japanese government direction nor that the Japanese government has the ability to influence company management to the degree the CCP clearly can with TikTok. It is well documented that the "Golden Shares" owned by the CCP and the board seat on they have give them fundamental control of the company.
Saying that the CCP is in control due to board seats is a bad reason. China gives CCP membership to the top students in schools, and most people try and join the CCP if they can. The people that make up the tops of companies are most likely to be CCP members because of the fact that highly driven people are most likely to be in or join the CCP. Yes the Chinese government has a lot of control, but members of the CCP being on the board is nonsense. It is extra nonsense when you consider how many US companies have government members on the board. Condoleezza Rice is a board member of Dropbox for example.
Would love to see the overlap of people concerned about threats to the conditional right to own guns, and those who are completely unconcerned about this direct attack on freedom of speech.
Being able to post videos in a walled garden owned by a corporation is not free speech. freedom of speech, regardless of where you are on the political compass, is in platforms like Mastodon.
Why don't we put the ownership of the actions back on the individuals? Presumably you and I would never destroy private property because it became a viral trend. We need parents to step up and educate their children on responsible decision making, and those breaking laws* should be held accountable.
*laws that protect a negative externality for an involuntary transactor.
Lawmakers don't care about that. You're giving them way too much credit. Since the public is not in an uproar about this destructiveness, there are no votes or advantages to be gained by advocating against it.
That's for altruists, who rarely make it to Washington and don't last long when they do.
Meta seems to be doing fine financially besides the VR money pit. Also in a weird way having TikTok around just bolsters their case against any sort of anti trust enforcement. That said I am sure they would be happy if TikTok did get banned but I also doubt they are sticking their neck out lobbying for that to happen (although I would not be surprised to be wrong)
> Surprising then that we don't ban Hondas and Toyotas
This is a holdover from the US supporting the development of industry in Japan to keep them from turning communist (which was a real threat back in the 60's and 70's)
When you are also banning VPN access to whatever tools you deem under the control of "foreign adversaries" (which, more people should look up the government's actual definition on this lol), then privacy is very much a core narrative. If it was just about China then Chinese apps would have been banned off Apple and Google stores years ago.
This is going to be one of those things Americans look back at, like the PATRIOT act, and wonder how the hell they allowed it to happen all because of one app/event.
China also has strict economic requirements for foreign companies too. Foreign companies of specific “strategic industries” are prohibited from operating independently in China and must open up as a joint venture with Chinese domestic companies and have party members on their board.
Bytedance is a Chinese company that is required by law to take direction from the CCP.
The CCP may find it useful to promote/suppress particular content regardless of the geographic location of the creator.
This is not an effective war strategy though. The same influence American politicians swear the Chinese government has over Tiktok can easily be obtained through any number of social media companies.
Moral high ground and fairness is the best strategy here. If it's illegal for all companies to capture this information, it makes enforcement easier and prevents foreign adversaries from merely infiltrating other companies.
There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.
I disagree. The most effective war strategy is playing dirtier than your opponent. Like, I don't know, throwing the two only atomic bombs ever unleashed on city centres.
I'm not saying that I approve it. I'm just saying that war is not an honourable endeavour. The one that goes further than the other ever dared tends to be the winner.
> There are plenty of influential people in the tech world that would sell America out for a quick Renminbi.
Indeed. The only way to stop that is through draconian laws, so you can jail these people for "high treason", like I imagine China already does.
If we're using China as a role model for our information hygiene, then I think it's fair to say that the free speech experiment that some liberal democracies have practiced over the past few centuries has ran its course, and can be considered a failure.
Pack it up, folks, as it turns out, there are some things that are too dangerous to let the public hear.
I think you need to study WW2 a little bit more. The Office of Censorship opening up letters to destroy pro-Nazi sentiment, and the Office of War Information buying up Disney Cartoons to show Donald Duck / Popeye / etc. as a Navy Sailor and encourage us to buy War Bonds through very overt propaganda.
Free Speech comes and goes in the USA. We tend to lean towards the freer-side of things, but if we need to, we clamp down on it to meet our other goals.
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WW2 is hardly an outlier either. WW1 had Espionage Act of 1917, Civil War didn't even have a law, Censorship and seizure of printing presses was just so common. Pre-Civil War, the Postmaster General of slave states commonly censored pamphlets from abolitionists. I mean, the "Alien and Sedition Acts" were passed within a year or two of the Bill of Rights, allowing the President to arrest various members of the press in the 1780s. Etc. etc. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of the USA as a country.
Book burnings and other such events were also widespread in the USA throughout our history... and even have legal precedent like the Comstock laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
IMO, we've gone too far into the free-speech side of becoming absolutely idiots about the subject in recent years and all of us can benefit from researching the actual history of the USA.
Free Speech, both opening up, and restricting it, has its uses. And if you're a student of history, you'll be able to feel the ebbs and flows of this subject throughout time.
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Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.
> Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.
How about the Red Scare or Huckleberry Finn? Problem with censorship as a tool is that it will be abused. What makes you so sure that the party censoring AP African American studies won't be back in power next?
There's plenty of evils available to the US Government today. As some people like to point out, a government is an entity that has monopolized violence, which is an arrangement that's largely to the benefit of society (at least, in the cases where it is used correctly).
Execution, jailings, regulations, etc. etc. Plenty of ways for the government to be abused. Its inevitable that we give the government power to do what is necessary in society, whatever it is. Censorship is just one more power that the US Government has toyed with from time to time over the centuries.
To prevent abuse, we need to elect the right people to be our leaders, and the ones who wield that power.
These guys are ridiculous, they represent the "I'm losing now so gonna take my ball home crying" mentality. Oh what a pity the US is not able to always win and have all the hot new toys made of american silicon! Of course it's very fine and dandy for all social networks that matter to be controlled on their soil, of course it's great that US is phone code #1!!1 and that .com is such an american thing at its birth. The land of freedom and opportunity cannot stomach that Zuker could not buy TikTok too? Come on give me a break. Also, even Rome fell. It's better not to start playing the loser's game, it just accelerates decadence.
I don't think it's specifically China. I think it's retribution because ByteDance won't open US offices and be beholden to the US government like other large corporations do. I think this is the US gov using them as an example of what happens when a corporation such as this dares not fall in line.
Bytedance absolutely has US offices. Their Mountain View office being branded Bytedance, while their LA office is TikTok. They also have office in many cities in the US like Nashville and NYC.
> I don't think it's specifically China. I think it's retribution because ByteDance won't open US offices and be beholden to the US government like other large corporations do. I think this is the US gov using them as an example of what happens when a corporation such as this dares not fall in line.
The bill affects multiple countries, not just China.
In fact, it encompasses "any foreign government or regime, determined by the Secretary [to be]... significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons"
Depending on how much (or little) you trust the Secretary of Commerce, that's incredibly far-reaching and could easily be abused.
That's absolutely incorrect. TikTok has plenty of US personnel and is doing something called "Project Texas" to try to assuage US regulator concern. This is about China controlling a channel that millions of Americans use to get their news
Congress is also working on privacy legislation, it just takes forever because it's massive and complex. I imagine that legislators feel they have urgency/momentum behind the TikTok stuff to get something focused done. From the article below: "The House Energy and Commerce Committee last year advanced a bipartisan bill backed by Rodgers and sponsored by ranking member Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., that would produce a national data privacy standard, but the measure didn't get a House floor vote, and no similar measure has passed in the Senate."
The concern is subversion and malign influence, which is a very real problem. USMC University has a book on political warfare that covers the topic fairly.
The politicians don't want to touch privacy or security laws since that would negatively impact their benefactors as opposed to actually doing their jobs for their constituents.
Its a power grab, hopefully it won't get passed because of the loose undefined wording that could apply to anything they so choose like in ways described in Ayn Rand.
Yes but Twitter and Facebook have already been used for that purpose and continue to be used in that manner.
I get that it is not appropriate on government phones in case they manage to leverage a zeroday but for the average Joe I'm not seeing the risk of TikTok being any greater than the rest of the social media world - the same info is shared/available.
Actual privacy and security laws aren't passed because this is not a sufficiently bipartisan issue to get enough votes.
One party is largely in favor of stronger privacy laws, but with enough dissenters that when that party is the majority party they still would need help from the other party.
The other party is largely against stronger privacy laws, without enough dissenters to overcome the more pro-privacy party dissenters when the more pro-privacy party has the majority.
The issue is that tiktok told congress that US data was inaccessible in China but there is evidence of Chinese nationals accessing american journalist's data in China. Also I'm sure big tech lobbying is playing a large role here too, but that's the cover story at least.
Because other social media companies aren't owned or controlled by an authoritarian state, one which expresses threats of violent aggression to its neighboring countries.
This is America, we follow through on our threats of violent aggression, no matter how far away other countries are. And when we ban speech, it's not authoritarianism, it's Freedom.
The US regulators and government is not tired of collecting money from and imposing fines on all social media and tech platforms, hence why Facebook, Google (YouTube), Instagram, Snap, etc all have been fined by the FTC for privacy violations.
Facebook and TikTok are of similar sizes and have both violated the privacy of its users and since FB has paid a giant billion dollar fine to the FTC, it already makes sense to also fine TikTok on similar grounds including overseas access to US data by specifically targeting US journalists.
General leeway for The Secretary of Commerce to classify things as they see fit. Chevron Deference, the idea that courts defer to executive branch agency interpretations of the law, might go away so this hedges against that - Sec 3-(a)-1-2 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
Judicial Review in Section 12. I think this is the section most resembling what we think of with respect to The Patriot Act. Basically feels like it will be very hard to challenge decisions made under this law. I don't read these things often tho so perhaps I am way off base. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
I think the VPN concern comes from a misreading of what is meant by "holding". A "holding" in this context is a financial asset like a stock. The section you highlighted:
> (B) includes any other holding, the structure of which is designed or intended to evade or circumvent the application of this Act, subject to regulations prescribed by the Secretary.
This is referring to intermediary holding companies intended to disguise an ownership stake by foreign nationals (like a shell company). Nothing to do with VPN or any other technology.
While it wouldn't blanket ban VPNs, a VPN is fairly clearly a "communication technology" and a provider could be targeted by this bill. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even need to do anything malicious, just be large enough and have some malicious users.
The provider would have to be controlled by China or other designated foreign adversary, and they would indeed have to be doing something determined to be a serious threat to the US.
The provider would be acting to abet the violation of this act. Whether or not they are Chinese doesn't matter in that subsection. If they were Chinese they wouldn't care about a US fine anyways. It's even possible that one would argue that a user using a VPN to access TikTok would be violating the bill.
The bill applies to only to financial transactions ("covered transactions" in the bill) and holdings ("covered holdings"), there's nothing in it at all directly regulating access to data or websites by individuals.
Here is the definition that the bill uses for "transaction":
> (17) TRANSACTION.—The term “transaction” means any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, >>>data transmission<<<, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services, or a class of such transactions.
As you can see here, mere data transmission is considered to be a transaction. I strongly suggest that you read the bill, in its entirety.
You're right, the definition of transaction is quite broad here. However in order for VPN to run afoul of this bill, the gov't would first need to enforce the bill by banning individual users from accessing specific sites on the internet, which the VPN would then bypass. That kind of censorship has never been permitted under the first amendment and I don't see anything here that changes that.
What I don't get is why we didn't pursue something in the WTO years ago.
China doesn't allow FB, Insta, Twitter, etc to operate in its market, but its companies can provide such a service to US customers? Is that not protectionism?
If we're afraid that China will use TikTok to push their propaganda in the US, we should be appropriately concerned that banning a platform to stop targeted speech is in conflict with our own norms around free speech. But instead insisting that TikTok can only operate in the US if FB/Snap/Twitter can operate in China on equal terms seems like it would be more in line with our rhetoric around wanting a rules-based international order, and freedom of both trade and speech under most circumstances.
If western social media companies were able to offer their services in China, their fear of our propaganda would be much worse than our fear of theirs.
> China doesn't allow FB, Insta, Twitter, etc to operate in its market
> If western social media companies were able to offer their services in China
I've seen this meme floating around a lot recently and feel the need to add in some relevant history.
Between the mid and late aughts Google, Facebook, and Twitter were all operating in China. Around this time the Chinese government got very serious about content filtering and imposed new restrictions on what could be shown/uploaded. There was a very strong backlash from the US side that American companies might be helping to build the Great Firewall. Many Americans were outraged and US politicians warned the companies not to build infrastructure that could be used for censorship. So the American companies acquiesced and either left the market or were banned (Twitter).
I remember the outrage back then. It's like what I see now but with the facts reversed! Back then the concern was that American tech companies would export infrastructure that could be used by China for social control. Now it's "China won't allow American tech companies!".
"We've always/never been at war with EastAsia."
Kind of disturbing stuff. Watch the congressional hearing of the TikTok CEO and tell me that the powers who are pushing this care about facts.
Allow me to elaborate a bit more: by implementing the firewall, China not only isolated itself, it enabled the western internet to concentrate western investment on Silicon Valley firms, that with no big Chinese companies around, established today’s western world internet monopolies. Or in plain English, by closing itself, China literally helped US companies dominate the www.
China on the other hand, not only had their domestic market entirely for their own domestic giants, creating their own expertise and talent pool, they also didn’t even had to think on what to do, as they could just copy US apps “with Chinese characteristics”, making A LOT of money too.
There was a lot of talk about technology transfer, but you right, the narrative 100% changed from helping the CCP to “China bad”, but how bad they really are when they allowed America to make a true empire on the www without the Chinese companies as competitors?
How America is reacting to its very first Chinese competitor says a lot about America true sportsmanship on the market, it’s very childish and lame if you ask me.
You're making the opposite argument of the comment you're replying to, though. China can't simultaneously have isolated itself (as you say) and it be the fault of Western companies choosing not participate in China (as the person you're replying to) says.
It sounds like you both agree China made a market that was specifically hostile to American companies, including intentionally banning some, though. Which is kind of the point most people are making when they talk about market reciprocity.
I’m having trouble finding useful info about size of china online sector vs USA in terms of GDP. But it definitely isn’t US dominating. Some sites say china is close 2nd to USA, but when I look at numbers china is 3x USA (7.1T Chinese digital economy vs apparently 2.1T in USA).
So companies that refuse to build tools for compliance with China's unique censorship/control policies are not allowed in the country. Most American tech companies opted to leave voluntarily rather than implement these controls, and at least one that did not implement the controls or voluntarily leave was instead forcibly banned.
I see the point you're making here, but at the same time, I think the situation as explained here can still be viewed as China not allowing American tech companies to operate in China the way those companies want to do business.
Has the US provided ByteDance with an opportunity to become compliant with this country's requirements that it has opted against? That would seem very similar to what transpired with Twitter in China.
The problem there is that Google, Facebook and Twitter refused to export American values abroad and chose to comply with the censorship laws of foreign governments. I do regard it as morally unacceptable for an American tech company to collaborate with political repression in a foreign country either by silencing dissidents or by helping that foreign government track down dissidents.
I also think it is quite reasonable that American tech companies should be allowed to operate in China and uphold American values in China if TikTok is allowed to operate in the US. I don't see a contradiction. The entire point of letting China into the WTO and allowing China to help Walmart and Amazon acquire inventory to offer "low prices" was to bring freedom to China by opening the country up to capitalism (this was stated more or less openly by western neoliberal policy makers at the time). It definitely wasn't to strengthen the CCP and weaken the USA but that's what the actual result of 2 decades of "free trade" with China has been.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter didn't have that choice. They could either agree to follow Chinese censorship, or be steadfast and get banned. They did the latter.
TikTok is not asking to be allowed to operate in the US and uphold Chinese values. It's just asking to be allowed to operate in the US, and agreed to public oversight on its algorithms and data storage. This is essentially equivalent to what the Chinese government asks of American companies, and what they declined to do, in large part due to moral disagreement from their employees.
> This is essentially equivalent to what the Chinese government asks of American companies, and what they declined to do, in large part due to moral disagreement from their employees.
Sigh, it isn't just this: China doesn't do rule of law, so American companies have to follow rule by law when operating in China, but they are also subject to American anti-corruption laws even for their operations in China, which makes doing business in China difficult (unless they can be isolated from that like they are in manufacturing). If it were just "moral disagreements due to employees", the CEOs would find a way around that, but technically it is just hard to do social media in China under Chinese rules that you won't even be told what they are.
But I agree TikTok should be treated fairly, even if that fairness is definitely not reciprocated in China.
There has been a very large increase in aggressive talk vs China. It feels very strange considering these same areas were against economic warfare with China when Trump was in Charge, and I would be money were against the Iraq and/or Afghanistan wars at some point. The "facts" don't matter. For what its worth, my memory is in line with yours, the back lash was absolutely on the US side.
Chinese containment has been a bipartisan agenda since the Obama presidency at least. It was the “trade war” being fought through used tariffs that certain people disliked and placing them on our allies that was overwhelmingly rejected.
If those companies were willing to obey the same rules that Chinese companies have to obey in China (censoring what the government tells them to censor, sharing personal data that the government asks for, sharing technology that the governments asks for) they could operate in China.
It's not all that different from how US restaurant chains cannot operate in the UAE unless they take things off the menu that violate Islamic dietary rules. So Wendy's in Dubai does not sell The Baconator.
So there's nothing really to pursue via the WTO. It's not a protectionism issue when domestic and foreign companies have to obey the same or similar restrictions, even if those restrictions are onerous.
PRC has "developing nation" status in the WTO. This allows the PRC to get special and differential treatment in a number of IP and general trade related agreements.
WTO regulation of services is very limited. It mainly regulates the flow of goods. Unilateral domestic regulation or bilateral agreement with China are the only options.
They'd have sided with China who on their official books says "they can come back they just have to follow our laws", while in practice continuing to ban and restrict these companies regardless.
What's the complaint exactly? Unrestricted global free trade isn't something every country is expected to support or the WTO is meant to enforce. China can ban foreign companies and services from operating in their jurisdiction for any or no reason. Other countries are free to do the same.
I feel like they could have done this by creating a bill saying that US social media companies must be given the same access and freedoms to the Chinese market as TikTok has to ours. It would put the onus back on the CCP, they would never allow it and they would get TikTok banned in the US without being the ones to directly ban it.
I am sure someone smarter than I can tell me why this is not a viable strategy.
Because market access is not the reason they're banning it. It wouldn't be very believable to now act like it's about a different issue than national security. You'd basically be saying "if you give us market access, then we'll let you spy on our citizens."
In a democracy you get the types of discussions that we've been seeing about TikTok, so that door's shut now. This sort of "trickery" only really works for authoritarian countries, where the discourse is exclusively behind doors.
It doesn't seem like they're shooting on our citizens to me. Rather it seems US citizens are voluntarily giving the CCP their data.
It's no secret that apps collect data. It's how they exist! Each American with it installed has made the decision to give the app creators their data, which means that anyone that wants the data can get it from the app creators.
Why are we blaming China for the deciduous of individuals?
> I feel like they could have done this by creating a bill saying that US social media companies must be given the same access and freedoms to the Chinese market as TikTok has to ours.
If you read the bill, it's very transparent that it's not about market access, and that it's not specific to China. It explicitly names five other countries and also authorizes the Secretary of Commerce to include any country that they feel is an adversary to "national security" interests.
I agree, but it's not a viable strategy because Congress doesn't have jurisdiction over what China does and does not allow in their country. So you would then have no trade, but in what categories? Does it include software for vehicles, a major market for Detroit automakers? Does it include software like Oracle? It's just not that clean to have tit for tat reciprocity
Because US/western social media has same market access to PRC... all they have to do is follow PRC regulations. Literally why FB and Google had internal projects to engineer compliant products to re-enter PRC market, but killed due to internal dissent. The narrative that PRC bans US platforms was always cope. Google pulled out because they didn't like dissidents being hacked, when operationally and eventually they should be cooperating on data sharing at PRC gov requests like in US. FB/Twitter got booted post 2009 minority riots for not complying to filtering (censorship) requirements on inciting violence that every PRC platform had built large and onerously expensive moderation teams to fulfill. Simply wasn't worth the headache for what little market share they had, and it wasn't until western platforms got hammered into improving their own moderation pipelines due to social media incited violence that they started thinking bout re-entering PRC. There's a reason Microsoft outlasted them for almost a decade until they also said fuck this to regulation and optics costs. Sure the game is rigged for domestic incumbants, it's not PRC's fault FB/Google employees killed efforts to move back into PRC, or that the SV was drunk on free speech (cheap moderation) until western society realized (but won't admit) PRC regulators were prescient.
Forward to today, somehow TikTok operating in US while compliant to US laws managed outcompeted US platforms. At this point even putting the finger down on some sort of joint venture like Oracle proposal, like how icloud in PRC is under domestic management (a very PRC solution) isn't enough to tip scales back to domestic incumbents. Hence bill to ban, or divest, which to be clear, even PRC hasn't resorted to because they already had regulations to limit influence / scope of US platforms. Playing "fair" is not viable anymore because TikToks is too big, as is the associated risk, so nothing left but nuclear option because TikTok won playing fair.
But China actively blocks all US social media companies, right? The social media companies aren't the ones blocking Chinese users from joining. They just don't operate any offices in China.
They aren't prevented from entering the market but their existing products are banned because they don't abide by PRC censorship and data sharing requirements.
The post you are replying to explains this in detail.
Google, Facebook, etc all either had products in China or planned products in China but all voluntarily withdrew for various reasons. I imagine low market share vs domestic services was probably the largest reason.
Remember that as soon as you release a service in the West a Chinese clone will spring forth almost instantly. That clone will be much more Chinese then your eventual adaption and as such will you likely struggle to compete with it. Worse yet said clone is probably built by either Alibaba or Tencent both of which have armies of extremely smart engineers, near unlimited cash to sink into new ventures and a near duopoly on the ecosystems necessary to thrive in China.
At the end of the day the Chinese market is just incredibly tough and Western companies (perhaps rightly) don't think it's worth the effort.
> Google, Facebook, etc all either had products in China or planned products in China but all voluntarily withdrew for various reasons. I imagine low market share vs domestic services was probably the largest reason.
No, Google withdrew because it refused to continue censoring results (and this was back before censorship become much more pervasive, in the 2010s). It wasn't a monopoly like in the US but had a good 30% market share (which in China is a lot). FB, which started later, never even got started in China because censorship of individual posts -- even worse than censoring search results -- would have caused an uproar with FB's user base in the US/Europe.
This isn't really true though... Companies that operate in China need to be run by a chinese national. So the government forces companies to create a chinese shell even if they don't have any chinese executives they like. This is how the ARM craziness happened where a rouge executive took over the company for year.
No, it's nothing like the US. PRC actively censors all social media in China (the social media companies do it themselves based on keywords provided by the government).
> it's not PRC's fault FB/Google employees killed efforts to move back into PRC, or that the SV was drunk on free speech (cheap moderation) until western society realized (but won't admit) PRC regulators were prescient
Moderation on Western platforms is nothing like the censorship that takes place on PRC platforms, and equating them is a gross misrepresentation of the situation. Not to mention that government censorship is much more problematic even than company defacto cenorship (where if you don't like Twitter you can move to Mastodon) since gov censorship is absolute.
I didn't say kind of censorship is the same, nor should they be. I said US platforms who want to operate in PRC should comply with PRC national security interests REGARDLESS of how it's "worse". It's happening in Vietnam and other highly censorial countries now without much issue. If didn't happen in PRC before because they didn't want to eat the cost.
What's moderated maybe different, but how it's moderated now is the same. US followed PRC platforms to build actual teams to "guide" content, PRC has extra step of formal content blacklist, no different than wiping out mass shooting videos. It's an expensive man powered team trying to ensure platform stays out of trouble. It's now technically / functionally / economically comparable, hence the comment about how western platforms started exploring ways back into PRC market AFTER they implemented PRC like moderation systems.
The comment isn't a debate about which censorship system is "superior". It's simply acknowledging US platforms got blocked because they couldn't compete on PRC rules that PRC companies had to follow.
>> Because US/western social media has same market access to PRC
I do not believe that the preferred platforms of the CCP, owned and operated by the same people, would not be favored in China. There is no open or transparent lobbying in China. Rather, overnight, someone from the CCP can decide that your platform should be shut down and your employees harassed, arrested and/or prosecuted. Yes, the market is huge, but why would any western company take that chance. For all its flaws, the US doesn't have these issues to this level. The TikTok debate is happening relatively slowly and a lot of it in the open (So our politicians can showboat, but still). TikTok also has access to the best lawyers, lobbyists, as well as grounds for appeal. Those in power will also be politically assailed by their opponents on behalf of those under 35 for shutting down their favored platform. People could conceivably lose office for the decision.
>> Forward to today, somehow TikTok operating in US while compliant to US laws managed outcompeted US platforms.
No argument here - TikTok has done amazing and has played by the rules (though if you have pile of nearly infinite money from a powerful government, you can do a lot). I'd argue that realpolitik, is alive and well, always has been and always will be. TikTok can both influence (which I'm less worried about thanks to the other avenues of free speech) but TikTok can also collect and retain the moral and legal trespass of the young for decades to then use it as blackmail when they are the ones seeking positions of power. You could argue the same for all the other socials, and I think their data retention is what should really be limited, but they are at least within the confines of a legal system, that yes, has flaws, but is open enough.
I'm not naive enough to believe the US is devoid of corruption, backroom deals, people whose rights are denied or trampled on etc. But compared to the CCP's framework, there is no debate.
Personally, I think TikTok has a first amendment right to exist regardless of who owns it. It's the data retention that really worries me, and unless you count data as property (which I could be convinced of), there is not right to data retention.
> realpolitik, is alive and well
...
> compared to the CCP's framework, there is no debate
Really the crux of issue for me. By all means ban TikTok, Huawei, constrain PRC chips, but let's chalk it up to sensible realpolitik than narrative over morals/frameworks. Like CIA basically bribed their way to control promotions throughout CCP throughout 90s-00s, hence Xi crackdwon on foreign NGOs, and dismantled PRC CIA networks. If US fears that's a risk vector for tiktok, and US society laws too open/fragile to handle even JV configurations like in PRC, then sensible people should accept that to ban TikTok, US has to adopt harsher methods than even PRC.
> would not be favored in China
I specifically highlighted PRC _would_ have tip scales towards domestic incumbents. Like US is doing now against TikTok. But PRC didn't have to do much, western platforms never really got localization right, Google stole Sogou pinyin so input didn't suck, Youtube never broke top10 streaming, Amazon was unimpressive relative to other ecommerce. PRC companies that focused solely on domestic market outcompeted western platforms where PRC sideshow. Then exported Tiktok that flourished in US because it's fashioned after Douyin style feel good content due to survivorship bias of PRC censorship.
> would any western company take that chance
Ask the 10,000s western companies that operate in PRC fine for 30+ years. Or why is twitter in India despite indian gov threatening to arrest employees? Or why western platforms in Vietnam cede to VCP censorship requests. Many have grown enough to have no scruples working with "shady" governments now. Hence me highlighting western platforms during 00s-10s had SV pride/optics/ethos considerations of the time that made today's routine acquiescing to foreign security interests unlikely then. As for why take that chance, because PRC still large market that was worth friction cost, until geopolitics made it not.
> US doesn't have these issues to this level
IMO functionally it does, all the lobbying and connections in the world isn't going to overcome interests of motivated national security state. US domestic sentiment has little effect on actual foreign / security policy. US had to ram through CHIPs act / October "surprise" without much industry consultation / ability to disrupt because ultimately US just comparably as capable as PRC in terms of overnight responses. Dressing it up with demographic process theatre isn't particularly convincing considering how many strategic industries US is home too, industries like in PRC that exist because state was precient enough to keep competition out/down.
Be free to post the equivalent of `Fuck Joe Biden` but about Xi or other leaders without any fear of repercussion. Be free to critique without fear of being disappeared.
This is a warped perspective of censorship in China. Many people do post things like that and they’re completely fine. No one ever got “disappeared” for criticism of the government or complaining about corruption. In fact, I don’t think disappearing is even a thing, it’s more like if you want to subvert the government then you’ll get a visit from the police telling you to pipe down. But if you’re complaining about government performance then you’ll get a free pass. You can Google protests in China and there are hundreds of videos showing mass protests over various topics. What is happening in China isn’t some caricature of Winston getting brainwashed in 1984 - these kinds of stereotypes are frankly disturbing and indicates that the opinion holder has no real relationships with anyone in China. If anything, the US is the real oligarchic dystopia. The passing of the Patriot Act and this bill would only be confirmation of that. If only people could read Chinese and browse the Chinese web, then they would see the much more mundane reality for themselves.
Diving in, the list of "foreign adversaries" is amusing. China and Russia have to be on there. Iran and North Korea I guess. Cuba and specifically a Maduro led Venezuela are a stretch.
What this bill actually seems to do is allow the Secretary of Commerce to review any communication technology, including both apps and hardware, used by a million Americans, and then suggest the president punish it if it poses an "unacceptable risk" of stealing IP, damaging infrastructure, interfering with elections, extorts a person in power, or just "otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons."
Then it discusses what penalties the President can enact, which are banning the thing, confiscating their assets, and confiscating their collected data (and code? not 100% on this.)
Next, how to designate a communication device needing review or foreign adversary, basically someone high up says so. Then how to remove a foreign adversary, which seems much more difficult though it may just have more possible methods.
The rest seems to deal with the minutia of enforcement. I also can't be bothered to read this once, let alone twice, but it also means I'm not quite sure what investigative powers the Secretary of Commerce has without getting a warrant.
So it's called a bill to ban TikTok, but it seems to give the government a fairly clear path to banning any foreign communication technology widely used. The adversary part doesn't even seem necessary, the only time the foreign adversary comes up is if they are undermining the democratic process. Which means Russia can't interfere in elections, Israel and Saudi Arabia can.
1. Apple adds easy support for non-Apple app stores and side-loading to iOS to comply with the recent EU regulations that require opening things up in 2024, and then people can download TikTok from outside the US and install it?
2. TikTok users switch to using the TikTok website instead of the app?
It looks like the main thing the app gives you that the website can't is a convenient way to film short video and edit it and add music all on your phone and then post that. Surely someone could write a social network agnostic app just for filming, editing, and adding music that can upload that short video to any of your social media accounts (TikTok, YouTube shorts, and whatever other ones allow video). The destinations could be entirely user configurable and support any social network that provides a halfway decent upload API.
What's the US going to do? Try to make a US equivalent of China's Great Firewall? I don't think that would work here, because our free speech laws make it too easy to circulate circumvention information.
If I was a company that does mobile apps I'd be seriously looking right now into making that general short video maker/uploader app. If the US does successfully cut off TikTok all those users aren't going to just stop wanting to post and read the kind of things they are now doing there. They are going to try to move to other platforms. Done right, maybe my app would be something they use as part of that.
The language on what constitutes a violation is vague, but it does appear you could face hefty fines and jail time for this behavior under the current draft of the act.
"Hence anyone using a VPN to access TikTok would be in trouble—specifically, subject to up to $1 million in fines, 20 years in prison, or both."[1]
If you believe the Senator who wrote it (up to you I guess), this doesn't meet the bar for prosecution.
> Warner's office says this isn't so. Spokesperson Rachel Cohen told Newsweek that the provisions only apply when someone is "engaged in 'sabotage or subversion' of communications technology in the U.S., causing 'catastrophic effects' on U.S. critical infrastructure, or 'interfering in, or altering the result' of a federal election in order for criminal penalties to apply."
I can't find that language in the act. It seems to apply to any violation of the act. The linked article goes over the language of the act and it seems to have the same impression thereof.
It's MUCH WORSE than the Patriot act. This bill is absolutely horrific. And calling it at bill to "ban TikTok" is extremely disingenuous as it egregiously goes well beyond that.
Thanks! The worst part of this is all the comments about social networking when this bill is about punishing people who want privacy or end to end encrypted communication on their devices with 1 million dollar fine and 20 years of jail time.
> In what way? Explain that, and let readers decide if it is horrific.
The bill allows the Secretary of Commerce to unilaterally ban products associated with countries of their choosing, with a 20 year prison sentence for any US citizen who attempts to use a VPN to circumvent the access ban.
My wife and I use WeChat because her family lives in China and we want to be able to chat and do video calls with her. If Secretary of Commerce declares that WeChat is illegal that is going to put an enormous strain on my family.
Fuck the US government. There should be mass civil disobedience over this if it somehow passes. Let them try to prosecute millions of citizens. This is no better than what the CCP or Putin's regime does to it's own citizens. I see that the EU and UK have similar designs to control the internet.
Hyper-partisanship has created an army of citizens who are quite ok with the government being authoritarian with no limits on its power as long as they're convinced that their ideology will be the one in control of the monster being created. The monster of course will follow its own path, crushing all that get in its way, not giving a damn about the ideological fantasies of those who allowed it to be created.
The problem is that the people who kick off an authoritarian government are typically the ones who die first. The revolution eats its own. See the brown shirts, the multiple rounds of beheadings during the French revolution, the Bolsheviks, and so on. So whoever hopes the government will continue to support them generally hopes in vain. The machine has two goals: continue existing, and expand its power.
> The problem is that the people who kick off an authoritarian government are typically the ones who die first. The revolution eats its own. See the brown shirts, the multiple rounds of beheadings during the French revolution, the Bolsheviks, and so on.
But, except for maybe some of those in the French Revolution, those are mostly foot soldiers, or leaders who fell victim to distinct subsequent revolutions, not the people who kicked off the resolution getting eaten by it.
Its not “are owned by”, its “has a current, pending, or potential future controlling interest, direct or indirect, that is, will be, or will come to have been held by an adversary of the united states” (and, yes, the bill itself explicitly and separately refers to both simple future and future perfect, for some reason.)
(10) ICTS COVERED HOLDING ENTITY.—The term “ICTS covered holding entity” means any entity that—
(A) owns, controls, or manages information and communications technology products or services; and
(B) (i) has not less than 1,000,000 United States-based annual active users at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President; or
(ii) for which more than 1,000,000 units have been sold to persons in the United States before the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President.
That's silly of course, but what about a Ractive? I think something that actively tries to collect data on you and shape your perception controlled by a geopolitical competitor should be handled carefully and potentially outlawed.
So you agree that the Chinese government is doing the right thing when they block a Chinese citizen from viewing Twitter?
You agree with the usage of the Great Firewall? You agree with the ability for the government to tell you what websites you can visit? If you use a VPN to read a Chinese newspaper article, you agree that the government should be allowed to imprison you and take all of your possessions? That's madness IMO.
Like I said, things "should be handled carefully and potentially outlawed." Personally I don't think your comparison holds because Twitter for instance isn't controlled by a state actor so the geopolitical issues don't really apply (unless you consider Elon controlled by China because of his dependencies on their critical mineral supply chains and market for Tesla... or by Saudi because of their funds ownership in Twitter).
I don't think the hyperbole here is particularly helpful; there is clearly a national security risk to allowing a foreign competitor unfettered access to your market and control over what amounts to a major media property. Maybe you believe that this doesn't matter and shouldn't be addressed, but if you do believe it should be addressed in some way, you need the legal framework to be able to do so
1) Twitter is not an arm of the US government in the way that Tiktok and most Chinese companies are.
2) The law is not calling for the information on Tiktok to be banned. For instance, an image of a tweet saying "fuck Xi Jinping" could not be viewed in China, but an image/video of a tiktok saying "fuck biden" would be fine to view in America.
3) Tiktok is not benign like a book is. It extracts information from the user and sends it to the company servers.
4) It is trivial to use the platform to perform psyops; the company could easily mix subtly pro-china content into the feed from time to time.
Re item 1: See [0]. Arguably any corporation involved in government censoring operations (which are by definition extra-judicial) is an active arm of said government. There's a reason people have taken to calling our current state "crony capitalism".
Re item 3: TikTok is worse than that. The recommendation feeds are specifically designed to rot the minds of American citizens. [1]
Sure, but there are natural guardrails within that... for instance if we decided to call the UK a country of national security concern it would trigger massive diplomatic and trade ramifications. Other than China you'll notice everyone else on the list basically has 0 trade volume with the U.S., so there's not much damage to the U.S. economy, but doing it to other countries would be a major escalation with economic consequences.
How would that be possible? I've read the text and didn't see any ability for them to not publish it, but more practically as soon as they ban an app from X country not already on the list, wouldn't it become clear in their justification for doing so that the country of origin would have been added?
Putting aside questions of whether TikTok deserves this or not, I really worry this is the beginning of the end of general purpose computing. Given how locked down our machines are today, whether on account of walled gardens or increased security, we're almost at the point where it may actually become possible to "ban software" with a few policy decisions, which backers of this bill seem to intend. ("We need a comprehensive, risk-based approach that proactively tackles sources of potentially dangerous technology before they gain a foothold in America, so we aren’t playing Whac-A-Mole and scrambling to catch up once they’re already ubiquitous.")
(10) ICTS COVERED HOLDING ENTITY.—The term “ICTS covered holding entity” means any entity that—
(A) owns, controls, or manages information and communications technology products or services; and
(B) (i) has not less than 1,000,000 United States-based annual active users at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President; or
(ii) for which more than 1,000,000 units have been sold to persons in the United States before the date on which the covered holding is referred to the President.
(11) INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS OR SERVICES.—The term “information and communications technology products or services” means any hardware, software, or other product or service primarily intended to fulfill or enable the function of information or data processing, storage, retrieval, or communication by electronic means, including transmission, storage, and display.
this seems pretty broad, not just TikTok, but WeChat, Little Red Book, Yandex and any cellphone made by Chinese companies has 1M+ unit sold may all be subject to same restrictions
Good. If American software companies face anti-competitive restrictions on accessing the Chinese market, then we may as well do the same. Paradox of Tolerance and whatnot.
So we can just calling time-of-death on the United States' social tech dominance now, right?
Domestic tech companies shamelessly sold access to American users for manipulation by "foreign adversaries" for years, made billions, suffered no lasting consequences. Then Chinese Vine walks in, smokes everybody else in ~24 months, the mad South African buys and destroys Twitter, and Mark toddles off the cliff of irrelevance with a social network in each pocket and an Oculus strapped to his face.
No, we do the most American thing imaginable. Just like we did with the space race, we got to the moon first therefore we won, even though we weren't first in much anything in the space race at the time. So I fully expect we ban TikTok then declare one of the American social media networks the winner of the social media race.
This bill is like a joke. It's like the lawyers who wrote this intentionally wrote it to be so Machiavellian, horrible, and 1984-esque, so that this bill would not pass.
This bill literally references parts of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and the Controlled Substances Act. It's beyond absurd. A good video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xudlYSLFls8
While I don't personally mind banning Tik Toc since I think that it is a drain on our culture and is likely addictive, I do have serious concerns:
Why nothing about US media companies pushing advertising based on data that really should be protected by privacy laws?
Why nothing about the material released from Twitter by Matt Taibi, et. al.? Very concerning stuff for a country talking the talk about democracy.
Why not enforce limits on what kids can watch and for how long, as China does? While I am all for free speech and liberty for adults, I think it is necessary for parents to put some guardrails on their kids.
There is a lot more at stake here: the USA (my country) is struggling to maintain the dollar hegemony, has some severe looming economic problems, and has the same general problems shared by all countries. The USA has been very successful by carrying a big stick and hitting other countries with it. But, what was once a successful strategy is, I think, now a very poor strategy. An Empire like ours should sometimes orchestrate a graceful exit, on terms best for our country. Now when I say best for our country, I mean best for people, and not what is best for Wall Street, Our Military Industrial Complex, etc.
> Why not enforce limits on what kids can watch and for how long, as China does? While I am all for free speech and liberty for adults, I think it is necessary for parents to put some guardrails on their kids.
This is the parent's job. Kids can't even play in the front yard without CPS being called, and adding more complexities like this sounds like an even worse nightmare.
> Why nothing about US media companies pushing advertising based on data that really should be protected by privacy laws?
Privacy is not the major concern here.
> Why nothing about the material released from Twitter by Matt Taibi, et. al.? Very concerning stuff for a country talking the talk about democracy.
Twitter is subject to the US courts and legal system and while there are issue we can work to resolve them.
> Why not enforce limits on what kids can watch and for how long, as China does? While I am all for free speech and liberty for adults, I think it is necessary for parents to put some guardrails on their kids.
Again not the issue.
Seriously, read at-least the start of the bill it makes it very very clear the main concern is limiting foreign powers ability to mass influence the general USA population.
The US is "the ship of Theseus"'ing itself, replacing parts that have worked in the past, but are no longer serving the ruling class to their satisfaction, with parts (policies) plagiarised from China that do better serve the ruling class.
Carefully selected to keep the ship distinctly itself, but still ever so slightly different each time.
(I just like the irony of plagiarising policy from China as a parallel to their plagiarising IP from the US - and likely elsewhere).
I don't feel any sympathy for Tiktok considering they block and remove content that goes against the CCP's narratives. So yeah, it's fair game when they do shit like that.
You know they wouldn't be doing this unless the point was to expand the government's ability to harm its citizens. Which sweeping and terrifying powers does this one introduce?
I heard on a podcast yesterday a suggestion that the reason the intelligence community doesn't like TikTok is that, unlike with Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, they can't just hand a warrant over to ByteDance get the data they want. If there's one thing the intelligence community hates, it's not getting the data they want.
Back in the previous administration, I figured this was all a temper-tantrum being thrown by an executive who got embarrassed when outsmarted by a bunch of kids. It may have started like that, but somehow in D.C. everyone's been convinced of the danger a foreign-owned social-media network poses. I'm still not sure I get it...
TikTok has a US business presence, their US user data is stored in the US. All of this is subject to US jurisdiction and court orders. TikTok can't tell US marshalls and federal agents to take a hike if they show up at TikTok's US headquarters with court documents--their leadership can be arrested and their servers seized.
I'm still unconvinced that tiktok holds much data that is valuable to any government. As a node in the information tree it might have some marginal utility but my understanding of tiktok is that the data primarily is how much you enjoy cat videos. Maybe the chinese government can work out your sexual orientation, or that you are anti communist, but this is only a problem if you live in China.
Even if the data is valuable, as far as I know there are no backdoors available to tiktok that aren't available to other apps (e.g any tencent game). The security model at the os level seems to be the proper place to ensure privacy, and the witch hunt against tik tok seems to only exist because it is popular.
Curious how many here have actually read this bill?
If you’ve read it and you still support it (as a US citizen) I’m going to be so heartbroken by today’s tech community.
This is authoritarianism in the name of protecting our children.
I understand, TikTok is projected to overtake Alphabet’s and Meta’s video ad revenue [0] and it won’t surprise me if they even lobbied for it.
I just see it as a shortsighted move by these companies not to strongly come against this bill.
Aside from the politics, I can't say I disagree starting with TikTok, but what about all the countless other Chinese applications they otherwise still allow that do even worse things unknown yet? Much as the other recent incident with Pinduoduo randomly adding spyware to their feature set. Every gadget with wifi, every game/app on our phones from random unknown International sources are a potential weapon of unknown potential payloads with a remote update.
As a Network/Security engineer, I personally trust American companies as little or less than anything Chinese, but I know nothing good comes from anything connecting to or from there for 99% of everything most of my non-international customers of mine or I do. They simply do not play by ours or any rules but their own. Given my druthers or by request with a capable firewall with geolocation, I gladly block anything to/from China and most anything outside the the US, particularly SLED/FED or regionally local to US only businesses. Not that I endorse isolationism, but as a practical engineer, it would likely save our incumbent non-security-savvy sheeple (or simply lazy businesses) from more blatant direct attacks and siphoning of data at least from the less tricky foreign villains without their own domestic botnets.
If later I actually do need to send something to/from blocked geolocations, there will be an exception policy for it that shall be documented.
The point of the bill is to give the executive branch the power to do exactly that: investigate and potentially ban or force divestment on any large technology business owned by a US adversary like China and determined to pose a serious security risk.
So, they're clearly trying to describe what they're doing in general terms. I'm not a lawyer, but I wonder if that's partly a constitutional matter -- just going after TikTok by name based on a knowledge of _past_ access to American data by staff in China would sound like an ex post facto law. So they have to frame it as being about a class of services with relationships to a group of foreign adversaries. But then are there other companies that might fall afoul of this? Yandex?
This is not that. But Congress has had years of opportunities to develop actual data privacy laws and they haven't. They held proceedings focused on a single company. The tagline for this post is specifically "Senate Bill to Ban TikTok" for good reason: it was written to target a single company.
We _should_ be concerned about companies which have personal data on basically everyone and have no real limitations on how it's used, but FB is gonna keep operating. We _should_ be concerned about a government that can gather private data about Americans by secretly working with a corporation. But AT&T's cooperation with the NSA never really hurt it.
@dang - please change the misleading title of this article from "Senate Bill to Ban Tik Tok" to "Senate Bill to Criminalize VPNs and Enhanced Governmental Wiretaps"
@dang – if you are going to chance it from one piece of editorialized misleading clickbait, don’t change it to another.
Unfortunately, the bill’s official one-line summary (“To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes”) and title (“Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act”) are also misleading, though perhaps not clickbait (they are more to discourage looking inside by making it seem bland than to encourage attention.)
The summary is factually misleading, because the Secretary of Commerce isn’t authorized to prohibit anything by the bill, the President is, and the bill specifically prohibits delegating except to the Attorney-General, and that only for litigation purposes, and it is an obscurant because it is vague about what kind of transactions and why. And the title is basically word salad to fit a forced acronym, though it does hint about the business domain of concern.
It's frustrating the discussion is not around data privacy in the US and potentially laws around privacy. If the issue with TikTok is primarily privacy could we have laws that strengthen privacy laws for companies within the US? This way a company can update its system to mitigate issues around privacy rather than a ban. This could impact US companies too, but that does not seem like a bad thing if they are forced to have user privacy in mind.
The operatives in China's social manipulation groups are laughing while reading this thread because you all are doing their work for free.
I don't think you guys understand here how important a bill like this is, and how much of a threat China is to us. This bill could be modified to restrict its usage more, and that would be good, but at the end of the day we must take action against the fact that China has such a massive social and cultural entry point into our culture, because China has spent the last 10 decades ensuring that they are protected from any social exchange from us to them.
They will use that tool against us. It is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, and it's probably already happening.
Do not hand our people's minds to a country that would destroy us. Pay attention to what Russia was able to do with nothing but a couple of troll farms. China won't just have that, they'll have the entire platform and the algorithm which determines everything you see every day.
I hear you, and at the same time I know nothing good comes out of government interfering with internet. Another 10 years and they will ban news websites with "fake news about war", as Russia did in 2022
Luckily I live in a small country now and shouldn't care much about us politics
sure fb and instagram are better or even vine was better. onlyfans? beautiful app definitly lifting people out of poverty.
I remember the trump days. the same democrats pushing for a ban where calling trump racist for his anti-china policies. what a 180 from all our enlightened benefactors and democrats thinkers
This isn't about lifting people out of poverty or the quality of the other apps. There are very big systemic problems that still need to be solved with regulations on American applications.
This is about making sure an enemy state doesn't have a little window to half the people in the country, with the ability to exert total control on what they see every day.
Wouldn't it be refreshing if Congress could identify exactly what is scary about Chinese-connected social media and legislate against it in such a way that it would prevent every other scary monster from doing exactly what they wish to deny China?
It seems silly to legislate "thou shalt not do really scare thing #1 if name == TikTok" or "thou shalt not allow any third party to have really scare access if name == China". Just leave out the if clauses.
Don't target China or Russia or Iran or North Korea. Don't exempt Virginia or Maryland or any three letter acronym. If it is dangerous for the Chinese government to do it, it is dangerous for the U.S. government to do it and for the sales department of Amazon to do it.
> To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes.
> The term “transaction” means any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, data transmission, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services, or a class of such transactions.
> includes, unless removed by the Secretary pursuant to section 6—
(i) the People’s Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Macao Special Administrative Region;
Interesting to see what the Government will focus their time on. Obama outrightly said recently that it's clear that a significant portion of the US (and outside of - namely Australia and the UK) is essentially mind-controlled by Murdoch Press through fear mongering and extreme sensationalism - whether that is Fox in the US, Sky in the UK, and a variety of news papers & channels in Australia.
At no point has anyone actually done anything about this, even though it significantly affects peoples views in a negative way through false truths, voting etc.
What about kids with social media and how bad it is for them? Evident through the fact that most people who work at social media companies ban or severely limit their kids
For half a decade, I have lived outside of the US, and I've watched as it has fallen to shit in slow motion. I make a decent chunk of income in USD and this terrifies me... but this. This move saddens me.
There are only so many hours that congress has to make real decisions ... and this, this is what they spent their time on? Talking about how 'kids' might be influenced by an algorithm when they're being influenced every day by how they might get shot up in math class? Come on (wo)man. This shit is fucking stupid.
It's just sad to me, sad to watch the country I grew up in, the one I went to war for ... do this level of stupid shit.
That's my 2 bucks, spend it how you want it.