This is going to be an interesting experiment:
A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.
Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?
Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.
Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.
Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.
It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.
Switzerland has just 8 million people, which are divided into two big language groups. And most people speak (or at least understand) English. So, it's natural for the algorithm to converge to content in English.
What I've learned is that since Switzerland has 3 official languages (German, French and Italian) children and teens at school focus on learning one of the other two regions they are not from.
In particular this leads to French and Italian cantons to be moderately fluent in each other's language. Strikingly when I lived in Lausanne, more people knew Italian than English. English was really not on their radar (plus, add that francophones are kind of elitist when it comes to languages and don't really like to consume content that is not in french).
In German speaking Switzerland proficiency in English was still subpar from most of the rest of Europe when walking in a shop or going to a restaurant.
Not to derail, but when I was in Switzerland, I found the German Swiss to be far more elitarian about NOT learning French, than the other way around. And French Swiss being a minority, they kinda got treated as other or less-than in the bulk of Switzerland. But all German Swiss are at least willing to try English, while the French Swiss tend to avoid English, so maybe that's where the vibe comes from?
For both you and OP, first of you, thank you for "elitarian", but even after reading the definition, I still think you both meant "elitist".
And even though I probably tend to agree with both of you, it's kinda funny to blame French or German speakers about being elitist against English speakers, of which native speakers are notoriously monolingual :-)
I don't blame anyone, I'm Italian and I'm fluent in French, English and Polish besides Italian.
I'm just saying that in the French part of Switzerland English wasn't a given among any generation and it neither was common in the German/Italian parts too if you exclude the expats.
And yes, francophone tend to be very elitist about consuming exclusively french content, regardless of them being from France, Switzerland or Belgium.
"Using your mother tongue is elitist" is bullshit on an epic scale.
It's litteraly your mother tongue man, everyone outside of the elite has a mother, and therefore a mother tongue, it's not expansive, it's your basic birth right.
Why don't people consume audio/video in a foreign language ?
I'm a polyglot myself, so I enjoy that very much, but the simple truth is that most people don't invest the time for becoming fluent in other languages in countries with a "big" language. Works for France, the US, the UK, Spain, Mexico, Japan or China.
Why ? Pretty obvious. Become fluent in a foreign language is a huge effort. Making that effort really only works if you either WANT to do it or if you NEED to do it. The WANT factor is the same everywhere but the NEED to learn a language is way lower if your mother tongue is in the top 5 - or top 10 languages of the world.
The only thing that is specific to French is that French & English have this weird shared history that makes the written langauges very similar and the oral languages very different. So a frequent compromise for french speakers is to become fluent enough at reading/writing, but quite bad at hearing/speaking.
+1 - parent commenter clearly takes too easily of an offense here. Even the French people in my inntercircle agree that there is some level of elitism.
I get the angle you're coming from, but in multi lingual countries where it's table stakes to be at least bilingual, an expressed rejection of not using language A over B is used often as a social cudgel.
Romansh is a national language, not an official one. (At the federal level) Which means that Switzerland considers it a part of it’s culture but that for instance laws and executive orders are not translated in Romansh.
As someone that lived there, and still returns regularly, it is kind of funny to have more fluency in three of those languages, kind of superficially understand the fourth, while many Swiss nationals have to switch to a non official language to understand among themselves when coming from different language regions.
Italian cantons usually focus on German and English, German rather learn English or Italian, French put up with English, and most stop learning the other official languages after the school year where they are compulsory.
Naturally a bit of stereotype, and each as a different experience.
> And most people speak (or at least understand) English.
This is wrong. In cities where there's a lot of tourism, they might understand. Most Swiss people only speak their local languages (German or French). As for those living in Ticino, they tend to be better polyglots.
About 40% of all Swiss inhabitants speak English at least once a week [1].
Anecdotally, I can't think of a single acquaintance younger than 50 years old that doesn't speak fluently. Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.
Some of my German speaking friends even talk in English to French speaking people, even when both have learned the other‘s respective language at school.
> Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years.
We learn the other's respective language for 7 years, too. Yet, as you pointed out, people speak in English because there is no willingness to learn and apply the other's language.
Some of my friends speak English fluently, but I have a very hard bias as I work in IT. My whole family doesn't speak any language other than French. Most of the people I've been to school with don't come close to speaking English casually. None would watch an English content creator.
Due to the shared heritage between the English and German languages, perhaps it's different in the German-speaking region. If you ask someone slightly complicated English questions, they might not be completely lost - after all, some words share the same etymology. But Switzerland is absolutely not an English-speaking country at all.
English is quite common to speak among Swiss from different cantons, since they usually stop caring about the other official languages after the compulsory school classes.
I find kind of ironic that I have better fluency between the official languages than many of my Swiss friends and work colleagues.
I met plenty of people in Lausanne who didn't speak English, or at least didn't want to speak English (it is hard to tell, and anyways, it doesn't really matter). I visited Montreal shortly after my 2 year stay in Lausanne ended and I was surprised on how multi-lingual people were there.
Montreal is not representative of Quebec in general. Montreal itself is very multilingual and anglophone depending on what specific part you're in. In the very touristy parts of Montreal you won't even notice French "requirements". Leave the island of Montreal towards the rest of Quebec (i.e. not towards Ontario) and you will find less and less people willing or able to speak English very very quickly.
Until they think you're a tourist. If they hear you speak another language than English and you seem like you're a tourist, then almost every Quebecer will try his best to speak English even if it means using hand and feet to communicate.
But if they think even for a second that you're actually Canadian, then outside Montreal and even in some parts of Montreal you will be met with the full force of Quebecois pride and nationalism and you better speak French to them.
Y'all are both claiming that the major cities in their region are not representative because they are touristy? That's going to apply to most major cities. Tokyo not representative of Japan, New York not representative of USA, Dublin not representative of Ireland, etc.. But they are.
You definitely won't get 'Southern Charm' or small town feel in NYC. Of course, trying to nail down what exactly is American is gonna be hard to do.
I would definitely not say that if you go to Tokyo you can get the Japanese experience. You get some of it, of course but to say you can get a grasp or even a handful of understanding without ever seeing rice fields and gardens interspersed with houses, beaches with people fishing and immediately turning the catch into sashimi, towns where nothing new has been built since the bubble...
You can't see and feel that in the hustle and bustle, where everyone moves to get away from having neighbors who know all about you, where night is erased by the neon glow.
> You definitely won't get 'Southern Charm' or small town feel in NYC.
This is true but also because the US is geographically and culturally diverse this is impossible in any given city. And that applies equally to none-touristy cities. You're not going to get a broad sense of America from Oklahoma City, either.
The smaller and more homogeneous the country, the easier it is to generalize and get a sense from even a single sample point.
I am not claiming the big city is not representative of Quebec because it's touristy at all. Please read again. But let me try to explain again.
Montreal, never mind tourism, is more English than the rest of Quebec. Depending on which part you're in nobody bats an eye if you don't speak French to them.
In other parts of Montreal and definitely in the rest of Quebec, big city or not, you better speak French unless they think you are a tourist. You can be out in the Beauce but if you look, act and speak like a (non Canadian) tourist they suddenly try their best at English. Quebec City is definitely a city and representative of the rest of Quebec with regards to language (minus tourists). Montreal much less so. There are a bunch of small towns across Quebec that are also very English.
That exists in other provinces as well, where things are very French in the middle of an English speaking province. Acadia comes to mind. Manitoba has some French parts.
Well, it makes sense. Canada still has a significant English-speaking majority. Even if Québec in isolation has a French-speaking majority, there's a very large incentive for French-speaking citizens to learn English because their province is surrounded by primarily Anglophone regions.
There are also other factors at play. Montréal has a fairly large community of native English speakers and receives a lot of tourism from Anglophone Canada and the United States due to its status as the largest city in Québec (and second largest in Canada). It also gets a lot of immigrants, many of which are (at least initially) more proficient in English than in French.
I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English. It also doesn't border any English-speaking countries. It seems English is mostly used as a lingua franca for communication between citizens who don't otherwise share a language rather than due to the direct presence of native Anglophones. Also, Romansh aside, all national languages of Switzerland (French, German and Italian) are spoken in areas that directly border a country where that language is the national language (France, Italy, Germany/Austria). With Switzerland being in the Schengen Area, its linguistic regions may be considered to be part of a much larger individual linguistic communities, which I feel may also diminish the need to learn other languages.
> I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English.
The language of French Switzerland is French. You'll never hear German, Italian, or Romansch. If you only spoke German and not French or English, you really couldn't live there very effectively (only places like Bern or Basel are truly multi-lingual), yes you'll get your official docs in German but then what? I assume the same is true in German speaking Switzerland, and I have no idea about Italian Switzerland.
If a Swiss German and Swiss French met for coffee, what language do you think they would wind up speaking? Perhaps English if neither had comfortable fluency in the other language. Not to take away from your point, but English can get you really far in this world.
I'm sorry if this sounds offensive or derogatory. But as a Swiss person, I've never heard anyone call it "Alemannic". Whether it be foreigners, Swiss-French speakers or Swiss-German speakers, everyone called it "German".
> Swiss German (Standard German: Schweizerdeutsch, Alemannic German: Schwiizerdütsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwizertitsch Mundart, and others; Romansh: Svizzers Tudestg) is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and in some Alpine communities in Northern Italy bordering Switzerland.
All Swiss-German is an Alemannic dialect, not all Alemannic dialects are Swiss-German, is how I'd interpret that.
It depends what you interact with. I tried it fresh today and it quickly decided I'm a Berliner muslim who likes Nigerian food because I lingered for a minute on something. That interest graph is very fast and volatile.
Uhh... that's kind of how these algorithms work. I presume you interact (i.e. don't scroll past) with a lot of the English posts. It's going to index on that and show you more English content. When I'm abroad, I might see a few posts in their native language but the algorithm will revert to showing English posts about the city/country once it realizes I'm not really jiving with Portuguese posts, for example.
An illiterate coworker of mine showed me his phone and asked for help. It was utterly amazing, he exclusively got videos from goat and donkey farmers. The most stunning part was that most of the videos were completely hilarious. People talking to their goat then the goat does what they say or the opposite on purpose.
I believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too.
Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"
The majority of the content feels regional, though.
I would believe if someone said it was completely organic. It's just how Internet is and how social graphs build up. The typical American notion that the Internet is nearly 100% dominated by American English socio-cultural platform and English is the foundational language of the world's all cognitive processing is just an annoying megalomaniac hallucination.
English is used as a lot as a fallback language for inter-cultural exchanges. In that sense it's kind of dominating, but that's it. Intra-cultural communications happens in local languages, and even if that preferred language happened to be one of en-* locales, that only means everyone is functionally bilingual, and it doesn't mean cultural informational borders don't exist. Data still only goes through bridging connections.
It tends to get people annoyed if you don't. Facebook user distribution is like 12% Indian and 6% American. Twitter is(was) 34% English and 16% Japanese. Bluesky was at one point 43% Japanese. If your feed ISN'T filled with Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and so on, with only one in five or less made in English sent from US, your feed is tampered with. But otherwise that social media would be genuinely less useful.
Mastodon only had the raw feed and that drove European network operators insane, so much so that they effectively GFW'd itself.
My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.
in Morocco most of the adults speak French and Arabic, so when they need to speak to an Englisher they get some kids over to help because they all speak English from TikTok
TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.
Do you think it would be possible to show this programmatically? As in scrape n posts from TikTok and Reels and show the first displays CCP tendencies?
Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic
Yup, but of course more than one person has to agree for this to actually happen. Which is not the case for other apps, like Twitter/X. If Musk wants to remove a government, he has only to promote "free speech" and let falsehoods and misinformation dominate his platform.
If a government can be removed easily with "mis"information then maybe it does not deserve to be in power in the first place. Maybe if politicians weren't habitual liars selling their votes to the highest bidder instead of acting in the interest of the people they are supposed to represent then those people would have some trust in them.
geopolitics aside could a turing machine identify misinformation / programatically check whether something is true or not? because even among humans there is no agreement
This is just not true. There are objective facts eg. the earth is round. We can all agree on this, and any information to the contrary should be banned.
The majority of us agree that racism is bad for society. Racist content should be banned.
Yes there are always going to be humans who think the earth is flat or has a core of cheese, but these people can be relegated to the fringes of society.
> This is just not true. There are objective facts eg. the earth is round.
The earth isn't round in many ways. It's vaguely spheroid but not a sphere and it has a rough shaped surface.
> We can all agree on this, and any information to the contrary should be banned.
If we can all agree then there is no need to ban anything. By definition, bans for information are means to suppress those who don't agree.
> The majority of us agree that racism is bad for society.
On the contrary, the majority seems to be very happy with racism. They just don't agree who you can be racist towards.
> Racist content should be banned.
I'd rather not have you or anyone else decide what is too racist to say. Especially when existing inforcement shows that "racism" often includes factual but inconvenient information. I do not support banning facts.
> Yes there are always going to be humans who think the earth is flat or has a core of cheese, but these people can be relegated to the fringes of society.
There are many more people that have much more reasonable (and often provably true) views but are going to be targetted with the speech policing your kind wants.
You are conflating strong Chinese Communist control of the business with how the content behaves. TikTok is full of content that would put a Chinese person in prison.
See this 2019 article outlining Chinese Communist moderation policies that (obviously) were attached to the app when TikTok was new, but were removed for non-Chinese user communities.
There's a Chinese creator on there Huey Li who just made a whole video about that as part of a story about how, now living stateside, he can no longer write in his mother language
I actually had to check if TikTok was subject to the French protection laws on localized media quotas. I see it applies to Netflix et al, but not directly to TikTok.
Yeah thats why Netflix has to produce so much french content, they need 60% of their content to be french but there is not enough lol. Thats how we got call my agent
> This is going to be an interesting experiment: A widely used social network across the world WITHOUT american content.
China has had such social networks for a long time. Their Weibo and Xiaohongshu are two prominent examples. Weibo started as a copycat of Twitter, but then beats Twitter hands-down with faster iterations, better features, and more vibrant user engagement despite the gross censorship imposed by the government.
My guess is that TT can still thrive without American content, as long as other governments do not interfere as the US did. A potential threat to TT is that the US still has the best consumer market, so creators may still flock to a credible TT-alternative for better monetization, thus snatching away TT's current user base in other countries.
To directly answer the question, Rednote is not generally used outside China, and the point about these apps being representative of "global" social media apps is false.
It's called Dispo. You probably haven't heard of it because it became almost irrelevant a few weeks after launch. #1 on the app store doesn't mean a whole lot.
I agree. But I'm just saying that #1 on the app store doesn't preclude something from being a fad and my guess is that in 1 month's time, no one is going to be talking about RedNote outside of Chinese communities.
How many of those downloads originated in China? Genuine question, I read the article and it doesn't say. Apple's App Store is available in China, and China's population alone could be skewing those numbers.
It received some popularity among TikTok refugees from the US and subsequently also from around the world by users who got curios about what the fuzz was all about.
Yeah, me neither. Some analysis said the absolute number is large but the percentage is still small. And the migration is more about protesting. Xiaohongshu will need to come up with better monetization schemes too.
I think it will be a temporary phenomenon. Tiktok people arrived on RedNote last week and were jaw-droppingly amazed at videos of flashy modern Chinese cities, natural wonders (Guilin mountains), beautifully dressed young men and women, tasty food, Luigi fandom, and cute cats.
For many it was a revelation that the US government/media complex has been systematically lying to them about China. They are arriving at an acceptance that the US is a shabby declining empire dominated by a corrupt elite and heartless broligarchs. Always a good thing to bump up against reality, imho.
However I think that the US-based population of Tiktok refugees will subside once the novelty effect has worn off. Probably shrink by half in a month. Hopefully there will remain a positive lingering effect.
> many it was a revelation that the US government/media complex has been systematically lying to them about China.
The rational and data-based take is that the CCP censors negative content about China on Red Book. See [1], [2] and [3] from David Zhang, and you can verify this on your own.
> They are arriving at an acceptance that the US is a shabby declining empire dominated by a corrupt elite and heartless broligarchs. Always a good thing to bump up against reality, imho.
Try making this comment about China in Red Book and see how long it lasts.
Can you post a video about use of gutter oil in China on Red Book? You can post a video about drug use in SF on Twitter and not get banned.
> If China is so developed, why does it fight for developing nation status?
Because overall, China is still much poorer than the developed world (Western Europe, USA, Japan, etc.).
China has some amazing infrastructure and beautiful cities, and many cities, like Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, are now quite developed, but on the whole, the country still has a ways to go.
> The rational and data-based take is that the CCP censors negative content about China on Red Book. [...] Can you post a video about use of gutter oil in China on Red Book?
There is heavy censorship in China, but there's also heavy propaganda about China in the US. Case in point: the videos you linked to come from Falun Gong media, run by a Scientology-like cult that somehow has tons of money (maybe from a 3-letter agency) to spread their own propaganda in the US.
> Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it?
This is a weird fantasy, but it brings up an interesting point. The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture. Especially when compared to Japan or Korea, countries with a fraction of the population but many, many times the influence.
I wish the CCP didn't wall off their citizens from the rest of the world in the name of protecting their own power. Think of the creativity we are all losing out on.
> The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture
The CCP has tried to get their culture out there, it just has not been successful at the visually obvious scale of Japan or Korea. But their culture is definitely getting out there, and I think we often don't spot the Chinese influence on something unless some journalist finds out and writes an article about it.
Some of their influence is leveraged in business deals, with several movies being altered by the demand of the CCP, and these changes persisting in worldwide releases, not just the Chinese-released version of the movies.
Some of their influence is leveraged in video games- Genshin Impact is a famously successful Chinese game. There are some competitive Chinese teams in various pockets of e-sports too. Tencent also owns several video game developers, and occasionally uses their influence to change parts of a game to please the CCP.
There is a Chinese animation industry (print and video), and occasionally they get a worldwide success. I remember being surprised when I found out that "The Daily Life of the Immortal King" was Chinese- you can tell it isn't Japanese but lots of people guess that it is Korean.
I became so interested in ancient Chinese mythology after playing black myth wukong. Also my cousin is watching cDramas all the time and she intends to marry Chinese guy… So I think the soft power is there already, whether we like it or not. but I think it’s good to have competing content instead of being fed whatever powers that be think is good fur us
It basically asks "Why can't China make a movie like this?" Kung Fu Panda was a love letter to Chinese culture, and it connected with people worldwide.
I think it comes down to government censorship. Art is expression and unapproved expression is seen as a threat to a dictatorship.
It makes me sad to think of all the Chinese art we have missed out on because of the insecurity of a government.
Most of the art, music, literature before the twentieth century were created under censorships of authoritarian regimes, and they don't lack vitality. Creativity often thrives under constraints.
The main difference is the classics were often created by a single person, while modern entertainment are created by large groups through industrial processes. The latter are capital-intensive, and investors are risk-averse. The bigger the market, the bigger the investments, the bigger the risks, and censorship is not insignificant a risk.
I think as the cost of production shrinks with technology, there will be an explosion of "high-production-value" works created by smaller groups or individuals, many from the "soft-authoritarian" countries. Traditional entertainment industries may gradually fade away, or pivot to some new medium.
Mostly true but the exception is K-Pop, which as I understand was the creation of a project by the South eKorean government. There was a severe financial crisis in the late 1990s where the country almost went bankrupt. Desperately seeking sources of revenue, the government funded K-Pop groups which eventually become a global phenomenon (BTS et al). At least that is what some Koreans have told me.
I think that’s what’s being implied by creating. Whatever people create and is allowed (or tweaked by) under a repressive regime that is. The government sets the guidelines and censorship and the subsequent content has some peculiar characteristics of the government policies.
I am Korean, and what you are saying is a lie created by anti-Korean people in Japan. Do you really think it makes sense for a government experiencing an economic crisis to desperately seek revenue sources and hope to overcome the crisis by funding a cultural industry that hasn't even succeeded yet?
I've always wondered about this, turns out there's a wikipedia entry for it
> To protect the South Korean culture industry, the South Korean Ministry of Culture received a substantial budget increase, allowing for the creation of hundreds of culture industry departments in universities nationwide.[21] It has justified its financial support for Hallyu, estimated to be worth US$83.2 billion in 2012, by linking it to South Korea's export-driven economy.[22]
It's completely different to say that the government took the lead in an industry that didn't exist before and to say that it provided support to an already successful industry. Of course, what I said was wrong refers to the former. In fact, the government supports all industries to some extent, so that can't be a label.
As someone who wants to learn Chinese, I think about it all the time. Watching Chinese shows just isn't as fun for whatever reason. I was telling my wife the other day I have met so many people who credit Friends for why they can speak English.
That's soft power right there.
I've had to resort to watching anime on Netflix with Chinese dubs - anime is good because people actually talk slower and usually use simple language. When I watched Three Body (Chinese version) the dialogue was impenetrable lol
Thanks I'll take a look. It will be funny if I end up with a Taiwanese accent around my Dongbei in laws but I've spent enough time in china to remember the mainland accent tbh
Three Body is a science fiction television series and I think sci-fi often involves complex vocabulary and abstract concepts, making it a tough choice for language learners
I guess so but it also has slower lines too especially for comedic delivery. The cultural references are good (now dated because Friends is 20-30 years old) because after learning a language, cultural references are next when it comes to fully being able to converse
But it's also highly visual. I forget where I saw it, but someone showed people an episode of Friends without any audio, and they could still understand the plot based on the overly dramatized physical communication.
I'm not surprised. It's extremely accessible in ways I wouldn't necessarily find engaging anymore given my very scarce time for watching media but that kind of accessibility is perfect for a show in a desired second language
Also the humor is very...basic. My theory is a show like Seinfeld with it's double and triple meanings didn't get popular abroad, but Friends and How I met Your Mother did.
I think the simplicity of the humor is the reason.
As a Chinese American, this is the real reason people don't know about China.
To be honest, most of the movies/shows China creates sucks. They're Marvel-esque CGI fests with awful storylines.
Meanwhile, Japan and Korea are creating awesome media.
The whole narrative about the US gov trying to "hide" China isn't really true. There are a ton of viral videos on YouTube about how great China is. And we welcome Chinese immigrants every year.
The real problem is that China itself doesn't execute when it comes to soft power.
Highly recommend Three-Body, the Chinese version of the Three-Body Problem. I enjoyed it much more than the Netflix adaptation, much closer to the source material, and more of a slow burn. Episodes are available on YouTube with subs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-UO8jbrIoM).
Isn't the disillusionment of the main scientist related to the violent abuse of the CCP (and he loss of faith in humanity) core to the reasoning of why she reached out to the aliens, despite their warning? How do they restructure something so core to the plot?
Yeah, I mentioned 三体 in a parent comment. It's a great counterpoint to the "high fructose" Netflix version. And interesting to see the American character portrayed by an American actor...dubbed by a Chinese voice actor. (Just be prepared to fast-forward the musical interludes.)
True that. My wife watched a few Chinese dramas, but they're quite boring compared to k-dramas or japanese shows. I find them annoying and full of propaganda. Only the historical ones are borderline interesting. Also the CCP crackdown on celebrities didn't help.
By contrast, there's now a very good k-drama with Lee Min-ho happening in space or the Gyeongseong Creature horror drama with Park Seo-joon.
I did see some good Chinese movies, mostly out of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-wai directed a bunch of good ones but they all predate Xi's regime and the takeover of HK.
One of my favourite contemporary artists is Ai Weiwei, who has gone missing in 2011 only to finally reappear four years later. I understand he now lives in Portugal. Got his book on my night stand, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.
The only good Chinese language films were all filmed in Hong Kong, directed by people like Wong Kar-Wai. In the Mood for Love is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Chinese cultural (and censor) sensibilities are why big budget US movies are almost universally boring and terrible these days. Authoritarian societies aren’t exactly known for creating good art.
There are many good Chinese language films, not all of them Cantonese. You're forgetting about Taiwanese directors (Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-Hsien) and mainland sixth generation directors (Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye). There are also works by less known authors such as Bi Gan, Hu Bo, Xinyuan Zheng Lu - very unique and impressive.
One should not throw around ignorant blanket statements. There's a wealth of amazing Chinese language movie made outside of Hong-Kong, and yes, good artists can exist under authoritarian regimes, a prominent example of which would be Soviet cinema and literature.
For better or worse, I think CCP has long been on the backfoot in international propaganda just because what passes for persuasive narratives in authoritarian contexts falls flat to global audiences fluent in western entertainment and media culture.
Of course they have modernized, but most actual influence obtained thus fair (e.g. international olympic committees covering up investigations, stopping the NBA from venturing criticisms) has come from projection of soft power rather than being on the cultural cutting edge.
I'm resentful for not having BYD here to offer affordable vehicles. The vast numbers of people who are now boxed out of the middle class could desperately use the help of a vehicle that doesn't cost them $700 a month.
I've never considered there to be one, although I'm open to the idea.
It's easy for me to recognize an Ameican pop culture or an Anglo pop culture, and the favor each show for certain imports over others, but those don't seem nearly so universal as your usage of "global pop culture" suggests.
Latin, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, French, Indian/South Asian, etc each represent huge "pop culture" markets of their own but also each have their own import biases.
Encountering a Chinese song playing a cafe in Latin America. A popular movie with global appeal. Or even people being aware of cultural trends. I feel like culturally, China is a bit of a black box.
Latin America is so insular, they don't even really play US songs in cafes. (Of course this varies between countries, Chile has more foreign culture, Peru has less.)
What do you mean by "global" pop culture? Maybe you mean "the west"/European/American pop culture. Being Vietnamese, I and my friends grew up with Journey to the West which at the time was bigger than Star Wars, Three kingdoms which is a lot lot bigger than Game of Thrones, and a lot of Jin Yong's movie adaptations. Star Wars the force is like normal thing in Jin Yong's novels. It's not a "complete" lack of. Sure you have heard of Monkey King, Lu Bu or Guan Yu, Cao Cao? They also won an Oscar long before Korean did. Sure they lose to Japanese's Pokemon but everyone lose to Pokemon really not just China.
China's pop culture having moderate success on directly boarding countries is not really proof that I am wrong. Given it's size, i'd say that's an example of how it fails.
Maybe it's late but no, China's pop culture is not having a "moderate" success on neighboring countries because they tried and failed but because those neighbors actively resist it. They had culturally dominated over neighboring countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam for hundred of years. See every Korean "historical" movies and you see Chinese culture everywhere. What you're seeing now is the active effort of those countries to stay as far far away from Chinese culture as possible. Imagine you successfully invade China and getting assimilated as the result. That's the Mongols. Thanks to Persia or whatever middle country between China and Europe, Europe did not get infected by Chinese culture. Now ironically thanks to Trump the west is resisting China's dominance before getting infected like Pokemon or KPOP or K-drama.
Recently Marvel Rivals came out and became really popular (developed by Chinese studio NetEase Games). Other than that, there have been talks about Ubisoft going bankrupt and being sold to a Chinese company, but those are rumors as far as I can tell.
The fact that the IP for that amazing book was bogged down in political and mafia-connected controversy, delaying it's global spread for almost a decade, that all kind of proves my point.
I think you are a bit too premature: China has at least one(usually dozens) competitor for literally everything America has. You just don't hear about everything in the US.
Think of any industry and there is probably a Chinese competitor that is trying.
Tesla -> BYD
Google -> Baidu
Starbucks -> Luckin Coffee
IMAX -> China Film Giant Screen or maybe POLYMAX
Finally Disney -> Possibly Beijing Enlight Pictures
They released an animated film Ne Zha in 2019 that according to wikipedia was "the highest-grossing animated film in China,[16] the worldwide highest-grossing non-U.S. animated film,[17] and the second worldwide highest-grossing non-English-language film of all time at the time of its release. With a gross of over $725 million,[18] it was that year's fourth-highest-grossing animated film, and China's all time fourth-highest-grossing film.[19]"
Ok I'll admit part of the reason people don't hear about these companies is that they are still too half baked. But look at BYD, they started off producing junk but this Chinese mindset of grinding and rapid iteration has put them to be super successful today. Why couldn't that kind of happen with their Disney competitor?
Another thing that might be happening is the literal closing off of the world into two spheres. Western US led and Eastern Chinese led. As we are seeing with BYD, they are taking over all the non western markets(and some western as well) but the US has essentially slammed the door shut on them (they haven't actually but made it impossible to enter with their tariffs). Maybe the Disney competitor will take hold in the non western aligned world?
Honestly its a shame they are not open or democratic. The idea of watching or even being part of a rising country that is building their empire is fascinating to watch. Will they collapse due to demographics or these fundamental issues like communism or will they make it? Unfortunately for many people, the only option is to stick with the US and work to keep the ship afloat as there is no place for them in China.
Chinese nation state hacking groups also literally break into American Fortune 500 companies and US aerospace/defense companies to steal R&D and tech to then use themselves + give to private Chinese industries. That sure does help them a ton when they dont have to do any research and can just steal and copy instead.
Thats true...you can only go so far with that though and thats probably why many of their industries haven't really met the par yet.
But at the same time they have eclipsed the west in certain industries such as commercial nuclear. That mentality is there in their industries that havent met the par yet and that was a major point I was making in my previous comment.
As far as I understand, they originally licensed the AP1000 but expanded upon the design enough that they have ownership over the new design and they use that now.
> The complete lack of Chinese influence on global pop culture
Hah, but in 3D fantasy animation - called Donghua - China has every other nation beat handily - even Japan. There are 3D Chinese animations shows like "Soul Land" and "Battle Through The Hewavens", "Swallowed Star", etc that a significant number of people watch all over the world.
"Soul Land" got animated? Which series? I hope the first, the second (or third?) series with that million-year-old white caterpillar was awful.
In any case: that manhua is one of the least bad stories, but the singular focus on "advancing to the next level" (incredibly popular in Chinese stories, for some reason) gets quite dull after a while. It's just that "Soul Land" manages to somewhat mask it; reading much of anything else Chinese is like going up an endless staircase (get trashed; level-up; reclaim face by trashing the baddies; loop).
This definitely wins by numbers - my local anime site features chinese 3d shows too and there’s a lot of them. But the viewership isn’t that good still, judging by the comments and voting.
This is precisely what i'm talking about. A country of 1.4b with a film industry that gets billions in state subsidies and they best they can do is mild popularity of a few films on their physical borders.
Let's be real, the top talent in China flocks to the tech world – internet, manufacturing, the whole shebang. Entertainment? Not so much. That industry's heavily regulated, you know? Look at what they've achieved: drones, electric vehicles, solar power, robotics... You could even say China basically "outsourced" entertainment to the West and East Asia.
Suppression can only go so far against really impressive works. Consider how even the Iron Curtain had trouble keeping them out, and today's USA has no such walls, but instead, an impressive cultural industry of its own. (Or was that your point ?)
I think they meant that because content is siloed already by language barriers, the only ecosystem that would be affected by the removal of US users is the English-speaking subsystem.
That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.
There will be a small category of content that will disappear. For instance, my fyp was full of Chinese fashion content (by choice) so I'm sure there are other categories of content that non-Americans consume that are American. Whether it's Movies or Music or whatever.
English is literally the most commonly spoken language in the world. No language in the world will fit your criteria if you want more than two thirds of the global population to speak it.
A quick search seems to confirm this. A few sites list the number to be around ~1.3 billion people who speak English at all, with around ~360-380 million being native speakers. For example: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-eng....
1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
US, UK, Canada, Australia is where you find the bulk of native speakers. In say Germany or whatever they may become fluent but it’s relatively rare for German parents to be speaking English to each other in casual conversation next to an infant’s crib.
> there’s only 380 million native English speakers
Not how a lingua franca works.
There are 1.5 to 2 billion English speakers [1]. By far the largest number of people to speak a single language. Most of them are in America [2]. (If you count English learners, No. 2 is China [3].)
But this number is dubious as it's largely from self response. Here [2] is a list by country. So 25% of Thais, 50% of Ukrainians, 50% of Poles, and so on "speak English."
In the sense of being able to say hello, thank you, and introduce themselves that is probably true. But "my name is Bob" maketh not a common tongue. If we narrowed it down to the percent of people that could hold a basic conversation, the number would plummet precipitously, likely leaving Mandarin at the top.
What I'm saying is that those are people counted as "knowing English" since the typical way such things are measured is self response. Nowhere remotely near the peecents stated for many countries is accurate.
China's also been pushing Mandarin lately and claim 85%.
You know, they weren't the one to bring it up and their point seems to have consistently been that the majority of the global population does not speak English.
> You know, they weren't the one to bring it up and their point seems to have consistently been that the majority of the global population does not speak English.
While that has consistently been their point, it's also wrong.
Their bar for "speaking English" is "Native Language". Absolutely no one uses that as a bar when talking about how many people can consume content in $LANGUAGE.
> 1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers.
1/3 of the population speaks English “at all” (by which they mean speaking fluently, not learning) and 380 million people (roughly 5% of the population) is native.
Not trying to throw shade at anyone but it’s really... not hard for a reader to pause a little when one reads something that sounds wrong; it’s possible the reader misread. It’s even in the guidelines under different words:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
There was a lot of failure to follow to this guideline in this comment thread.
Plurality of the world (25%) and a larger plurality of the internet-connected world (37%, [1]) speak English. (Granted, most of TikTok’s market now probably doesn’t speak English.)
There are only about 400 million native English speakers. You can't just add up the population of English speaking countries, because that excludes immigrants living in these countries, and people born there who did not learn English as their first language.
As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.
IMO first-or-not is moot. It’s estimated that around one billion people speak English to a reasonably fluent level. Included in that is many of the commonwealth countries in which English often holds second spot as a lingua franca (eg. India). It’s an incredibly global language.
this is horseshit. Canada, the US and the UK alone have - minimum - 400 million. Australia has 25 million, Ireland 5, New Zealand 5, then there's the Anglophone African nations, plus a lot of the Carribbean. Nigeria on its own likely has 100 million native speakers of English
Not all Nigerians can speak English. But there are a lot who can. It honestly felt about 50/50 to me. And I see some other commenters saying that 60 million Nigerians have some ability to speak it. (But you need to think of that like if I was to say 60 million Americans have some ability to speak Spanish.)
However, even for those with some facility with English,I don't know that I'd classify it as their native language.
As I've said, you can't just sum up populations. About 20% of the US population are immigrants. A lot of them won't speak English as their native language.
Only about 60 million Nigerians speak English. Hausa is the most commonly spoken native language. Just because English is the official language doesn't mean that it's people's native language.
I'm not just making stuff up. The 400 million number is from The Ethnologue, a source which linguists generally consider as reliable.
I'd like to see their working for that number. Let's say we subtract 20% from Canada + the UK + the US, we get ~320 million. add Nigeria and Uganda and you have easily 400 million. That's without Australia, Ireland, New Zealand or any of the African or Caribbean countries.
There aren't that many native English speakers in Nigeria and Uganda. To me, it looks like your back-of-the-envelope calculation will come pretty close to 400 million.
That’s at all, there are only ~380 million native English speakers.
Of that 1/3 (of the global population) a significant percentage have extremely limited skills, though the threshold is above knowing a few random words.
By coming from different country their native language (IE what language they heard as infants) more closely resembles that country than America. Note I said 47 million and there are more than 47 million immigrants.
There are also some native born Americans to immigrants who also don’t have English as their first language and People born in China whose first language is English, but that’s ever smaller refinements on a specific estimate.
> ~47 million Americans aren’t native English speakers having immigrated from a non English speaking country.
Your link says 46M total which includes native speakers. So it does not state how many non-native speakers. (not that it would matter as most would be proficient english speakers, just pointing out you're exagerating and your numbers are wrong)
The question of your native language is answered long before any of what you’re talking about here. A 20 year old isn’t time traveling to have different parents when they take an exam.
I presume the US market is the dominant target market for ads / influencing, a quick google search suggests it is 75% of the global spend. So the other issue is not just losing US influencers but all influencers will take a haircut. I don't know how much of popular content is paid for by such revenue but taking a 75% haircut could put a real damper on content producers - especially those who make it a full time job. I don't know if that'll make it better with an increase in proportion of more organic content. I personally don't use TikTok - I waste enough time on HN.
There is an additional separate issue that influencer is a coveted 'career' for many children (~30%), so not only would it wipe out many jobs it'll kill their dreams. I guess like cancelling the space program at a time when kids really wanted to be astronauts.
I think there is a lot wrong with society and TikTok is part of it - but that's a much longer discussion for some other time.
If so, good riddance. The good point of TikTok is that the videos appear genuine and wholesome. Not the hyper-optimized for monetization crap YouTube Shorts show you. I much prefer the videos with kids goofing around on icy streets over the American narrator telling me some bs about some great baseball player.
I think charming/wholesome videos are nicer than ragebait/hustle culture videos, even if both have been just as ruthlessly optimised. Optimisation isn't the problem.
Sometimes dreams are all they have - especially if they're young.
I think we have to understand the reality that the economy today is not what it once was, not even close. I think a lot of people are looking to the influence trade since they see the corporate / political / economic future as failing them and they want to carve out something on their own while the getting is good and while they still can. Sure some just want to be famous but others appear to have a very realistic view of their prospects both as an influencer and elsewhere.
Hopefully the US tech industry is not so schlerotic that they're unable to clone it and offer a competitive alternative. Given TikTok has demonstrated there's a huge amount of money to be made in that space. Although given how awful Google Shorts and Reels' recommendation algorithms are in comparison, maybe there really will be no replacement.
This was covered in a recent podcast. Apparently TikTok classifies videos on many more factors than e.g. Youtube and other US companies. China can do this because they have a cheap pool of many users who can perform this activity.
The podcaster felt that with AI capabilities getting better day by day (maybe - that's another discussion) that this multi factor classification could be automated. It seems not to have been done yet AFAIK.
You'd think with all the H1Bs the US is importing some of those could bring in some recommendation engine expertise.
The truth is that the recommendation engine is power and people drawn to power in the US were too quick to abuse it driving out the old hands - and once institutional knowledge is lost it's hard to get back.
There are such products. Outside of America whatsapp is a dominant social app but its use internally is almost mute despite being an american social app.
Tiktok america is over 50% of tiktok revenue I think that more than anything else would choke out growth world wide.
I don't think it will survive because non American cultural exports are not quite there yet you have to be born outside the US to understand the reach of Hollywood/cultural export as an opinion shaping tool
But then again Telegram survived and they had to resort to kidnapping the CEO so if it does survive the US pretty much gifted that space to a geopolitical adversary
But I'm pretty sure Langley/MD folk thought about this and are betting on it not surviving
How will YouTube shorts, and instagram stories pivot? They already aren’t seen as true rivals, but maybe they can change or spinoff a third brand. The gold in TR has always been its algorithm. Maybe they can fake it. How easy will it be to circumvent via vpn? Will other English content on tt skyrocket? Eg uk and Canada.
Yes, but it's also singularly focused on its core experience rather than being a bolted-on experience that is confusingly blended into an ecosystem where it's not the primary experience.
I'm really at loss at how bad Google is at algorithms considering how pioneering they have been in selecting engineers based on their algorithmic skills and their immense contributions to the whole ML sector.
I can let Spotify play on its own for hours and it will be just right...Even with songs I know nothing about, it's just very good.
I tried Tik Tok once and I could see how easily it could pick content.
But Youtube and Youtube Music are a disaster. Youtube Music is a decent service, but it's hard to get suggested anything really.
Youtube Shorts are a disaster. Sure I like the Sopranos, I find some Joe Rogan's interview interesting and sure I like the NBA, but that's virtually all it feeds me, even if I start scrolling away to other topics.
I feel like Youtube Shorts follows the same logic as youtube where whales skew recommendations. So yeah, you get feed the same shit over and over as the rest of users.
OTOH, with tiktok I got surprised of how much "viral content" is tailored to me. I mean in the sense that I get a huge amount of videos from different trends from different creators, that indicates should be a big thing but then I realize that people around me, heavy tiktok users, barely get recommended or even not aware of.
Wish this was a thing for youtube as well. I’d like a breathe of fresh air from either my bubble or the logged out frontpage that s is not political and cultural propaganda, no /s.
American dominance in english speaking media is really tiresome.
It will take ages for that to happen. AFAIK the "ban" only really removes it from app stores, I don't think it even requires store owners to force it off of phones that have downloaded it already.
I wonder if it's more of a deactivation pending XYZ, with a readiness to flip the on-switch back on if there's a policy change in the U.S. (which it seems like there might be).
True enough but I don't think that will be fast either. The main reason to update would be features and they can keep the old version of any APIs up to support US customers. Other than that the only reason they would have to update is any breaking changes in Android/iOS which are a lot rarer these days afaik since they're both so mature as OSs.
I remember pre-Musical.ly TikTok here in Japan, and it was MUCH better then. In fact, it noticeably degraded when Musical.ly was folded in.
American social media culture revolves around money and sex in a way that isn't as popular in Korea/Japan/S. Asia—roughly speaking, the original scope of TikTok's userbase, since Douyin has always kept Chinese users separate.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of garbage social media content in Asia, but it's more boomers and gen-z era that consume hentai/money flexing/politics/etc., so that nonsense was almost completely absent in the early days of TikTok, when the users were mostly Asian teenagers and young adults trading choreography, in-jokes, and showing off their video editing skills.
I main duckduckgo, but I use Yandex more than Google these days. Incredibly useful for stuff power people in the US want to censor (and I suppose, Google is useful to russians for the exact same reason).
I don't think US content will disappear from TikTok. Most viral creators know how to use VPN. No one's gonna leave such a huge pile of eyeballs on the table.
India also just banned TikTok, I wouldn't be surprised if bans became widespread outside of America with any country worried about China's geopolitical power.
First, I still don't think the ban will actually happen. The current administration will punt the issue to the next and Trump has already signaled he wants to save Tiktok, whatever that means. That might be by anointing a buyer that he personally is an investor in. Tiktok may choose to still shutter in the US rather than being forcibly sold.
But there's a biger issue than loss of American content should this come to pass: the loss os American ad revenue for the platform and creators. A lot of people create content aimed at Americans because an American audience is lucrative for ad revenue. If that goes away, what does that do to the financial viability of the platform?
A worrying angle is that Elon is essentially subservient to the CCP because of Tesla’s presence in China. Remember when Tesla signed a pledge to uphold socialism at the behest of the CCP a couple years back? It’s also why Elon - who claims to uphold free speech, capitalism, democratic values, etc - will NEVER say anything negative about China. If Trump is close to Elon, and Elon is easily influenced/controlled by the CCP, it really undermines the independence of US leadership. I am concerned this next administration will be soft on China in all the wrong ways, including not enforcing a ban that has been legally instituted and upheld unanimously by SCOTUS.
To your point, why is it rumored that China is exploring selling TikTok to Musk and no one else? For as many topics Musk goes off on rants about that he ends up having very little knowledge on, he never says anything about China.
If Musk plans to uphold Communism in China and Democracy in the US, does that not mean "peace in our time"? WW3 pushed back 4 years? The alternative I've been hearing is that warhawks are being stuffed into the federal government this season.
Trump doesn't seem to understand that there's a very real possibility that Tik Tok tuned their algorithm to support Trump because he's their best chance at survival. He's being played and doesn't seem to care as long as he's popular on the platform.
If a US-based alternative appeared which not only substituted performatively, but also monetized creators and influencers enough to put everyone else to shame, people could not help but notice and migrate there in droves.
It would be pretty cool if there was a respectable capitalist with enough money, or if that won't do it then a bigger more-respectable political organization or something, and Tiktok would be nothing but a memory of how things used to be before they got better.
Think about it, a social force or financial pressure strong enough to reverse unfavorable trends, even after they have already gained momentum.
And all it takes is focusing that pressure in an unfamiliar direction that could probably best be described as "anti-enshittification".
I’d worry that such a platform would be used to reverse social trends unfavorable to the owner, instead of social trends unfavorable to society in general.
It also seems… sort of bad if an individual has the ability to be strong enough to reverse a social trend, right? So we basically would have to expect one of the trends they should reverse to be… their own existence. In general it is unreasonable to expect individuals to be so enlightened as to work against their own existence, I think.
This is why I can't wait for Loops to enable real federation, because it distributes this over a number of instances and isn't putting all the eggs in one basket.
At least in Germany, for Gen Z, Facebook is quite dead and Instagram co-exists with TikTok, both with >70% of the cohort [1] using them. There is no clear winner. Anecdata, but for freshmen, TikTok is way more popular.
TikTok-based social media campaigns also e.g. managed to unexpectedly swing an election in Romania (for Georgescu, was later annulled).
Why do you think Instagram is immune from being used in social media based campaign? The only difference between TikTok and Instagram is the recommendation engine they use
... I do not think that it's immune? I don't see where I implied this, sorry if I was unclear. ^^'
This specific campaign was done via TikTok, though, and had massive impact, which shows that TikTok has heavy usage and is popular, outside of the US and China.
(I'm not American, I have no horse in this "ban foreign TikTok" race. :D)
Sorry me neither english no good the thing I'm trying to understand why do you think they used TikTok over YT shorts or Instagram Reels? What makes it better suited from a coding POV usage numbers suggest comparable MAUs for all three
Anyone here who's not a TikTok content creator reasonably upset about losing access to the platform? Can you tell me why it will sting for you? I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad. Both said they wasted too much time on TikTok and were hoping life will now feel better. Seems the very thing that made the platform sticky puts it in a guilty pleasure category perhaps.
(I'm asking about the lived experience outside of the political questions around who should decide what we see / access online.)
EDIT: Thank you for the replies! Interesting. I'm still wondering if most people use TikTok just for passive entertainment? I don't love Youtube, but it's been a huge learning and music discovery resource for me.
The only thing I get sent from TikTok are dances and silly memes but I don't have an account.
Other's have said it; but TikTok was such a nice format for media. It emphasized what the creator can provide its users; what content was legit; entertaining, informative, etc.
Whereas Instagram and FB are more about personal "branding". You post the best version of yourself and it's rewarded with engagement. Where on TikTok the emphasis is on the content; even creators I follow and have seen dozens of videos on I couldn't tell you what their account name was.
On TikTok you put up or you were shut up.
The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks. Maybe YouTube shorts.
I've heard the algorithms for YouTube shorts are much worse. Most people have said the best thing about TikTok is how well it learns the content you want to see.
YouTube essentially does what every big stupid US-based social media algorithm does: If you like cat videos, it serves you more and more cat videos.
Because YT is longform content and the UI isn't a scrolling feed it's OK. I appreciate the different-ness than TikTok (which is why YouTube shorts is kind of annoying actually)
TikTok's algorithm gives you more of what you like, too. But it also feeds you just... random stuff. Content adjacent to your hobbies. Or content that seems to be somewhat popular with people who frequent the niches you frequent. Feeding you a lot of uninteresting videos is low risk; user's still appreciate the variety even when the algo isn't on point.
"My algo has gone off the deep end" is a common trope amongst TikTok users. Bc every now and then TikTok would pull in a lot of new/unrelated stuff for you to check out. And you just scroll by the stuff that isn't of interest. This is how its algo gets good; it's a UX heuristic as much as an algo one.
It's an important distinction because it exposes users to new content, which is fun. YT doesn't do that as much, so YT's content recs can be dull as paint some times.
I'm kinda OK with my kids using Youtube, but I don't want them getting sucked into the infinite pool of shit that is Shorts. But I can't block it even with parental controls.
There are browser extensions that block shorts. You can also block all algorithmic suggestions. I uninstalled the YouTube app ages ago and wish I'd done it sooner.
I have set up YT Kids account for a young relative and manually approved many channels and hundreds of videos. This is one way you can block Shorts, with the added benefit it’s no longer an infinite feed.
NewPipe and Tubular also lack the continuous video feed feature, so you can watch Shorts if someone sends you a link, but they're just like regular videos.
I never used tiktok. You don't follow accounts? You just open and scroll and hope eventually you get something? There's a nothing being done intentionally by the user to find content?
You can follow accounts, and they offer a Following tab to keep track of accounts you really like, but the default consumption mode is to use it just like TV. When you're done with a video you scroll to the next. The app uses signals like how long you spent on a video, whether you liked it or not, whether you sent it to friends or not, etc to see how much you like a video. You can also reset your "algorithm" if you find yourself consuming content you don't like.
Most people just scroll the home page yea. Of course you can follow accounts but that’s not the main use case. The algorithm really is mind bogglingly good
You can follow accounts, but you don't need to follow accounts. The UX is dead simple: scroll and watch content of interest to you. Tiktok handles the rest
Rednote is a fascinating experiment in T and C blindness. Just how far can you go in the terms? Put them in Mandarin worldwide? Apparently OK. Include a commitment to uphold the "12 core socialist values" of the Chinese government? OK. Include rules against criticizing the Chinese government, Chinese socialism, or Chinese interests? I guess that's OK too.
At what point will there be a reaction from industry? From government? I guess there's no reaction point for users. Would China or RedNote try to enforce any of this?
I remember 20 years ago someone putting the right to your firstborn in a software license agreement. No-one reads them, no-one cares, and why would or should they? It's not like companies that ignore their own privacy policy get anything more than a slap on the wrist, so why bother reading it?
> The experience, in the end, was always on point for shortform content. Nothing else like it exists; and I don't think American tech can make it because they benefit too much from being ad networks.
It’s really not, not even close to the same. The algorithm is really, really bad compared to TikTok. You can’t pause videos, can’t download them, can’t use copyrighted music, the comments are awful and full of bullying and hate and anger. It doesn’t have the powerful tools to actually edit your videos. It doesn’t have the community. Instagram reels just feels like a bad copy of TikTok. It’s also not timely; on TikTok you see things as they happen. News arrives instantly. Stitching enables two way conversations. Everything on Instagram is just recycled crap from two weeks ago on TikTok. I only use instagram to talk to people really; the actual content doesn’t do anything for me.
This hasn't matched my experience at all. TikTok is much better at surfacing interesting content. IG's "learning" seems to be a sort of auto regressive retargeting rabbit hole logic that just doesn't compare. And the people do seem nicer. But maybe that reflects the videos I am being served. IG discussions on the other hand are more likely to have the kind of smug snark your comment does.
The problem is that Instagram content is so ... fake? manufactured?
There is very little original creator content in there, it's all semi-professional "influencers" doing heavily scripted skits or just plain stolen stuff (vertical versions of TV shows, movies, stand-up sets etc)
The running joke for years is that Instagram Reels is where you go if you want to see last month's viral content from TikTok. In my experience it's true.
The format is the same but not the algorithm or what people are putting on it. I’m not a tok tok user but the few times I’ve been on it they felt surprisingly different. Meta reels are less substantial in content.
I have a lot of Japanese friends and travel between Japan and here frequently. TikTok is huge in Japan and a lot of my For You Page is content trending in Japanese spheres. I don't live in Japan so being able to plug into Japanese media is a very, very convenient thing.
I'll probably continue trying to use the app if possible since I mostly connect with Japanese content, but I will say there's also a fun world of Japanese creators who straddle the English and Japanese speaking words who are about to lose an outlet to the English speaking world, and I feel really bad for that too.
The "algorithm" is also just so much better than Reels and others. I spent an afternoon of PTO training my algorithm a couple years ago and it's been great ever since. My partner and I share TikToks with each other all the time and. we shape each other's algorithm and interests. Reels fixates too much on your follows and Youtube Shorts is honestly a garbage experience. Both platforms really reward creators building "brands" around their content rather than just being authentic or silly. I treat Reels as the place for polished creators or local businesses who are trying to sell me something and TikTok as the place for content. I find that I get a lot less ragebait surfaced to me than I do on other platforms, though I admit my partner gets more than I do. We both skip those videos quickly and that has helped keep this stuff off our FYP.
An important thing to remember is TikTok was one of the first platforms that was opt-in for short-form content. Both Reels and Shorts was foisted upon users who had different expectations of the network and as such had to deal with the impedance mismatch of the existing network and users who didn't want short-form content. TikTok's entire value proposition is short-form content.
I second this. I spend a few minutes each evening watching random people out and about in Japan, Korea, China as it is fascinating to learn about foreign cultures in such a direct way. Just yesterday I learned about the palm scanners some stores in China have as a payment system.
I don't create for TikTok, I have never had a TikTok account, and I don't use TikTok, outside of being exposed to videos on other sites, or occasionally clicking a link.
I had been exposed to DouYin before, but my first experience of TikTok in real life was someone at a party, holding their phone, exclaiming something along the lines of "I can't look away, it's so addictive." It was uncomfortable, and I'm aware of how fake this sounds, but it happened.
But I think this is very bad.
With Section 230 in crosshairs, EARN IT being reintroduced every year or two, and access to books and sites being fragmented across the US, things are very already bad, and have the potential to get much worse. TikTok being banned is censorship, and presents a significant delta towards more censorship.
Congress didn't just "ban TikTok", Congress banned its first social media. This is case law, this is precedent, this is a path for banning other social media apps.
I think this is bad because I think this is the start of something new and something bad for the internet.
> TikTok being banned is censorship, and presents a significant delta towards more censorship
I don't see it that way. I'm not American and I've never used TikTok.
I don't see any censorship here.
This is more of an ongoing power struggle between the US and China, tit for tat after they banned American apps.
Censorship would mean that they're banning actual content. That's not what's happening here. Any of the short form videos from TikTok can be hosted on several other video platforms, if the creators care to upload it.
Banning a platform is not censorship. It's like banning a book publishing house but allowing any other publisher to continue publishing their books.
It does appear that there is actual censorship, in the form of book banning, happening in several US states recently. But this ain't that.
I’m shutting down the film festival and reserve the right to shut down all future film festivals with this precedent.
I’m not censoring you, of course. You’re free to assemble in the local Hollywood studio.
Sounds a lot like censorship lite before the full fledged version ships.
> Any of the short form videos from TikTok can be hosted on several other video platforms, if the creators care to upload it.
Sure, you can repost TikTok content anywhere, but what people really notice when they recognize that tiktok's algorithm is unique—without realizing it—is that it's apolitical by default, and not-western when politics come into play. It actually shows you what you're interested in, instead of force-feeding western progressive/consumerist messaging and banning half its users for wrongthink.
So yeah, post the same content on Reels/Shorts if you want, but if it doesn't align with the western narrative, good luck with the shadowbans and downranking.
The algorithm's advantage could disappear in an instant. It is not a real moat, and if TikTok weren't banned I definitely think we'd see that play out in the next 2 years.
LoL, the algorithm is the only reason TikTok was able to dethrone both Meta and Alphabet in short form content (also Snap but who gives a damn about that loser).
TikTok even put their algorithm workings out there in the internet, as part of public presentations, yet Google and Facebook being unable to replicate something that's anywhere close to performant compared to TikTok is evidence of the moat ByteDance has.
Algorithms can and have been copied and improved. It is human nature.
For years people would wax about Spotify's algorithm never being dethroned, but the anecdotes I'm seeing lately are that YouTube Music's algorithm is now far ahead of the pack.
If the algorithm is all TikTok had, they'd lose long term. See also Snapchat and Instagram Stories.
> Algorithms can and have been copied and improved.
Tiktok's algorithm can't be copied in the West. What makes it "so good" isn't some technical secret—it's that it starts apolitical and remains politically non-committal. If you're not into politics, it won't push political content at you. If you are, it won't suppress conservative views or force-feed you western progressive narratives. If you change your political interests it won't continue to nudge you towards western progressivism or Conservatism™ or some mainstream "safe" brand of political discourse.
Western corporations won't replicate this because they're committed to embedding specific messaging in everything at all times to astroturf and force national culture shifts.
This understanding is sufficient to explain the motive behind the Tiktok ban as well as why no extremely well funded and highly motivated, intelligent corporations in the west can repeat tiktok's algorithm success.
Algorithmic content, and how that can be used to shape a chosen narrative, is an important issue. However, it's much more closely related to propaganda rather than censorship.
The west is committed to their own propaganda narrative, which explains the tiktok ban and the "inability" (unwillingness, really) to replicate the algorithm.
I'm not saying china is perfect. They do their own propaganda and narrative control. The west trying quite successfully to replicate THAT algorithm—authoritarianism and narrative control, corporations acting as arms of the state propaganda agencies, etc.
What's being targeted is TikTok's algorithm. User's videos are still legal US speech and can be posted and shared freely.
The specific rationale upheld by SCOTUS and unenumerated in the law itself (it's only like two sentences, I would recommend just reading it) was based on national security concerns and level of scrutiny.
TikTok failed the criteria. US companies do not, and laws to ban them would have to use entirely separate methods which would face a far tougher SCOTUS test. (It's not like the Justices are falling over themselves to always agree on things, especially the current court.)
Banning US companies is just politically infeasible. But the Chinese issue is pretty bipartisan (right now).
> User's videos are still legal US speech and can be posted and shared freely.
Sure, but removing the platform still removes speech. This relies on all of the people saving and re-uploading their videos.
Imagine a scenario where you needed government and regulatory approval to create a new website. HackerNews, personal websites, etc. were all banned. Would it be okay, since you could repost all your comments and threads onto Facebook?
> Banning US companies is just politically infeasible. But the Chinese issue is pretty bipartisan (right now).
FOSTA and SESTA impacted US companies. It leakd to increased censorship on practically every social media platform.
The EARN IT Act is still a threat (unless Salt Typhoon, ironically, provided the proof necessary to show how vital e2ee is). It has also enjoyed bipartisan support, and backdooring encryption is harmful and does constitute censorship.
While I agree the legal specifics of the TikTok ban are meant to target TikTok, the political apparatus has been proven. Congress banning apps has been normalized.
No matter how you cut it, this is another big loss for the free and open internet, at a time when wins are far and few between.
I'm pretty upset about it honestly. TikTok's algorithm has always done a fantastic job of providing interesting clips in a way that Facebook and Instagram has never been able to provide. I will say that upon a new account, it's mostly garbage, but it quickly learned what I was interested in and what I would tend to engage with. It also does this while showing me considerably fewer ads than the meta platforms.
That said, the algorithm got noticeably worse after 2021. Maybe because of the TikTok shop. I’ve categorized around 3,000 clips into different collections (with 600+ being in “educational”) but that fell off over the last few years. I would be a lot more upset about the ban if they had maintained quality, but now I’m like well, whatever.
Serious question: Why is the back end learning of so many human habits not creepy to you? It was weaponized once with how they created armies of teenagers who called their local representatives and made threats.
> It was weaponized once with how they created armies of teenagers who called their local representatives and made threats.
This is an extremely dramatic way of saying "they had a banner in the app which informed users of a policy that affected them and directed them to contact their representatives", something which plenty of other social media platforms, such as Reddit have done without controversy.
> Why is the back end learning of so many human habits not creepy to you?
In the context of banning TikTok for this particular reason, then X.com, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are all equally guilty in how they both boost and suppress different types of content based on interference from local government.
They weaponized the backend to drive that by injecting in recommendations for that inorganically, or that was something that emerged from having a recommender system backend?
All the other content recommendation systems force you into a ghetto and are highly auto-regressive. They only show you content like they already showed you, so you will never be exposed to new things. This hampers discovery, and you end up with only a few winner-take-all accounts with mass appeal and mass distribution (e.g., "Mr. Beast") who are broadly not interesting or specialized.
TikTok is more stochastic and is more likely to give wider circulation to niche and esoteric subjects. Booktok could never happen on YouTube shorts or Instagram.
Using those other platforms is like shouting into the wind. You could have videos up for years and not get 50 views. With TikTok, a random video could be seen by 250k people.
A corollary to other systems being so auto-regressive is that they are much more dangerous for vulnerable people. If Instagram decides to start showing you extremist or otherwise political content, that is all you will see. This is the "rabbit hole" effect that people have commented upon. This doesn't happen to the same degree with TikTok; while this content can be recommended, it's not all that will be recommended.
Think you nailed TikTok's magic sauce, that algorithm finely balances the ghettoization of most traditional social networks and the "you might like this" randomness that feels like it's two-steps of interest away from your usual feed. Any regular user will see that pattern of 10-15 things that fit a pattern, and then a couple of very clear pieces of tracer content that expands and reinforces your own FYP.
It shows an understanding and adoption of risk that most western social networks don't have, while they're too invested in supporting and reinforcing the status quo, TikTok has always felt a little more willing to find the edges of/expand your interests.
Each and every time I open youtube I think "there surely must be other stuff on here", but yt has me so doggedly pigeonholed they won't let me ever see anything outside of what I've watches in the last two days. The algorithm is so ridiculously over fitted.
TikTok provides the "human" element that IG and YouTube do not.
On IG and YouTube the algos are shoving "creators" in my face, which is fine sometimes. But TikTok surfaces randos whose only followers are their own family members, and they happen to be talking about something unique or funny in one video out of dozens that got only 2 views.
On IG and YouTube, the algos give me brightly lit faces, brightly lit homes, professional editing. On TikTok, I get people speaking quietly from their bed, or their recliner in what is obviously a trailer, or in the passenger seat of their car at Safeway, double-chinned and sleepy-eyed, saying something hilarious or just talking about their day or maybe sharing something they just realized.
On IG and YT, I get a video of someone falling on their face plastered with poorly worded captions and one or more logos for some social media company. On TikTok, I see the original video of that person falling on their face from the original account, and if you go to their account it's obviously just a real person who made a funny video by accident one time.
All the things that IG and YT force on me certainly exist on TikTok too, and you can surround yourself with that content if you like. But if you don't want that kind of content, TikTok lets you choose.
Not a content creator, but a TikTok user for several years. I really feel like the app changed my life. It opened my world to new cultures and ideas, brought me out of my comfort zone, introduced me to several real life friends. I made big changes in my life as a direct result of TikTok and have improved my life and health significantly as a result. I’ll be really sad to see it go.
In no particular order:
- I learned a new language and moved to a new country, as a direct result of what I saw and learned from TikTok.
- I learned about countless new cultures from all over the world.
- I learned new perspectives about domestic and international politics.
- I met a variety of real, online friends and 3 real life friends who I actually spend time with in person.
- I was able to learn how to express my emotions in better and more constructive ways.
- I learned a ton of random things about every subject matter I can think of—from AI and programming, to psychology, to cooking, to mechanical and electrical engineering, history, medicine, science, etc. As a generalist it’s very important to me, as I’m able to connect information well across diverse subject areas.
- I discovered the majority of the music I listen to these days.
- I started traveling the world, learning how to do it safely and finding new destinations I didn’t previously know anything about.
The list really goes on and on, but these are some of the quick highlights that come to mind. Thanks for asking!
I've found something like a very efficient sorting into communities of shared interest, and something egalitarian in being able to see people with 0 views and get reactions from them.
It's by contrast to say, Youtube and X, where The Algorithm (tm) sustains a central Nile river of dominant creators and you're either in it or you're not.
That said, I think the political questions are rightly the dominant ones in this convo and those color my lived experience of it.
You’re right about youtube shoving the main river on you but recently discovered a lot of niche youtubers with very few views in my areas of interest. I just wish I had more control in what the feed returns, for example if im irked by a certain content I should be able to escape it with a click. But thats not how youtube or facebook/instagram work. Content is targeted at you behind the scenes based on an accidental encounter you had in the past with some content and there’s no way to disable that. Don’t recommend this channel/page doesn’t work because there’s an army of channels/pages that push the same content on you. This is very powerful for paid propaganda
I know you’re joking, but this is not true. There’s something short and stupid for everyone, but not something interesting for everyone at all.
Last couple years I spent my media time watching trackmania and noita for the most part. These are just-games, but with rich interesting worlds behind them. I can’t imagine spending all this time watching a pig or people cutting bangs or someone lipsyncing or talking nonsense. Not judging, but it’s such mind disgracing activity in my view.
To reiterate the post you are responding to, saying “not judging” doesn’t make a statement not a judgment in the same way that saying “sharing a personal opinion” doesn’t make a statement not a judgment. “What you enjoy doing is a mind disgracing activity” is a judgment, full stop, regardless of how nonsensical of a statement it is or how you dress it up or qualify it.
My wife, well into her 30s, initially got an inkling that she might be on the Autism spectrum after being exposed to TiKTok videos of high masking, high functioning women who talked about their Autism.
After many years and dozens of tests and questionnaires and appointments with speech pathologists, occupational therapists and psychiatrists, she was formally diagnosed last year with Level 2 Autism (there are 3 levels here in Australia).
After years of being misdiagnosed with various forms of anxiety or depression (and none of those drugs or treatments being helpful for her), this has been life changing. So much of her early childhood and past life now suddenly makes sense.
We used to be very bad at diagnosing autism in girls
technology changed our life. especially internet and smart phone impact a lot on social engagement between peoples.
if people spend much time on internet or smart phones daily, if it is not tiktok, it will be something else.
should we go back to non smart phone time? or even roll back to no internet time? maybe no electricity time.
technology is just like a tool. how people use it matters not the technology itself can be evil.
tiktok's algorithm helps speed up information delivery to the people who likes it. eventually it helps to form a community of people online who like similar thing or have similar options.
people needs to be aware of the content on any platform has "survivorship bias". seeing couple of examples is not representing the whole.
Not a content creator and use it regularly. My algorithm is mostly silly stuff, music, etc. I'm not convinced there's a discernible risk to national security, and as someone with a lot of libertarian views, I think the ban is an overstep by the US government.
The "sticky"-ness is real, but many will flock to the TikTok copies in other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, anyway.
Regardless, I enjoy the platform. It's fun to reference the viral sounds/trends on the platform with other friends that use it.
I don't have an account, but how about this: I don't want the government to ban websites or apps in general, and certainly not for who owns them.
The internet was supposed to be a global thing, where it didn't matter who you were and everyone could connect to everyone. That is the internet I grew up with.
As a millennial, I use TikTok as a “normie” version of Reddit. The algorithm has a similar vibe. It puts content in front of me that I’m likely to be interested in, exposing me to quite a diverse set of content. The instagram/youtube algorithms don’t come anywhere close in comparison.
It’s a guilty pleasure in the dopamine sense, but also surfaces a lot of informative content if you bias towards that! I suppose it depends how you use it.
> Anyone here who's not a TikTok content creator reasonably upset about losing access to the platform? Can you tell me why it will sting for you?
I like living in a country where the government does not get to decide what I'm allowed to read/watch/see. The TikTok ban chips away at that in a meaningful way.
I value this above most other concerns, including vague worries about "Chinese spying".
I'm not just upset because I have a general dislike of being told I'm an idiotic, addicted, communist stooge who is easily brainwashed. I am used to folks telling me that- it started when I was writing anti-war editorials in the early oughts, so there is nothing new in that.
What I regret is that I have been following a number of quite-good political discussions on the platform, with a nicely diverse group of interlocutors.
While the discussion generally leans far left, there are many flavors of that left:
not a lot of tankies, mostly just people between "dirt bag left" and "black panther party", lots of women, BIPOC, trans folks, academics, working people, indigenous folks, queer folks of all stripes, activists, and folks who just don't like authority.
Those conversations had been very hard to come by on Yt, Ig, or Fb.
I think it's the response format for videos. I don't think it's worth bothering to speculate about other reasons, though I did note that several legitimate left news sources were shuttered in 2020 when Meta and Tw started their political purge.
Anyhow, I know that folks in the US have very little regard for political autonomy, so I am not surprised that this happens, and compared to the carceral state and the happy ecocide of the planet this is a very little thing. But I will still miss it.
My fyp was very similar. I'm going to miss having so many like minded folks to hear from and interact with. I don't think any other app has given me this same sense of community and to some degree empowerment. I am very left leaning in my politics, I also happen to be a POC who is surrounded by apolitical friends. TikTok showed me that there are other folks just like me - that is a powerful and reassuring feeling.
Same. I mean I didn't find quite the same type of community, but I did get exposed to content that was different than other platforms. Just weirder, more fun, more interesting. Definitely going to miss it if it goes away.
It's unfortunate that more people can't see that it:
1. actually has some social value
2. banning it is a restriction on our freedom
Obviously, it's
3. mostly junk and brain rot
4. a potential tool for Chinese influence and manipulation
But I think we need to accept that 1 & 2 override 3 & 4. Honestly for 4, it's more important to have a widely used source that isn't necessarily subject to the same restrictions (legal or cultural) as US-based apps.
> I was really surprised that my daughters (avid teenage TikTok users) are much more relieved than mad.
A sense of relief may be a coping mechanism. I've heard laid-off colleagues inform me they felt relief in the immediate aftermath; granted, the lay-offs were pre-announced before they communicated who would be "impacted", and it was at a high-pressure environment; but the human mind sometimes reacts in unexpected ways to loss outside of one's control. Rationalization is a mechanism for ego defense.
It doesn't occur to you that they may be relieved because they know they're addicted and are glad that someone is going to step in and give them the help they can't give themselves?
It's annoying to have to take the time to train my recommender on a different platform. I'm sure I could get YouTube Shorts to eventually give me an equivalently pleasant experience, it's just a pain.
I don't really care either way. I used TikTok and uninstalled it since I found myself watching more than doing. Even if you curate your algorithm to 'good' stuff, it's still just consuming.
TikTok has replaced Reddit for me (I can expand more on why I stopped using Reddit, but it's not related to TikTok) in terms of "checking what's up on the internet" or as Reddit would put it "Checking the homepage of the internet".
I trust TikTok's "algorithm" to give me quick and entertaining short-bits about what's going on, what's interesting, etc. It learns what I'm into effortlessly, and I appreciate how every now and then it would throw in a completely new (to me) genera or type of content to check out. Whenever I open it, there is a feed that's been curated to me about things I'm interested in checking out, few new things that are hit or miss (and I like that), and very few infuriating/stupid (to me) things.
Its recommendation engine is the best I have used. It's baffling how shitty YouTube's algorithm is. I discover YouTube channels I'm into form TikTok. Sometimes I'd discover new (or old) interesting videos from YouTube channels I already follow from TikTok first. For example, I follow Veritasium and 3Blue1Brown on YouTube but I certainly haven't watched their full back catalog. YouTube NEVER recommends to me anything from their back catalog. When I'm in the mood, I have to go to their channel, scroll for a while, then try to find a video I'd be interested in from the thumbnail/title. And once I do, YouTube will re-recommend to me all the videos I have already watched from them (which are already their best performing videos). Rarely would it recommend something new from them.
On TikTok, it frequently would pull clips from old Veritasium or 3Blue1Brown videos for me which I'd get hooked after watching 10 seconds, then hob on YouTube to watch the full video. It's insane how bad YouTube recommendation algorithm is. Literally the entire "recommended" section of youtube is stuff I have watched before, or stuff with exactly the same content as things I have watched before.
Here is how I find their recommendation algorithm to work:
YouTube: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? Here is that video again, and 10 other "brisket smoking videos". These are just gonna be stuck on your home page for the next couple of weeks now. You need to click on them one by one and mark "not interested" in which case you're clearly not interested in BBQ or cooking. Here are the last 10 videos you watched, and some MrBeast videos and some random YouTube drama videos.
TikTok: Oh you watched (and liked) a brisket smoking video? How about another BBQ video, a video about smokers and their models, some videos about cookouts and BBQ side dishes, a video about a DIY smoker, another about a DIY backyard project for hosting BBQ cookouts, a video about how smoke flavors food, a video about the history of BBQ in the south, a video about a BBQ joint in your city (or where ever my VPN is connected from), etc. And if you're not interested in any of those particular types, it learns from how long you spend watching the video and would branch more or less in that direction in the future.
Another example is search. Search for "sci fi books recommendations":
YouTube: Here are 3 videos about Sci-Fi books. Here are 4 brisket smoking videos. Here are some lost hikers videos (because you watched a video about a lost hiker 3 weeks ago). Here are 3 videos about a breaking story in the news. Here are 2 videos about sci-fi books, and another 8 about brisket.
TikTok: Here is a feed of videos about Sci-Fi books. And I'll make sure to throw in sci-fi book videos into your curated feed every now and then to see if you're interested.
I think the easiest answer to follow for "why is this not prevented by free speech protection" is "the fact that petitioners “cannot avoid or mitigate” the effects of the Act by altering their speech." (page 10 of this ruling, but is a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Broadcasting_System,_In...)
It's amazing to me how many people are derailed by the free speech argument.
This is about who controls the network, not the content on the network.
There is a law that only U.S. citizens can own TV stations. That's why Murdoch became a US citizen (allowing him to buy Fox). This is in a similar vein.
If you followed the politics of the TikTok ban, it was absolutely about the content of the network.
US Congresspeople and Senators were angry that TikTok would not censor or de-emphasize pro-Palestinian / anti-Israeli content, whereas Facebook much more actively de-boosted that kind of content. All previous attempts to ban TikTok failed to gain traction, until the Gaza war began, and that issue convinced many politicians in the US to back a ban.
I know this was a common talking point but I don't really agree it is a valid reason. It's probably just demographic and algorithmic differences that pro-Palestine content is more common on TikTok.
What would be interesting though - on all platforms, what's the organic percentage of the different view points, and whats the percentage that ends up being shown to people. I think that's what people are worried about being quietly manipulated. So even a small amount of people with some extreme view point would get promoted because China wants it, but since it's real content, it's not really obvious that it's being pushed.
I'm totally pro-TikTok btw I just don't really buy the idea that it was about this specific content.
right you really have to be not paying attention or be living in an alternative facts world. For instance look on X, there are literally thousands of paid for foreign propaganda bots trying to inject hatred and division in the USA and they have free reign and the government is not trying to stop them after Musk told them "no". Soon it starts happening to facebook, except there is no "paid" bluecheck account, the result will be the same. TikTok is a clear and present attempt by a centralized foreign advesary to do the same thing, but they will be treated differently because it's the enemy from without and not owned by an American company.
> There is a law that only U.S. citizens can own TV stations.
The communications act did not ban already-existing networks, and it did not ban specific providers. The tiktok ban is targeted specifically against one social media that the government does not like[1], with a thin veneer of "security concern" that people might specifically choose to share their contact list and that one of those contacts may be in a sensitive position.
[1] I don't even really think it's about the government not liking it! They thought they could get cheap support by drumming up anti-chinese sentiment and they ran with it. It's the most pathetic kind of politicking.
Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply. The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.
> Simple answer. A chinese owned company has no such rights or protections. Free speech does not apply.
The Constitution does not place limits on which people are protected by it (you don't have to be a citizen for it to apply as the founders were looking to limit the powers of their government not their citizens). And with the expansion of those protections to corporations through Citizens United, I'd be surprised if a court found that `company + foreign != person + foreign` when they've decided `company == person`. (Well not surprised by this Court.)
> The law also does not censor content (so no free speech violation anyway). The law simply bans the distribution of the app on marketplaces stores for reasons stated (national security). Big difference.
The rest of your comment still stands right in my eyes. National Security has often been used as a means to bypass many things enshrined by the Constitution.
Eh? Unless otherwise specified, corporations satisfy the definition of a person across all federal laws per 1 USC §1, which reads: "the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals"
That 1 USC §1 is not a typo: this copy appears in the first section of the first title of US code, on disambiguating common terms used in law.
Totally beside the point. Verbatim from Citizens United:
> The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”
That is not nearly the same thing as saying that they are people. Just that when it comes to this particular right, the way it is applied is not functionally different. That’s like saying that because corporations pay taxes they are also people.
The point you and others try to make is that corporations are people as a result of CU and so other human rights apply to them. This is backwards. SCOTUS and lower courts basically established that free speech applies to corporations same as individuals. But it did not establish their personhood. This is exactly equivalent to saying that a corporation has to pay taxes like a person. It does not make it a person.
So what people get wrong is they say “if a corporation is a person then it gets to do X”. Thats incorrect, nobody except talking heads on TV called it a person. Similarly “if a corporation has the right to free speech it has the right to do X” is incorrect. Having one right does not confer all rights. Again think of it as the idea of corporations get to pay taxes. People get to pay taxes. This did not make corporations people and did not confer any other rights onto corporations.
Ugh. CU doesn’t state that corporations are people. They can’t vote or own guns or get married or divorced. They can’t be legal guardians to children or pay income tax. They aren’t entitled to Social Security benefits and their coverage for health insurance may be denied for preexisting conditions. What CU said is that collectively people can use company resources to exercise their right to free speech and established the concept of super PACs.
This isn’t to say that it was the right decision (certainly seems to have done some very bad things). But “corporations are people” is a lay person talking point, not an actual legal doctrine. Therefore you can’t just apply it to other cases because there is nothing to apply.
You are correct that free speech isn’t limited by your citizenship status.
Isn’t Alphabet and other tech companies technically Irish owned? Doesn’t Saudi Arabia own a chunk of Twitter? Seemed like the whole ownership ship justification is a cheap canard.
Sure but even the supreme court disagrees with the supreme court. Treating their rulings as the best or canonical interpretation of a case doesn't make much sense.
It's not like any interpretation is valid but there are plenty of valid ones.
By definition, the Supreme Court's decision _is_ the canonical interpretation. Whether you disagree with the decision has no bearing on the matter.
And of course it makes sense, because the legal system was created by the very laws it upholds. If you think it should be different, then you'll have to convince a lot of people to change a lot of laws and probably parts of the US constitution
This is not affecting US citizens' legal free speech rights. You have the right to say what you want; you don't have the right to say it on a specific platform. You had free speech without TikTok before it existed, and you'll have the same amount of free speech if it does not exist again.
This is exactly the simplistic framing the person you replied to is talking about. So let's take an absurd extreme. The government designates a 1x1 mile "free speech zone" in the middle of Wyoming and says you're not allowed to speak anywhere else. You have the same amount of free speech as you did before, right?
Another extreme, let's say the government declared that you may speak freely but only by filling out a web form routed to Dave. Great guy. I mean they haven't technically taken away your right to speak? And someone will hear what you say.
Both of these would he flagrant violations of 1A as I'm sure you'd agree. But what this means is that implicit to 1A the government has limits on how many places it can deny you speech and limits on how much they can deny you an audience. And you can't hide behind the "well it's just divestiture not a ban" because the courts aren't blind to POSIWID.
So the more nuanced question is does banning TikTok meaningfully affect the ability of Americans to speak. And I think because of how large they are you could answer yes to this question. Americans know exactly what they're signing up for with their TT accounts and want to post there. TikTok but owned by an American would be legal so the platform itself isn't the issue. And saying TT can't operate in the US and actively preventing Americans from accessing it are two very different actions.
>Another extreme, let's say the government declared that you may speak freely but only by filling out a web form routed to Dave. Great guy. I mean they haven't technically taken away your right to speak? And someone will hear what you say.
This argument touches on the more valid defense for TikTok: restricting which people can host speech is a good way to restrict content, by punishing those who tend who host certain kinds of content. Personally, I'm okay with requiring a US company control TikTok in the US for national security reasons, but I would've preferred the law go through strict scrutiny. Laws can restrict what would usually be Constitutionally protected rights as long as they have good reasons and little room for collateral damage. If what Congress has been claiming is true, this law should pass that standard.
Actually, both of those examples might be legal (assuming the form is applying for a permit for some specific event/location). Time, place, and manner restrictions have long been upheld by the courts. What isn’t legal, or at least what requires strict scrutiny, are content restrictions.
Cool, so is all US companies in all other countries around the world then, no protections. All countries in the world, USA just showed it is perfectly fine to steal a foreign companies' asset. Let's do that to all USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them. U know how rich you will be if you just got a piece of them? U know you could end homelessness, poverty, balance trade, stabilize your currency, elevate tax revenues, get free education and health care for your citizens, provide great jobs if you just got a piece of USA companies? Now you can! All of them can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies. Everyone gets a piece, everyone gets them equally, everyone will benefit and be happy!
I get this argument, and obviously it's not stopping people from uploading the same content other places. But isn't there (or shouldn't there be) something about not banning what people can consume? Like could the US ban aljazeera? Or banning foreign books?! And still TikTok is different, because it's about the potential for quietly manipulating or curating what is seen, even if that content is produced domestically... And even if people can use other apps, there's still a community and subcultures that are being dismantled.
There is limitation of foreign control of all foreign companies in all countries. USA companies can stay in the world markets if it sells itself to owners of that country. All USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them, can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies.
There are no issues of speech. Nobody’s speech is restricted in any way. China simply isn’t allowed to sell a social media app in the US. This is just an import control like if we decided not to import lemons from Brazil or anything else.
What specific speech do you think is no longer allowed?
> Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a brief opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. She stressed that she saw “no reason to assume without deciding that the Act implicates the First Amendment because our precedent leaves no doubt that it does.”
The rest of the justices sidestepped the question by assuming the First Amendment was implicated for the sake of argument.
They upheld the ban even if there were a First Amendment interest. That doesn’t mean that there is one, it means that if there were one it wouldn’t matter. They didn’t examine if the first amendment applied or not because it wouldn’t matter.
The freedom to speak without having to be on camera. TikTok made it so millions of people could express themselves with filters and AI voices without having to be on camera. Or could dance along with a crowd asynchronously. There are so many more class of expression that if they were known people would advocate for their protection. To transplant a species to a new environment is to modify an ecosystem. At scale, it means silencing at least 15% of population with no credible alternative, no apparent migration path.
Limits on how you can speak are absolutely limits on speech. It's called burdening. The government must demonstrate a reason to burden a right. It is held to various levels of scrutiny depending on the ways it is burdening.
I think it is very obvious why removing the most-used social media from 170 million americans would be burdensome. SCOTUS disagrees.
Interesting that the reference linked is in reference to must-carry regulation. The tiktok scenario is the opposite though? Must-not-carry that content! I suppose Uncle Sam's sword cuts both ways.
Also, more directly for those in the back, the actual first amendment:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The first amendment doesn't guarantee the speaker a venue for their speech. You're still free to say whatever you want to say, so long as it doesn't cross any other laws, in or on whatever other private venues or town squares you so choose.
To turn your question around, rather than spending time defending TikTok I wish people would spend time thinking about the need for actual privacy laws. The kind of laws that outline data governance and the extents to which an individual can expect their individual privacy to be respected. Maybe then we can play less whack a mole with invasive and potentially harmful social software.
Sweet summer child, do you think TikTok would've been banned if it didn't come into focus as a hotbed for pro-Palestinian content?
"The issue in the United States for support of Israel is not left and right. It is young and old. And the numbers of young people who think that Hamas' massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly odd. And so we really have a TikTok problem."
Something very appalling has just taken place in the USA. Old people have muzzled the free speech of young people. Americans spend more hours on TikTok than on television (but it mostly skews to young people), and now it's been taken away.
If TikTok were sold to an American company, as the new law demands, why would that change anything about the amount of pro-Palestinian content? Just because the ADL said they don't like TikTok does not mean that's the motivation for the bill. You're still allowed to criticize Israel as much as you were a decade ago (which is to say, less than you're allowed to criticize the US, for some reason ;) but still).
Because a sale is and has always been impossible since it would be an unacceptable embarrassment for China in the current climate. The divestiture is just a way to make the ban pass muster.
Thats a good reason why it's banned. China cannot sell. TikTok is under the strong control of their government, and so won't sell despite loosing an stupefying amount of revenue by doing so.
X may be the one exception, though I note that the "advertiser boycott" was ended when Musk made trips to Israel, was photographed next Netanyahu's atrocity propaganda prop pieces, next to Ben Shapiro, etc.
Musk first posted an antisemitic tweet, which caused a minor scandal. Then, to atone for that, he traveled to Israel, met with Netanyahu, and had Twitter begin boosting pro-Israeli content.
Musk went from antisemite to Israel fan in the course of just a few days. This actually isn't so surprising, though. There are many people who are both antisemitic and pro-Israel (see basically every far-right party in Europe, for example).
TikTok was specifically banned because of one main reason. When it was being discussed in congress, they told their users to complain to their congresspeople, and posted their congresspersons number. Then when a bunch of unhinged teens called threatening to kill themselves, congress members rightfully went "What the fuck" and the bill gained enormous support
Tik tok was banned because it tried to use children to start a political movement. Unfortunately for them children can not vote so the movement did nothing other than scare adults.
When the law is directed at a publisher, the 1st amendment is likely at issue. Especially if that law is singling out one publisher and not applying to any other entity, as this one is.
But why didn't Supreme Court find the first ammendment arguments compelling? As per first ammendment it is legal and protected to print/distribute/disseminate even enemy propaganda in the USA.
Even at the height of cold war for example Soviet Publications were legal to publish, print and distribute in the USA.
What changed now?
Even a judge, Sotomayer said during this case that yes, the Government can say to someone that their speech is not allowed.
Looks like a major erosion of first amendment protections.
Because there is no "TikTok" ban and never has been.
There is a "TikTok cannot be controlled by the CCP" law. TikTok is completely legal under the law as long as they divest it. However, in a great act of self-incrimination, Bytedance (de facto controlled by CCP) has decided to not divest and would rather shutdown instead.
Exactly. And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat. Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.
It would have been great for ByteDance to IPO TikTok in the USA, it has had plenty of time to do so, it would have made lots of people boatloads of money, Chinese and Americans alike. Even Snapchat, which had similar levels of pervasive arrogance, IPO'd.
In the late 80s and early 90s, the foreign-exchange reserves of China was less than a billion dollars. The US government could spend $50M to negotiate a lot of things from China, like having a war with Vietnam even though it was Soviet who was behind Vietnamese government. Nowadays, Chinese government could easily say fuck this $100B. Papa can afford it to call your bluff.
It's great that an entire nation can gain wealth through hard work and good strategic decisions, at least in some way. But it hurts me that the US lost its way in the process by losing so much manufacturing capabilities, to the point that we can't even adequately produce saline solutions, nor could we make shells or screws for our war planes cheaply.
Or the Chinese government can do its citizens a favor for forcing Apple, Tesla, Walmart, Starbucks, Johnson-Johnson, and all USA companies to sell itself to the Chinese people. So your suggest for how to deal with a pirate and terrorist is to bow down and pay the ransom. Got it, let's do that to you then. Could it be the inventor of Tiktok, who are Chinese citizens don't want their assets to be stolen by USA?
In fact, all countries in the world, USA just showed it is perfectly fine to steal a foreign companies' asset. Let's do that to all USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them. U know how rich you will be if you just got a piece of them? U know you could end homelessness, poverty, balance trade, stabilize your currency, elevate tax revenues, get free education and health care for your citizens, provide great jobs if you just got a piece of USA companies? Now you can! All of them can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies. Everyone gets a piece, everyone gets them equally, everyone will benefit and be happy!
Any amount of $$$ earned by CCP will not be easily passed down to citizens.
I’d be interested if there’s any objective measure of how much a countries money is passed down back to its citizens or hoarded by people in power. Is there any such measure?
Even if the money from the IPO itself doesnt go to directly to random citizens it still pumps a ton of money into their economy providing capital for other investments in new markets creating jobs, spending on goods/services by the company, hiring internally (IPOs always allow companies to expand), etc etc. That money doesn't just sit in a giant pile being unused, like Scrooge McDuck's gold pile.
Not to mention the training and development it would give a whole new class of people in China to operate global businesses.
So why didn’t they? Cmon. Is that not enough evidence to show you that something else is at play here? Of course going public would have been the honest and rational move. Communist governments would never
The evidence and reasoning by Congress was all "non-justiciable" by the courts.
Congress looked at some evidence and made a decision. That is their purview and our checks-and-balances do not allow the courts to second-guess Congress like that. They can look at the "how" of the law, but not the "why".
Specifically the court looked at "what is congress' goal and is there any other way to achieve that goal that doesn't stop as much speech" and there isn't, but they can't question the validity of Congress' goals.
So there's no point in Bytedance arguing any of it, at least not in court.
>And what puzzles me is that the evidences offered by the Congress was quite speculative, whether it's about data collection, content manipulation, influence of Chinese laws, or the potential future threat.
I think in a national security paradigm, you model threats and threat capabilities rather than reacting to threats only after they are realized. This of course can and has been abused to rationalize foreign policy misadventures and there's a real issue of our institutions failing to arrest momentum in that direction.
But I don't think the upshot of those problems is that we stop attempting to model and respond to national security threats altogether, which appears to be the implication of some arguments that dispute the reality of national security concerns.
> Yet ByteDance chose not to argue about the evidence, but to argument about 1A.
I think this is a great point, but perhaps their hands were tied, because it's a policy decision by congress in the aforementioned national security paradigm and not the kind of thing where it's incumbent on our govt to prove a specific injury in order to have authority to make policy judgments on national security.
If you look at the people defending TikTok, if you ask similar questions they won't try to defend it either, it's an immediate switch to whataboutism with regards to native US tech companies or arguing that the US Gov is more dangerous than the CCP.
But all that only just confirms the priors of the people who are pro-Ban. And unfortunately it's about justifying why we shouldn't ban TikTok, not why we should ban TikTok. They can't provide a good justification for that, the best they can is just poison the well and try to attack those same institutions. But turns out effectively saying "fuck you" to Congress isn't going to work when Congress has all the power here.
If the EU and US became adversaries, I would fully expect the EU to do exactly this. The EU already has the GDPR with data residency protections that Meta was fined ~1B for violating.
This is just hypocrisy baiting, this isn't a real analysis at any level. They didn't bring ANY evidence for them to argue against, it was purely an opinion by the state that there could exist a threat, which again is not supported by evidence, true or not. America has a lot to gain by controlling tiktok and one American billionaire will become a lot richer, that's all there is to it. I mean both candidates used tiktok to campaign while wanting to ban it. It's just a ridiculous notion and even they know that.
"Oh you love hamburgers? Then why did you eat chicken last night? Hmmm, curious... You are obviously guilty"
According to the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, TikTok can access “any data” stored in a
consenting user’s “contact list”—including names, photos,
and other personal information about unconsenting third
parties. Ibid. (emphasis added). And because the record
shows that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can require TikTok’s parent company “to cooperate with [its] efforts to obtain personal data,” there
is little to stop all that
information from ending up in the hands of a designated
foreign adversary. Id., at 696; see id., at 673–676; ante, at
3. The PRC may then use that information to “build dossiers . . . for blackmail,” “conduct corporate espionage,” or advance intelligence operations.
It basically just says that the app asks for the user's contact list, and that if the user grants it, the phone OS overshares information. That's really thin as evidence of wrong-doing. It doesn't even say that this capability is currently coded into the app. This sounds more like an Android/iOS problem - why is the contact sharing all or nothing? Would the ban still be OK if the app didn't have read contact permissions?
USA should ban the air, because the air is breathed by Chinese communists, the air is tainted with communism. The air could influence how American people think, could infect them with disease, cause people to be sick or death. This is a national security threat, USA government must ban the air.
"But before seeking to impose that remedy, the coordinate branches spent years in negotiations with TikTok exploring alternatives and ultimately found them wanting. Ante, at 4. And from what I can glean from the record, that judgment was well founded."
Maybe that was one of the alternatives. I wasn’t on the task force but if I was asked to then I would have went one on one with their tech lead’s and asked them to stop collecting this.
But it seems it is greater than that. How you interact with it, your likes and dislikes can be used as a fingerprint and against you.
This fingerprint can then be used against firesteelrain some time in the prophetic future.
Gorsuch says
“To be sure, assessing exactly what a foreign adversary may do in the future implicates 'delicate' and 'complex' judgments about foreign affairs and requires 'large elements of prophecy.' Chicago & Southern Air Lines, Inc. v. Waterman S. S. Corp., 333 U. S. 103, 111 (1948) (Jackson, J., for the Court). But the record the government has amassed in these cases after years of study supplies compelling reason“
Then he says this.
“ Consider some of the alternatives. Start with our usual and preferred remedy under the First Amendment: more speech. Supra, at 2. However helpful that might be, the record shows that warning users of the risks associated with giving their data to a foreign-adversary-controlled application would do nothing to protect nonusers’ data. 2 App. 659–660; supra, at 3. Forbidding TikTok’s domestic operations from sending sensitive data abroad might seem another option. But even if Congress were to impose serious criminal penalties on domestic TikTok employees who violate a data-sharing ban, the record suggests that would do little to deter the PRC from exploiting TikTok to steal Americans’ data. See 1 App. 214 (noting threats from “malicious code, backdoor vulnerabilities, surreptitious surveillance, and other problematic activities tied to source code development” in the PRC); 2 App. 702 (“[A]gents of the PRC would not fear monetary or criminal penalties in the United States”). The record also indicates that the “size” and “complexity” of TikTok’s “underlying software” may make it impossible for law enforcement to detect violations. Id., at 688–689; see also id., at 662. Even setting all these challenges aside, any new compliance regime could raise separate constitutional concerns—for instance, by requiring the government to surveil Americans’ data to ensure that it isn’t illicitly flowing overseas. Id., at 687 (suggesting that effective enforcement of a data-export ban might involve).”
And the nail in the coffin is this
“All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional. As persuaded as I am of the wisdom of Justice Brandeis in Whitney and Justice Holmes in Abrams, their cases are not ours. See supra, at 2. Speaking with and in favor of a foreign adversary is one thing. Allowing a foreign adversary to spy on Americans is another.”
Of course if the app have done anything seriously illegal it would not have been necessary to bring this law to ban it, because existing laws would have sufficed to do it.
Perhaps because US government wanted to do it despite TikTok not breaking any serious provisions of law this law has been made.
It feels like a sleight of hand
from government to ban something that has broke no (serious) law (yet).
Did the SCOTUS go into the necessity of having this law to achieve what government wanted, if existing laws would have sufficed, provided that government met the standards of evidence/proof that those laws demanded.
If not, it is as if government wanted a 'short-cut' to a TikTok ban and SCOTUS approved it, rather than asking government to go the long way to it.
I suggest you read the full 27 page ruling and what I quoted again. Supreme Court doesn’t weigh on the wisdom. But found enough evidence that TikTok does not refute that showed that they were engaging in the conduct that Congress alleged and that the law is not unconstitutional.
The question is if the new law was necessary, if there is case that to be made TikTok has violated other existing law, but government merely has to prove so?
Was government trying to take a shortcut to a TikTok ban which could have been achieved through current law but which needs greater burden of proof/evidence from government.
Did SCOTUS go into the question of the need for such a law considering all other laws which might apply in the situation, just so that government can achieve the same ban without having to prove that TikTok has broken an applicable law.
Trump tried to ban it first by executive power, but the Supreme Court decided he didn’t have the authority to do that. Then congress passed a law, and the Supreme Court is saying that the law is valid and Trump has no grounds to ask for a pause for him to “work a deal.” Congress could just repeal their law, but other than that it stands.
Do they do this with other bans, like those against network hardware? Other countries sell their goods here at the American government's leisure. It's always been this way.
What if Congress passed a law that said "The New York Times must shut down unless all foreign owners divest"? That's effectively impossible for a publicly traded corporation. Is that just a ban, in practice?
That's what the question of strict scrutiny vs. intermediate scrutiny vs. rational basis is about. The courts would have to decide the appropriate level of scrutiny given the legal context and then apply that to the law as written.
Your hypothetical clearly implicates the Times' speech, so intermediate scrutiny at least would be applied, requiring that the law serve an important governmental purpose. I think that would be a difficult argument for the government to make, especially if the law was selective about which kinds of media institutions could and could not have any foreign ownership in general. The TikTok law is much more specific.
It's interesting to read the full TikTok opinion https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf and search for "scrutiny" and "tailored" while referencing some of the diagrams from the overview above. It's a good case study of how different levels of scrutiny are evaluated!
IANAL, but my lay opinion is that thanks to the foreign commerce clause this would be a matter of rational basis.
So quite likely Congress could craft such a law and have it hold up, if it could show that foreign control of the NYT (which is incidentally the case) posed a national security concern.
Except this isn't a law against any foreign owner, just specifically a foreign owner that is essentially the #1 geopolitical adversary of the US.
A large part of the US-China relationship is zero-sum. If America loses, china wins, and vice versa. That relationship is not the same for, say, the US-France relationship.
That’s what the China hawks want you to believe, it’s not just a lie but a shameful, war mongering lie. And they will increasingly use that lie to shut people up, shut apps down, until we have no choice but to believe that the Chinese want us dead and we them. It’s textbook propaganda and you’re spreading it.
China and the US have been in a massively successful, mutually beneficial global economic partnership for decades. Zero sum my ass. Take a peace pipe, make friends not war.
I want to believe you, but arguments like this are so simplistic that it's profoundly disappointing. It is simultaneously the case that they are extensive trade partners and that there's ongoing harassment in the South China Sea, the horrifying takeover of Hong Kong and the increasingly chilling situation in Taiwan, or the harassment of expat dissidents who have fled to the West.
To say nothing of extremely adversarial cases of increasingly aggressive hacking, corporate espionage, "wolf warrior" diplomacy, development of military capabilities that seem specifically designed with countering the U.S. in mind, as well as the more ordinary diplomatic and economic pushback on everything from diplomatic influence, pushing an alternative reserve currency, and an internal political doctrine that emphasizes doubling down on all these fronts.
I don't even feel like I've ventured an opinion yet, I've simply surveyed facts and I am yet to meet a variation of the Officer Barbrady "nothing to see here" argument that has proved to be fully up to speed on the adversarial picture in front of us.
I think what I want, to feel reassured, is to be pleasantly surprised by someone who is command of these facts, capable of showing that I'm wrong about any of the above, and/or that I'm overlooking important swaths of the factual landscape in such a way that points to a safe equilibrium rather than an adversarial position.
But instead it's light-on-facts tirades that attempt to paint these concerns as neocon warmongering, attempting to indulge in a combination of colorful imagery and ridicule, which for me is kind of a non-starter.
Edit in response to reply below: I'm just going to underscore that none of the facts here are in dispute. The whataboutism, insinuations of racism, and "were you there!?" style challenges (reminiscent of creation science apologetics) are just not things I'm interested in engaging with.
That covers the China side of things. Presumably America is doing nothing against China. In that case things would be very lopsided and you (in general) would have a reason to be concerned. On the other hand if America was doing “adversarial” things in the direction of China as well, and both sides at sufficiently low intensity, it could still be argued that the two countries are not playing a zero-sum game overall because trade etc. happens in spite of all that.
You complain about "whataboutism," but your comment is just a long list of, "But what about this bad thing China did?"
Yet when other people point out much more horrible things the US has done in the same timeframe (like backing Israel to the hilt as it kills tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and destroys the entire Gaza strip), you respond with, "That's Whataboutism."
The list of offenses from China are foundational to the case for banning Tiktok. They belong to an argument that bootstraps itself. Those points aren't merely offered in a reactionary manner as a way to attempt to refute or deflect other criticisms.
What makes any specific point into whataboutism is its intended use as a counterpoint in a context where it doesn't change the outcome of the argument its responding to.
The fact that they're using whataboutism should point to you that these posters very much are the adversaries of America that the poster is talking about. They are certainly not acting in your interests here.
if you reread your post, looking for whatabboutism, each critique you provide could be described as such in response to "we're great trading partners and will continue to be"
why are these whatabboutisms interesting but others are not? what makes you comfortable with working with americans, when its clear how they treat expat political dissidents like Assange and Snowden? why are you ok working with the US who's military is tuned for seizing iranian oil shipments? why are you favourable to a US reserve currency when the US has been abusing its power by putting all kinds of unilateral sanctions, and confiscating reserves without any due process? its not just china thats trying to make a new reserve currency, the EU does too, so they can buy iranian oil.
minus all the whatabboutisms, america and china exchanged ~$750B worth of goods and services in 2022, with neither's trangressions being a blocker. Americans by and large care much more about the cost and variety of goods than they do about fishing rights in the south china sea. americans dont care that much about US foreign policy goals, compared to shopping and culture.
>why are these whatabboutisms interesting but others are not?
I don't agree that they are whataboutisms for starters. I don't present them in response to criticisms of the U.S. to deflect away those criticisms, which is an essential, definitional characteristic of a whataboutism. Everything ususal to the critique of whataboutisms is sufficient I think to address the new examples you present in your comment, which I would say just fall in the same old category.
The critiques of China in this context are "interesting" because they relate to democratic norms, human rights, freedom of expression and the security environment that safeguards them.
And perhaps most importantly, I don't regard democratic values and economic transactions to be in a relationship where the loss of one is compensated by the presence of the other. This is a point which I believe is a relatively well understood cornerstone of western liberal democracies.
> And perhaps most importantly, I don't regard democratic values and economic transactions to be in a relationship where the loss of one is compensated by the presence of the other. This is a point which I believe is a relatively well understood cornerstone of western liberal democracies.
Western liberal democracies (so-called) don’t care about democratic values.
The commenter above you said that the US-China relationship is not zero-sum, and has brought enormous economic benefits to both sides.
Your response was essentially, "But what about Hong Kong, the South China Sea, Taiwan and political dissidents?" That's a complete non sequitur.
You moved the conversation from one about mutually beneficial economic relations to one about how awful China is because of XYZ. The natural response to that is that the US is awful because of a different litany of XYZ. Yet you've decided that we're now talking about how terrible China is (which is irrelevant to the original topic of mutually beneficial relations), and anything else is whataboutism.
Have you been to China? Know anyone from there? Or is your opinion on what they deserve based entirely on TV headlines? Do you relate to them as humans? That’s what I need to see before I take anyone’s condemnation of any group of people seriously.
I’m disputing none of the facts you raise, I just don’t think it’s reason enough to label the entire country as an enemy state and shut the door like a petulant child. Especially in light of the horrifying atrocities that we ourselves are funding.
> China and the US have been in a massively successful, mutually beneficial global economic partnership for decades
Past performance is not indicative of future results. China is now grappling with sluggish GDP growth, declining fertility, youth unemployment, re-shoring/friend-shoring, a property crisis, popular discontent with authoritarian overreach (e.g. zero COVID and HK), and increasingly concentrated power under chairman-for-life Xi. Their military spending has hockey-sticked in the past two decades and they're churning out ships and weapons like nobody's business. He realizes that the demographic and economic windows of opportunity are finite for military action against Taiwan (and by extension its allies like the US and Japan). The Chinese military's shenanigans in the South China Sea with artificial islands, EEZ violations, and so forth in combination with Xi's rhetorical sabre-rattling in domestic speeches don't paint a pretty picture.
Before somebody like this poster calls me a "war-mongering [liar]" or something similar let me point out that this is the opinion of academics [1], not US DoD officials or politicians. I have nothing but reverence for China's people and culture. I'd love to visit but unfortunately it's my understanding that I'd have to install tracking software on my phone and check in with police every step of the way. This type of asymmetry between our governments is why this ban has legs.
With the gift of hindsight I think it's safe to say that neoliberal policy (in the literal sense of the term, not the hacky partisan one) is a double-edged sword that got us to where we are today. To say that the US-China relationship is sunshine and puppies is ignorant of the facts.
> I'd love to visit but unfortunately it's my understanding that I'd have to install tracking software on my phone and check in with police every step of the way.
Uh, what? I've never encountered this in my trips to China.
You do have an ID scanned (like literally, on a photocopier) when you check into a hotel.
Ya, that’s whack. Even the police/hotel thing isn’t really that strict, it depends on the locality…
People think China is authoritarian with effective central control. The first part is right but the second part is far from the truth. China is a bit more lawless than the average western country.
One time the ID check I got was a super old photo copier and the resulting (paper lol) image was basically unrecognizable. Hotel receptionist was like "not my fucking problem, oh well, welcome to the hotel"
That was the us policy for 20 years under the assumption that political liberalism with follow economic liberalism. It has not. This is also no one sided. China is preparing for conflict with the US so we must also. Yes hawks can push a country into war but so can doves.
Or the US is preparing for conflict with China, so China must also. But actually it's probably a two way feedback loop between the two of them that the ignoramuses that run each country love because it makes their jobs exciting and, probably, profitable.
All powers are mutually antagonistic and it prudent to prepare to confront each other. As long as thoes efforts are equally matched and neither side is prepared thinks it can gain an advantage the peace is held as it held during the cold war.
The Scotus case linked to here by others has noted the possibility of tying networks of contacts to Tiktok user profiles, and network mapping political groups in Taiwan can be leveraged to support any number ventures to disempower the island's democracy-favoring majority.
Only insofar as their support networks extend into the United States. But you're right to suggest that Taiwan should consider a ban also, over similar security concerns.
Do you dispute the persecution of Uyghurs in China? The UN, US Dept. of State, House of Commons in the UK and Canada, Dutch Parliament, French National Assembly, New Zealand, Belgium, and the Czech Republic?
This is not a government to be friends with. It's time we go our separate ways from the CCP.
I do not dispute it (in fact if you have good sources on the latest goings-on about this issue I’d appreciate it). But to say that it’s cause enough to excommunicate the CCP and go to war… is hypocrisy of the highest order, when we ourselves clearly fund and condone massive atrocities as long as it’s someone else’s hands. Road to peace is not paved with blood, do not be confused. Peace comes from boring communication work: talking, arguing, hashing the problems out, day in and day out. Shutting the door is the first step to a tragedy, always.
I don't advocate war, but I'd prefer a relationship similar to Russia or North Korea. No trade whatsoever. No trade with nations that trade with China.
Well, to a large extent, the reason Russia and North Korea are hopeless backwaters ruled by petty dictators and filled with suffering… is precisely because nobody would trade with or invest in them. And when they predictably fall into dysfunction and despair, they end up threatening everyone’s peace. You reap what you sow. We need to do better.
That's completely wrong. All of Europe heavily traded with Russia, and Germany even wanted to base their green transformation plan primarily on trade with Russia.
By which point, Russia was already in the hands of a dictator. Too late and too little, as they say. But yes, obviously, every country deserves a large share of blame for its own situation.
Either way - even if I concede this, my point stands that starving nations and denying them development isn't a great long term strategy for peace.
This argument is in my opinion backwards and therefore does not make sense. First willingness to do well by themselves must be demonstrated sufficiently to gain interest and trust, then healthy and mutually beneficial friendship may begin. On state as on individual level.
You do realize that many countries are going to do the math and pick China right? You would basically be cutting us off from at least half of the world, and underground trade would flourish to china’s benefit. Russia and North Korea don’t really make anything we need (well, Russian titanium is nice), but more important, they don’t provide much value to other countries (Russian oil and gas, and that’s it). But China? Ya, good luck with that.
Maybe, but I don't think that would be the outcome. It's a risk I'd be willing to take. Personally I'd never side with communists for any reason at all, even if it meant my life became a little more difficult.
Yes, I dispute, because all of that are lies and brainwashing done by USA government. Please show prove of 1 million Uyghur locked up in China, genocide. Or you should apologize for your lies to the world. You say there is genocide in 2018, now is 2024, where is the bodies, people desperate to escape? Ur ambassador to China spent his time riding on Chinese bullet trains funded by Chinese government and vacation in the country, instead of going to Xinjiang and rescue all the 1M Uyghur people locked up camps?? What is your military doing? Should you save these poor people? Xinjiang is free for anyone to travel. People are allowed to freely leave and enter with all its neighboring countries. And USA say they love the Uyghur people, and the way they show their support is ban all the products, every single one, made by Uyghur people? Lol, you are not fooling anyone here. It is a fact Uyghur people can freely leave China if they want. And it is a fact, Uyghur population increasing faster than the broader population. And u can travel in Xinjiang today, there is Uyghur language everywhere, on shops, street signs. Uyghur language is taught in every government funded schools. Did the American boarding schools for native Americans teach their own language? Today, Uyghur kids are running in the streets, freely, speaking in Uyghur. Why don't you get all the countries you listed to form coalition army to save the poor Uyghur souls? Your government officials should not shake Chinese government official hands and travel on Chinese government trains to vacation in the country. No more talking, only action.
Everyone outside China saw tankman and the other protesters get killed by the CCP in 1989. I think another group of brave Chinese like them will one day succeed in defeating the CCP and China will be welcomed into the international community.
My person in deity do I need to go down the list of genocides and atrocities the US has either participated in or funded in its long and bloodsoaked history? It's a long list but it ends with the billions of dollars in weapons, aid and personnel we sent to help Israel try to wipe out the Palestinians.
This isn't an attempt at whataboutism here, no one is denying that what China is doing to the Uyghurs is terrible, but the US and its allies have no moral high ground to stand on at all in this regard.
>Now, regarding the international situation, The biggest wish of most of us Chinese is that the United States disappears completely and permanently from this beautiful earth.
>Because the United States uses its financial, military and other hegemony to exploit the world, destroy the peace and tranquility of the earth, and bring countless troubles to the people of other countries, we sincerely hope that the United States will disappear.
>We usually laugh at the large number of infections caused by the new coronavirus pandemic in the United States, not because we have no sympathy, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.
>We usually laugh at the daily gun wars in the United States, not because we don’t sympathize with the families that have been broken up by shootings, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.
>We usually laugh at Americans for legalizing drugs, not because we support drugs, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.When we scold American Olympic athletes, it's not because we lack sportsmanship, but because we really hope that America will disappear.
>We make fun of Trump and Sleepy Joe, not because we look down on these two old men, but because we really hope that the United States will disappear.
>We Chinese are hardworking, kind, reasonable, peace-loving and not extreme. But we really don't like America. Really, if the Americans had not fought with us in Korea in the early days of our country, prevented us from liberating Taiwan, provoked a trade war, challenged our sovereignty in the South China Sea, and bullied our Huawei, would we Chinese hate them?
And that's what Chinese netziens agree without controversy on one of their biggest social media sites. What about the CCP here? Well if we look at Wang Huning, Chief Ideologue of the CCP, he is explicitly an postliberal who draws from the Schmittian rejection of liberal heterogenity, which he sees as inherently unstable, in favour of a strong, homogenous and centralized state based on traditional values in order to guarantee stability. And if it that's just internally, how do you think a fundamental rejection of heterogenity translates to foreign policy? So yes, whether you think China is a problem, China certainly thinks you are a problem.
It's always very interesting to see people pull out threads with low like counts (like 12k) and claim that central idea of the post is widely held.
We're talking about platforms with tens of millions of users; wide appeal is at least a quarter million likes, with mass appeal being at least a million. A local-scale influencer can gather 10-30k likes very easily on such a massive platform.
Do you disagree then that's not a sentiment widely reflected within Chinese social media? I simply gave an example for brevity, other answers are similar, I would encourage people to actually go in and read themselves here.
>It's always very interesting to see people pull out threads with low like counts (like 12k) and claim that central idea of the post is widely held.
In what context is 12k likes a low amount? To me this is reminiscent of arguments I heard from neocons that global anti-Iraq war protests, the largest coordinated global protests in history at the time, counted as "small" if you considered them in absolute terms as percentages of the global population.
I think it's the opposite, that such activities are tips of the proverbial iceberg of more broadly shared sentiment.
It would be one thing if there were all kinds of sentiments in all directions with roughly evenly distributed #'s of likes. I'm open to the idea that some aspect of context could be argued to diminish the significance, but it wouldn't be that 12k likes, in context, is a negligible amount. It would be something else like its relative popularity compared to alternative views, or some compelling argument that this is a one-off happenstance and not a broadly shared sentiment.
bro literally citing chinese facebook comments ;) if you started taking pissed off internet comments seriously we'd have to go to war with every country in the world
look man, i'm not saying china is some heavenly force of justice. but the thing about peace is that it's bigger than both sides, and it's maintained by the grace of those who understand that often the real threat isn't the enemy, it's your fear of the enemy.
>it's maintained by the grace of those who understand that often the real threat isn't the enemy, it's your fear of the enemy.
But how do you know that? Do you any such examples of how the CCP or China is dicussing politics amongst themselves to support that claim, their ideological leanings and papers or their own national strategies?
Sadly that's above the pay grade of everyone here only the rich folk that run the world get to see that on all sides :)
One idea would be to completely ignore news outlets and look at raw data imports, exports, official visits to try to identify geopolitical patterns algorithmically has anyone on HN attempted such a thing?
That might be true, and yet it's also true that enemies are not just a fictional concept, and letting them have undue influence that weakens your society probably isn't a good idea.
The ban is not rooted in the concept ByteDance has a minority of investors who are Chinese citizens so any comparisons framed around that concept will not change the analysis. The reason for the ban, agree with it or not, is the perceived control and data sharing with the Chinese government made possible by many things (mainly that they are HQ'd in that government's jurisdiction and then have all of these other potentially concerning details, not that they just have one of these other details).
If the NYT were seen as being under significant control of and risking sharing too much user data with the Chinese government then it would indeed make sense to apply the same ban.
Personally, I'm still on the fence about the ban. On one hand having asymmetry in one side banning such things and the other not is going to be problematic. On the other the inherent problems of banning companies by law. Such things work out in other areas... but will it work out in this specific type of example? Dunno, not 100% convinced either way.
>>>mainly that they are HQ'd in that government's jurisdiction
ByteDance is; TikTok is not. TikTok is headquartered in USA and Taiwan. Why is that not part of the analysis? The CCP can control/influence ByteDance, the US can't do anything about that. But it could do a number of things to prevent ByteDance control/influence on TikTok, and it jumped directly to "must divest".
Congress could have passed a law banning TikTok from transmitting any user data back to ByteDance/China, for example. Why not do that, if that was the actual concern?
Well, reporting as recent as April of 2024 suggested that Bytedance is able to access tiktok user data despite Operation Texas. And generally speaking, we have seen enough in the way of (1) security breaches and (2) leaky promises not to disclose data either to govts or 3rd party data brokers, only for those reassurances to fall flat. I would even go so far as to say that professions to uphold trade agreements or international agreements are uniquely "soft" in their seriousness from China in recent history.
Guarantees of insulation from bad actors from major tech companies unfortunately are not generally credible, and what is credible, at least relatively speaking, are guarantees imposed by technology itself such as E2E encryption and zero knowledge architecture, as well as contextual considerations like the long term track record of specific companies, details of their ownership and their physical locations.
The reporting I found (from the Verge) was that an employee of TikTok (in America) would email spreadsheets to executives in China, and other similar cases of US employees having the actual access to data and passing it along to other folks in China.
This all suggests to me that the 'Operation Texas' technical controls were actually in place and pretty good (or dude in China would have just run some SQL himself), and what isn't in place is hard process control to prevent US workers from emailing stuff to China. Which, you know, is exactly what Congress could pass a law to deal with.
I took the article to be absolutely damning in its reckoning on the utility of Operation Texas, precisely because it proved that no amount of technical control would be a match for the human infrastructure that tied Tiktok to China.
Which I suppose is a different way of making the same point as you.
Haha, yah, I think we agree; Operation Texas does what it says on the tin (the data is stored in the USA! It can only be directly accessed from within the USA) but ultimately that doesn't matter at all, since Jim in Texas can just email it all to China.
Actually, I think we do have a little bit of a disagreement overall, but maybe not a huge one. I would not take the human exchange of data to imply or count as proof of otherwise airtight data security. I don't think the one follows from the other. It certainly could be the case, but, that kind of conclusion would hinge on contextual information that we don't currently have.
>Personally, I'm still on the fence about the ban. On one hand having asymmetry in one side banning such things and the other not is going to be problematic.
I wouldn't worry about that, as FB, twitter, reddit etc are banned in China. To the extent that we want equilibrium here, banning Tiktok would reprsent a step toward parity.
Yes, because the NYT is a publicly traded company. And it is majority-controlled by a single American family - the Sulzbergers. I'm not sure you could argue that a Chinese national owning a single share of NYT stock could have any kind of sway on the operation of the company. Could the same be said for the relationship China has with TikTok?
Why not just nuke China then, without these pesky 1.4B people, the world will be a much better place! Otherwise, you are stuck with us, we 1.4B people will never leave this planet. So it's up to you if you want to convert 1.4B of us to your enemy or your friends. But so far, with all the attacks, bullying, theft you are doing to Chinese people, you are not wining any hearts and minds here. Believe it or not, a lot of Chinese people like the USA before 2016. Then with every attack, insult, theft, oppression you are pulling, you are converting your fans to people who despise you. Huawei's executives used to be biggest cheerleaders of USA. Bytedance founder and nearly all Chinese entrepreneurs loved the USA. Now with you stealing their asset, blackmailing, terrorizing them in broad daylight, people are shocked this is the true DNA, color and culture of USA. Protection of private assets? Nope. Freedom of speech? Nope? Humanity, reason, logic, love, trust? Nope? Pursuit of happiness? Nope. Human progress? Nope. Making all people on Earth's lives proper, no poverty, no starvation? Nope. It turns out USA is the biggest pirate, oppressor, dictator, bully in the world. USA say u care about human rights and freedom, what would democratic international relationships? What about the rights and freedom of 1.4B Chinese people to survive, live in dignity, peace, relative prosperity? And spare me Chinese people getting richer is bad thing for the USA. USA companies made trillions of Chinese market and 1.4B Chinese consumers. You only have this market if Chinese people have money. Your companies are stupidly rich and powerful. If you don't think Chinese people benefit your companies, please ban all of your companies from selling to Chinese market. Please no more all talk, no action, ban them now.
Well, yes. Just like you're allowed to say who your biggest enemy or your best friend is, even if your biggest enemy or best friend don't feel the same way about you.
Anyways, who do you think China would say their #1 geopolitical adversary is?
As far as i can tell, the Chinese care mostly about building and investing. They're aware that the US sees them as their "number one enemy" (what a childish, irresponsible way to refer to a nation of a billion, mostly innocent, people), and that the US has maintained its global domination since WWII by political assassinations, bombings, proxy wars, and half-assed failed invasions.
My advice? Stop using words like "geopolitical adversary" to mask what you really want to say. This is life, not a chessboard.
What if Congress passed a law that said "The New York Times must shut down unless all foreign owners divest"?
This already exists in some ways. Foreign companies are not allowed to own American broadcasters. That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a (dual?) American citizen when he wanted to own Fox television stations in the United States.
They absolutely could if the NYT was fully owned by a foreign entity, and that entity was a government that adversarial to the US.
The issue is not that a company has foreign shareholders -- it's the fact that is under the control of the CCP.
This was also an issue when Rupert Murdoch wanted to buy Fox; he was only able to do so once he became a US citizen, for the same reasons.
The 1A arguments by ByteDance was a diversionary tactic to shift the conversation away from the real issue (control) -- and judging by all the comments on HN by people who don't understand it's about control, I'd say they were pretty successful.
In fact, I think it makes the goverment's argument even stronger. Would we allow the NYT to fall in the hands of the CCP? I'd say no way, congress would act way before that's even possible.
I think the equivalent would be if New York Times is somehow owned by Tencent and given that the Chinese government uses golden shares to control private companies. In that case, I think it's fair game to force NYT to divest or force them to shutdown.
That would be like telling Facebook to "divest" from the US government. Which, in this case, means ignoring all government requests for data and censorship. Facebook obviously cannot do that.
Ostensibly, the US government honors the 1st and 4th amendments, and only restricts speech on the platform in rare instances where that speech is likely to incite or produce imminent lawless action, and only issues warrants for private data which are of limited scope for evidence where the government has probable cause that a crime has occurred.
The accusation is that the CCP and Bytedance have a much more intimate relationship than that, censoring (or compelling) speech and producing data for mere political favors. Whether or not this is true of Facebook's relationship with US political entities is up for debate.
The only reason it isn't widely known that social media platforms in the US share information with the government regularly is because it's illegal for said platforms to disclose those requests. It used to be that platforms would have canaries, similar to a dead man's switch, that would be removed once they were subject to these types of requests. None of them do it any more because the requests are commonplace.
Cross the US government and see how fast that turns into shadow bans, your loved ones getting tortured, someone else working with your SSN, dummy up and fish, imprisoned algorithmically etc you won't even have to cross them just be guilty by association
No horse in this race as both horses hate and will trample me but just saying lol
Of all the arguments in all directions, by far the least compelling have been the ones that attempt to both-sides equivalences between the U.S. and China on question of free speech and democratic norms. It's not that there's no offenses on the U.S. side, it's just the game of whatabouting reeks of JV debate team sophistry that is very discouraging to engage with.
The single party domination, the great firewall, the authoritarian surveillance are without comparison in scale and I think that has to be among the explicitly agreed upon facts that sanity check any conversation on this topic.
Edit since I can't reply to the comment below: all the examples mentioned below appear to involve the very equivocation between differences in scale that I spent this whole comment talking about, or attempt to equate past vs present, or are too vague to even understand the nature of the comparison, and collectively are so disorganized and low effort that they are degrading the focus and quality of the conversation as a whole.
Until now, the closest thing we had like this were national our regional networks like Russia's vk, but Vk was never truly popular outside Russian speaking countries.
Now we, for the first time ever, will have the situation where a social network has global reach but without american content.
Will it keep being a english first space? Will it survive/thrive? How the content is going to evolve? What does this means in terms of global cultural influence? Will we see internationalized Chinese content dominating it? Will this backfire for the US?