The same guy who pushed for a ban massively last year, is going to save the app despite the security concerns he and most of our government said they had. If only we knew what happened in that classified briefing that made them vote together across party lines.
[1] https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxbusiness.com/foxbusiness.c...
China doesn’t allow US social media companies to operate there—why should the US unilaterally allow Chinese social media companies to operate here with no reciprocity?
Continuing to play cooperate over and over when the other player keeps playing defect is not smart.
This statement is not entirely accurate. It is possible for a US social media company to operate in mainland China, provided it complies with local regulations, including hosting its servers in China and adhering to censorship requirements. For instance, LinkedIn operated in China until August 2023. However, it may ultimately prove unfeasible due to factors such as user preferences, the volume of censorship requests, or even perceived unfair competition. Since at least 2010, when Google faced demands for compliance with Chinese censorship regulations, the requirements for foreign companies to operate in China have been clearly outlined.
No comment on these policies, but it is undeniable that businesses operating in foreign markets must comply with local laws. However, by intervening in business activities, undermining corporate property rights, and contradicting its own stated principles of free market economics and international trade rules, the U.S. has demonstrated economic nationalism. I can't tell who is playing defect in this case.
Read about Google's search engine project in China aka Project Dragonfly[0]; it was a totalitarian dystopian nightmare where CCP wanted to know everything about people who use Google, their queries and they probably demanded from Google that millions of websites and webpages must be censored (deleted from Google's index).
Project Dragonfly was like Stalin's manifestation of perfect surveillance tool.
Basically, there are 2 legislation in the world, legistlation and the China legislation. In China, there are laws on the surface and there are rules underneath. For example, the government never admitted that the GFW exists, yet it keeps blocking more and more sites. The government never bans online forums, yet it never grants license to open a online bbs, since like ten years ago.
During some political sensitive times, the government would send secret requirement to local companies like ByteDance and Tencent on how to censor the social media. Back when I worked at ByteDance, when the 19th Communist Party congress was open, the auditors would be in a war room, just for making sure that no negative news or comments would be released. American companies also work with the government on censorship, more or less, but that's another story.
It's very common for Chinese people who have been fooled by the government to say that, these western companys left by themselves. But it's not the laws that on the surface drives them away, it's the rules underneath.
My biggest fear isnt China or Russia (like Im told it should be) but becoming like China and Russia. It's happening faster every day.
When the first and the fourth amendments are shredded then Putin and Xi Jinping get to say, with increasing truthfulness, "America is no better than us".
And even if it did it isn't a suicide pact that forces the US to do very stupid things like let the CCP use TikTok to manipulate US citizens to the benefit of the CCP and detriment of the US.
No citizen has comparable power to influence (and hide their tracks/sources) no matter how manically they post. It's rapidly becoming 'giant computer farms full of AI following scripts' and that still counts as 'speech', but rather than an individual's opinions it's targeted influence operations towards indirect goals.
It can be as close to 'crying fire in a crowded theater' as you like, except it's methods to coordinate teams of people all crying fire, knowing there's no fire, but intending to cause a mass casualty event through their actions.
Speech?
Usually this does not work out that well. Point in case - Central Europe after WWII.
Chinese astroturfing is a thing too, but in many cases it is legit naive people.
Yep. I call it "Chomskyism"
Because in the end it's always about money.
Well about power really, but money is the main means to get that.
Are you able to expand a bit?
Do you think Trump's being paid by ByteDance to lift the ban?
Often this is accompanied by a public message of flattery or a donation to his "political" coffers.
An easy way is for TikTok to just promise to algorithm away any criticism of him in the US.
There is never a need to be that direct. Republican and Democrat donors tell politicians what positions to take. Trump doesn't need to take money directly from a company. He takes it from his donors, who in turn take it from the company in some form.
In this case, the theory is that billionaire Jeff Yass (an investor in Tik Tok) has "persuaded" Trump to flip his position.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/jeff-yass-billionaire...
My understanding now is that now we've shifted from "ByteDance pays Trump to flip" to "American businessman Jeff Yass meets with Trump and convinces him to flip"
I hope you can understand that as a non-American observer I see a lot of distance between those two claims and find myself confused when they're treated with equivalency.
I'd still love your clarification though - do you still stand by the claim that Trump is being paid to reneg on his position re. TikTok, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42755872 ?
The waters get pretty muddy if we're willing to suggest that American presidents are "paid" by other nations to enact policy which benefits said nations, it's not unreasonable to ask for clarity about such claims.
To my knowledge, if I'm understanding rbanffy's position correctly, this would be the first time in history US president was directly being bribed by a foreign actor, so I still maintain it's worth seeking clarification.
Am I wrong in holding skepticism here? I don't doubt there are political points to be gained for Trump here, especially given the domestically controversial nature of the ban, but I'd really love for someone to hold true to the original notion under question that someone (ByteDance, CCP, etc.) is "paying the incoming president", as rbanffy suggseted.
Yass has paid in tens of millions of dollars, he's going to call that in to get an unban.
I really don't know which way to bet on this though. The Trump presidency is going to be consistently unpredictable.
They know exactly what they are doing. That message is going to be effective and the person it’s targeted at doesn’t understand that it can be spun any way the CCP wants to spin it. How does he not see how risky letting a foreign government run something like TikTok in the US?
Since he was running as a Republican, why are they not also signing off on all this? Why is the completely Trump-friendly Supreme Court not signing off on all this?
This is the corporate version of "he quit before they could fire him".
No real anything presented to the American public, just handwaving and finger pointing
It just barely needs to make sense and it becomes the center of the conversation, derailing any meaningful or real discussion
Very effective propaganda
However, there’s been a lot of people not just signaling but openly announcing they are vying for the purchase. Like Kevin O’Leary, who said he’s offering $20b in cash to buy TT
Would you feel better if an anonymous user uploaded it to Reddit/Twitter/Tiktok?
10 years ago, no. Today? An audiofile is really easy to make with or even just a couple people in a studio.
That is, of course, unless it is true.
A denial wouldnt necessarily indicate that it is false (he has every reason to deny it, but lying is a risk) but the lack of a denial is very strong evidence that it is, in fact, true.
There is a very low cost to denying lies, so the absence of a denial (unlike its presence) is a very good indicator.
> There is a very low cost to denying lies.
So people can just lie.
See: Clinton and Lewinski, the Profumo affair, Russian troop buildup on the Ukraine border 2022, Russian attacks on Ukraine 2014+, claims by NSA execs prior to the Snowden leaks, etc.
A state-controlled newspaper in an autocratic county? It could be something they did verify as true and just happens to align with their agenda - or it could be nonsense and they know it. Or they couldn't just shrugged and said "makes the US look bad, run it."
I think most people don't appreciate the levels of internal review and fact-checking that go on when a national paper in the US ends up with a big story in its lap.
Oh yeah, like the verification of their stories of the oven babies
If anything, this whole ordeal has shown that all media is at some level censored and controlled by special interests behind the scenes
We’ve been living in a post-truth world for a long time, way before AI
It might be the Iranians making stuff up, although realistically that sort of activity is what should be expected without any leaks at all. It has been obvious since around 2016 that the corporate media doesn't have the ability to single-handily dominate the narrative any more and that will impact national security propaganda because, you know, what military would be stupid enough to leave that sort of messaging to chance?
E.g when Russia stopped denying the presence of North Korean troops, it was pretty much cast iron proof that Ukraine's recent videos of the prisoners were not fakes.
A denial wouldnt necessarily mean it was true, but the lack of a denial certainly does.
You're naive and wrong.
We have a TV problem, more specifically, lots of coffins on TV problem.
Circa 2003 America:
We have TV problem, a media problem, specifically coffins all over the media problem
That's extremely antisemitic given that Jewish groups have been some of the most public and vocal opponents of Israel's genocidal actions.
I already mentioned this in your other comment, but these Hasbara talking points come off like they're written by a corporate PR department and are getting stale.
Now estimate the age of the International Court of justice, the United Nations, and dozens of international aid organizations who have called Israel's actions as a genocide? lol or do you consider them to be Iranian proxies too?
It's like talking to a finite state machine that emits duckspeak
How about you give us some specifics. List 5 things where he put himself first and some larger societal interest second (or lower).
People consumed by Vanity do not take same risks that got them shot and made them target of coordinated law fare.
A media outlet not easy to censor is unacceptable to the Israeli lobby, and therefore unacceptable to our politicians.
[1] https://www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result?keyword=gay (requires log-in)
"Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
I don’t imagine discussion of what’s happening to the Uyghurs is getting much traction in TikTok either.
Movement against TikTok started started with the Trump admin well before Oct 7, 2023 [1].
I think this is less Israel / Palestine and a better explanation lies elsewhere. Namely, that anti-China sentiment has been growing for a while now and Meta has plenty of money to burn (on the Metaverse, Lobbyists, etc.)
The actual law was passed after accounts of spying on Hong Kong citizens were made public [2].
———
1 — https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
2 — https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-...
Only after the strong shift in sentiment by younger Americans on Israel's genocidal actions did the effort renew with vigor.
State run propaganda networks are actually a pretty good source of information; they are well resourced and have a vested interest in being perceived as high-credibility so they can tip the scale on a small number of issues critical to the state. And good propaganda is mostly done by omission and careful fact selection, although a lot of the bit-player dictatorships aren't competent enough to handle good propaganda.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-authority-...
The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are not exactly friends, they don't need much convincing to ban Al Jazeera.
There are dozens of contradictory narratives depending on who you ask, what makes your paticular narrative more compelling than the competing narratives?
Edit: to be honest, it is an honest question.
My guess is that the uniparty can’t afford a popular platform they don’t fully control and where there is significant dissent.
On Russia-Ukraine, the voices against US propaganda didn’t gain enough traction for them to worry about it. With Israel-Palestine, the opposition was for the first time reaching people who they previously never could.
This has been going on for years now. The Navy banned TikTok because of security concerns in 2019.
Then in 2020, the US announced it was considering banning them. ByteDance planned to divest by selling to an American company. The Chinese government disagreed.
TikTok sued and that took a while to go through the courts.
Then TikTok tried negotiating to avoid having to divest for a couple years by placing all private user data in the US, but later leaked recordings made it clear that Chinese employees still had access.
A law to ban TikTok on US government devices was then passed.
Then a law to ban TikTok unless they divest was drafted, but it took a couple years to pass and then that had to wind its way through the courts.
The ban both could have started earlier and been pushed to completion based on more recent factors.
Lawmakers talked about propaganda potential relating to Palestine directly, multiple times.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
It’s a convenient narrative because it sounds like „the government“ or „they“ want to conceal the truth, and suppress the honest rebels. It’s a trope.
Again, it may well be that some parts of the government feel like the side effects are beneficial, and I’m not commenting on that. But spinning the story to say this was the whole purpose of the law is simply not the truth, and instead pushing a certain narrative.
Dismissing a frequently reported on factor that mentioned by officials requires a higher burden than vague commentary on narrative shaping. Trying to minimize it despite factual statements is its own narrative.
> But in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, conservatives have become hyper fixated on policing pro-Palestinian messages on the app, accusing TikTok of influencing young Americans to “support Hamas” and favoring pro-Palestinian content.
If you follow the link attached to "influencing young Americans", you'll find Palestine isn't mentioned once, but Hamas is.
Of course there's bias everywhere, and we should have by now ways to follows stories to their source automagically by now. But anyhow.
However at least one question is about whether the attacks on Israel...
Can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians
So while most questions force them to pick sides between Hamas and Israel with no option to say they support Palestinians they do get at least one chance to say whether they think the Palestinian people have legitimate grievances (though still only in context of supporting an attack).
And the Intercept article is very clear when they link that they think Palestinian and Hamas support are being intentionally conflated, just as you've tried to do again here.
And we know this type of thing works because we see it everyday with US internal propaganda. The last thing the US needs is an adversary with a direct line to the US populace controlling what they see. Also, I'm not even talking about misinformation, just pushing what stories are seen and not seen. Once you add in misinformation and bots it's pretty wild how easy it appears to control the population.
"If these two get into a fight, we can move on with our Taiwan agenda."
That's why Trump is pushing the EU to properly finance their defense, so the US can concentrate on Asia Pacific. He signalled this during his Notre Dame meeting with Macron, France being the only European NATO ally with a reliable army and interests in the region. To Trump, China is the new US rival, Russia is merely a bigger Iran with nukes and more advanced tech. I don't see him giving Tiktok a break.
If something can be done through the Israeli/Palestinian conflict which damages the US, you can be sure China is working on it.
I lost any doubt that the American left's interest in Palestine is partially manufactured when I saw how the topic dominated the "most viral" feed on imgur for months, only to disappear almost completely right after election day, soon replaced by posts celebrating Luigi Mangione.
Maybe the US should just create some privacy protections instead ?
That’s the opposite of fascist.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
No, but they can direct the federal government to deprioritize enforcement.
But... But that would apply to Meta and Twitter as well Ö
> The Act exempts a foreign adversary controlled applica- tion from the prohibitions if the application undergoes a “qualified divestiture.” §2(c)(1). A “qualified divestiture” is one that the President determines will result in the appli- cation “no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary.” §2(g)(6)(A).
This feels like a fast track path to an oligarch system ? Pay enough and get your exception..
Also, in case you didn't notice, the world's richest man just about bought the presidential election by spending over a quarter billion dollars.
In 2028, who knows. The current president told his supporters that in four years, they won't need to vote anymore, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/trump-says-it-could-be-wo...
> "I think we're going to have to start thinking because, you know, we did go on TikTok, and we had a great response with billions of views, billions and billions of views," Trump told the crowd at AmericaFest, an annual gathering organized by conservative group Turning Point. > > "They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I looked at it, I said, 'Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while'," he said.
- -
"Sorry, TikTok isn't available right now.
"A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now.
"We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!"
- -
That last paragraph is 100% the language of authoritarian regimes.
"We are fortunate to have the Leader's personal attention!" — and he hasn't even taken office yet. Incredible.
It sounds like an authoritarian regime because it is one.
Public communications by corporations were like this in 1930s Germany and Italy, and more recently in 2020s Russia.
Vs
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/iran-tiktok...
Mitch Hedberg:
My belt holds my pants up, but the belt loops hold my belt up. I don't really know what's happening down there. Who is the real hero?
I'm not a fan of the ban, mind you, but it's not like they were ordered to leave the country.
I wish CPC could do the same thing to Telsa and Apple, or even to kidnap Tim Cook just like how they kidnapped Meng Wanzhou, gee, that would be thrilling
You're taking a decision to protect national interests that safeguards investor's interests, and here you are spinning it with "mafia" nonsense.
Pray tell, how do you address the problem of having a totalitarian regime manipulating and spying on your whole country? Do you try to shut down the operation? Or do you argue they should continue their psyops operations because otherwise it "sounds like the mafia"?
You are free to call Biden more principled but to me it looks like a shot in the foot.
This take is extremely disingenuous.
TikTok is a espionage and propaganda vector currently controlled by China's ruling regime. The only decision at this point is whether China continues to operate their propaganda and intelligence operation with free reign within the US. The only question at this point is whether Trump is in the pocket of the CCP.
TikTok's propaganda is clearly targeting Trump. I mean, ByteDance rejected a sale and instructed TikTok to unitalerally turn the lights off and post messages on how Trump was their savior. This is extremely transparent. There is nothing Biden could do to counter this.
What makes your take extremely disingenuous is the fact that you are arguing that Biden should fold to the CCP's pressure to continue their propaganda and intelligence campaign within the US, and you're trying to frame this somehow as keeping a major social not in the pocket of Trump. As if Trump is the issue.
It couldn't be because Jeffrey Yass has spent some dozens up to hundreds of millions US$ in GOP donations, could it? [1]
It really feels like the USA is circling the drain faster and faster these days...
[0] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/03/18/billion...
Ha, is that uniparty vote supposed to be something meaningful? If the government had true concerns, they could 1) be aired to the public and 2) other senators like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul would not be speaking against the ban.
People can change their views and minds. It's only a problem when you lie and pretend you didn't. Pres Biden signed the law and could suspend it now if he wanted, but he chose not to do it as it'd be contradictory to his own signing. And of course soon-to-be President Trump will get the credit for reverting it. Nobody cares about the details beyond those invested into politik.
Have you ever gotten 36 people to agree to something, let alone 360? There's obviously more to this that we aren't aware of.
Chinese nationals are banned from even accessing TikTok within China in addition to the Chinese government not allowing America media apps to compete their market.
There isnt an argument in the world that this app isnt bad for US interests and the only reason this is emotional at all for people is that it took too long for the government to act.
BTW, the RedNote userbase in China is 70% female, similar to Pinterest in the US. That may be why there's an affinity with a portion of the Tiktok userbase. The RedNote users are not into politics (at least were not). They cats, cooking, fashion, interior decorating, travel, sports.
The next day, they uploaded a new post saying they will quit the platform over the decision but was soon on the receiving end of homophobic comments, with some users accusing them of cultural imposition.
A Chinese user suggested that he try covering his nipples, as Chinese social media platforms generally impose restrictions on displaying them when it is perceived as sexually suggestive.
A few RedNote users also noted that posts about the Japanese anime My Hero Academia, which faced censorship in China since 2018 due to controversial references to Japan’s wartime history, have since been removed from the platform.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/16/tech/tiktok-refugees-rednote-...
[0] https://www.xiaohongshu.com/search_result?keyword=gay (requires log-in)
I wonder why? Post about Taiwan or 89 or Winnie the Pooh and find out :)
Yes, Russian bot farms work hard on TikTok. Algorithms and bot farms have no right for "free speech".
Or is the US just too much of a moral actor to do this?
But is a very typical Ruzzian stuff happening in response to my original comments
1 denial, "are the Ruzzians bots in the room with us" , trying to imply I am mad and there is no such thing as Ruzzian bot farms funded by Kremlin
2 Ruzzia has bot farm but what about USA
The content of the information war or different, but it's still a war, and the idea that the US would just cede all advantages to Russia because they're above using bots strikes me as faintly ridiculous.
Ridiculous is your idea that whatever Ruzzia does then USA also is doing.
Ruzzia kills journalist on Putin's birthday as presend or the deal leader then USA does it too to make their president happy
Ruzzia poisons political opponent, then arrests and kills them in prison, now they also arrested the lawyers then USA also does this (provide evidence for say just 3 poisonings and opponents killing assasinations of the USA president in the last 2- years please)
Oligarchs fall from window weekly in Ruzzia so it must be the same in USA, please provide evidence
Prigozin creates an army of cyber trolls, gets rewarded by Putin so it must be the same in USA, show me the USA version of Prigozin , a criminal /murdered nazi friend of the president that has a cyber army and a mercenary army.
Ruzzia puts weekly fake/falsified documents about Zelensky buying a new mansion or a new sports car, show me please faked documents posted weekly about Putin buying a new home/ sports car
Ruzzian groups are selling services of bot farms, they reocated after the invasion in Gerogria and Bulgaria and it is well known, so please show us the USA groups that sell bot farm services for social media.
Ruzzia downed 2 civilian airplanes and continues to not admit it, ask the Ruzzians and you will get 5 different version of the events, some ridiculous like "NATO airplanes were flying over the MH-17 to hide" , or "MH-17 was filled with corpses to make the good/kind Ruzzia look bad" , please show me how USA does this kind of idiotic mistakes and then they pretend it was the illuminati or some other bullshit.
Ruzzia sends their people in meat vawe attacks, show me in USA such low value for human live.
Riuzzia lies to their people and everyone knows it, like all drones intercepted but the debries started a fiew, or the Moscow was sunk because of bad weather or smoking accident, show USA is the same.
It is obvious for people that follow what happens in Ruzzia that the Zed regime is vary different, they want to kill their political opponents in a visible spectacular way, they lie to you and know that everyone knows it is a lie, they are a russian flavored fascist regime bettern named russcism.
US government has massively more oversight because of still somewhat functioning legislative and judicial systems. Also free press is still a thing (compared to Russia anyway..).
Ao any large scale program like this would inevitably be leaked and scrutinized (of course if they keep it somewhat low scale it will probably pass under the radar).
So effectively.. yes? It is?
"If germany had concentration camps and they were effective then surely US has much larger concentration camps"
Why do you assume that US must be worse than the worst in everything? US is not perfect but russia, iran, north korea etc are on another level.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
The US government can barely make a comment telling people that they're not horses.
Does they also faked opinions about Isreal and Gaza?
It's horrible, how should we identify them?
This is well known but ou can contionue to pdo your job pretending it is not. Independent group also could prove this, it is easy, thousands of accounts that were created at the same time, then slept for years are activated at the same time and spread same content.
Ruzzia was very proud by the cyber troll army, did they start denying it now? And now do you belive their Mistier of Invasion ? I mean they are still reporting that they are always downing 100% of the drones but the debries sometimes hit the target, sometimes cigarrates or lighting cause fires... so please let's ignore everything those criminals say.
Do you pretend bot farms do not exist?
>It's horrible, how should we identify them?
Social Media can identify them if they want.
As a regular users in general you can spot a bot account if it is new or hybernated for years and just started posting. But the issue is with bots that vote, give lies this ones are used to boost content so the algorithm pushes that agenda in fron of real users. but having many bot accounts increase their evaluation so they are not putting effort into silencing them.
And I assume you mean woke* content not DEI.
Truly bleak.
Geroge Orwell - Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I don’t get how can Americans be so insecure about themselves and have such fragile trust in what they can achieve as a country. This idea that foreign authoritarian regimes should be respected as much as their own people and system is just baffling.
Respect doesn't mean that you have to agree. If you believe that something is wrong, use arguments, educate, inform... It's hard to implement pathological behaviour in well informed and educated society. Fragile society, however, is easier to be manipulated with and lead to hate, violence and wars.
Years of TikTok usage
The politics of this are exactly the opposite of that you're saying. This is about restricting democratic rights.
Senator Mitt Romney put it very bluntly [0]:
> "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites - it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
Or maybe Mitt Romney is just another conspiracy theorist?
0. https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
Let's be honest: "Democracy" in the USA is and always has been a game for the rich, especially since the 1908s when Reagan and Thatcher decided that China should be the top dog in the world order.
People just want to live happily. Simple as that. TikTok gives a lot of people a feeling, a snippet, of a little bit of freedom and connection with others. All US media makes people fearful - FOX "news" is literally just fearmongering for boomers and their children who can't afford homes of their own. CNN and MSNBC is just fear mongering against boomers who watch FOX "news". Facebook/Meta/IG/WhatsApp is an extension of these fears into the virtual world and TikTok offers something better.
Jokes on the USA though. RedNOTE is gonna close the cultural divide between America and China and Americans will realize just how far the boomer generation and those who have been elected to uphold boomer beliefs really left younger/current generations behind.
China has won technologically and now begins the cultural victory.
I can foresee, sadly, that there will be an unnecessary loss of lives in the short term however for both the USA and BRICS nations. Hopefully I wind up being wrong.
TikTok is not some bastion of freedom, they did win with critical mass and a vastly superior algorithm. All media makes people fearful, you speak so highly of China but have you consumed mainland Chinese media before? It is like Fox on steroids, packed full with stories that paint China as the victor and America as a dangerous and silly country.
Calling a victory in technology is laughable, mainland manufacturing is incredible, one of the best in the world. Products in China have caught up and in some spaces exceeded western brands. China is still missing out on innovation in high-tech, thats why they have been caught so frequently trying to steal corporate secrets.
RedNOTE is not going to prove anything to americans except the disdain the Chinese have for Americans joining their social network and the level of censorship that exists in a mainland app.
It is like you are a propaganda machine and ironic enough it reads just like a mainland Chinese news article. If there was a conflict everyone would lose out. I am surprised anyone would foreshadow it. China unlike Russia seems to still think through the lens of economic interests, I suspect nobody in the current regime would want any type of conflict. While they may have a military its entirely untested both equipment and men.
Unanimous decision to ban TikTok from a divided Supreme Court, 2025.
The privacy / data protection angle on TikTok is a red herring.
There are other ways China, or anyone else, including any one of us, can get their hands on vast amounts of personal data about anybody. It just costs more than operating a profitable social media platform.
All you need to do is flash a few bucks and talk nicely to a data broker, or Meta (remember Cambridge Analytica?) and there's nothing the US Government or you can do about it, because it's entirely legal. The minimal barriers that are in place to protect the data going into "wrong" hands are trivial to bypass.
And if that doesn't work, the next level up in difficulty is hack the same organizations. China has made an industry out of that.
In both ways, users do it voluntarily, by agreeing with terms of use. You don't have to use those platforms.
- Meta - Facebook et al
- Stasi (an abbreviation of Staatssicherheit), was the state security service and secret police of East Germany from 1950 to 1990. It was one of the most repressive police organisations in the world, infiltrating almost every aspect of life in East Germany, using torture, intimidation and a vast network of informants to crush dissent
0: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
The fundamental issue is ByteDance ownership. Forced divestiture due to legitimate concern for potential abuses is perfectly acceptable whether by a financial or national security rationale.
———
1 - https://www.axios.com/2024/04/27/biden-tiktok-sale-grindr
All data that they collect are given by user voluntary, by agreeing with their terms of use. Instead of banning, educate about how data harvesting works and why it matters. No one is learning from censorship.
Not all of it. Just some of it. No need to see everything in such a black and white way.
Also Orwell was obviously not talking about major entities run by other countries. Do you think he would have opposed stopping newspapers directly run by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union from operating inside Britain?
Let’s JUST invent practical nuclear fusion and sentient AI while we’re at it. Both would be probably significantly easier to achieve..
How are you supposed to manufacture consent if it works?
Not the entire U.S. population is on TikTok. Even if a significant percentage are, your argument is that they cannot think for themselves? It is widely known that TT is Chinese owned/controlled yet Americans still used it. Even a regulation requiring disclosure of that fact each time you open it would be fine. But an outright ban on the app itself? This is a huge "feel good" moment which will not improve any aspects of the social media environment in the U.S.
we don't let any foreign citizens work on missiles and stuff (ITAR), we shouldn't let adversarial countries own and control communications infrastructure
this doesn't get enough attention. ByteDance could have easily partitioned off the US environment and made bank selling it. but the influence potential was too juicy for CCP to let ByteDance sell it. even if the CCP wasn't manipulating the algorithm to sway US public opinion - I don't know whether they were or not - having that option open was far too valuable to part with it.
and I think they were playing a game of chicken, honestly. they bargained for the US government being too dysfunctional - and TikTok too popular - for the ban to happen.
I think that's kind of trivializing the position they were in. Would you take the same tone if it were an American startup that were forced to sell a big chunk of itself pre-IPO? Would you roll your eyes at them for "being greedy" at any indication of pushback against such a requirement?
I don't think the law is necessarily bad, considering the national security implications, but it's a cop-out to dismiss the burden of being forced to sell a major part of an enterprise as no big deal and the owner as just stubborn.
to be clear, I don't think ByteDance was greedy. I suspect ByteDance would have been happy to cash out. but it wasn't up to them, they needed approval from the CCP.
if a US social media startup somehow got extremely popular in China, I'd understand and even empathize with China requiring it be sold. they'd be right to mistrust us.
China avoided this problem by ensuring that never happened in the first place.
Then China requires the company's operations in China to be more than 50% owned by China. The TikTok thing is very much "what's good for the goose", but it's also the US acting more like China the authoritarian country.
You can both believe that the requirement is justified and that it comes at a big cost for the org that would have to sell. They aren't mutually exclusive.
> let adversarial countries own and control communications infrastructure
This is an exaggeration that a social media platform for short form content is communications infrastructure, akin to a cell tower or fiber optic line. I'd the say the same for your mention of ITAR in a thread about, again, a social media platform.
If we were serious, there would be regulations for all social media, not just forcing of U.S. ownership then saying "all good, this can't be bad since Americans own it"
if "we were serious" about what? the issue of foreign control is not relevant to domestic companies. we could have some other regulations too, sure, but this one is reasonable.
I think people should be able to decide which social media apps they want to use. They're not even close to reaching the levels of the "infrastructure" box you're forcing them into to justify this decision.
TikTok isn't "infrastructure", TikTok is software. TikTok exploits the infrastructure of the internet across the world, it is not infrastructure itself. The servers TikTok runs on is technically "infrastrucutre", but those same servers could run anything else, the hardware is not "TikTok". I could run "TikTok" the software on any hardware, even if it isn't connected to the public internet, and that would not qualify it as "infrastructure", at least not in the sense that it's servicing any population.
Suppose that is true. Then why are you ok with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or any other American oligarch wielding even more influence on US culture? When it comes down to it, it's just jingoism, isn't it? China man bad, America man good.
Not wanting authoritarian shitholes to have influence on people isn't really all that crazy of a stance, IMO, even if the world isn't perfect and shitheads like Zucc have similar influence.
Ban 'em both for all I care, my whole point is that pretending as if the west is being evil or whatever for banning these obvious propaganda channels is absurd to me
America man friend of president.
Singaporean corporations controlled by the Chinese government in China does not have FA rights.
It assumes that we must prevent public from accessing some thoughts/propoganda as they may not be able to make right decision themselves. This is rhyming with 1930s Germany or other authoritative regimes since then.
america and americans should be able to view any media and still come to the best conclusions. banning media is a lack of trust in americans ability to formulate opinions. what the point in having media and democracy if you dont think people can make good decisions based on it?
I’m rather confused how do you think that is somehow connected with:
> horrible crutch that suggests america is already dead and gone
If you believe that then surely you must also believe that it was never “alive” in the first place?
Americans certainly didn’t have unrestricted access to any type of media in ta past. In fact it was heavily centralized and controlled by a small number of entities. One might argue that the decentralization starting with cable television/etc. and then internet led us to where we are.
Everyone used to be watching the same handful of television channels (which were relatively “apolitical” anyway) and a small number of available newspapers. It’s rather obvious why it was much easier to reach societal consensus on most issues compared to these days…
We have freedom of speech in this country — and for the boogeyman that China was somehow weaponizing their platform, we just removed the voice of countless communities that had formed on TikTok.
Imports of firearms and ammunition from China to the USA have been banned since 1994 [1]. IIRC Chinese companies were caught selling rifles and other gear to known gangs in California and that motivated the law.
Firearms imports are also much more restricted generally than most other categories. More than one manufacturer has reincorporated in the United States because of the regulations.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3355...
there is no First Amendment right for Chinese companies to operate within our market. there is no First Amendment right for RT to be carried on US cable networks.
if TikTok were a website, it'd be different. it'd be one thing if the US were blackholing tiktok.com. but TikTok is an app that sells ads, and they're not entitled to sell ads to US businesses or publish on US app stores.
It's not true, just to clarify it.
Many foreign corporations operating in China, only if they:
1. Keep all user data within the border. 2. Cooperate with censorship
TikTok meets the first condition in the U.S., and I think the issue lies with the second condition.
so Azure in China can only be ran by a Chinese entity
If you look at it from the other side, it's like Tiktok must be hosted by Microsoft/Amazon but not datacenters in China
They just move to new place. Loads of online communities have died/migrated for various different reasons over the years.
> We have freedom of speech in this country
This doesn't impose on your freedom of speech at all.
Just because you have the right to say anything, doesn't give you the right to say it where you want.
By this logic, the US government should be able to ban any newspaper that is publishing articles that they don't like: it doesn't encroach on the freedom of speech of the reporters of that newspaper, they can just speak somewhere else. They don't have the right to say anything at that particular newspaper, just in general.
Of course, in reality, banning a publication (TikToK) because you think they may publish stories that you won't like (propaganda for Chinese interests) is an obvious violation of the first ammendment and a form of government censorship.
Just to give an example of what would be concerns of the platform aspect of TikTok, that would be concerns about the ability for the app to deploy malicious code to users' phones, or the amount of data that it siphons off legally. But those are de-emphasised in favor of their control on content, which is precisely what's supposed to be protected by the Constitution.
Both are publishing stories written by others (reporters for the newspaper, subscribers for TikTok), and taking decisions on which stories to publish (through direct editorial control for the newspaper, through the algorithm + some direct editorial control for TikTok).
The operator doesn’t necessarily have to be American. A European operator would be sufficient. But it can’t be an overtly hostile nation.
All of these arguments have been made ad nauseum.
All social media companies controlled by the CCP will be banned in the US. And since all tech companies in China are controlled by the CCP that means all Chinese social media products will be banned in the US.
It’s not all that complicated. It’s not even that controversial.
You can say what you want and don’t go in prison, sure, but nobody owes you the platform.
The issue isn't money going to CCP. The issue is data and CCP control of the algorithm.
As does turkey or Germany or whoever when it comes to US socials operating in their countries.
All you need is a court order and all socials will delete whatever content is requested.
China's rule of law is generally very weak. "Ultimately, no matter what the laws say, it would be difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement, and the courts cannot be relied on to provide a remedy." https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/what-the-national-intel...
This is particularly obvious with the number of senior executives of key Chinese companies who have simply disappeared, at least temporarily, when they displeased the government. Again, nothing comparable in the USA (yet).
>USA has showed it is perfectly okay with this daylight robbery and piracy.
Why? They didn't steal TikTok, they forbade it from operating in the US with the current ownership.
The rest of your comment has so many falsehoods in it I don't really know where to start.
Are you being sarcastic?
Personally, I think it’s a bit of both. There’s definitely concern about Chinese control but it has also been seen as a business opportunity.
but yes, there is some evidence but of course its very controversial
That sounds pretty geopolitical adversary to me.
Rather you don't remember the agenda and just roll with the flow.
Trump and Boris Johnson are both total arse clowns, much smarter that they appear to be, and masters of throwing a dead cat on the table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
Trump is a _very_ good carny grifter, he can grab attention like few others can.
Remember that pledge to fix Ukraine within a few days of taking office? Probably not - he tangented off on seizing Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Meanwhile, that basket of deplorables is being sworn in.
It all just smacks of protectionism and isolationism to me.
we are the same now
The CCP is not some weird thing that's wrong 100% of the time, so the US must always do the opposite thing.
The CCP banning Google/Facebook was wrong, but not for the reason of removing something a "geopolitical adversary has control" over, it was wrong because it was part of their extensive and illiberal censorship regime. The US has nothing similar.
> we are the same now
No.
this reminds me another brilliant comment:
> China bans US businesses because it has an autocratic, ethnocratic government. The US is banning a Chinese business for obvious national security reasons.
In the 1950s, China forced private enterprises to sell half of their shares to the state In the 1990s, it required foreign companies to establish joint ventures and share intellectual property as a condition for entering the Chinese market.
Congrats, you just walked in the primary stage of socialism
With Tiktok, US is designed to disgust, it is not giving you an option to comply. If you don't sell yourself, you lose all the business, if you sell yourself, you lose even more business because others will get invention you created. But since USA showed this is perfectly legal, let's use this on USA companies, sell yourself or get banned. Looks like you are perfectly okay with this. Facebook was worth $25B when 15 years ago, let's force Facebook to sell itself and pay Facebook $25B, it will worth $3T today, you still won, and original inventor, the business owners still get screwed. When Apple was weak and worth millions in 80s and 90s, force Apple to sell itself. Steve Jobs gets $100M. Today, you will have $4T brand, technology, ecosystem and company. Yep, this is totally moral and totally American values.
We have a lot of people like that, who used to believe in America's free trade, democracy, fair competition, and innovation. I used to be one too
now things are changing...
Terrible precedent for global trade, thing is Silicon Valley pulls hard for deregulation, and it's common wisdom here that regulating tech would be slowing down the only economic sector we have that's still growing, so we cannot write any rules that might make for a fair playing field, protect Americans from data leaks and disinformation or whatever, only tool we have is ban competition.
>> China gives you a list of requirements to operate in the country, if you meet it, you can operate.
Some US companies (like Google) choose not to operate there because they don't want to put up with harassment and intellectual property theft that comes with having offices on the mainland.
I’m not concerned so much about TikTok as spyware or data gathering or a vector for influencing young minds… though it is all of that, to some extent.
The real problem is the one sided nature of the U.S.-China trade relationship.
Some people believe that not retaliating stops cycles and systems. Some of us have principles beyond the very childlike, "well, they did it first".
If you believe state censorship is bad, you should oppose it when it is deployed, even if it's deployed against someone you think is also bad.
Like, I think using slurs is bad. I oppose using slurs, even against people I loathe. I have a principal, and I do not violate that principle even if it would hurt people I would consider my opponents.
Same here. My commitment to my principal that "state censorship is bad" far outweighs any feelings about China.
I think some progress was made getting TikTok on US servers and the US hires etc. Maybe more transparency in how the company operated or observers within could have been good next steps. Maybe some mutual concession with some version of US media operating within China.
Ideally finding benefit to nation states competition benefits global citizens in some way such as the green race transition to renewables is good ... Can we have privacy and democratic media race somehow? ... Maybe not possible :)
I am shocked that so many seem to root for China pointing a mind-control weapon at hundreds of millions of people? The Chinese government wants Europe and the US to fall to them. The good does not outweight the bad, in my opinion.
One doesn't have to support the existence of Instagram and Twitter to definitely not support the Chinese control of TikTok. I think the world would be better without closed-source algorithm-controlled short video feeds.
Do you believe this in your heart? Or how about this: do you believe that Europe wants China to fall? Or that the US wants China to fall?
I feel there’s some uncontroversial stuff like China wanting absolute control over messaging about itself, in the context of avoiding organized resistance in its internal affairs. And it goes to extreme measures to do that.
But (glibly) “we want no criticism to be mentioned of us” does not lead to “we want the US to collapse”! There’s a whole texture to the Chinese position here, one that is different from, say, Russia actually taking more or less direct control of various places during the Cold War.
Have you been repeated this for years that now you take it at face value?
I'm no fan of the Chinese regime, but as an European it's my biggest ally spying on me, lying (Iraq/Lybia) and manipulating me.
China is on the other part of the world and it's history it has never bothered neither Europe nor US. In fact it's our troops that conquered and killed Chinese in millions, not them.
What makes you think that, it's just an algo and network effects.
>I love the us vs them argument. Because it's baseless. Why don't you stop buying everything that's made in China. Let's see how far you get.
Because that would be harmful to US consumers. Lack of short video entertainment reccomended in a particular way is not very harmful. No microwaves or fridges for a couple of years is.
>Nobody is brainwashing anyone.
Influence operations on social media by nation states and others is a verified and ongoing concern. The US and others have been doing this for decades. If China is not doing it via Tiktok already, they would when the invasion of Taiwan starts.
>Except women the world over getting everything for free because they have holes. Nobody complains about that.
Touch grass please.
> Because that would be harmful to US consumers. Lack of short video entertainment reccomended in a particular way is not very harmful. No microwaves or fridges for a couple of years is.
And it wouldn't be a bad thing to "stop buying everything that's made in China," but it's not something anyone can do suddenly. It would require a massive political project on par to the industrialization of China. China makes pretty much everything now (IIRC, they have 30-40% of the world's manufacturing capacity), and that is not a good thing for anyone who is not an authoritarian Chinese communist.
Any suggestion that TikTok poses no real threat to U.S. interests is staggeringly naive. Imagine if CBS, NBC, FOX, and ABC were all owned and operated by the government of America’s greatest adversary—that’s essentially what we’re dealing with. Meanwhile, Chinese citizens are explicitly barred from accessing TikTok in China, and American social media companies are shut out of China’s market altogether. There’s no credible argument that TikTok doesn’t undermine U.S. interests; the only reason people are reacting so emotionally now is that our government took far too long to address this blatant national security risk.
That analogy falls apart by making use the hyperbole of comparing ownership of one social media application to the ownership of all major broadcast media television channels. Or is the U.S. so socially conflicted and institutionally fragile that it not handle one single social media application being owned and operated by 's/the government of/a private company from/' its greatest adversary?
The broadcast TV analogy may be more applicable if Instagram, X, YouTube and Twitch were all operated by the oligarchy of a single geopolitical adversary... which arguably could become the case for the E.U. from tomorrow 20th January 2025.
Here's what would happen: Nothing. People already think America is a terrible country to live in. Sure, certain interest groups would be preferred, probably Palestine over Israel. Maybe something instead of Saudi Arabia. But for the average American? Why should they care?
I'm not that educated on the subject (I think most people who are making claims either way about this aren't), but all my priors indicate to me that China's government collects data from and controls content (to be shown only to the western populace) in TikTok much more than the US government with US social media companies.
I understand the comparison, but I think the magnitude of the problem is very likely to be much higher with TikTok.
I suspect many people see that as a worthy cause. They may not understand what it implies, but dammit, they don’t want none of that foreign spyware.
Some money could possibly be made by some people legitimately.
The bleakest part is people who didn't recognize how extreme a gamble it is if that's what somebody wants to pin their entire livelihood on.
Whether they wrote the app or not.
The "house" just drew the winning hand, and all the gamblers lost everything they had on the table at once.
That can happen at any time, and almost always happens eventually, that's why they call it gambling.
It's not so bad if you don't bet everything.
Posts that get 5m+ views on one platform may only get 5000 on another.
Think it would be pretty reasonable for other countries to ban such platforms too though, as China has understandably already been doing for over a decade. Facebook of course played a big role in genocide in Myanmar, so I wouldn't dare say the US platforms are necessarily better.
Meanwhile we have a member of the inner circle of the US President-elect using the social network that he owns to explicitly attempt to depose the leader of the UK, to support violent extremists, and to support far right parties across Europe. TikTok never did any of that.
> https://www.reuters.com/world/musk-examines-how-oust-starmer...
I suppose you refer to this: https://theconversation.com/why-romanias-election-was-annull...
"The Romanian constitutional court annulled the country’s presidential election on December 6.
This decision is unprecedented in Romanian history. It followed the declassification of documents by Romanian intelligence services that exposed evidence of voting manipulation through social media platforms, illegal campaign financing on TikTok, cyber-attacks orchestrated by external forces and suspected Russian interference."
https://www.ejiltalk.org/electoral-dysfunction-romanias-elec...
> Here, the opposite could be alleged- that Romania took action, but the action was too immediate and drastic than was called for in the circumstances. Considering how the Court expressed a critical view of overly drastic measures in cases such as the above-mentioned Kermiova v Azerbaijan, it is possible that the Court could similarly show a disdain for the expeditious actions taken by the domestic judiciary in Romania.
Also apparently most voters voted this candidate because of economic reasos, not due to Russian proximity.
Establishment parties obviously didn’t like that outcome.
So we downplaying how Russia had a big hand in getting the US President elected? Twice?
This is not some conspiracy theory: this is 100% of the official reason that Congress voted on this. They fear that China has influence through TikTok into the US public, and could use this to sway public opinion [unsaid: just as the US does with Facebook or Twitter]. They also fear that China could surreptitiously spy on high-value targets through the TikTok app - which is why it was forbidden two years ago already from any device used in doing business with the US Government, including the business phones or BYOD phones of all federal employees and contractors.
Interestingly, part of the fear of influence ties back to Gaza. Here is a quote from Mitt Romney about this [0]:
> SENATOR ROMNEY: A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard.
This is exactly the sort of issue that the US fears: losing control of the public narrative, especially in the USA, but more broadly as well.
[0] https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-mccain-i...
Actually, they didn't even bring any evidence of that, except for the fact that he claims in official documents and public appearances that his campaign cost 0, which is such a bold faced lie that it barely needs dismissing.
But no, I don't share the court's apparent opinion that, but for TikTok, this lunatic wouldn't have won. All suggestions are that, will he be allowed to run again (which is theoretically the current status quo, him not having been put under any sort of judicial control!), he will win again, despite his vastly diminished TikTok presence. Turns out, to my great personal sadness, that many of my countrymen, idioticaly, actually liked the fascist and weren't (just) manipulated by TikTok.
...well most of those service are banned in China.
TLDR TikTok is not comparable to the other services you mentioned because ByteDance is required to comply with Chinese intelligence, and China has made many public statements in recent years to the effect that it is a hostile, rival power to the United States. Allowing ByteDance to operate TikTok is granting a hostile government a tool to influence US public opinion as well as to track the locations and text messages of 170 million American citizens. Congress gave ByteDance the option to divest control so that they could get paid and TikTok could continue to operate, ByteDance refused.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-is-tiktok-being-banned-supr...
Why did Congress want to ban TikTok?
U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that TikTok threatens national security because the Chinese government could use it as a vehicle to spy on Americans or covertly influence the U.S. public by amplifying or suppressing certain content.
The concern is warranted, they said, because Chinese national security laws require organizations to cooperate with intelligence gathering. FBI Director Christopher Wray told House Intelligence Committee members last year that the Chinese government could compromise Americans' devices through the software.
As the House took up the divest-or-ban law in April 2024, Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, compared it to a "spy balloon in Americans' phones." Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said that lawmakers learned in classified briefings "how rivers of data are being collected and shared in ways that are not well-aligned with American security interests."
"Why is it a security threat?" Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said Friday. "If you have TikTok on your phone currently, it can track your whereabouts, it can read your text messages, it can track your keystrokes. It has access to your phone records."
If the Chinese government gets its hands on that information, "it's not just a national security threat, it's a personal security threat," Hawley said.
If the United States government gets its hands on that information, "it's not just a national security threat, it's a personal security threat," Hawley (should have) said.
Also the keystroke part seem technically entirely not true and location is only partially correct.
The Chinese government is motivated to have US citizens angry and unproductive.
While productivity and happiness are not the same thing, I am personally far less worried about how my government would influence me than how China would influence me.
meanwhile, we're
- pretending that inflation has landed and is not being resisted by the Feds
- deregulating all the anti-trust accomplishments we made over the years to drive up prices
- pantomiming at best the idea of affordable housing as housing prices surge
- increasing homelessness and unemployment nationwide Something the modern job market does not help with as more job postings than not are fake to hire non-americans (or no one at all).
- deporting immigrants while Trump likely grants even more H1B-s to billionares,
- starting multiple trade wars because Trump is showing the definition of insanity by imposing tariffs again. When last time we lost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars over it.
But yes, banning the chinese app that actually gave some income to young american citizens suffering the worst from the above was done in a snap, relatively speaking. I'm ambivalent on the actual ban, but I can't blame american tiktok users being absolutely fervent with the bald-face hypocrisy going on.
> "[...] it can read your text messages, it can track your keystrokes. It has access to your phone records."
Is that quote accurate though? For accessing text messages, you need to give them an OS permission. For tracking keystrokes, they need to install a keyboard app and you need to select it and use it in the app whose keystrokes they're interested in. For phone records, you again need to grant a separate permission.
I don't use Tiktok but the current gatekeepers of this world don't usually allow unnecessary permissions
I see zero, little evidence that TikTok brought any particular sympathy to China.
Nor I've seen a single study that has demonstrated that TikTok is any more biased than other socials. In fact it was even less than some (such as Twitter).
Is the narrative on other platforms under their control? What does that even mean? US hardly has coherent narrative these days anyway or at least it changes every 4 years.
Regardless what benefits can you see in allowing the CCP to shape US public opinion in any way?
I have always and will always say that the government does not have the sole right to influence me as a US citizen, and it is my right to slurp up "influence" from whoever and wherever I want to. The idea that Americans are too stupid to ingest whatever information is out there (edited or unedited, curated or not, propaganda or not) for the sake of democracy is a threat to the very idea of democracy itself.
The very fact that this argument has gained traction is the worst outcome of this entire debacle. I never ever ever thought I'd see Americans cheering that the government should limit the ability of their own fellow citizens to access information, and here we are.
What the United States has accomplish over the last 200 or so years is remarkable, but it's colossally myopic to believe that the US has never curtailed the rights of it's citizens in the name of security. The OSS was never legal. The CIA definitely should not be legal. And lord only knows what the NSA does. But I promise you that restricting access to a Chinese mobile app is not the most egregious thing the United States Government has ever done.
This is the perfect time for Twitter / X to relaunch Vine again.
> Rather than have some sort of further regulation for what data any application can collect and present to Americans, we've just brought the hammer down on the millions of people that use this application for their livelihood.
That's why we have our existing regulators to issue fines against Meta, Google (YouTube), X, Snap, etc when they violate their user's data in the billions.
> Truly bleak.
Life in India appears to be functioning well after their TikTok ban with its 1BN users so even if this is temporary, it is not the end of the world.
This is a chance for TikTok users in the US to reflect on their addictions and hopefully change for the better. There is life after TikTok.
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
You combine that with the lack of reciprocal access for American and European social media apps to the Chinese market, the mental health issues TikTok causes, the lack of safeguards in TikTok that inexplicably Douyin has (China’s TikTok from the same parent company), and on and on - banning isn’t just justified but the only sane thing for all countries that aren’t China to do.
No, they do not. These are US products, not the foreign communist party psyops project.
Like, "it's a foreign project"... so is my Nintendo. Are you afraid or worried about foreign things? A lot of the world does a lot of things better than the U.S.
"It's a communist party project"... first of all, plenty of great communist projects out there, and the Chinese communist party is really only a very very narrow slice of communism so your brush is absolutely over broad. But second, so what? What do you own that didn't pass through China in some capacity?
"It's a psyop"... it's an app with funny videos on it. I think you need to set that tinfoil hat down and pause a bit. Does it have a different cultural root used to moderate it? Sure! Are they making moderation decisions I would make? No. Does that make it psyop? Of course not. Don't be absurd.
Is Xbox prevented from competing with Nintendo in Japan, under similar conditions as Nintendo competes with Xbox in USA?
Are there representatives of the Japanese government sitting within Nintendos offices overlooking what Nintendo is doing? Is that government run by a single party?
China doesn’t allow US social media apps, mostly because they want extreme control over the content on their side of the firewall. But probably also because they know that US intelligence services could force the US social media companies to give them access to information or make changes to their code.
So it’s utter madness and ridiculous naive to allow Chinese companies unfettered access to the US market when we know that the parent company is forced to be under direct supervision of the communist party of China, and we know that the party and the PLA along with its intelligence services are essentially one and the same entity.
At the very least this gives Chinese companies undue advantage in the US market. It’s much easier for them to leverage the code they’re written in both the Chinese and the US market, making them more efficient and thus letting them undercut US companies over time.
I can’t believe how naive nearly all of the comments defending TikTok are.
(Sure the “psyop” part of the other comment is a bit much, but I took it as hyperbole and I think most readers would)
Healthy political discourse ?
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
For the down voters, what exactly is the claim here? That everyone on earth is inherently antisemitic, like it's in our DNA? What exactly do the Chinese have against Jews?
And for anyone living in North Korea who ever has a chance to read your comment, I'm sorry, this person has no idea what it means to live in a police state under a belligerent dictator.
And the right comes from their Constitutional power to regulate foreign commerce. The US has banned American companies from doing business with various foreign entities for a while, though it really picked up after 1990.
I doubt there were, because it would have been moot: the Soviets were so far behind on computer technology that they didn't really make anything anyone would want.
But more generally, the US was a lot smarter about trade with adversaries during the Cold War. There were significant restrictions on trade with the Communist Bloc that limited the kinds of entanglements we now have with China. The US got really stupid and overconfident after the Cold War ended, and that's only slowly starting to change (and this TikTok "ban" is a welcome part of that).
Being a government. They also get to tell you want kind of guns your allowed to have, what kinds of medicines you can take, and how much gas your car uses, and how your home has to be built.
Welcome to the real world, is this your first time here?
This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters. Geopolitic strategies are increasingly executed as grey zone warfare, and some hybrid warfare, because the costs and risks of traditional overt warfare have become unacceptably high.
> Use of the term grey-zone is widespread in national security circles, but there is no universal agreement on the definition of grey-zone, or even whether it is a useful term, with views about the term ranging from "faddish" or "vague", to "useful" or "brilliant"
It goes on to say:
> Grey zone warfare generally means a middle, unclear space that exists between direct conflict and peace in international relations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relat...
Also, I'm starting to feel like the vagueness of "are we at war or not?" is an intentional feature that gives people in power leverage to gaslight the public. That applies to both cold war and grey zone conflict.
AOC published a video talking about how she (and some other representatives) believed that the arguments that were presented to them were just as vague, nonspecific and theoretical as these online arguments I keep reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-zone_(international_relat...
The problem has no easy solution.
At the end of the day, either users are really in control for what they can or they cannot talk about or it's censored one way or another and thus not free.
Information war is complex and if we don't allow our foes to express their povs then all we're left is our own manipulated media. If we do allow it we might face a spread of a different kind of information.
I wish this was all solved by allowing everybody to spread whatever information and educating citizens since young age about raising a lot of doubt about anything they hear/see in the news/socials.
But again this is also complicated on a social media level especially with those auto feeder algorithms that will either push you controversial content because it makes views or just because you stumbled on few videos on the topic so it's gonna push you even further in the hole.
In any case there's no simple solution.
The issue with China is that our own information and misinformation cannot reach them either.
We allowed Russian state media for long on our platforms because they allowed our on theirs too. Reddit or YouTube or X were never banned there. But again 90% of Russians get informed by tv, and the minority that doesn't gets it on VK or other Russian social media.
If you control the "last mile" infrastructure, you have a pretty good idea what's going on. If you control the mobile network, you can track everyone, and flash their baseband processor if you like.
(see also: concerns about Huawei equipment in our internet infrastructure)
The documents that Snowden released confirmed that this kind of thing was going on. To be honest, I don't think that really surprised anyone in the security community.
We just don't want China to have the same power to monitor our citizens as we have ourselves.
Could you please give some source on that info?
a backdoor: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-developers-fin...
a patent for doing it in "civilian" applications: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2013114317A1/en
sure, the NSA will respect that
Look at the backlash against the US government trying to clamp down on Covid misinformation with a national emergency declaration [1]. There’s exactly zero reason to expect the CCP has an incentive to behave differently, especially when there’s effectively no way for companies to push back in China.
And no that doesn’t excuse the nonsense some US administrations get up to. Like undermining the effectiveness of the Chinese covid vaccine [2].
There is already evidence of pressure being applied to ByteDance by the CCP for data on Hong Kong citizens [3].
So it would be silly to think that: 1) data for different TikTok users is more or less difficult for the CCP to access based on their specific locations (technically or practically) And 2) the CCP has more respect for foreigners than Western governments do.
———
1 - https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-ca...
2 - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
3 - https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-china-bytedance-user-data-...
That's what growing conservative "anti globalist" movements backed by national security elements are really about. Not ultimately immigration or racism or tax cuts (that's how you get the tubes on board), but about how the inability to keep civilians out of information conflicts has made running countries incredibly difficult.
This is one area where China absolutely has the right approach and we need to wake up about what it means in the public rather than complain that we can't scroll silly waste of time videos all the time. The US public is incredibly uneducated about this concept and why it poses a threat, so the discussion needs to be had.
I think we should be far more critical of American internet companies as well and quite a few of them should probably be banned because they are creating the same sort of problem w.r.t how we can practically organize a functioning society. That's the unfortunate thing, is a bunch of libertarians in silicon valley a while back decided to invent a business model that could cause a global war.
> This has been an open secret in national security circles but the average person on the street has no idea what a grey zone conflict is, what it looks like, or why it matters
Looks like you're just confirming what OP said
Might as well look up the definition of "5th column"
"Why wasn't I told this before?" Is a common sentiment in those videos.
The only study I've seen said that TikTok wasn't any more biased than other social medias.
It's not like those hashtags were even banned, so what's the point here?
It's also likely that demographics between the apps are different.
Calling it "Grey zone conflict" feels like the "Deep state" shenanigans... It's primarily marketing to achieve your goal.
We've seen the invasion of Iraq; that was all based on lies. We got ISIS as a result... "National security circles" look for evidence so it fits their narrative. Like watching FoxNews. It's a very narrowminded funnel of carefully picked pieces of evidence. They are not truth seekers that aim to provide a holistic view of the situation. No, they are scared aged men who love to control the narrative and see danger in everything in the hope to get more funding for their next projects.
Btw; banning TikTok is a good thing, but for other reasons entirely.
Social media manipulation has already been effective.
cold-war (not an obsolete term)
ambient non-linear conflict
cyberwar
business
I’m sorry, but not everything on this world is Israel/Palestine.
"Manipulation Playbook: The 20 Indicators of Reality Control"
Education?
That has been happening since time immemorial.
What is actually the issue is that for the first time ever in the post-WW2 Pax Americana era, media is being weaponized by a powerful non-American state (China).
America does through Facebook, Mysterious Twitter X, Reddit, CNN, Fox News, PBS, et al. what China does through TikTok. If anything, other countries should also seriously consider banning foreign media and realize insofar as future geopolitics that Pax Americana is ending.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_i...
TikTok serves to make everyone wear Chinese blue jeans and listen to Chinese pop music, and America does not like that.
Putting it another way: America can dish it out but they can't take it.
America banned TikTok because it's not something America can control, that really is all there is to it. It's even stated right there in the law: Sell TikTok to America and they can do business.
There is a passage in the book Life of Pi, where Pi's family is gathered and ready to leave India for Canada. And his mother does something out of the ordinary:
> The day before our departure she pointed at a cigarette wallah and earnestly asked, "Should we get a pack or two?"
> Father replied, "They have tobacco in Canada. And why do you want to buy cigarettes? We don't smoke."
> Yes, they have tobacco in Canada-but do they have Gold Flake cigarettes? Do they have Arun ice cream? Are the bicycles Heroes? Are the televisions Onidas? Are the cars Ambassadors? Are the bookshops Higginbothams'? Such, I suspect, were the questions that swirled in Mother's mind as she contemplated buying cigarettes.
Do I use TikTok? No, I've always advocated against it. Will I use it if it is reinstated? Probably not. But I downloaded it anyway the same way Mrs Gita Patel wanted to buy cigarettes. It wasn’t about need or use. It was about the loss.
I would stand behind a tiktok ban if it was for the right reasons. But this ban is only because it failed to conform to manufactured consent.
This, to me, is a weird stance. On what grounds did you advocate against it?
I just had to create a new account tonight after the ban[0] to keep using it. When you first start TikTok you might be presented with a wave of seemingly crap, bizarre or boring videos, but after several minutes of liking and watching the good stuff the algorithm very quickly starts serving you some excellent content.
There is some really, really great, really smart content on TikTok. I have always advocated for TikTok on those grounds.
[0] my accounts are all on USA servers and you can't log into them even through a VPN
> my accounts are all on USA servers
Keep telling yourself that ;)
No idea how you could know this. I have never seen any concrete evidence that there are propaganda videos interlaced into people’s feeds. Everything I have heard is hypothetical. “China could” do this or that. If there were anything more than conjecture it would be huge news.
Casey Newton said on Hard Fork that he started a new account recently as an experiment and didn’t mention anything about China propaganda videos.
I did once see a cat that was named "Chairman Meow" in one video, which might have been very subtle CCP reprogramming now that I think on it.
Usually it is about behavior shifts and/or emotions. E.g. if I’d be watching videos with cute penguins and then seen a politician „adopting” penguins at zoo, that’d be a political propaganda.
Political ads have to be marked clearly but if politician is sympathetic to the platform and platform owner has a stake in keeping good relations then it’s just another penguins video, right?
And it’s omnipresent, so you stop paying attention. It’s not only China who is doing that. That’s why Paris Syndrome exists, car manufacturers don’t allow game makers to show their models in a destroyed form or why actresses don’t like to show their nostrils.
The problem with China (as far as I understand) is lack of the symmetry. They will sell you everything, but refuse to let your merchants in.
And I’d describe message shown to American users as a propaganda.
I have been using TikTok for months and I didn't see any propaganda at all. I only get content about my interests (3d printing, game dev, tech stuff). Sometimes it shows random stuff like animals and camping and funny videos or something but nothing like heavy politics at all.
I guess if I started engaging with "slightly political stuff" and started searching for it, it may be possible to get that kind of content, but yeah it's definitely not shown to me.
I expect that to stay unless I start to show intentions to the algorithm that I care about that kind of content.
It's owned by the Chinese government and I don't trust the Chinese government.
> Chinese mobile apps were stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data.
> The compilation of such data, and its mining and profiling by elements hostile to India is a matter of very deep and immediate concern which requires emergency measures
[0] https://apnews.com/article/bd02ecd62ff9da6b1301868f0308e297
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Personal_Data_Protecti...
Do you understand what kind of information can be derived from 150 million smart phones?
(For anyone out of the loop, see https://www.dw.com/en/elon-musk-backs-far-right-afd-in-contr...)
Too bad. Sucks that you got beat at your own game.
And in this case they are known to be exceptionally ruthless and part of Trump's administration.
Meta won't tinker with the algorithm to push propaganda. TikTok will.
TikTok had a huge negative impact on special interest groups that want to continue to allow the holocaust of our days to continue happening and the genocidal state to continue to behave with impunity.
The U.S. is already infiltrated by people working for foreign interests. The thing is, it's not infiltrated by China's or Russia's operatives.
Would you not expect the rules to be different?
If it's only about reciprocity and global hegemony, well then...
United States is classified as a flawed democracy. Partly because sweeping decisions like this one are made by Supreme Court Justices who nobody voted for and who hold their position for life.
Or maybe that's what you meant and you were being sarcastic with the quotation marks around "bastion of democracy"?
As in, due to their official stance, we should not expect reciprocity at all.
But you did pique my curiosity, where did you get that list of "full democracies"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
I wouldn't refer to USA as very democratic or China as a center of human rights violation.
If there is no blanket ban, there would have to be many laws, rules, regulations and restrictions prohibiting the software from government buildings, etc.
In addition to the data points: contacts, location, audio, video, etc, malicious actors can learn a lot through deduction. That's before any sort of manipulation.
You could say it is a bastion of liberty but I'm from Europe and women here have reasonable abortion and sexuality rights.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Inde...
Libgen domains are "seized", and tiktok "goes dark", but of course other countries "censor" porn or news outlets.
1. Libgen domains are "seized" - only the domains got seized, the website is still operational.
2. tiktok "goes dark", yes because it was an action of tiktok to go dark with the hope that they will be operational next week. Nobody banned them and even Biden said he would not enforce it so they could have simply do nothing and wait for the next week.
3. "censor" porn or news outlets, I think thats common usage.
It's probably worth adding, though, that Libgen, TikTok, Porn and News Outlets would all be censored/banned/deliberately-excluded-from-culture-by-people-with-legitimate-power for different reasons.
I think TikTok and News Outlets would be the most closely aligned in this sense.
You say "banned", but that is not quite the same as "censored". Just try and search, you will see the US "bans" and China or Iran "censor". Perhaps one regime's "censorship" is experienced as "lawfully banned" from within the context of their legal and cultural system.
And no, I don't see why would I keep my edgy observations to myself. That would be self-censorship :)
What I mean is: maybe it's not about protecting "their" humans (from what, exactly?), but protecting "their" corporations. Which is a very different goal.
But yes, countries who impose import restrictions often don't want others to impose them.
Amazing that Congress will see bipartisan action on this issue before any of the other much more important issues.
It absolutely destroys criticisms of China banning Facebook, etc.
1. https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-ru...
basically china's entire tech industry was built on the back of creating an artificially constrained market where foreign competitors with superior products were not allowed to compete. that is, everything that wasn't built off outright theft of American tech. that could have been hundreds of billions of dollars of increased market cap and returns to the investing public, hundreds of billions that china effectively stole.
The US does plenty of sketchy shit, but it has nothing on the surveillance state imposed by the CCP, nor is it empowered to suppress information in the same manner.
The CCP’s censorship is so heavy handed that others have tried to weaponize it, as discussed recently here:
Tokyo University Used "Tiananmen Square" Keyword to Block Chinese Admissions [2].
———
[1] - https://hms.harvard.edu/news/whats-stake-us-supreme-court-ca...
The US also spread COVID antivax information.
If the EU decided WhatsApp should be spun off from Meta (for any number of legitimate reasons) to continue operating there, we wouldn’t claim that the EU banned the app.
Freedom means freedom from censorship. I can’t think of an equivalent event that’s happened in my lifetime in the US. "India did it too" isn’t exactly a strong rallying cry.
That said, we’ll live. Hopefully our blind trust that there were security concerns ends up being worth something.
You're in a bubble if you think there is a massive migration happening to an unlocalized app .
It was a pleasant surprise. That said, I’m not too interested in endless house tours, so I’m going to see what kind of content there is when things settle down. That’s still a migration though, at least for me.
"Sure, there are the people calling themselves “TikTok refugees” and joining Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app, as a half-joking protest of the U.S. government’s decision to ban TikTok on national security grounds. (The joke part is: OK, Congress, you want to stop us from using a sketchy Chinese social media app? We’ll download an even sketchier Chinese social media app and use that instead.)"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/technology/what-if-no-one...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/arts/tiktok-red-note-chin...
Is there a really strong market demand for whatever social platform as long as it's owned by a Chinese company?
How do we know they're not siphoning our EU data to the US, or controlling what the algorithm shows us to influence politics?
Do you think that’s going to be good for you?
What is that criticisms about? US and EU should ban that too.
I understand that people spend a lot of time doomscrolling on it, but even with millions of daily users the optimistic side of me really wants to believe that it won't affect anyone's mental health in any measurable way.
Nothing specific to TikTok either. PUBG mobile was also banned here around the same time, and people just moved to Call of Duty mobile.
This is the first largely used anything online the government has banned, and I'm personally still upset it even got this far. The internet was supposed to be free speech incarnate, and banning apps and websites for Americans on it, isn't something I honestly thought I'd ever see
As they should be, because they stupidly made their lives dependent on a single platform that anyone with a brain could see was likely to run into trouble sooner rather than later.
The lesson for the is: don't put your eggs in one basket.
I listened to the final, farewell videos of several people. Some have leveraged TikTok on other platforms, but for a great many, TikTok was the only platform that let them reach an audience.
TikTok was eating the competition because it was simply better at matching content. It is a completely different beast in that regard.
Calling people stupid who leveraged an unrivaled technology to build a community and/or a business feels particularly anti-human.
It’s worth knowing I don’t go seeking new music on TikTok. Music that resonated with me was brought to me while looking for other things.
Topics which I found interesting lead me to books by new authors I didn’t know were authors on topics I didn’t know I wanted to read about. I’m not even much of an avid reader
A new year's resolution to go cold turkey and a chance to change a cure their own addictions.
It is not the end of the world. Just the end of someone's supply of a brand of digital drug.
And tell "go fuck yourself" to FB, Instagram, X ... etc.
What is freedom, anyway? Surely it can’t include allowing a foreign adversary access to a knob to twist on an important demographic of society. A foreign adversary who is actively compromising the network infrastructure of that society [1] but definitely wouldn’t touch infrastructure around an app owned by a Chinese company.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. One person's portal to a better world is a state's vehicle to shaping it in the state's interests.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/united-states-china-hacking-espio...
To a degree... I'd say western sanctions targeting the population as a whole were at least as effective in supporting the autocracy.
It's a question of freedom for whom and freedom from what.
There were vibrant communities, subcultures.
Real issues were aired there. Real people connected. From the early days of Covid it provided a window into a broader world.
While platforms dominate, instead of content dominating (see podcasts where this seems to be happening), you will always be a prisoner to what happens on the platform.
I truly feel a loss. I have changed aspects of my daily life for the better due to TikTok.
And I also watched too many cute animals and "don't talk to cops" videos.
Music accounts like Rare The Nanas who put me to sleep many nights with amazing VHS finds of obscure 90s music performances.
Tons of music theorists, weird quirky bands and musicians who built huge followings there, film makers, game devs, and on and on and on.
TikTok may have been too effective and addictive, but it undeniably worked. I started watching many niche and interesting content creators that the other platforms wouldn't recommend to me.
Success on one platform doesn't always mean success on all.
How much money has MrBeast made outside of YouTube? (excluding Amazon)
US is a hypocrite. How about Meta and other US companies? Those companies does the same if not worse damage to your citizen.
No, it's not. The point is about who's doing the damage. Ultimately, you can't really drop a ginsu telephone pole or send a 3-letter agency for a late night visit to a China-controlled company's leadership, but you can do that with US-based companies. From a geopolitical stance, US companies can be wielded to further US' interests, not so much for ByteDance.
I personally know musicians, actors, and artists that got a lot of work through TikTok. People who actually create things, and people who just used the app to make ends meet who probably aren't going to make ends meet this month
And let's not pretend that TikTok is filled to the brim with high quality products and small businesses. Yes there may be a couple of feel good stories about a local pizza place or small band that got their big break because of TikTok, but 99.9% of the advertising there is for the same junk/scam products that are on every other influencer-driven app.
TikTok's algorithm was amazing, as was the community.
You can't just recreate communities. They're alive, organic, fragile things.
I cannot count how many times minute I’ve been the first to see or comment on a TikTok video.
It let small creators be shown to lots of people in a way no other platform does.
For example, there’s a company called “Cerebrum IQ” which scams people out of hundreds of dollars for fake IQ tests. We are painfully aware of this issue because we own cerebrum.com, and we receive at least 100 furious support requests per day from people who have been charged $80.00+ for a subscription they never agreed to, and they somehow confuse us with “Cerebrum IQ”.
They get most of their users from TikTok ads.
We’ve reported them to TikTok many times, with no action taken. Meta at least restricted their ability to advertise.
youtube shorts and instagram reels seem like they do the same thing on the surface, but they're so much more focused on showing you content that they are certain you'll like, and from people in your network or people who you normally watch. they're a whole lot more focused on keeping people in their existing content silos.
some of the fediverse alternatives seem appealing but have less content.
i'm sure something will replace it if the ban remains in place but at the moment there's nothing nearly as good for me
Handwaving TT away as "another social media platform" is like comparing Friendster or MySpace with the ad machine that FB has built. There are countless businesses that will be impacted by this.
I don't give two shits how many leads these platforms drive, just like I don't care how many farmers the tobacco industry employs.
“You play the guitar on the MTV // That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it // Money for nothing and your chicks for free”
We utilize every platform equally. TikTok organically grew at least 5x the followership for our business, meanwhile Meta gouges us for advertising to be seen at all and we see worse results and interactions there.
The ban of TikTok will have resounding effects even if people are utilizing the alternatives. I've seen far too many people who haven't used TikTok and the alternatives for their business, or are not business owners at all, declare their opinions as facts when they have no actual experience in this space.
I'm not saying this explicitly includes you, I don't make presumptions about your experience in this space.
I think people overestimate how much local businesses relied on it, sure a few were booming making "me too" content (looking at you pressure washing companies). But you will still find the goods and services you need.
And now you won't have dozens of bad temu ad's "OH I feel bad for whoever bought this vacuum yesterday because now its 57% off!!!"
No, these options are not truly equal, and many businesses will suffer.
While I disagree with the ban, I'd rather have a sensible fine just like the ones for Meta, Google (YouTube) and others. At one point it also might have temporarily saved someone's chronic addiction to the platform, then they'll just find another platform to get hooked on.
But for now nature is healing.
Indian on contrary are cheap, their profile are worth close to nothing.
> U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that TikTok threatens national security because the Chinese government could use it as a vehicle to spy on Americans or covertly influence the U.S. public by amplifying or suppressing certain content.
In other words, US officials are scared that China is going to do what the USA has been doing with American social media apps in various countries
Yes, and? It's naive to think that this is anything new or surprising -- a country attempting to further it's own interests ahead of other countries that it is competing with.
Americans usually whined and complained that China banned US social media
And if the U.S. does ban TikTok then it sets a precedent that other countries can ban U.S. and Chinese social media apps in the same manner. Europe for example.
Or are you arguing that no operating system can exist without tracking and sharing all of this data?
Land of the free...except when it comes to Tik Tok.
Freedom of expression...unless you're talking about Georgia polll workers
Freedom of expression...unless you're 60 Minutes in the editing room cutting Kamala's interview
Freedom of expression...unless you mention that Ivermectin has been used successfully to combat Covid-19 all over the world
Freedom of expression...unless you're CNN and your story is about a contractor in Afghanistan.
Freedom of speech is not freedom to demand a platform to speak in. You don't have a constitutional right to a soapbox, just one to not be prosecuted for speaking from a soapbox you found. And unless you own said soapbox, you're relying on the owner of the soapbox to continue to allow you to use it.
I remember reading this in my mid-teens and it really speaking to me.
Sometimes we tend to forget: nobody is forcing us to use the crap that "the Internet" has become home to.
The Internet isn't the content, it's the network - the map is not the territory and the underlying architecture hasn't changed all that much.
There will always be room to carve out your space and find your people.
My point it's just really moved to the periphery and is a subculture (and tied to crypto, which has a lot of shady things associated with it). The mainstream tech culture seems extremely nationalistic and terrified of the possibilities of a supranational unregulated unmoderated internet
Why are we trying to build a single unified platform for everything?
Maybe the friction of having different networks/applications based on the specific subculture/group you wish to associate with keeps them all a little less mainstream? Maybe this is a good thing?
I just wouldn't have guessed thing would have gone this way. I thought the old tech ethos would permiate the culture and form at least the technological backbone instead of being relegated to the turbo nerds
Being non mainstream also does present some issues. For instance I'm in China traveling at the moment. Github isn't blocked here but the connection is very flakey and some days it doesn't load at all. But effectively all OSS dev happens on github so I'm just out of luck. It'd be cool if there was some way to torrent repos for instance, but I don't think that's a service hooked up to github in any way
There's a middle ground where you get the worst of all worlds bc the current kinds lame/oring solution works for 90% of people most of the time
In retrospect what is surprising is how long it took for such a disruptive new technology to register with existing power structures (at least explicitly).
Cyberpunk was already a well established genre in 96, if you didn't see what the net was going to turn into you were already high on your own hopium.
Now days we have way more advanced self-media platforms, but each one is just an island of (both platform-imposed and self-imposed) isolation.
Chinese business crying foul over simply forcing an app to change owners is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.
It seems to me the only recourse the US would have is building The Great Firewall of America.
This is pretty much how US internet services operate in the rest of the world: YouTube have no physical presence in, say, Nigeria, but Nigerians watch YouTube just fine. That’s what the internet was all about. We’re connected by default, unless a government actively implements a firewall to stop it.
The argument for TikTok ban is that it's a Chinese propaganda machine.
I don't know whether it is true. But assuming it is, propaganda usually costs money.
The public discourse in the US appears very distorted. The rececently elected legislative heavily tampers with the executive/judicative and somehow this is stil democratic?
IMO the tiktok ban is only about media control, no morale or legality, just political power and somehow there is still free speech for all?
All this is so bizare to me. I dont expect reasonable answers.
You have been misinformed, it is not illegal to publish biased media.
> The rececently elected legislative heavily tampers with the executive/judicative and somehow this is stil democratic.
What are you trying to say? The majority passes something, and the Supreme Court chose to allow it to continue.
> IMO the tiktok ban is only about media control, no morale or legality, just political power and somehow there is still free speech for all?
You're right that it's about media control, namely a foreign adversary being able to completely control media widely consumed in the United States. Framing a content-neutral conditional ban, which could've been avoided without any content changes, as being against "free speech" makes zero sense when the platform being banned is controlled by a foreign adversary that doesn't have free speech. The argument is that a foreign adversary shouldn't be allowed to censor and manipulate our media and farm our data.
So, the problem seems to be _foreign_ biased media and not biased media in general. General media bias could be made punishable too but this would take away influencial powers.
> a content-neutral conditional ban.
So TikToks content or bias is irrelevant? The only thing left is the adversarial ownership, which is ban worthy. How?
That literally is the purpose of the ban. It’s not like you have happened across some kind of novel “gotcha” here.
Look at how the US internet fuelled the fires of the Arab Spring / HK protests / Jan 6th / Any number of colour revolutions in Europe. Even today, we see X being used as a platform to encourage protests against governments in UK and Germany. National sovereignty is contingent on digital sovereignty - everyone is going to need a firewall.
It's reasonable for governments that don't entertain the notion that their citizens have freedoms of association, speech, etc. For countries where those concepts are legally enshrined in the country's own founding documents, no, it's not. Part of living in a democracy is having the responsibility to inform yourself and make voting decisions based on your own understanding. Letting the government tell people who they can and cannot listen to flies in the face of the very idea of democracy.
Giving an enemy a direct medium to feed information to your constituents at will is just a bad move, and no amount of free speech will change that.
TL;DR Communication technology has changed the relationship between rulers and the ruled, and we are just beginning to see what that might mean for the future of civilization. The book promises a lot but doesn't quite deliver. Still interesting reading.
Maybe, once the inflammatory platforms like X & Facebook are banned in the EU, then we can also get a social network that is not fueled by VC growth and engagement metrics; but can be run by a nonprofit or something. A man can dream.
That doing an interview with a controversial politician is "applying pressure" and is seen as "a danger to democracy" (quoting German media) is all you need to know about the German media landscape and German politics.
>but can be run by a nonprofit or something
There are high profile celebs on German "state" television unironically being in favor of a state-run social network.
It’s not perfect, for cancer treatment a family friend had to drive 100 miles to the nearest major hospital, but that’s more of a rural thing.
Why are these bribes in most of the world but not in America?
The no 1 reason the US is banning Tiktok because they are protecting against the war on the minds of their population.
About availability of TikTok and ByteDance Ltd. apps in the United States - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42754130 - Jan 2025 (80 comments)
I guess you missed the nine million articles over the last few months about how the head of TikTok has been palling around with the new admin and is going to be proudly at the inauguration.
Zuck is not the scapegoat you're hoping for.
Meanwhile, the greatest grifter in the world is installing his kleptocracy cabinet, pushing more neoliberalism economic policies, tax cuts for the ultra wealthy at the cost of public programs.
This country is absolutely cooked man.
Edit: Nevermind, it works from an incognito window. So it's just my account they banned.
If Hacker News were to shut down for just the US users and people were told to go continue the conversation on Facebook do you think that it would feel the same?
Part of what makes TikTok and Hacker News great is the interaction with people all over the world. What's going to happen to the diaspora? Are they going to all end up in one place?
Again, if Hacker News kicked out all of the Americans living on US soil then would the rest of the users follow the Americans onto Facebook to continue the conversation?
Same thing could be said of the academic side of Twitter. It’s now fragmented across Twitter, Bluesky, mastodon, and the level is discussion is very diminished
This was also tested in practice in India, when the country banned TikTok in 2020. Rest of World published a report in 2023 with the conclusion that most users simply switched to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts without much complaint, just as the previous commenter predicted: https://restofworld.org/2023/america-india-tiktok-ban/
I was browsing r/TikTok and the comments there certainly don't seem to imply that everyone is eager/interested in going to reels/shorts. I hardly even see those platforms mentioned in https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i4p6s0/rip/ but it could just be sampling bias since I'm reading Reddit comments rather than looking for discussions on YouTube/Instagram.
Still, it takes time to habituate to a new app's UI and culture. Even if people are willing and able to shift to a new platform I think there will be a lot of shared frustration in the short term.
Opinions on Reddit and HN are almost always from the 5% most engaged, most online of any subgroup. These are not regular people. Is every software developer you know represented by the opinions that get upvoted on HN? Thankfully, no. Similarly the kind of people posting to /r/tiktok aren’t your regular TikTok user by a long shot.
They were faster to clone Twitter with Threads.
Wasn't that because they hired a lot of ex-Twitter employees with an obvious ax to grind ha ha?
Yeah yeah. Cattle customers. Bla bla bla.
I must be missing something blatantly obvious or there is some conspiracy here?
404 did an article on it: https://www.404media.co/a-tiktok-ban-is-a-gift-to-meta-and-i...
Even Trump, who we know Zuckerberg had donated to, claims he will try to “bring back TikTok”.
This case was argued and won on the basis of national data security.
But I see through it because once again, I'm not an idiot.
When far more sensitive social media apps like Grindr were sold to Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd, nobody went crazy because it didn't threaten FAANG.
There's many swiping and dating apps owned by chinese firms. You also have chinese capital firms being the primary investor in cloud and photo sharing apps. Plenty of sensitive stuff going through the spindly fingers of the shifty orientals without a peep - for like decades.
There's even Chinese finance apps like WeBull that hold things as sensitive as American's retirement accounts. Apparently also not a problem.
People have Wyze doorbell cameras and TCL smartTVs and Eufy security cameras. They have TP-Link routers and Hisense computer monitors. Chinese cameras, WiFi, and microphones are everywhere in the modern home.
But once something came around that was a plausible competitive threat to FAANG then all these reasons just materialize and get applied to that thing specifically.
I mean seriously. Give me a break.
We like to look back 100 years ago at protectionism and racism and tell ourselves that we were dumber back then and wouldn't fall for it now.
And yet, here we are.
- IG Reels are limited to 90 seconds compared to 3 or 10 minutes on TT;
- Youtube Shorts can now be up to 3 minutes but that's relatively new (October 2024 IIRC);
- Tiktok moentization is better than these other two platforms, both in terms of ad revenue but more importantly, the Tiktok Shop;
- The comments on Tiktok are truly a league above IG or YT. The latter two are just full of random drivel and vitriol;
- The recommendation algorithm for scrolling on TT is miles ahead of either platform;
- Tiktok is the only platform where people went there for short-form videos. They're native to the platform whereas they were bolted on to both IG and YT as an afterthought, a real "me too" Tiktok response. And they don't quite fit. The user experience on Tiktok is so much better than IG or YT.
- A huge chunk of Reels and Shorts content is simply reposted Tiktoks.
Sundar and Mark may think they'll simply gain Tiktok's user base. I honestly don't see that happening. I'm sure there'll be an uptick in YT and IG but now 170M MAU worth.
- you can't watch at 2x on reels
- you can't pause a video while watching on reels
- you can't seek in a video either, you just have to watch the whole thing over
- reels interrupts your experience with awful ads every 2-3 swipes
- YT shorts probably has awful ads too, I haven't tried it
The time limit is probably going to be the biggest issue for YT and reels, but the ergonomics of both are so awful that I can't use them for more than a few minutes. I could scroll TikTok until the little video about scrolling too long came up (an hour I think).
- You can seek in a video too. Again, awful UX, the line is super small, but you can. Depends how large the video is, I believe.
Like so much else on Tiktok, this originated elsewhere. In this case, Twitter.
You’re being downvoted. But you’re correct. The vocal minority inflames about this are mostly ideologically offended, based on the calls and letters I’m hearing both blue and red electeds receive.
If it were this simple then Rep Ro Khanna wouldn't still be posting about TikTok. As far as what happens, as with everything else, we'll see. There's a million variables and Hacker ``Social Media was tantamount to the Fall of Man'' News is not the place I'm expecting particularly fruitful, unbiased analysis.
Eh, I canvassed for privacy bills and that was a total disaster. I believe in the TikTok ban, but I’m not passionate about it.
> then Rep Ro Khanna wouldn't still be posting about TikTok
If I were advising Ro I would absolutely insist he tweet about it. Particularly off cycle. Anyone in Silicon Valley or a district with rich libertarians, for that matter.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i4puyg/pov_tiktok_...
And what exactly is preventing China to launch a new app withjin hours (that is the point of cloud infras right?) under a new company using tiktok source code and allow easy importation of dumps from tiktok to facilitate their migration and get a head start?
As for the one's they've missed, typical government incompetence. They have trouble differentiating what is, and is not a "Chinese app".
"And what exactly is preventing China to launch a new app within hours..."
No users. TikTok's massive userbase wasn't created in 7 days.
Banning TikTok only treats the symptom , the real disease is that people are way to susceptible to propaganda and misinformation.
Personally I think all closed source social media should be outlawed and all algorithms used should be audited by a third party.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
Spirit of the script seems to be stolen straight from the former USSR
Ie through state sanctioned ddos and bot swarms
This isn't about data that people agreed to allow ByteDance to scrape. It's about ByteDance going beyond that and scraping contact information of NON-TikTok users, which could be used for blackmail or in other illegal and adversarial ways.
Everyone knows U.S. companies gather user data. Oracle had been doing it for decades. This is not the issue and not at all why TikTok has been banned.
The difference is that ByteDance was blatantly going after data that was legally not within their rights to grab; NON-TikTok user data on TikTok user's devices.
In addition, there are hints in the decision that the FBI provided evidence that China was using this information for adversarial purposes.
The decision very clearly walks through the First Amendment issues in relation to foreign adversaries and explicitly states that this is a singular decision.
It would have been VERY EASY for ByteDance to stop scraping data or to find a U.S. partner to host the data of U.S. Citizens. I've worked at global consulting firms and Germany requires this. All German citizen data must be hosted in their country. This isn't anything new. Companies make these kinds of compromises all the time and have for decades. Some companies explicitly state their data has to be on-prem or not in AWS. As an enterprise architect, I make these kinds of design decisions all the time. (Scenario: If customer is located in XYZ country, where do we store their data?)
ByteDance simply refused because even though they claim they are not handing data over to the Chinese Intelligence Service, they ACT LIKE THEY ARE.
None of this will matter in a few months. There are active projects to build Instagram and TikTok clones on the atProto network (Bluesky) which will serve the same content without advertising and without an algorithm. There will be Feeds for cat videos, pirate dress up videos, and APT dance videos and I'm 100% sure all the users that join that service will completely forget about TikTok. And the moderation will be given to the users so they can decide what to see.
As if merely writing the code is the only prerequisite for making a hundred billion dollar business
Also, not to defend the CCP, but America has more prisoners than any other country, China included, and dramatically more per capita.
China banning Facebook is an authoritarian action. If we are doing the “same shit”, it feels expressly undemocratic and I am speaking towards that.
Facebook and Google are still making tens of billions from Chinese advertisers selling stuff on their platform. And China never forced Facebook or Google to sell themselves to Chinese owners, so completely give up control on branding, IP, code, data and all assets etc etc.
US is not even giving you any technical rules to comply with. Tiktok's approach to US is replicate China's rules for foreign internet companies in China. All content moderation done by US employees, US employee work on code and data. Data stored in US based servers. But US companies operating in China, like iCloud, AWS and Azure, US employees can still get access to Chinese data for daily engineering operations, like debugging. Tiktok also offered US government appoint security and natsc officials on Tiktok senior leadership, overseeing all code and data practices. US government have kill switch to shutdown Tiktok if they find anything. Tiktok is perfectly fine with US government implementing the censorship to censor whatever US government doesn't like. These details are equal to China's practices.
But US is not allowing that, it just sell yourself 100% to US owner or get banned. And ban is much more draconian than Chinese ban. Chinese citizens can visit FB using VPN, and companies can transact with FB and Google, hence billions of advertising dollars for these companies. US ban targets all transaction with Bytedance, hence Google, Apple and Oracle are completely geofencing US users that even US user using VPN can't access Bytedance services. And Chinese regulations target specific type of products, Meta's FB main app may not be in China, but FB advertising is. US ban targets Bytedance, the entire company. Capcut, a video editing app is also banned in the US. What data does a video editing app collect? How does a video editing app affect public discourse and opinions? How is Capcut a national security threat? What evidence is there?
US is not offering you a chance to comply, it is offering you a knife to kill yourself, and say here, you got options, why don't u kill yourself. Anyone who think it is not an insult is just, I have no words for you. China gives foreign companies room to live, so your workers have jobs and income, your inventor keep their inventions and private assets. US gives the foreign company two options: either we kill you, or we give you a knife so you can kill yourself. Your workers are out of jobs, what was a comfortable livelihood gone, your inventor's invention is destroyed, you will not get what your invention is worth, your private assets are gone. Or we can take your invention away from you and you lose all control of your baby in the future. If you don't see the difference, I have no word for you.
Every politician flip-flops, but Trump is something else.
Here in Victoria, Australia the state government has deplatformed itself from TT and banned the app from government phones due to security concerns.
Clearly, the state government has taken instruction from the federal government who has received advice from somewhere (5 eyes / intelligence agencies) about the risks.
And I have just observed that you have been downvoted
I created a new Canadian account and now I see a lot of Canadian memes that I don't get lol
On mobile the VPN doesn't work as it checks your app store country. I saw a few USA refugees on Canada TikTok saying they changed their Apple App Store country and it works just fine now. I think I'll sacrifice an Android device and do it that way.
When the US government asks China to censor TikTok, that's a good thing.
Make it make sense.
Second, the two proposed situations are entirely different. The former is censoring particular results, the latter is a content-neutral ban with the ability for ByteDance to continue operating with no change to content.
Third, perhaps this is controversial, but many people don't want a foreign adversary to have the ability to manipulate public perception. If you are the United States, allowing an enemy to have the ability to manipulate massive amounts of your population is extremely dangerous.
I don't even know that I support the ban, but I certainly know that most of these sorts of comparisons simply don't make sense and are either missing or ignoring vital pieces of the puzzle.
China gave foreign internet applications a list of rules to comply. And these are doable rules, u may not want to do them, but they are doable. That is why Bing, iCloud, AWS, Microsoft office, Azure, Tesla's cars, some of hosts critical and sensitive Chinese data are operating fine in China, even used by governments and state-owned companies.
And Google and Meta are currently earning 10s of billions of dollars from Chinese advertisers. And google and Meta can offer any other services to China that is not regulated by online community services.
Chinese citizens can visit Google and Meta apps using VPN, Google and Meta can transact with Chinese companies. Chinese rules just target online community-based services with a list of doable rules.
Tiktok's original wish is to replicate China's rules for foreign online services in China in the US. So have US citizens do the data and code, implement whatever censorship regime US government wants, store US data on US servers. Allow US government official inside the company to review and oversee code, algorithm and data practices. Allow US government kill switch to turn off the app if they see anything. This is reciprocity of rules.
But US is not giving any technical, doable options for you to adhere to. It is giving two options: either we kill you, or we give you a knife so you can kill yourself. China gives foreign companies room to live, so your workers have jobs and income, your inventor keep their inventions and private assets. US gives the foreign company two options: either we kill you, or we give you a knife so you can kill yourself. Your workers are out of jobs, what was a comfortable livelihood gone, your inventor's invention is destroyed, you will not get what your invention is worth, your private assets are gone. Or we can take your invention away from you and you lose all control of your baby in the future. If you don't see the difference, I have no word for you.
China doesn't kill your companies. Take away the invention from the inventor, take away assets, IP, technology, branding from the inventor, forcing the inventor the giveaway the baby they invented and worked so hard on. China just don't want you say certain things within its borders, but everyone can live, have a job, get paid, bring food to the table. US just want to end your company, make everyone jobless, and you can't say what you want to say anyway because everything is gone.
* Republicans ban TikTok
* For whatever reason ban doesn't go through (was it via executive order)
* Dems pickup where republicans left off and ban TikTok
* Republicans undo ban
Why.....
Especially since it was the same republicans in both cases
Maybe if he’s feeling himself he’ll say it was a 4D chess move to make Biden look like a bozo by being the one to ban it just for him to swoop in and undo the ban in 48 hours.
It’s impossible to gotcha a guy who pretends the past never happened — or who insists that his imagination of the past is accurate.
A lot of the anti-TikTok sentiment seems to revolve around the mores of college-educated, upper-middle-class white GenX and Millenial mores, which the Republicans have gleefully used as punching bags.
There are about 10 million news cycles between now and the midterms, highly unlikely anyone will remember any of this by then.
Gen Z voters are also young, and young people never vote.
If they lose (again) it won’t be because of TikTok. No place left to look but in the mirror.
He said so himself. "Trump told the court that TikTok was an important platform for his presidential campaign and that he should be the one to make the call on whether TikTok should remain in the US—not the Supreme Court.":
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/trump-told-scotu...
best way to access it is via your desktop browser
We need a distributed social platform. Distributed currency system. Distributed personal information privacy. Distributed AI. Where’s the tech YC?
Following the money. TYC did things like bitcoin.
TYC gives zero shits about information privacy and distributed AI because they can't make more money than god. TYC isn't going to save you here. Nor are the masses going to adopt it.
I want open source everything.
Open Source social media.
If you and 5000 like minded people don't like Blue sky you can effectively spin up your own server and exclude others.
Open Source games. I want a billionaire to fund an open source fornite with the same idea.
Which reminds me, Tencent owns major stakes in (100%) Riot and Epic Games ( 40%). Are they next ?
You know what would be great for a music site? If someone new was able to instantly hear music!
Nope. After 5 mins of UI Ninjutsu, I gave up.
Going by the comments, it seems a lot of people here actually believe this whole thing is about “China”
“China” is the new “communism”. It’s just the phantom enemy to scare everyone
Without a real disclosure about the real reasons for the TT ban, we will never really know what is going on behind the scenes
Maybe we’ll have to wait a few decades to get some unclassified docs
Though it's hardly unique in that regard. That's modern social media now.
This is the most unusual endorsement I've seen, admittedly of a most unusual President.
Yes. All big social media should be banned for just this reason, we already had Cambridge Analytica to know this. Banning TT for spying is just a good first step.
With this said, the US.g has had the power to ban business with entities for a long ass time and those laws are pretty well established, especially in the case with foreign entities.
Six years ago, The Onion mocked the idea of TikTok being dangerous to the US as a paranoid fantasy.[0] Now, that position is bipartisan consensus. China hysteria appears to have no limits.
What this temporary outage might do is have the opposite effect TikTok expects - to show people they need a break from such an addictive app.
Stranger things have happened on the internet. The longer before Trump "cuts a deal" the more I expect people to press the question - why allow China access to this market if China is shut to our social media apps ?
- Users tend to use the same passwords across apps. It would be trivial for TikTok to provide an email + password combo to CCP.
- Until 2020, the tiktok iOS app was accessing the system clipboard at all times that TikTok was running (even in the background) https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/26/21304228/tiktok-security-...
- A sort of vague concern that because CCP can easily compel Chinese companies, it could easily compel TikTok to show / not-show various content to American users. (this could stir political tensions, misinformation etc).
- TikTok (and by extension CPP) could access any content/messages that the app has access to. E.g. Phone contacts (if permission given), private messages sent on TikTok app (possibly even if just typed but not sent).
What else?
There are metadata threats around who's connected to whom, where users are, where they go, etc.
There can be leaked data in videos posted by military personnel
1: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168079/grindr-sold-chine...
We also know who is fat because myfitnesspal does the same thing.
We also know who is pregnant, who has recently been raped, who feels vulnerable. And so on. You see an ad? We know a thing. We know if you like boobs even if you don’t.
Without trying to speak to what American governments and corporations have done with that knowledge, the “security” point is that the Chinese government has this knowledge as well, and the fear they can do something with it.
That being said, what Cambridge Analytica did (a British company) with this kind of knowledge is well-documented, so I can agree the fear is warranted by both those who seek to monopolise those powers, and those who seek to escape them.
Hadn't heard of this. The linked article explains:
> At the time of Reuters’ March 2019 report, it was unclear what CFIUS’s specific concerns were, but the FT says the committee worried the Chinese government could use personal data from the app to blackmail US citizens — which could include US government officials.
Will they also ban TikTok as a security threat? If not, will they issue a statement contradicting US actions?
If they do, what about US owned platforms that have been known to e.g., interefere with European elections (Facebook / Cambridge Analytica) and (at least) one of the owners openly supports certain type of party across the continent?
What a grotesque theater. How much more hypocricy can the political classes that enabled the wholesale enshittificarion of our digital lives get away with?
As far as what's next, it's up to the Biden and Trump admins to see what happens next. If deadlines are extended, what does a good divestiture settlement mean for TikTok? Can the executive department get away with not enforcing this law? And of course, the question that really lies ahead of us: what does this mean for other social media based outside of the US like Telegram, Line, and KakaoTalk?
No one reads the actual law, everyone is taking the bait.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521
Serving content could be seen as an ongoing maintenance activity.
The bill also prohibits the provision of "internet hosting services" for the app. Serving content over the internet could be considered providing hosting services, which would be prohibited unless there's a divestiture.
Just putting it out there.
I’m over 1/2-way thru my life. I think I know what I like doing with my time by this point.
Dont think this will affect foreign influence by china much.
You only notice the bots that you notice. How do you know how many bots you encounter where you dont realize it is a bot? Knowing this number is necessary to make the claim that claim, but it is fundamentally unknowable.
I would have thought that indeed, they have looked at it already carefully.
Yes it is a joke. But whether it is outsized influence of foreign power or uber rich nutter, what's the difference...
We’ve had almost a century of foreign-ownership limits for media properties [1]. (It’s recently been relaxed but not released [2].)
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/foreign-ownership-rules-and-poli...
[2] https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2017/02/articles/fcc-approv...
I already foresee a Mueller investigation part #2 “Trump is a Chinese puppet” stories.
The ban – which is an incredible overreach – was a bipartisan effort by congress. Sticking it to Biden seems very, very off.
Biden explicitly left the decision if and how it is enforced to Trump. ⇒ No reason to go dark now to have a huge: “Thank you, tangerine tyrant, that you are willing to maybe save us!”
I do enjoy Tik Tok a lot, but is it unanimously good or even only unproblematic? Hell, no. It is an indoctrination machine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/18/tiktok-..."
Dunno, I'm wayyyy out of the loop on all of this.
On desktop VPN works but you need to create a new account if yours was originally created on the USA servers.
Trying to copy TikTok is probably the worst thing Instagram has done. Their “suggested reels” are a cancer.
Then, when the civilians are tired of this bullshit and the dust settles, we emerge with truly decentralized social networks.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/12/11/teens-social...
This is a 50/50 split between YT and SpaceX on the problem.
That spaceX does not broadcast it live on YT leaves an opening for the scammers to get a popular channel up.
Now, the scammer channels you see are what happens when an actual big name channel with a lot of followers gets hacked, all the old videos deleted, then they start that feed of the launch and turn it to a bitcoin scam at/right after the launch part.
- Trump schemes to get TikTok blocked in the US
- He waits till he is in charge
- Presents himself as White Knight (or rather Orange Knight?)
- Gets TikTok unbanned
- Popularity with the younger generation rises
- ...profit?
Who's next ?
The "learn more" link tells you that you can still download your data. I'm not sure how. Website maybe? Because the app only has "learn more" and "close app" as options. Interestingly the fyp still loads and you see a video in the background.
I do think it'll come back this week but it's not clear what the legal mechanism is. Since the ban has gone into effect the extension in the law doesn't seem to apply anymore. This would then seem to require Congressional action and there doesn't seem to be much appetite for that but maybe that's because Republicans in Congress want to give credit for saving Tiktok to Trump when he becomes president on Monday.
Another option being talked about is nonenforcement by the Department of Justice. Some dismiss this by saying "the DoJ can change their mind" but that's not strictly true. Defendants in a case can rely on statements by prosecutors. It's a valid defense. If the Attorney-General makes an official statement saying "we will not prosecute Amazon or Google or Tiktok for 90 days (or whatever) while we work this out", that's absolutely a legal defense should the DoJ ever change their mind.
Basically, this is now a shakedown as some Trump allies will seek forcibly buy Tiktok or at least a large stake in it as a price for its continued operation in the US. It's unclear if Tiktok will acquiesce to this.
Remember though, Bytedance has significant US investors so there are conflicting forces at play here.
I found another USA refugee on Canadian TikTok who said he just got Apple to change his app store country and it worked after he redownloaded it.
As soon as I try to login to my US account it bricks the app.
YMMV.
[0] - https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-...
But in terms of TikTok, I don't care. Burn it down. If Trump uses his first 100 days to pressure his 3 vote majority in the House to vote to overturn something they passed overwhelmingly it's a pretty startling indication of his priorities and loyalties in his second term. His crypto-scam this weekend is only the prologue.
I am actively anti-social media myself, it's a hard stance I have and I have had to effectively "die on that hill".
The amount of time our social media team has had serious issues with me refusing to comply with their requests to be involved with their current tiktok trend, arguing about "but you need to be relevant to the modern generation" when my argument is exactly the thing Tiktok was banned for, I want to be in control of who has my data. That is bad enough already but to freely just give my likeness to a chinese owned company to sell adverts however they like?
It's got nothing to do with "relevance" its a moral standing. And no I don't think tiktok is the only guilty platform but it's a step in the right direction concidering how absolutely mindless and time consuming the content is.
And no matter how strongly you believe you have free will and freedom of thought, you are a reflection of the people you surround yourself with and I would make the argument the media you consume.
And tiktok specifically is significantly more addictive than other media, sure the same argument can be made for youtube shorts and IG reels and whatever else which is the current short form content, and the biggest issue there is: there's no way to justify your stance, to bring evidence to back your case.
All that there is is the ability to state your point and the majority of users will follow if you state it compellingly enough. It's mass propaganda taken to the extreme.
I strongly believe YouTube shorts etc should follow the same fate as tiktok has. It should be regulated as strongly as Narcotics because it is equally as addictive and imho has a similar effect on society.
Sorry for the rant but as I said, I have a moral stance on this topic and for some reason society in general decided it needs to be faught with the zeal of the crusades.
Why is all of our media bombarded with the ban when it has been signed into law and backed by the relevant countries highest powers.
If it was a unanimous vote in government and held up by the supreme court why is media against it? They are scared the next step is them.
This isn't the media holding government accountable, this is media swaying the general public's opinion. This[1] comment on HN just proves that. They had no interest in tiktok, if media let it just go quietly into the night they would still have no interest but now that the fact that its disappearance has been shouted from every rooftop to every single human being the addiction crysis has spread to them. "Fear of missing out" strikes again.
Media is designed to control and the first punch thrown against it is being countered, who will win in the end?
Hopefully this movement will continue on other social media. Though unfortunately none are quite as light on censorship as TikTok is for feminist voices, often unfairly framing these as "hate".
This is just the state of social media...
It is also a test for "Rednote" and if they grow extremely fast in the next 90 days then that will be another ban target. But this is all temporary and they will run back to TikTok again.
But again 170 million users just had their crack / cocaine supply cut off. Now is the time for them to reflect and cure their addiction.
The ban will be repealed on Monday and it will be sold to US tech lords by month’s end. The damn hysteria is embarrassing
Tik Tok chose to block US users this evening even though that’s technically not what the bill asks for.
The entire situation hinges on TikTok’s ownership. They could sell themselves to any organization based outside China and have been given multiple opportunities to do so and they’ve refused.
That tells you all you need to know about the priorities of ByteDance, considering the U.S. was their biggest market since they’re banned in both China and India, the only other countries larger than the U.S.
China does play a real threat to American and other western interests and has done so for many years. If you have evidence that ByteDance is not controlled by the CCP or that the CCP has not very openly played many games both economically, politically and socially I would be happy to see that evidence.