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The work "ban" is in scare quotes for a reason. The law doesn't ban TikTok. Rather, it bans TikTok from having Chinese owners. If the law stands, the end result will likely be that TikTok will be sold to US owners, rather than TikTok going away.

It's surprising to me that this this pretty significant distinction has been glossed over both in media reporting and in general comments here on HN.

To be clear, I'm not supporting the law with this comment, just clarifying what the actual content of the law is.

A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China. You can't own a broadcast station in the US as a non-US citizen. Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen to buy Fox. I don't know if I agree with this but you can't say there is no precedent for it in the US or in China.

> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China.

And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.

"Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)."

We can say that Google and Facebook are "banned" or "censored" in China even though China would surely be happy to unban them if they sold their operations in China to a Chinese business. So it is consistent and fair to say that this bill "bans" or "censors" TikTok.

The bill doesn’t block access to TikTok, it blocks US companies from doing business with TikTok. So it isn’t exactly a ban, or censorship.

If TikTok wants to give up the revenue, they can continue to send propaganda to the US, and kids can continue to watch and make videos.

China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.

> China blocks access to Google. Whatever you want to call what the TikTok bill does, it is not the same as what China does.

China does way more than that. China forces all companies that wish to do business in China to host their data in China in a way that ensures the CCP has complete access to it.

It boggles the mind how some anonymous accounts try to attack the US for interfering with a Chinese company doing business in the US, particularly one which is a notorious security hole, but leave out the fact that CCP's China goes well beyond as a matter of policy.

It boggles my mind how people look at China's censorship regime and think, "wow we are so far behind in the censorship race, we must move in that direction and start banning things ASAP"

The goal is not censorship, this is completely obvious.

The US is doing great at achieving this non-goal then.

it boggles the mind that everyone is complaining about tiktok and yet, each of the big cloud providers have data centers in china, hey but dont worry guys, they're physically separated honest

If you start a business in the US and you're only adding China DC's specifically for Chinese customers, I don't see why you'd invest more time and money in connecting the CCP to your US DC's.

It would make more sense that Chinese customers would want to host their data in the US not vice versa, and in that case you would treat them the same as American customers in American data centers with the same security in place.

It's the cheaper solution, caters to all customer needs, and doesn't risk your customers' faith.

I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't separate them.

Do you have some reason to believe they aren't or are you just guessing that they wouldn't take precautions? Because in this case, the precautions are actually the easier topology to build, I think.

The U.S. might be doing that, you just don't know because that kind of thing comes with gag orders making it a federal offense to even reveal that any such thing is occurring.

I'm absolutely not defending China's authoritarian regime and overall the U.S. isn't seems less bad, but at the same time it's a bit rich to pretend the U.S. doesn't do the same if it matters.

China passed data law after US and Europe, actually very similar law.

Also China does not stop companies to do business with Facebook and Google, if you look up numbers from Facebook and Google, a big chunk ad revenue would come from Chinese companies.

Telling a business it's free to do something if there's no profit involved is like telling a man he's free to drink whiskey if he can jump over the moon.

Here comes Elon with another hold my beer moment. Thank god he already wasted billions on Twitter.

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This bill will force google/apple to remove the tiktok app store listing. It's as good as dead after that with no updates/new installs.

give a dog a bad name and it's as good as dead.

Nah, people are too addicted. They'll follow steps to install an apk, even if they're nontechnical.

I bet you that would become a thing at school, getting the geekier kids to "install tiktok 4 me pls"

China is banned. TikTok isn't banned. You're conflating those to say that TikTok is banned, but your argument is what applies to China, not TikTok.

In the same sense, it's not Google that's banned in China. It's free speech. Google just can't operate without it so it decided to exit the market by refusing to allow CCP access to user data and to implement CCP firewalls.

You can conflate things to make them sound like the same thing. Words can have subjective and loose meaning.

But reality is very complex and very specific and doesn't have any loose meaning. And this is not remotely the same thing.

Why is that improbable? Study your history. Merck was nationalized during WWI (that's why there's two mercks).

> And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.

Well that’s the crux, isn’t it.

If TikTok is just a business, like ByteDance insists, any business would rather get something than nothing. So ByteDance would sell.

If TikTok isn’t merely a business but rather an organ of soft power, and China blocks a sale, then the suspicions of the U.S. intelligence community are confirmed.

> If TikTok is just a business, like ByteDance insists, any business would rather get something than nothing. So ByteDance would sell.

Using that logic, facebook, google, etc are not businesses either since they chose to be banned from china.

The stance of the US is that ByteDance has to sell off what is already a separate product (TikTok).

Google, Facebook etc don't have a "Chinese market" product at all, so there's nothing to sell off. If they did have a Chinese market product, worth many tens of billions of dollars, they would very likely sell it rather than spike it.

That's weak if common logic. Wealthy people burn a lot of money out of spite, constantly.

Essentially, you are asking everyone to assume that Bytdance does not really have a financial choice in the matter, and therefore financial irrationality is evidence of corruption.

When the reality is that the money may not mean as much to them as you are asking people to assume, and that in lieu of a payout they'd rather not reward a sale to the country that is strong-arming them. Which few with financial flexibility, and a healthy ego, would.

ByteDance would sell, but China is blocking it for export restrictions. It does not confirm anything. China is not a business, and it will look bad if US can force ByteDance to sell. You are mixing up ByteDance and China. China is not responsible for returns to ByteDance shareholders.

> "Ban" is completely appropriate shorthand for "ban (unless something highly improbable occurs)."

It's only improbable if the suspicion is true, and in that case: good riddance.

Also TikTok apparently isn't even allowed in China they have their own version.

I didn't see the parent say there was no precedent.

But anyways, I like to hope that the US is better than China. If US citizens are abused while in China, I would be appalled to see Chinese citizens abused in the US as retribution.

> I like to hope that the US is better than China.

I lost hope long ago.

There is absolutely no moral ambiguity in demanding fairness in trade. It's actually the highly moral position, see prisoner's dilemma.

Trade is conducted by individuals and businesses, not by nation-states. The fact that two parties have agreed to a mutual value-for-value exchange makes it fair by definition, and what is unfair is encumbering some people's commerce in order to serve the interests of some particular political faction.

The proper moral position is for trade to be governed by rational rules that apply consistently regardless of who is trading with whom or what country they are from.

Nations are just as relevant as businesses as abstractions as far as trade is concerned. Free trade across the world arguably only exists because it's made possible by the rule-based order with the might of the US Navy and affiliates to secure it.

Nations are abstractions. Trade involves individuals and businesses. Whatever the US Navy is doing to secure overseas shipping lanes doesn't change the nature of that in any substantive way.

Businesses are abstractions. You can't touch a business any more than you can touch a nation.

Trade involves individuals, businesses and nations. Government policy always affects trade.

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I think it would be a poor argument to liken the US banning Tik Tok to US (or other) citizens being abused in China with supposed retaliatory measures.

We don’t need to overly moralize this and somehow find the US on a pedestal with impossible to reach and shifting standards of behavior that are only applicable to the US when it’s convenient for various bad actors and despotic regimes (Putin, Hamas, CCP, Iran, North Korea).

America can be “better” than China without having to accept disadvantages. Likewise China could allow American social media companies to show that it is sincere in being interested in free and fair business. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be regulations but there’s simply no good argument to allow a Chinese social media company to operate in the US without reciprocal activity and nothing, nothing is lost by banning Tik Tok.

Actually a free market is one of the main points of America. It’s not a moral argument of its superiority but a practical argument that a free market should result in the best outcome for all.

I still believe in this, and if you look at America’s policies of sanctioning countries like Russia, blocking a business from operating in a country is actually a detriment to that country because they lose access to the benefit that that company provides. Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party.

I don’t fundamentally believe it’s about fair playing ground or advantages/disadvantages for equivalent US companies in China. The current consensus is really about national security, and having China be able to access data on US people. If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way.

Furthermore if it did become about fair playing ground for domestic companies then I think it fundamentally misunderstands the free market economic model. The free market would benefit domestic companies. It would strengthen domestic companies to have competition.

The free market has never existed in an unregulated state, and since the founding of the country there have been rules and regulations on imports and what companies can operate in the United States and under what circumstances.

It was framed as a moral argument by suggesting the US should be “better”. At least that was my interpretation. I don’t think arguing from a market perspective really changes that interpretation but instead further weakens China’s lack of allowing American social media companies to operate in China with the same unfettered market access.

> If you want to talk precedent, China has pretty aggressive domestic ownership laws for foreign subsidiaries, but we don’t care about that in the other way.

We kind of care and we have been caring more. The problem is that legally it has been difficult to say “go ahead and build or operate your business in the US except if you are China”. Likewise China just blanket applies the rules that it has to entities that want to operate in China.

> Of course it’s a win win for both parties so by cutting off our own foot it indeeds also hurts the other party.

So far from what I’ve seen these types of actions have been very specific and targeted. In the case of Tik Tok there isn’t any loss to citizens and letting it continue to operate with impunity in the US brings all sorts of negative externalities that the market isn’t equipped to solve.

It’s also important to remember that some things are more important than profit. The economy and market are just one aspect of a nation. Lowering cost and increasing competition are nice but they are not the point of civilization.

> The free market has never existed in an unregulated state, and since the founding of the country there have been rules and regulations on imports and what companies can operate in the United States and under what circumstances.

Of course in practice that's true, but we also tout free-er markets as something to strive for, especially when it comes to us imposing it on other countries in conflict with their sovereign rights to restrict their own markets.

> So far from what I’ve seen these types of actions have been very specific and targeted. In the case of Tik Tok there isn’t any loss to citizens and letting it continue to operate with impunity in the US brings all sorts of negative externalities that the market isn’t equipped to solve.

I think TikTok is a highly special case, and sort of brings to light the rationale why China decided to ban foreign mega tech corps, especially social media ones. We also saw a backlash when Facebook tried to influence India's elections and politics with a banner on their website. Social media is indeed a special case.

But I think this problem is also similar to the national security vs privacy/encryption battle. We are giving up some of our principles to make our short term lives (national security) easier. Yes, TikTok can be weaponized as an influence machine... however letting it run free could mean developing a more natural resistance to it in the American population (if possible). If we devolve to market manipulation we'll rely on it as a crutch. Why stop there? Why not engineer the whole economy.

I don’t understand what principals you are suggesting we are “giving up”. Could you elaborate?

> Why stop there? Why not engineer the whole economy.

Why go to extremes? You could just argue the opposite and argue why don’t we explicitly allow slave labor, bribery, and dumping?

As soon as you provide an argument against any of those things you can use that same rationale to argue to ban a company like Tik Tok.

TikTok in the US is not run by the Chinese parent directly, it's run by a US-based company called TikTok U.S. Data Security

> A US company would never be allowed to own any kind of social media company in China

Every company that complies with the local laws can open any kind of company in China and they do.

The US has to do the same per WTO law as long as Tiktok obeys the US law. And it does. Hence the made up 'national security' horsesh*t to justify the ban - otherwise it would run afoul of WTO rules.

To be fair, China never claimed to be the bastion of free market capitalism.

America did. Still does. And now it’s banning and regulating superior products off the market.

Just like crack and fentanyl! Let the market decide, cowards.

Although it is fun that it's totally fine for an American company to take the reins and continue on.

This could have been done with emphasis on the way China engineers TikTok/Douyin in each country and the effects on the end users - but that wouldn't make anyone with money or power very happy. The thing it does is fine - merely where the data goes and who pulls the levers is the concern.

The "ban" will change nothing in our society, thank God.

Ironically we’d see far fewer overdoses and a lot less drug-related violence worldwide if America would legalize the drugs people are going to take in America regardless of drug laws. You didn’t pick a great example.

I think it's great. For both, problem is extremes of apathy to actual consideration of the effects in society and lack of rational regulations.

The important part should be understanding the whys and building access to a robust nonpunitive way out for those who want it.

But the profits of addiction are too important either way.

Can you prove this?

> America did. Still does.

Where and when did America claim that?

When it was forcing every country to privatize everything they had in the last 40 years...

It’s banning it because of national security concerns and has nothing to do with capitalism. Honestly though this administration doesn’t seem to take national security very seriously so this will probably fall to the wayside and be enforced with the same vigor as our border security laws - so yeah nothing for them to worry about.

Somehow, it becomes a security threat when the product is superior than local offerings

The Biden admin has also been looking to halt BYD sales in the US, citing security threats [0]. BYD’s cars are often cheaper than Teslas and very well reviewed

0: https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/24087919/biden-tariff-c...

To be even more fair, America never claimed that free speech and free markets are wrong.

China did. Still does. And now it's begging and suing to keep those freedoms.

> You can't own a broadcast station in the US as a non-US citizen

Because freedom of speech doesn't work in practice?

There can only be a finite number of broadcasters because of how radio works, so it makes sense to regulate. (A little bit of sense, not a lot.)

There should be no restrictions on who owns a website. There can be an unlimited number of websites, and every website's "reception range" is the entire planet.

Today's rulemaking pushes us one step closer to a Great Firewall. If ByteDance moves operations entirely to China, what measures will the government enact to prevent people in the US from using it? (It will probably be strong-arming app stores, but that will fail because they can just make it a web app. So the only option will be to have two Internets, one with everything except TikTok, and one with everything.)

It will be interesting if this extends to other apps. Will it be unamerican to play Genshin Impact?

In this particular case, the law targets financial interactions with the company in question. So it wouldn't actually ban the company from serving on the internet, but no US company can knowingly facilitate their services on their servers.

Ex, ByteDance couldn't go to AWS and ask for capacity, nor could they go to Hurricane Electric and ask for Peering.

If the ban was based on the context of the speech it would violate the constitution, but ownership of corporations is fair game to regulate. It's not uncommon for countries to have foreign ownership restrictions on other industries like banking, utilities, railroads, etc.

The other problem is the teapot calling the kettle black. If the US has precedent, and this action follows that precedent, then our bitching and whining about Google and Facebook in China previously makes us look really contradictory.

We’ll end up validating Chinese policies all these years if we claim this action has precedent.

If it doesn’t have precedent, then it’s even worse. It becomes a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them (or their practices).”

> The other problem is the teapot calling the kettle black.

You could say the same thing about China complaining about this. Actually, that's what people would think of first when you mentioned "the teapot calling the kettle back". Frankly, I think people in China are surprised we kept our internet open for so long. Anyways, yes, American is now admitting that they will play by the same rules as China, rather than giving them a pass.

What does it matter what China does? If they don’t want our stuff then that’s their choice. I mean, we voluntarily use an economic blockade as a weapon against North Korea, Iran, and Russia, and it is not to their benefits.

My whole second point about joining them is saying that it shouldn’t matter what China does or says. They are hypocrites so we can be too???

I mean, if you think like that, then it doesn't really matter at all. Americans aren't so bound to concept of Chinese face that they actually even care about this. Since we don't get face hurt, accusations of hypocrisy are pretty pointless anyways.

Saving face is not just about saving face. There's also your credibility at stake. There's only so many times you can invade a country under false pretenses before the international community, or even your own constituency, starts siding with the opposition. I guess also if we really don't have any principles anymore, we'll have devolved back to survival of the fittest principles. At which point we don't need thinkers, just people doing what they can to get what they can all the time. No need to argue or make points. Just fight it out and save some time.

China said "American companies not welcome in China's internet", well they didn't say it, they just made that the truth. America saying "Chinese companies not welcome in America's internet" 10 years later isn't going to raise many eyebrows abroad. For the most part, people are wondering why it took so long.

> I guess also if we really don't have any principles anymore, we'll have devolved back to survival of the fittest principles.

China has been very clear that the principle should be tit for tat. All of their economic and foreign policy is based on that, from the visas they issue to visitors, the tariffs we exchange on vehicle production, and the foreigners they throw in prison when one of their own is put on house arrest in Canada. This is just a very late counter-reaction to a policy China has held for awhile.

It's the sovereign right of any country to be protectionist. Protectionism is actually the default. Open markets is not the default. I'd like to think the open US market is what makes it great, and too much protectionism actually stifles innovation and the robustness of the domestic economy.

The US market hasn't historically been that open. We started this country with tariffs as the only thing funding the government. All the free trade market stuff we have today was carefully negotiated via the WTO, and even then there is a huge bias in supporting allies (remember, when China opened up in the late 90s, it was antagonistic with Russia and actually a US ally since the the late 70s, that is all history now).

But we're not. The mantra of the West has always been that government must stfu and let the people talk. Government is charged with protecting that right for the people.

China is a government, so, just like our government, it must stfu.

This is a pretty straightforward protection of the people from government that's very much in line with American ideals.

I'm seeing downvoters here. Do you guys mean that people shouldn't have a right to free speech? Or you believe that if we give foreign governments the right to free speech, that they won't use it to silence you? I can think of at least one example that did.

China.

It's like this: imagine your neighbor is a raging alcoholic, and you say - he can get drunk and beat his wife, so I should too. And anyone who says this is bad can clearly see that he was the first one to do it.

I think it's more like, "we've been telling him not to get drunk and beat his wife. Now he's coming to our house and beating ours."

China is using TikTok to suppress free speech, so I don't see how your analogy relates here.

Ummm... we only exactly copied the censorship that China practices? How this flies over people's heads is beyond me.

Because we exactly didn't. Look what's flying over your head.

China: censors free speech in China then makes a US speech platform and censors American speech on the new platform. Blocks US platforms in China because they refuse to censor speech for the CCP.

US: blocks China from owning speech platforms because the US doesn't allow censorship and doesn't trust China to stop censoring speech on the platform.

Literally the opposite thing. How you've managed to conflate two completely opposite things is very interesting.

Are you a habitual TikTok user? Or do you work for the CCP?

I'm openly suspicious that you might be getting paid to conflate these very obviously opposite things.

How would it validate China? China has made itself a laughing stock hypocrite. It tells everyone how bad free speech is, and then it begs for free speech?

Conversely America is holding to its core values of restricting governments from acting in the political field. That right is reserved for citizens, and is especially protected from government use. America is founded on restricting government so that free speech can exist.

This move firmly reestablishes America as a leader in free speech protection, as it protects citizens speech from influence by government, both domestic, and now, foreign.

This isn't the US joining China's practices, they aren't cracking down on all foreign ownership, they're targeting China as a tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat is the right response to a defector like China, the US still cooperates with other cooperators like those in Europe.

>If the ban was based on the context of the speech it would violate the constitution

It still wouldn't violate the Constitution. Rights are reserved for citizens. It's perfectly legal to tell TikTok what they can or can't say.

That's not what Congress has done, but it would be legal.

Because freedom of speech is less protected (in practice) for foreign entities.

No because a US person can be called in to answer questions in a court of law or before congress. If the owner is Chinese living in London, where would you even begin ?

There is always the option to detain them in Canada and maybe, possibly extradite them to the US (or not).

That was for breaking sanctions law, but you supported my point. It's difficult.

Maybe you can expand on what you’re trying to say because freedom of speech is protected afaik.

Because freedoms apply to US citizens. It works just fine.

Well, no, that's not quite right. Even though we nominalize the concept of 'freedoms' as something that we have (making it possible to conceptualize there being people who don't have them), the actual legal framework in place operationalizes these freedoms as restrictions on the exercise of political power, without qualification.

In other words "freedom of speech" means that Congress doesn't have the power to pass laws that suppress speech itself, regardless of where it comes from. It's not that the first amendment applies to some people (and certainly not that it doesn't apply to others), but that it applies to Congress and limits what laws they can pass without qualification.

To clarify further, interpretation of what it means to to be a right of people vs a limit on Congress; FEC v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life is one of many examples where we have to assume SCOTUS interpreted that it's a right of people as there was no congressional action for them to limit in that case. They are clearly protecting people.

These cases go back and forth.

I would argue that it wasn't necessary to spell out that constitutional rights apply to citizens because the law is presumed to defer to common practice in cases where no law exists. That is, laws go back to long before the Constitution and those laws are referred to as common law.

In that sense; the king has lordship of his subjects, and no obligation to subjects of other kingdoms. He collected taxes, and provided protection from foreign threat and justice for his subjects.

Likewise, citizens of China don't pay taxes to the US, they have not that obligation because they are not subjects of the US government. Neither do they have the rights that are afforded a subject thereof.

Congress has no need to clarify that. It's presumed to be the case. That they mention it in certain amendments is incidental, despite the creative interpretations I've read, mostly from immigration proponents. (Not that I'm opposed, I'm an immigrant.)

No doubt, lots of people prefer to interpret this differently, especially when it's a right they need for a specific reason. That's exactly what China is doing here.

They are arguing about why the law should be interpreted in their favor this time. And next time they will argue the other way, as they do against their subjects.

It's up to the judge what it means in each case, but as a generally accepted interpretation, applying US law and protections to a foreign nation without some kind of formal alliance specifying more directly what is provided, is an egregious stretch of the imagination. It's ridicule, at best.

Your interpretation might have been right before. But now you're looking at a vast majority bipartisan vote that makes something inarguably clear; China doesn't have those rights as of the most recent interpretation. That's now true, regardless of previous interpretations.

That's not the way it works. Bipartisan votes in Congress don't alter the constitution, or expand Congress's own power under the constitution, unless the vote is for a constitutional amendment, which must subsequently be ratified by the states to become effective.

Yeah, I didn't say that.

Firstly, they didn't expand or alter the Constitution.

I'm not sure where you got that from. Reading back and I don't see it anywhere.

Stated again, hopefully more clearly; by exercising restrictions on China they've reestablished that China is not "the people" described in the Constitution. So, it's not protected from congressional acts.

And second, they didn't need to do that anyway. Foreign policy is a power reserved for Congress and the President. No amendment ever restricted that power.

See Article 1.

Amendment I takes precedence over Article I. Congress does not itself get to decide what "the people" refers to in the Constitution, and acts of Congress do not alter or establish any meaning of any terminology in the Constitution. Where there is ambiguity, the courts resolve it -- Congress does not have the final say in interpreting the rules that define and limit its own power.

Further, the protection of free speech in the first amendment does not even refer to "the people", but simply prohibits Congress from abridging the freedom of speech per se, without qualification or any exception for who is doing the speaking. Congress cannot pass laws that abridge the freedom of speech as a matter of actual effect, regardless of whether they are doing so under the auspices of exercising other powers.

Foreign policy powers don't come into it -- if the act restricts free speech, it is unconstitutional, regardless of what end Congress was attempting to pursue.

That's exactly it.

Freedom of speech is my right to be able to bitch about Biden or Trump without having to worry that I'll die in prison.

Freedom of speech is not a right of foreign entities sending me memes about them to manipulate who I will vote for in the election.

There's a law where foreign entities can't own TV or Radio in US. This might be controversial, but IMO it should be updated to also include social media as this is source where people get news from.

I think, also with respect to the comments to this comment, we need to appreciate the minute nature of this scenario and statement.

Journalists and your everyone else enjoys free speech, it must not be curtailed, neither must it be fostered.

While companies as a disembodied judicial entity cannot have speech in the same sense as people of flesh and blood, they can, simply based on their properties, act as an amplifier or muffler.

This requires at least some level of care which cannot be guaranteed if the business is run by a company headquartered in an unfriendly foreign nation which does not allow free speech at all and only allows businesses to conduct international business that is sanctioned.(We have had numerous reports about this now over the past years that foreign investors and companies operating in China are actually competing with the Chinese state there.)

If you don't agree, let's take out China in this argument and phrase it differently:

Would you think it would've been a good idea to have foreign investors from Nazi Germany run newspapers and radios in the states in the 1930s and leading up there? (I mean we had Nazi parties in the US around that time, BUT from today's perspective we would agree that such a scenario(the media-outlets) is a clear cut case with the US-government prohibiting it.)

What was better in the 1930's was that the newspaper industry was in the business for the news. They were a news-company. These days hedge-funds and for profits(not necessarily bad but it takes a turn when it is unadulterated greed by all means necessary( The Atlantic wrote a nice piece about this where Money swoops in buys a newspaper and runs it into the ground and that regularly and at scale, just cannot find the article)). So our position is a bit dire and we have Television and an industry that strives to captivate/capitalize all the attention it can get for a few pennies to deal with these days.

The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death).

Pair that with the New Silk Road initiative and the Dollar-Imperialism the Chinese government tries to run in the Pan-Pacific region and the picture becomes less welcoming.

Don't get me wrong, there is enough blame to go around for everybody, but I rather have it come from a non fascist entity. That being said, I can go into Washington and demonstrate peacefully(!) against Biden or Trump and I can ask questions about the past. Try doing that in Bejing with respect to Xi or Tienamen Square.(So while we can blame both sides there is still more to one argument than the other, so much for whataboutism) Considering that 'Grandpa' Xi enforced a personal cult around him starting with children's school books(not unlike Putin) and with what goes on with the Uyghur population in China's north, the attempts to strong arm Taiwan , the alignment of China with Russia, the broken promise made to Hong Kong and other items, I have to say that China is fascist and the CCP communist in name only.

The concept of Lebensraum is firmly on the agenda of global and, if you are unfortunate enough, also local politics again.

China and Russia only differ in the choice of their tooling, approach and starting positions.(China is less commercially insulated than Russia it appears. Propably one of the reasons China's is a bit softer trying to incorporate time.)

From an economic perspective I totally get that no company wants to have their business taken away, but I doubt Bytedance is just a company. This is just a change in ownership, nothing out of the ordinary. The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership. That framing, in the light of what I just wrote, becomes highly suspect. Almost vicious, bordering on the willingness to divide and incite. (Which reminds me: Totalitarian regimes like to be part of the regular government bodies but they also like to set up their own counterpart so that they, after having stopped the working of those other bodies (or if they are ousted), still have a viable alternative.)

That is why I welcome this, why I think it is high time, why I hope to see more of these actions globally,

> China and Russia only differ in the choice of their tooling, approach and starting positions

This is deeply, deeply wrong - China and Russia are natural opponents, they are two autocracies that deeply distrust each other and do not understand each other’s culture. They will never be like USA and UK.

The alignment between then, is because they both face pressure from USA. It’s not natural and is a huge failure of US foreign policy.

Russia emulates Europe, it produces weapons using German machines, and bottles vodka on Italian production lines. Buying Chinese equipment gets local governors in trouble. They are happy selling natural resources and have no real desire to compete with US in iPhone production or car market. The main friction is around territory. They are kinda like brexiteers - they don’t really have their own vision of the future outside of a narrow. Specific issue.

China is totally different, they have a vision that is very different - it is not ‘be like the west but better’ - it’s be their own thing. they are getting off oil and plan to compete in high-tech industries. That’s not to say they are better, but the plan is totally different

I don't think that GP was asserting that China and Russia are close natural allies. You're drawing some accurate distinctions, but I'm not entirely sure how they relate.

Oh boy...after the first two paragraphs it gets so wrong I even don't want to start arguing.

> This is deeply, deeply wrong - China and Russia are natural opponents, they are two autocracies that deeply distrust each other and do not understand each other’s culture

Well Stalin and Hitler were like that too. Luckily for the world Hitler couldn't stay his hand reaching for Moscow, otherwise the Allies wouldn't have faced a Germany being engaged in a two front war. Also, considering that Putin and XI met during the Olympic Winter Games face to face and that the invasion of Ukraine commenced right after the games as to not affront Xi, depriving him of China's moment in the Limelight is telling non the less. So there must be some mutual understanding. Especially considering that Xi is slavering over Taiwan.

> The alignment between then, is because they both face pressure from USA. It’s not natural and is a huge failure of US foreign policy.

I wouldn't consider it failure. Opponent is Opponent no matter what.

>Russia emulates Europe, it produces weapons using German machines, and bottles vodka on Italian production lines. Buying Chinese equipment gets local governors in trouble. They are happy selling natural resources and have no real desire to compete with US in iPhone production or car market. The main friction is around territory. They are kinda like brexiteers - they don’t really have their own vision of the future outside of a narrow. Specific issue.

The whole world produces weapons. This is a red herring implying that Russia is just doing what Europe does. That is outright wrong. Europe does not try to forcefully move borders attempting to annihilate a sovereign nation by committing genocide. And I doubt they are bottling Vodka from Russian production in Italy, especially not since the sanctions. Vodka may have originated in Russia, BUT every company can distill and sell it. Same goes for weapons. I also doubt that it would get anyone in trouble buying Chinese, otherwise, Me thinks, a lot of people in Russia would be in trouble, especially way out East. The way you label the War in Ukraine is also ... euphemistically put... and no, they are not like the Brexiteers. Please don't take me or anyone else here a fool. Britain left the EU because of populism and now they are dealing with the fallout. They have no notion of reviving the British Empire. Putin wants to recreate the UdSSR. He himself declared the downfall of the Soviet Union the single most geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century. In short he is a Soviet still in mind and manner.

>China is totally different, they have a vision that is very different - it is not ‘be like the west but better’ - it’s be their own thing. they are getting off oil and plan to compete in high-tech industries. That’s not to say they are better, but the plan is totally different

Really? Ask the Philippines, Vietnam or in general countries around the South China Sea, read news articles not penned by the South China Morning Post or read accounts from fishermen there. I am sure that the picture you fine there is totally different. Territorial saber rattling, building of artificial islands trying to stake a claim. China always say they come in peace and that we all should be tolerant, but when you try to see if that sentiment is true, then it is only true for others, for all other situations China comes first. Their recent political statements have become a statement of whataboutism and we are the victims of the bad bad west and we did no wrong ever... To my mind their vision of the future is a Chinese one where everything non-Chinese is to be treated as second rate at best.

They are not like the west and definitely not better, otherwise the Chinese Government wouldn't have warned against the bad influences of Christmas some months back. Open minded, tolerant... with that message I don't think so. And you are right, their plan is different. Industrial espionage on a very very large scale. And please don't try to white-wash or absolve. They are creating new power plants burning coal at a rate higher than any other nation.

I must also add here that Xi, just like Putin, feels slighted by history. That China's fall from might, from national glory, is bad and that it must reclaim its 'rightful' place. Anyone seeing a parallel here. I might also add that it is quiet telling that no one mentions the great leap forward by Mao dark times ahead indeed.

> China's fall from might, from national glory

Haha, haha, ha...

Have you ever been to China? They have made more progress in the last few decades than the whole western world combined. And the west in in a serious decline. If anything that statement should be backwards.

Before you reflexively dismiss this argument and go hit that downwards triangle: what you are saying is China had more glory during the Opium wars than it does now. Surely you can see how absurd this statement is.

Good, nuanced analysis.

Also, it's nice to see a bipartisan bill in the national interest. There used to be a saying, "politics stops at the water's edge." Every so often we remember that.

Thank you.

Yes, I have heard that saying being quoted some time ago.

While I mostly exist on the other side of the water's edge... I am happy and hopeful that that is the case and hope it will continue to be that way and that the circus some politicians yonder the water's edge are putting on stops.

Some things do, and should transcend, political boundaries. e.g. while I, would I be eligible to vote in the US, would most likely not vote Republican(probably not aged enough yet :D ), I must say that I like this guy https://www.facebook.com/RepZachNunn/videos/this-isnt-a-horr... simply for trying to do the right thing there. Found it while I was prompted to do some more research due to busying myself with this thread.(and it is not the only report I found... See here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S160061352...) I always thought of it to be some boogie man story made up by Falun Gong or Falun Dafa hanging about the CBD to rope in support. Finding out that it is actually substancial... I think this is my seeing evil moment if I ever had one, and I am only in front of a computer screen in my PJs.

Wall of text, yet this part is interesting.

> TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly

This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.

(example based on physical addiction) If I was a smoker, and Phillip Morris completely changed it's marketing near me, and sold completely different cigarettes in my local area that were wildly different than the market standard, just because there was a local smoker inhabiting the area, I'd be furious. Especially if they were "dumbed down" versions of what actual smokers got.

If a website serves me wildly different content, even if we search for the same terms, have the same interests, then that's a load of BS. And if I was in China, I'd also be vaguely annoyed at the nanny state behavior.

"Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, 'Essays on Mind and Matter'

> This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.

Do you have proof of this? Either in the positive, or the negative (if Chinese kids search for garbage they will be given garbage?)

who's searching for things? you just scroll and get whatever the algorithm feeds you

You search by "voting" for certain content over other while TikTok probes you. Then it learns and gives you more.

But the materials that are "acceptable" to give to you in the first place is mostly garbage on TikTok and highly curated on the Chinese version.

That's the point.

There is a massive lack of garbage on Chinese TokTok. It's not actively injected into society like they do in the American version. It's a propaganda tool in both countries, each having a targeted purpose.

I'd say this is because of the laws in China around what kids can watch rather than some nefarious plot.

Not just kids, adults. Everyone.

Amount of text is seldomly a metric for good or bad texts, some stuff needs explaining. Especially when dealing with matters like this where others do not warrant their positions.

> This portion is rarely discussed. The algorithm that serves content, should be the algorithm that serves content. If kid who likes STEM in America searches STEM content, kid in America should get STEM content. Same in China. Kid likes STEM content, kids get STEM content.

Really? Then this investigation should be wrong, but they are a reputable source and I trust them, especially since that is not the only report or the only source.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T_Lu1S0sII

> "Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?" Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, 'Essays on Mind and Matter'

That is THE MOST inhumane and humanity denying thing I have read today. It does not matter the color of your skin or the cultural background of your upbringing, we all bleed when stabbed and we all feel pain and fear. If that sentiment is still alive in the governing ranks of that country and wide spread we should all be very very careful and worried.

> (example based on physical addiction) If I was a smoker, and Phillip Morris completely changed it's marketing near me, and sold completely different cigarettes in my local area that were wildly different than the market standard, just because there was a local smoker inhabiting the area, I'd be furious. Especially if they were "dumbed down" versions of what actual smokers got.

A) you would have to notice to be upset B) that is not how services and the internet work. We could sit side by side and use the same app and visit the same website and could,depending on connection or identifying markers still see totally different content or sentiments being expressed. Considering that we are on HN, I fear you know and you played that card deliberately non the less.

> If a website serves me wildly different content, even if we search for the same terms, have the same interests, then that's a load of BS. And if I was in China, I'd also be vaguely annoyed at the nanny state behavior.

Search for Tienamen Square inside the GFW and outside and also add the word Massacre to it and observe. We also see a less politically colored version of this in general dubbed the Search Engine Bubble. Also, you are free to be annoyed, but if you speak up you might also be 'free' to receive a free political 'reeducation' or sanctions.

Do we allow Soviet Union to have …

>Would you think it would've been a good idea to have foreign investors from Nazi Germany run newspapers and radios in the states in the 1930s and leading up there?

Good idea? No. But the world isn't exactly ran on good ideas. Instead of Nazi germany newspapers they went straight to american broadcast itself and seeped in like a poison.

And the sad part is I don't even blame them. People want to hear what they agree with. Some may be legitmately brainwashed, but I've seen enough examples of individuals shunning the truth to conclude that we're well into a post-truth era.

>The 60min segment of ABC(Australia) also clearly showed that the TikTok version in China serves more STEM content to kids while the non-Chinese version shows entertainment mostly(let's amuse ourselves to death).

And would Tiktok be the fastest growing social media if it did the same? China can force their citizens to watch whatever they deem worthy. they have literal curfews for playing games implemented by the government. imposing that onto the west is just a bad business decision.

It goes back to the root issue, many westerners have long lost that disciplined to be an educated populace, to identify and defend against bias. to will themselves towards what they need to do as opposed to want. a single social media side won't change that.

>The users won't know the difference between posting on TikTok under Chinese or American ownership.

They would if they pulled out of the US. I'd look forward to the fallout that ensues. Maybe it will get the you to understand the power of their vote.

> It goes back to the root issue, many westerners have long lost that disciplined to be an educated populace, to identify and defend against bias. to will themselves towards what they need to do as opposed to want. a single social media side won't change that.

Really? That is like saying that Russians are always good at chess or Chinese good at Kung Fu or Japanese good at Karate.

We had this type of rhetoric during the time of the Cold War as well.

Aside from it being profiling let's entertain this:

If what you say were true, then the populace of China(to borrow your verbage) wouldn't start laying flat. You wouldn't have to introduce a system of snitching and forced conformism via the social credit system(which is less technical than is made out to believe in the west, more like some dada and wify on the bench taking notes) and you wouldn't have dissidents or the need to 'shield/protect' the population from any foreign influence via the GFW.

And onto other parts: > And would Tiktok be the fastest growing social media if it did the same? China can force their citizens to watch whatever they deem worthy. they have literal curfews for playing games implemented by the government. imposing that onto the west is just a bad business decision.

Really? It is only a crime, bad if caught and now they have been caught and called out. Also, how do you measure growth? Over the past years commercial data from within China has been dubious. And what is the fastest growing anyways? Usershare? Tiktok enjoys an unfair advantage. China has a large population and western products are not allowed to participate and e.g. Weibo or tencent are de factor monopolies. I assume it to be similar with Tiktok. Also, things that are not good for you usually are the most fun. Think junk food. There is nothing wrong with that or endulging it it(every once in a while), but, once again, it is nefarious when there is malicious purpose behind it like with Tiktok. A foreign power trying to subvert values and a way of life. And to answer your question: Yes, given that the Chinese Government is footing the bill they have more clout than their competitors because of that.

> They would if they pulled out of the US. I'd look forward to the fallout that ensues. Maybe it will get the you to understand the power of their vote.

Well, then the ownership does not change. Their choice, it is their company. They may do with it as they please, but if they don't play by the rules they may conduct business elsewhere only. Why stop a parting guest?

It's, not profiling, it's culture. You abandon all your safety nets in lieu of a increasingly individualistic society, and then costs of living increases as wages stagnate. The logical conclusion is that you start to become more selfish, and focus more on your own survival and satisfaction, instead of thinking in the larger picture about long term goals or how you can server your community or society.

It didn't have to go that way but that's the direction it went. And I see no initiative to change that.

>f what you say were true, then the populace of China(to borrow your verbage) wouldn't start laying flat.

In all honestly, most of my post has nothing to do with China at all. So I have no idea what you are deriving from my statement.

>so, how do you measure growth?

As a social media platform? Aquire more users, capture to market share, and increase profit margins. Asia isn't so different from NA/EU in that regard.

Then when expanding/globalizing you adjust your platform to the culture. China has theirs, the US has a different one. Facebook has to do this, Google has to do this, Even Apple has to do this. Nothing is really unique from a business perspective.

>Usershare? Tiktok enjoys an unfair advantage.

The US doesn't care about the Chinese userbase. And if the Chinese userbase could influence platforms, Weibo would be the Facebook of the world, instead of Facebook.

That's the quirk of growth that companies can forget when expanding. You don't just get a bunch of famous or masses of users and things become profitable nor even popular. Even companies as big as Amazon may pull out of a country if it can't properly understand this.

>but if they don't play by the rules they may conduct business elsewhere only. Why stop a parting guest?

Again, I don't really care about their fate. I'm looking at the fallout from a bunch of angry ticktok users. The last time we had a bunch of angry people on social media enraged by some trivial issue we got Trump.

Maybe I can't stop the second coming, but I sure as heck won't have the wool I've my eyes again and get caught up in the petty squabbles.

>It's, not profiling, it's culture. You abandon all your safety nets in lieu of a increasingly individualistic society, and then costs of living increases as wages stagnate. The logical conclusion is that you start to become more selfish, and focus more on your own survival and satisfaction, instead of thinking in the larger picture about long term goals or how you can server your community or society.

If that is so altruistic, I am sure a mom from that cultural background would forfeit the future of her child so that another family(maybe her sister's) has a better life ensuring the thriving of their offspring instead. I have known many a people of Asian decent. What you describe is pure idolism. A cliche, a stereotypical, unreflected, reflexive - dare I say romatizised - vision of the Eastern Culture. If it were true, why are so many people migrating then? Away I mean? And what about the wandering workers that are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth? Also, what you are framing as logical is human nature. It is not different based on culture. Only its hue changes. You also left out my point about the generation that lies flat and other remarks.

> In all honestly, most of my post has nothing to do with China at all. So I have no idea what you are deriving from my statement.

ByteDance is a Chinese company with Bejing's blessing. The whole debate, not just our little discussion here, is framed US-China or West-China.

> Then when expanding/globalizing you adjust your platform to the culture. China has theirs, the US has a different one. Facebook has to do this, Google has to do this, Even Apple has to do this. Nothing is really unique from a business perspective.

Really? Recall project Dragonfly of Google's ? Does any Chinese company operating in other jurisdictions require a minimum percentage of Chinese shareholders or similar shenanigans?

> The US doesn't care about the Chinese userbase. And if the Chinese userbase could influence platforms, Weibo would be the Facebook of the world, instead of Facebook.

See project Dragonfly again. A lot of companies are interested in the Chinese market. That is all Bloomberg ever raves about when it comes to the Chinese market opening and Earning calls being presented. So the statement that the US(or the west in general) is not caring about the userbase in China is outright wrong. A lot of consumers, biiiiig market. They are just not allowed to touch it or under hefty penalties with big handicaps. And weibo was beaten to the punch, Tiktok wants to become the youtube/whatsapp of the world. Don't try to misdirect here ;) .

> That's the quirk of growth that companies can forget when expanding. You don't just get a bunch of famous or masses of users and things become profitable nor even popular. Even companies as big as Amazon may pull out of a country if it can't properly understand this.

See my previous reply. I must also add, tongue in cheek, .... or is coerced to leave because of unfair competitive scewing. Amazon is the kingpin of online retail and must be checked in in general. Such a 800pound Gorilla knows what it is doing. So I doubt that would qualify for your argument to begin with.

> Again, I don't really care about their fate. I'm looking at the fallout from a bunch of angry ticktok users. The last time we had a bunch of angry people on social media enraged by some trivial issue we got Trump.

That is a discussion worthy of its own thread and I am not touching it in order to stay focused(nice try though). Let's just say that doing the right thing should be done regardless of the implications because it is worth doing. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be smart about it. And reigning in China's delusions of gradeur and Xi's pipedream of wanting a legacy as big as Mao's no matter the cost on the back of millions of people is the right thing. You can't let a bully step over you.

Just because it doesn’t say “ban” doesn’t mean its not one. It is well known that China lists algorithms and AI models trained on citizen data as a non-export so tiktok will never be able to sell to anyone other than a Chinese company unless they retrain the model etc.

The CEO has mentioned that they will simply pull out of the US market.

Theoretically they could sell "TikTok" to a US company who then licenses algorithm processing to the Chinese entity, no?

The US entity isn't beholden to the CCP and can decide to switch algorithm providers if they suddenly notice it's getting very propaganda-y, which provides a degree of independent oversight appeasing US concerns while not necessitating actually switching from the current systems.

The law requires the President (i.e. executive agencies) to verify any such transaction, and it specifically calls out "cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing" as subject to review. So they thought about that.

"TikTok" in the US is already a US-based company in LA.

I am baffled that any thoughtful person would take a CEO statement at face value without considering incentives.

1) prior to bill passage, convincing the public that they will pull out is optimal as it helps argue against bill, regardless of whether it is at all true

2) but, after bill passage, the incentives are totally different. Pulling out means giving up a billion dollar market that could instead have been sold. The shareholders would be livid.

So I am very skeptical. I have heard CEOs say many things they later were found to clearly never have meant seriously, simply because it was what they needed to say at the time. Like, "we would never do outsourcing or layoffs, your division is totally safe"....

I would think thoughtful HN readers would be just a little less credulous

Exactly, if they pull out it only means that the fear that it was meant only for propaganda was well justified.

That does not follow at all. Perhaps they simply don't want to spin off a future competitor, and decide that selling simply isn't worth that future risk.

They could work on a "good enough" algorithm that is basically already in public/open source domain when they sell it. 80% of its value is captive audience and "cool factor" with younger users.

As I understand TikTok has been investing in building out a U.S. fulfillment center network over the past two years, perhaps a drop in the bucket for them. With this investment and the loads of U.S employees they have I would be surprised if they leave their large (largest?) user base.

This they can actually sell, plenty of fulfillment companies that would be interested in buying. They aren't selling their tech though and I don't blame them, Facebook wouldn't sell to be in China so whatever. However, I am disappointed because we aren't China and shouldn't govern the same. I personally will be voting for any non incumbent going forward (for my remaining time in this country, I'm getting out of here), the current legislature on both sides is insane, dangerous and (obviously) slowly creeping up the road of fascism.

There's a great book that I think everyone should read:

"On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" by Tim Snyder, it's also is short and to the point (audiobook is 2 hours long) and teaches people what to look for to see when their country slides into authoritarianism and what to do to fight it.

The author also reads it on YouTube if you can't get a hold of it.

Of course the CEO is going to say that, because they don't want the law passed. When the chips are down, it's a lot less likely that just pull out than that they take the money from one of the many salivating buyers.

If TikTok is in bed with the CCP as much as Congress says they are, think about the actual cause and effect of their different options.

If ByteDance sells TikTok to US owners to satisfy the requirement, they give up control of a successful platform developed inside of China to a self-declared adversary that already controls most of the world's social media platforms, representing a significant loss to China as they attempt to compete online.

If ByteDance ignores the demand to sell, the US government has obligated itself to prevent its citizens from accessing one of the most popular social media apps in existence, something that the affected users will be extremely angry about, and will likely make claims of state censorship.

If I were China, and my goal was to leverage TikTok to do harm to America, I would choose the option that turns US citizens against the government over the option that transfers power from China to the US.

Isn't the obvious alternative "split TikTok and sell TikTok USA"?

aren't they already split and use different app in China vs US. Interestingly Chinese app's algorithm chooses more STEM videos, while Western version just pushes addictive crap.

> Interestingly Chinese app's algorithm chooses more STEM videos, while Western version just pushes addictive crap.

That's simply a lie. Douyin is full of the same trash as Tiktok.

Tiktok isn't in bed with the CCP, it is the CCP.

China is a communist country. State owned industry. The leash they give business "owners" might be long (long enough to fool westerns it's just another USA), but it is still a leash, and they are still under control of the party. No courts, no rights, no lawsuits. Party wants, party takes.

The really funny part about all that is that those bans were a reaction to the last time the US tried to ban TikTok.

Kind of reinforces the allegations of being CCP owned and compromised and not an independent entity. If you have poison pill provisions.

There are plenty of US companies that are authorized to use government-funded patents, that would prevent them from transferring ownership to foreign owners. This isn't a "poison pill" conspiracy, this is standard export control for state-funded technology.

Companies that are export controlled have military tech. The idea that a social media app would have a poison pill for export control is ridiculous and shows how owned these supposedly independent companies really are.

ITAR applies to many technologies that are trivial to duplicate or have been redeveloped outside the US to bypass those restrictions. Memory chips hardened for space are subject to ITAR. These memory chips are commercial with lead tape on them.

Any non-arms companies in that mix?

Merck (not an arms company) was expropriated from Merck.

From the Germans, during WWI.

Yeah sure. At least WWI Germany wasn't committing two genocides.

> The CEO has mentioned that they will simply pull out of the US market.

Nope! He has said - TT is not going anywhere and vows to fight back legally. I was a bit shocked to find court put a hold on Trump’s ban of TT

He'll lose, since the US already has done this sort of thing.

Very big example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merck_%26_Co.

So not only does TikTok have to be sold but they also have to remove the addiction algorithm? This deal just gets better and better!

> they also have to remove the addiction algorithm

Whoever they sell it to, if they end up doing that, is going to be more than willing to put in place their own addiction algorithm, in just the same way that American social media and other adjacent tech companies have implemented them.

I'm in no way a fan or user of TikTok, but thinking this will improve the app seems naive.

Having the US's primary rival, which runs massive disinformation campaigns, also opaquely control the content that US youth consume en masse seems worse than...just about any alternative.

Someone like Facebook wants the algorithm to show addictive content that generally isn't super offensive to the average person. Someone like the CCP wants the algorithm to show addictive content that idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.

It doesn’t sound like you’ve ever used TikTok. I assumed the same thing going in and found quite the opposite. I’m way better informed since I started using it. In some cases by people that were actually involved in whatever event was newsworthy.

Selectively reducing or excluding some events as not newsworthy while promoting others is observable when using ticktock and the underlying means of propaganda people are concerned about.

For a US example you can simply count the minutes of coverage Fox News and CNN give to various stories for the same basic effect. How much coverage you gives the Russia- Ukraine war can be just as impactful as if you refer to it as a Russian invasion or not.

At least you think you are way better informed.

I don't use TikTok, but I use Facebook and Google's short video versions. I find just as many anti-CCP as pro-CCP content on it, and...I guess these are mostly TikTok videos because many of them still have TikTok watermarks.

Don't take my question as aggresive, but why do you think you're "way better informed" since you started using it? Better informed on what?

What the algorithm decided to inform them on.

Have you even used TikTok? Facebook connects you with the people around you, and TikTok connects you with your favorite people on earth. That's the essence of the product.

> I’m way better informed since I started using it.

I'm legitimately terrified to know what this means.

Presumably it means they base their opinions of Gaza on videos of what's actually happening there rather than on propaganda statements by the IDF.

I've found way more false news and stuff on TikTok than anywhere else, even about innocuous things and not something serious like a war. It's taken on the form of modern day chain mails in the way it spreads lies, with the participants being the most invested. They all think they're doing citizen journalism yet most of them verify nothing.

Let me not even get started on the deep fakes lurking on the platform.

Not only is there more false info on Tiktok, the user comes away with high certainty they are being reliably informed. Because accounts popular on Tiktok focus strictly on presentation and entertainment, not anything actual journalists prioritize.

The effect is less informed with higher certainty, and terrible combination for training citizens for actual civil discourse.

"Jews control the media" isn't an opinion worth debating. Move on

It's less that and more brown people aren't humanized, so media is too skittish to call a spade a spade.

I don't know if I've ever met a tiktok addict that's well informed.

How well informed are people who talk about TikTok addicts, though?

Well they know enough to know it's not a reliable source in anyway, so probably better than most?

ok zoomer

Everyone who you ask will tell you that ads never work on them, yet we all buy branded shit.

Same thing with propaganda used by social media.

This video illustrates the effects of it: https://youtu.be/pB7WzqUq4Nk?t=324

How would you know?

> increases division in Western countries.

I don't see how people can say this with a straight face knowing that American adversaries operate almost in the open on Facebook. You don't need to control the platform to control the message. That's what social media companies sell!

That was restricted in previous actions by Facebook, according to Zuckerberg's testimony. So today, you do need to control the platform.

> according to Zuckerberg's testimony

Not according to his employees

That might be true, but after testimony in front of Congress?

They would have to be bribing the IRS. No way.

I don't like or use Facebook and I hope it dies a horrible death. But I'm also a realist.

Why would they have to bribe the IRS?

A foreign adversary can't pay Facebook for an ad without using a bank that reports to the IRS.

I don't think the GP was talking about ads at all when referring to foreign adversaries influence on Facebook. They wouldn't need ads. They're doing fine disseminating disinformation already. TikTok does not promote CCP messages through ads, either.

I think they were talking about ads because the comment referred to what they sell specifically.

>That's what social media companies sell!

In any case, without paid ads, their "friend me" campaigns didn't work. There's some research from the FBI on this.

Can't find the link right this second but I'll post back if I do.

If it has to come down to companies increasing division in Western countries for profit over ideology, then fine. One is a negative externality that can be mitigated, the other is the entire point (therefore cannot be made better).

They operate everywhere in the open, with college campuses and academia being the most prominent places if you ask me.

But you need to control the platform to siphon user data , have a foothold into everyone's phone and to peddle misinformation and entertainment instead of education (Chinese version operates differently than the non-Chinese one).

There is no greater vehicle to deliver a hooking mechanism to target specific users for spyware upload than an app that is installed on a lot of platforms. Weechat is one other such tool btw. and that thing behaves strangely compared to e.g. Whatsapp if you install it.

> increases division in Western countries.

To be fair having first past the post voting does wonders for division. No external enemy necessary.

While this AFAIK only applies to the US, it should be the #1 issue to solve. By a wide margin. It's honestly baffling that not everyone with half a brain is up in arms about it.

Most people just don't understand basic math.

Weirdly they understand it well enough to be angry at third candidates spoiling the election, but aren't able to make that last, tiny connection.

> increases division in Western countries

I'm not convinced anything on TikTok is more divisive than any other social media platform. And Reddit seems to be filled with a lot more tankies than other platforms.

> idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.

You're right, everyone I know now buys their glycine from Donghua Jinlong instead of using domestic manufacturers. This is clearly not because of the superior manufacturing capabilities of Donghua Jinlong, who are ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified, and whose glycine is industrial AND food grade, but because of an insidious campaign by the CCP to promote Chinese glycine across the entire industry, trying to crush American glycine manufacturing. I demand congressional hearings about what our elected politicians are doing about this threat to American-made glycine!

Seeing another DHJL glycine enthusiast here on HN was not on my bingo, but it is a pleasant surprise.

Readers might also be happy to know DHJL glycine is Halal, Kosher, and Reach certified, and more recently, FDA approved as well!

On a serious note, it's so amusing to me to read the comments of people who hate TikTok, but who clearly haven't used it. They simply have no idea what it looks like and the kind of content that is popular on it.

But they're very certain that it's bad!

Meanwhile, I'm scratching my head trying to understand how my watch history could have any value whatsoever. Cute kittens, shirtless guys chopping wood, sad hamster memes, Sanchez the sleepy racoon, Young Royals edits, some dude eating all kinds of cheese, A bunch of confused Americans in Europe and vice versa, PEDRO PEDRO PEDRO, guys promoting their onlyfans, schwapeepee, and of course Donghua Jinlong content, although it seems to have run its course now.

> Having the US's primary rival, which runs massive disinformation campaigns, also opaquely control the content that US youth consume en masse seems worse than...just about any alternative

How is it worse than making disseminating disinformation illegal? The law as written lays bare the true motivation - it's not about fighting disinformation ("inauthentic user activity" has been detected across all social networks for the purposes of disinformation). It almost certainly is about protecting American companies from competitors with better AI algorithms. The legislature has telegraphed that the tech/potential for abuse are not problems by themselves - ownership by a Chinese company is what they take issue with.

But why is that a bad thing, China has the same regulations on companies not Chinese? Its not "better" algorithms its "weaponized" algorithms designed for specific populations including its own population which I imagine are not as damaging then the ones applied to others. My point is, of course this will be banned if the US gov cannot benefit from it and considered a threat to certain people.

> But why is that a bad thing

I didn't say it was a bad thing - I said there's a better option that wasn't taken. IMO, protecting citizens from bad behavior by domestic and foreign companies is nobler than corporate protectionism. YMMV .

>Having the US's primary rival, which runs massive disinformation campaigns, also opaquely control the content that US youth consume en masse seems worse than...just about any alternative.

Sounds like a skill issue. The Us has decades worth of a head start on the internet and social media. If "the enemy" can just waltz in and disrupt that in a matter of 5 years, I think we have bigger issues on hand.

> Someone like the CCP wants the algorithm to show addictive content that idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.

Yeah, America has a decade long headstart on that too. We blamed facebook in 2016, we're blaming Tiktok in 2024. How long are we going to deflect this to the internet?

> “socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries

Do you have a single example of a successful Chinese media campaign, disinformation or information - just one?

Because I can name, off the top of my head, disinformation campaigns by Trump (election was stole) , by Israel (bunker under a hospital), by Isis (mass recruitment in western countries), by oil companies (heat pumps don’t work in Britain’s unique climate), by food companies, by Russia, by Greenpeace, by crazy people on 4chan but I cannot name a single message that came out of China and got major public resonance in the west.

CCP is a major pusher of disinformation/propaganda. Look up Dragonbridge. Or how YouTube had to remove thousands of CCP propaganda channels. Or the classic "US Army Covid Origin" story that China pushed when social media came for Wuhan.

China's 50-cent army buys social media accounts, or creates fake personas, to push narratives and abuses reporting/takedown mechanisms to suppress unfavorable posts and channels.

This is major pusher of propaganda?

> Most DRAGONBRIDGE activity is low quality content without a political message, populated across many channels and blogs

If anything, this is a demonstration that their efforts are futile and incompetent, very much non-threat. I’ve seen even 4chan do better

We have multiple actors that push divisive misinformation through bots, much more successfully, and we do not apply any scrutiny to that.

Not really.

A Facebook or Twitter-esque addiction algorithm is WAY better than a CCP addiction algorithm since the latter tries to socially engineer unrest and disillusion, on purpose, as a targeted act of Nakatomi-esque cyberwarfare against a totalitarian regime's rivals. The former kind maybe does so as an inadvertent externality, and with every reason to wager to a far lesser degree.

Meta won't turn up the heat on antisemitism and down on something the CCP doesn't like. It might turn up the heat on, I don't know, trans rights, and down on neo Nazis, but it's much more benign dystopic info filtering than an actual "what will destabilize the US and fuel stochastic terrorism and civil war?" agenda (which is against Meta's best interest).

The US social media seems to be encouraging nationalism and conservatism. Which Im also not to happy about. It seems to be creating more unrest in the west rather than strength progress and unity.

China might not even need to influence the west through tiktok, meta and friends seem to be doing plenty of it themselves. None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh

I give TikTok negative benefit of the doubt though. Nobody can prove if the stream of craziness is organic or a result of Chinese propagandists tuning the algorithm, but I'll believe it's the latter every time. Could I even afford not to? It's just game theory at this point.

> None of it seem to be making us progress forward tbh

The Nirvana Fallacy is when you reject the better of two outcomes because it's not good enough compared to some mythical optimum.

In this case, the optimum could be some social media service that "strengthens progress and unity" or it could be a total ban on social media altogether, both of which seem pretty mythical. :p

I believe organic, chaotic derangement is better than extrinsic, targeted derangement in magnitude and outcome.

This comment has almost brought me around to supporting a tiktok ban just to remove a leg from the conspiracy theories.

Take some responsibility for Americans posting on social media to other Americans, for the love of god.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted - but I think this is thoughtful and to the point.

The highest ideal American SNS follow is profit. That will generate all kinds of externalities that might be bad for society. Still, at least so far, we've found it to be the least destructive optimization target in modern human history (vs. socialism).

The CCP is clearly tuning the algorithm in the SNS under its control to limit topics it deems undesirable in its goal of an ideal society. Whoever thinks this isn't so bad hasn't experienced an authoritarian state personally or at least highly underestimates the pain and suffering one can inflict.

I'm looking forward to more regulation of social media to be honest... All of the algorithms only end up working against the entertainment and educational factor of it all anyway. I'm thoroughly convinced that the social media mega-platforms have all moved out of algorithms to just pushing sponsored ads all day. Many of these ads repeat far too often every time I log in, and it's been making me want to ban all the apps anyway...

> I'm looking forward to more regulation of social media to be honest

I'm afraid that's not goign to happen in the US. Politicians never let a disaster go to waste: had the will been there to regulate social media in general, the hysteria around TikTok would have precipitated it. Instead, we got a law specifically targeting TikTok and ignoring other SM.

Facebook & Instagram have had tons of Congressional scrutiny over the past decade, the problem is they never really did much to fix issues with the platform as a result.

The mere fact that these social media CEOs are building vast bunkers and amassing billions of dollars highlights the issue that they are literally shoveling value out of these platforms into their own pockets, and those of their investors, while preying upon the instincts of all their users in a deeply psychological manner.

I just don't we'll ever see bans of social media working in the USA if the company is from here, at least not for the next 15 years, SCOTUS will most likely shoot down any attempts to do any serious regulation of social media except for maybe people under 18.

No social media company would stay in business without the under 18 demographic

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Nah, social media is the status quo. It's impossible to 'refrain' from the status quo, unless you invent something an order of magnitude greater.

Personal web sites have been around for ages. Things worked better before when there was a proper search related to individual web sites and music blogs. There was also a lot less obsession with minute-to-minute updates from artists and scams to get on playlists and for likes and followers.

I'm a musician myself, and social media is totally overburdening the music economy with scams for musicians like paying for ads and bot services just to get visibility. Social Media overall is considered to be a wasteland dedicated to promoting only artificially engineered celebrity music and stories right now in the opinion of many.

You're right, but to the consumer like me I cherish how I'm able to connect to my favorite individuals like Andrej Karpathy and still learn a lot. I guess most people are likely the same, and spend an awful amount of time daily on this, whether they know it or not.

Playing devil's advocate: you can't block on native apps, and some mobile web browsers don't have extension support.

Also, please avoid ad-hominem ("hilariously limited intellect"); it overshadows what otherwise would be a valid point (enforcing a ban vs. practicing personal habit, critique on blanket statements, etc.)

Google and Meta already have plenty of TikTok-style videos with addictive algorithms, so I don't think we will be much better off if TikTok leaves the market. Kids will just migrate to other competitors.

The algorithm's novelty and recommendation accuracy is so far beyond what other competitors like Google, Snapchat, and Meta have that this seems like a coordinated effort by the private sector to push forth their mediocre products and centralize social media service which I absolutely DETEST. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly announced how far behind Tiktok Meta was. Many years later they are still playing catchup.

Though, the saddest thing is that it seems like the U.S citizens, (i.e ANY of tiktoks 160 MILLION US users) have absolutely no say in the operations,a yet we actually interact with the app not these old people in Congress. The fact that Biden so swiftly signed the bill too makes me frustrated as I want to vote for him, but he keeps doing or okaying things that are counter to my values.

Yeah. Google won this war already by getting Chromebooks into schools, which are mandatorily tied to a Gsuite account and thus have YouTube Shorts, drive, Gmail, etc access.

As a parent, I hate google a lot more than TikTok. I can already block TikTok, but I can't block youtube because the school district mandates it.

They don't need chromebooks in schools, my kid uses YouTube kids at home (that doesn't include shorts), teens will have their own phone usually, and youtube is already a popular place for them to go, discovering YouTube shorts (if they haven't already), is easy.

But ya, if a teen is otherwise cut off from devices besides the ones they get from school, then you could see that as a weak point, although I don't think that applies to a significant portion of families. For the ones that it does apply to, they probably have bigger problems to worry about than TikTok being banned.

The admins should be able to block YouTube for minors when asked. There's a way to do it but it's by OU not individual user. Fight for it if you want it.

nah, that would be left up to tiktok, the CCP, and the buyer of the company, if there ever is a buyer and the CCP would even permit it.

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Remove the addiction algorithm?

You mean like Facebook, YouTube, and Starbucks?

Riiiggghhhttt…

Coffeebourne addiction algorithms?

Good thing it’s only those evil Chinese making algorithms such as this /s

> China lists algorithms and AI models trained on citizen data as a non-export

Isn't this just another reason to conclude China views Tiktok as a national security asset?

I'm fairly certain the title of this article already makes that perfectly clear: "starting clock for ByteDance to divest it". If anyone is unclear on what is meant, that is purely a failure of reading, not a failure of media reporting.

While I get the point... if the EU said Facebook could not be available in the Country unless the company divested from US interest, would we not call it a ban?

I think it matters whether it really is a ban or just called a ban, because the whole First Amendment argument hinges on this question.

If TikTok was banned in the sense that it had to shut down then the First Amendment argument could work. But if it's just a forced sale then it has no bearing on the freedom of speech of TokTok users.

"Forced sale" is interesting, because it assumes that a Chinese company would allow itself to be forced to sell. If TikTok refuses, the government either has to admit that they have no power to force a sale or actually ban access to the service, or they have to start demanding that app stores remove the app, and DNS providers stop resolving the website, and that ISPs start blocking the IPs. This would become a complete shitshow pretty much instantly.

The law doesn't ban them from having Chinese owners.

It bans American companies from providing services that distribute, maintain or update any sufficiently popular apps substantially owned or controlled by foreign adversaries.

TikTok could host APKs from CCP headquarters if they want to.

Is this just a distribution ban or will US actually block the app at net/protocol? I have never used the thingie but this ban business motivated me to download it the other day.

The most essential advice I can give to any new user of TikTok is to be EXTREMELY liberal with the "long press > not interested" feature. The default FYP ("For you page", the algorithmic feed) is initially tuned towards the average teen, with lots of garbage (pranks, half-dressed women, and assorted other trashy content). The algo is pretty good at picking up what keeps your attention, so be careful what you give your attention to.

If you tune it right, there's a lot of good content on there, though.

The crux of TikTok's success is that you don't have to "game the algorithm" like in other apps, and it's quite resilient even if you try. It seems to know what's an organic signal and what's an artificial signal.

Most other short-form content recommendation algorithms overfit like crazy (ahem Instagram ahem), and many users trying to bend it a certain way mess it up.

Give it a try. It's weird, fun, educational, stupid. It's whatever you make of it. Is it also whatever China wants you to make of it? Maybe. But they could do the same thing with news, TV, or movies.

The law doesn't authorize blocking access to servers outside the US.

(to the respondents to my op): thanks!

does that mean that it could be used to basically block any app made by the Chinese?

I believe so. It's called "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" not "TikTok Ban Act", so it can be applied to apps like WeChat as well.

What about iphone?

They're free to host their website which iPhones can access from CCP headquarters too.

Heck, they could post their IPA or source code if they wanted. This law isn't what prevents users from sideloading.

Even if you have source code or IPA, it needs regular refresh of 7 days, which is too much inconvenient.

For what it's worth, "play money" betting site Manifold is currently at a 69% chance of sale versus 31% of shutting down.

https://manifold.markets/mint/conditional-on-the-tiktok-ban-...

There's another market with more options where "ban will be rendered unenforceable by courts" is leading: https://manifold.markets/MichaelBlume/tiktok-endgame-which-w...

What about no sale yet they continue to operate because the ban is not enforceable either legally or technically?

For example, if they (or some party that's directly targeted like Apple or Cloudflare) gets a U.S. court to enjoin enforcement of some of the provisions.

Plug pulling is easy technically. I think plug pulling legally is also easy. Bytedance just doesn't have a strong defense.

The defense is the bill of rights.

Buzzkill! Everybody else on here was having fun opining that it's 100% certain that China pulls the plug, or conversely that a sale will happen, and you just had to point out that it's an empirical question where nobody can read the CCP's mind. Boo.

It’s alarming to me that you think the owners of arguably the most successful social media company in the world would sell it only to appease a single country. It comes off as a typical American perspective of thinking they’re the center of the world. At TikTok’s current global growth rate, they could exceed the entire user base of the USA in just a few months. I’m not sure how that user share corresponds to revenue as I’d assume the US is a lucrative market,but I just don’t see it. And TikTok has directly said they won’t be divesting.

How much of their revenue comes from Europe and Asia though? American users are much more valuable than Greek or Spanish users for instance.

A propaganda tool doesn’t need to be immediately financially profitable though, that’s not their expected main outcome (though I guess that can be a nice bonus).

You being downvoted seems to be a reflex of HN hive thinking that a Chinese company could be “just a company”

The US is typically more profitable than all the other countries combined, as people here have far more disposable income after all expenses, and are more inclined to spend it.

The advertising market in the US pretty much eclipses the whole rest of the world, so yes the owners are very likely to sell it to appease a single country.

The reason it is kind of wild is because a company being forced to sell basically the only thing it has in order to stay relevant in the second most major region of the world is kind of big news, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they just took the ban and then only started working in Europe and China. Is bytedance even known for anything other than tiktok? What do they do other than provide the service for tiktok?

ByteDance did a ton of stuff in China before getting into short videos, which was a hype cycle with a whole bunch of players until eventually they consolidated to one or two.

The amusing thing looking at this from China perspective is that ByteDance has been hit by the government over and over again for appealing to the mainstream.

The first big success they had was a social media platform centered around memes/jokes, and because the CCP doesn't have a sense of humor they crushed this platform when it started getting too popular.

Their second big success was a news aggregator that focused on surfacing news people actually wanted to read instead of the news the CCP wanted people to read. Which is to say mostly lowbrow gossip and sensationalist storytelling instead of long and tedious treatises about how great the party is. The Xi administration crushed that too, mandating changes in the platform that made it just as sanitized as all the other Chinese "news" outlets.

TikTok getting popular overseas seems like the result of a very well-timed purchase of musical.ly. The small number of western Gen Z youth I'm in contact with say they came to TikTok through musical.ly. Either way, we all see how successful that has been. Once again, ByteDance figured out a product that gave the "low end population" exactly what they wanted, and once again the government is punishing them for it.

At this point you wonder if these guys should just throw their hands in the air and pivot into oil or pharmaceuticals or some other addiction industry that's totally in the government's pocket. I guess the suspicion of some in the US government is that that's already happened and that's why this fun app that everyone loves is actually a tool of the CCP.

CHINA already has the fentanyl market covered. They'd crush that too.

It originally started in china as short video sharing and is quite successful there. TikTok came after their home market success. I’m spacing on the name.

I believe it's Douyin

If I forced you to sell your home and said you couldn't live there anymore, and if you refused to move, we would tear your house down. Would you then say that I am banning you from living in your home? Kinda feels like a ban, even though it's just a forced sell.

That’s similar to eminent domain, a right granted to the government in the constitution.

Eminent domain requires a fair price and it's for public infrastructure. This isn't, this is just an app.

This is pretty much a ban. Why would the company convert their main product into a competitor? Majority of congress isn't stupid and knows what they want to happen.

We didn't call the baby-bells an AT&T ban.

Because it was more than a mere ban, AT&T was dissolved.

AT&T corp was not dissolved in the '84 breakup. It continued to exist, providing long-distance service, but didn't operate any local exchanges.

Because the shareholders would most likely rather have X billion dollars from selling the company than 0 dollars from refusing to sell and getting banned.

It wouldn't be 0 dollars, though; the majority of their users are apparently outside the US. So the question is: how does the amount you could get by selling a US-inclusive Tiktok compare the potential future earnings of a US-free Tiktok? If the market prices it accurately, you'd sort of expect the former to be higher (a US-inclusive version seems obviously more valuable), but maybe they think the market undervalues them, or maybe prospective buyers would smell blood in the water because of the deadline and try to low-ball, etc.

> Why would the company convert their main product into a competitor?

Thats easy to answer.

The reason why is because they'd get paid 10s of billions of billions of dollars for it, and otherwise their investment would massively lose a large amount of value otherwise.

Also, bytedance wouldn't be competing with tiktok anymore in those markets as they'd have sold it off.

So the choice is either to make a bunch of money, or to instead have their investment become worthless.

But would a new US-Tiktok not try to expand globally? Original-China-TikTok would then compete with US-Tiktok in Europe and elsewhere.

No, because "original tiktok" has a different name in China and doesn't compete significantly outside of China.

The tiktok that you know about is the international app that already doesnt compete with the rest of bytedance.

>It's surprising to me that this this pretty significant distinction has been glossed over both in media reporting and in general comments here on HN.

That's because:

* Saying it'll get banned makes for a more sensational headline.

* Saying it'll get banned is accurate enough for most practical purposes.

* Saying it'll get banned is simpler than explaining the details of divestiture. Most Americans probably don't even know what "divest" means without pulling out a dictionary.

Another reason could be: many are not sympathetic to the America's claims that these foreign platforms are at the whims of a country it is at odds with and which have repeatedly demonstrated covert abilities to change American's perception.

Speaking with some younger American co-workers in the past, their suspicion/hatred of their own country is astounding to see and it seems to have coincidentally begun after TikTok entered US market a few months before US elections.

So the worry seems to be that young American voters exposed to a foreign social platform will influence upcoming elections. I do not think this is far fetched as multiple countries have come out to expose various tactics by certain countries to influence perception.

>their suspicion/hatred of their own country is astounding to see

Speaking as an American, our country was founded on the principles of being apprehensive of governments including our own. Being suspicious of our own government is a very American thing and should not be understood as surprising.

See our Declaration of Independence for further reading and context.

And old people losing their connection with objective reality is connected to fox news. Next argument. It's being banned because old technically illiterate people (most of congress) latched onto a simplistic solution to the wrong problem,

Also wonder whether the law names TikTok in particular or just some criteria that matches it. If it's the latter, are other companies also on the clock?

It's not just tiktok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...

Does yandex have an app or use cloudflare?

According to that Wiki link, the law does actually mention TikTok by name.

It does, but it's not exclusive to it. You can read it here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/...

Hmm, but it gives the US President the ability to decide who is targeted, so one way or another it seems like TikTok is treated specially.

I've seen articles saying that it would be hard to find any large enough investors to buy it who also don't cause a monopoly. Can ByteDance spin off TikTok to a separate company which would have an IPO and go public and in the process no longer have Chinese owners?

IPOs usually involve selling only a small fraction of outstanding shares. Aramco sold less that 2% of it's shares.

Or maybe TikTok decides to exit US in protest because they don't want to comply with the law. We've been seen this 15 years ago.

what happened 15 years ago?

I guess Google's exit from China.

That was more 2013.

That was Jan 2010.

The chance that TikTok sells to US owner is zero, so the “ban” implies that assumption

They only need to sell the US portion of the business. They can continue to operate everywhere else, right? Why would they throw away tens of billions of dollars (value of the US portion)?

The CCP does not care about the marketcap of bytedance, they care about the soft power that tiktok allows them to wield. The CEO of bytedance may want to sell, but the CCP won't let them.

In US those are essentially equivellent as money buys soft power very easily. This whole thing is US not wanting to expand user rights but protect it's soft power and it shows.

I think either way this whole thing is a big W for CCP and L to US democracy that doesn't have the balls to actually expand regulation when it's clearly wanted and needed.

They're losing the soft power anyway. But if they sell they can atleast earn money.

They would lose soft power in the US but what if the CCP accepts this and shifts their tactics to slowly but surely flood the rest of the world with anti-US propaganda? Unfortunately, it really doesn't look like the US could win here.

So this will be the trust test. If they sell then it's a legit product. If not then it's clearly CCP spyware.

> The law doesn't ban TikTok. Rather, it bans TikTok from having Chinese owners.

My prediction: China would absolutely throw away a few billion to enjoy the chaos that results from the country that preaches free speech painting itself into a corner and banning it. Enacting a ban on the most popular app among Gen Z would cause a huge uproar.

It would be like taking away terrestrial radio from boomers. It's that popular.

> Enacting a ban on the most popular app among Gen Z would cause a huge uproar.

Or they just move over to FAANG competitors? I've never used TikTok before since it is an app, but I use YouTube shorts and whatever that Instagram short thing is Facebook is pushing into my feed (with...erm...a lot more addictive algorithms than YouTube). Ok, I'm not Gen Z, but it looks like content providers are already hedging their bets on platforms (they often don't even remove TikTok watermarks), I don't see why consumers wouldn't follow. Its not like YouTube or Facebook is blocked in the USA.

>Or they just move over to FAANG competitors?

Currently the FAANG competitors are much worse; their recommendation engines are inferior. That's why consumers overwhelmingly prefer Tiktok currently.

This is an old misconception. Reels has already exceeded over 50% of TikTok's watch time. The algorithm is better on Reels now IMO.

Sorry but Reels is crap. Its just stolen TikTok videos mixed with some other nonsense.

Content providers are stealing their own TikTok videos, although I'm sure some providers are stealing other people's TikTok videos to make money on Reels and Shorts, especially the Chinese ones I've seen (probably ripped off by other Chinese wanting to make some quick money).

Yeah. This is really a generational thing. That's why the ban was bipartisan... nobody in Congress is of the age that uses TikTok. However, the youth in this country are going to be enraged, far more than I think a lot of people expect. I don't use TikTok but the people I know who use it are extremely passionate about the app.

I'm not genz but I use tiktok. You need to give it a try. All of the comments on here from people who don't use it are bizarre.

We can be skeptical, but not afraid of foreign owned media.

> All of the comments on here from people who don't use it are bizarre.

100% agree.

I would say this offers some insight into the real reason they want to ban TikTok.

I mean, I’m happy to see tiktok removed from app stores for the same reasons as I’d be happy to see any social media apps be removed from app stores, so from that perspective, I don’t think it matters that I haven’t used tiktok unless it’s somehow exempt from the problems that are endemic to social media apps.

I mean it's debatable whether or not social media is good for society, and there's legitimate concerns about data privacy, but do you really want the govt to remove them?

Good question! I wouldn’t trust a government aiming to remove them, but seeing them run afoul of legitimate legislation (where I’m not actually familiar enough with the US/tiktok law to really make a judgement call on) in ways that get them punished satisfies me. (Assuming those punishments are in line with principles I otherwise support - e.g. I wouldn’t support ISP-level blocking.)

Sounds like you just don't care much for free speech.

> the people I know who use it are extremely passionate about the app

It's addictive and they don't fully understand the dangers of CCP spyware and CCP controlled algorithm. It's like drugs addicts being passionate about drug use.

If I were China this is the move. I’m suspect this is the intention of the bill from the US end as well.

lol, you really think the US has "free Speech" and this is some unprecedented action that will tear us apart?

>the end result will likely be that TikTok will be sold to US owners

Why does everyone assume this is likely? The CCP has already said they would block a sale of TikTok. This happened a while ago - so the US saying TikTok must be sold is an effective ban. The misdirection of the wording of the ban is just dishonest.

> misdirection of the wording of the ban is just dishonest

Ban usually means you can't use it anymore. Take, for example, Google in mainland China. Banned without unusual circumvention. If TikTok refuses to sell to a non-Chinese owner, on the other hand, they get removed from app stores. Their website still works without any circumvention. Not banned. Even in the worst case.

1. You are moving the goalposts. Now it's not "they will be forced to sell", but "the website will still be available".

2. I am looking forward to seeing the justifications that will be trotted around once the USG torpedoes net neutrality and bans the website

> you are moving the goalposts. Now it's not "they will be forced to sell", but "the website will still be available"

Where did I set a goal post? What does the goal even represent in this metaphor? What counts as a ban?

The United States is capable of banning stuff. When we take down pirate websites, we're enacting a ban: domain seizures, asset freezes, criminal penalties and possibly sanctions. We can even go lightweight: say it's illegal to provide services to Americans (or more draconian, which I must add lines up with China's approach, make it illegal to access them) and then leave enforcemnt to the executive.

What we're doing here is milquetoast: sell enough to non-Chinese owners so they no longer have a controlling stake or distribute this from non-American servers and via the internet and sideloaded apps. Calling this a ban is like saying someone was banned from a restaurant because they arrived after it closed.

>Where did I set a goal post? What does the goal even represent in this metaphor?

It has gone from "not a ban" because they just have to sell, to "not a ban" because because the website is still available.

It's an effective ban because the CCP has already said they will not allow a TikTok sale. Congress knows there's no recourse for ByteDance. They aren't going to hand over the IP to a non-Chinese entity. If France said they were going to ban NVDA unless NVDA sells to a French national we would call it a ban.

>Calling this a ban is like saying someone was banned from a restaurant because they arrived after it closed.

The irony about this is that China has the same exact policy in the mainland, but no one argues whether or not Google is banned in China. Google used to be in China! China said Google had to censor some topics or they wouldn't be allowed to do business in China. Google opted to leave.

Nobody sits around pontificating that it technically wasn't a ban because all Google needed to do what follow Chinese law on censorship.

> It has gone from "not a ban" because they just have to sell, to "not a ban" because because the website is still available

These are both true, though. Again, if you want to see a ban, look at how Facebook is treated by China.

But fair enough, people are using the term "ban" inconsistently. I wouldn't say anyone's moving the goalposts as much as we're using an ambiguous term interchangeably.

> If France said they were going to ban NVDA unless NVDA sells to a French national we would call it a ban

This is tautology. You literally said if Sally were to do X to Andy unless {}, then X = X.

> Nobody sits around pontificating that it technically wasn't a ban because all Google needed to do what follow Chinese law on censorship

You can't go to Google.com in China. You will be able to go to TikTok.com and access its content freely after it's been, per your definition, banned. From a free-speech perspective, that seems material.

I get your point from a free-trade perspective. This is obviously not a free-trade bill. Maybe that's where the discussion is losing traction...

Why are you framing this in such a way that treats one party as having agency and the other party as being immovable? The US is not banning TikTok, they are posing stipulations towards its use and you believe the CCP when they say they won't comply with those stipulations. But why is that a ban, versus "the CCP refuses to let TikTok comply with US law?"

Do you consider Google banned in China? The CCP had stipulations for Google's continued business in China. It was unable/unwilling to follow them, so Google left (voluntarily, infact).

I've never seen anyone argue that Google isn't technically banned in China. It's clearly a ban when China does it.

Can you connect to the Internet in China and visit google.com?

Do you consider companies that refuse to comply with GDPR banned in the EU?

I don't recall the GDPR being created specifically to target one company that politicians disliked.

Yes. Is this even a contentious point? Despite the fact EU hasn't bothered to null-route an application that doesn't comply, they will impose onerous fines.

And what do companies do that don't want to comply to GDPR? They ban EU users. You can use the search bar here to find countless people talking about being banned. There's no ambiguity - there's only ambiguity when it comes to TikTok.

It's mostly a first mover thing.

If I purchase a car with low gas mileage, and then the EPA requires cars to have minimum gas milage, that "bans" my car. Even though technically, I could figure out some way to rebuild it to comply.

It's glossed over because it creates a more emotional response framing it like that rather than giving the technical details that reveal the actual situation is perhaps less sensational?

If by glossed over you mean put in quotes in the title and made clear in the first sentence of the article.

Sure, raise that to the original commenter.

Today's news is that ByteDance says they'd prefer just to shut down TikTok rather than sell because:

1) Their algorithms (presumably video recommendations) are proprietary and used by their other Chinese apps

2) TikTok revenue isn't that significant for them

Maybe these reasons are bogus, but I'd not be surprised if they do refuse to sell.

It bans American companies from providing services that distribute, maintain or update any sufficiently popular apps where a company is headquartered in, or has more than a 20% ownership share of the company held, in a country that has been determined to be a foreign adversary.

It is much, much broader than a 'tiktok ban', it applies to any company that fits that criteria. So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company. It's not just a ban, it simply won't exist on the internet for US users.

There are probably a bunch of companies that will be subject to this if it's upheld in court, and the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet. It'll also likely result in Chinese interests devesting down to >20% from US companies that they do not want banned, for much the same reasons.

Basically, this is the result of a bunch of tech-illiterate politicians who have no idea how any of this works, passing a law that looks good in news headlines without regard to the potential consequences. So business as usual on the hill.

Is this going to impact Riot Games' games (League of Legends, Valorant), the wildly popular American video game company which is owned by Tencent?

As people are pointing out, no. This isn't a blanket law, it requires per-case executive action to enforce.

What the law absolutely does do is make "Chinese Ownership" an existential risk to companies with software products with large numbers of US users. Riot, Epic et. al. will be strongly incentivised to get their PRC shareholders to divest, and in the future other companies will be disincentivized from accepting that kind of investment.

And surely that's intentional.

> it requires per-case executive action

Abuse of power in a nutshell.

Tencent also owns 40% of Epic Games, which wants its own AppStores on the mobile OSes.

If the current president decides that they're a threat to national security, then yes.

Lol, queue china writing a clear document on all the US stock their citizens and companies own. Just to mess with the USA.

Anything they sell just gives them more money to buy more ownership.

>"passing a law that looks good in news headlines"

It does not look good at all. It just shows that they have no trust in their own citizens. And maybe for a reason.

> So to put it bluntly, if the CCP bought 20% of reddit, reddit can't be distributed, maintained or updated by any US company.

Provided they have more than 1 million MAU (which they do, obviously). The president would also have to affirmatively ban it and report to Congress about the specific threat that company poses, and what assets need to be divested. TikTok is the only company written into the bill by Congress that doesn't require affirmative action by the president, or the report.

> the law very likely could be weaponized by the CCP to get things banned that they don't even own yet

Only if the president believes they should be banned.

1 million MAU is nothing. Throw up AdSense on something that gets 1m MAU and that pays for a single developer. Also, I don't like the President getting this kind of power over businesses. It's bad enough when they can make angry Twitter threats... now they can give them a corporate death penalty.

Sure, that's a valid concern to have, and I'm not saying the bill is a great idea. I'm just pointing out that there's nothing automatic about the process and the clock to divestment wouldn't immediately start ticking the moment a company crosses 20% Chinese ownership. The person I was responding to said the bill could get weaponized by the CCP to ban things via the threat of them acquiring more than 20% ownership, but that's not how the bill works.

The fact that it's not automatic is even worse. It means that the president can just target whoever they don't like.

The US has already done this with a different company, without passing a law[1]. I don't know what else to say, other than the TikTok algorithm must be some secret sauce and actually is being manipulated by Beijing and that's why they're making such a big deal about a forced sale in this case. Otherwise, this would just be a giant liquidity event for these senior business executives and that would be that.

Instead, the TikTok CEO is invoking the First Amendment and "freedom" to emotionally manipulate people into thinking Congress did something wrong here.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-03-06...

What's different is that it's owned by a communist country. Otherwise, it would just be a giant liquidity event.

I don't think it is possible or economically viable for ByteDance to sell TikTok under the terms set out, even if they wanted. Because of the shared code base with Douyin and the bill's requirements on severing ties between the two.

The likely outcome is that TikTok will stop operating in the US and continue in Europe and other places plus Douyin will continue in China.

Nope it doesn’t ban TikTok from having Chinese owners. TikTok could very well continue to have Chinese owners, and if so the US will ban the product domestically

China has made very clear they do not want ByteDance to sell. And that ByteDance should follow Chinese law.

Hmm I wonder why..

I think it's unlikely they will sell and it will instead be removed from US markets. China would prefer that we don't have another successful social networking platform, and they would like to keep their spyware for use in other countries.

China has signaled that they would block a sale.

Which makes the case of china interference seems more plausible now.

It really isn't, it's not in anybody's national interest to allow other companies to force a sale. It would set a terrible precedent where any Chinese tech company could see their Western/International operations get captured and therefore cause major loss of expected returns.

It is already well known that tiktok ai models and algorithms trained on Chinese citizen data is non-exportable, so tiktok will never be able to sell to a non-chinese entity.

The AI model doesn't much matter. The algorithms do matter. CCP will ban the sale. It doesn't really matter if they are banning the data or algorithm.

No it doesn't, were the roles reversed with say Facebook the US wouldn't think twice before blocking the sale.

In the case of a role-reversal here Facebook was just banned in China from the start. There was never a sale opportunity in the first place.

You're focusing too much on the what and not the why. Banning all foreign business in certain market segments to protect your domestic industry is fine (because it's all countries) Banning Chinese businesses because we're imposing trade restrictions with China is fine (because it affects everyone). Hell banning specific companies because they don't comply with local laws is fine too (because it's the same rules for everyone).

Fuck this one particular subsidiary majority owned by a Chinese company rubs me the wrong way because China doesn't do this to us. As a general rule US companies can operate in China and US companies are allowed to own stake in Chinese companies.

To me this is an escalation of the fair-weather, "I don't like you, you don't like me but we can still be professionals when it comes to mutually beneficial trade" attitude we've had.

The easiest way to understand this issue is to ask yourself why American social media companies can’t operate in China with the same level of operational freedom that Tik Tok can in the United States. Once you have those answers you will understand why it needs to be banned from the perspective of the United States.

> Fuck this one particular subsidiary majority owned by a Chinese company rubs me the wrong way because China doesn't do this to us

Unintentionally funny comment when positioned next to its sibling about this exact thing happening to FB in a targeted way back in '09

> Facebook was just banned in China from the start.

It was not. It was only banned in 2009 after it was allegedly used to organise protests that escalated into deadly race riots in Xinjiang.

Facebook didn’t start to become globally popular until around this time. In 2006/2007 when I joined you still needed a .edu or in my case a .mil email address to access it. Basically as soon as it started becoming popular in China it was banned.

The organized protests[1] were just a convenient excuse. Race riots have occurred in many countries and you can link those back to various social media platforms which were used to organize protests.

[1] The protests as you describe them… there is a lot to unpack here and it’s not a good enough excuse to ban American social media companies. But if you think it is, then the US also gets to arbitrarily ban foreign social media companies.

The US would not block the sale.

It's somewhat of a sinophobic/red scare dogwhistle and provincial protectionism insecurity gasp of declining global influence because it doesn't necessarily matter who owns it when day-to-day operations are led by the same people with the same interests and allegiances as before. Domestic politicians compete to look tough by seeming to attack convenient, distant foreign adversaries in symbolic ways.

US news media is able to spin headlines to maximize drama and outrage for the chumbox sales while misinforming readers. The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world and so US mainstream news media doesn't have to seek excellence in evidence, integrity, accuracy, or precision.

If this is Sinophobic, China must be pissing its pants terrified of the United States. It's a shame for the two of them I guess.

>The reason is Americans, in aggregate, are under-educated compared to the rest of the world

Objectively wrong. It's one of the most educated countries in the world, just mediocre compared to the rest of the OECD. They're more educated than China, no matter how well a small number of urban Chinese students do on international standardised tests.

Comparing wintermelon and oranges. Live a few more decades and then your definition of "objective" may face reality. The higher education system of the US is selectively excellent, but 0.5-0.75% of Americans have top tier university degrees. Only 39% of Americans have any college degree at all, but this includes online and colleges that accept anyone. Fewer and fewer Americans read books of substance, or any books at all. America is deeply anti-intellectual from its founding arising from the culture of English settler merchants, with a tiny core of intelligentsia that grew around exiled religious movements.

a. Quantitatively

- Reading: Canada is 3rd, America is 24th

- Science: Canada is 7th, America is also 24th

- Math: Canada is 9th, America is 39th

^ There should be negligible differences between them given vast similarities.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/02/15/u-s-stude...

b. Qualitatively - Meet and talk to enough people from Asia (Japan, China, Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China) and Europe (Iberian and Eastern) & UK. And then talk to many Americans from anywhere other than from the coasts. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, MAGA, and QAnon are the mainstream norm rather than the exception. The difference is: they don't have government censorship, a totalitarian regime, or social credit habits as an excuse for their ignorance. There are billboards with borderline racist MAGA slogans in the South US.

In china in 2018, 17% completed tertiary education. If you're comparing the worth of society by tertiary educational achievement, than Canada is beating America and crushing China. I already said that Americans educational achievements are mediocre relative to the rest of the OECD. However I'd bet money that its PISA scores would hold up next to China's if China actually tested the same percentage of the population that America did.

One country has borderline racist MAGA slogans. The other has Han Chauvinism and forced propaganda for a totalitarian state. There's plenty of conspiracy theories and misinformation in both countries. Here's a study showing that 13.8% of people in China considered GMO foods as a form of bioterrorism targeted at China[1].

I'm not saying America doesn't have problems, but most of the criticisms you lobbed at America can just as easily be lobbed at China, and yet China seems to be economically expanding rather rapidly relative to America or most places. I'll also say being highly educated isn't all roses, every country with tertiary education levels as high or higher than Canada's has a well sub-replacement birthrate - the education levels you idealise aren't even independantly sustainable.

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41538-018-0018-4

There is another possibility. TikTok exits the us market.

That's been widely discussed. But it's basically the same end result - for users.

[dead]

I see this as a national security threat that it is. The potential for abuse from the CCP on the minds of US users exists as does the tracking the app could do and every data point that is generated is stored and potentially useful for blackmail or otherwise on members of Congress or others.

The US and its allies got rid of Chinese telecom hardware from their networks for the very same reasons now it’s time to do the same with TikTok.

Would you let an enemy supply you with the very same kit you would use to fight them? No. Would you let that same adversary install an app on your most used device to watch and track you? Hah no.

A spin to a US company is not enough. It needs to cease operating in the US because there’s no surety that even with a spin data and sharing won’t get back to ByteDance China.

Parallel to this we need a federal national data privacy law that protects us but also cracks down on the huge industry of data brokers selling Americans’ data to anyone that has cash.

To be honest, the use of the word "enemy" is far too strong, it sounds like we are at war with them while they somehow supply half of our goods at prices we've grown accustomed to. "Adversary" is a weaker word that is more apt (which you use later), where the US is not on the friendliest terms with China but isn't in an outright war with them.

Words matter, at the very least to avoid starting nationalistic flamewars here on HN.

> "Adversary" is a weaker word that is more apt

> Words matter, at the very least to avoid starting nationalistic flamwars here on HN.

I agree!

Back in Arcade Machines time, when a player is busy playing a fighting game, Street Fighter, I guess, and another person inserts a coin to play against him, the game pauses and a message that reads "Here's come a new challenger" pops up, so I think challenger would serve the purpose somehow!

I don't want to compare life to video games and I think comparing a genocidal dictatorship that ruthlessly suppresses its citizens and occupies foreign lands (Tibet for example) a challenger is a bit of a downplay

> I don't want to compare life to video games

Not that this is relevant to anything, but if it were: no one was doing this.

The US has an official list of enemies and that includes China. I believe the list was introduced under Trump and is determined by the sitting president:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...

Others are calling this out but they're not able to state why:

They're listed as adversaries and not enemies because aiding an enemy country suddenly unlocks a litany of other crimes.

Enemy is very specifically defined: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/2204

Adversary is very specifically defined: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...

Your link names them "adversaries". Its an official list of adversaries.

Yes. They make it sound much nicer.

It is about connotation. I play Go against you. You are my opponent or, if it is a tournament, I could also call you my adversary(connotation is a bit stronger, less matter of fact like opponent, more around competition now). After the game, we sit down and have tea and laugh.

Now let's explore the connotation of enemy. Playing Go against you calling you my enemy is outright wrong. However, if you were my enemy, I would not drink tea and have a laugh with you afterwards. I wouldn't even be playing a game of Go against you, but rather trying to do other not so nice things to you.

Such is the nature of connotation. Being erudite helps here ;) .

The word enemy is not used on that page at all. It says adversaries

The US is in a cold war with China as long as China is open to the idea of the use of military force on its neighbors, including Taiwan. A cold war is the only alternative to surrendering the free Taiwanese people to communist rule, and a hot war.

US is also open to the idea to use military force and not only on their neighbours but also on countries far away.

US is in cold war with China because China might soon be economicaly getting upper hand.

The only way that China gets an upper hand economically is by selling products to the US and the Western world.

If they enter into a conflict where they are cordoned off, their export oriented economy would crash immediately.

A war between China and USA is impossible to win for either sides, due to both military size, budgets, interdependence, and nuclear weapons arsenal. And this is why it's a cold war.

> The only way that China gets an upper hand economically is by selling products to the US and the Western world.

I am not a geopolitician, but this looks like a little too simplistic perspective, doesn’t it? I mean China diversified its wallet, including by helping to create infrastructures in Africa where there is still a largely growing young population (in contrast to the general trend in the occidental countries, or even what the long standing single child policy led to in China).

If western demand goes away, you think African demand can compensate for that? Domestic would be more realistic, and even there China has nowhere near enough domestic consumption to keep the system running, let alone sustain historical growth rates.

Not really. China has so much manufacturing power that if they limited exports and focused on manufacturing for inland it would have major economic shifts for both china and the west. That's the problem with the world putting all of their manufacturing eggs in one basket

Sell domestically to whom? Domestic buyers ain't buying. That's why they are exporting.

I don't get your first paragraph. Of course the US is open to the idea of using military force against, well, pretty much anyone. I don't see how that's relevant, other than as some form of pointing out hypocrisy? Or are you actually saying that "because the US is prepared to do its own military action, it categorically doesn't enter cold wars with other countries based on which military actions the other country could do"? I don't understand.

Hypocrisy mostly. You can’t tell others to stop doing what you keep doing.

The US considers all of LATAM as his own back yard. Why can’t China consider all of Asia as its own back yard?

This is what upsets people, the sheer size of hypocrisy.

I was more interested in their answer, I don't think you have much more insight into what they meant than I do

Hypocrisy mostly.

So two wrongs make a right?

If your military is powerful enough, yes.

The point is that the US has set a precedence on military power around the world. The US told the world that using military power for your own country's benefit is ok to do. So why can't China?

No the GP, but their point is that the US can't complain about how China treats the rest of Asia when it looks so similar to how the US has treated Latin America.

That doesn't mean either side was right, or that one justifies the other. Only that the pot should into call the kettle black.

>or that one justifies the other

That is absolutely the implication here.

I definitely read it differently, but maybe I did misunderstand them.

The commenter's focus on hypocrisy reads to me more like they take issue with the US calling China out for this rather then justifying what China is doing because they aren't the only ones.

Without the West, China would collapse economically. I mean literally collapse, ever heard of tofu-dreg?

Exactly. It’s Cold War 2.0 this time we trade with them …

The two blocks traded in Cold War 1.0 - there was even direct trade between the US and the Soviet Union - although no denying that trade was a lot smaller than US-China trade is today

No I meant what I wrote. But I meant it about the CCP not the average Chinese person.

China wants to replace the US and the west as the global power. This will lead to upheaval and likely a war. When that finally comes to pass it behooves the west and the US to protect itself from anything that could undermine its own protection. In order to win a war you need hearts and minds. Not a populace that is being programmed to think despotic neo-communist-capitalist-when-it-suits-them rulers in China are somehow paper tigers.

Let’s compromise here: they are adversaries now but I think they are preparing to become enemies in every sense of the word. If they invade Taiwan, shed blood in the conflict over the breached rusting ship in the Phillipines, continue supporting Putin in his illegal attempt to annex Ukraine then yes they will eventually become enemies.

Even in the times of the Great Empires, there were always other great powers - perhaps not peers, but powerful enough to be truly independent. This era most of us grew up in where the US was this unchallenged global hegemonic power was a major outlier in history, owing exclusively to rare circumstance. That being that after the USSR suddenly collapsed, there were not only politicians in the US that wanted to be rulers of the world, but also no other powers that could even remotely compare on a technological or economic level except Japan. But Japan itself also began a rapid economic collapse just about the time that the USSR collapsed.

And now not only were these circumstances rare, but they were also inherently liminal. Technological and economic edges fade rapidly, especially in light of major population level differences. I see no reason to think China imagines they could or even wants to be anything like the US was 30 years ago. The world is returning to its more natural multipolar state, as it's more or less always been.

If my reading of history is correct while there might have been more than one power or more or less equal powers they all vied to be the one most powerful one. I think that’s the natural order of things and the question is do you want the west lead by the US or one of her allies to be that leader or China or her allies.

How exactly do you think China is going to be able to "lead" the US? This is what I mean. The era of one hegemonic power being able to be the sole judge and authority on every single action around the globe was an extremely brief and freak incident in history, and that time is over. It required an extreme economic/tech imbalance that has rarely existed throughout history, no longer exists, and will probably not exist again for the foreseeable future. So whoever calls themselves the 'most powerful' is ultimately irrelevant - it would just be a mostly meaningless title.

I would much rather live in a world with a balance of power than one with a concentration of one.

It’s by no means a given that a more even distribution of power leads to war or China ‘replacing the US’ as the only one. But an attitude where everyone thinks so, ironically, might.

History is bloody when there is no concentration of power. Historically peace happens when there is a strong hegemon.

The idea that your population can be "programmed" in the first place is the antithesis of american ideology. The whole point of freedom is you're free to think and say whatever you want and society has to deal with that. Society either rejects the ideas or accepts them but either choice still represents an active choice, an exercise of freedom. Saying that people are being "programmed" reveals a rather shocking lack of respect for the intellectual freedom and autonomy of their fellow man.

I’m pretty sure that I have been programmed. By my parents, by my friends, my education, my environment.

Change any of those things in a significant way and I’m sure I would be a different person now. I love the idea that I am an autonomous agent of my own that exists self evidently outside of those bounds, I just don’t think it’s true.

Then humanity today would approximately the same as humanity of its first era. I don't really understand the tendency to deny one's own agency. We were all once teenagers. And one of the first things we do as our brain starts to develop is rebel against the authority of a time. And, for some, that spirit of independence and rebellion never ends.

>The idea that your population can be "programmed" in the first place is the antithesis of american ideology.

The fact that you might be programmed to hate/dislike/fear China despite, I'm guessing having never been to China, is proof that America also programs you, just in another way.

Hint: Mostly through media.

People are dumb, and like to believe the first thing they see, so "programming" a population is as easy as showing everyone something so often that it is all they see, tge human mind is incredibly malleable, and many big tech companies employ teams of psychologists to make best use of that, given china is a adversary or enemy or whatever you wanna call it, giving them a pipeline by which they can have direct access to tens of millions of American minds is a little silly to say the least, you do not win a war by winning battles, you win a war by breaking the enemies will to fight "Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting" Sun Tzu said that, and I'd say he knows a little more about fighting then you do pal because he invented it

Were this true then any of the countless authoritarian states which ended up in complete control of all media, news, and even the ability to enter or leave the country - would have had a nation full of fully misinformed and obedient people. Instead it's invariably the exact opposite. The USSR is one of the best examples. They not only controlled all media, all news, and even who was allowed to leave the country. Yet trust completely collapsed as the state of nation completely collapsed.

With them picking Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, the term enemy is rather applicable at this point.

By the same logic with the Israel-Palestine issue, the US is currently the only state visibly blocking calls for immediate ceasefires and establishing a Palestinian state (which is essential for a two-state solution) at the UN and it can therefore be called the enemy of the most of the world.

Edit: improve grammar and wording

I agree. However, banning Tiktok won't change anything. If Tiketok is banned another company will take its place.

Now coming to the subject of Facebook, Twitter etc, these apps pose the same threat to nations other than the US. As in, these apps serve US interests by pushing US propaganda onto the rest of the world and constantly monitors/tracks the individuals who have these apps installed.

So a better option is to ban any type of tracking - on all apps. But it is extremely unlikely that this will be made into law.

Yes. Two pronged. Much stronger US consumer data privacy laws including a culling of the business of data brokers. And a total ban of TikTok in the US.

Why should the US to other governments jobs? I say this while not being American.

I sometimes get upset when I see that every privacy and safety law is written to protect only US citizens, when it is the US that creates and fuels those predatory companies. And I understand they basically don’t care if they destroy everyone if it benefits them. Great. But what are our governments doing?

>I sometimes get upset when I see that every privacy and safety law is written to protect only US citizens,

Huh? Where did you get this idea? The GPDR in the EU isn't a US law, it's an EU law to protect EU citizens.

The US government really doesn't do much to protect the privacy of US citizens, certainly nothing at the level of the EU's laws.

US and EU are very alike, I'm from neither.

No they are not. Just today, it made news here in HN that the (US) airlines will have to compensate their customers for cancelations/delays. EU has that for something like 20 years [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...

I am not saying that US should protect the rights of non-citizens but this will likely result in retaliatory action by other nations on apps from the US.. though I won't hold my breath

It may not solve it, but it will change it. The amount of influence these apps have on people make them a prime target for planting and spreading misinformation.

The problem is with the bill being legal.

For example, US citizens are free to listen to chinese radio stations, or chinese TV channels, read chinese books. Why the government needs to restrict what US citizens have access to in this specific case?

Because TikTok not only has the tracking potential of BigTech, but it is a serious competitor to some of them.

It's just protectionism, like banning the Huawei phones (not talking about the infrastructure, that's different) or banning DJI drones. It just sounds better to mention national security than to say "we don't want others to do to us what we do to them, and we don't want them to compete with us".

Your thoughts leave out one thing:

Radio and newspapers(including internet articles here in general) are a one way street. With Tiktok, you not only get access to the users device via the app, but it is also a two way street. Tiktok gets to choose what it feeds you.

And what you describe is also true in a lot of countries(I can choose my medium). However, with newspapers, radio and television what you feed the population is readily visible to anyone. I can turn on the telly to see what is being streamed. This is not the case with an app. Unless the government watches you 24/7 and I doubt that. The costs are prohibitive. The thing that does exist is metadata. If I were to visit terrorist.com or bombmanual.org.uk I would make a list. But watching TikTok all that is being seen is me communicating with content-servers(here the subject that needs to be watched also changes from the user(me) to the proprietor(the company)) from them and protocolling the content of everything watched, unless you break encryption at scale, and monitor everyone is also prohibitive. Not to mention analysis of the content. So Tiktok is the perfect vehicle for subversion of a foreign nation if I want to play for time.

Yes, but you think that possibility of government oversight/monitoring is an inherent necessity for government permitting any kind of media to operate in the US?

If doesn't work in many cases anyway, Government has no way to track who is tuning in and listening to hostile radio broadcasts.

Even it might be hostile propaganda, First ammendment protects both publishing and consuming content, without any "national security" considerations. But US lawmakers are now seemingly keen to introduce such conditions in the publishing and consuming of content.

During the cold war it was perfectly legal for the Soviet Life magazine to be published in the US and for people to buy and read it.

First ammendment really does say that "Congress shall make no law .." without any caveats for national security or even war-time exemptions.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the SCOTUS.

All very good points! Which apply to all social networks, not only TikTok. The difference with TikTok being that the US do not have control over it, and they are not used to that.

The US law in question actually isn't specific to TikTok either. That's all that is brought up in the media and by politicians because it gets more attention, but the law is much .ore wide reaching.

This is the government grabbing the authority to ban online services that they deem a national risk. The bill would honestly have been much more benign if it was a few pages spelling out a specific ban on TokTok. Hell, I don't think they'd even need a law to have Google and Apple pull the app from the app stores.

I would generalize it. With radio, television and newspapers you have national sovereignty.

The internet broadened that and introduced apps. So I would see this as a correction rather than anything else.

The bill is unconstitutional. See the recent Montana ruling.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-eff-applaud-rul...

No it isn’t. One, national security is a federal matter not a state matter. Two, Montana outright banned the app whereas this bill forces divestiture. If TikTok doesn’t want to divest, too bad, bye bye.

Extremely difficult to make a national security case for restricting speech or access to content. A court will also want to see a specific cause.

Much of the Patriot Act is probably unconstitutional but the government had 9/11 as a national security justification. No similar justification exists regarding TikTok.

Let’s see. Lawyers are split on this. The national security context is the strongest case. And as an American and a voter I support this 100%. In exceptional cases I support Congress banning companies especially if they happen to originate from hostile nations, us hedge fund investors be damned.

As an American, why don't you prefer allowing consumers to leverage their free will and just make clear what the risks of using TikTok are?

The government getting into the business of banning companies, and more specifically banning online services, is very, very dangerous in my opinion. This one move effectively creates the need for our own great firewall, starting with a list of only one service but with the executive power to grow that list as more "national security threats" are named.

Because governments recieve the mandate from the people to take up things like national security on information we are not privy to.

In this -- extreme case -- the exceptional case of banning the company I think is warranted.

Secondly, half the country voted for DJT. Some insignificant percentage believed his lies and doubted science and such during COVID. Mistakes were indeed made by governments and scientists and public trust in them was strained ... but it proved to me, at least, that the general US public is not educated enough or are just too hopped on their social media opium to care enough to really weigh the threat that TikTok plays. And in this case I defer to the intelligence community and those who operate in the area of national defense to handle this. Seems enough of congress and the senate agree with me.

If banning TikTok is a national security requirement then they should just ban TikTok rather than create a law that grants new peers to the government. I don't have the codes handy, but I'm 99% sure the powers are already in place for the government to have forced he ban of TikTok without new laws if national security was at risk.

I'm hesitant to assume people are uneducated because of who they vote for. Talking about Covid and the pandemic response, a vast majority of our politicians and health leaders were knowingly spouting off lies in the name of what they thought was best for us. Again, I can't pin that on any one person, even Fouci. The system broke down and that says nothing meaningful about the average voter.

That said, an educated populace is a fundamental need in a democracy and one that the US founders were well aware of. We don't have that today, whether by incompetence or malice our major societal systems reinforce obedience and subservience. We need more people following their curiosity wherever it leads, and we won't get there by continuing to further lean into a distrust of the general public or by making everyone's daily lives more and more complicated and stretched with less time to spend however each person wants to spend it.

You make it sound like that is a clever gotcha that a judge will rubber-stamp.

When has the US forced a private corporation to sell up via Congressional decree in peacetime?

Seems to me that Congress is betting that Bytedance will capitulate instead of taking the case to the Supreme Court.

It’s Trump’s right wing court. They don’t care for China. They are hawks and I think they’ll side with the govt on this.

It could happen, but not overnight. SC cases take years to resolve. Even if this one was fast-tracked, it will create a media and PR circus that whatever administration is in power will not want.

Exactly this. The strongest case that the government can make in keeping this bill from being overturned in the courts is the national security one.

Whenever these posts about limiting chinese influence pop up, a bunch of whataboutism comments against the US pop up. I'm thankful that hackernews highlights new accounts

How do we know a China man doesn’t work at Sony and is listening in to all PlayStations In households? Actually with all these Alexa devices and so many employees at Amazon it’s probably best to make sure all these devices are controlled by the government. Yes we have freedom of speech and privacy but no where in there did it say all communication shouldn’t be owned and and monitored by your government. It’s for the greater good.

Yea that mind set sounds awful.

Spies exist, yes that is a problem but it is a different problem.

And the reach of one individual is just not the same as a nation state. I’m not sure I get your point.

CIA and FBI propaganda campaigns on US and Europe's population are however acceptable somehow.

Let's be critical here: We should differenciate between spying(passive) and misinformation/manipulation(active)

Mentioning propaganda you choose the latter.

Pray tell what are those campaigns you talk about? If you are posing this question you must have at least some in mind and ready at hand to share.

Remember all those "independant" experts that were calling for the invasion of Irak because of those WMD?

Or all those action movies relying on leased military equipments under the condition they will never portray the US military in a bad manner?

Or Operation Mockingbird during the cold war?

Those are all examples of US propaganda.

There is much I left aside ofc, including anything related to the support of the ongoing "military operation" against the palestinian people.

I know that tactic and the response to this argument is: Two wrongs do not make it right. Just because the they did a wrong the others should be permitted to do it or continue doing it until the other party stops...wink wink? The answer to that is NO. That is whataboutism and a smoke screen.

But let's entertain those smokescreens even just to see where it leads:

The second Gulf war was outright wrong agreed. The hawks had their day and it was a dark one and all that followed because of it. A falling from grace. No argument there. But it is not an argument one should make when arguing over operations done by other countries especially since it is not related and long past and the current subject of discussion is happening right now.

The action movie thing... it is their equipment, they may provide it under any condition as they see fit. I wouldn't want to lend my neighbor a canister either if I knew he chooses to use it to write not so funny stuff in burning letters into my front lawn. I would not be surprised if other militaries would do the same thing if they were to lend their equipment at all.

>Or Operation Mockingbird during the cold war?

Was that even a real operation?

> There is much I left aside ofc, including anything related to the support of the ongoing "military operation" against the palestinian people.

That one is a doozy. The US made it clear that Israel should do more to shield civilians from harm. But let's be clear. Israel and the US are the wrong party to be mad at. If you want to be mad: be mad at Hamas, at Iran for supporting Hamas and at China and Russia for using it in a game of Geopolitical checkers in the UN security council. Without the scourge that is Hamas, who still continue to shoot missiles from South Gaza and who deny a sovereign nation the right to exist, non of this would've happened. Hamas uses the Palestinian people as shields, uses humanitarian institutions(e.g. hospitals) as hide outs and ammunition storages and subverts aide organizations created to help the people in the Gaza strip. They also slaughtered innocent civilians and kidnapped 100s a few months ago. And the people in Gaza should also be mad at their long ago elected inapt and impotent president and their dysfunctional governing bodies. And their inability to face down those terrorists hiding amongst them.(I cannot blame them though, it is a horrid and couraguous thing to do in any circumstance.)

And let's entertain the scenario that the US would step out.... well the entire Middle East would implode or explode like a powder keg. Trade would also suffer considering the shipping routes, oil and other things. And then Iran with Russia's and/or China's blessing would then do evil things... not a very comforting thought either, especially if you give a hoot about religion.

QAnon is not really accepted.

Perhaps not broadly within the US, but certainly by a handful of U.S. congressional representatives .. and seemingly seriously to boot, not just as an affectation of convenience.

gp is probably referring to hollywood type of prop not the imageboard born type

> A spin to a US company is not enough. It needs to cease operating in the US because there’s no surety that even with a spin data and sharing won’t get back to ByteDance China.

Can we apply this logic to Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc?

I personally only support a ban of TikTok if we apply the logic universally. Such services are weapons, and weapons are sure to be weaponized.

All centrally mass collected, plaintext or effectively plaintext data will sooner or later be co-opted by state actors.

Best to ban the practice of bulk plaintext data storage entirely unless it can all be E2EE and anonymozed to the point of being useless to the companies storing it.

> Can we apply this logic to Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc? I personally only support a ban of TikTok if we apply the logic universally. Such services are weapons, and weapons are sure to be weaponized. All centrally mass collected, plaintext or effectively plaintext data will sooner or later be co-opted by state actors. Best to ban the practice of bulk plaintext data storage entirely unless it can all be E2EE and anonymozed to the point of being useless to the companies storing it.

We can ostensibly anyway regulate the American social media companies whereas the Chinese ones are a black box even though they might operate here under an American entity. That’s why we are here. They claimed they didn’t share data but they do. And that’s how the whole algorithm and value works

Should other countries do the same with US companies? US government regularly (ab)uses FISA to get data on foreign nationals: https://transparency.meta.com/reports/government-data-reques...

> Parallel to this we need a federal national data privacy law that protects us but also cracks down on the huge industry of data brokers selling Americans’ data to anyone that has cash.

And also dismantle the law where the US can request any data on any person, even abroad, if the company is US-based

Given the well documented Russian tendency to wage nation hostile whisper campaigns and app algorithms natural tendencies to promote such speech we are in place where every country both democratic and not have CIA levels of disorder, new mental health issues, and general productivity drain introduced by social apps. I think every country should take a hard look at what is happening and should consider banning or time limiting some U.S. apps.

I believe the underlying narrative of TikTok was with government control the algorithms would be purposefully tuned to promote disorder elsewhere which is a level of control the U.S. government does not have over U.S. companies and they were jealous (although with the level of information control during Desert Storm I am not 100% certain on that). However, I think this law was very premature and should have required evidence of tuning or actual war. While soldiers may have apps they should not the spies should know better.

The China side where they have banned encryption apps also seems to be war preparation. A digital iron curtain while depressing for the population behind it is not something that can be torn down from the outside. A per app legal war seems an unfeasible use of congressional time when many Chinese smart device control apps require location to function and are on many phones. This also appears to be an opening shot by congress for putting up a U.S. national firewall if TikTok just leaves all US offices and continues business through web based offerings.

It is called a fortified democracy. And absolute democracy like the Weimarer Republik is a dangerous thing. All modern democracies are fortified these days. And it is good that they are. And yes if the US is caught with the hand in the cookie jar the nation in question is not happy, but there is a difference: Spying is passive and not influencing the democratic process of the nation or disrupting it. The concern with Tiktok is that it is active, trying to disrupt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T_Lu1S0sII

Also, unlike the Bytedance and the Chinese Government, US companies do not run intelligence operations. They are in it solely for the money, otherwise the NSA wouldn't have had to snoop on Google in 2013(?).

and this point

> And also dismantle the law where the US can request any data on any person, even abroad, if the company is US-based

I find questionable. It is too blanketed. There are international criminals afoot after all. Red Letters do have their purpose as do international treaties for law enforcement to cooperate across borders in a bespoke manner in accordance with their and international laws.

> I find questionable. It is too blanketed. There are international criminals afoot after all. Red Letters do have their purpose as do international treaties for law enforcement to cooperate across borders in a bespoke manner in accordance with their and international laws.

There's a difference between "Hey, France, we would like this info on a known criminal" and "U.S.-based companies have to turn over all data on any person regardless of that data location or the nationality of the person in question".

That's basically the basis for both Schrems I and Schrems II.

Edit: See also CLOUD Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

--- start quote ---

The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil

--- end quote ---

> ... via warrant or subpoena to provide ....

This is crucial. Legal due process. Also

> ..... U.S.-based technology companies ....

Other jurisdictions have something similar, every company must adhere to the laws of the jurisdiction they want to operate in. You don't like it as a company, not a problem just don't incorporate in the US and live with the repercussion.

There is nothing that suggests that it is out of the ordinary or malicious.

Where it becomes interesting is access without a warrant, or with a muzzle attached, at large scale. That is the clandestine stuff. The purview of intelligence agencies.

That has been addressed by the EU with legislation; privacy shield was not really the hit, but guess what: MS complied. https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-roll-out-data-b... so spooks from the US will now have a harder time accessing user data at scale without a warrant.

> This is crucial. Legal due process.

That is entirely US-based and ignores any laws or regulations of other countries.

> Other jurisdictions have something similar, every company must adhere to the laws of the jurisdiction they want to operate in.

The key: operate. The US claims data from those companies even if the data and the operations happen in foreign countries.

> That has been addressed by the EU with legislation

EU legislation does not negate US laws. CLOUD Act is still there. And that is a huge issue for any country dealing with US companies.

>Also, unlike the Bytedance and the Chinese Government, US companies do not run intelligence operations.

Is this a joke?

No. Feel free to educate me though. Only request I have, nothing older than 30 years please as I feel it may not be relevant any longer and before long we would argue about the antebellum period and what have you not. And it must be large scale.

> Should other countries do the same with US companies? US government regularly (ab)uses FISA to get data on foreign nationals

This is already in process in case of EU: https://noyb.eu/en/update-cnil-decides-eu-us-data-transfer-g...

This decision is based on Schrems II, which does not really apply anymore since the DPF. Though the latter is already being challenged.

> Should other countries do the same with US companies?

Absolutely.

Can someone please explain to me what the security threat is? I still haven't understood it.

If it's that China will know more about Americans through data ingestion, they can already do that. Americans willingly upload every little bit of their lives to YouTube, Twitch, and tons of other platforms. Not to mention that Temu is the most downloaded shopping app in the US. And what kind of attack can TikTok information provide that other publicly available online information scraped from other social media sites cannot?

If it's that China can show American citizens a curated list of topics and videos to make Americans think certain ways or vote certain ways, then I absolutely think that's a 1A problem. That's the exact same rhetoric tons of repressive Communist countries used and still use to deny people the freedom to read books from outside, watch movies from outside, read newspapers from outside, etc. And I'm never going to accept the idea that information (even full on lies) so dangerous that people shouldn't be allowed to see them.

I *think* the main national security argument is that TikTok can tweak the algorithm to incite discord and inflame conflicts within the US. They can do this far more effectively from their own platform than by doing it on other social networks via bots and fake accounts.

I tend to come down with the same opinion as you though. It's all still essentially a first amendment issue and the negatives I listed aren't going to disappear if TikTok goes away.

"Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed." - President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Yeah, unfortunately "inciting discord" and "inflaming conflicts" is very well protected by the First Amendment. It's the entire negative consequence of truly allowing free speech (not counting movie theater fire exceptions). I guess we're gonna throw that out all on a whim in 2 weeks...

> Can someone please explain to me what the security threat is? I still haven't understood it.

Facial recognition database and tracking people at a global scale.

With advances in computing power and unsupervised machine learning, correlating a person with the person's surroundings is now largely or fully automated – what used to take forensic experts weeks, months or years to hunt down a person by poring over indirect clues in photographs or CCTV camera footage, is now almost instantenous.

Remember, TikTok is not just topless teenagers twerking on the camera, it is used by people to take short videos at random locations (and the locations are already easify to classify and account for), so if you happen to be a dissident (or a person of interest in general) hiding from the CCP, and you happened to have walked past a TikTok user shooting a short video and you got in the shot, your identity is matched up and your current location is revealed automatically, in near real time or with a short delay.

I have almost no doubt that people in TikTok videos are already digitised, and their faceprints are sunk into a gigantic database behind the Great Firewall. It is easy to project what other kinds of nefarious abuse are possible when such datasets are available.

Why is a facial recognition database dangerous though? The vast majority of Americans publicly upload pictures and videos of their faces online in a way that it would be trivial for any nation state to gather them up.

Everything you've pointed to can be done already by mining the publicly available treasure trove of YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc. A pretty small team can scrape these sites and do what you're insinuating.

And lastly, I still don't see the danger of releasing this info? I mean, can't any foreigner travelling on a tourist visa record public vistas for 30 days and essentially do the same thing?

> With advances in computing power and unsupervised machine learning, correlating a person with the person's surroundings is now largely or fully automated – what used to take forensic experts weeks, months or years to hunt down a person by poring over indirect clues in photographs or CCTV camera footage, is now almost instantenous.

I don't know of any system capable of doing what you describe. But if such a system existed it could just use publicly available videos from Facebook and Instagram. It wouldn't need its own social media platform to feed it data.

Such a system would be built on orders of the state and it would not be publicly or widely advertised, esp. in mainland China. Russia, for instance, has built SORM (deep packet introspection of the ISP traffic at the nationwide scale) – to monitor all internet activities of its citizens (on demand, not constantly), and its technical architecture is not widely known.

Having a direct feed of videos being uploaded from the user's device is also advantageous as the higher resolution of the original video will provide more details before it is recomompressed for long term storage in a smaller resolution. Most importantly, Instagram and Twitter won't allow uncontrolled access to the content they host whereas a Chinese company simply does not have a choice and has to serve the content up on its state demands.

Until proven otherwise, it is safer to project that such a system exists.

Deep packet introspection is a completely different problem from the kind of facial recognition of people in video backgrounds that you envisage. Videos uploaded from cell phones are already MPEG-4 compressed and don't need re-encoding to be served. While it is true that social media companies don't allow unfettered access to their data, server farms for scraping web sites are a dime a dozen. I don't agree that it is safe to assume that systems there is no evidence for exists. It's one step removed from Chinese mind control viruses.

Sounds like you have been watching Travelers - specifically the episodes where the Director is looking for Traveler 001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series)

I don't think China are going to find their Dissident in TikTok videos any time soon. The false positive rate on even the best facial recognition is way too high for tracking individuals globally.

That a foreign nation with aims not aligned with the US has the dominant social network with the CAPABILITY to use this influence to influence the US, collect data, shape the minds of youths and future voters etc etc. that is enough for me.

>the CAPABILITY to use this influence to influence the US

But this is communist era logic used in some countries to this day to ban "foreign" and "corrupting" materials. Forgive me if it smells like repression and tastes like repression, I think it is repression. Shaping the minds of youths is not the exclusive purview of the US political class. That's some 1984 logic...

It is because it is the adversary who controls the algorithms and suggestions.

The establishment wants and needs a monopoly in shaping the opinions and thoughts of its citizens.

> then I absolutely think that's a 1A problem

Not from US so I had to check the 1A:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"

"or of the press" sounds like it applies here but does 1A covers also foreign companies?

Why trade with enemy at all? Why do money transfers? Mutual investments? Why let enemy people live in your country?

Every step you do to isolate yourself from your enemy makes them even more your enemy.

At the end of this process is war. Completely unsurprising. Pretty much inevitable.

Alternatively you could accept that you are loosing competition in some fields without turning it into mortal conflict.

Now, let's have other countries doing the same to Meta, Google, Microsoft and the likes. They all collect the data and send them to a foreign country (USA). They also use their algorithms to manipulate public meaning and to censor opposite opinions.

Oh, and a US company spaying foreign citizens in not only legal in the USA, but also required.

> spaying foreign citizens

now that would be a bridge too far...

Hey, you found a typo, and that made me learn a new English word.

Thanks for being a spelling-nazi :)

Frankly... other countries should probably consider this IF they have an adversarial relationship with the US.

And they already do -- neither China nor Russia allow Meta services in their countries. Nor do they allow most of Google's services.

That means the data of US enemies is much safer than the data of US vassals^H allies.

I'm trying to understand this.

I guess by "safer" you mean "less accessible by the US" and I suppose that is likely "true".

But would you rather be in China and send an anti-Chinese message to your friend via... some app that China allows? Or would you rather be in the US and send an anti-US message to a friend?

Both countries are going to try and snoop that data. Both are going to be successful.

But in which would you feel "safer" -- meaning in which one is the government likely to take action against you?

If I lived in China, I would rather be spied by the USA, and not by the Chinese government.

But since I live in the "west", I'd rather be spied by China and Russia, than by the USA or any of their allies and vassals.

That being said, I'd rather be spied on by the government, than by my wife, family, and friends.

People and organizations I don't have to deal with are less of a threat to me.

Does having the pipe that gets you cheap gas blown up by the US count as an adversarial relationship? /s

Yeah probably...

>A spin to a US company is not enough. It needs to cease operating in the US because there’s no surety that even with a spin data and sharing won’t get back to ByteDance China.

At this level of paranoia you may as well ban Facebook and other social media as there is no guarantee their data is not getting intercepted by China.

This is the idea of the "clean network" originally brought forward by Trump.

Basically all tech is clean and ok if comes from the good guys (the US and allies) and unclean if it comes from the bad guys (China, Russia ...).

IMHO a sad state of affairs. We would be at a healthier and less hypocritical place if our tech was secure by design, and suppliers and platforms were subject to open objective criteria and rule of law wrt. censorship and surveillance.

My local library blocks Yandex but allows the Daily Stormer when using their wifi.

I don't see how "secure by design" tech would solve the TikTok problem. TikTok isn't hacking people's devices, it's tracking them and giving them disinformation and propaganda. Secure code isn't going to fix those problems; the only way to fix them is to simply not exchange data with tiktok.com.

Well a lot of agencies do that out of the box because secure by design is not believed. Trust but verify. You see that when intelligence agents talk about cooperation between partners. So in the grand scheme of things it wouldn't really change things.

The one thing it would change though is that it would make the life a bit harder for cyber criminals(think downgrading tls connections).

And the criteria you talked about, they are open. Called capitalism, and regulations those companies operate under. Along the way that abomination of surveillance capitalism was born though.

>I see this as a national security threat that it is.

The US government is a far greater danger to the average American than the Chinese government is, and this bill just gives even more power to the US government to dominate its citizens.

This statement is not obviously true.

It is also a logical fallacy. Even if it is true that the US is a greater threat in some sense, that doesn't invalidate that China is also a threat. It also doesn't justify not taking this action.

[ citation needed ]

You are also more likely to be murdered by a loved oned than by a stranger, but this doesn't mean that it's rational to open your door to strangers and bar it to your loved ones.

> The US government is a far greater danger to the average American than the Chinese government is

The US government could, if it wanted to, slaughter the entire civilian population of the US right now and no one could stop them. I don’t believe for a second that China would be so restrained if it suddenly had that power over the USA. So, while it’s true that having the power that it does makes the US government a potential threat, it is nowhere near as much of an actual threat as China.

Very doubtful. Military would defect en masse and you would get a civil war where government gets the boot in the end rather sooner than later.

It's not defection to refuse to carry out unlawful orders, soldiers can be punished for carrying out orders that they knew were unlawful, or orders which are so obviously unlawful that the soldier should have known. The united states does not have an SS.

>The US government could, if it wanted to, slaughter the entire civilian population of the US right now and no one could stop them. I don’t believe for a second that China would be so restrained if it suddenly had that power over the USA.

What the fuck are you talking about???

Just to spell it out, you are suggesting that if "China" could, would conduct a mass scale genocide against Americans ?

And you base that where exactly ?

This was passed because TikTok posts are not supporting US (horrendous) foreign policy. There are recorded statements from congressmen of them discussing and saying exactly this, it’s not even a secret.

This whole thing is baffling to me. What are you talking about? What enemy? I would rather someone in China has my information than my own government. China has no power over me; my own government does. I don’t care if china knows whether I like cheesecake better than blueberry pie. They’re interested in monitoring their own citizens, im sure- for the same reasons our own government agencies and corporate behemoths monitor ours. But I don’t see what use china could have for data about Americans.

Look: the Cold War is over. And communism is a red herring. The world has changed. For some reason Americas elites view TikTok as a threat, probably because they don’t have the kind of total access to their servers that they’re accustomed to with American firms. But that has little to do with regular Americans. And there’s no argument other than decades old red baiting tropes they can think of to try to get us to care.

Commerce is not zero sum. When done right both parties gain something. But China’s ambitions directly counter those of the United States. They’re propping up Russia against Ukraine for example. Use of heavy state subsidies and lack of environmental controls mean they can flood the world with cheap solar destroying the incentives for local production. When all the world is dependent on China for something they then hold outside impact.

To not see the coming conflict be it cold or otherwise or not see the CCP for what it is is just ludicrous to me.

They want to — and as they should — become to dominant world power and reshape things as they see fit.

They will take Taiwan by force and it is zero sum: either China and its allies become the world’s leading economy and lead on things or the US and it’s allies remain in “power” and the west continues. This is the threat.

Now I’ve nothing against the people of China. It’s the government that I don’t trust.

> They’re propping up Russia against Ukraine for example.

That's a funny argument, given that the same piece of legislation with the TikTok "ban" also includes a(nother) $60.8 billion package for Ukraine [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/senate-aid-pa...

Ok but even if I accept all that, what does it have to do with TikTok specifically?

I feel like all these arguments just come down to “China bad, therefore anything that annoys China is good” which is silly and juvenile reasoning

On economic grounds this basically describes what every developing country would try to do as an offensive and hostile action.

But on topic I still think the ban is still old men barking at cloud. Somehow embarrassing really.

i don't think "cold war is over", in a way it is, but the amount of propaganda tik toks blows my mind and the most important thing is - it's so one sided, that i fully support this bill/law or what it is, EU should do something too.

> i fully support this bill/law or what it is, EU should do something too.

Reading your comment, it's pretty obvious that we should do something about propaganda here in the EU. About US propaganda I mean.

Same. The wall fell as did Russian communism but it just swapped antagonists. Now it’s the Chinese government.

Scaring people is a great way to get them to stop asking awkward questions.

Cold war is over we are in the era of empires starting actual wars to annex other countries that is def not a cold war.

You are attempting to link Russia invading Ukraine with TikTok? I’d love to see the chain of reasoning here.

CCP controls TiKTok CCP supports Russia's invasion of Ukraine CCP suppresses videos on Ukrainian war on TikTok

The cold war of authoritarian VS democracy never ended. And China has the ability to turn anyone with mainland access into a asset by holding family hostage and models itself after the British empire. The Indians did have no quarrel with the king of India, until they did. Westcentrism and neutrality are no strategy now that the fascists march again.

Word salad. There isn’t really any coherent thought there for me to respond to.

Worldviewsalad, there is no coherent concept for me to reply to. Not even values.

Separating the world into “good guys” and “bad guys” does not constitute “values”. That is the thinking of a child.

So how are you so sure that TikTok doesn't sell the data to the US anyway?

This way the same thing happens and china did also make some money. I don't see the argument that china having your data is somehow better than your government.

Because china doesn’t have direct power over me, and so there’s not much they can do with the data that affects me.

To me the real national security threat is that Americans don't know how to use social media safely.

> The potential for abuse from the CCP on the minds of US users exists

The exact same way Facebook and other U.S. social networks abuse the minds of US users.[1]

> as does the tracking the app could do and every data point that is generated is stored and potentially useful for blackmail or otherwise on members of Congress or others.

Yep, and in a similar way every large US player hoards as much data about its users as it can get away with, even if it doesn't know what it'll do with it, and eventually loses said data in a giant breach, which can lead to blackmail, etc.[2]

And here we sit, either toothlessly regulating the U.S. actors or attempting to ban the foreign ones instead of teaching people how to actually use social media in a way that helps them instead of melting their brains and exposing their deepest secrets to malicious actors.

I'm not much of a capitalist or a social darwinist but I'd say the best thing to do is let people learn the hard way. We seem cool to do that with junk food,[3][4] and the similarities in social engineering between the social media and junk food are striking.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/08/11/waukegan-district-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21999689/

The red scare is real, holy shit.

I want it to shut down because I believe it’s a bad influence on kids in general.

Musk has already alluded to bringing back Vine, so the eradication of TikTok would be no great loss.

As an aside, I always viewed TikTok as a real world analogue to the mind control subplot from Zoolander (Frankie says 'relax')...

Twitter couldn’t make Vine work. Trying to do it in the severely weakened form it’s in now strikes me as less plausible than his Mars plans.

We already have YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and even LinkedIn to fill the short video void - bringing back Vine would be a Johnny-come-lately move.

if you've been to China, you'll know that they ban all western products: facebook, google, etc etc and replaced them with their own variants. If they want to run around free-range without any restriction with their own products then they should respond by loosening restrictions in their own country.

This is an absolute no-brainer. If you want Tik Tok in the US, lower your middle finger. Am I missing something?

Personally I don’t think ‘totalitarian government does it, so should we’ is a super compelling reason.

Ownership restrictions on media companies generally are commonplace throughout the developed world.

Being common doesn't make them a good idea.

That's true, it just makes them common. This is a good idea on its own merits.

> Personally I don’t think ‘totalitarian government does it, so should we’ is a super compelling reason.

How about “make economic power and one of our main competitors” does it? Just because China is a totalitarian government didn’t mean they can do the “right” thing.

Exactly. Leadership isn't following with tit-for-tat pettiness.

What would be US leadership would similar to what Ro Khanna is saying with data and personal information privacy standards like a nationwide US GDPR but with the teeth of something like HIPAA. Data brokers should be put out of business.

Because we don't want to look like pushovers and wimps who won't push back against a bully who is eating our lunch.

Give me a break... what, you'd rather just let said totalitarian government pump their propaganda into the US? This is a great example of following your moral principles right off the cliff.

What makes you think the propaganda won't be pumped in if the US app is sold to a different company?

If it's sold to a US company then it will be our intelligence agencies pumping the propaganda, not theirs. Which is an outcome I'm more amenable to, considering that our intelligence agencies generally have more of an interest in the stability of American society than the intelligence agencies of China.

See also - Facebook is American owned, yet that never stopped assertions that it was used by foreign adversaries to pump their propaganda.

So if it's propaganda either way, then no loss will happen?

Tolerance shouldn’t tolerate intolerance.

Why is this downvoted? This is a well known philosophical problem with a known solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Have you been to China? I've been to China and had no problems using all the things you're mentioning with the help of a VPN. Was it as easy as in Europe? No. Did it feel like a ban? Also no.

Was it a ban? Also yes

Were the apps available on the App Store? Also yes.

The story back in the ancient history of ~1989->2021 was our free open liberal system was so obviously superior that we were just going to wait around for China to realize their dumb mistake and join us at the end of history. Their great firewall would cripple their economy until then. The new story is we're copying China's tactics because China did it first and it works great.

I mean, sure, go with that. But it doesn't negate the irony.

> The story back in the ancient history of ~1989->2021 was our free open liberal system was so obviously superior that we were just going to wait around for China to realize their dumb mistake

That story worked out fine until US companies started sending all their IP over to China for manufacturing which resulted in 3 key outcomes that broke the initial strategy:

1. It funded and supported the buildout of China's manufacturing base. China now has the best manufacturing base in the world, and in some cases is the only place in the world certain things can be feasibly made.

2. It guaranteed an export market for Chinese goods which helped to drive their economic engine.

3. It allowed unfettered industrial espionage. There is a reason that nearly every product in existence has a Chinese clone/counterfeit available within a week of launch.

The strategy failed, because the Great Firewall only keeps information out of China that the government wants kept out of China, but any other information goes in, but it prevents pretty much all information from flowing out. Firewalls are not binary, they are tunable with policy, and the Chinese government has historically had a strong strategy and nuanced policy, which has allowed them to see great economic success despite reducing freedom of information. Fundamentally, it's economics that drives the rise and fall of governments.

> US companies started sending all their IP over to China

That's how capitalism works. And it worked extremely well and to most everyone's benefit.

We're copying china's tactics wrt CHINA specifically (and other foreign adversaries)

This is not the same thing as copying China's approach to the world

Reciprocation is rational and good

Reciprocation is actually the policy more likely to get China to open up. As long as they can impose rules on US companies with impunity, while we stand back and give them free reign in our market, they have a zero likelihood of compromising.

I don’t see this as reciprocation, I see it as a continuation of an existing policy that requires US media to be owned by Americans.

I do agree with you though that the capitalism=democracy experiment was a pretty obvious failure. You can have pretty free markets with or without democracy. The US emerged from the Cold Wa with ideological battle scars which prevent us from doing what’s best for the people because that might be communism. We are gradually finding out that concentrated corporate power is potentially an even greater threat.

There's no irony in realpolitik.

The rejection of realpolitik is at the core of modern liberalism (indeed, in international relations, liberalism is antipodal to realism which is realpolitiks namesake), so the irony persists.

And given the repeated examples of how realpolitik has led to conflict escalation, war, economic collapse, etc., the superiority of modern liberalism should be obvious.

It seems fairly clear to me why this is the case: complex, conflict-prone relationships often involve prisoner's dilemmas, and alignment on fundamental principles is an effective method for avoiding the worst-case outcome of a prisoner's dilemma. Abandoning principles for a purely situational approach to conflict makes the presumptive lose-lose outcome much more likely.

While modern liberalism rejects realpolitik in theory, in practice the structures it has set up have often been ignored by purportedly liberal actors, so your argument from experience is very tenuous.

As far as prisoner's dilemmas, its a lot more complicated than that. A purely pragmatic approach can lead to win-win outcomes that would be impossible in a purely idealist framework - realist IR scholars would, for example, argue (and could back it up far better than the alternative) that if it wasn't for Bush and Cheney's idealism, the 2003 Iraq war would never have occurred.

The realist counterpoint to the prisoner's dilemma is that it's not just due to conflict prone relationships, but because it's impossible to know what the intentions of other actors are, which is not something that international liberalism can solve in practice. In theory, liberalists would argue that two liberal states can communicate their true intentions well because their intentions reflect the intentions of the population, but this has conclusively been proven to be untrue in the case of foreign policy (not very surprising due to the way intelligence has to be set up), and therefore the liberalist rebuttal to uncertainty of intentions seems much weaker now than it did originally.

As a result, realists argue that following realpolitik can actually reduce the likelihood of war, as agents will be careful to act in such a way as to avoid seeming as to pose a threat in the absence of knowledge of their intentions, while a liberal actor, acting according to their ideals, would act in a way such that an actor who is unsure of their true intentions would have to perceive as a threat.

This means that you just can't assert easily that realism is more likely to cause lose-lose outcomes. It's a complicated argument where this kind of ironclad certainty just isn't justifiable.

That's... a fair point.

> The rejection of realpolitik is at the core of modern liberalism

why do you believe so?

i see no reason why rationalism and political pragmatism are mutually exclusive with liberalism. in fact to me it seems they complement each other well

Realpolitik and rationalism are not the same thing. Realpolitik is the idea that politics (esp. international politics) is ultimately dominated by power politics where each actor is trying to maximize their power and self-interest, and is generally an idea of the realist school of politics

While that might arguably be compatible with liberalism within a society where there is a relatively benevolent monopoly of power imposing a certain number of rights and rules molding the self-interest of all in such a way as to be compatible with civilization, within the international system there is no monopoly of violence, and therefore norms and rights are contingent on countries not acting purely in their self-interest and therefore to maximize their power.

Since modern liberalism is inherently internationalist (arguably since Woodrow Wilson, some called his approach to diplomacy "idealpolitik"), modern liberalism does have to reject realism as a school of thought.

The debate between liberalism and realism as it pertains to international politics is the main topic of contention in international relations theory.

More generally, you can also argue that liberalism assumes the good faith of powerful people not to destroy the liberal system to maximize their own power, but this is far easier to argue against in the domestic setting than in the international setting.

Nonsense. A free and open system does not require foreign adversaries to be given free access to manipulate and control the population. That's not an open system, that's pure stupidity.

Sorry but reciprocation is not copying. This is basic game theory. A 'tit for a tat'.

> If you want Tik Tok in the US, lower your middle finger.

Reciprocity isn't the main reason. It's become a legitimate national security problem. We're no longer in the early 2000s where we could delude ourselves into thinking China wasn't a rival. They're clearly revisionist, with their aggressive approach to resolving border disputes and rhetoric about forceful reunification of Taiwan being on the table. They are bolstering strategic reserves of oil beyond normal peacetime levels, appointing Taiwan hawks to the Politburo, increasing PLA presence near Taiwan, running war games involving an embargo of Taiwan. They doubled their trade with Russia, filling in gaps left by sanctions. They are overtly hostile to the maritime sovereignty of a treaty ally of the US.

The world has changed a lot, and few here realize it because they're stuck in this weird libertarian bubble where everyone's interests are the same and foreign policy doesn't exist and it's cynical intentions all the way down. You are all in for a rude awakening to wake you up from your hypnosis just as Europe was back in 2022.

The US will legislate according to its interests, and that is what it's appropriately doing here.

> their aggressive approach to resolving border disputes

China hasn't fought a war in 40 years. In recent years, there have been some border skirmishes with India between unarmed soldiers (it's not even clear which side initiated them) and some naval confrontations about a few islands with no shots fired, but that's about it. Meanwhile, the US has been fighting wars all around the world.

> It's become a legitimate national security problem.

What is the nature of the risk?

> You are all in for a rude awakening to wake you up from your hypnosis...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox

> What is the nature of the risk?

The risk is information warfare. It's difficult to know whether they've used it for that purpose yet, because there's a lack of transparency, which is actually part of the problem. But regardless, the risk is unacceptable, especially if the Taiwan or Philippines/Vietnam situations boil over. There's no historical precedent of a rival having such massive control over domestic consumption of information. The one thing we do know from the history of conflict is that all available tools will get used for that purpose (e.g. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C8197).

Ok, at least you understand the real problem.

I don't disagree, but for clarity, you appreciate this is totally contrary to the (formerly) popular "free speech" meme that used to be a source of pride for Americans?

Isn't it a bit funny that America can't manage to educate[1] its citizens so they are resilient to propaganda? Do you think it is all that difficult to do, if the government set it as a priority"?

[1] It's worse: they can't even try to. To me, this is peak hilarity, doubly so when combined with the conversations in this thread...which themselves are a consequence of the root problem. Oh my, the layers of irony.

> Isn't it a bit funny that America can't manage to educate[1] its citizens so they are resilient to propaganda?

Since you imply it's not difficult to do, which country has educated their citizens to be resilient to propaganda?

Does a lack of prior instances of something being done guarantee that it is difficult?

Don't forget: to accomplish something, you (typically) must first try.

The answer is none then.

Was there something about my question that you did not like, so you chose to answer a different one?

It's the same one. The answer is yeah it is difficult. It is evident based on the fact that no country in the history hasn't been able to achieve.

"Making citizens to be resilient to propaganda"?

While we should try to do our best, it's also not mutually exclusive to remove bad propaganda. Yet you make it sound like the 2 actions are mutually exclusive for some reason.

> It is evident based on the fact that no country in the history hasn't been able to achieve.

How many have tried, and what did they try?

Contrast this with the attention and funding the war machine gets, or the science machinery.

Check this out: https://twitter.com/BeenThereCap/status/1783120159101628446

Regarding education, we should do that too. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

Do you believe that analysis to be without flaw, and potential for flaw?

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/17839541809708159...

There might be flaws or other explanations. This is just tentative evidence that should push you in one direction more than the other.

Are you saying that it is a fact that it should necessarily point me in the direction that you think it should? It is literally not possible that the actions being taken toward TikTok are not a net good idea?

what happened in Europe in 2022?

Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before this, the European polity were stuck in this "End of History" mindset where great power conflict was a relic from the past and everything could be solved through negotiation and institutions. The sooner laypeople realize we're in the Second Cold War (as the foreign policy types have) the less these kinds of moves (banning TikTok, restricting Nvidia exports to China) will come as a surprise, and you may even start to appreciate them.

I was always in favor of banning it for this reason, but I'm concerned that Biden is now banning it for a different reason. The timing is interesting. Certain lobby groups have been urging Congress on this due to TikTok videos about the war in Gaza. Then again, Trump was also trying to ban it for his own reasons.

Yep. TikTok is the only major social media app in the US that does not downrank pro-Palestinian content. No one in the US government cared about TikTok until the latest conflict in Israel. This is the only reason for the ban.

I'm having trouble squaring that with data, since the trends go back to 2020 and 2022: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

There was no bipartisan consensus until Israel's atrocities began last year.

Yes, you and another user have claimed that but provided no sources or proof. For my part, I'm a dem and it always seemed that Dems weren't very vocal about it but were highly concerned about Tik Toks data sovereignty. They've kinda had bigger issues in their face since 2016.

I thought Trump wanted TikTok banned when he was president?

Yes he did. Funny enough, he now criticizes this.

He is one of the best political game player. Look at immigration (he does not allow bipartisan law to smooth the issue out) and abortion (he enabled it but does not want this to be the matter during election year).

Agree his policy might many of us not. But player great he is.

I don't think it's accurate to say Biden is banning it. The vote in the House was very bipartisan. R's were like 92% in favor and D's more like 75%.

    Yes: 155 D + 197 R
    No:   50 D +  15 R

    "We do not want to ban apps like TikTok. What we want – and what the 
    legislation we support would do – is ensure that TikTok becomes owned by an 
    American company so that our and our children's sensitive personal data stays 
    here instead of going to China and so that Americans' understandings and 
    views can't be manipulated by algorithms potentially controlled by the PRC."

> The vote in the House was very bipartisan.

That's a sure sign the citizens are getting screwed.

so they want to outsource to nations where paucity of labor and environmental laws give corporations higher margins, but is ready to force a ban if US laws cannot control the narrative and influence people. Okay

Yeah, the White House doesn't pretend it's not about influencing public opinion. So it's a natural question, what opinion are they worried about. Maybe there's no particular one, but idk.

The clear implication is the CCP.

Does that that would apply to any foreign country owned website ?

The bill gives the US President, currently Biden, the ability to designate social media apps as sufficiently popular and its owning nation as adversarial, mandating a forced sale. Biden approved the law and chose to use it on TikTok. So you could say it's to be sold or else banned (and China has already said they won't sell), but anyway it's in Biden's hands.

That's the real reason!

AIPAC wants Tiktok gone because young people are getting objective information rather than the propaganda of mainstream "responsible" media. [1]

Tiktok is not a good thing for Genocide Joe either! He has been an Israeli puppet for decades. Thanks to Tiktok, being an Israeli puppet has become a political liability because Israel has lost its control over American minds.

[1] https://twitter.com/SweatieAngle/status/1725897178038595901

Has AIPAC in particular said this too? Because I've seen JFNA's letter to Congress encouraging a ban but nothing from AIPAC so far.

AIPAC works behind the scenes.

They are very busy trying to get Finkelstein banned from Youtube as a "terrorist sympathiser"[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=norman+finkelst...

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China is communist. That is not the bar we are holding ourselves to.

Free trade and reciprocity agreements don't depend on a country's political leanings. You either play ball with the world or you don't. Can't have it both ways.

> Can't have it both ways.

You definitely can. International trade has never been a fair field, power balance will be the most impacting element in the deal you get.

And this is the US exerting its power (which it should have done a long time ago).

How can free trade be unfair?

Please define "free trade".

I think that's a concept that is thorny enough to merit a word on what we mean by that. I personally don't know what it actually points at (is there any "free trade" ever happening in real life ?), or my naive interpretation would be trade with absolutely no rules, but I assume that's not what you're pointing at.

Tit for tat is the bar for all international relations.

I feel like we can be more evolved than this. This mentality is not a sustainable strategy.

Game theory proves otherwise. Defectors must be punished to maintain a stable system.

Do some research on game theory and you’ll find otherwise.

for some reason capitalist countries love trading with them, gee I wonder why.

China is absolutely not communist, it's probably the most capitalist country nowadays !

It's more capitalist than communist but you'd have to be deranged to claim it's the "most capitalist" country.

Please don't call me deranged. How much do you know about China?

As vague and imprecise as the term "most capitalist" is, it is a blatant ignorance of the way Chinese people (have to) live, especially in cities, to think that it isn't a consequence of an extreme form of capitalism: enormous gaps between the wealthy and the poor and materialism.

China is as much a communist country as Congo is a republic.

Edit: Reading the other comments, it seems like we might all value different aspects of the country to define whether it is capitalist.

China's national bourgeoisie has a seat at the table, but there are plenty of recent examples of them being brought to heel by the CPC. So, while they definitely have some capitalist productive relations I'd hardly call them capital-C Capitalist in the "ruled by capitalists" sense of the term.

Compare with the US where the capitalist class not only has a seat at the table: they are the table. And the chairs around the table, the room the table is in, the building the room is in, the property the building is on, the people who go in and out of the building, and the bullets that shoot anyone who tries to enter the building who isn't supposed to. The US is "more capitalist" in all the ways that count - what might be confusing you is that China has more sustainable and powerful relations of production which is why they're overtaking the US. But that doesn't make them capitalist.

IDK about that but you are correct that it is explicitly not communist. It's ruled by the "communist" party that wants to "establish communism" but it is very explicitly only on the path to communism even according to its own propaganda.

It's a "communist country" in an aspirational sense, not in a descriptive sense. When we call countries "capitalist" by contrast, we usually mean that in a descriptive sense. This tends to lead to a lot of confusion: nothing that China does is "communism", it's at best something that is done with the justification of being part of the pursuit of communism. Whether or not the CCP is truthful or honest in its claims about its aspirations is a different question.

Ha - I'll bite. How is it the most capitalist country nowadays? It's HEAVILY state-sponsored mixed-market, if anything.

All other countries have heavily state sponsored economies. We just call them "subsidies", "research grants", "tax rebates" etc.

Many industries wouldn't be where they are without decades long government intervention, and govs will also apply extra scrutiny on who owns which company, and pick up the winners as needed for national interests.

China is the most transparent about it, but being transparent and being the most engaged in it are two different things.

To be clear, I think that's just the natural state of things. Real free markets are chaos and we want countries to actually think about where they're going.

Terrible take. You want the USA to follow the same policy on speech that Communist China follows?

Yes, you are missing something. Because you're seeing tiktok as a product, not as a community of millions of people. There are tens of thousands of small family-owned businesses that are only able to survive because of Tiktok. For a lot of the younger crowd, Tiktok is part of social culture. Cutting out a part of someone's life like that is not a decision that should be taken lightly at all.

Peace.

There’s tens of thousands of families that depend on income from meth production or trading. Meth is part of the social culture for a significant subset of people.

Are you giving an example of a false equivalence? Because if so, you nailed it.

How is it false equivalence to refer to two products that people use/sell to provide for their families, yet the product has been proved to cause great harm to communities, especially children [1]?

[1] https://theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/04/how-tiktoks-a...

It's a community of millions of people, but which are seen by the millions is subject to the CCP's algorithm.

Just search for "Uighur genocide" and see how many negative Tiktoks you find.

Now go on any western social media platform, search for any contentious topic, and notice what's banned. It's not stuff that's harmful to the government (eg. Gaza/Israel topics) it's stuff that advertisers think is harmful (racism, unlabeled porn, etc.).

Also, restraining from banning a platform because some people can't be arsed to also post to IG reels or other platforms is their own fault as entrepreneurs.

Out of interest, I just tried this. "Uighur genocide" was the fifth auto-completed search result. In the "Top" tab, the first video was a (maybe Chinese) guy saying he never saw any discrimination against Uighurs and maybe Americans should ask about the Hawaiian cultural genocide. The video next to it was from (presumably) Uighur people saying that they were suffering cultural genocide and China was selling their organs. Below that was a snippet from Wikipedia saying that China had been committing cultural genocide against the Uighurs.

The prominence of the Chinese guy "denying" the cultural genocide was interesting - I wouldn't assume he's a plant (it's equally likely he's just a rabid nationalist) but the placement of the video does strike me as a little odd. It had 300 likes, but rates higher than the second video which had 5000 likes? Does smell a bit.

This is from Singapore, by the way. I assume geography makes a difference.

The Tiktok search ranking does this for every query. There is no obvious rhyme or reason for the sort. There's a filter button to change how it's sorted, but by default I can never figure out what it's doing.

I search for "retro pc":

1st result 47k views, 4 months ago

2nd result 457k views, 2 years ago

3rd result 9k views, 1 year ago

4th result 133k views, 1 year ago

5th result 1k views, 5 months ago

Make it make sense!

Then it's time for them to move on to a new platform.

The fact that people have become dependent is no good argument for keeping the platform around.

And, with that said, if TikTok disappears - a new platform fill its void, as well as other platforms absorbing users. If there's a demand, someone will supply.

If you told me Facebook directed some AI chatbots here to discuss how great this is, I'd believe you. It seems the initial comments are positive, followed by a lot of arguing. It's usually pointless debates, like whether it's a ban. Yes, it is effectively a ban, similar to imposing a million-dollar tax per gun, or required to be age 85, which essentially bans something protected by an amendment. Then there are those calling for regulations and bans, which is strange. I can manage my app usage and my kids', but I can't control safety regulations for trains carrying toxic chemicals. And then there are the trade war advocates; at what point does this back-and-forth justify losing rights and access? I don't care if China becomes like North Korea. The bill also mentions website and service providers, meaning it could block access through websites too. We should have rights to privacy, encryption, and anonymous whistleblowing without government interference in every social media platform.

> If you told me Facebook directed some AI chatbots here to discuss how great this is, I'd believe you.

Relevant to context: whatasaas is an account with 10 karma and 9 total comments that has been mostly idle for its 14 month existence. Many of the trench fighters in the threads here are names I recognize.

Yea caught me, I self reported to try and trick everyone. Jokes aside my comment was based on net neutrality if you don’t remember https://duckduckgo.com/?q=net+neitrality+bot+comments

Some of the stuff that really chipped at our privacy as our isps got to sell our dns pings to advertisers and social media. Have a good day citizen.

Paranoia

It’s not about you and your kids’ usage, it’s about the general population. Let’s not be naive, TikTok is the 2020s version of “Radio Free X”, a state-backed propaganda tool where anyone can run targeted ads with pinpoint geo accuracy, and cause division and social unrest. And unlike Facebook or YouTube, you can’t hold a company owned by a near-peer geopolitical adversary liable in the US.

At this point Tiktok is getting more regulatory action against it than Facebook has....and Facebook's lax moderation spread the wildfire of genocide in Myanmar.

As it should. This might sound insensitive, but we’re drifting back to an era of realpolitik in geopolitics. Facebook fanning the flames of a genocide in Myanmar has little effect on US citizens, TikTok does.

I also seem to think Facebook fanning the flames of an insurrection is a greater threat than whatever dubious vaguely defined impact TikTok has had.

You can hold Facebook legally accountable in the US (whether you will or not is another question). You can’t hold TikTok legally accountable.

> You can’t hold TikTok legally accountable.

Sure you can. You follow the law or you are banned from doing business. This law just skipped the first part because the authors didn't want to write any actual regulations.

Why wait until TikTok breaks the law to ban them? Banning an app after it’s been used for nefarious reasons to either spread propaganda or incite chaos in the upcoming elections is too late. It’s like saying “let’s not patch a zero day we found because no one has abused it”.

TikTok being owner by Bytedance means you don’t have who to prosecute for misdeeds, besides some fall guy.

> Why wait until TikTok breaks the law to ban them?

Why wait until a homeless guy steals some bread to throw him in jail?

The foundation of the rule of law is that the law applies to everyone equally, not arbitrarily. That includes a presumption of no wrongdoing and due process.

It should be mentioned that TikTok already has its full US data and source code audited by Oracle, a level of scrutiny higher than any of the domestic tech companies. Combined with the FBI and NSA watching them like a hawk, if they were breaking the law, it would be old news by now.

Didn’t know the homeless guy is a rising superpower with imperialist aspirations. Didn’t know the homeless guy is actively attempting to destabilise the US in order to become the new hegemon.

It’s not about the data or the code. Data brokers exist everywhere, it’s about a platform with reach to the eyeballs of 170 million users controlled by an adversary state.

You can’t use “foundation of the rule of law” wrt an actor that blatantly disregards rule of law.

Interesting that you think breaking the laws is justification for banning a Platform. I wonder how the US would feel about the EU banning every last US tech company for the plethora of violations.

Last I checked the EU and US are not in the pre- stages of hot war.

we're not? we're spinning up production of 150mm shells and other pre stages from my pov

Are you trolling?

I'm not. from my POV, we are spinning up the economy for war. we're already in world War III, we're just waiting for someone to officially declare it.

US defence spending is still below its 2010s level. Besides, you mentioned EU banning US apps. Last I checked, with some exceptions, all EU nations are in NATO, and directly procure weapons from the US.

It’s absurd to compare banning a Chinese-owned app to EU banning US apps.

the EU banning apps wasn't me i don't think

Are you?

That is false. Companies can be held legally accountable in the US regardless of whether they are owned by Americans or not.

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The way I see this is that democracy is extremely susceptible to tools that can change public opinion en masse. This of course applies to Western social media as much as TikTok, and I'd love to see regulation around all social media algorithms to ensure they're unbiased. I see this as a good start to counter a real threat, which is China's ability to influence US elections through TikTok.

It is not just democracy. All governance systems are susceptible to mass communication tools that can change public opinion, be it books, radio, tv, news organizations, or tiktok. It is why many non democratic countries do not have freedom of press, and a highly censored internet. This is a main contributor to Arab Spring.

It is just sad that even US is susceptible to this.

Susceptible? 90% of our public discourse is manufactured, and this whole TikTok thing is a prime example.

Well mass manipulation of the people is how the USA functions. This is what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote about extensively in their book Manufacturing Consent from 1988. So it is no wonder it works when other people do it too. I agree though, it is sad, or frustrating, upsetting, infuriating, that the USA works like that.

https://chomsky.info/consent01/

And indeed this gets at the falsity of democracy as a concept itself. In a certain sense it is more duplicitous than dictatorship

This is the same logic as would be used in banning the translation of the bible or the printing press. For any sufficiently concerned state, 'unbiased' means 'agrees with me'. For example, it may be seen in the USA to be 'unbiased' to be completely uncritical of Israel (anti-Zionism is anti-semitism according the US congress bill H.Res.894). However, this is not the case anywhere else in the world, including Israel (which criticizes itself sometimes), in fact it would seem quite insane.

Regulation to ensure media is unbiased sounds on the face of it impossible. Anything that looks "unbiased" simply shares the same biases as you.

Exactly right. What is "unbiased" or "neutral".

That said I think some regulatory control is needed. There needs to be some sort of accountability e.g. for intentional propagation of fake news or censorship or defamation. This is no different than requirements for ethical behavior in other industries. Just like we regulate public companies in general we should be able to impose some requirements on any business that distributes media. Free speech for individuals but if you are a business or a media "provider" you need to meet a somewhat higher bar? I think we used to rely on journalistic standards or self regulation but with "new" media (and maybe even with old media) this seems to be not working that well any more. There's a fine line there for sure but seems like whether China owns some social media or someone with US citizenship we still want to have guards against harms this can cause. The amount of power these companies wield is scary.

If this were true, TikTok wouldn't have ended up in a ban.

No. Your statement does not follow.

TikTok can be undermining the US (and potentially be a growing problem) without it being currently capable of preventing itself being banned.

By your logic, nobody should go to hospital when sick, as if they can go to hospital then they must not be sick.

It's not being banned.

China has already indicated that because the sale would require a "technology export" of the algorithm, it would need their approval. And also that they would not approve it.

So if China has already made it clear it considers a TikTok sale illegal, this is a ban.

That being said, you don't get Nancy Pelosi and Marjorie Taylor Greene on the same side unless there is some serious fire behind all of the smoke. My guess is everyone who has seen the classified info agrees this ban is too critical to even play games with it.

Microsoft will dust off it's previous merger plan from the last time this political football was punted and fill superfluousmanagement and "trust and safety" positions with old national security alumni. The surveillance will continue.

There's many companies that have reproduced the tictok algorithm. Surely if it was sold, the multibillion dollar company would have no issue with that aspect.

What's an example of a company that reproduced the TikTok algorithm?

Facebook Reels and Youtube Shorts have pretty good implementations at this point, especially facebook, it is kind of scary. But I didn't use the original TikTok app so I don't know if TikTok is somehow better than these (I only started watching them because they started placing them in my Facebook and Youtube feed, sneaky!).

"you don't get Nancy Pelosi and Marjorie Taylor Greene on the same side unless there is some serious fire"

All you need to convince American politicians of anything is jingling keys and cash. Plus MTG opposed the original TikTok bill, they only voted in favor when it was packed together with sending money for Israel.

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> I'd love to see regulation around all social media algorithms to ensure they're unbiased.

The bias is a feature. They just don't like the fact that they can't control the bias on TikTok so it spews Chinese propaganda instead of Western propaganda.

Does it spew Chinese propaganda though? Have you even used TikTok?

You’re saying you don’t believe in freedom of speech.

You are free to post whatever you want on a different platform. Banning TikTok and its algorithm has nothing to do with free speech. It's funny this always gets brought up, like what is TikTok allowing you to say that you can't say on FB, YT, etc?

"The government isn't allowed to ban speech, but they can ban the tools used to speak". Pretty scary argument.

Not a problem as long as there are other tools to speak. You have no right to YouTube or Facebook because neither are necessary for your free speech. This isn't complicated.

Not really

Overall we would want to give good education to children but sadly many parents resort to electronics quite early. There really should be a law to ban cell phones and pad for children less than 5.

Improving the economics would help too. Raising a kid when both parents probably have to work presents challenges that just don't exist if most careers could support a family on a single income.

Fun fact: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma..., tiktok.com has been blocked in mainland China since 2020.

TikTok is branded as Douyin in China. The international version is the one that is blocked.

No, it's not just a rebrand.

Douyin, like all social media in China, is subject to government censorship. Tiktok, like Google, FB, IG, etc., are not and therefore banned in China.

That's why they are two completely separate platforms.

It's a rebrand + censorship then? I'm not sure the distinction you're trying to make exactly, it's not like Douyin is a completely different thing from Tiktok, so I think "completely separate platforms" is also a stretch. The core technology and parent company/ownership is the same for both.