It's been said elsewhere in here but I'm going to parrot because this caught me by surprise and this is on the level of importance of the SOPA [1] craziness back in 2012.
The TikTok ban has very little do with TikTok. It's yet another Patriot Act (now, the Restrict Act [2]) style back door to slip in some seriously heinous legislation that could find you fined to the tune of millions, or worse, thrown in jail for 20 years.
> A person who willfully commits, willfully attempts to commit, or willfully conspires to commit, or aids or abets in the commission of an unlawful act described in subsection (a) shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both.
I do view TikTok as a covert military campaign (ideological subversion) and do think it should be limited in the West, however, not via this bill.
> The TikTok ban has very little do with TikTok. It's yet another Patriot Act (now, the Restrict Act [2]) style back door to slip in some seriously heinous legislation that could find you fined to the tune of millions, or worse, thrown in jail for 20 years.
Yep. They couldnt put the backdoors through the 'we are fighting pedophilia' excuse. Now they are using Tiktok...
> I do view TikTok as a covert military campaign (ideological subversion) and do think it should be limited in the West, however, not via this bill.
I'd like you to expand on the idea that is it is "a covert military campaign (ideological subversion)". It's common talking point, but I literally do not understand it. Sure there are some Chinese based creators that are spreading lies like how everything is super cool in Xinjiang with Uyghurs, but I can go on Twitter and find some American tankie saying that as well. The *VAST* majority of stuff on my FYP is cosplayers, dancing girls, dumb and intentionally awkward jokes, and skateboarders. Are Warhammer 40k and 3d printed Star Wars droids a CCP plot on par with the CIA and modern art[0][1]? To what end? To crash our economy by trying to get us to impress skateboarding leggy Chinese girls with the size of our 7-foot Imperator Titans[2]? Chinese girls that would no doubt a face swapped APT-2 officer, ala Azusagakuyuki[3][4]?
I'm not trying to be dismissive, but it does seem far fetched. So what's the best argument?
Interesting that you've been downvoted enough to get the light text coloring, but the only reply to you so far is the parent commenter's concern about "gender ideology and feminism".
I'll get downvoted for it, but the lot of it is around gender ideology and feminism. It's also around the general infantilisation of younger populations in the West (i.e., promotion of victimhood as a virtue).
As for a why: look at the parallel of how the Chinese raise their youth, specifically in relation to combat and military service [1]. If your biggest adversary is the United States/its Western allies and you intend to perform a military strike down the road, it's in your best interest to weaken their fighting population physically and mentally to an extent where they're either non-existent or easily destroyed.
That military strike could either be Taiwan, or, on the continental United States in conjunction with other BRICS countries (namely, Russia and now, Iran and Saudi Arabia).
I get that the idea is unsavory and triggering (just me having to say that is evidence that the campaign was/is successful), but it's a reality that people need to be aware of in the West. Western hegemony is coming to an end and the geopolitical vultures are taking flight.
They are afraid of China getting unchecked access to the data and being able to manipulate the recommendation algorithm to subtle manipulate to public opinion about some topics.
> apply some oversight to this process...
They don't care about that, they also get the data they need from other companies they have much more influence one. Like phone companies, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, etc. etc.
This assumes that the government is sincere in its complaint that their concern is about user's data. I think that's cover for what they're really concerned about: user's beliefs.
TikTok is arguably the most powerful means to spread ideas, and people in that line of business do not appreciate outsiders on their turf.
The whole TikTok thing itself seems like a distraction from the contents of the bill they've drafted under the guise of only banning TikTok.
Democracy as it is is a giant magic trick, and TikTok is pulling back the curtains in it, so it must go.
That is a solution, but there's nothing simple about it. Obviously there's an even much simpler solution than coming up with what would be a very very complex set of regulations and laws, that would have impact across all the industry, and that btw tech giants would love. The really simple solution could be done tomorrow, without the need of figuring out what "proper" is in this case.
Not that what you're saying shouldn't happen, but it's a different battle that needn't be intertwined with this one.
Complex regulation like that is much harder to sell U.S. voters. A lot of Americans are libertarians or libertarian-leaning, so their first instinct is to reject regulation out of hand, unless it can be shown to be extremely necessary.
Regulation in general is a double-edged sword. While it may be great in the short term if your goal is to rein in the bad behaviour of large companies, in the long run it can act as a pretty effective moat for established companies, preventing startups from effectively being able to compete. A lot of people attribute Europe’s less competitive tech sector (vs the U.S.) to an abundance of complex regulations in the EU.
Americans are almost universally against corporate surveillance though. (Look at the percent that opt out on iOS).
We should pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing right to privacy, and it should apply to both the US government, and to firms operating withing the US.
The proposed law specifies it's targeting China, Iran and Russia, as well as North Korea, Cuba and (the Moros regime of) Venezuela. It also has rules for adding or removing countries from that list going forward.
If you want a fair and simple solution that applies to all companies, how about this? If an American company isn't allowed to operate in a foreign country, then don't let companies in the same industry from that country operate here. So TikTok would be banned here since China bans Twitter, etc.
Massive fine(s) for repeat offences would be even better. The EU does it for GDPR and takes companies single digit percentage of worldwide annual revenue(s).
The majority of these US companies have already been fined like this. The same should happen to TikTok if they want to continue to follow the regulations in the US.
Friendly reminder that the TikTok ban is actually the Restrict Act, and that is a much larger, more aggressive and powerful piece of legislation that's being pushed through than just a "TikTok Ban":
To add, sections 9 and 10 read to me (very paraphrased)
"Any telecom, etc, product where someone in the parent post's list has partial ownership, including voting stocks and has >= 1 million users"
So, that includes a lot of video games (Genshin Impact, League of Legends, Gunfire Reborn, etc) and also Reddit and Epic Games, maybe? I'm sure an argument would be made that since the CEO of Telegram was born in Russia, it would count, too, somehow.
Edit: whoever downvoted the above comment, that's literally section 8B
Addendum: I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a layperson trying to read this thing.
People don't realise how ridiculously asymmetric the relationship between China and the rest of the world is.
Spin up a cloud VM in China now. Go do it. Try.
I can, literally in minutes, go create a virtual machine hosting a web site in some random middle eastern country I probably would not visit because they're anti... everything. Anti-female, anti-christian, anti-gay, anti-freedom, anti everything I hold dear.
But I can create a virtual machine there, right now, no problems.
China? Hah... no.
That would require paperwork, in person, in chinese, paid for in renminbi, from a Chinese bank.
I'd have to get a chinese id, and submit it to a police station to get an authorisation number, which I would then have to display on every page of that web server.
Chinese companies can spin up whatever they want in any country they please.
Every other country has to sign up to Chinese censorship laws to publish anything at all on that side of the Great Firewall.
You can do all that easily in HKSAR, but you're mostly correct about the mainland. (technically you don't need a Chinese ID, just a permanent residence)
Funnily enough, spinning a cloud VM is quite easy actually. You can do it in seconds on Alibaba Cloud. Getting port 80 unblocked on the other hand...
Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't really just create a single website that serves both western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is stopping them, doing this is just going give your western customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America and complying with all local laws to do so.
How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one. You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but, again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into the western market with millions of dollars with the acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some American competitor.
Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you.
Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has already done with the GDPR ...
When President Trump raised tariffs on China in 2017 - economic soundness aside - the media commentary initially lambasted it as unprovoked xenophobic aggression. But the outrage soon died down as people looked at the numbers and saw it was a mere reciprocal setting of our tax rate to match or reach a fraction of China’s (and hopefully would enable future lowering negotiations). Now, in 2023, President Biden has maintained that course and the public has come around to more hawkish policy.
I can think of one - banning superior foreign products and services mean that people have to use inferior local substitutes. Just because the CCP doesn't want Chinese people to use the best available products is no reason to deny them to Americans. Americans should have access to the best products that they can afford.
This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
That being said, there is always an argument for banning foreign social media companies (really all media companies) from making commercial profits in other countries. The political and military risks are significant.
When the product is commercializing and manipulating its users, though, things aren’t so clear. Is it a gift, or a Trojan horse? That’s the open question here, regardless of Congress’s demagogic motives.
> banning superior foreign products and services mean that people have to use inferior local substitutes.
TikTok is only superior in poisoning the minds of people using it here in US. That's why the Chinese version is different. I think zero is lost if people use the inferior local ones in this case.
> This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
Sure, the optimal solution for the prisoner's dilemma is that both cooperate. But once one doesn't cooperate, the optimal solution is not to cooperate. US looks like a dummy waving the flag of morality while China laughs in its face.
That's fine but domestic businesses should be held to the same standard. China doesn't allow TikTok BS to be disseminated in their territory. The same reasoning should apply to FB and Twitter.
The contention here is that one country does not allow the other to do business in their territory, yet complains when their product is threatened with a ban.
The contention is _not_ that double standards are being applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.
Because American citizens (are supposed to) have rights that Chinese citizens don't. The first amendment covers access to information. Banning TikTok is a violation of all Americans' first amendment rights.
Banning the operation of a foreign-controlled corporation from a state that harshly restricts foreign economic activities in their borders is hardly a first amendment issue. It's not even close.
[EDIT] Case law citations would be a lot more convincing than downvotes.
Banning TikTok even runs counter to the value we hear used to justify the first amendment: diversity of thought and discourse is inherently good; it allows people to decide for themselves using their faculties of rationality. We even have Benjamin Franklin and polemic if not mis-attributed Voltaire quotes[1] used to inspire a basis for free speech.
Except for some reason, diversity of thought and free speech ideals aren't actually used to justify speech people disagree with, namely China's. This two-mouthed approach is noticed. It de-legitimizes the diversity of thought value.
To anyone who has argued for free speech before but is silent now, your silence says more than your speech ever could.
"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them"
I agree with the sentiment, but in this case the value TikTok provides for free speech outweighs China's unfair trade policies, which have been this way for a couple decades.
I don't understand why China is allowed to have web products in our markets but we don't seem to be allowed Google, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. in theirs.
We need to just make it a fair playing field and if they want to have software startups on the Internet and in App Stores they need to open their markets to our products too.
> I don't understand why China is allowed to have web products in our markets but we don't seem to be allowed Google, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. in theirs.
Because we're a democracy with free speech and open markets, and China is not? Banning foreign speech and competition is not the victory for our way of life that some people seem to think it is.
There is a problem with TikTok - like ALL social media it uses opaque ranking algorithms that serve nefarious interests, and like ALL social media it spies ruthlessly on its users. How about we address those issues, thereby indirectly resolving the TikTok issue too?
There's no such thing as a free market, regulations are everywhere. One such regulation that I think is perfectly reasonable is that if you want to sell us things we need to be able to sell you things. This is largely true with hardware (e.g. Apple, Tesla sell into China just fine) but most software companies and especially social media have been outlawed.
Just because we are a democracy with different values to the CCP does not mean we should be taken for fools.
But we aren't banning foreign speech, we are banning a foreign platform for information dissemination. I don't see anyone promoting not allowing Chinese citizen's posts to be viewable in the USA. That is what banning foreign speech would look like.
Banning TikTok is a completely rational thing to do, given the control that the CCP has over the app. We can't poison our minds with letting China control the algorithm and affect hundreds of millions of Americans. We aren't talking about a company motivated by money, it's motivated by power and control. It is 100% a national security threat.
We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security threat.
And I personally love TikTok, I'm active on it for a couple of hours a day, but I know that it's a threat.
> We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security threat.
China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government.
Most US internet companies aren't willing to meet those requirements, so don't operate there.
If the US wants to ban TikTok it should do the same thing here: make privacy and transparency rules that all social media companies that want to operate in the US must follow.
> China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government.
Those rules, however, are official state secrets, and western companies who wish to operate in China must infer what they are themselves lest they get kicked out. China works on the standard that "there are rules that you must break, we won't tell you what they are, so be very very very careful." Not transparent at all (incidentally, China rejects rule of law as a western imperialist concept).
No one has succeeded in doing that, despite a number of attempts by companies that have operated in the country for decades. Microsoft was the most recent to give up by stripping the social features from LinkedIn in china a few years ago.
The laws on paper might be entirely fair, but what those laws say doesn't matter.
> We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security threat.
China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government.
Most US internet companies aren't willing to meet those requirements, so don't operate there.
Wow. Talk about being disingenuous. “oh you can vote - you just have to take a literacy test first and show us 5 different types of ID we’re sure you don’t have - it’s just the law”.
“It’s just the rules” - what else could it be? Censorship isn’t this mystical thing the government does - it’s implemented with rules. Sounds like “go back to your country” at company scale.
From a European perspective, I don't see TikTok as any different from American platforms. America has been caught spying on other countries and interfering with democracies before.
The question you should ask, as a fellow European, is whether reducing influence from the US government, a stable but somewhat flawed democracy, is worth the price of losing access to US social media. Think in geopolitical terms, with all this entails of long-term divergence in cultural values, trade and other forms of economic compatibility.
And whether this judgement is significantly different from whether reducing influence from the CCP, an obviously totalitarian government that does not balk at overtly undermining of democratic values within your own borders, is worth losing access to TikTok.
You don't even need to have an European perspective to realize this. Do you think Facebook, a private company, has any problem with selling (American) data to the CCCP?
Adding to my previous comment: If I lived in the US, I'd be far more afraid of how American companies and government entities use my data. It's a far more real and immediate threat.
Then advocate for banning American social media companies in European countries. This type of "whataboutism" keeps coming up every time the news breaks about the USA banning or restricting Chinese tech companies. It misses the point.
The point is that EVERY country needs to concern itself with its own national security, local laws and regulations. I wish that every country would embrace freedom, free trade and the open Internet and that we could all just get along ... but those are my personal value judgments being applied. In the current world of foreign relations, countries are going to act according to their own national interests, whatever those happen to be. Each will pretend that it is the one taking the "right" position, and each might behave hypocritically in the moment. The question of who is "right" and who is "wrong" will vary according to your own set of moral principals and beliefs.
There is a big difference. American platforms are not state owned and controlled, they are independently owned and operated by private individuals.
TikTok is state owned and state controlled. On top of that, the communist Chinese state has consistently threatened its neighbors with violent annexation. I think it's a dishonest argument to claim that independent American platforms and state-owned Chinese platforms are equivalent.
On a personal level, yes, I'd be much less concerned with China having my data than my own government.
On a national scale? Well, I certainly do not want an adversary with an interest in overtaking the U.S. have both data and means to manipulate the opinions of its citizens.
As an American, I'm less concerned with China having this data than I am with US corporations having this data. China has limited interest or means to harm me, personally. US corporations have plenty of interest and means.
You can be weaponized against your own interests through psychological manipulations. China may not have physical access to do harm to you but they do have digital access and that can do serious damage if you aren't careful.
The government isn't going to come after you. You can stop living your weird libertarian fever dream. That's not a thing that happens. The government is not just going to randomly pick out epups and then do something nefarious with the data.
Instead of banning TikTok, why don't we ban the data collection policies that make it a threat?
I don't really see a fair way to handle this that doesn't end up also banning Facebook, Instagram, etc. The problem is that these companies are collecting enough sensitive data to pose a huge security risk, but our politicians are acting like it's only a problem when someone else does it.
I'm sorry, but what? You haven't cited anything that shows China cares about using TikTok as a means of influencing foreign countries? You're just spouting rhetoric that is made to fearmonger.
China bans western websites because they don't follow China's censorship requirements. Apple services exist in China, why isn't Apple a national security threat? They're the richest tech company on the planet, and based in the US.
Because Apple sucks up to China. And they're not a security threat to China because they're controlled by their shareholders, not the government. Shareholders who will not want to throw their entire investment into the toilet.
And he doesn't have a choice. Google took a stand and had to give up its position in the Chinese market. But Apple as a manufacturer will have to give up their entire business if they go against China.
China is preparing a military invasion of a US Ally (Taiwan) within the next 5 years. They absolutely care about influenceing the US public to oppose military support for Taiwan.
I would go a step further and say that reclaiming Taiwan and triumphing over the US are among the top goals of the CCP.
I oppose banning TikTok. I oppose it even though I dislike the platform. I dislike its data collection. I dislike that the CCP likely can access the data. I dislike that it is a national security threat.
I would accept limited bans within specific contexts (e.g., people in sensitive positions with access to sensitive data).
At the same time, I crave reform to our privacy laws. We, the people, need better protection against data collection and use by both private and public entities.
It sounds like you see banning TikTok as rational out of a sense of reciprocity with the application's country or origin. Is that the operating principle?
If the RESTRICT act passes, TikTok will likely be just the first ICT (Internet Communication Technology) service to be banned. Next on the list may be Russia Today, Rumble, or any other app or site that is not fully US based and controlled. The decisions are at the discretion of the president. Be careful what precedent you set.
Ah, the American freedom of thought... Communism not allowed. Any other political party or group is allowed, and could have a platform. There are a lot of foreign media allowed there. Internally even KKK is allowed. But who were really persecuted were groups like the Black Panthers, which until nowadays have members kept as political prisoners.
but its ok to have "open"AI steal everything on the open web, use it as a training set and rent it to people so that the guys who answers the questions and built the prior knowledge of the web can be paid less or even removed? hell Id take TikTok anyday vs OpenAI
What? China bans Facebook, Google, and Instagram because of censorship, not because they're "national security threats". And it will absolutely be motivated by money once Bytedance sells the platform.
A Chinese company sold Grinder because of privacy concerns. Tiktok will either IPO or be sold off
Ah, yes, the typical HN arrogance that the pee-ons must be protected from any thought or concept that doesn't support the poster's beliefs. It's important for Democracy for the voters to have only a restricted view of the world, lest they vote the wrong way, at which point, where would we be?
Ignoring that nation states are have organized efforts to degrade other countries over time by these mediums doesn't make it any less true. It just means your head is in the sand.
Tiktok gained audience and market share because it happened to be a better product in its niche. Inventing any excuses to ban it is unadulterated hypocrisy.
All the words like "censorship", "free", "CCP", "national security", "china bad" are just euphemisms for childish protectionism of an oversized ego.
Let's say TikTok was the same exact company founded in another country, do you believe that the conversation about banning it would be the same? With some exceptions (maybe Russia, for example), I seriously doubt it.
I'm against a TikTok ban and here's why: if user-level data collection and fingerprinting are wrong, ban that. If algorithms to show certain things for certain people are wrong, then ban that too. If a company being owned by a foreign entity who is a "frenemy" at the eyes of the military, then sure, ban it. If US social networks are banned in country X, then ban X's social networks in the US. Again, that's Ok.
But those are rules made for any company in any place, not just TikTok. Just banning TikTok now seems more like making some convenient excuses for doing what some folks already wanted to do anyway as soon as TikTok started getting their cookies and slices of ad revenue and media relevancy.
Readit News
The TikTok ban has very little do with TikTok. It's yet another Patriot Act (now, the Restrict Act [2]) style back door to slip in some seriously heinous legislation that could find you fined to the tune of millions, or worse, thrown in jail for 20 years.
> A person who willfully commits, willfully attempts to commit, or willfully conspires to commit, or aids or abets in the commission of an unlawful act described in subsection (a) shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both.
I do view TikTok as a covert military campaign (ideological subversion) and do think it should be limited in the West, however, not via this bill.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
Yep. They couldnt put the backdoors through the 'we are fighting pedophilia' excuse. Now they are using Tiktok...
I'd like you to expand on the idea that is it is "a covert military campaign (ideological subversion)". It's common talking point, but I literally do not understand it. Sure there are some Chinese based creators that are spreading lies like how everything is super cool in Xinjiang with Uyghurs, but I can go on Twitter and find some American tankie saying that as well. The *VAST* majority of stuff on my FYP is cosplayers, dancing girls, dumb and intentionally awkward jokes, and skateboarders. Are Warhammer 40k and 3d printed Star Wars droids a CCP plot on par with the CIA and modern art[0][1]? To what end? To crash our economy by trying to get us to impress skateboarding leggy Chinese girls with the size of our 7-foot Imperator Titans[2]? Chinese girls that would no doubt a face swapped APT-2 officer, ala Azusagakuyuki[3][4]?
I'm not trying to be dismissive, but it does seem far fetched. So what's the best argument?
[0] https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463076
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VgjqNmKPEE
[3] https://twitter.com/azusagakuyuki
[4] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g88m/viral-japanese-biker-...
As for a why: look at the parallel of how the Chinese raise their youth, specifically in relation to combat and military service [1]. If your biggest adversary is the United States/its Western allies and you intend to perform a military strike down the road, it's in your best interest to weaken their fighting population physically and mentally to an extent where they're either non-existent or easily destroyed.
That military strike could either be Taiwan, or, on the continental United States in conjunction with other BRICS countries (namely, Russia and now, Iran and Saudi Arabia).
I get that the idea is unsavory and triggering (just me having to say that is evidence that the campaign was/is successful), but it's a reality that people need to be aware of in the West. Western hegemony is coming to an end and the geopolitical vultures are taking flight.
[1] https://bitterwinter.org/compulsory-military-education-chine...
No need to be interested unless you develop for:
... [critical infra] ...
... [telecom / internet] ...
... [services] ...
... [IoT anyone uses] ...
... [unmanned vehicles] ...
... [apps] ...
... [anything important] ...
_put up proper user protecting rules by law and enforce them fairly against any company_
it's simple, fair, and would either ban TickTock due to non compliance or cripple it's ability to do whatever they are afraid of it doing
the problem is the US Government isn't against the things TickTock is doing, it's only against them being done under Chinese control
They might fear that Tik-Tok might apply some oversight to this process...
> apply some oversight to this process...
They don't care about that, they also get the data they need from other companies they have much more influence one. Like phone companies, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, etc. etc.
How would that work? A warrant signed off by a judge is required to compel companies to comply with requests.
TikTok is arguably the most powerful means to spread ideas, and people in that line of business do not appreciate outsiders on their turf.
The whole TikTok thing itself seems like a distraction from the contents of the bill they've drafted under the guise of only banning TikTok.
Democracy as it is is a giant magic trick, and TikTok is pulling back the curtains in it, so it must go.
I watched the hearing. The main concern voiced is manipulation of content by the CCP. User data is what cranky HN users care about.
That is a solution, but there's nothing simple about it. Obviously there's an even much simpler solution than coming up with what would be a very very complex set of regulations and laws, that would have impact across all the industry, and that btw tech giants would love. The really simple solution could be done tomorrow, without the need of figuring out what "proper" is in this case.
Not that what you're saying shouldn't happen, but it's a different battle that needn't be intertwined with this one.
Can you elaborate?
Regulation in general is a double-edged sword. While it may be great in the short term if your goal is to rein in the bad behaviour of large companies, in the long run it can act as a pretty effective moat for established companies, preventing startups from effectively being able to compete. A lot of people attribute Europe’s less competitive tech sector (vs the U.S.) to an abundance of complex regulations in the EU.
We should pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing right to privacy, and it should apply to both the US government, and to firms operating withing the US.
And that's a perfectly fine reason.
We do the same thing with Iran, Russia and others.
The proposed law specifies it's targeting China, Iran and Russia, as well as North Korea, Cuba and (the Moros regime of) Venezuela. It also has rules for adding or removing countries from that list going forward.
The majority of these US companies have already been fined like this. The same should happen to TikTok if they want to continue to follow the regulations in the US.
Deleted Comment
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
(i) the People’s Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Macao Special Administrative Region;
(ii) the Republic of Cuba;
(iii) the Islamic Republic of Iran;
(iv) the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea;
(v) the Russian Federation; and
(vi) the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela under the regime of Nicolás Maduro Moros.
"Any telecom, etc, product where someone in the parent post's list has partial ownership, including voting stocks and has >= 1 million users"
So, that includes a lot of video games (Genshin Impact, League of Legends, Gunfire Reborn, etc) and also Reddit and Epic Games, maybe? I'm sure an argument would be made that since the CEO of Telegram was born in Russia, it would count, too, somehow.
Edit: whoever downvoted the above comment, that's literally section 8B
Addendum: I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a layperson trying to read this thing.
Spin up a cloud VM in China now. Go do it. Try.
I can, literally in minutes, go create a virtual machine hosting a web site in some random middle eastern country I probably would not visit because they're anti... everything. Anti-female, anti-christian, anti-gay, anti-freedom, anti everything I hold dear.
But I can create a virtual machine there, right now, no problems.
China? Hah... no.
That would require paperwork, in person, in chinese, paid for in renminbi, from a Chinese bank.
I'd have to get a chinese id, and submit it to a police station to get an authorisation number, which I would then have to display on every page of that web server.
Chinese companies can spin up whatever they want in any country they please.
Every other country has to sign up to Chinese censorship laws to publish anything at all on that side of the Great Firewall.
Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't really just create a single website that serves both western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is stopping them, doing this is just going give your western customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America and complying with all local laws to do so.
How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one. You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but, again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into the western market with millions of dollars with the acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some American competitor.
Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you.
Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has already done with the GDPR ...
Popper’s Paradox on the geopolitical scale.
This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
That being said, there is always an argument for banning foreign social media companies (really all media companies) from making commercial profits in other countries. The political and military risks are significant.
TikTok is only superior in poisoning the minds of people using it here in US. That's why the Chinese version is different. I think zero is lost if people use the inferior local ones in this case.
> This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
Sure, the optimal solution for the prisoner's dilemma is that both cooperate. But once one doesn't cooperate, the optimal solution is not to cooperate. US looks like a dummy waving the flag of morality while China laughs in its face.
The contention here is that one country does not allow the other to do business in their territory, yet complains when their product is threatened with a ban.
The contention is _not_ that double standards are being applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.
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[EDIT] Case law citations would be a lot more convincing than downvotes.
Except for some reason, diversity of thought and free speech ideals aren't actually used to justify speech people disagree with, namely China's. This two-mouthed approach is noticed. It de-legitimizes the diversity of thought value.
To anyone who has argued for free speech before but is silent now, your silence says more than your speech ever could.
1. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
We need to just make it a fair playing field and if they want to have software startups on the Internet and in App Stores they need to open their markets to our products too.
Because we're a democracy with free speech and open markets, and China is not? Banning foreign speech and competition is not the victory for our way of life that some people seem to think it is.
There is a problem with TikTok - like ALL social media it uses opaque ranking algorithms that serve nefarious interests, and like ALL social media it spies ruthlessly on its users. How about we address those issues, thereby indirectly resolving the TikTok issue too?
Just because we are a democracy with different values to the CCP does not mean we should be taken for fools.
We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security threat.
And I personally love TikTok, I'm active on it for a couple of hours a day, but I know that it's a threat.
China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government.
Most US internet companies aren't willing to meet those requirements, so don't operate there.
If the US wants to ban TikTok it should do the same thing here: make privacy and transparency rules that all social media companies that want to operate in the US must follow.
Those rules, however, are official state secrets, and western companies who wish to operate in China must infer what they are themselves lest they get kicked out. China works on the standard that "there are rules that you must break, we won't tell you what they are, so be very very very careful." Not transparent at all (incidentally, China rejects rule of law as a western imperialist concept).
The laws on paper might be entirely fair, but what those laws say doesn't matter.
Wow. Talk about being disingenuous. “oh you can vote - you just have to take a literacy test first and show us 5 different types of ID we’re sure you don’t have - it’s just the law”.
“It’s just the rules” - what else could it be? Censorship isn’t this mystical thing the government does - it’s implemented with rules. Sounds like “go back to your country” at company scale.
US: Listen CCP, you can't use your tech companies to deploy a massive surveillance system on American soil as you do in China.
CCP: OK!
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I wonder how many people in the US will use TikTok if the rules require government censorship and data sharing.
And whether this judgement is significantly different from whether reducing influence from the CCP, an obviously totalitarian government that does not balk at overtly undermining of democratic values within your own borders, is worth losing access to TikTok.
If the US withdrew from NATO we would be in theoretical trouble.
If US would like to hurt us economically, our retaliation capacities are weak.
All in all we unfortunately depend on the US and have to play along.
The point is that EVERY country needs to concern itself with its own national security, local laws and regulations. I wish that every country would embrace freedom, free trade and the open Internet and that we could all just get along ... but those are my personal value judgments being applied. In the current world of foreign relations, countries are going to act according to their own national interests, whatever those happen to be. Each will pretend that it is the one taking the "right" position, and each might behave hypocritically in the moment. The question of who is "right" and who is "wrong" will vary according to your own set of moral principals and beliefs.
TikTok is state owned and state controlled. On top of that, the communist Chinese state has consistently threatened its neighbors with violent annexation. I think it's a dishonest argument to claim that independent American platforms and state-owned Chinese platforms are equivalent.
On a national scale? Well, I certainly do not want an adversary with an interest in overtaking the U.S. have both data and means to manipulate the opinions of its citizens.
that way governments may act against you regardless of where you are, best abide by the law, citizen,
I don't really see a fair way to handle this that doesn't end up also banning Facebook, Instagram, etc. The problem is that these companies are collecting enough sensitive data to pose a huge security risk, but our politicians are acting like it's only a problem when someone else does it.
So much this. Everyone's gotten focused on one particular company when this problem is much more widespread than that.
China bans western websites because they don't follow China's censorship requirements. Apple services exist in China, why isn't Apple a national security threat? They're the richest tech company on the planet, and based in the US.
Tim Cook just went all the way over there to kiss their feet: https://nypost.com/2023/03/27/tim-cook-touts-apples-symbioti...
And he doesn't have a choice. Google took a stand and had to give up its position in the Chinese market. But Apple as a manufacturer will have to give up their entire business if they go against China.
I would go a step further and say that reclaiming Taiwan and triumphing over the US are among the top goals of the CCP.
I would accept limited bans within specific contexts (e.g., people in sensitive positions with access to sensitive data).
At the same time, I crave reform to our privacy laws. We, the people, need better protection against data collection and use by both private and public entities.
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Is that really where you want to go.
Not true. Communism is allowed:
https://www.cpusa.org/
It is just not very popular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA#Best_resul...
Memes about Tiananmen square were popular on that platform. As well as videos critical of the CCP.
Anyone who claims otherwise clearly hasn't used Tiktok. And they'll shift goalposts to fit their narrative
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A Chinese company sold Grinder because of privacy concerns. Tiktok will either IPO or be sold off
Instead, the idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Tiktok gained audience and market share because it happened to be a better product in its niche. Inventing any excuses to ban it is unadulterated hypocrisy.
All the words like "censorship", "free", "CCP", "national security", "china bad" are just euphemisms for childish protectionism of an oversized ego.
Ah yes, because China can totally tolerate competition.
Some of us think all social media is trash for the mind and society, and think it's doubleplusungood when a hostile foreign power controls the algo.
You're implying that I root for Instagram. That's not the angle.