Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.
TikTok has one of the lowest bars to monetization out of all the major social media networks.
There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.
Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of features that just don't exist on other platforms.
Awful lot of people on "Hacker" News incredibly worried about the livelihoods of people who look pretty and dance for 15 seconds for a living.
Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate.
That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.
They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like.
So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy.
I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like".
Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately.
And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.
Is your argument that we shouldn’t ban TikTok because the CCP can manipulate upset users? Isn’t that one of the reasons we’re banning it in the first place?
Every US publicly traded company of course has to kowtow [0] to the US national agenda. How else could it work?
The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1]
Lol, they realize it's a sell-or-ban bill, right? Kind of a moot point when you realize that TikTok as we know it will continue, just without a connection to the CCP. Even if they do ban TikTok the company, the engineers/ML scientists who developed the recommender system powering TikTok still exist, so worst comes to worst someone makes a new company, hires the engineers, and off to the races
What a wild take. You know they spent multiple billions of dollars on advertising to get their userbase? Which without, algorithms don't work. The best algo in the world means nothing if there are only a million people using the thing.
Beijing has a veto on the sale, and are likely to exercise it. From their point of view, allowing the US to force a Chinese company to sell itself off as soon as it achieves success would set a very bad precedent, and encourage a torrent of other blackmail efforts.
They'll be willing to let Bytedance take the L on this. Bytedance can console themselves that TikTok can still operate elsewhere on the world, just making less money.
China has already indicated it won't sell its 20% share, and so TikTok will be removed from the US app stores.
And any replacement would be US only, limiting its reach to some 10% of what it had before.
This is why most people view this as a ban. And IMO, rightfully so; it's not as if our congressmen and congresswomen are fumbling about in the dark. They've just bought.
The rest of the world will likely follow. Also most of the world has already accepted that US tech firms have all their data, but don’t want China to have it. If there’s a feasible alternative to TikTok then banning it in Indonesia or Poland or Brazil becomes much easier for the politicians.
Staying away from the politics, anybody who has a business model completely dependent upon a single service’s algorithm should question what kind of business they have.
I'm sure you have the same sympathy for Coal workers, Steel workers, Mom & Pop Retail, right? or is this specially reserved for people who make a living out of content creation, just because you don't like it
Many successful businesses specialize in a niche. Mastering the algorithms of a single, popular platform can be a strategic advantage. Think of SEO experts or social media marketing firms.
This can be true at the same time the parent comment is. Advantages can be short-lived. I suppose the key is just not to take them for granted, or be surprised when they disappear.
Correct in theory, false in practice. Case in point : google adwords / adsense. It’s been close to 20 years and counting, and lots of the online ad economy is still relying almost exclusively on it.
Not sure what your point is. If you rely heavily on Google search traffic or ads, and get banned you are in the same boat. Id say it’s still correct, because the point OP was trying to make is, don’t run a business that can fail entirely because of another entities whims.
Beyond what the article says, something that is very hard to quantify is whether the promise of fame on TikTok causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would, even in excess of the income they actually receive from either TikTok or its effect on the promotion of their ventures. Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
> causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would
The promise of fame is not exceptional. The type of person who on an implicit promise makes decisions that are damaging to their own lives possibly have a larger problem then the exact ownership specifics of one single media company.
> Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
What percentage of the working age population is actually using social media in this unhealthy way? Is there a better solution that doesn't involve outright taking decisions away from everyone else?
Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.
Why not also ban Instagram? Its algorithm is not categorically less harmful than TikTok's. And its parent company has been known to sell Americans' data to foreign brokers and intelligence analysts.
What many of us who opposed this ban are frustrated about is that there are major underlying problems with all large social media companies, and the "foreign adversary" angle gives these companies cover to keep abusing their users just because they happen to be incorporated in the right country.
Most of the TikTok concerns could have been subsumed in a user-rights bill that prevented data from being shared with third parties and limited the scope of what an algo-feed could do under Section 230's safe harbor. Of course, this would have required some real legislating that would have upset some very large donors, so we get the "foreign adversary" bill instead.
Banning TikTok will cause an entire generation of Americans to lose all trust in their institutions. Whatever vanishingly small influence China may or may not have through TikTok---still completely unproven innuendo---pales compared to the absolute public relations coup that would win were it banned. If you think cynicism is bad now, there will be zero trust in the democratic process and the rules-based order were this to happen.
You're way overdramatizing this. Tiktok has already been banned in several countries (like India) for similar reasons and without any of the catastrophe you're suggesting.
People can and will switch platforms, it's not that big of a deal...
Why does HN and other Tech elitists treat creator/influencers with disdain that they don't show the same sympathy as they would to other professions?.
This is akin to saying "Mom and Shop Retail closes? who cares, the workers can go work at Walmart"
"Coal Industry shut down? who cares, they can learn to code"
It's not easy for someone to easily rebuild audience from one platform to another or easily transfer the skills required from one platform to another.
Remember these are small businesses run by people with little technical skills. Many have toiled to be where they are.
Your analogies are all wrong. It's sad for people who built their businesses on TikTok, but it's the same tragedy that it would be for those businesses built on a dam that must come down to avoid a larger disaster.
The people who pinned their livelihoods to TikTok are casualties, if and only if TikTok doesn't sell. If the company just shuts down then we'll know two things:
1. The primary reason for its existence was not a profit motive (hence no reason to sell, if China can't get influence powers from it).
2. The commercial facades holding the bag were not the ones calling the shots.
If TikTok is sold to a "friendly" company, we'll know less, but it also means that none of those duped people whose livelihoods you're opining about will be touched.
Well, there are many types of work harmful to society that people partake in. Coal, content makers for abusive social media, there have even been some organizations in history which have committed atrocious war crimes in which people had jobs, and they would have needed to re-specialize had they lost those jobs. It's not that there is a lack of sympathy for anyone who loses their job, but some organizations and efforts are harmful to the broader public.
The "HN and other Tech elitists" don't like social media because it's harmful to society. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant already brought forward the notion that it is immoral to use a rational human as means to an end. We have broadly accepted this philosophy in life. So when social media companies exploit human attention and cause significant harm to their mental health as means to achieve advertising income and towards mercenary surveillance (surveilling the public for the highest bidder), that is broadly considered questionable. And not only by HN, but by psychiatrists, psychologists, other health care workers, teachers, social sciences researchers, and so on.
There is a national security argument to be made for TikTok as well, which is why governments have taken an interest in it recently. So the ends may be more insidious than advertisement and mercenary surveillance like we see across all social media.
We know that the content on TikTok changed a lot the day Russian invaded Ukraine, there has been a flood of misleading information about the war, including a wave of glorifying the "Z" armed forces and the "special operation", not to mention the "denazifying" stuff. People are being used as means to information warfare ends, too. And by both sides of various conflicts. This is also, arguably, immoral. Although I doubt there's much of an argument to be had.
The mental health and the national security arguments are separate, but given their context, characterizing this as a hate for mom and pop shop closures in some way or form is inappropriate. I think this comparison is a bit of a low effort troll. It's clear you want to rile people up as I don't think anyone starts a serious discussion by calling the other party an elitist or any -ist. But still, above are the reasons why very many people dislike social media and TikTok.
Adam Curry theorized on his podcast a few years ago that the TikTok ban chatter was a protectionist move to help Facebook, Twitter and other US social media companies.
Because TikTok has other goals than capitalistic, and other measures of success. It is a media company that parrots a China's Communist Party line and by virtue of that, receives monopoly benefits in China, which is a substantial market.
The company which owns TikTok, ByteDance, has had employees speak about this. The VP and ByteDance's internal CPP committee secretary has stated that their intent is for ByteDance to "transmit the correct political direction, public opinion guidance and value orientation into every business and product line." While employees of a subsidiary company TopBuzz have spoken out about its intent to push CCP sympathizer content to foreign users.
ByteDance's history is mired by CCP interventions, it is a company heavily managed by the communist party, with multiple branches closed for non-compliance. It is allowed to exist by the CCP because, so it has been claimed very publicly, it toes the CCP's political line. That's how it measures success. Its success comes from this compliance.
TikTok may very well be a commercial flop in the West and still be in business, operating very well.
Because their algo is really, really good. Scary good. And it had a ridiculous amount of money funding the marketing machine behind it to onboard users.
US startups don't have access to that kind of capital, and even if their algo is better than tiktok, users make or break it, so they can't really get off the ground.
I'd say the closest idea is snapchat, and, that was/is massively hampered by the semi-slimy reputation it has. Sure it's profitable, but, had it never been used to send lewd images among college kids, it could very well have been as big as tiktok.
If we are not careful, millions of people will have to resort to obtaining employment. Luckily we'll still have Twitch, Kick, playing the meme stock market, and gambling for them to fall back on.
Also illegal drug sales may taper off for a while but they'll find snap to be quite cozy again.
Readit News
There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.
Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of features that just don't exist on other platforms.
Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate.
That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.
So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy.
I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like".
Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately.
And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.
The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-...
They'll be willing to let Bytedance take the L on this. Bytedance can console themselves that TikTok can still operate elsewhere on the world, just making less money.
Until the CCP decides to allow a level playing field for US companies operating in China they can go pound sand as far as I’m concerned.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.homyt.thex
And any replacement would be US only, limiting its reach to some 10% of what it had before.
This is why most people view this as a ban. And IMO, rightfully so; it's not as if our congressmen and congresswomen are fumbling about in the dark. They've just bought.
The rest of the world will likely follow. Also most of the world has already accepted that US tech firms have all their data, but don’t want China to have it. If there’s a feasible alternative to TikTok then banning it in Indonesia or Poland or Brazil becomes much easier for the politicians.
https://archive.is/SoSw9
Beyond what the article says, something that is very hard to quantify is whether the promise of fame on TikTok causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would, even in excess of the income they actually receive from either TikTok or its effect on the promotion of their ventures. Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
The promise of fame is not exceptional. The type of person who on an implicit promise makes decisions that are damaging to their own lives possibly have a larger problem then the exact ownership specifics of one single media company.
> Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
What percentage of the working age population is actually using social media in this unhealthy way? Is there a better solution that doesn't involve outright taking decisions away from everyone else?
What many of us who opposed this ban are frustrated about is that there are major underlying problems with all large social media companies, and the "foreign adversary" angle gives these companies cover to keep abusing their users just because they happen to be incorporated in the right country.
Most of the TikTok concerns could have been subsumed in a user-rights bill that prevented data from being shared with third parties and limited the scope of what an algo-feed could do under Section 230's safe harbor. Of course, this would have required some real legislating that would have upset some very large donors, so we get the "foreign adversary" bill instead.
Banning TikTok will cause an entire generation of Americans to lose all trust in their institutions. Whatever vanishingly small influence China may or may not have through TikTok---still completely unproven innuendo---pales compared to the absolute public relations coup that would win were it banned. If you think cynicism is bad now, there will be zero trust in the democratic process and the rules-based order were this to happen.
People can and will switch platforms, it's not that big of a deal...
This is akin to saying "Mom and Shop Retail closes? who cares, the workers can go work at Walmart" "Coal Industry shut down? who cares, they can learn to code"
It's not easy for someone to easily rebuild audience from one platform to another or easily transfer the skills required from one platform to another.
Remember these are small businesses run by people with little technical skills. Many have toiled to be where they are.
The people who pinned their livelihoods to TikTok are casualties, if and only if TikTok doesn't sell. If the company just shuts down then we'll know two things:
1. The primary reason for its existence was not a profit motive (hence no reason to sell, if China can't get influence powers from it).
2. The commercial facades holding the bag were not the ones calling the shots.
If TikTok is sold to a "friendly" company, we'll know less, but it also means that none of those duped people whose livelihoods you're opining about will be touched.
The "HN and other Tech elitists" don't like social media because it's harmful to society. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant already brought forward the notion that it is immoral to use a rational human as means to an end. We have broadly accepted this philosophy in life. So when social media companies exploit human attention and cause significant harm to their mental health as means to achieve advertising income and towards mercenary surveillance (surveilling the public for the highest bidder), that is broadly considered questionable. And not only by HN, but by psychiatrists, psychologists, other health care workers, teachers, social sciences researchers, and so on.
There is a national security argument to be made for TikTok as well, which is why governments have taken an interest in it recently. So the ends may be more insidious than advertisement and mercenary surveillance like we see across all social media.
We know that the content on TikTok changed a lot the day Russian invaded Ukraine, there has been a flood of misleading information about the war, including a wave of glorifying the "Z" armed forces and the "special operation", not to mention the "denazifying" stuff. People are being used as means to information warfare ends, too. And by both sides of various conflicts. This is also, arguably, immoral. Although I doubt there's much of an argument to be had.
The mental health and the national security arguments are separate, but given their context, characterizing this as a hate for mom and pop shop closures in some way or form is inappropriate. I think this comparison is a bit of a low effort troll. It's clear you want to rile people up as I don't think anyone starts a serious discussion by calling the other party an elitist or any -ist. But still, above are the reasons why very many people dislike social media and TikTok.
The company which owns TikTok, ByteDance, has had employees speak about this. The VP and ByteDance's internal CPP committee secretary has stated that their intent is for ByteDance to "transmit the correct political direction, public opinion guidance and value orientation into every business and product line." While employees of a subsidiary company TopBuzz have spoken out about its intent to push CCP sympathizer content to foreign users.
ByteDance's history is mired by CCP interventions, it is a company heavily managed by the communist party, with multiple branches closed for non-compliance. It is allowed to exist by the CCP because, so it has been claimed very publicly, it toes the CCP's political line. That's how it measures success. Its success comes from this compliance.
TikTok may very well be a commercial flop in the West and still be in business, operating very well.
US startups don't have access to that kind of capital, and even if their algo is better than tiktok, users make or break it, so they can't really get off the ground.
I'd say the closest idea is snapchat, and, that was/is massively hampered by the semi-slimy reputation it has. Sure it's profitable, but, had it never been used to send lewd images among college kids, it could very well have been as big as tiktok.
Also illegal drug sales may taper off for a while but they'll find snap to be quite cozy again.
I’m always amazed at how many accounts openly sell drugs, I report them, meta says they are ok.