Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X. What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices. The Chinese can buy all of the information they want on Americans and Canadians from ad brokers, who will happily sell them everything they need to track individuals' locations.
Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.
It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.
Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.
> Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.
It is happening on our local platforms here. Meta, based in the US, is systematically censoring Palestinian content that would otherwise be available here in Canada.
What’s crazy is few people even talk about who currently owns major US news networks and what their motives might be. People don’t like Musk owning Twitter/X, that’s a start - but start reading about who owns the rest (especially traditional media).
> It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.
Well, this is Canada we are talking about. All of the countries in OP's list are foreign.
This sounds reasonable but I feel just like OP, its still missing the forest from the trees
Its not about who has the data, although that is important.
Its not about subversion of a population by a foreign state, although that is important too.
The crux of the issue is reciprocity.
China does not let any CAN or US companies into China markets, without first demanding local factories, forcing local production, requiring equity control and even IP. And if you dont share it, bohoo they will steal it anyway. And, there's no recourse.
The chinese govt has abused free trade for so long. Its time to demand fairness.
They dont give us access into their markets? OK! We close our markets to their corporations.
> Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish
Okay. Now imagine CNN and NYTimes and Fox News being coerced into publishing or not publishing info because a US gov agency demands it. Or how about the US gov pressuring Meta and Twitter to change their algos around very specific topics? You don't need to imagine it actually.
So why is that less of a concern than China controlling a media delivery service?
I don't see how a foreign government or any foreign interest is worse than domestic interests (or governments).
The us is already one of the most propagandized nations on earth and our own government only benefits from this, despite ostensibly being criticized from sanitized angles.
I don't know what life is like in canada, but what i surmise from friends is that the experience is similar.
As opposed to the domestic government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.
The difficulty here is that it has long been US policy to promote the exports of its intellectual property (such as its movies) and communications networks (such as the internet). Trade policy is almost always a two way street, particularly in the modern era in which arrangements like the "unequal treaties" that choked the Qing dynasty are highly unusual. So banning Tiktok necessarily results in reciprocal bans. Canada does not have similar concerns as the US does because it is our little gas station whose pretensions to independence we humor and they do not export IP or communications technologies at the same scale as we do.
It’s your people who decide to see it, not a foreign govt. Chinese media like cnn and nyt exist, no need to imagine either that or the situation where China buys cnn and nyt and gosh now you have to watch their propaganda.
The essence is, by denying agency of your country’s users, you deny the whole set of ideas it bases on. If that’s a natural vulnerability of the ideology, addressing it by banning media is a patch over a bleeding wound.
Canadian teens will simply learn about VPN, like they always do in other countries which ban internet resources. Not a single one of them will leave tiktok.
It's about the western gov'ts NOT being able to control the feed, what evidence is there that Chinese gov't is actively involved in curating the TikTok feed?
> It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm
The right way to stop bad behavior is to write a specific description of the bad actions and the penalty for doing them into the code of law. The wrong way is to declare specific entities guilty of bad behavior you can only vaguely describe.
There is a very good reason the US constitution bans bills of attainder: they become a way of going after individuals for reasons that if properly articulated could not withstand public scrutiny. Canada would do well to uphold the same taboo.
Note that I'm not registering a position on TikTok itself. It could be run by turbosatan for all I care. I object to the lawless mechanism through which western governments are trying to go after TikTok in particular.
>It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.
Adam Curry opined that this was the excuse and it's really about protecting domestic (or at least Western in the case of Canada) social media companies. Seems plausible.
I don't use TikTok so I'm not sure what the feed looks like, but it seems like a bunch of people doing silly stuff and mugging for the camera.
Data protection regulation addresses the abuses of reading information from databases.
An analog to address the abuses of controlling how users read information from databases would be anti-trust regulation that unbundles client software from hosted services. "The algorithm" should be under control of the client software, for which there should be a competitive market, based on well-documented APIs for communication between the two. Then everyone can choose what "algorithm" they want, rather than having one singular one pushed on them by the service provider abusing its captive audience.
But foreign news media are legal for people to consume in the US, at least. If every American wanted to read and watch Al Jazeera and put it on in every store and bar and restaurant, that wouldn't justify banning it
Canadian users can still access Tiktok and are still subject to Tiktok's algorithms. They're also still subject to Meta's algorithms that, unlike Tiktok, have already helped cause at least one genocide[1].
Tiktok's Canada-based offices must have been up to some other form of skulduggery for them to have been shuttered while leaving Canadian use of the platform completely status quo.
I tried TikTok out earlier this year. It was enjoyable but at least once a day when I was using the app heavily I would be served a video that was mildly pro China. Like a clearly western person living there showing off how great it is.
It wasn’t offensive or even off the mark but it felt like I was being served low grade propaganda.
Only foreign? Zuck during elections, Musk during elections. etc. Living in the EU, if I am gullible, when I open X, I have to believe that all Americans are mentally challenged. Being raised as a kid or gullible reading all that crap every day cannot be good for you right? Without foreign influence that is.
You were so close and nearly got there. It's not about fear of China controlling the narrative, it's about not being able to control the narrative on Tiktok like they are doing on other (American) platforms.
For most of the world, that "foreign government" is the US that pushes its propaganda via facebook, twitter and also by buying up local tv/news stations, newspapers, etc.
I know this is a US-centric site, but globally, you're a minority that pushes the most propaganda around.
...especially since the article is about canada, so US is a foreign government, and meta/x are foreign companies.
Let's take this one step further, then, and ask why we should allow private media ownership if it's this important. Why should some malevolent billionaire be able to own CNN or NYT and decide what stories they could publish? Does it matter if the billionaire has a US passport or not?
And yet if some other country bans US-controlled social media exactly for the same reasons, this works as a data point to label them as "lacking freedom of speech", "axis of evil", "undemocratic", etc.
But I do appreciate the honesty of at least admitting the hypocrisy.
Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris from the New York Times causing the resignations of many within the organization and a similar situation occurred with Bezos and the Washington Post . We have internal issues as well. I agree with what you are saying though. I don’t know what can remedy the apparent degraded integrity of social platforms and major news outlets, but I’m all ears. Federated platforms are compelling but no holy grail and such things founded on ideological extremes like Lemmy (developed by self professed Leninist Marxists) and the stigma around decentralized technologies make them less attractive.
I know this is shocking, but people don't have to look at TikToc or CNN no matter who owns it. Personally, I welcome the stat of Iran purchasing CNN and Putin buying TikToc. If the public doesn't like the apps/network they can use something different.
SO THIS! it's not about data protection, it's about the platform allowing misinformation and hate speech to thrive there. i've reported hundreds of videos, comments, and accounts - TikTok said they don't violate the community standards. the worst was yesterday - someone commented he was sad Hitler failed on a TikTok video about the Israeli hostages held by Hamas - and TikTok, after 30 minutes, said this doesn't violate community standards.
before anyone says "free speech" - views or comments that are not aligned with the CCP and its allies get taken down when reported. several of mine were taken down.
i owe the rising antisemitism among young people to TikTok and its lack of action towards misinformation and hate speech.
> Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X.
The law should be against general bad behavior by social media companies, but it isn't because the unsaid reasoning is too impolite to speak: we can compromise with Western companies' spying, manipulation, and exploitation of us, but it's unacceptable if a Chinese company does the same.
These sorts of movements gain a life of their own at some point, but the cynical side of me suspects the TikTok ban animus started with big tech lobbyists, not a grassroots movement from concerned citizenry.
No because the US is happy of having those giants data, sometimes without even needing a warrant. We already have multiple evidence in courts and news and congress hearings that all of those and Apple gave to various US agencies for years.
But since Bytedance doesn't dance at NSA's tune, different rules apply.
The platforms like that also provide interesting aggregates. Like hidden trends and the political mood... Interesting correlations. And having this information is pretty beneficial for any agent (for ads or to know your population better). There could be a lot of research done based on having platform like tiktok (like what kind of fake news would work the best in the specific situation). Ah, big data.
> What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices.
Also, what some people dismissed at the time is that from a European perspective it makes perfect sense to consider any foreign power a potential future threat. That seemed less plausible a few days ago but with the person running the site formerly known as Twitter now likely becoming part of the US government and the foreign policy/trade course the president elect has been advertising throughout his campaign, European leaders seem to be waking up to the possibility that US vendors should no longer simply be considered neutral by default.
Keep in mind European intelligence services have literally watched American intelligence happily infiltrate friendly governments (e.g. the German-American joint venture operating from Switzerland selling fraudulent encryption that Germany abandoned when they saw the US selling to allies, ostensibly to avoid raising suspicions from the real targets) and even wiretap heads of state (cf. Snowden revelations), you'd think people would have wisened up to this earlier but as a German I'm just happy to see any progress at all.
Ask them to check how much their own Ad spend is increasing every year.
And ask them to check how much New Content they need to produce everyday. And how much that has increased over the last year.
Basically Politicians, instead of being on the ground dealing with people issues, are turning into Content Factories and Fund raising machines to keep the content factories running.
Human Attention is finite. If its not treated as such, we trap everyone in an Attention Capture arms race to nowhere.
I think his argument holds. We should apply the same standards to Meta. Zuckerberg has explicitly harmed our democracy. Let's treat all companies that are hostile and run by those that despise America with deep hostility (look no further than his private practices in Hawaii for examples). That's my personal opinion. The same standard is the most democratic path
If the west is serious about its "universal values", that would the approach to take. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Yes, China banned Facebook, X etc for national security reasons, too. The Chinese government wants Chinese data to stay in China, and all of these social media platform would have to comply with Chinese law, including some requirements regarding censorship. Now it becomes more and more obvious that the west is not that different from China, the country it keeps bitching about on a daily basis. Censorship has been there for a long time, and now you have outright banning of a social network because it has roots in China.
You can accept one of these two things but not both:
A. National security is above freedom of speech
B. Freedom of speech is a fundamental value of an open society and should in no scenario be given up
If you accept A, you have to be honest and admit that the banning of Facebook etc in China is completely justified.
If you accept B, you have to just let TikTok operate normally as any other social network.
> What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices
I've always found the EU and India’s data regulations somewhat superficial. Sure, it’s a start that my data is stored in the EU, but how does that really help if the CCP can just call a ByteDance executive and ask them to run a SQL query on demand?
I am not saying those laws shouldn't exist, but don't protect against the threat model of other side being China
Could someone in the ads world give an estimate of how this would work? What volume of data would need to be purchased, how one individual person could be de-anonymized from that volume of data, how much it would cost to do, etc.
I've always been terrified to think about how much of my data is out there, but I don't understand enough about how it can be used, and the potential risks.
Perhaps not2b could "legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament" in order to "get anti-regulation politicians on board". He could then present "real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple and X."
By banning them from operating in the US. The implementation really isn’t complicated - it’s a simple statute outlawing the company on national security grounds, and all the tech companies (viz Apple and Google) will have to abide by it or face huge fines and criminal sanctions.
If US suspects they are breaking the law they can convince judge to sign warrant to get that information or start lawsuit and go through discovery. If they refuse the judge can hold them in contempt of court. I assume next they could just get judgement against them (assuming they are breaking the law) and that could be e.g. require seizing assets and dissolution of the US company.
You'd be surprised how many companies or individuals won't exchange money with you if doing so puts them in criminal or civil legal jeopardy. No need for even a Great Firewall.
This isn’t about data. This is about pubescent brain rot and foreign influence and misinformation and attention spans and depression and anti-sociality and suicide.
> "Most people can say, 'Why is it a big deal for a teenager now to have their data [on TikTok]?' Well in five years, in 10 years, that teenager will be a young adult, will be engaged in different activities around the world,"
I’m technically Gen-Z (but just barely) and this is something that really worries me. It’s become increasingly normal in recent times to share absolutely everything online but I’ve got a pretty grim feeling that this isn’t gonna end well. People don’t realize that the AI’s being trained on your data today will act as an internet history that you can never delete.
> It’s become increasingly normal in recent times to share absolutely everything online
It certainly feels that way when you pull up a social media feed
However, the majority of people I interact with (all ages) don't post frequently or at all.
It's 10% of the users posting 90% of the content, including over-sharing. It only looks normal because they're so dominant in the feed that you don't realize who's missing.
I'm worried about the 1 or 2 posts where I said something stupid, but someone tied everything to everything else I've ever said, and it comes back to bite me. It doesn't take much to ruin a person.
We are lucky who live in America with free speech. I read an article the other day where a woman in Israel was kicked out of school, arrested and imprisoned for months without charge, and basically had her entire career and life ruined for social media posts because that country doesn't have the freedom of speech we often take for granted.
As someone who actually didn't participate in the facebook generation (I was a straight edge Millenial who started college at the tail of the Gen X generation), I do not envy anyone trying to live in modern western society without their generation's social media of choice. The few of us 'counterflow' cannot win against the tides as long as we remain part of the larger society. At best we eke out livings generally disadvantaged compared to our brethren with social media presences and all the drama that goes with it. A few of us may get opportunities from those rare outliers in positions to make a call or introduce you to a friend of a friend. But make of the rest of us simply become one of the unspoken masses, just like say the people in Slab City, or those old rock hounds who used to live in Quartzite, AZ (now some weird mass of RV park and bedroom community for Phoenix, as I understand it.)
My point, winding as it may seem, is that this generations kids are bound to their social mediums just like the radio and then television generations were to theirs, for mainstream culture, and like the Beatniks, Hippies, Progressives(I'm not sure of the proper term here, but the non-internet groups of the 80s-00s, LGBTQA movement, the BDSM movement, etc) for the outliers. There are plenty of other subcultures out there that have waxed and waned as well, some of them crossing other boundaries, like the religious or politcal gaps in this country.
But for many of us that leaves us as the odd person out. Not being into the right hobbies or social activities or just having the wrong values and you soon find yourself distanced from those around you. The internet can give that back to you or help take it away, but in the long term the dossiers on each of us that being online produce is far less damaging than the lack of in-person connections many of us(not I) gain from social networks even as we give up our privacy and our opportunities for future dissent against the status quo, something that Eastern and Western societies alike are rapidly barreling towards an ultimatum on.
Assuming you're not YOLOing it, what will you give up for your life now, versus the lives you want to leave you to your descendants, or if you're not planning on your own and not a selfish jerk, for other people's descendants?
Footnote: This comment was written from an American point of view, although much of it still applies to our Canadian cousins and European/Australian brethren.
"As ye sow, so ye shall reap"! errm, soz for the Biblical ref.
If everyone is spewing (sorry ... sharing) pics on TikTok, X and co then you won't stand out from the crowd. Unless those pics involve something too controversial.
I have an internet history that stretches back to Compuserve and I've always used my real name, which may or may not have been a good idea. Many years ago I decided not to give myself a silly pseudonym because I thought it would be futile and counter productive.
> If everyone is spewing (sorry ... sharing) pics on TikTok, X and co then you won't stand out from the crowd
You’re assuming people are consistent. You may have been photographed doing the same thing as all your peers, the fact that your photo can be highlighted unfavourable is ample ammo for proven lines of character attacks.
One possible saving grace for Z is that, due to how expensive it is to keep around, video will probably disappear much more readily than text and photos.
I wouldn't worry about it the truth is the internet forgets quickly. Important popular things disappear quicker than you expect. User data and logs exponentially becomes less valuable as time goes out. Know you are at McDonalds now is much more valuable then that you visited 10 years ago and being able to connect this data becomes difficult when devices switch. Video from 2005's is generally not easily consumable because of format changes and quality from a few years ago makes older video painful to watch. Even facebook starts forgetting data you upload.. stops being searchable after a few years.
I think the exact opposite. It's becoming easier and easier to crunch all that data. Let the AIs build up a perfect model of each individual human. No one needs to sit through and watch all that video content. And video formats are very much a non-issue, even if it's a pixelated mess, GenAI is very good at making sense of that.
The more data there is on you, the easier it'll be to fingerprint you in the future. Google photos can recognize me as a baby. Even I can't tell myself apart from my brother.
ByteDance will keep no data in Canada, will not employ any Canadians, will not report any information to Canadian authorities, and will have no reason to comply with Canadian warrants or court orders. (Or even judgments.) At the same time, all Canadians can continue to use the app.
On balance, this seems bad for Canada and great for ByteDance.
> On balance, this seems bad for Canada and great for ByteDance.
It's hard to balance anything until they explain why they did it. So far they claim they aren't at liberty to share but claim it was bad enough to make a very unprecedented move like this.
The only reason I think they would do this is because of espionage, so you want to remove the offices but keep the app. But there is no proof provided within the article.
ByteDance can't sell advertising in Canada. They can't make money off of Canadian customers, that has to hurt, although it is small potatoes compared to being banned in California, let alone the whole of the USA.
As far as I can find, Bytedance is one of only three companies ordered to shutter their Canadian operations. The other two are both involved in the drone detection space.
This makes the most sense if Canada expects (or has) Canadian troops secretly deployed somewhere. And that is one sobering thought.
Most app developers don't have legal entities in all the countries their app is distributed. Apple is the merchant of record for apps sold and distributed through its app store.
But what's the point? It's more common for a government to force companies to have an office in the country to exercise political or legal control (see for example recent news about Twitter's Brazil office). Why banning them from having one?
I believe there is a legal concept at play here. If a company has an office - a physical presence - within the country, then it has what is called “mind and management” in the country. The mind and management doctrine gives the company certain rights within Canada that presumably the security folks don’t want them to have.
The public will probably never find out the scope of ByteDance’s operations in Canada for the Chinese government, but if it follows the same arc as other Chinese operations in Canada, I expect it is far more pervasive and frightening than one might expect. This isn’t about the app. This is about the offices.
Yes, there have also been Chinese "police stations" in Canada. In its November 2023 Interim Report of the Special Committee on the Canada–People’s Republic of China Relationship for Canada's parliament [1], investigators detailed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has established unauthorized "police service stations" in major Canadian cities - at least 3 in Greater Toronto, 2 in Vancouver, and potentially 2 more in Montreal/Brossard. While branded as administrative service centers, these stations are reportedly part of a broader transnational repression apparatus.
What makes this particularly concerning is their alleged connection to the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the CCP's primary foreign interference arm. Most operators are local residents with established community connections and long-term involvement in influence operations, making them more effective than parachuted-in agents.
The RCMP has launched investigations and taken some interesting tactical approaches - including deliberately visible patrols with marked cars to encourage reporting and show community members they're taking action. However, investigations are described as "lengthy" and no arrests have been made yet.
The parliamentary committee seems to view this as part of a broader pattern of increasing transnational repression under Xi Jinping. According to Safeguard Defenders' testimony, there were at least 11,000 "successful persuasion to return" operations globally between 2014-2022, with at least 3 confirmed cases in Canada.
What's particularly striking is that these stations operate quite brazenly in G7 countries. It's a remarkable example of how authoritarian states are becoming increasingly bold in projecting power within democratic societies. The Canadian government has formally demanded the PRC cease these activities as violations of diplomatic conventions, but enforcement remains challenging.
The report suggests several countermeasures, including a foreign agent registry (currently defined in Bill C-70 [2]) and modernizing the 1984 CSIS Act, but the most interesting recommendation might be the call for coordinated frameworks among democratic allies to address transnational repression more systematically.
> The public will probably never find out the scope of ByteDance’s operations in Canada for the Chinese government, but if it follows the same arc as other Chinese operations in Canada, I expect it is far more pervasive and frightening than one might expect. This isn’t about the app. This is about the offices.
Man wait until you find out what the canadian government is up to within canada. I hear they're praising nazis!
If there are actual "national security concerns", they should rule that TikTok data of Canadian citizens needs to be stored within Canadian borders and can only be accessed by Canadian employees. This ban (removing the company's presence from the country while keeping the app active) ensures the exact opposite.
The point is that from a disinformation dissemination perspective, it doesn't matter where the data was stored, but the government could have possibly had more control if the data was stored in Canada. Forcing the data to be removed from Canada doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything positive for the Canadian government or people.
Brainwashed with what. All I can see is people are brainwashed to believe Chinese ppl bad, Chinese ppl are spies, a tiktok office is an evil spy outpost. The evil commmies from China are going to spread the red scare everywhere. We need to drop the iron curtain now!
Oh give it a rest with the nationalist fear mongering. This isn't about 'national security concerns'. That's the smoke and mirrors to get the populist support necessary to ban it. Meta and Google are feeling threatened that their dominance on North America is being tested and they are flexing their lobbying muscles.
I remember when Trump had Canada re-ratify Nafta that Canada had to waive the right to require Canadian data stay in Canada.
I know Canada signed the agreement but I am not sure if that requirement was ever put in legislation or whether the requirement was universal or just for US-based companies.
> This has also been the catalyst behind the ban of TikTok in the US
No it hasn’t. The war in Gaza is a foreign policy issue, which means most Americans tuned out from the start, and one that was a top issue for a very, very narrow slice of the electorate.
The sad truth is we’re aware of atrocities; we simply aren’t too bothered by them. (If you’re honest about yourself, you aren’t either. Nobody sane could be. There are too many of them, and they’re all burning furiously and it has been this was for a long time.) TikTok is about China, not the Middle East.
Looking forward to Ireland following suit, and then logically following through and also banning Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, Facebook, Pornhub, Netflix, Disney, Spotify, etc.
For too long these foreign companies have been "shaping public opinion" - to quote a sibling comment here, who I think accurately sums up at least some of the reasoning behind this kind of development.
In case there's some ambiguity here - I am being sarcastic. I hope Ireland doesn't do that. I have strong issues with some of the above platforms and companies, but governments getting involved like this is nothing to be cheered.
To play devils advocate - your are not wrong. We have see the rise of right-wing Trumpist style politics turn up in Australia, NZ, UK, etc. thanks in part to social media platforms algorithmically presenting it to those people.
Readit News
Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.
Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.
It is happening on our local platforms here. Meta, based in the US, is systematically censoring Palestinian content that would otherwise be available here in Canada.
Details:
* https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
* https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
For a very recent example, one of the few remaining prominent Palestinian journalists, with a following of over 1M on Meta, was banned today:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/11/7/al-jaze...
Well, this is Canada we are talking about. All of the countries in OP's list are foreign.
Its not about who has the data, although that is important. Its not about subversion of a population by a foreign state, although that is important too.
The crux of the issue is reciprocity.
China does not let any CAN or US companies into China markets, without first demanding local factories, forcing local production, requiring equity control and even IP. And if you dont share it, bohoo they will steal it anyway. And, there's no recourse.
The chinese govt has abused free trade for so long. Its time to demand fairness.
They dont give us access into their markets? OK! We close our markets to their corporations.
Its as simple as that. The golden rule.
Okay. Now imagine CNN and NYTimes and Fox News being coerced into publishing or not publishing info because a US gov agency demands it. Or how about the US gov pressuring Meta and Twitter to change their algos around very specific topics? You don't need to imagine it actually.
So why is that less of a concern than China controlling a media delivery service?
The us is already one of the most propagandized nations on earth and our own government only benefits from this, despite ostensibly being criticized from sanitized angles.
I don't know what life is like in canada, but what i surmise from friends is that the experience is similar.
The essence is, by denying agency of your country’s users, you deny the whole set of ideas it bases on. If that’s a natural vulnerability of the ideology, addressing it by banning media is a patch over a bleeding wound.
Canadian teens will simply learn about VPN, like they always do in other countries which ban internet resources. Not a single one of them will leave tiktok.
The right way to stop bad behavior is to write a specific description of the bad actions and the penalty for doing them into the code of law. The wrong way is to declare specific entities guilty of bad behavior you can only vaguely describe.
There is a very good reason the US constitution bans bills of attainder: they become a way of going after individuals for reasons that if properly articulated could not withstand public scrutiny. Canada would do well to uphold the same taboo.
Note that I'm not registering a position on TikTok itself. It could be run by turbosatan for all I care. I object to the lawless mechanism through which western governments are trying to go after TikTok in particular.
Adam Curry opined that this was the excuse and it's really about protecting domestic (or at least Western in the case of Canada) social media companies. Seems plausible.
I don't use TikTok so I'm not sure what the feed looks like, but it seems like a bunch of people doing silly stuff and mugging for the camera.
You know, China hit a lot of these problems before we did and the ir platforms are "nicer" because they are more regulated.
Rather than ban tiktok and suffer the same problems with meta's Reels, what if we borrowed some of thier regulation?
An analog to address the abuses of controlling how users read information from databases would be anti-trust regulation that unbundles client software from hosted services. "The algorithm" should be under control of the client software, for which there should be a competitive market, based on well-documented APIs for communication between the two. Then everyone can choose what "algorithm" they want, rather than having one singular one pushed on them by the service provider abusing its captive audience.
Or simpler, domestic companies having foreign workers developing and implementing the algorithm itself???
I love how this is not censorship but when non-western countries do it, then it is.
Tiktok's Canada-based offices must have been up to some other form of skulduggery for them to have been shuttered while leaving Canadian use of the platform completely status quo.
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
It wasn’t offensive or even off the mark but it felt like I was being served low grade propaganda.
Not foreign, but we already have that problem with Sinclair and local TV affiliate stations.
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I don't know about others but to me the NYT and CNN are quite the propaganda machines already.
There's nothing resembling actual journalism ongoing at these places.
I know this is a US-centric site, but globally, you're a minority that pushes the most propaganda around.
...especially since the article is about canada, so US is a foreign government, and meta/x are foreign companies.
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But I do appreciate the honesty of at least admitting the hypocrisy.
before anyone says "free speech" - views or comments that are not aligned with the CCP and its allies get taken down when reported. several of mine were taken down.
i owe the rising antisemitism among young people to TikTok and its lack of action towards misinformation and hate speech.
The law should be against general bad behavior by social media companies, but it isn't because the unsaid reasoning is too impolite to speak: we can compromise with Western companies' spying, manipulation, and exploitation of us, but it's unacceptable if a Chinese company does the same.
These sorts of movements gain a life of their own at some point, but the cynical side of me suspects the TikTok ban animus started with big tech lobbyists, not a grassroots movement from concerned citizenry.
But since Bytedance doesn't dance at NSA's tune, different rules apply.
Also, what some people dismissed at the time is that from a European perspective it makes perfect sense to consider any foreign power a potential future threat. That seemed less plausible a few days ago but with the person running the site formerly known as Twitter now likely becoming part of the US government and the foreign policy/trade course the president elect has been advertising throughout his campaign, European leaders seem to be waking up to the possibility that US vendors should no longer simply be considered neutral by default.
Keep in mind European intelligence services have literally watched American intelligence happily infiltrate friendly governments (e.g. the German-American joint venture operating from Switzerland selling fraudulent encryption that Germany abandoned when they saw the US selling to allies, ostensibly to avoid raising suspicions from the real targets) and even wiretap heads of state (cf. Snowden revelations), you'd think people would have wisened up to this earlier but as a German I'm just happy to see any progress at all.
Ask them to check how much their own Ad spend is increasing every year.
And ask them to check how much New Content they need to produce everyday. And how much that has increased over the last year.
Basically Politicians, instead of being on the ground dealing with people issues, are turning into Content Factories and Fund raising machines to keep the content factories running.
Human Attention is finite. If its not treated as such, we trap everyone in an Attention Capture arms race to nowhere.
Platform profit, content factories profit, fund raising machines profit - https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/digital-ad-market-boom-big-...
Yes, China banned Facebook, X etc for national security reasons, too. The Chinese government wants Chinese data to stay in China, and all of these social media platform would have to comply with Chinese law, including some requirements regarding censorship. Now it becomes more and more obvious that the west is not that different from China, the country it keeps bitching about on a daily basis. Censorship has been there for a long time, and now you have outright banning of a social network because it has roots in China.
You can accept one of these two things but not both:
A. National security is above freedom of speech B. Freedom of speech is a fundamental value of an open society and should in no scenario be given up
If you accept A, you have to be honest and admit that the banning of Facebook etc in China is completely justified. If you accept B, you have to just let TikTok operate normally as any other social network.
I've always found the EU and India’s data regulations somewhat superficial. Sure, it’s a start that my data is stored in the EU, but how does that really help if the CCP can just call a ByteDance executive and ask them to run a SQL query on demand?
I am not saying those laws shouldn't exist, but don't protect against the threat model of other side being China
I've always been terrified to think about how much of my data is out there, but I don't understand enough about how it can be used, and the potential risks.
I’m technically Gen-Z (but just barely) and this is something that really worries me. It’s become increasingly normal in recent times to share absolutely everything online but I’ve got a pretty grim feeling that this isn’t gonna end well. People don’t realize that the AI’s being trained on your data today will act as an internet history that you can never delete.
It certainly feels that way when you pull up a social media feed
However, the majority of people I interact with (all ages) don't post frequently or at all.
It's 10% of the users posting 90% of the content, including over-sharing. It only looks normal because they're so dominant in the feed that you don't realize who's missing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/magazine/israel-free-spee...
- How 4 Instagram posts ruined her life
My point, winding as it may seem, is that this generations kids are bound to their social mediums just like the radio and then television generations were to theirs, for mainstream culture, and like the Beatniks, Hippies, Progressives(I'm not sure of the proper term here, but the non-internet groups of the 80s-00s, LGBTQA movement, the BDSM movement, etc) for the outliers. There are plenty of other subcultures out there that have waxed and waned as well, some of them crossing other boundaries, like the religious or politcal gaps in this country.
But for many of us that leaves us as the odd person out. Not being into the right hobbies or social activities or just having the wrong values and you soon find yourself distanced from those around you. The internet can give that back to you or help take it away, but in the long term the dossiers on each of us that being online produce is far less damaging than the lack of in-person connections many of us(not I) gain from social networks even as we give up our privacy and our opportunities for future dissent against the status quo, something that Eastern and Western societies alike are rapidly barreling towards an ultimatum on.
Assuming you're not YOLOing it, what will you give up for your life now, versus the lives you want to leave you to your descendants, or if you're not planning on your own and not a selfish jerk, for other people's descendants?
Footnote: This comment was written from an American point of view, although much of it still applies to our Canadian cousins and European/Australian brethren.
If everyone is spewing (sorry ... sharing) pics on TikTok, X and co then you won't stand out from the crowd. Unless those pics involve something too controversial.
I have an internet history that stretches back to Compuserve and I've always used my real name, which may or may not have been a good idea. Many years ago I decided not to give myself a silly pseudonym because I thought it would be futile and counter productive.
You’re assuming people are consistent. You may have been photographed doing the same thing as all your peers, the fact that your photo can be highlighted unfavourable is ample ammo for proven lines of character attacks.
Gerdesj? Or Wonky231?
The more data there is on you, the easier it'll be to fingerprint you in the future. Google photos can recognize me as a baby. Even I can't tell myself apart from my brother.
ByteDance will keep no data in Canada, will not employ any Canadians, will not report any information to Canadian authorities, and will have no reason to comply with Canadian warrants or court orders. (Or even judgments.) At the same time, all Canadians can continue to use the app.
On balance, this seems bad for Canada and great for ByteDance.
It's hard to balance anything until they explain why they did it. So far they claim they aren't at liberty to share but claim it was bad enough to make a very unprecedented move like this.
Really not saying anything, but that's the line they are going with.
If it were that great for them, they wouldn't be present in Canada in the first place.
... and Bytedance will not have any recourse if Canada bans the app.
This makes the most sense if Canada expects (or has) Canadian troops secretly deployed somewhere. And that is one sobering thought.
1: Ban presence in the country
2: Add data provision requirements that personal information be stored in the country.
3: TikTok can’t meet requirements? Well that’s on them, guess they can’t operate here.
1. Show the current government is doing something after the CSE said the Canadian government has been breached by China's MSS [0]
2. A response to China for breaching Canada's systems.
3. A way to get a quick win to make bipartisan China hawks across the border in the US happy.
[0] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cse-cyber-threats-china-1.7...
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The public will probably never find out the scope of ByteDance’s operations in Canada for the Chinese government, but if it follows the same arc as other Chinese operations in Canada, I expect it is far more pervasive and frightening than one might expect. This isn’t about the app. This is about the offices.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1170571626/fbi-arrests-2-on-c...
What makes this particularly concerning is their alleged connection to the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the CCP's primary foreign interference arm. Most operators are local residents with established community connections and long-term involvement in influence operations, making them more effective than parachuted-in agents.
The RCMP has launched investigations and taken some interesting tactical approaches - including deliberately visible patrols with marked cars to encourage reporting and show community members they're taking action. However, investigations are described as "lengthy" and no arrests have been made yet.
The parliamentary committee seems to view this as part of a broader pattern of increasing transnational repression under Xi Jinping. According to Safeguard Defenders' testimony, there were at least 11,000 "successful persuasion to return" operations globally between 2014-2022, with at least 3 confirmed cases in Canada.
What's particularly striking is that these stations operate quite brazenly in G7 countries. It's a remarkable example of how authoritarian states are becoming increasingly bold in projecting power within democratic societies. The Canadian government has formally demanded the PRC cease these activities as violations of diplomatic conventions, but enforcement remains challenging.
The report suggests several countermeasures, including a foreign agent registry (currently defined in Bill C-70 [2]) and modernizing the 1984 CSIS Act, but the most interesting recommendation might be the call for coordinated frameworks among democratic allies to address transnational repression more systematically.
[1] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CACN/Reports...
[2] https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-70/first-r...
Man wait until you find out what the canadian government is up to within canada. I hear they're praising nazis!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Victims_of_Com...
I remember when Trump had Canada re-ratify Nafta that Canada had to waive the right to require Canadian data stay in Canada.
I know Canada signed the agreement but I am not sure if that requirement was ever put in legislation or whether the requirement was universal or just for US-based companies.
This has also been the catalyst behind the ban of TikTok in the US.
No it hasn’t. The war in Gaza is a foreign policy issue, which means most Americans tuned out from the start, and one that was a top issue for a very, very narrow slice of the electorate.
The sad truth is we’re aware of atrocities; we simply aren’t too bothered by them. (If you’re honest about yourself, you aren’t either. Nobody sane could be. There are too many of them, and they’re all burning furiously and it has been this was for a long time.) TikTok is about China, not the Middle East.
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For too long these foreign companies have been "shaping public opinion" - to quote a sibling comment here, who I think accurately sums up at least some of the reasoning behind this kind of development.
In case there's some ambiguity here - I am being sarcastic. I hope Ireland doesn't do that. I have strong issues with some of the above platforms and companies, but governments getting involved like this is nothing to be cheered.
Now the company can continue to operate. Canada has no hold on them. Canadian jobs lost. What is the gain?
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They should insist that the data doesn't leave their borders; this is the opposite of a ban. They're insisting on having all their user data leave.
Government being stupid. Imagine that.