While the Court based this decision solely on the non-classified portion of the record, I found this quote to be very interesting:
>Notably, TikTok never squarely denies that it has ever manipulated content on the TikTok platform at the direction of the PRC.
The Court held that the law could satisfy strict scrutiny (regardless of whether or not it applies), which requires that the Government prove that the restriction furthers a compelling interest and less restrictive alternatives would not accomplish the Government's goals. That's a high, high bar, and most laws subject to it are found wanting.
I doubt that the Supreme Court is going to want to hear this case. The most interesting legal question for them to decide was whether the law is subject to strict or intermediate scrutiny, but that is off the table now that the D.C. Circuit says it doesn't matter because the law could satisfy either standard.
It also speaks books worth of implications that the TikTok CEO would never straight up state to Congress that they would not promote CCP material or disinformation strategies if they were told to do so (not like they have a choice either, its literally a CCP law)
I don’t agree with that analysis. The modern Supreme Court loves to wade into high-profile First Amendment issues, all the more when it’s actually a relatively novel application. They’ll take this case either to be argued at the end of this term or next term, and it will be subject to their analysis and whatever Trump decides to do with his discretion.
Agreed. This would be the perfect vehicle for a very broad ruling that the government can ban media in the name of national security, the precedent of which could be used in an ad hoc manner.
This is a bipartisan issue. One of the three judges is an Obama appointee. If this case goes to the SC (big if), expect it to swing the exact same way.
Trump also has no ability to upend this: he lacks the authority by law.
"Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked. Period. Our US moderation team, which is led out of California, reviews content for adherence to our US policies – just like other US companies in our space. We are not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government; TikTok does not operate in China, nor do we have any intention of doing so in the future."
"58. Have members of the Chinese Communist Party, or other members of the Chinese
government, asked ByteDance or TikTok employees to heat content?
TikTok does not heat content in the U.S. at the request of any government, including the Chinese
Communist Party. TikTok may promote or "heat" specific content (including, e.g., promoting the
video of an artist who will be hosting a concert on TikTok Live) in line with company content
policies to support the inclusion of diverse and high-quality content on the platform. A content
operations team will review heating requests submitted by a limited number of cross-functional
partners with access to the heating request, and the Content Operations team will either approve
or reject the request based on their assessment of whether it follows the platform's best practices
in support of content diversity and quality (including, e.g., being engaging and meaningful and
focusing on timely/relevant content) and business objectives. An audit function, that is in the
process of being refined, will regularly review the heating request process to ensure internal
compliance with company policies. Even if the request is approved, increasing visibility or video
views ("VV") is not guaranteed as the recommendation system will not heat low quality content
(e.g, reposted or irrelevant content). Heating impacts less than 1% of VV in the US."
The court isn't an investigative body, they take the evidence submitted. Perhaps TikTok was more careful to be truthful in court submissions than press releases.
I think those kind of answers might be exactly what the court is talking about. You don’t have to “remove” something to influence its reach.
They’re denying stuff that doesn’t matter while leaving plenty of room for the kind of behavior that does.
To the question that you quoted: asked a question in the past tense, they responded in the present. Asked whether individual people had made requests, they answered whether they currently act on government requests.
Things can be manipulated without being removed. This sort of word substitution is the type of misdirection "never squarely denies" could be referencing. They're asked about manipulation and they reply about removal. Removal is merely one type of manipulation. For example something like permanently hiding content while keeping it in the database isn't a removal.
If a court of appeals says a party to a case "has not denied" something they are speaking specifically about the record of the trial being presented to them.
Public comments not made in court are worthless as a defense. They didn't make those same remarks in court where they could be forced to answer questions about their meaning and where the speaker could be sent to prison for knowingly lying about them.
TikTok was used to push an unknown, unlikable character to almost win the presidential elections in Romania, who shares a lot of border with both Ukraine, the Black Sea and Danube.
> to push an unknown, unlikable character to almost win
How does it work? You simply give some money to TikTok and the whole country runs to vote for an unknown, unlikable candidate? It must have superpowers.
1) it's a very well known fact that 70% or so of the electorate can't be moved from their positions, even if their party said they were gonna harm them people will still not vote the other ones, thus any real advertisement or anything is gonna only impact a few % of people
2) extremism is on the rise everywhere in the world, from Germany to US, from South Africa to South America. Narratives have made centrist governments, especially those coming from larger coalitions made weak (often for good reasons)
3) we have had multiple scientists (stats, sociologists) look at these allegations of interference and no single data seems to demonstrate that political discourse on TikTok is any different than other media platforms. In fact, if anything, it seems way less controversial than other US based ones.
4) The average European finds supporting Ukraine not only a lost cause nowadays, but gives part of the blame to the west
People using new forms of media to break political status quos is a tale as old as time. This is a classic crackdown on democracy by a flailing elite, complete with the usual scapegoats.
TikTok is why Trump won his 2nd term. TikTok did not moderate away his content or moderate away pro Trump content like the other socials and Reddit. TikTok's viewership is massive and pro trump content was getting millions of views and likes and positive comments. Reddit will moderate that content away. TikTok has diminished Reddit's influence on politics.
In summary: China is a threat to the West (also to Africa, but they are still in denial). But you can't get rid of hacking through a bit of legislature, so fixing telcos is another process.
I keep hearing people crow about how Africa is going to get re-colonized by China, but I just don't see it. For instance, in the last 50 years, America and her allies have:
-Overthrown Gaddafi and destabilized Libya in the process, leading to million of small arms washing into the Sahel. Jihadists groups have killed hundreds of thousands with those weapons, further destabilizing the region.
-Funded and backed murderous dictators like Hissene Habre who tortured, killed, and raped roughly 40k innocent Chadians.
-Other dictators that have held unto power with implicit/explicit American support include Mobutu, Amin, Barre, etc., and I'm not going to go into the atrocities they've committed.
-Continue to meddle in African countries, including their implicit support for the overthrow of popularly-elected governments like Egypt's Muhammad Morsi, and Congo's Lumumba, after which the country fell apart .
These are just a few examples off the top of my head. No matter how much you scaremonger about China, all they do is transfer technology, build infrastructure, and assist with explicit approval of local governments.
Do they have evil intent in the long-run? Who knows?
But, given their track record so far (of going heads down and building stuff) and the West's history of plain maliciousness, it'd be stupid to suggest anyone shouldn't partner with China.
> you can't get rid of hacking through a bit of legislature
We can make it harder. Switch our telecoms to E2E by default.
We’ve shown the current set-up can be exploited by adversaries. It’s not a huge leap given the prevalence of encrypted messaging apps. And you can market it as a finger to the deep state on one side and a limit on the executive to the other.
Jokes on China! Americans don't talk on the phone anymore.
(Also this week I had to share my credit card number over the phone to book an airline ticket and the next day I got a nice assortment of fraud charges despite using tap to pay/Apple Pay everywhere else)
It’s because this TikTok matter is not at all about Chinese ownership, which is really rather irrelevant since it is technically an American company based in CA and abides by American laws.
The China China China histrionics is disingenuous and dishonesty by dishonest and fraudulent people who are concerned with the loss of control of censorship and thought policing. They want total control over thoughts and speech in America and TikTok is a major problem for them, a red-pill so to say, and they want everyone taking that blue pill because their whole tyrannical and fraudulent power structure relies on regularly taking the regime’s blue pills.
It’s why there is so much frantic flailing about this issue and the same people who not only never cared about “protecting the children” from violence, gore, and sexuality including explicit pornography, are all the sudden so concerned with children once they may learn something about the world that makes them realize the dishonest, lying, narcissistic, histrionic, psychopathic dirt bags that control all of the west; have been telling them lies and abusing them and plundering their future for their own kind.
Discussions about Tiktok are always dominated by the focus on privacy which is a joke.
The real problem is the algorithmic control this gives China to influence the populations of Western countries. But Meta was found to outsource content moderation to a Canadian company that outsourced Instagram content moderation to Iran.
This is not about privacy. These platforms have become the new media. Getting your news from profit-seeking American and Chinese companies is not ideal in the long run.
> the algorithmic control this gives China to influence the populations of Western countries
The first amendment allows us to choose whatever we want to influence us. If Americans want to sit in front of Chinese controlled social media and gorge on it, that's our right. I don't agree the government can take it away. The idea that they should control what influenced us is very anti democratic.
Ok but like if this true and operative, why aren't they mobilizing their algorithmic control right at this moment when it seems like they would need it the most?
Just seems like pretty incomplete control if they can still let themselves get to this point.
Even if they aren’t doing it, it’s just a crazy risk to run. Imagine if the biggest American newspapers were owned by Russia during the Cold War. America just wouldn’t have allowed it.
And unlike that metaphor, TikTok offers basically 0 value over replacement compared to other media. Maybe it’s even worse than other media since it’s more addictive.
> Ok but like if this true and operative, why aren't they mobilizing their algorithmic control right at this moment when it seems like they would need it the most?
Just seems like pretty incomplete control if they can still let themselves get to this point
"TikTok sent a push notification to United States users on Thursday morning asking them to call their local representative to “Stop a TikTok shutdown.” The app refers to a bipartisan bill gaining momentum in Congress this week which could ban TikTok altogether."
Its way better than American propaganda, it just looks like normal people doing interesting things. Im gonna miss it but do I really deserve to be so well entertained?
The Court did not say that the law is subject to strict scrutiny. The majority holds that they need not decide whether strict or intermediate scrutiny applies because the law satisfies the more stringent test.
The concurrence by Judge Srinivasan would instead hold that the law is subject to only intermediate scrutiny and uphold the law on that basis.
Why do it this way? It takes away a potential avenue of appeal for TikTok. They can’t ask the Supreme Court to hold that the law is subject to strict scrutiny, because that issue wouldn’t help them overturn this ruling.
If you had forced the rest of the panel to choose, I think they would have landed on intermediate scrutiny.
I'd guess that at least one of the panel members thought strict scrutiny applies. Otherwise I think they would have ruled both that intermediate scrutiny applies, and that even if it doesn't the law passes strict scrutiny.
The first amendment doesn't carve out an exception for non-citizens, so you should be asking if there's precedence on foreigners inside the US NOT having First Amendment rights.
Outside of the US your question is moot, as the US constitution is only binding in the US.
This ban has always felt so silly. If it's privacy and data harvesting as a concern, don't a million apps do that? If it's anti-China sentiment, why TikTok and not a million other things? If it's about protecting elections and propaganda, why not X and Meta and YouTube?
> If it's about protecting elections and propaganda, why not X and Meta and YouTube?
Because the government is not threatened by X, Meta, or YouTube. In many ways, it exists in their pocket. There's not a lot of looming dissonance between what those parties are interested in seeing happen and what the modern federal government (as run by either party) is pursuing, and at this point, those each provide far more value as an allied propaganda arm than as a hostile propaganda risk.
But China and the US have directly competing interests in many places around the world, and the radical changes that both countries have undergone in the last 80 years have set the stage of a fresh contest of power. Obviously, both parties would like to navigate that contest in the best position possible. Allowing your anticipated opponent access to unmediated, private communications with hundreds of millions of citizens in an already vulnerable democracy is not a great position to be in during that contest.
It’s very simple, the entire young generation lives on TT. It’s where they get all of their information. It’s owned by a foreign adversary. We already have laws against foreign owned media for radio and TV, why would this be any different given this is TV in 2024?
I’ve used both reels and TT. I’ve only ever gotten lots of pro-China content on TT.
I tried TikTok and never saw much political content at all. The algorithm gave me little dances and bad cooking. I finally got it to ditch the bad cooking and show me some interesting pseudo 70s horror AI videos. But then things kept repeating and I bailed.
Speak for yourself, I dont have any 'foreign adversaries,' really that sounds like cheap talking points and nothing to do with my interests as an american.
Data harvesting is a-ok. Propaganda by Americans to Americans is protected by the first amendment. But a foreign state harvesting data and applying influence is more straight forward.
Look at the proposed solution: Just sell TikTok to someone else who isn't China.
Because the AIPAC lobby explicitly called TikTok out for exposing young Americans to footage of the Gaza genocide (causing support for Israel among US youth to reach and all-time low), and pushed for the ban. The US politicians who initially pushed it had received hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations from AIPAC.
I think it's just a mater of time before TikTok starts seeing bans (or threats of bans) all over in the west.
Countries are starting to view it as a _serious_ national threat, due to the disinformation risk.
Just look at the Romanian election: A couple of hours ago they annulled the first election round, after a coordinated Russian campaign managed to propel a rather unknown pro-Russian candidate to the top, where they used platforms like TikTok to influence voters.
Not that platforms like Facebook, Snap, etc. are much better, but this comes down to having some control.
> the damage has already been done in the sense that it leaked a lot of training data and PII data to China
That's not nearly the damage that people are organizing against. It's hard to imagine China really gains much simply be holding some trove of old details about some subset of US consumers, no matter how large. Vanishingly few users are individually interesting from halfway around the world, and the aggregate data grows stale quickly.
The pressing concerns are in them being able to (a) advance their global political agenda by dynamically manipulating what people see and how its presented to them in a way that almost nobody can monitor, and (b) intercept ostensibly private messaging between select users. From the national security perspective of a foreign government, both of these are huge vulnerabilities in a hot or even mildly warm conflict with China as most of the globe seems to be anticipating.
And the fact that pushing back against these strategic threats raises ideological conflicts with Western celebration of free speech and free trade -- making it hard for the government to do anything about the threats and stoking internal conflict when they try -- is gravy on top of it.
I'm not too concerned about that part of the damage. The big threat is that China can tell TikTok to promote particular views and political thought to American users. If TikTok is banned, that threat goes away. Sure, they've already gathered data to use in running influence campaigns on other platforms, but the US-run platforms at least try here and there to stamp out bot accounts and state-run account rings. (Well, I assume Musk is ok with them on Twitter now.)
I've never understood this part of it. There's a disinformation problem on all of these platforms, so why not just kill all of them? The only argument I've seen is basically that it's better for the West to be the ones manipulating people in the West vs. having people in the East manipulating people in the West. And that just doesn't feel like a good argument.
As much as there are legitimate reasons to go after TikTok, I can't help but feel it's not a coincidence that it gets singled out for legislation because it's the only one owned by China.
And yes, that ownership is problematic but I would argue that the others including those you've listed here are equally problematic for the safety of users.
So to answer your question: they should be too, but they likely won't, because the force behind this isn't a desire to protect users from disinformation, the desire is to protect western companies from scary Asian competition. Same reason behind us constantly propping up Detroit. Protecting people from disinformation is just an excuse.
>due to the disinformation risk.
>Just look at the Romanian election: A couple of hours ago they annulled the first election round, after a coordinated Russian campaign managed to propel a rather unknown pro-Russian candidate to the top, where they used platforms like TikTok to influence voters.
What you've described so far isn't disinformation but something more like illegal campaigning. This and disinformation both happen on platforms owned by the countries they're effecting (Facebook in 2016 with Trump). US shareholders benefiting doesn't really stop it.
> Countries are starting to view it as a _serious_ national threat, due to the disinformation risk.
You mean disinformation that the West does not control. If i want to hear disinformation, I don't need TikTok. I can just watch the public TV channels that are just parroting whatever the government says.
> Just look at the Romanian election: A couple of hours ago they annulled the first election round, after a coordinated Russian campaign managed to propel a rather unknown pro-Russian candidate to the top, where they used platforms like TikTok to influence voters.
Yes, these people are so brain dead that a few videos on TikTok changed their minds. It absolutely not because the governments of the EU have stopped listening to their people. No, it's the Chinese and the Russians.
>>I think it's just a mater of time before TikTok starts seeing bans (or threats of bans) all over in the west.
Countries are starting to view it as a _serious_ national threat, due to the disinformation risk.
Aah I see the ruling elite in the West can't actually handle freedom of speech. The court really should unseal the classified part where they accuse TikTok of towing Chinese/PRC line. Then lets have a referendum to decide its fate or at least Congress to pass a law banning it.
Readit News
>Notably, TikTok never squarely denies that it has ever manipulated content on the TikTok platform at the direction of the PRC.
The Court held that the law could satisfy strict scrutiny (regardless of whether or not it applies), which requires that the Government prove that the restriction furthers a compelling interest and less restrictive alternatives would not accomplish the Government's goals. That's a high, high bar, and most laws subject to it are found wanting.
I doubt that the Supreme Court is going to want to hear this case. The most interesting legal question for them to decide was whether the law is subject to strict or intermediate scrutiny, but that is off the table now that the D.C. Circuit says it doesn't matter because the law could satisfy either standard.
Direct link to the opinion: https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2024/12/24-111...
Trump also has no ability to upend this: he lacks the authority by law.
"Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked. Period. Our US moderation team, which is led out of California, reviews content for adherence to our US policies – just like other US companies in our space. We are not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government; TikTok does not operate in China, nor do we have any intention of doing so in the future."
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/statement-on-tiktoks-conte...
"58. Have members of the Chinese Communist Party, or other members of the Chinese government, asked ByteDance or TikTok employees to heat content?
TikTok does not heat content in the U.S. at the request of any government, including the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok may promote or "heat" specific content (including, e.g., promoting the video of an artist who will be hosting a concert on TikTok Live) in line with company content policies to support the inclusion of diverse and high-quality content on the platform. A content operations team will review heating requests submitted by a limited number of cross-functional partners with access to the heating request, and the Content Operations team will either approve or reject the request based on their assessment of whether it follows the platform's best practices in support of content diversity and quality (including, e.g., being engaging and meaningful and focusing on timely/relevant content) and business objectives. An audit function, that is in the process of being refined, will regularly review the heating request process to ensure internal compliance with company policies. Even if the request is approved, increasing visibility or video views ("VV") is not guaranteed as the recommendation system will not heat low quality content (e.g, reposted or irrelevant content). Heating impacts less than 1% of VV in the US."
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF00/20230323/115519/HHRG...
The court isn't an investigative body, they take the evidence submitted. Perhaps TikTok was more careful to be truthful in court submissions than press releases.
They’re denying stuff that doesn’t matter while leaving plenty of room for the kind of behavior that does.
To the question that you quoted: asked a question in the past tense, they responded in the present. Asked whether individual people had made requests, they answered whether they currently act on government requests.
It reads as such a non-denial denial.
It feels like I'm on Reddit and not in a place that should be more intellectually active and open.
TikTok was used to push an unknown, unlikable character to almost win the presidential elections in Romania, who shares a lot of border with both Ukraine, the Black Sea and Danube.
See also: is China suddenly a center of human rights activism, or was it Americans who got upset about Israeli treatment of civilians?
How does it work? You simply give some money to TikTok and the whole country runs to vote for an unknown, unlikable candidate? It must have superpowers.
1) it's a very well known fact that 70% or so of the electorate can't be moved from their positions, even if their party said they were gonna harm them people will still not vote the other ones, thus any real advertisement or anything is gonna only impact a few % of people
2) extremism is on the rise everywhere in the world, from Germany to US, from South Africa to South America. Narratives have made centrist governments, especially those coming from larger coalitions made weak (often for good reasons)
3) we have had multiple scientists (stats, sociologists) look at these allegations of interference and no single data seems to demonstrate that political discourse on TikTok is any different than other media platforms. In fact, if anything, it seems way less controversial than other US based ones.
4) The average European finds supporting Ukraine not only a lost cause nowadays, but gives part of the blame to the west
Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3a9oSuydBs
Same with Trump. I don't agree with many of his policies but hey, did the establishment take care of the people?
-Overthrown Gaddafi and destabilized Libya in the process, leading to million of small arms washing into the Sahel. Jihadists groups have killed hundreds of thousands with those weapons, further destabilizing the region.
-Funded and backed murderous dictators like Hissene Habre who tortured, killed, and raped roughly 40k innocent Chadians.
-Other dictators that have held unto power with implicit/explicit American support include Mobutu, Amin, Barre, etc., and I'm not going to go into the atrocities they've committed.
-Continue to meddle in African countries, including their implicit support for the overthrow of popularly-elected governments like Egypt's Muhammad Morsi, and Congo's Lumumba, after which the country fell apart .
These are just a few examples off the top of my head. No matter how much you scaremonger about China, all they do is transfer technology, build infrastructure, and assist with explicit approval of local governments.
Do they have evil intent in the long-run? Who knows?
But, given their track record so far (of going heads down and building stuff) and the West's history of plain maliciousness, it'd be stupid to suggest anyone shouldn't partner with China.
We can make it harder. Switch our telecoms to E2E by default.
We’ve shown the current set-up can be exploited by adversaries. It’s not a huge leap given the prevalence of encrypted messaging apps. And you can market it as a finger to the deep state on one side and a limit on the executive to the other.
(Also this week I had to share my credit card number over the phone to book an airline ticket and the next day I got a nice assortment of fraud charges despite using tap to pay/Apple Pay everywhere else)
The China China China histrionics is disingenuous and dishonesty by dishonest and fraudulent people who are concerned with the loss of control of censorship and thought policing. They want total control over thoughts and speech in America and TikTok is a major problem for them, a red-pill so to say, and they want everyone taking that blue pill because their whole tyrannical and fraudulent power structure relies on regularly taking the regime’s blue pills.
It’s why there is so much frantic flailing about this issue and the same people who not only never cared about “protecting the children” from violence, gore, and sexuality including explicit pornography, are all the sudden so concerned with children once they may learn something about the world that makes them realize the dishonest, lying, narcissistic, histrionic, psychopathic dirt bags that control all of the west; have been telling them lies and abusing them and plundering their future for their own kind.
The real problem is the algorithmic control this gives China to influence the populations of Western countries. But Meta was found to outsource content moderation to a Canadian company that outsourced Instagram content moderation to Iran.
This is not about privacy. These platforms have become the new media. Getting your news from profit-seeking American and Chinese companies is not ideal in the long run.
The first amendment allows us to choose whatever we want to influence us. If Americans want to sit in front of Chinese controlled social media and gorge on it, that's our right. I don't agree the government can take it away. The idea that they should control what influenced us is very anti democratic.
Just seems like pretty incomplete control if they can still let themselves get to this point.
And unlike that metaphor, TikTok offers basically 0 value over replacement compared to other media. Maybe it’s even worse than other media since it’s more addictive.
They did try: https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-activates-army-of-u-s-tweens-to-s...
"TikTok sent a push notification to United States users on Thursday morning asking them to call their local representative to “Stop a TikTok shutdown.” The app refers to a bipartisan bill gaining momentum in Congress this week which could ban TikTok altogether."
Dead Comment
Strict Scrutiny has two tests: 1. Compelling Government Interest 2. Narrowly Tailored (least restrictive means)
Note the court does not say foreign actors don't have First Amendment rights.
The concurrence by Judge Srinivasan would instead hold that the law is subject to only intermediate scrutiny and uphold the law on that basis.
Why do it this way? It takes away a potential avenue of appeal for TikTok. They can’t ask the Supreme Court to hold that the law is subject to strict scrutiny, because that issue wouldn’t help them overturn this ruling.
If you had forced the rest of the panel to choose, I think they would have landed on intermediate scrutiny.
Is there a precedence on foreign actors (either inside or outside the US) having First Amendment rights?
Outside of the US your question is moot, as the US constitution is only binding in the US.
It's so weirdly targeted to me. Why TikTok only?
Because the government is not threatened by X, Meta, or YouTube. In many ways, it exists in their pocket. There's not a lot of looming dissonance between what those parties are interested in seeing happen and what the modern federal government (as run by either party) is pursuing, and at this point, those each provide far more value as an allied propaganda arm than as a hostile propaganda risk.
But China and the US have directly competing interests in many places around the world, and the radical changes that both countries have undergone in the last 80 years have set the stage of a fresh contest of power. Obviously, both parties would like to navigate that contest in the best position possible. Allowing your anticipated opponent access to unmediated, private communications with hundreds of millions of citizens in an already vulnerable democracy is not a great position to be in during that contest.
I’ve used both reels and TT. I’ve only ever gotten lots of pro-China content on TT.
How did you manage to get Chinese propaganda?
Deleted Comment
Look at the proposed solution: Just sell TikTok to someone else who isn't China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/business/tiktok-accusatio...
Deleted Comment
Countries are starting to view it as a _serious_ national threat, due to the disinformation risk.
Just look at the Romanian election: A couple of hours ago they annulled the first election round, after a coordinated Russian campaign managed to propel a rather unknown pro-Russian candidate to the top, where they used platforms like TikTok to influence voters.
Not that platforms like Facebook, Snap, etc. are much better, but this comes down to having some control.
That's not nearly the damage that people are organizing against. It's hard to imagine China really gains much simply be holding some trove of old details about some subset of US consumers, no matter how large. Vanishingly few users are individually interesting from halfway around the world, and the aggregate data grows stale quickly.
The pressing concerns are in them being able to (a) advance their global political agenda by dynamically manipulating what people see and how its presented to them in a way that almost nobody can monitor, and (b) intercept ostensibly private messaging between select users. From the national security perspective of a foreign government, both of these are huge vulnerabilities in a hot or even mildly warm conflict with China as most of the globe seems to be anticipating.
And the fact that pushing back against these strategic threats raises ideological conflicts with Western celebration of free speech and free trade -- making it hard for the government to do anything about the threats and stoking internal conflict when they try -- is gravy on top of it.
but what about Instagram and X?
And yes, that ownership is problematic but I would argue that the others including those you've listed here are equally problematic for the safety of users.
So to answer your question: they should be too, but they likely won't, because the force behind this isn't a desire to protect users from disinformation, the desire is to protect western companies from scary Asian competition. Same reason behind us constantly propping up Detroit. Protecting people from disinformation is just an excuse.
If this were really the problem, TikTok wouldn't be singled-out. This is american frustration with the sympathy to Palestine: https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
https://www.douyin.com/
What you've described so far isn't disinformation but something more like illegal campaigning. This and disinformation both happen on platforms owned by the countries they're effecting (Facebook in 2016 with Trump). US shareholders benefiting doesn't really stop it.
You mean disinformation that the West does not control. If i want to hear disinformation, I don't need TikTok. I can just watch the public TV channels that are just parroting whatever the government says.
> Just look at the Romanian election: A couple of hours ago they annulled the first election round, after a coordinated Russian campaign managed to propel a rather unknown pro-Russian candidate to the top, where they used platforms like TikTok to influence voters.
Yes, these people are so brain dead that a few videos on TikTok changed their minds. It absolutely not because the governments of the EU have stopped listening to their people. No, it's the Chinese and the Russians.
Aah I see the ruling elite in the West can't actually handle freedom of speech. The court really should unseal the classified part where they accuse TikTok of towing Chinese/PRC line. Then lets have a referendum to decide its fate or at least Congress to pass a law banning it.
They did that already.
Dead Comment