I really hate how people are arguing that it should be banned because of the content being inappropriate in one way or another when the content you see is based on how you interact with the app. We don't all see the same stuff. So yeah China may have more educational content but that's probably just becuase the people there are interested in that stuff. When I travel to the mountains, I get more outdoorsy/hiking videos. When I'm in my hometown, I get things relevant to our community. It's really a beautiful algorithm once you get to know it. And its so sad that the most ignorant in our society feels like they can make decisions like this for the rest of us. This sort of issue shouldn't even be state or municipal issue, it should be a household one.
China and the US are in a deepening cold war. Our political systems are fundamentally opposed so conflict is inevitable (given there is no higher authority to manage our relations). If you are looking for some specific justification for a ban, you're missing the forest for the trees.
The rift has nothing to do with the political system (e.g. the US is freely and openly allied with Saudi Arabia despite radically different political systems), and everything to do with the competition for power and influence in the world. SA is not a real contender there, China is. From here the rift and inevitable conflict.
> If you are looking for some specific justification for a ban, you're missing the forest for the trees
Every reason for the ban comes from the above competition for power and influence in the world. Whether it's not having an adversary financially profit from your own citizens or influence their decisions, or it's to eliminate foreign competition and fill the gap with local companies, it's all abut power and money and the political system couldn't matter less.
So how do we ensure that Tiktok doesn't covertly alter the algorithm to subtly include propaganda tailored to China's geopolitical interests that are detrimental to the US? Or even just propaganda tailored to enhance internal strife to weaken the country?
As a European I have to ask the very same questions about US apps and European interests.
Even though I personally do not harbour strong suspicions towards the US, it's not a given that the US will always act favourably towards the EU, Europe as a whole, or any one particular EU country in the future. Especially in light of recent elections.
this is the exact same question being asked around the global - how could you be sure that American made LLMs are not altered in a way to maximize US interests at the costs of everyone else's.
What’s funny is nothing could be worse for our country than post war US foreign policy. Check out the wikipedia article on US foreign interventions. We don’t need China to fuck us up by subtly sending messages, we have our entire political establishment overtly doing it every day in DC.
Do you really think TikTok has more power in the US than the local oligarchs and warlords? Short-form video does more to "internal strife" than the lack of basic government services, widespread substance abuse and state violence?
Are you aware of what happened in Romania with Tiktok?
A candidate got funded by foreign agents, paid for influencers, and sprinkled with Russian bot accounts it was enough to make a pro-Russian candidate get 20% of votes when he was an unknown political figure.[0]
The app allows this. You can try to distract everyone from an app that enables illegal foreign interference by hiding under the guise of "oh, this is just what people want to hear; the problem isn't Russia but Romanian politicians." - that's a very dangerous stance and a threat to free & fair elections.
The solution to this is to change the way elections work to make it harder to pull off this kind of short term influence pumping. The problem is that it’s possible to flood the zone with shit before people have a chance to have discourse on it.
I’ve heard a number of ideas including multiple round elections with averaged results. That way if someone pops in round one the discourse can focus a spotlight on them and if people don’t like what they see on closer inspection they can push the other way in round two.
The other problem though is that establishment politicians are so unpopular in so many places around the world that a rando with a simple catchy meme-worthy message can run in from nowhere and upset things. If the establishment were more responsive to the people it would be harder to do this.
But is the issue really the app itself? Or that not a symptom of a larger problem, or even multiple problems, we face, seemingly now more than ever before?
I don’t want to say „banning TikTok is wrong“, I honestly do not know. But I don’t think it it solves any of the underlying problems. It may make it harder to hit these vulnerable demographics directly in the short term, but it won’t solve media literacy, corruption, or any of the other issues involved.
If your argument is social media allows the subversion of free and fair elections there is no reason for TikTok to be singled out. In fact you could argue that WhatsApp groups should be banned as well.
I guess you're someone familiar with programming and algorithms begin this is HN, so you must be able to understand that it would be trivial for TikTok to serve different kinds of content to people based on their geographical location and other attributes?
They do. Like I know for a fact that I get different content in different cities. But it's algorithmic. I don't think anyone at TikTok is saying let's manipulate specific locations. They don't need to and it would be too risky and not worth the tech debt tbh. Besides, you can do it as a third party with bots.
So like whatever replaces it will get manipulated just the same. Facebook has had this problem for over a decade now and nobody's solved it. Let's just admit that national governments are stupid.
Engagement driven algorithms do not necessarily show what users are consciously interested in, but what they subconsciously can't turn away from. You are probably a well-regulated, internet-savvy adult who easily recognizes engagement bait and knows to swipe away form it quickly to train the algorithm to stop showing it to you. People arguing for a ban are probably concerned about how it affects those who are not so regulated using logic similar to arguments for banning drugs.
I do not share that position, but I'm inclined to support some weakening of platform immunity for services that use an individualized recommendation algorithm to maximize engagement.
I did not quickly find an authoritative source, but it is widely reported that Douyin, the Chinese domestic market equivalent of TikTok deliberately favors educational content, especially for children. Here's one news report claiming that: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...
> the distinctions largely owe to stiff regulations in China centered on youth social media use and political dissent.
> The differences between the two apps highlight a comparatively permissive legal environment for social media in the U.S., protecting free expression but also leaving some users -- especially young ones -- vulnerable to addictive behavior, the experts said.
> That same year, Douyin imposed a 40-minute daily limit for users under 14. Last year, Chinese regulators introduced a rule that would limit children under age 18 to two hours of smartphone screen time each day.
It is important for context that the above poster seems to be of the opinion that government rarely if ever can be useful for citizens. So when they say "government shouldn't get involved", it doesn't seem to be a statement of their opinion on social media or tiktok, it is about government in general.
>This sort of issue shouldn't even be state or municipal issue, it should be a household one.
And I guess you believe that every consumer product and service should be treated strictly as household issue.
For absolutely everything - even the most dangerous, toxic and antisocial ones, I can find one good use case credible enough to ask other to behave themselves. And I'm no David Hahn.
This is really naive. These algorithms can be and are tuned to manipulate the audience.
That being said, it’s not fair to single out TikTok. They all do it. The only unique danger with TikTok is that it could be controlled by a foreign adversary, or at least could be more easily than the others.
It is fair to isolate TikTok becaues it is controlled by an adversarial world power. That's a lot different than facebook/instagram/etc pumping out addictive engagement tripe, which I think should have some serious limits on age availability using them, but that is an adjacent topic and not on the same level as a foreign power using the same techniques. The US government is giving them an out, which is to sell to a friendly foreign nation's company or to a US company, if TikTok won't take them up on it then it's time to cut them off.
> it would "not directly prohibit the continued use of TikTok" by Apple or Google users who have already downloaded TikTok. But it conceded the prohibitions on providing support "will eventually be to render the application unworkable."
I have a technical question with regards to this.
Typically, censorship* investigation efforts (from academia or elsewhere, such as OONI, Apernet etc.) have tended to focus on non-American countries to map their firewalling infrastructure used to this end.
Since the US was never brought up in these investigations, as an outsider, I got the distinct impression that TLS packets were never interfered with, and the US mostly relied on either seizing the domain and its associated resources (such as in the various piracy cases, the raidforums/breachforums investigation etc.)
Does this mean that a second-order effect of this directive would be asking the ISPs to block requests based on SNI, and in that case would it be a first in the US?
* For the purposes of this discussion, let us step aside the discussion about "censorship" and simply use that term to mean any kind of network filtering used by ISPs.
Would killing .ipa/.apk distribution not suffice? PWA still sucks, no one knows how to deal with .apk let alone invalid signed .ipa, I think it'll effectively prevent any app from going mainstream. Which is crazy but I suppose okay just this one time?
PWA also offer some advantages that apps don’t. As a personal anecdote, I’m often using a 8yo iPhone and as you might guess many apps don’t work anymore. Not because OS incompatibility (still updated thanks to Apple) but because they laaaaag and crash. Local gumtree (Leboncoin, if some dev here) systematically crash at the first in-app add load. Conter-intuitively, many PWA seems to be way more performant on the field. I know this is not the tech itself but bad dev, but that’s my experience so far.
Americans can’t invest directly in Chinese companies and shouldn’t be obligated to host Chinese companies in their markets or be surprised when political whims ban them, since the lack of shared investment is political too. People clearly enjoy the content on there so the outcome is sad but it’s a complicated economic dynamic that is hard to grasp
> Americans can’t invest directly in Chinese companies
This is not true. You can trade onshore Mainland China stocks through the Hongkong Stock Exchange. There is a special programmed called "Northbound" and "Southbound" in the broker-dealer industry. (This also allows investors from Mainland China to trades Hongkong stocks.) Any big brokerage should offer access to the Hongkong Stock Exchange. There is even a weird special currency called "CNH" that is the Chinese RMB that is allowed to settled in Hongkong, so you don't need a brokerage account in Mainland China to trade.
That’s a good clarification as not all companies are tech related and there are companies eligible for trading. However northbound trading still follows all applicable laws and there’s no access to direct ownership in some amazing companies
Americans can definitely invest into most Chinese tech companies- the exception is direct investments into non-tech, licensed companies, that require a VIE structure, which enables Americans to still invest.
> Susquehanna, a global trading firm, first invested in ByteDance in 2012 and now owns roughly 15 percent of the company, a person familiar with the investment said. The Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in ByteDance in 2014 when it was valued at $500 million. Sequoia’s U.S.-based growth fund later followed suit.
> General Atlantic, a private equity firm, invested in ByteDance in 2017 at a $20 billion valuation. Bill Ford, General Atlantic’s chief executive, has a seat on ByteDance’s board of directors. The company’s other notable U.S. investors include the private equity firms KKR and the Carlyle Group, as well as the hedge fund Coatue Management.
I have been assuming that the ownership is in the Cayman company and it is analogous to the situation with VIEs.
The ownership would have no votes on controlling the company but only ownership for hypothetical dividends on profit from the cayman shell. If anybody knows otherwise please elucidate us.
Oddly enough Snapchat IPOd with stocks with zero control as well.
"...there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
Geroge Orwell - Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972
If you want to use that analogy, a big reason Chinese cars aren't in the US is because the Chinese government heavily subsidizes their car production, which would lead to unfair price competition with other carmakers.
If you want true reciprocity there, China would either need to stop subsidizing their carmakers, or the US would need to add heavy tariffs to their cars to level the playing field.
The videos dividing America are being shot and filmed right here at home, and cross-posted to Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.
The better analogy would be disrupting the Taliban's opium supply routes, but allowing allied warlords to continue selling it freely to finance their operations.
Man you're cutting off communication for 300 million people. These governments can shove it, they have no business censoring this many families. The government shouldn't have the right to backdoor every piece of software in the country. We've officially lost our collective minds here. I thought you Americans loved freedom of speech. Especially Elon. Or I suppose that was only marketting for his world takeover scheme. Huh
Where does the law say anything about reciprocity? This is censorship under the guise of 'national security'. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have done more to undermine American institutions and openly divide the population than anything the CCP could dream up.
They are blocked because they don’t censor content. If they did agree to, they would be allowed - just like Microsoft, Bing, Apple, and a handful of other digital products are not blocked in China.
Edit: for those downvoting me, Google literally shut down their China operations because they were unwilling to comply with censorship requirements. Conversely, Google and other US companies seem completely willing to comply with national security letters that compel them to spy on non-US persons, which should make other countries where US companies operate equally uneasy.
"Doesn't censor content" is probably not describing the situation correctly; while some companies like Google have typically resisted such in the aughts, they regularly take requests from other countries of this sort, and it'd be very simple for them to reenter the China market by having a stance similar to what they have for other countries.
The issue here is probably caused by the requirement for an ICP recordal which requires removal of violating user-generated content within 15 minutes, which is probably a very tight deadline, probably coupled with a strong false positive rate which is why said companies are also hesitant to introduce automation.
It could also be argued that Tiktok is not completely value-aligned with US interests, although this has not been provably shown and whatever we have thus far is speculative.
So… if China mistreats their citizens, reciprocity says we must mistreat ours?
You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.
As soon as you find yourself arguing that you have no choice but to engage in the same behaviors you claim to dislike, you have literally become the enemy.
The reciprocity is between you and me. If you do something bad to me, I can do something bad to you. Is not that if you do something bad to yourself I need to do something bad for myself.
"Mistreat" is a bit unnecessarily dramatic. People in the US were fine (possibly even better off) before TikTok, and they'll be just fine if it goes away.
China's level of internet control and censorship does seem to rise to the level of mistreatment (in that they control and shape access to information, in ways that further the interests of state propaganda), but denying Chinese companies (and the Chinese government) market access to American consumers in some spheres seems fine. It's never been a two-way street with China, and I think we should be engaging in a bit of protectionism when it comes to allowing or not allowing Chinese companies to operate here.
If the US government were suppressing particular views or discussion of some topics (as the Chinese government does to their own citizens), then I would be alarmed. But that's not what's happening here; if the TikTok ban goes through, US citizens' free speech rights will not be meaningfully impacted, as there are other platforms that can and will carry the same content.
Banning a foreign company from doing business in your country isn't automatically censorship. There's nuance.
(And beyond all this, I do worry about the Chinese government using TikTok as a platform to influence Western citizens' thought, culture, and politics, for their own purposes. If they're not doing it already, I'd be astonished.)
censorship schmensorship. This is more banal than that. China bans US companies from doing business in China. This is quid pro quo. Chinese companies, of the same industry, are getting banned in US.
Sure, but how are you gonna enforce it? Proprietary codebases usually stay...proprietary. Even Telegrams open client doesn't prove shit when it comes to server-side decryption keys and logs. And this, from a black box systems perspective, is a hard thing to make transparent.
Given the history of cryptography we can't even rely on that anymore and have to assume a compromise in the future due to how those elliptic curves (and their seeds) are created.
Even just assuming that Qualcomm doesn't track you with their two GPS domains that are constantly pinged is very naive. And we've also uncovered a history of abuse in CPU backdoors (looking at you, Intel).
So where does transparency have to start? My theory is that without solving capitalism as the bug of democracy we can't have transparency. As long as there is financial incentives, there will be no transparency.
This way of thinking has been debated for a long time. It's not clear or self-evident doing it the way you describe is the best way to handle things. Sure, it's more self-righteous and sounds good on paper, but does it really hold? https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I think a ban that prohibits the distribution of a product is fine.
My understanding is that private citizens are still legally allowed to use TikTok if they want, but TikTok isn't allowed to market their product directly to US consumers via App stores. That seems pretty reasonable given China's position on US internet products.
Free trade and openness only works if all parties agree on the rules. If one party is open while the other exploits that openness by selectively opening up only when it benefits them then undermines the principles you believe in.
If we want China to be more open we have to ensure they're playing by the rules and they're not going to do that if we continue to allow them to exploit us.
> So… if China mistreats their citizens, reciprocity says we must mistreat ours?
This is such a silly strawman. A better example would be that reciprocity would say that if China mistreated our civilians then we should mistreat theirs. Reciprocity doesn't mean "we do whatever China does".
> You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.
It's not censorship so this also doesn't make sense. They are being forced to be sold. TikTok can exist just fine, just not under control of ByteDance which is de facto under control of the CCP. The basic point here is that the CCP will not be allowed to control a major media arm in the US which is in turn used to spread CCP propaganda. If you want to prevent CCP from owning a major media channel which can freely spread CCP propaganda, this is a completely rational means of doing that stands up perfectly to "cursory thought".
> As soon as you find yourself arguing that you have no choice but to engage in the same behaviors you claim to dislike, you have literally become the enemy.
I hate violence but sometimes violence is required (see WWII). I don't think we (the US) became the enemy in WWII for engaging in violence.
>You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.
There is literally no basis for this belief. Do you have a realistic solution to the gish gallop? Have internet comments proven to follow the most well reasoned with it's own uncertainties or the most rhetorically convincing?
That's a straw man argument and kind of a different thing entirely (moral / ethics / human rights vs corporations / entertainment) though.
Anyway while I do agree with your statement about censorship vs openness, I do think in the broader sense things need to be done about social media - that is, Tiktok is specifically singled out for being Chinese, but its target audience, addictiveness, usefulness as a propaganda tool, is very much not unique on the market. It was only after Zuckerberg and presumably the SV tech lobbyists raised the issue of Tiktok with Trump and the government that they pulled on the brakes.
But this is where the reciprocity argument comes in; US based services in China are under strict regulations and requirements, to the point where at best they can have a subsidiary in China under Chinese management. But while it's not trivial as a foreign entity to have a presence in the US either (e.g. you need to have or be a US company to be able to sell your software there), it seems more accessible and less restrictive than operating in China; in a sense this move levels the playing field.
I don't understand this position. It's not censorship, it's security. It's protecting USA from China. Why should we allow China to have access to all contacts, media, location, etc for half of all Americans? Would you agree on a limited ban for military or government employees?
This is such a stupid argument. This is about censorship to American citizens and a conversation about losing their rights as an authoritarian state's victims.
If TikTok is the only place you can speak and there aren’t equivalent services then it sounds like it needs to be broken up on the basis of being a monopoly.
As there are other services and the only thing being targeted is foreign ownership by members of a country that blocks our services, then no, I don’t think it’s about censorship.
This wasn’t even a ban on TikTok, bytedance could have sold to an American owner but have refused.
No American will be censored if TikTok is banned. They will simply use (or go back to using) one of the many other non-TikTok alternatives to talk about the same things.
If TikTok were the only game in town, sure, banning it would be censorship. But that's not the case, by a long shot.
For anyone that has had even moderate experience with TikTok comment moderation, it becomes clear very quickly there's an incredible bias that seemingly disfavours Western interests. This includes calls towards extreme violence that should be banned per their own content policy. I don't think you need to have access to any secret documents to have a good deal of suspicion this platform is being used by foreign actors either directly or indirectly to shape attitudes in the West. If freedom of speech is at stake, protecting TikTok may actually be harmful to that cause.
If China develops a medical technique better than ours and ban ours, will we ban that technique here? We must do what is right for our nation. If TikTok harms us we must ban it, reciprocal or not. If it does not harm or does benefit us, we must not ban it, reciprocal or not. The question is only whether it harms or benefits our people.
1) Excellent way to teach millions of people about sideloading overnight. This could be a big win for Android (where sideloading is easy) vs. iPhone were sideloading is impossible (? or only possible only with an annual dev license?)
2) Will this affect apps like CapCut and Lemon8 too?
Sounds like the “Year of Linux” fantasies 20-30 years ago. No, people won’t learn about side-loading much like they didn’t care to try out linux instead of windows. They will simply use a competitor app.
Sideloading is not Linux, it's Napster (or maybe Fortnite). Switching to Linux requires a level of ideological commitment that is not necessary for accessing something like TikTok.
On Android, there is no work associated with sideloading besides checking a toggle letting you install an app outside the App Store.
> 2) Will this affect apps like CapCut and Lemon8 too?
Both, the bill lists any "website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly" by ByteDance, which controls CapCut and Lemon8.
Sideloading doesn't work if an extremely popular app can't handle transactions in a proper way. Creators won't get paid, the ecosystem will fall. I bet US government would ban Tiktok from banks and billing systems.
All that would do is drive off the "blue checkmark" class of uploaders, good riddance. That's not what people are on TikTok to view. Note that the TikTok influencers have never made it as big as the Youtube era of influencers, and that's a good thing for society.
TikTok is popular primarily because it's easy to get to. You're expecting normal people to learn how to sideload applications and that's simply not going to happen at a scale large enough to keep TikTok at critical mass in the US.
I wonder what kind of impact this would have on their ability to actually provide good ML recommendations. Based on reporting that would be a lot of data to give up
TikToks appeal is that it's digital heroin. People aren't going there because it's genuinely amazing stuff. People are going there because it's a dopamine hit. When you make it harder to view like having a web app that you have to refresh or click or have less smooth touch interactions, it'll get less engagement.
Edit: it will be more difficult to track user behavior and location with a web app.
Do you have a source that the act is being interpreted by the government to include prohibiting network operators from serving traffic? That definitely seems like it would be a stretch given the text of the act
The act prohibits
> (A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
> (B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
With the following relevant definition
> (5) Internet hosting service.—The term “internet hosting service” means a service through which storage and computing resources are provided to an individual or organization for the accommodation and maintenance of 1 or more websites or online services, and which may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting.
Which I've basically read as "it will be removed from app stores and not be allowed to host content on US servers". Which as a matter of policy seems more than sufficient to reduce the reach of tiktok to a tiny fraction of it's current US user base.
Yeah tiktok is a drop in the ocean for the critical mass needed for people to abandon iPhone. It is already highly censored in the US and no one said let's use Android.
Too many elections are being influenced by the free exchange of ideas on TikTok -- best to shut it down if the U.S. corrupt government cannot control it. Who cares what the people think!?
Right on, it's only a free exchange of ideas if US alphabet agencies can exclusively put their thumb on the scale.
The CCP's "influence" here is just letting content exist that would normally be suppressed on other platforms. Which, obviously, the US government doesn't like - do not intersperse the pro-US military content with anticapitalist rhetoric!!!
The CCP is a scourge on humanity, predominately in their own country; whereas the US establishment* is also a scourge, but its evils are off-shored. US and China also have powerful propaganda models that control information. Silencing opposition inside of the country is not the way to win a war -- educating people about it and letting them make up their own mind is the only way out of furthering a "censorship industrial complex".
1 - neoliberals, neoconservatives, fundamentalist zionists, other "factions" composing the majority of those who largely want the warfare/welfare state
Either you are being sarcastic or you forgot about the Cambridge Analytica incident. Elections can be influenced via the latest prevalent platform in a region. If it’s not TikTok, it’ll be Facebook / Instagram / YouTube.
Sure, but consider that we actually found out about Cambridge Analytica, Facebook got egg on its face, and made changes in how they share data as a result. (We can argue over how meaningful those changes were, of course.)
And on the other side, we have a company owned in part by entities that are beholden to every whim of the Chinese government. That's by design, and they can't change that, and have no motivation to change that.
Exactly. Even with Twitter bought and paid for it was to close to Elons and Trumps liking, so the platform has to go, or bend the knee and start running rightwing propaganda.
My guess is that TikTok is about to get the Huawei treatment.
Like it happened to Huawei, the US State Department will campaign against it in various foreign countries and seek a similar ban. And like it happened to Meng Wanzhou, the US will use its legal system to pursue key figures in ByteDance, many of whom reside in Singapore, a country which has an extradition treaty with the US.
(If you think I am exaggerating, hear this week's edition of the All In podcast.)
It's not in the US strategic interests for China to control the most popular social media (aka propaganda) site, so from a realpolitik perspective this makes a ton of sense. Reliance on a foreign power for things that are so prevalent is a risk, and it's not like the US is incapable on a technical level of producing a TikTok alternative - it's "only" popular because of network effects.
FWIW I mostly agree that your take seemed to be a likely outcome if Harris had been elected, but I literally have no idea what the new administration will do.
Meng Wanzhou got caught because she was in Canada, and she was (apparently) a Chinese national. But I cannot imagine Singapore just handing over their own nationals to the US as a political prisoner...
I'm not sure how exactly the First Amendment works, so someone please correct me, but does banning a platform constitute a violation if individuals can choose other platforms?
It's possible to violate free speech rights by banning a platform even when their are alternatives. Most relevantly to this situation, the platform itself is most likely engaging in speech of its own by choosing what to repeat of what other people have said (i.e. it's choice of algorithm). If the platform was being banned for that speech (and that speech didn't happen to fall under an exception) that would be problematic.
It's also clearly possible to ban a platform under other circumstances. For instance banning a platform that was used by various parties for (protected!) speech, but was also being used for money laundering...
TikTok is a complicated case. It is on the edge of banning a platform for protected speech in so much as it is concerned with a US corporations (relevant because speech by non-americans from outside of the US is not protected) choice of recommendation algorithm, except the algorithm is really dictated by a Chinese corporation under the direct influence of the CPP. There are also however very compelling legitimate concerns the government has, such as the CPP's espionage interests, and the CPP's (not-protected, as a foreign government!) influence over TikTok's speech.
It's also notable in this case that the platform is being banned only so long as the foreign adversary refuses to divest. TikTok is free to continue operating in the US, so long as it isn't under China's (an entity without free speech rights) control.
The real answer is that it depends on what the Supreme Court says.
There's a valid legal argument to be made here either way; that the government has some amount of leeway to censor foreign propaganda, or that the first amendment prevents it from doing so at all.
We'll really just have to wait and see how they rule on it, because the issue will definitely make its way there at some point in the near future.
It's also likely that the verdict won't have a neat and tidy partisan breakdown, so the final result will be hard to predict.
The answer is no, it does not violate the 1st amendment, as proven by the fact that the courts are allowing this ban to go into place.
The government makes laws that effects platforms all the time. And Tiktok is perfectly capable of also following the law by doing what the courts have ordered (divest from its ownership basically).
Americans discovering the constitution is interpreted and reinterpreted whenever it needs to be is the best thing on the internet. B-bu-but muh free speech!
Readit News
The rift has nothing to do with the political system (e.g. the US is freely and openly allied with Saudi Arabia despite radically different political systems), and everything to do with the competition for power and influence in the world. SA is not a real contender there, China is. From here the rift and inevitable conflict.
> If you are looking for some specific justification for a ban, you're missing the forest for the trees
Every reason for the ban comes from the above competition for power and influence in the world. Whether it's not having an adversary financially profit from your own citizens or influence their decisions, or it's to eliminate foreign competition and fill the gap with local companies, it's all abut power and money and the political system couldn't matter less.
Even though I personally do not harbour strong suspicions towards the US, it's not a given that the US will always act favourably towards the EU, Europe as a whole, or any one particular EU country in the future. Especially in light of recent elections.
Deleted Comment
A candidate got funded by foreign agents, paid for influencers, and sprinkled with Russian bot accounts it was enough to make a pro-Russian candidate get 20% of votes when he was an unknown political figure.[0]
The app allows this. You can try to distract everyone from an app that enables illegal foreign interference by hiding under the guise of "oh, this is just what people want to hear; the problem isn't Russia but Romanian politicians." - that's a very dangerous stance and a threat to free & fair elections.
[0]https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/romania-tiktok-pr...
I’ve heard a number of ideas including multiple round elections with averaged results. That way if someone pops in round one the discourse can focus a spotlight on them and if people don’t like what they see on closer inspection they can push the other way in round two.
The other problem though is that establishment politicians are so unpopular in so many places around the world that a rando with a simple catchy meme-worthy message can run in from nowhere and upset things. If the establishment were more responsive to the people it would be harder to do this.
And Facebook too !! :-D
(obviously kidding but... well... not so much after seing https://www.france.tv/documentaires/documentaires-societe/67... )
2. Meta has a far worse track record here.
If your argument is social media allows the subversion of free and fair elections there is no reason for TikTok to be singled out. In fact you could argue that WhatsApp groups should be banned as well.
So like whatever replaces it will get manipulated just the same. Facebook has had this problem for over a decade now and nobody's solved it. Let's just admit that national governments are stupid.
Transparent to the degree that if there were a centrally managed influence campaign, researchers would be able to detect it in near real-time.
I do not share that position, but I'm inclined to support some weakening of platform immunity for services that use an individualized recommendation algorithm to maximize engagement.
I did not quickly find an authoritative source, but it is widely reported that Douyin, the Chinese domestic market equivalent of TikTok deliberately favors educational content, especially for children. Here's one news report claiming that: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-china/story?id=108111...
> the distinctions largely owe to stiff regulations in China centered on youth social media use and political dissent.
> The differences between the two apps highlight a comparatively permissive legal environment for social media in the U.S., protecting free expression but also leaving some users -- especially young ones -- vulnerable to addictive behavior, the experts said.
> That same year, Douyin imposed a 40-minute daily limit for users under 14. Last year, Chinese regulators introduced a rule that would limit children under age 18 to two hours of smartphone screen time each day.
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And I guess you believe that every consumer product and service should be treated strictly as household issue.
For absolutely everything - even the most dangerous, toxic and antisocial ones, I can find one good use case credible enough to ask other to behave themselves. And I'm no David Hahn.
That being said, it’s not fair to single out TikTok. They all do it. The only unique danger with TikTok is that it could be controlled by a foreign adversary, or at least could be more easily than the others.
> The only unique danger with TikTok is that it could be controlled by a foreign adversary, or at least could be more easily than the others.
Isn't that the entire reason given for why they are singling them out? You say it's not fair then give the exact reason why it seems to be.
It was fine when it was US companies...
I have a technical question with regards to this.
Typically, censorship* investigation efforts (from academia or elsewhere, such as OONI, Apernet etc.) have tended to focus on non-American countries to map their firewalling infrastructure used to this end.
Since the US was never brought up in these investigations, as an outsider, I got the distinct impression that TLS packets were never interfered with, and the US mostly relied on either seizing the domain and its associated resources (such as in the various piracy cases, the raidforums/breachforums investigation etc.)
Does this mean that a second-order effect of this directive would be asking the ISPs to block requests based on SNI, and in that case would it be a first in the US?
* For the purposes of this discussion, let us step aside the discussion about "censorship" and simply use that term to mean any kind of network filtering used by ISPs.
Read more here: https://www.hkex.com.hk/Mutual-Market/Connect-Hub/Stock-Conn...
> Susquehanna, a global trading firm, first invested in ByteDance in 2012 and now owns roughly 15 percent of the company, a person familiar with the investment said. The Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, invested in ByteDance in 2014 when it was valued at $500 million. Sequoia’s U.S.-based growth fund later followed suit.
> General Atlantic, a private equity firm, invested in ByteDance in 2017 at a $20 billion valuation. Bill Ford, General Atlantic’s chief executive, has a seat on ByteDance’s board of directors. The company’s other notable U.S. investors include the private equity firms KKR and the Carlyle Group, as well as the hedge fund Coatue Management.
The ownership would have no votes on controlling the company but only ownership for hypothetical dividends on profit from the cayman shell. If anybody knows otherwise please elucidate us.
Oddly enough Snapchat IPOd with stocks with zero control as well.
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If that is the case, then there should be no complaint with blocking Bytedance/other Chinese apps in the West.
Geroge Orwell - Proposed preface to Animal Farm, first published in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September 1972
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Lets see what the next chapter is; as you said reciprocity is key ...
If you want true reciprocity there, China would either need to stop subsidizing their carmakers, or the US would need to add heavy tariffs to their cars to level the playing field.
The better analogy would be disrupting the Taliban's opium supply routes, but allowing allied warlords to continue selling it freely to finance their operations.
Nothing in this world is black and white.
Edit: for those downvoting me, Google literally shut down their China operations because they were unwilling to comply with censorship requirements. Conversely, Google and other US companies seem completely willing to comply with national security letters that compel them to spy on non-US persons, which should make other countries where US companies operate equally uneasy.
The issue here is probably caused by the requirement for an ICP recordal which requires removal of violating user-generated content within 15 minutes, which is probably a very tight deadline, probably coupled with a strong false positive rate which is why said companies are also hesitant to introduce automation.
It could also be argued that Tiktok is not completely value-aligned with US interests, although this has not been provably shown and whatever we have thus far is speculative.
These platforms certainly do censor content. They have large teams globally that do just that.
You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.
As soon as you find yourself arguing that you have no choice but to engage in the same behaviors you claim to dislike, you have literally become the enemy.
Can you explain this better without the assumption that it is self-evident?
They're banning app/news delivery app managed by enemy government
It is not like they're blocking internet, wikipedia
they're banning stupid, memes/brainrot app
China's level of internet control and censorship does seem to rise to the level of mistreatment (in that they control and shape access to information, in ways that further the interests of state propaganda), but denying Chinese companies (and the Chinese government) market access to American consumers in some spheres seems fine. It's never been a two-way street with China, and I think we should be engaging in a bit of protectionism when it comes to allowing or not allowing Chinese companies to operate here.
If the US government were suppressing particular views or discussion of some topics (as the Chinese government does to their own citizens), then I would be alarmed. But that's not what's happening here; if the TikTok ban goes through, US citizens' free speech rights will not be meaningfully impacted, as there are other platforms that can and will carry the same content.
Banning a foreign company from doing business in your country isn't automatically censorship. There's nuance.
(And beyond all this, I do worry about the Chinese government using TikTok as a platform to influence Western citizens' thought, culture, and politics, for their own purposes. If they're not doing it already, I'd be astonished.)
Sure, but how are you gonna enforce it? Proprietary codebases usually stay...proprietary. Even Telegrams open client doesn't prove shit when it comes to server-side decryption keys and logs. And this, from a black box systems perspective, is a hard thing to make transparent.
Given the history of cryptography we can't even rely on that anymore and have to assume a compromise in the future due to how those elliptic curves (and their seeds) are created.
Even just assuming that Qualcomm doesn't track you with their two GPS domains that are constantly pinged is very naive. And we've also uncovered a history of abuse in CPU backdoors (looking at you, Intel).
So where does transparency have to start? My theory is that without solving capitalism as the bug of democracy we can't have transparency. As long as there is financial incentives, there will be no transparency.
My understanding is that private citizens are still legally allowed to use TikTok if they want, but TikTok isn't allowed to market their product directly to US consumers via App stores. That seems pretty reasonable given China's position on US internet products.
Free trade and openness only works if all parties agree on the rules. If one party is open while the other exploits that openness by selectively opening up only when it benefits them then undermines the principles you believe in.
If we want China to be more open we have to ensure they're playing by the rules and they're not going to do that if we continue to allow them to exploit us.
because TikTok is the epitome of openness? Has never censored any opinion?
This is such a silly strawman. A better example would be that reciprocity would say that if China mistreated our civilians then we should mistreat theirs. Reciprocity doesn't mean "we do whatever China does".
> You don’t fight censorship with censorship. That doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory thought. You fight censorship with openness.
It's not censorship so this also doesn't make sense. They are being forced to be sold. TikTok can exist just fine, just not under control of ByteDance which is de facto under control of the CCP. The basic point here is that the CCP will not be allowed to control a major media arm in the US which is in turn used to spread CCP propaganda. If you want to prevent CCP from owning a major media channel which can freely spread CCP propaganda, this is a completely rational means of doing that stands up perfectly to "cursory thought".
> As soon as you find yourself arguing that you have no choice but to engage in the same behaviors you claim to dislike, you have literally become the enemy.
I hate violence but sometimes violence is required (see WWII). I don't think we (the US) became the enemy in WWII for engaging in violence.
There is literally no basis for this belief. Do you have a realistic solution to the gish gallop? Have internet comments proven to follow the most well reasoned with it's own uncertainties or the most rhetorically convincing?
Anyway while I do agree with your statement about censorship vs openness, I do think in the broader sense things need to be done about social media - that is, Tiktok is specifically singled out for being Chinese, but its target audience, addictiveness, usefulness as a propaganda tool, is very much not unique on the market. It was only after Zuckerberg and presumably the SV tech lobbyists raised the issue of Tiktok with Trump and the government that they pulled on the brakes.
But this is where the reciprocity argument comes in; US based services in China are under strict regulations and requirements, to the point where at best they can have a subsidiary in China under Chinese management. But while it's not trivial as a foreign entity to have a presence in the US either (e.g. you need to have or be a US company to be able to sell your software there), it seems more accessible and less restrictive than operating in China; in a sense this move levels the playing field.
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Targeted addictive misinformation.
Blocking that source of misinformation is the only logical response.
Reciprocity means that we are not required to allow Chinese propaganda into our children's bedrooms.
We are at war with China and Russia, and we are fighting it with both hands tied behind our backs.
If it was about freedom of speech the gov would have requested all the apps to censor the topics, not banning one app.
As there are other services and the only thing being targeted is foreign ownership by members of a country that blocks our services, then no, I don’t think it’s about censorship.
This wasn’t even a ban on TikTok, bytedance could have sold to an American owner but have refused.
If TikTok were the only game in town, sure, banning it would be censorship. But that's not the case, by a long shot.
b) Removing the platform entirely is not censorship. Especially when everyone will just shift to Instagram, Youtube etc.
c) This was a decision made by the US Congress. It is by definition not authoritarian.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...
2) Will this affect apps like CapCut and Lemon8 too?
On Android, there is no work associated with sideloading besides checking a toggle letting you install an app outside the App Store.
Did Windows and linux PC sales rise ? Well yes, to some decent extent:
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/2023-pc-games-revenu...
Both, the bill lists any "website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly" by ByteDance, which controls CapCut and Lemon8.
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TikToks appeal is that it's digital heroin. People aren't going there because it's genuinely amazing stuff. People are going there because it's a dopamine hit. When you make it harder to view like having a web app that you have to refresh or click or have less smooth touch interactions, it'll get less engagement.
Edit: it will be more difficult to track user behavior and location with a web app.
The act prohibits
> (A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
> (B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
With the following relevant definition
> (5) Internet hosting service.—The term “internet hosting service” means a service through which storage and computing resources are provided to an individual or organization for the accommodation and maintenance of 1 or more websites or online services, and which may include file hosting, domain name server hosting, cloud hosting, and virtual private server hosting.
Which I've basically read as "it will be removed from app stores and not be allowed to host content on US servers". Which as a matter of policy seems more than sufficient to reduce the reach of tiktok to a tiny fraction of it's current US user base.
The CCP's "influence" here is just letting content exist that would normally be suppressed on other platforms. Which, obviously, the US government doesn't like - do not intersperse the pro-US military content with anticapitalist rhetoric!!!
1 - neoliberals, neoconservatives, fundamentalist zionists, other "factions" composing the majority of those who largely want the warfare/welfare state
And on the other side, we have a company owned in part by entities that are beholden to every whim of the Chinese government. That's by design, and they can't change that, and have no motivation to change that.
Like it happened to Huawei, the US State Department will campaign against it in various foreign countries and seek a similar ban. And like it happened to Meng Wanzhou, the US will use its legal system to pursue key figures in ByteDance, many of whom reside in Singapore, a country which has an extradition treaty with the US.
(If you think I am exaggerating, hear this week's edition of the All In podcast.)
FWIW I mostly agree that your take seemed to be a likely outcome if Harris had been elected, but I literally have no idea what the new administration will do.
Meng Wanzhou got caught because she was in Canada, and she was (apparently) a Chinese national. But I cannot imagine Singapore just handing over their own nationals to the US as a political prisoner...
It's possible to violate free speech rights by banning a platform even when their are alternatives. Most relevantly to this situation, the platform itself is most likely engaging in speech of its own by choosing what to repeat of what other people have said (i.e. it's choice of algorithm). If the platform was being banned for that speech (and that speech didn't happen to fall under an exception) that would be problematic.
It's also clearly possible to ban a platform under other circumstances. For instance banning a platform that was used by various parties for (protected!) speech, but was also being used for money laundering...
TikTok is a complicated case. It is on the edge of banning a platform for protected speech in so much as it is concerned with a US corporations (relevant because speech by non-americans from outside of the US is not protected) choice of recommendation algorithm, except the algorithm is really dictated by a Chinese corporation under the direct influence of the CPP. There are also however very compelling legitimate concerns the government has, such as the CPP's espionage interests, and the CPP's (not-protected, as a foreign government!) influence over TikTok's speech.
It's also notable in this case that the platform is being banned only so long as the foreign adversary refuses to divest. TikTok is free to continue operating in the US, so long as it isn't under China's (an entity without free speech rights) control.
I'd encourage you to read the appeals court ruling for a much more nuanced, and authoritative, take then mine: https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2024/12/24-111...
There's a valid legal argument to be made here either way; that the government has some amount of leeway to censor foreign propaganda, or that the first amendment prevents it from doing so at all.
We'll really just have to wait and see how they rule on it, because the issue will definitely make its way there at some point in the near future.
It's also likely that the verdict won't have a neat and tidy partisan breakdown, so the final result will be hard to predict.
The government makes laws that effects platforms all the time. And Tiktok is perfectly capable of also following the law by doing what the courts have ordered (divest from its ownership basically).
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