As someone who's been on TikTok for years now, it's extremely fake, the algorithm is a total ruse, as most of what trends is based on seeing news stories repeated hundreds of times, and most other content has the same repetitive music behind it... Far too much repetition and subtle seminaries in trending content, down to the way videos are color graded to be honestly real & organic... I've had a few videos go viral, but most things that do go viral are memes, the minute you want to push out anything remotely serious or related to business, they want money to let it pass the visibility gate.

I won't miss it if it does get banned. It's stressed so many people out for no good reason, and sucked up millions of hours of free labor from unrecognized & unpaid creators that deserve better.

That doesn't mean that any Meta product is good for content creators mind you.

The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted it.

It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.

I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...

Your perception of TikTok likely depends on your TikTok for you page. If you spend time cultivating it, the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.

This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels unfortunately.

Just did a test, opened up TikTok

1) a guy telling me in my native language (not english) how to spot phishing scams 2) another guy doing a short video about how much you need to invest to retire in my native language 3) Donald's AG not answering simple questions directly 4) video about 2CV ice racing where people leisurely drive old Citroens 5) A skit by an Australian dude who has a wall full of Milwaukee tools

Instagram Reels

1) A couple doing a very much scripted skit 2) A stolen clip from an old 90s sitcom 3) one-liner joke 4) A dude farting 5) A homophobic "joke" video

Youtube Shorts

1) pro skier made up to look old doing tricks on the slope 2) A couple I don't know showing what they looked like in 1988 3) A skit by a couple 4) One of those weird youtube-only dating channels reposting a clip of their stuff 5) Americans not knowing how to drive on icy roads in 2022

The quality difference is so clear that it's not even funny. In my experience all of the good content in Reels is just reposted/stolen TikTok content. Shorts has the same or snippets of bigger YT videos.

FB Reels is so bad I don't even want to give them the engagement metrics.

My wife hates it when I don't enjoy the TikTok videos she sends me, because it's very easy for me to tell how staged and fake they are. She, on the other hand, neither notices nor cares.

This would be concerning, if I didn't know that this way of thinking was incredibly common these days—instead, it's mildly terrifying.

It's where the young kids who don't know any better overshare. Instagram is where the perfectly manicured young adults put out a phony facade to make their money.

All the major social networking things are fake, no matter how they feel to one particular user.

However, the US seems to ban only the options where it's not US companies making money off their users...

I don't know if I would characterize TikTok as 'authentic' first and foremost, but it's a platform where real people go to perform. When I scrolled TikTok, I would often get poorly-shot videos from average folks trying to put their spin on the day's joke format, or reacting to that day's outrage. It was junk food, but at least somewhat 'real'.

My Reels feed, on the other hand, is 100% bot drivel. It's all stolen viral videos by artificially-boosted accounts, and the comments appear to be fake comments that were 'paid for'. I assume there must be some sort of financial incentive to gaming the system this way.

The end result is that TikTok feels like scrolling through (attention-grabbing, reactionary) stuff by real people, and Reels feels like scrolling through some sort of bot wasteland.

I guess I should add that, due to its size, TikTok almost certainly also has a bot problem, but if it does it's not as clearly evident in a way that is detrimental to the platform.

You're both right! There was a good article/discussion on on this yesterday, but tldr: They are authentically fake! As in, the creators are not putting up a show with a 'real' person behind the persona, the algorithms have remade whatever person there use to be such that their 'authentic' self has become the persona.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42696691

The lady with the rug story, the tik tok recipes... All felt very real, down to earth to me. Versus IG's obsession with glamor, travel stories, other hucksters.

You have to break it in, strangely enough. When I first used it it was like being logged out and watching Reels. But overtime it really understood what might interest me, even topics I didn't think I'd be interested in but was

I think Im in your universe…how do we get out?

TikTok has a lot of true believers.

Got any room over in your universe? I'm feeling pretty tired of this one.

Fake compared to what? Alt-right Zuck with a fresh perm?

Seriously. US social media is taking a massive turn to the right while its owners are swearing allegiance to Trump. To most of the world that is a much more real danger than the Chinese communists.

Yeah… TikTok is absolutely chock full of garbage for me, whether or not I’m logged out.

YouTube Shorts are not bad now for this kind of thing. I’m guessing it’s based on my subscriptions so it’s already off to a good start for me.

If you spent 10 minutes on each platform, you'd immediately realize how tone-deaf and naive your comment is.

This isn't rocket science. What's going on is having the keys to the kingdom with regards to serving videos to influence the mind of a user with extremely precise targeting.

China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free Europe, and likely before.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Radio-Free-Europe

If you feel that the national security angle is a farce, do you similarly feel that the DoD banning TikTok on government systems was just for show? https://defensescoop.com/2023/06/02/pentagon-proposes-rule-t...

i think there are obvious reasons why bytedance would not want to spawn a US-based competitor and why a US only social media network would be ineffective.

this is exactly the same as what China does with their gfw, they allow american apps to divest and be owned by a chinese company.

Social media is the front line of an ongoing cyber war. It is a matter of propaganda and social engineering.

Imagine if Japan owned all the newspapers in the run-up to WWII.

That's not to say China is the only one with propaganda.

It reminds me of Google's decision to pull out of China instead of censor their results.

>The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt

Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded, TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese company?

I mean, the Chinese government was never going to let the US just take their company at bargain basement prices.

I think this is untrue. The government wanted to shut down TikTok, but it can't just outright ban it because that's a clear violation of the first amendment, so it came up with a way to ban it indirectly. That was their intention all along.

I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill.

I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in this case they probably didn't even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll be back legally operating in the US within a year.

What, they should just shut up and sell? They're getting extorted.

Yeah it’s about that algorithms could radicalize the population or turn them against each other

Are you aware that almost all of the scam calls, phishing emails, and other attempts to separate you from the currency in your bank account arise from outside of the US?

Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users. You can imagine how well they are up to that task.

This is a rather poor take. Individually it's "probably" not much, but when you start putting the data together in bulk you have a social network graph of huge parts of an entire country. That and everything they like and probably work on. If you can get things like location data, then you can figure out what entire companies are doing. You can get insight into secret projects. You can figure out what small companies/contractors to install moles in.

It is literally the biggest spy data gold mine on earth.

It's infinitely worse for someone abroad to have your SS because it is worth it for them to try for several days to scam you for just a few dozen dollars. There's an entire industry of scam farms run in Cambodia by CH gangs.

Exactly. There are people deleting menstrual tracker apps in the US because the information might be used against them by law enforcement. But what's the risk to them of the Chinese government having that? Other than turning it over to the US authorities, of course.

You said a lot of words that are a litmus test proving you almost never use TikTok nowadays. First of all this is not 2020 anymore, you're 5 years late if you think TikTok is still filled with "dances". "Paid influencers" mean nothing in TikTok since everyone has an equal voice and equal shot at virality, see you're still seeing it from the lens of Instagram here.

The NPC live streaming is weird yeah but you cherry picked a trend and then make it about all TikTok. Literally hundreds of trends spawn up in TikTok every month and some of them are damn more authentic than whatever happens in IG reels. Some of the successful original trends even pick up in Instagram or YouTube.

yes but those types stick to live and tiktok lets you completely remove live from your feed. In fact if i don't want to see joe rogan, peterson, or other such horsemen of the misinformation apocalypse outside of live, I can make that decision on tiktok in a meaningful way. I can actually remove that content from my feed. Good luck getting that to work on youtube or instagram. You'll get that content if you like it or not. Good luck blocking all the random alphanumeric account names posting the deluge of that kind of content, reels / youtube shorts will force feed it to you anyway, no matter what you do.

> This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.

Provide literally one source for this. literally any source.

It's the same kind of mentality that thinks "reality TV" is about real people and not intentionally produced performances.

No 小红书 is literally not a TikTok replacement. The app is only very partially short form video, while most of the posts are more like pinterest. If you are talking about the recent UI changes that made it look like TikTok, I'm sorry to break it to you but I think that's just a coincident.

Exactly. They keep fear mongering about China stealing our data but when these companies leak every single piece of sensitive data about hundreds of millions of americans they get a slap on the wrist. Tells you exactly where their priorities are.

The content doesn't matter. There's more than a lifetime supply of I'll relevant kinds of content on both platforms. The algorithm for curating your feed matters.

that would be an extremely interesting experiment. Young people would probably feel completely lost, unsure of where to get "news" from. Actually having to go websites and search for stuff :)

"At this point, we have to accept that younger generations—precisely the people who have been raised on quantified audience feedback for their every creative gesture—have an unrecognizable conception of authenticity."[0]

[0]https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbea...

On Wikipedia, it says he chose red because:

> The Chinese name was inspired by two pivotal institutions in its co-founder Charlwin Mao's career journey that both feature red as their primary color: Bain & Company, where he worked as a consultant, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA.

I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.

However, for any Chinese people who also know English, the association is obvious.

I asked an actual Chinese person about 小红书 and they assumed I was talking about Mao's book until I clarified.

The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I wouldn't call that very Maoist.

..did you only learn chinese academically or something? anyone in china would think of Mao if you said 小红书 (well, at least before the app)

So they're moving to a video site named "Red" plus a four-letter word?

TikTok, you've changed! But maybe not that much.

My kids in HS and their friends all downloaded “Red Note” this week. I said “what about Reels?” — “That’s for you and mom”.

> In English, it seems to be called rednote.

I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.

> My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.

If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.

Tiktok is buggy, lacks undo in obvious places, and has seemingly random transient UI changes. Nobody cares.

Rednote could be a fad that fades, but technical problems won't be decisive.

Shorts has a way worse algorithm, I don’t use TikTok because it’s too addictive but I get bored of YouTube shorts after like 5-10mins most times, which actually for me is a Feature but for YouTube itself is a drawback.

A large part of it is obviously negative polarization: you tell people they can't use a Chinese app, they're going to use a different Chinese app. Hence the pictures of Luigi.

It's worth asking why Reels/Shorts didn't take off and those companies had to ask for their competition to be banned instead. Everyone agrees that "the algorithm is better", but this is very hard to quantify. Perhaps something about surfacing smaller creators? Quantity/quality of invasive advertising? Extent to which people feel particular kinds of rage content is being forced on them?

I don't use TikTok, but my understanding is that they are just a lot better than anyone else with the algorithm. Somehow where Meta built a social graph, TikTok built a graph of videos (no need to know who you are, they can just suggest videos based on other videos you watch). And it's apparently difficult to catch up (presumably because they have more users so more data to make better predictions).

That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not something else.

As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps? Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.

I use both and YouTube Short produces mostly just garbage for me. AI voice videos that will get your attention, but has little content. TikTok's algorithm on the other hand is much better and provides quality, half-long-form content.

Shorts is garbage.

There are so many UI elements on top of video that end up blocking what you're trying to see. There is no way to hide them.

YouTube also destroyed its search.

As someone that uses both, YouTube shorts it's _not_ superior. Two very simple reasons:

1. the algorithm sucks 2. it will consistently fail to load content quickly enough when scrolling unwanted content

I spend a lot of time on YT, and less time on Instagram... and 0 time on TikTok, where I never created an account.

YT Shorts exist exclusively for YT creators who want to publish bite-sized pieces of content for their audience with a much lower expectation of polish than their normal longer form content. Perhaps the algorithm also presents "random" YouTubers', too, but the vast majority of what I see is put out by the publishers I'm already following (or other very similar publishers in the same ecosystem).

I would suggest that TikTok's successor is Insta Reels. Reels are almost exclusively entertainment and because they tie into Instagram's broader user/connections network the UX is much better than TikTok. Nobody goes to Instagram to figure out how to replace their garbage disposal -- this is squarely YT domain. If YT Shorts can make inroads in the entertainment market [without feeling like a commercial break between pieces of actual content, which is the impression I have and the way I use it].

It's not as addictive. TikTok mastered the hyper-addictive algorithm.

IMHO good riddance. Anything bad for the mindless addictive chum industry is good for humanity. Now do Instagram, Facebook, Xhitter, etc.

> The UI is better than TikTok ever was

I cannot disagree more. I just scroll on tiktok and tiktok populates the scrolling with videos I want to see, and it takes about ten minutes to signal to tiktok what content you like and don't like. Youtube, meanwhile, is an exercise in a far too-busy UI with thumbnails and comments and text and buttons—it's inherently a desktop app shoved into a web browser. Nice if you want to search for a specific topic and watch a four-hour video on it, but terrible for entertainment or killing time.

The only use I have for youtube are in solving these two problems: 1) where can I find a music video and 2) how do I do x

...but the focus on the interface obscures why youtube shorts won't ever take off: youtube is extremely bad at pushing content I want to watch. I've heard this over and over and over again and I know it's true for me, too.

Let's see if the ActivityPub Loops in time (made by the creator of Pixelfed): https://loops.video/

If I'm not mistaken the 'killer feature' of Tiktok is not the player, but the editor (Capcut?)

No 2x speed playback doesn't help

> I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor

It might be eventually.

(GenZ) People are migrating to RedNote now to lift a middle finger. It's more of a meme.

Shorts is absolute trash. It does not have critical mass and will repeat the same videos to you over and over.

EDIT: I want to overemphasize just how bad it is. It feels like a project someone whipped up in coding bootcamp over a week. It feels like it has zero ability to pick the next video correctly and it genuinely repeats videos between sessions.

Because Youtube shorts is awful, at least me, as a user.

Most of the content there, it's, well, "shorts", cuts from full videos of podcasts, etc. It lacks real users. It's basically the current youtube creators doing content for Youtube Shorts.

Let alone how the algo it's worse, and you can't download videos :)

I think in part because of YouTube demonization, which is how TikTok could poach the creators in the first place.

I suspect if they're mirroring content to YouTube, it's more to try to attract audience to TikTok than monetize through YouTube.

Sometimes I visit forums where people share video snippets, I've never seen sexy stuff snagged from Shorts, but a lot from TikTok.

I think both Alphabet and Meta suck at seductive material.

Because for 5-20 dollars you can drive hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people to your video, product, meme, whatever... Youtube, not so much.

Part of it is intentional spite from the users switching; a big part of the push for banning TikTok was based on the fact that it's based on China, so purposely seeking out a Chinese alternative is making a statement. Whether or not you think the ban is justified, I think it's hard not to see the obvious inconsistency in banning only a single app on those grounds that this migration points out.

I've never personally used TikTok, so it's possible my perception is flawed, but to me it almost seems like a dare to the government to prove how serious their rationale is. If the government truly thinks that having data collected by Chinese apps is so dangerous, are they willing to flat out ban _all_ Chinese apps? If so, is that more extreme step still something the courts consider constitutional? If not, was TikTok just a convenient political target rather than something actually dangerous?

I loathe YouTube Shorts entirely.

TikTok has a great e-commerce integration, no one else is offering this at the moment.

the community on TikTok is friendlier and more uplifting compared to YouTube shorts

both shorts and reels give me so much more brain dead content than tiktok and it’s really hard to get out of that rut

Shorts is almost there. IMHO all it needed to do was be a separate app and not try to get you to sign up for YouTube Premium every 2 seconds.

Reels needs to be more disconnected from Facebook for it do anything similar.

Why do you say the Shorts UI is better? It seems exactly the same to me.

"Hey Homie, it's Tony,"

I've never been so interested in advertisements for commercial equipment before that guy.

Rest of World had an informative article about Xiaohongshu few months ago, it seems indeed to be a combination of Instagram and Tripadvisor. Chinese people that are able to travel are using it to find the "authentic" places.

https://restofworld.org/2024/xiaohongshu-southeast-asia-tour...

> cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy)

What does this mean?

Additionally, what's worse is, I've seen posts of people unable to get out of the algorithm bubble on TikTok no matter how many videos they dislike. I think some people even try blocking the accounts. It's the weirdest algorithm. I assume it works for MOST users (when its not a "MEME" Bubble, its likely content you actually like), but if you shove someone into a niche meme bubble, it can get weird.

The "it's" to which that sentence is referring is the previously mentioned "xiaohongshu, or "little red book"".

I don't think rebellion has anything to do with why kids use Tiktok. Nor do I think the US has any interest in forcing kids to use social media...

Hilarious categorizing TikTok as non-mainstream. I get what you mean, but the most popular thing is pretty much mainstream by default

parents aren't on Discord

> It is amusing

Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a bunch of their citizens...

It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing their citizens for a while by now.

At some point, something breaks and you get either an autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already there but this is really still not clear.

> It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information

my guess is that nigh 100% of tiktok users think the app is getting banned because the government is some combination of capricious, bought, and incompetent. their stated reasons for banning it barely register.

No, the law doesn't give a users threshold: it names ByteDance and TikTok specifically, and provides a mechanism for the President to add new companies controlled by a "foreign adversary country" to the list. So anything at all by ByteDance is banned, but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.

https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7521/BILLS-118hr7521rfs...

The backdoor named "backdoor", the l33t h4ck3rs strike again.

Running strings for “backdoor” isn’t quite top-notch technical analysis.

Quite plausible. To what extent can a backdoor escape Android/iOS sandboxing?

Yes, they're shoved in user's faces and cannot get rid of them, disable them, etc.

Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord, quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the new US government.

> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)

Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.

Sources:

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...

https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule should at least be something like “Europe is welcome to blast propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast propaganda at their teenagers.”

>Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?

Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I mean, Fox News practically already is.

i absolutely reject this great firewall style of thinking. I’m an American, an adult, and I can read and watch whatever I want.

But is there actually any evidence that the US's foreign adversaries can more effectively deliver propaganda on Tiktok compared to other platforms?

I understand the concern over foreign propaganda, but this feels like it's not going to remotely impact the ability for foreign governments to deliver propaganda to Americans. It's perfectly possible to deliver propaganda on US-based social networks.

The best outcome of this is just that Americans find the other social networks so boring that they spend less time on social networks altogether, thus reducing their propaganda intake (at least, from social networks).

Literally same arguments used by Iran.

It’s fascinating honestly. Soon we’re going to have “we need government to be able to DPI and block propaganda!”

> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.

I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?

The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.

The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.

So many people keep missing this. It's not about data harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the population and controlling that narrative. Of course any social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same rules.

> propaganda

It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.

Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.

Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?

Meanwhile the rest of the modern world is not banning apps because of propaganda. China and USA is.

I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to democracies, not strengths.

Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The world is increasingly becoming not friendly.

Elon Musk seemed to leverage Twitter to try to manipulate the US election along with a myriad of other underhanded actions.

Should Twitter be banned as a propaganda / risk to US democracy?

> Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?

They don't have to, Fox News does it for free /zing. But for real I wouldn't see a problem with it. Less now that the world is more globalized than ever, I can get news from every corner of the globe both from our allies and enemies.

Could they be subtly pushing a narrative of communism or something, sure but this kind of "news is biased towards its owners" is beyond commonplace at this point. Jon Stewart just did a whole bit about why he couldn't criticize Apple or China.

"FJB" and "MAGA" are within the bounds of allowed political discourse and were encouraged.

"Throw the bums out" without any additional coherent political project is precisely what the elites allow and what allows them to maintain power.

Or, maybe, those things they don't see as a problem.

These shifty foreigners, however... Xenophobia isn't just some old timey things we use to do

Facebook is extremely censored re: the genocide in Gaza

TikTok is not

This claim is incompatible with the reality that the U.S. runs an enormous bilateral trade deficit with China.

well china does it too with google,fb etc back then, and other nation do it too

albeit not outright banned it all together but sometimes they prefer homegrown company/technology

Mercantalism begets Mercantalism. If their mercantalist policies become successfull then unfortunately we'll need to also assume similar policies to protect ourselves, aka Beggar Thy Neighbour, and everyone loses in an arms race of tariffs and subsidies.

That's exactly why free trade proponets oppose those policies, but the CCP didn't want to reform so we'll go the opposite way.

It's important to say that the US had TikTok with Vine, but is so corrupt that it let Facebook buy it to shut it down.

I cannot argue on the TikTok as strongly but I can see strong arguments on why Huawei and DJI are national security risks. Some of this is more educated guesses so not defensible with numbers. We know most major companies in the Chinese market have extremely close ties to the CCP. No doubt historically the US has gotten companies to put in backdoors or other mechanisms but I believe the CCP takes it to a next level. We know for a fact that the CCP and chinese entities play extremely hardball when it comes to corporate espionage. Some of the stories we have seen almost read like a spy novel. Certainly Huawei and DJI make some incredible products but when you have drones being used to survey the electric grid or other major pieces of infrastructure, I do believe it warrants major concern for national security.

I think you are proposing a much more extreme conspiracy compared to the easier explanation, China is a fairly crafty bad actor in a lot of cases. 99% of the imported products from China are not getting blocked, just the ones that have very significant national security risks.

Huawei has been caught stealing more than enough trade secrets to justify a ban. I'd be happy if they banned a lot more Chinese firms for that, or just in response to China's own bans. But TikTok seems to be uniquely about censorship.

Yup. China has been kicking Silicon Valley's butt for some time now, and I don't see any signs of that changing any time soon.

This drives the point home:

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38242135-ai-superpowers

> the concern isn't just data collection but manipulation of the american public (psyops).

I don't buy it. If that were actually the concern, we would be talking about banning Facebook and X for manipulating Americans to vote against their own interests and hand over more power & money to the platforms' owners. Facebook has done way, way, way, way more harm to America and Americans than Tiktok ever did. The Tiktok ban is an illegitimate handout to America's oligarchs to protect them from having to compete. It's nothing to do with protecting Americans from manipulation.

The video and audio data that users publicly post?

Absolutely

Funny you mention Raw Capitalism:

It shows a point I like to bring up often that Capitalism and The Free Market are directly opposed. What capital (a fancy word for shareholders) want is an infinite money machine and that is easiest with a monopoly. Hence, banning a competitor that's doing too well in the free market.

To the other part, I consider your 3 and my 2 the same, the US doesn't want us getting Chinese info and has their own perfered sources instead.

> to have the rising generation's worldview shaped by raw capitalism

.. by the guy sitting next to the President? It's not yet clear what this "DOGE" thing that Musk has been given by Trump actually is, but it sounds like part of the government to me and has "government" in the name?

To be clear, it's not just that China won't let Western websites operate uncensored as businesses within China targeting the Chinese market.

It's also that people within China can't access the foreign websites and apps (without using a VPN), because China's Internet firewall blocks that access! That's what makes it an incontrovertible ban!

Even if a company has no interest in operating as a business within China in the first place, China may still block the websites and apps. That's a ban no matter how you slice it.

China doesn't allow uncensored Chinese social media to operate in China either, so it doesn't really make much sense to say that they should have to allow uncensored American social media in order for Chinese social media companies to operate in the US.

That would be like saying that an Israeli publisher should not be allowed to publish in the US because US publishers cannot publish holocaust denial books in Israel. Or saying that a UAE restaurant should not be allowed to operate in the US because the UAE doesn't Wendy's there to serve the Baconator.

The sensible rule is that X should allow companies from Y to operate in X subject to the same rules that domestic X companies must follow if Y allows X companies to operate in Y if they follow the same rules as domestic Y companies.

This is like saying, "well sure they invaded us with their military, but we don't want to be like them, so let's not take any military action in response."

Fundamentally, aggressive action as a response is not equivalent to being the initiator of aggression. Hence: turnabout is fair play. If someone punches you economically, it's entirely fair and reasonable to punch them back. It does not make you "just like them" to defend yourself.

> What about the people who want TT?

Well, unlike Chinese nationals, Americans live in a democracy, so they could write to representatives or vote.

But realistically, few care enough for this to sway who they're voting for.

> You can not hold them hostage to Chinese people not having TT or other apps.

You actually can! As long as one nation is being shitty on trade and that starts a trade war, yeah that will hurt some regular people, but the alternative would be to become a total doormat and just let other countries get away with doing whatever they want.

Well I did say "popular".

The problem is that it's the government who decides who the enemies are when silencing "the words of enemies"

> hostile government

I don't recall us being at war or anything with China. For example, most of our crap is made there and shipped here with barely a look. If China were truly hostile and combative like everyone claims, they could literally import bombs and spies via those means.

Is this just the Red Scare 2.0? I've had way more issue with American oligarchs and politicians fucking over America's values and our way of life than China in the past few years/decades, that is for sure.

> There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality; Netflix is just easier

I'm slightly annoyed how this comment completely ignores the moral and ethical reasons someone might want to avoid making an illegal copy of something while denying it's creators any compensation. I need more coffee.

Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on google (you have to use yandex for that).

I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.

Convenience wins every time. Digital photos are lower quality but easy. MP3 is worse than CD quality but easy. Etc.

Exactly. There was a blog post a couple years ago called “The Tyranny of the marginal user” that states this principle succinctly. If it’s anymore effort than a thumb swipe, you’re losing users in a hurry.

This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?

In any case, yeah, I'm not sure that "the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade" knows what a web browser is. I've observed some user behavior among family members that indicates a pretty bizarre mental model of how the Internet, web, and mobile applications work.

If the holding power of TikTok is strong enough (which it just might be) then you might actually see teens start to switch to Android.

I got popcorn ready to see how the masses of iOS users will react to the TikTok ban

“We” do not want surveillance propaganda targeted towards children. The US government does not want Chinese surveillance propaganda targeted toward children. They’re perfectly happy when it’s done on US soil under US jurisdiction.

If we don't want this then we simply won't make an account on those platforms...

YOU want this ban and you don't like that OTHER PEOPLE like TikTok. Clearly you don't have a TikTok account and that's not enough. You want to make sure no one else is allowed to have a TikTok account either

Instead of spreading the message about possible harms you'd rather ban other people's abilities

For most of the world, your platforms are already foreign-owned.

You do realize that in vast majority of all countries, all major social media platforms are owned by foreign companies?

There seems to be a real risk of propaganda on Tiktok, but foreign ownership alone isn't a sound reason for a ban.

There are foreign-controlled TV networks in the US. Not over-the-air, but that's probably due to them being niche more than anything.

I watch like 25 hours of TikTok a week. I absolutely love it.

I certainly _do_not_ want this.

There's a Kremlin radio station in Missouri.

No one who actually uses it or understands it wants this. This is like vegans banning steak.

The users for sure don't want this. Among non-users, I'd say there's a sizable difference (let's say 50/50)...

Many things aren't that democratic when you look at it like that!

But this isn't about banning social media, it's about banning dissent.

Would you feel the same way if the US government banned all mainstream media organizations except the ones you ideologically oppose?

What criteria define social media that's ban-worthy for you? Does it require the combination of user-generated content and a personalized algorithmic feed which characterizes modern corporate social media, or do you extend it to a broader range of ways people can interact over the internet?

Where is that whataboutism coming from. What has the one to do with the other? Do you want a great Firewall for America? Is that what this is about?

Those in leadership being against a meaningful percentage (about 30%) of those under their care is common.

America has an Israel problem.

Some, sure, highly unlikely a majority does if you look at how many Americans use TikTok

Shockingly, given how often congress shirks its duty these days, they did write such a law:

https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr7520/BILLS-118hr7520eh....