[HN Gopher] The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet
___________________________________________________________________
The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 155 points
Date : 2023-03-28 06:32 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| lucasyvas wrote:
| TikTok is a proprietary piece of mental malware driven by a
| malicious state actor - it has nothing to do with the open
| Internet.
| toss1 wrote:
| The entire premise is backwards.
|
| TikTok (and other surveillance apps) are what is the betrayal of
| the open internet.
|
| Banning TikTok alone will not fix it.
|
| But, it is a good start. Banning everything from China would be a
| better start, considering the insane asymmetry the CCP enforces
| on everything, and the degree to which they consistently and
| systematically lie, cheat, spy, and steal from their trading
| "partners" in order to gain military advantage (and no, don't
| start with the false equivalency about US companies' surveillance
| capitalism; although it is also evil, it isn't even close to
| proportional).
|
| Yes, we've got to fix all of the exploitative surveillance, but
| banning technology seeded by another nation-state actor like CCP
| because of it's both data harvesting and asymmetric warfare
| capabilities does not threaten the open internet.
|
| And certainly, since CCP has banned most US technology because
| they won't do their dirty work of surveilling and spreading
| disinformation in _their_ population, banning all CCP tech (which
| is all China tech) in response is a good step.
| imiric wrote:
| Exactly. Most people don't realize that this isn't about free
| speech and banning some harmless meme videos, but about
| information warfare and protecting American citizens from
| hostile aggression.
|
| In the age of social media, information has been weaponized to
| an alarming extent, with the power to influence masses, incite
| violence and topple governments. Those Russian troll farms and
| Chinese bots and CCP shills aren't just doing this for the
| lulz; they're paid agents working for a government who's found
| that the easiest and cheapest way to harm your enemy is via the
| same channels they've built and opened for everyone to use. The
| East and West have been at war for decades now, and these
| operations no longer require sophisticated IT knowledge and
| expensive hackers; they only need thousands of agents willing
| to spread disinformation and propaganda on the internet. This
| sows division and panic, which eventually causes societies to
| crumble from the inside out. There's no doubt in my mind that
| the mass hysteria we've seen in the past decade has been
| stirred in part by foreign agents.
|
| I encourage everyone to watch this interview of a former KGB
| agent[1]. He explains the power of psyops and information
| warfare. This was well known and in widespread use in the
| 1980s. Imagine how sophisticated these operations have become
| today with the internet.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ol0M6P9LLY
| lakomen wrote:
| I'll tell you something.
|
| I started using Tiktok about a month ago. I selected German,
| among other languages as languages I understand and my location
| shows I'm in Germany.
|
| At first I got the usual dumb videos, all the uninteresting fake
| crap. Then, about a week in, I was being flooded with AfD
| (Germany Nazi party) content. It just wouldn't stop. I blocked
| every single account, I created filters, nothing worked. I had to
| delete Tiktok and my account.
|
| I can absolutely understand why Tiktok is being banned and I
| support it. I'm usually pro free speech and I defend it. But this
| is pure brainwash and propaganda. Someone at Tiktok decided that
| I had to receive this kind of content, no matter what, because of
| my age and location and sex probably. They were pushing an
| agenda.
| tw1984 wrote:
| > Someone at Tiktok decided that I had to receive this kind of
| content, no matter what, because of my age and location and sex
| probably. They were pushing an agenda.
|
| love your conspiracy theory
| d_sem wrote:
| I think comedian and recent guest-host of The Daily Show, Al
| Franken summarized it best:
|
| "We don't need a Chinese company stealing our data and spying on
| us. That's a job for American companies. USA! USA! USA!"
|
| Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zps3gz0krC4
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I'm subscribing to TYT's view on this: they want to ban TikTok
| because it gets young people to vote. The CCP angle is just a
| good excuse.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQK1LAtRh7Y
|
| Republicans hate it because they lost both the president and the
| senate by thin margins due to, arguably, too many young people
| deciding to vote.
|
| You would think Democrats would welcome more young voters, but
| only a few do (AOC is one..), because they are corporate
| democrats and don't really want young people to vote in
| primaries.
|
| Mainstream media will be on board since they don't want another
| competitor.
| spamlettuce wrote:
| This is weak take
| colpabar wrote:
| I do not understand how anyone can listen to cenk uygur for
| more than 30 seconds and believe he is worth listening to. He
| sounds like an emotional teenager who just got into leftist
| politics and wants to stick it to his conservative parents.
|
| I do enjoy compilations of him freaking out though.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Who would you suggest as the voice of reason?
| colpabar wrote:
| No idea; I'm struggling with that question myself.
| _Definitely_ not cenk though.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| At least it's worth listening to a variety of points of
| view. Yes, Cenk is annoying, but there are not so many
| far-left news sources available in the US these days.
|
| Well, there is this chart:
|
| https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-
| chart/?utm_...
| Miner49er wrote:
| Isn't this backwards? AOC is against the TikTok ban and
| benefits the most from young people voting.
| rvz wrote:
| Firstly, the Verge is trash source, no better than the Daily Mail
| in their reporting alongside their affiliate marketing grifting
| with clickbait.
|
| Secondly, a better solution is a multi-billion dollar fine for
| TikTok's egregious invasion of privacy and the like, worse than
| the other tech companies and they also got massive fines.
|
| Either TikTok pays a multi-billion dollar in the US or they exit
| the US market. This is much better than a ban and a win-win-win
| for TikTok, US gov. / regulators and the users and the ball is in
| TikTok's court.
| fsdaklj32 wrote:
| The threat is the CCP using TikTok for algorithm-directed
| propaganda, extortion based on video history, and anything else
| you can imagine.
|
| A one-time fine doesn't fix that, and you can't get the
| oversight to make sure consumer data is protected because
| you're dealing with a state actor. But maybe you're thinking of
| some sort of recurring fine, like a "Sell Americans As A
| Service?" SAAAS? Innovations like that could help with the
| national deficit.
| rvz wrote:
| It can be recurring for repeat offences. Still spanning in
| the billions.
| Jochim wrote:
| > Secondly, a better solution is a multi-billion dollar fine
| for TikTok's egregious invasion of privacy and the like, worse
| than the other tech companies and they also got massive fines.
|
| Where is the evidence that TikTok has been much worse than
| their peers in this regard?
| rvz wrote:
| If you watched the congressional hearing, the evidence of
| this was already presented here [0] and here [1].
|
| [0] https://futurism.com/tiktok-spy-locations-specific-
| americans
|
| [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tikt
| ok-...
|
| Could not have been more clearer and is worse than the rest
| of the US social networks.
| insomagent wrote:
| The congressional hearing was hilarious. I thought the
| TikTok CEO did great, and the vast majority of questions
| Congress asked were pants-on-head ridiculous. They are so
| out of touch.
| Jochim wrote:
| To be honest it sounds like you've only read the titles of
| those articles.
|
| Your Futurism article directly contradicts the claim that
| any of this behaviour is unique to TikTok:
|
| > This isn't the first time that a major social platform
| has been caught spying on specific individuals. In the
| past, Facebook and Uber have both been in the hot seat for
| tracking the locations of journalists and political
| figures.
|
| The byline of your June 2022 Buzzfeed article implies that
| TikTok was already actively working to remove foreign
| access to the data:
|
| > an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off
| Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans'
| birthdays and phone numbers.
|
| This largely appears to have born out based on the PBS
| article regarding the recent congressional hearing[0]:
|
| > As of October (2022), all new U.S. user data was being
| stored inside the country. The company started deleting all
| historic U.S. user data from non-Oracle servers this month,
| in a process expected to be completed this year, Chew said.
|
| > access to U.S. data is managed by U.S. employees through
| a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which
| is run independently of ByteDance and monitored by outside
| observers.
|
| The hearing itself was mostly evidence of how unfit many of
| your elected officials are for office. From a previous
| comment of mine:
|
| > Buddy Carter confidently believes that TikTok is tracking
| it's users emotional response through pupil dilation but
| has no comprehension of why you'd need to identify
| someone's eyes to put a motion tracking filter over
| them[2]. According to Mr. Carter, TikTok isn't doing enough
| to protect younger users but thinks that asking a user
| their age and checking whether or not the users public
| videos align with the age they declared is "creepy".
|
| > Dan Crenshaw used his time to state that Chinese law
| requires it's citizens to co-operate with their national
| intelligence agencies. That might have been a good point if
| not for the fact that TikTok's CEO, the person Crenshaw was
| questioning, is not Chinese.
|
| > Richard Hudson proved himself unable of forming a
| coherent question as to whether TikTok attempts to access
| other devices on a WiFi network. Instead asking "So if I
| have a TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home
| WiFi network, does TikTok access that network?"
|
| [0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-
| tiktok-ceo-...
|
| [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/25/tech/tiktok-user-
| reaction...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZDpJHl6amo
| rvz wrote:
| So TikTok not only DID admit to have foreign access to US
| data, but also lied and denied previously about it then
| according to the leak in the Buzzfeed New article.
|
| This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a
| billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before,
| rather than trying to evade responsibility and join the
| likes of Facebook who did get fined for privacy
| violations, if they want to continue to operate in the
| US.
|
| If Facebook can't get away with the fines, neither should
| TikTok.
| Jochim wrote:
| > So TikTok not only DID admit to have foreign access to
| US data, but also lied and denied previously about it
| then according to the leak in the Buzzfeed New article.
|
| They never claimed their own employees didn't have access
| to the data. They claimed that access to the data was
| controlled and it was stored in data centres not subject
| to China's jurisdiction[0]:
|
| > First, let's talk about data privacy and security. We
| store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with
| backup redundancy in Singapore. Our data centers are
| located entirely outside of China, and none of our data
| is subject to Chinese law. Further, we have a dedicated
| technical team focused on adhering to robust
| cybersecurity policies, and data privacy and security
| practices.
|
| Furthermore, the Buzzfeed article acknowledges that the
| "foreign access" was typically in the service of
| restricting that access:
|
| > In the recordings, the vast majority of situations
| where China-based staff accessed US user data were in
| service of Project Texas's aim to halt this data access.
|
| The actions of TikTok don't appear to be that of a bad
| faith actor. They responded to concerns about data
| privacy by moving customer data from their own data
| centres to those of an American cloud provider and have
| shown that they're working to restrict access to that
| data further.
|
| > This only proves that TikTok should deservedly get a
| billion dollar fine from the regulators as I said before,
| rather than trying to evade responsibility and join the
| likes of Facebook who did get fined for privacy
| violations, if they want to continue to operate in the
| US.
|
| What regulation did TikTok break?
|
| > If Facebook can't get away with the fines, neither
| should TikTok.
|
| Facebook wasn't fined for allowing internal employees in
| other countries access to internal data. They were fined
| for spunking that data all over anyone that winked at
| them. In the absence of a data breach, I'm not aware of
| which US law TikTok would have been breaking by allowing
| specific employees access to internal data.
|
| [0] https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/statement-on-
| tiktoks-conte...
| cosmin800 wrote:
| and theverge is serving the CCP
| jtode wrote:
| Nothing corporate and capitalist like TT has a whit to do with
| the open internet. Siddown.
| lazyeye wrote:
| All the people here desperately trying to find some argument in
| favor of an absurdly one-sided relationship in China's favour.
|
| Silicon Valley truly is the enemy.
| Miner49er wrote:
| What? The people here defending TikTok (myself included) are
| probably more likely to not be fans of Silicon Valley. Why
| wouldn't Silicon Valley support the ban? It gives them back
| their monopoly over Americans' data.
| lazyeye wrote:
| I think they feel more threatened by any kind of regulation,
| regardless of the target.
| laughingman2 wrote:
| Can't unseen the amount of double negatives in this article.
| cudgy wrote:
| Don't never doubt the lack of not valuing the confusion to the
| never not reading person.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| What is your sentence trying to convey?
| aaroninsf wrote:
| The titular claim is not the problem.
|
| The problem is that an open internet is incompatible with [the
| politics of] the world we live in.
|
| In that world, state and other actors seek to use contemporary
| surveillance data to drive sentiment and behavior in targeted
| populations. To put it directly, we (the US) are engaged in
| memetic warfare both internally and externally.
|
| Tik Tok is correctly being singled out as a singularly powerful
| platform for surveillance of and control of Americans by a state
| rival.
|
| Should we come to war (e.g. over Taiwan) hot or cold, it's not
| viable to have a Tik Tok and its well-publicized ability to
| determine what goes viral, in the hands of the foe.
|
| This is at heart a conflict between aspirational principles which
| are incompatible with the reality of human nature and the tools
| we have built as force multipliers.
|
| This is unfortunate.
|
| Much is.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| I think TikTok is a CCP attack
|
| I don't think banning it is the answer
|
| On reading this article I wonder how much Xi paid to get these
| talking points shilled
| tempodox wrote:
| I don't think it's a betrayal of the open internet to be non-open
| to mass-murdering despots.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Shall we ban every single company that has owns a voting-sized
| stock amount of Tencent, too?
|
| ( read the RESTRICT Act. That's my layperson read of what it
| says. I'm not a lawyer. )
| tempodox wrote:
| I have no sympathy for supporters of the Chinese surveillance
| and propaganda apparatus.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Some points to consider:
|
| 1. TikTok has a "heat" button. It can make anyone go viral. This
| is not uncommon to other platforms artificially boosting some
| content, but this is much more deliberate than the other methods.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tik...
|
| 2. Persuasion is two things: exposure and frequency. The native
| way that TikTok works allows for this to happen easily. Imagine a
| tool that is very good at this being controlled by a government
| that is hostile to most of the rest of the world.
|
| 3. The idea of the open internet was based on actors working in
| good faith. The CCP does not do this (the Great Firewall of
| China).
|
| 4. Bytedance (TikTok's parent company, and directly controlled by
| the CCP) has donated substantial amounts of money to various US-
| based political caucuses.
| FredPret wrote:
| The CCP control of TikTok is a betrayal of the open internet
| ekianjo wrote:
| Funny, the Verge did not complain as much when Parler was taken
| down in concert in the matter of 2 days. So much for defending
| the "open internet".
| titaniumtown wrote:
| Parler was taken down because the companies that hosted their
| services no longer wished to because of the content on the
| platform. This is complete incomparable with a piece of
| legislation.
| gopiandcode wrote:
| To be fair, the distinction here is about actions by a
| government, versus actions by private entities. Opposition to
| the government banning a website does not necessarily mean that
| you would oppose private companies refusing to provide service
| to a bad actor.
| prohobo wrote:
| At the behest of the government, no doubt. The Twitter Files
| show that the real situation is a lot more messy.
|
| Large internet "infrastructure" businesses are in partnership
| with government officials, so I have no reason to believe
| that the Parler takedown was anything but political
| censorship. Maybe not technically, but definitely in spirit
| and effect - and after all, that's all that really matters.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The internet is largely made up of private companies. If
| Comcast decides to not route traffic to you there is nothing
| you can do. Private companies are the ones who decide if the
| internet is open or closed. The government can influence
| these companies behaviour, but companies technically can do
| what they want.
| vetinari wrote:
| When I was growing up behind the Iron Curtain, we had a
| joke: in communism, the companies are owned by the
| government. In capitalism, it is the other way around.
|
| On this topic, the point is, that something is banned by
| someone with the appropriate means. It doesn't really
| matter whether it is government or private enterprise,
| because they meet in the backroom and coordinate their
| steps anyway. In the end, it doesn't matter who's
| initiative it was, who did the execution, but the purpose
| and result itself.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| The distinction Verge used was that of "friend" and "enemy"
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Follow the money.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Banning TikTok won't fix anything unless you also ban Facebook,
| Instagram, etc.
|
| If you make the underlying data collection practices illegal,
| then TikTok will stop being a problem.
| Eumenes wrote:
| The open internet died a long time ago
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The people at Verge should interview of the victims of the
| dangerous TikTok challenges such as the ones that have killed
| people or left them disabled for life.
|
| They should also should condemn the controversial content such as
| questionable dance videos from underage teenagers.
|
| And how depressed teenagers are as a result of using TikTok and
| Instagram.
|
| Or how the entire thing is run by the CCP.
|
| But of course they don't care about any of that. Even during a
| time where CCP is invading US airspace.
| glonq wrote:
| I had presumed that the tiktok ban was simply "we only want
| companies that are domestic or from allied countries to monitor
| and manipulate US citizens"
|
| ...which kind of makes sense given how easy it is for a social
| media platform to deliberately influence peoples' thoughts and
| feelings.
| uc_banana wrote:
| It turns out, the "open internet" is, in general, a terrible
| idea.
|
| Edit: I'm serious. From a national and personal security
| perspective, as unpalatable as it is, China has the right idea -
| what sane country allows any stranger from anywhere in the world
| detailed access to any of their citizens' thoughts and decision
| making processes?
| the_third_wave wrote:
| I never saw publications like _The Verge_ proclaiming that e.g.
| the ban of _Parler_ was a betrayal of the _open internet_. Either
| the term _open internet_ is to be interpreted as _the internet
| which reflects my ideology_ or (to paraphrase a term made popular
| in the early days of the public internet) _my way or no digital
| highway_ or there is just not enough money to be had from tiny
| players like the aforementioned _Parler_. No matter what it is it
| does not bode well for these TikTok-astroturfers.
|
| Checking Wikipedia's _Perennial Sources_ list [1] I notice that
| The Verge is listed as 'green' with a green checkmark, i.e.
| 'reliable': _There is broad consensus that The Verge is a
| reliable source for use in articles relating to technology,
| science, and automobiles._. Here _reliable_ probably serves the
| same function as _open_ in the title of this thread, i.e. _that
| which follows my ideology_.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| My personal approval of TikTok ban efforts is based on a more
| nuanced view: yes TikTok is not _currently_ nefarious, but in the
| event of conflict with China, it will almost certainly be an
| outlet of CCP propoganda beamed straight into the US, and that is
| exactly when banning it would be the most politically
| contentious. Better to ban it now and not when the CCP uses it to
| influence domestic politics, at which point the optics of banning
| TikTok will come with the optics of banning political speech.
| stametseater wrote:
| The betrayal occurred when American tech companies assisted the
| CCP in creating their national firewall, creating an imbalance in
| the information war which has yet to be redressed.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I own Meta stock, but that's not why I want the ban. I want the
| ban because they ban our anchor platforms. They do that not
| because of propaganda like everyone says. They do it for long
| term economic advantage. The more the world relies on Chinese
| infrastructure, the more they rule the world. The US wants to
| keep ruling the world. I'm on the side of the U.S. not because
| I'm patriotic so much as I live here, and I'm rational.
| mantas wrote:
| China is a betrayal to open internet. And West's BigTech
| oligopoly. TikTok ban would be a tiny fix for both. Maybe a good
| starting step...?
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The open internet is a mirage. There used to be barriers against
| distributing encryption, there's bans for copyright violations,
| there's blocks for adult imagery and revolutionary ('terrorist')
| speech.
|
| There is no such thing as a truly 'open' internet and the real
| internet is open enough that any constructed really open network
| will be overrun by content no one wants to host, like racist
| extremism and pedophilia.
| adventured wrote:
| The premise that the Internet is open or was ever open, is fairly
| absurd given the actual history in question. It started out
| nation state controlled (ie restricted), and the core difference
| between then and now is that those controls have become highly
| localized down to a given nation (and often entirely localized;
| versus the US previously having dominant control over much of the
| whole of the Internet).
|
| To argue it's a betrayal of the open Internet, is the same as
| pretending that somehow nations weren't going to apply their
| real-world laws, beliefs, economic or political restrictions on
| the Internet space just as they do in their physical space.
| Whether we're talking about moral/religious type matters, basic
| speech issues, human rights issues, commerce/trade, and so on.
|
| The Europeans often think the US is crazy for having something
| reasonably close to true free speech. There must be restrictions
| they'll proclaim. Britain has far tighter controls over offending
| public officials online for example. No open Internet for the
| Europeans? They'll universally disagree with the premise.
|
| To make that argument, you have to say that every single
| localized control over the Internet is a betrayal of the open
| Internet. And even if I agree that that is true, good luck,
| because it's going to get dramatically worse over the next decade
| (and all 50 US states are likely to get further into the
| regulation party).
|
| Morally the US should ban TikTok just on economic reasons alone,
| in response to China not allowing various foreign competing
| products into the country (in the social media category in this
| case). Not just ban it in the US, we should lobby for its
| economic wipeout across all spheres in which the US has economic
| influence. The US is in a severe confrontation with China
| (economically, politically, culturally, etc), and it's only in
| the 2nd or 3rd inning, there's no sense in pretending at this
| juncture. That confrontation ends, one way or another, in Taiwan.
| [deleted]
| blindriver wrote:
| Banning TikTok is a completely rational thing to do, given the
| control that the CCP has over the app. We can't poison our minds
| with letting China control the algorithm and affect hundreds of
| millions of Americans. We aren't talking about a company
| motivated by money, it's motivated by power and control. It is
| 100% a national security threat.
|
| We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram,
| Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security
| threat.
|
| And I personally love TikTok, I'm active on it for a couple of
| hours a day, but I know that it's a threat.
| adolph wrote:
| It sounds like you see banning TikTok as rational out of a
| sense of reciprocity with the application's country or origin.
| Is that the operating principle?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| A couple of hours a day is a lot of time on TikTok. What
| content have you seen that might be CCP controlled?
| kvn8888 wrote:
| OP is irrational here. You can find videos about 'Uyghur
| genocide' with that exact search term and countless of
| Tiananmen square videos.
|
| Memes about Tiananmen square were popular on that platform.
| As well as videos critical of the CCP.
|
| Anyone who claims otherwise clearly hasn't used Tiktok. And
| they'll shift goalposts to fit their narrative
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well yeah because this platform is focused on Western
| markets. TikTok is not available in China itself, there's a
| different version.
|
| There's no point in hiding these things from western users
| because we already know about them. If they will block them
| it will only attract more attention (aka Streisand effect)
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| That's only because they got called out on it.
| throwaway29812 wrote:
| > OP is irrational here. You can find videos about 'Uyghur
| genocide' with that exact search term and countless of
| Tiananmen square videos.
|
| Sure, but would you get delivered this content if you
| didn't search for it?
|
| Or if you are in a contested region?
| https://futurism.com/china-hong-kong-censoring-protests-
| tikt...
|
| Big difference.
| kvn8888 wrote:
| Yes. I've been delivered John Cena bing chilling memes
| with slightly racist undertones. I've seen memes about
| Tiananmen square. Winnie the pooh xi jinping memes.
|
| And we're talking about TikTok content in America, not in
| Hong Kong.
| graboidhunter wrote:
| I oppose banning TikTok. I oppose it even though I dislike the
| platform. I dislike its data collection. I dislike that the CCP
| likely can access the data. I dislike that it is a national
| security threat.
|
| I would accept limited bans within specific contexts (e.g.,
| people in sensitive positions with access to sensitive data).
|
| At the same time, I crave reform to our privacy laws. We, the
| people, need better protection against data collection and use
| by both private and public entities.
| s3p wrote:
| Banning TikTok is not the point. The point is about stopping
| the bill congress is creating to enforce the ban.
| nicbou wrote:
| From a European perspective, I don't see TikTok as any
| different from American platforms. America has been caught
| spying on other countries and interfering with democracies
| before.
| gspencley wrote:
| Then advocate for banning American social media companies in
| European countries. This type of "whataboutism" keeps coming
| up every time the news breaks about the USA banning or
| restricting Chinese tech companies. It misses the point.
|
| The point is that EVERY country needs to concern itself with
| its own national security, local laws and regulations. I wish
| that every country would embrace freedom, free trade and the
| open Internet and that we could all just get along ... but
| those are my personal value judgments being applied. In the
| current world of foreign relations, countries are going to
| act according to their own national interests, whatever those
| happen to be. Each will pretend that it is the one taking the
| "right" position, and each might behave hypocritically in the
| moment. The question of who is "right" and who is "wrong"
| will vary according to your own set of moral principals and
| beliefs.
| beebmam wrote:
| There is a big difference. American platforms are not state
| owned and controlled, they are independently owned and
| operated by private individuals.
|
| TikTok is state owned and state controlled. On top of that,
| the communist Chinese state has consistently threatened its
| neighbors with violent annexation. I think it's a dishonest
| argument to claim that independent American platforms and
| state-owned Chinese platforms are equivalent.
| treeman79 wrote:
| US tech companies are not owned by the government, but they
| are heavily in bed with government.
| beebmam wrote:
| When you say "they are heavily in bed with government",
| can you articulate what you mean?
|
| Are you saying that the US government can compel these
| companies to take certain actions in the same way that
| the Chinese government can? Like, as in, being able to
| force the company to give up all of its users' private
| details? Or being able to force the company to inject
| malware into their software?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >Are you saying that the US government can compel these
| companies to take certain actions in the same way that
| the Chinese government can? Like, as in, being able to
| force the company to give up all of its users' private
| details?
|
| There is reasonable evidence of this happening. For
| example: what happened with Qwest. The former CEO claims
| this was the primary reason for him being targeted. He
| was openly against the spying by the NSA before the
| charges were filed.
| https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/former-qwest-ceo-
| joe-na...
| kevviiinn wrote:
| The US government can definitely compel US tech companies
| to give out information on users, they do regularly.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| So do I (French). But I realize that we are not really
| powerful for a country like the US. Even as the EU.
|
| If the US withdrew from NATO we would be in theoretical
| trouble.
|
| If US would like to hurt us economically, our retaliation
| capacities are weak.
|
| All in all we unfortunately depend on the US and have to play
| along.
| abirch wrote:
| Completely fair. Why not ban both?
| adfm wrote:
| The Streisand effect?
|
| TikTok is sketchy AF, but you don't ban it. Just have your
| buddies at Raytheon or Teledyne snatch up the old Vine
| assets and get cheugy with it.
| livelielife wrote:
| counterpoint: why instead not ban anything?
|
| why ban at all?
|
| or did you mean why not ban TikTok AND america?? hmmm
| that's a more interesting proposition
| abirch wrote:
| Ban CCP spyware and US spyware. I'm not sure of a country
| I'd trust with my data, maybe a Swiss company.
| kvn8888 wrote:
| Ban this, ban that. Lets ban everything I don't like!
| Lets ban the Statue of David even...
|
| It's a slippery slope
| naikrovek wrote:
| > It's a slippery slope
|
| no it's not. there's no such thing as a slippery slope.
|
| ban TikTok. it is a threat.
| livelielife wrote:
| can I ban you? I feel threatened by your idiocy as
| exposed from your saying clearly false things like
| "there's no such thing as a slippery slope."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The proposed law doesn't ban TikTok, it creates an open-
| ended, mostly unchecked Presidential authority that is
| not at all restricted to TikTok.
|
| It's not a slippery slope, true, its already the bottom
| one worries about a slippery slope leading to.
| marvin wrote:
| The question you should ask, as a fellow European, is whether
| reducing influence from the US government, a stable but
| somewhat flawed democracy, is worth the price of losing
| access to US social media. Think in geopolitical terms, with
| all this entails of long-term divergence in cultural values,
| trade and other forms of economic compatibility.
|
| And whether this judgement is significantly different from
| whether reducing influence from the CCP, an obviously
| totalitarian government that does not balk at overtly
| undermining of democratic values within your own borders, is
| worth losing access to TikTok.
| rpgbr wrote:
| I'd very much appreciate a reduced US influence and social
| apps in my country.
| hyuuu wrote:
| imo, our data is getting harvested regardless, and if we
| were to have a say, I'd choose whichever country that does
| not have a tendency towards violence and let's be honest,
| between the options on the table, which one has a longer
| track record of waging wars? I don't want that country.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| Social media provides no value.
| luispauloml wrote:
| I am confused by your questions, honestly. Maybe my English
| skills are lacking, but could you clarify?
|
| Here:
|
| - Is it worth losing access to US social media to reduce
| the influence of the US government?
|
| - Is it worth losing access to TikTok to reduce the
| influence of the CCP?
|
| Are these the questions your are asking? I really want to
| understand your comment because I think the same as the
| parent commenter. And even though I don't understand what
| you're try saying, it seems like they are important
| questions I should ask myself.
| xii23 wrote:
| You don't even need to have an European perspective to
| realize this. Do you think Facebook, a private company, has
| any problem with selling (American) data to the CCCP?
| johnea wrote:
| Yea, we muricans need to focus on letting fox and myface poison
| our minds!
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
| bt4u wrote:
| [dead]
| ehhthing wrote:
| I'm sorry, but what? You haven't cited anything that shows
| China cares about using TikTok as a means of influencing
| foreign countries? You're just spouting rhetoric that is made
| to fearmonger.
|
| China bans western websites because they don't follow China's
| censorship requirements. Apple services exist in China, why
| isn't Apple a national security threat? They're the richest
| tech company on the planet, and based in the US.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Because Apple sucks up to China. And they're not a security
| threat to China because they're controlled by their
| shareholders, not the government. Shareholders who will not
| want to throw their entire investment into the toilet.
|
| Tim Cook just went all the way over there to kiss their feet:
| https://nypost.com/2023/03/27/tim-cook-touts-apples-
| symbioti...
|
| And he doesn't have a choice. Google took a stand and had to
| give up its position in the Chinese market. But Apple as a
| manufacturer will have to give up their entire business if
| they go against China.
| yadaeno wrote:
| China is preparing a military invasion of a US Ally (Taiwan)
| within the next 5 years. They absolutely care about
| influenceing the US public to oppose military support for
| Taiwan.
|
| I would go a step further and say that reclaiming Taiwan and
| triumphing over the US are among the top goals of the CCP.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| >They absolutely care about influenceing the US public to
| oppose military support for Taiwan.
|
| Soo... where is all this anti-Taiwan stuff on tiktok then?
| Because I've seen exactly 0.
| ecshafer wrote:
| So the big threat of China having control of Tik tok is
| that... the people of the us might not support going to war
| over Taiwan?
|
| That's a silly reason.
| kvn8888 wrote:
| What? China bans Facebook, Google, and Instagram because of
| censorship, not because they're "national security threats".
| And it will absolutely be motivated by money once Bytedance
| sells the platform.
|
| A Chinese company sold Grinder because of privacy concerns.
| Tiktok will either IPO or be sold off
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| [flagged]
| throwaway29812 wrote:
| Ignoring that nation states are have organized efforts to
| degrade other countries over time by these mediums doesn't
| make it any less true. It just means your head is in the
| sand.
| epups wrote:
| If I was American, I would be much less concerned with China
| having my data than my own government, who can act against me
| at will.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| IMO it's less about them taking your data, and more about
| what data they will selectively choose to show you.
| Faark wrote:
| Source? From my understanding, tiktok leaves the algorithm
| highly unconstrained in figuring out what the user wants,
| compared to its domestic counterpart. Yes, this alone might
| end up bad, but any restrictions would be exactly the
| political nightmare we complain about
| passion__desire wrote:
| You can be weaponized against your own interests through
| psychological manipulations. China may not have physical
| access to do harm to you but they do have digital access and
| that can do serious damage if you aren't careful.
| cjdoc29 wrote:
| On a personal level, yes, I'd be much less concerned with
| China having my data than my own government.
|
| On a national scale? Well, I certainly do not want an
| adversary with an interest in overtaking the U.S. have both
| data and means to manipulate the opinions of its citizens.
| epups wrote:
| I see, so America should block and filter content its
| government judges to be adversarial. Shall we call it the
| great freedom firewall?
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| Big difference between preventing information getting in
| vs getting out.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > with an interest in overtaking the U.S. have both data
| and means to manipulate the opinions of its citizens
|
| How is that any different from the US itself. People seem
| to have forgotten the WMD lie...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| One is my government, one is a hostile government. Why do
| you suggest they are the same? Why do you imply I approve
| of the US doing it too?
|
| Your argument leans on whataboutism.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > One is my government, one is a hostile government. Why
| do you suggest they are the same?
|
| Your government was the one kidnapping its own citizens
| through 'rendition flights' totally outside the legal
| apparatus and holding and torturing them whenever it
| wanted. It still does that.
|
| Your government has power over you. Not China. If you
| would be concerned about 'opinion manipulation', there is
| still the open issue of the Iraqi WMDs lie and the entire
| false reality created by that very government of yours
| and its private sector extensions. If you are not worried
| about that, you would have no grounds to be worried about
| 'hostile' governments.
|
| And what does 'hostile' even mean? You think that China
| or any other country cares about what you do as a
| singular American? And their hostility is toward you, the
| random American in god knows where in the US and not
| instead towards your government that is openly,
| explicitly, directly saying that it is targeting China in
| total violation of the international laws? Are you aware
| that any such threat or open admission of intent of
| economic or actual warfare from a country that can follow
| up those threats gives a legitimate casus belli against
| the targeted country and triggers the Article 51 of the
| UN convention?
|
| Its amazing how the Americans think that they have
| anything in common with their government and
| establishment and they literally claim shared interest...
|
| > whataboutism
|
| There is nothing wrong about 'whataboutism'. Those who
| make moral, legal, ethical accusations have to provide an
| objective framework for their accustion. You cant just
| smear others while your own side does even worse things
| than what you accuse others of. Without an objective
| framework, any kind of moral accusation becomes a mere
| smear.
|
| Chinese government does not have the power to abduct you
| without telling anyone, hold you in an undisclosed
| location for however long it wants without telling
| anyone. The US president does. No other president and
| government in the world has that kind of openly
| legislated power. Not even any secret service anywhere
| has been given that power. And yet you worry about 'other
| governments'.
|
| This behavior pattern seems more like projecting the
| troubles at home to abroad to avoid cognitive dissonance
| than any actual concern...
| infamouscow wrote:
| It seems that you may not be fully informed about the
| U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948,
| often referred to as the Smith-Mundt Act. This
| significant piece of legislation aimed to shield American
| citizens from being influenced by propaganda disseminated
| by organizations such as the CIA.
|
| In 2012, the act was updated to accommodate the
| prevalence of the Internet, and has led to an increase in
| the spread of government propaganda. Individuals who
| unwittingly perpetuate these false narratives may
| inadvertently be contributing to the deterioration of the
| Western world, all for the benefit of a select few who
| manipulate situations for their personal gain.
|
| It's essential to recognize that remaining ignorant on
| such matters is not acceptable. We must strive to educate
| ourselves and be critical of the information we consume.
| If this is your first exposure to the Smith-Mundt Act, it
| may be time to reflect on whether you have been misled in
| the past.
|
| Also, "whataboutism" only serves to stifle meaningful
| conversation and hinder our ability to understand
| different perspectives. To foster a healthy exchange of
| ideas, we must commit to evaluating arguments based on
| their merits, rather than resorting to discrediting
| tactics that have been employed by evil political parties
| you think you're against.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If you ever have conversation with people in meat space
| and wonder why they don't listen to your incredible
| wisdom, consider that sounding like a condescending,
| well, I can't say it on HN.
|
| Being condescending does not help you win arguments.
|
| After I got past your tone, I saw you completely ignored
| the part where I said my disapproval of Chinese spyware
| does not imply approval of American spyware.
|
| EDIT- Let the record show that infamouscow substantially
| edited their remarks above without noting it. The tone
| was indeed condescending and referred to me as a
| marionette.
| infamouscow wrote:
| I'm eager to exchange ideas, but it's important to engage
| with those who are genuinely interested in constructive
| dialogue and are open to considering different
| perspectives.
|
| If one chooses not to actively participate in the
| exchange of ideas, it may lead to a perception that the
| informed individuals are being condescending, when in
| reality they're sharing knowledge and perspectives.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You edited your original post to be more acceptable,
| didn't acknowledge it, then doubled down on implying I
| don't want to engage. Shame on you.
|
| I'm eager to exchange ideas, but it's important to engage
| with those who are genuinely interested in constructive
| dialogue and are open to considering different
| perspectives.
|
| I am willing and able to debate the nature of all
| governments and to acknowledge history. I don't enjoy
| sarcasm, snide remarks, and unacknowledged bad faith
| edits.
| infamouscow wrote:
| I apologize. I edited the previous messages to come
| across less snarky; that was not my intention and it's
| why I quickly deleted it. I genuinely value open dialogue
| and the exchange of ideas. However, I must point out the
| irony that while we both claim to be interested in
| constructive conversation, this discussion has yet to
| delve into the substantive aspects of the issue at hand:
|
| "One is my government, one is a hostile government."
|
| Instead, we find ourselves focusing on peripheral points
| and accusations.
|
| This situation brings to mind the tactics employed by the
| CIA to discredit truth tellers like journalists and
| academics. These tactics often involve diverting
| attention from the core issues, creating distractions,
| and undermining the credibility of the individuals
| presenting the facts. Engaging in this behavior we
| inadvertently contributes to a climate of misinformation
| and confusion, which hinders productive discourse and
| prevents us from reaching a deeper understanding of the
| issues at hand.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Or the COVID lies, but most aren't willing to admit they
| got fooled again like they did with WMDs.
| livelielife wrote:
| ah, but the data is digital, so both will have it.
|
| that way governments may act against you regardless of where
| you are, best abide by the law, citizen,
| JohnFen wrote:
| As an American, I'm less concerned with China having this
| data than I am with US corporations having this data. China
| has limited interest or means to harm me, personally. US
| corporations have plenty of interest and means.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Except that TikTok is _known_ to have used private
| information to go after people.
| JohnFen wrote:
| True. But TikTok is far from the only company known to do
| this, so it's not an argument for singling them out. It's
| a problem that needs to be resolved on an industry-wide
| basis.
| yadaeno wrote:
| > China has limited interest or means to harm me.
|
| Source? They are a totalitarian government that considers
| the US it's #1 enemy, and has its sights on a military
| invasion of a peaceful democratic nation and ally in a 2-5
| year horizon.
| taylodl wrote:
| Wrong. Taiwan is internationally recognized as being part
| of China. Heretofore the United States has had an
| official policy of 'strategic ambiguity' - play both
| sides. Pretend Taiwan is part of China when convenient
| and then pretend Taiwan is its own sovereign entity when
| convenient. You can thank Kissinger for that cowardly
| policy.
|
| Taiwan is not the Ukraine.
|
| For better or worse, I'll give Biden credit for picking a
| side, though I personally think he picked the wrong side.
|
| No. Let's call spades, spades. The Unite States is
| declaring war on China, not the other way around. Our
| policy with Taiwan is as stupid as if the EU recognized
| the Confederacy as not belonging to the United States.
|
| Once again the United States seeks war - and this coming
| from a U.S. Marine.
|
| Once again the United States will compromise its
| principles in its pursuit of war. Winston Churchill is
| credited with the quote, and I'm paraphrasing, "the
| United States can be relied upon to do the right thing,
| once it has exhausted all other possibilities."
|
| Here we go again, exhausting all those other
| possibilities.
| yadaeno wrote:
| Winston Churchill, the man that went to war to stop the
| invasion of peaceful democratic countries by the nazis.
| JohnFen wrote:
| They do indeed. But none of that means that they care
| even a little bit about me, personally. Why would they? I
| can neither help nor hinder their efforts.
|
| Understand what I'm saying here -- I'm specifically
| talking about whether I'd prefer to be spied on by China
| or by corporations. If that's my choice, I'd prefer to be
| spied on by China because they don't care much about me,
| individually.
|
| But really, I'd prefer not to be spied on at all -- and
| that's my underlying point. When it comes to issues like
| TikTok, I'm not saying TikTok isn't a problem. I'm saying
| that the problem TikTok presents is not unique to them.
| If we are to address the problems -- and I think we
| should -- we should address it across the board, not just
| with a single company.
| yadaeno wrote:
| The US does not live in an isloated vaccum where it's not
| affected by geopolitics. Your life will be impacted,
| _personally_ when China decides to invade Taiwan.
|
| I don't want to be spied on by either government, but
| this point you are trying to make that China has 0
| influence or means to impart change in American life is
| incorrect.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > this point you are trying to make that China has 0
| influence or means to impart change in American life is
| incorrect.
|
| That is most definitely _not_ the point I was trying to
| make.
|
| I'm talking about data collection, not propaganda.
| [deleted]
| tzs wrote:
| > We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans
| Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national
| security threat.
|
| China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can
| operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese
| internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship
| requirements and requirements to share data with the
| government.
|
| Most US internet companies aren't willing to meet those
| requirements, so don't operate there.
|
| If the US wants to ban TikTok it should do the same thing here:
| make privacy and transparency rules that all social media
| companies that want to operate in the US must follow.
| Calvin02 wrote:
| Great. Let's copy and paste China's rules on western social
| media apps and apply them to Chinese owned social media apps
| in the US.
|
| I wonder how many people in the US will use TikTok if the
| rules require government censorship and data sharing.
| anaganisk wrote:
| That's not what they meant and probably you know that, it's
| more like coming up with a standard set of rules that
| applies for all the apps and TikTok can either choose to
| obey them or exit the US market. Exactly like how American
| companies exited China. What the government perceives as a
| threat for apps from other nations must also apply to home
| grown apps. It's not like US based apps haven't been
| unethical, or didn't cause a crisis.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can
| operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese
| internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship
| requirements and requirements to share data with the
| government.
|
| Those rules, however, are official state secrets, and western
| companies who wish to operate in China must infer what they
| are themselves lest they get kicked out. China works on the
| standard that "there are rules that you must break, we won't
| tell you what they are, so be very very very careful." Not
| transparent at all (incidentally, China rejects rule of law
| as a western imperialist concept).
| kelipso wrote:
| This sounds like blatant nonsense. You got any source on
| this at all aside from your imagination?
| bradlys wrote:
| Transparency law is never going to happen because US
| companies don't want to follow such things.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| [dead]
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| Imagine the CCP following rules set by an adversary.
|
| US: Listen CCP, you can't use your tech companies to deploy a
| massive surveillance system on American soil as you do in
| China.
|
| CCP: OK!
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| There's also forced tech transfer
| thiagoharry wrote:
| Ah, the American freedom of thought... Communism not allowed.
| Any other political party or group is allowed, and could have a
| platform. There are a lot of foreign media allowed there.
| Internally even KKK is allowed. But who were really persecuted
| were groups like the Black Panthers, which until nowadays have
| members kept as political prisoners.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Ah, the American freedom of thought... Communism not
| allowed. Any other political party or group is allowed, and
| could have a platform.
|
| Not true. Communism is allowed:
|
| https://www.cpusa.org/
|
| It is just not very popular:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA#Best_resul.
| ..
| thiagoharry wrote:
| Sure, it is very easy and convenient to allow dissent only
| when it offers no risk. But if there were a chance for them
| to became popular, then FBI would restart the pogroms from
| McCarthyist era. There are still Black Panther members
| jailed and kept in solitary confinement because authorities
| are afraid that they could talk with other inmates and
| convince them of their ideology.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Madison Square Garden used to allow Nazi rallies. Now
| Reddit will have you fired if you make the OK sign because
| they're too embarrassed to admit they got trolled by 4chan
| and have no problem destroying the lives of innocents who
| don't keep up with the latest outrage culture headlines to
| understand what's suddenly unacceptable common behavior.
| throwaway29812 wrote:
| > Madison Square Garden used to allow Nazi rallies. Now
| Reddit will have you fired if you make the OK sign
|
| Progress?
| xster wrote:
| China didn't ban Instagram, Facebook, Google
| throwaway29812 wrote:
| Sorry?
| tstrimple wrote:
| China set conditions for those apps to operate within their
| nation. The companies which own the apps declined to jump
| through the hoops for the apps which aren't in available
| China. China didn't specifically ban any of these US apps.
| TikTok in China operates quite a bit differently than in
| the US because the US doesn't have laws protecting children
| from social media abuse the way China does.
| [deleted]
| babypuncher wrote:
| Instead of banning TikTok, why don't we ban the data collection
| policies that make it a threat?
|
| I don't really see a fair way to handle this that doesn't end
| up also banning Facebook, Instagram, etc. The problem is that
| these companies are collecting enough sensitive data to pose a
| huge security risk, but our politicians are acting like it's
| only a problem when someone else does it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Instead of banning TikTok, why don't we ban the data
| collection policies that make it a threat?
|
| So much this. Everyone's gotten focused on one particular
| company when this problem is _much_ more widespread than
| that.
| throwaway29812 wrote:
| What makes you think a country with a long history of theft
| and cheating agreements will do anything besides ignore any
| rules the west attempts to create?
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's missing the point. The point is that this is a
| problem with US (and other) companies just as much with
| Chinese ones. Any legislative solution should address the
| underlying issue and attempt to resolve the problem
| across the entire industry, not just with one single
| company.
|
| If a company (Chinese or otherwise) ignores the law, then
| it would be appropriate to sanction them.
| rhamzeh wrote:
| "a country with a long history of theft and cheating
| agreements will do anything besides ignore any rules the
| west attempts to create" - kinda ironic you mention this
| considering your description fits the US like a glove.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| With the argument, we (speaking as a european) should ban
| Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on.
|
| Is that really where you want to go.
| cardosof wrote:
| I'm against a TikTok ban and here's why: if user-level data
| collection and fingerprinting are wrong, ban that. If algorithms
| to show certain things for certain people are wrong, then ban
| that too. If a company being owned by a foreign entity who is a
| "frenemy" at the eyes of the military, then sure, ban it. If US
| social networks are banned in country X, then ban X's social
| networks in the US. Again, that's Ok. But those are rules made
| for any company in any place, not just TikTok. Just banning
| TikTok now seems more like making some convenient excuses for
| doing what some folks already wanted to do anyway as soon as
| TikTok started getting their cookies and slices of ad revenue and
| media relevancy.
| ChocoluvH wrote:
| There's no such thing as open internet
| fsflover wrote:
| Yes, there is: I2P.
| cabalamat wrote:
| There might have been 20 years ago, but in the meantime it's
| been killed by politicians and big corps.
| hef19898 wrote:
| It's been killed by big tech, for once traditional big corps
| are kind of innocent.
| mathverse wrote:
| I see no reason to give China access to Western markets if we
| cant do the same with our IT companies.
| esrh wrote:
| It's to be freer than china
| josephcsible wrote:
| America should unconditionally extend freedom to its own
| citizens, but not to agents of foreign governments that don't
| reciprocate in kind.
| albertopv wrote:
| "If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are
| intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant
| society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the
| tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them"
| mantas wrote:
| On top of that, maybe we shouldn't put tolerance itself as
| a goal? It's a tool. And a tool that can be greatly abused.
| But nowadays it seems to be a goal by itself. Which both
| opens up a lot of abuse and seems a wee meaningless as a
| goal by itself.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Why flag intolerance selectively?
| albertopv wrote:
| China is an existential threat for western block. She is
| buying almost all mines of raw materials needed for
| batteries and green economy, generally speaking, she's
| going to buy russian gas at great discount, she's
| undermining western established institutions. Maybe it's
| a good thing for the world to be more balanced towards a
| so big autocracy, it seems majority of people don't care
| about democracy. But I'm egoist, I live in the west and I
| care about the future of my country.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| What do you mean by existential threat? Walk me through
| the scenario that starts with the US not banning TikTok
| and ends with the non-existence of the US.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I've been hearing this for years, possibly decades. If
| China is such an existential threat, why didn't we (the
| wealthiest country in the world) buy up those mines
| ourselves?
|
| Why is TikTok of all things where we're making our stand?
| I don't buy it.
| shagie wrote:
| The US Government has very little interest in becoming
| the employer of mines overseas... and rightfully so. The
| accusations of colonialism when applied to the United
| States are quite appropriate.
|
| Having arbitrary companies buy the mines is something
| that they occasionally do - however, that comes with the
| risk of exposing themselves to the corruption and issues
| of the country where the mines are located. The FCPA
| https://www.trade.gov/us-foreign-corrupt-practices-act
| makes it difficult for companies that aren't going to use
| bribery to compete against other companies and countries
| where corruption isn't seen as an issue.
|
| These can make it rather difficult for the United States
| government or a company based in the United States to try
| to "buy up" the raw materials of other countries.
|
| TikTok, however, is a way for _one_ government that the
| US has a strained relationship with to potentially direct
| the public discourse in the US or use it to track /
| identify individuals. The spying that was mentioned is ht
| tps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-
| by...
|
| > TikTok has admitted that it used its own app to spy on
| reporters as part of an attempt to track down the
| journalists' sources, according to an internal email.
|
| > The data was accessed by employees of ByteDance,
| TikTok's Chinese parent company and was used to track the
| reporters' physical movements. The company's chief
| internal auditor Chris Lepitak, who led the team involved
| in the operation, has been fired, while his China-based
| manager Song Ye has resigned.
|
| > ...
|
| > ByteDance and TikTok had initially issued categorical
| denials of the allegations when they were first reported.
| The company claimed it "could not monitor US users in the
| way the article suggested", and added that TikTok had
| never been used to "target" any "members of the US
| government, activists, public figures or journalists".
| Those claims are now acknowledged to be false.
| lenkite wrote:
| "The US Government has very little interest in becoming
| the employer of mines overseas... "
|
| US does this for Oil rather. It isn't so sophisticated in
| mining. But it has occupied the Syrian oil fields and
| uses them to supply military bases.
|
| Crickets in the media - because it wouldn't look good.
| shagie wrote:
| (From 2021) https://www.polygraph.info/a/fact-check-
| syria-false-claim-th...
|
| > In 2020, a U.S. firm called Delta Crescent Energy LLC
| secured a deal with the Kurdish authorities under an
| authorization from the U.S. government. The firm's
| partners include former U.S. ambassador to Denmark James
| Cain, also a Republican campaign donor; James Reese, a
| former U.S. special forces officer; and an experience oil
| executive, John Dorrier Jr.
|
| > The Daily Beast reported that Delta was to earn $1 per
| barrel of oil exported from Syria, according to
| government filings. Dorrier, the firm's CEO, had worked
| with a U.K. oil company with offices in Syria. He told
| the Military Times that Delta "had some $2 billion in
| contracts to sell oil into the international market that
| will benefit American allies in northeast Syria that have
| helped in the fight against the Islamic State group."
|
| > The Assad foreign ministry called it all a U.S. plot to
| "steal Syria's crude oil." The ministry described the
| Kurdish forces as "terrorist militias," and predicted
| they would be defeated by the government.
|
| > Delta Crescent Energy was the only firm licensed by the
| U.S. government to work in Syria. The license was
| permitted despite U.S. Treasury sanctions aimed at
| punishing the Assad regime.
|
| > Things changed when the new Biden administration did
| not renew Delta's sanctions waiver this year.
|
| > In February, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that
| the 900 American troops then in Syria were there to
| resist IS and "are not authorized to provide assistance
| to any other private company, including its employees or
| agents, seeking to develop oil resources in Syria."
|
| ---
|
| Do you have any additional sources that support the US is
| using Syrian oil fields for supplying US Bases?
| lenkite wrote:
| You have to look at non MSM and non US media sources.
| What is declared "formally" by the US is not what goes on
| under the hood. US is generally famous for underhanded
| stuff like this in the middle-east.
|
| https://www.thecitizen.in/opinion/us-continues-to-occupy-
| syr...
|
| https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2023/03/05/2863033/us-
| con...
|
| https://thecradle.co/article-view/22945/us-resumes-theft-
| of-...
|
| Smuggling out and plundering valuable resources from a
| region that has undergone a disaster is what I call
| "evil" by any definition.
|
| Also, you may wish to find and talk to some savvy
| educated Syrians. They will laugh if you suggest the US
| is doing nothing of the sort. Of-course, usually, there
| will be no American citizen doing this - it will be all
| done by third parties. They made a mistake here by
| explicitly involving the US Army and thus this got
| extensively publicised (in the non Western media).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But it has occupied the Syrian oil fields
|
| As a consequence of the US war with the Islamic State
| across Iraq and Syria; IS had previously occupied Eastern
| Syria where the oil fields now controlled by the US are
| located.
|
| > Crickets in the media - because it wouldn't look good.
|
| Crickets in the news media largely because the news media
| covers news and static situations aren't news (same
| reason whey the occupation of Crimea got intense coverage
| for a short time in 2014 and then critics until 2022,
| which wasn't because Russian aggression and occupation
| looks bad for the US.)
|
| The news media covers _events_ related the US presence in
| Syria, but the ongoing fact just isn't news.
| lenkite wrote:
| "The news media covers events related the US presence in
| Syria, but the ongoing fact just isn't news."
|
| I hard disagree - smuggling out oil in multiple large
| convoys by the US military from a region just after a
| significant natural disaster is most _certainly_ news.
| But the US media will never cover something like this.
| mistermann wrote:
| "Saying something is true doesn't make it true, but if you
| say it enough times it can _literally_ make it seem true. "
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
|
| Tolerance is an important social/psychological phenomenon,
| but perception is even more important. Teaching people to
| think in memes is dangerous imho.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Combine this with "lies spread faster than truth," and
| you can see why advancements in communication technology
| proceed periods of social upheaval, at least until
| inoculating social technologies are developed to moderate
| the synergy of these two effects.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Combine this with "lies spread faster than truth,"....
|
| Even more complicated:
|
| - this applies to all piecs of information, including
| mainstream "truths" that are _not actually true_
|
| - there is an important distinction between lies,
| speaking untruthfully, speaking misinformatively, etc
|
| - most people are not just bad at epistemology (and
| related fields), _they think they are good_ (because it
| seems that way, and "seems true _equals true_ " in our
| culture) - epistemology is _highly_ counter-intuitive
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Yep, the critique of social facts on HN gas gotten me
| some of the most extreme responses. It's also frankly,
| delightful to frame personal opinion in the language of
| social fact and have folks wires get fried not knowing
| how to respond. Espistomology can have it's entertaining
| and playful side too. :)
| Miner49er wrote:
| Because American citizens (are supposed to) have rights that
| Chinese citizens don't. The first amendment covers access to
| information. Banning TikTok is a violation of all Americans'
| first amendment rights.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Banning TikTok even runs counter to the value we hear used to
| justify the first amendment: diversity of thought and
| discourse is inherently good; it allows people to decide for
| themselves using their faculties of rationality. We even have
| Benjamin Franklin and polemic if not mis-attributed Voltaire
| quotes[1] used to inspire a basis for free speech.
|
| Except for some reason, diversity of thought and free speech
| ideals aren't actually used to justify speech people disagree
| with, namely China's. This two-mouthed approach is noticed.
| It de-legitimizes the diversity of thought value.
|
| To anyone who has argued for free speech before but is silent
| now, your silence says more than your speech ever could.
|
| 1. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'm not sure what Ben Franklin quote you are referring to.
| While I'm sure he valued diversity of thought and
| discourse, I don't know of a clever phrase of his that gets
| often used.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| His security-liberty quote. It's easy to frame this as
| "trading the liberty of free speech and free association
| for the security of being free from Chinese propaganda,"
| and I agree that we should be discussing the validity of
| that framing as fervently as we possibly can because at
| the face of it, it appears to be exactly that. Every
| argument against that framing seems to be trying to carve
| out an exception for the purpose of security, often with
| extreme language of existential threat.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Come on.
|
| I agree that banning TikTok on the grounds of its algorithm
| being controlled by China is dubious. After all, it is
| content, it is information, and it is up to an open society
| to call out the fact that social media is trash, that
| Chinese social media is anti-American disinformation
| poison.
|
| However, it is reasonable to believe tiktok's
| recommendations are crafted to harm American intellect,
| prey on vanity to reward shallow behavior, and gather large
| scale behavioral and physical activity (site tracking,
| habits, physical location, items in homes, etc) for the
| purposes of the Chinese government. If it is recognized as
| a spy tool of a hostile government, why permit it?
| epups wrote:
| Would you say the same of Twitter, Facebook and
| Instagram, and defend the right of the rest if the world
| to ban them?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| As suspicious as the US federal government is, I don't
| think what those companies do is as tightly coupled with
| the government as TikTok and China.
|
| That said, I'm not sure I would lament a body blow to
| social media specifically.
|
| Let me put the questions to you directly:
|
| Do you think the Chinese government is generally hostile
| to the long term success of Western liberalism?
|
| Do you think the Chinese government has meaningful
| influence on the behavior of TikTok or its recommendation
| engine?
|
| Do you think TikTok data on its hundreds of millions of
| users is available for general analysis to the Chinese
| government?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Yes, yes, yes, but I will defend to the death for their
| right to say it! Free speech means accepting speech one
| doesn't want to hear, especially if it leads to outcomes
| one doesn't desire.
| epups wrote:
| >As suspicious as the US federal government is, I don't
| think what those companies do is as tightly coupled with
| the government as TikTok and China.
|
| They have backdoors to all major tech companies, they
| actively try to control discourse in social media and
| they just bailed out their tech sector. If that's not
| being tightly coupled, I don't know what is.
|
| >Do you think the Chinese government is generally hostile
| to the long term success of Western liberalism?
|
| No
|
| >Do you think the Chinese government has meaningful
| influence on the behavior of TikTok or its recommendation
| engine?
|
| Probably but no concrete evidence exists
|
| >Do you think TikTok data on its hundreds of millions of
| users is available for general analysis to the Chinese
| government?
|
| To the same extent our data is available to the US and
| its allies, yes. But China cannot do much with my data,
| my government can.
| [deleted]
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Oh no, a bunch of self-harm and cat videos don't get shoved
| in front of millions of teenagers. Some speech isn't worth
| protecting.
|
| Edit: if you're going to downvote, at least explain why in
| a reply. Thanks.
| epups wrote:
| Says who?
| [deleted]
| lazyeye wrote:
| This is a ridiculously naive take.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Banning the operation of a foreign-controlled corporation
| from a state that harshly restricts foreign economic
| activities in their borders is hardly a first amendment
| issue. It's not even close.
|
| [EDIT] Case law citations would be a lot more convincing than
| downvotes.
| Miner49er wrote:
| The first amendment issue is mentioned in the article. It
| cites a case for Trump's WeChat ban.
| roenxi wrote:
| I can think of one - banning superior foreign products and
| services mean that people have to use inferior local
| substitutes. Just because the CCP doesn't want Chinese people
| to use the best available products is no reason to deny them to
| Americans. Americans should have access to the best products
| that they can afford.
|
| This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should
| match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
|
| That being said, there is always an argument for banning
| foreign social media companies (really all media companies)
| from making commercial profits in other countries. The
| political and military risks are significant.
| r-w wrote:
| When the product is commercializing and manipulating its
| users, though, things aren't so clear. Is it a gift, or a
| Trojan horse? That's the open question here, regardless of
| Congress's demagogic motives.
| walkhour wrote:
| > banning superior foreign products and services mean that
| people have to use inferior local substitutes.
|
| TikTok is only superior in poisoning the minds of people
| using it here in US. That's why the Chinese version is
| different. I think zero is lost if people use the inferior
| local ones in this case.
|
| > This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should
| match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.
|
| Sure, the optimal solution for the prisoner's dilemma is that
| both cooperate. But once one doesn't cooperate, the optimal
| solution is not to cooperate. US looks like a dummy waving
| the flag of morality while China laughs in its face.
| hooverd wrote:
| Personally, I think TikTok is just responding to market
| forces in America. It's clearly delivering what people want
| in an app.
| t-writescode wrote:
| TikTok is superior in rapidly distributing relatively niche
| information to enormous quantities of interested parties.
|
| I believe the current recommended example is "Go look up
| France on TikTok vs look up France on Instagram"
|
| Addendum: TikTok is also superior at dynamically generating
| an advertisable collective that are specifically interested
| and desiring of the ads they're given. Five million small
| businesses found their place on TikTok entirely because
| they found their 2000-person size niche that would be
| interested in buying their product, and even encouraged
| them to buy it.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > poisoning the minds of people using it here in US
|
| in what way is tiktok poisoning the minds of people?
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| As an American, I don't feel any belonging to any collective
| that includes me when it says "we" and expresses itself this
| way
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That's fine but domestic businesses should be held to the same
| standard. China doesn't allow TikTok BS to be disseminated in
| their territory. The same reasoning should apply to FB and
| Twitter.
| [deleted]
| shenman wrote:
| Is that a red herring?
|
| The contention here is that one country does not allow the
| other to do business in their territory, yet complains when
| their product is threatened with a ban.
|
| The contention is _not_ that double standards are being
| applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.
| evandijk70 wrote:
| Censorship is bad. Two wrongs don't make a right. I don't
| see why banning Facebook in China makes banning TikTok in
| the US good. It's like saying:
|
| White people are discriminated against in China, so we
| should discriminate against Chinese people in the US.
| staticman2 wrote:
| I'm not sure if banning foreign businesses is
| "censorship".
|
| But if you insist on calling money "speech" and banning
| foreign businesses "censorship" then it turns out, under
| your very broad definitions, censorship is sometimes a
| very good thing!
|
| Your argument amounts to word games.
| himinlomax wrote:
| TikTok is not being banned because of what they say,
| they're being banned for what they are. Ergo it's not
| censorship.
|
| Same thing when RT was banned across Western Europe. It's
| not what they were saying that was banned, it's what they
| are: an arm of the Russian government. Russian shills are
| still free to peddle their propaganda.
| chinathrow wrote:
| What is China aiming for? Dumbing down hundreds of millions
| of westerners while their own population only sees "better"
| content?
| capableweb wrote:
| Exactly the same arguments against TikTok can be made for
| basically any social media, "dumbing down the population".
| Only difference is what country's laws the company is
| regulated under, which hardly makes one better than the
| other.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Revenge for the opium wars.
| Tade0 wrote:
| They're already having that:
|
| https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_D
| IR-...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I thought the opium wars were fought by the British after
| US independence
| mistermann wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but in this case the value TikTok
| provides for free speech outweighs China's unfair trade
| policies, _which have been this way for a couple decades_.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| People don't realise how ridiculously asymmetric the
| relationship between China and the _rest of the world_ is.
|
| Spin up a cloud VM in China now. Go do it. Try.
|
| I can, literally in minutes, go create a virtual machine
| hosting a web site in some random middle eastern country I
| probably _would not visit_ because they 're anti... everything.
| Anti-female, anti-christian, anti-gay, anti-freedom, anti
| everything I hold dear.
|
| But I can create a virtual machine there, right now, no
| problems.
|
| China? Hah... no.
|
| That would require paperwork, _in person_ , in chinese, paid
| for in renminbi, from a Chinese bank.
|
| I'd have to get a chinese id, and submit it to a _police
| station_ to get an authorisation number, which I would then
| have to display on every page of that web server.
|
| Chinese companies can spin up whatever they want in any country
| they please.
|
| Every other country has to sign up to Chinese censorship laws
| to publish _anything at all_ on that side of the Great
| Firewall.
| ehhthing wrote:
| Funnily enough, spinning a cloud VM is quite easy actually.
| You can do it in seconds on Alibaba Cloud. Getting port 80
| unblocked on the other hand...
|
| Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely
| asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't
| really just _create_ a single website that serves both
| western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is
| stopping them, doing this is just going give your western
| customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across
| the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable
| speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by
| Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America
| and complying with all local laws to do so.
|
| How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a
| Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one.
| You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but,
| again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was
| designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies
| don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason
| TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into
| the western market with millions of dollars with the
| acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical
| evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being
| successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some
| American competitor.
|
| Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to
| serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost
| certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP
| license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese
| audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for
| now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow
| Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you.
|
| Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot
| of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws
| are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese
| companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle
| foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution
| would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create
| federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has
| already done with the GDPR ...
| RobotToaster wrote:
| You can do all that easily in HKSAR, but you're mostly
| correct about the mainland. (technically you don't need a
| Chinese ID, just a permanent residence)
| drak0n1c wrote:
| When President Trump raised tariffs on China in 2017 -
| economic soundness aside - the media commentary initially
| lambasted it as unprovoked xenophobic aggression. But the
| outrage soon died down as people looked at the numbers and
| saw it was a mere reciprocal setting of our tax rate to match
| or reach a fraction of China's (and hopefully would enable
| future lowering negotiations). Now, in 2023, President Biden
| has maintained that course and the public has come around to
| more hawkish policy.
|
| Popper's Paradox on the geopolitical scale.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Pushing back on China, economically, has been broadly
| popular for a long damn time. It's just unpopular-among-
| actual-voters neoliberal trade policy, which has been the
| consensus policy of both major parties for decades, that's
| kept us from doing it--Trump, very notably, was the first
| major party Presidential candidate to run since probably
| some time in the '80s, on a platform with such a strong
| anti-neoliberal stance.
|
| The media were freaking out about the trade restriction on
| China, but my circle of D-voting friends and I (and I'm
| about as libby-lib as a lib can lib) who mostly hated Trump
| were like "fucking _good_ , more of this please".
|
| I think he mostly caught at least as much shit as he
| deserved over his shenanigans (far less, in some cases--my
| "oh no, this is gonna be _really_ bad for the health of our
| democracy " moment was when he made his "2nd amendment
| people" remark and suffered _no meaningful consequences_ ,
| back in the '16 campaign) but there were a handful of cases
| like that, where the negative media response was sharply at
| odds with our (as, again, solid D voters who AFAIK all
| voted against him twice) reactions to things he did.
| stanislavb wrote:
| This! Until China is fully open and non-totalitarian, they
| don't have any right to complain.
| twelve40 wrote:
| it is not about them, its about why should there be some
| entity out there that censors my information and decides
| what I'm allowed to see and what I'm not allowed to see?
| why does the government here feel like it must interfere
| with me, censor and babysit me?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| The proposed ban on TikTok _is not about you_. No one
| cares to babysit you. They want to punish china for the
| perceived injustice (and security risk).
|
| China has an asymmetric market, and it's bad for US
| businesses but good for Chinese businesses. The US wants
| to send a message to china that it can also punish
| businesses that it doesn't like.
| twelve40 wrote:
| yeah but it amounts to straight up censorship. Someone in
| the government decides what is safe for the citizens to
| see. How do you even ban it, does the US have mechanisms
| in place to enforce a government ban on a web site/app?
| petronio wrote:
| Apart from what vineyardmike mentioned, there's a few
| additional levers, like having the app removed from app
| stores. I don't know what the current state of their
| traffic and DNS filtering capabilities, but if they
| really wanted to go nuclear they have jurisdiction over
| the com TLD. Wouldn't be the first time they've seized a
| domain on "national security, etc." grounds.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| It's incidental censoring. The content can and will move
| elsewhere, so it's not preventing speech just limiting
| where it can go.
|
| Yes the US has a mechanism to ban _a company_ and that
| should apply to that company's app. It's just trade
| restrictions like with Huawei. Banning a _website_ will
| be harder, but by banning advertisers from paying for ads
| it'll destroy the profitability of serving American
| consumers.
| epups wrote:
| They don't want to babysit you - they just want to block
| stuff that you use because it's better for business!
| (they think)
| seydor wrote:
| In return for that china allowed the world to export its
| pollution and manufacturing . Those are trade-offs
| Gareth321 wrote:
| China benefits greatly from that arrangement too.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Exactly this. This is just a response to what China's already
| done with non-Chinese companies for decades.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Is forcing the sale a betrayal of the open internet?
|
| Do keep in mind that the US forced the sale of Grindr away from a
| holding company that had golden shares in an actively homophobic
| regime.
| [deleted]
| rglover wrote:
| It's been said elsewhere in here but I'm going to parrot because
| this caught me by surprise and this is on the level of importance
| of the SOPA [1] craziness back in 2012.
|
| The TikTok ban has very little do with TikTok. It's yet another
| Patriot Act (now, the Restrict Act [2]) style back door to slip
| in some seriously heinous legislation that could find you fined
| to the tune of millions, or worse, thrown in jail for 20 years.
|
| > A person who willfully commits, willfully attempts to commit,
| or willfully conspires to commit, or aids or abets in the
| commission of an unlawful act described in subsection (a) shall,
| upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a
| natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or
| both.
|
| I _do_ view TikTok as a covert military campaign (ideological
| subversion) and _do_ think it should be limited in the West,
| however, not via this bill.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg
|
| [2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-
| bill/686...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > I do view TikTok as a covert military campaign (ideological
| subversion) and do think it should be limited in the West,
| however, not via this bill.
|
| I'd like you to expand on the idea that is it is "a covert
| military campaign (ideological subversion)". It's common
| talking point, but I literally do not understand it. Sure there
| are some Chinese based creators that are spreading lies like
| how everything is super cool in Xinjiang with Uyghurs, but I
| can go on Twitter and find some American tankie saying that as
| well. The *VAST* majority of stuff on my FYP is cosplayers,
| dancing girls, dumb and intentionally awkward jokes, and
| skateboarders. Are Warhammer 40k and 3d printed Star Wars
| droids a CCP plot on par with the CIA and modern art[0][1]? To
| what end? To crash our economy by trying to get us to impress
| skateboarding leggy Chinese girls with the size of our 7-foot
| Imperator Titans[2]? Chinese girls that would no doubt a face
| swapped APT-2 officer, ala Azusagakuyuki[3][4]?
|
| I'm not trying to be dismissive, but it does seem far fetched.
| So what's the best argument?
|
| [0] https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463076
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VgjqNmKPEE
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/azusagakuyuki
|
| [4] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g88m/viral-japanese-
| biker-...
| rglover wrote:
| I'll get downvoted for it, but the lot of it is around gender
| ideology and feminism. It's also around the general
| infantilisation of younger populations in the West (i.e.,
| promotion of victimhood as a virtue).
|
| As for a why: look at the parallel of how the Chinese raise
| their youth, specifically in relation to combat and military
| service [1]. If your biggest adversary is the United
| States/its Western allies and you intend to perform a
| military strike down the road, it's in your best interest to
| weaken their fighting population physically and mentally to
| an extent where they're either non-existent or easily
| destroyed.
|
| That military strike could either be Taiwan, or, on the
| continental United States in conjunction with other BRICS
| countries (namely, Russia and now, Iran and Saudi Arabia).
|
| I get that the idea is unsavory and triggering (just me
| having to say that is evidence that the campaign was/is
| successful), but it's a reality that people need to be aware
| of in the West. Western hegemony is coming to an end and the
| geopolitical vultures are taking flight.
|
| [1] https://bitterwinter.org/compulsory-military-education-
| chine...
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| The fact is, the modern Western mind is built entirely with
| advertising, propaganda, and mass-media manipulation. I'm
| sure foreign adversaries are attempting to use these
| mechanisms to weaken us too, but even if they somehow
| weren't, domestic market forces are sufficient to turn our
| brains to mush.
|
| You think you're a rebellious independent-minded feminist
| sticking it to the patriarchy (or [insert identity here])?
| Yeah maybe, but you're also being tricked into spending
| money on stupid unhealthy shit by a real-life cartoon
| villain. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom
| rglover wrote:
| Correct.
| rglover wrote:
| For those interested, the important stuff can be found in the
| bill on these pages: 1, 10-22, 32, 36-46, 50-52.
| Terretta wrote:
| Unless you're making apps that run on one of the named
| platform types, you don't have to worry.
|
| No need to be interested unless you develop for:
|
| _... [critical infra] ..._
|
| _... [telecom / internet] ..._
|
| _... [services] ..._
|
| _... [IoT anyone uses] ..._
|
| _... [unmanned vehicles] ..._
|
| _... [apps] ..._
|
| _... [anything important] ..._
| unity1001 wrote:
| > The TikTok ban has very little do with TikTok. It's yet
| another Patriot Act (now, the Restrict Act [2]) style back door
| to slip in some seriously heinous legislation that could find
| you fined to the tune of millions, or worse, thrown in jail for
| 20 years.
|
| Yep. They couldnt put the backdoors through the 'we are
| fighting pedophilia' excuse. Now they are using Tiktok...
| Proven wrote:
| [dead]
| zactato wrote:
| What are all the teens/20 yos going to do when they wake up one
| morning and TikTok is turned off?
|
| I'm not saying that TikTok or other social media is great, but it
| would certainly be an interesting social experiment to suddenly
| force millions of kids to go cold Turkey on something that
| they're addicted to.
|
| Maybe they'll turn to other social media, maybe they'll start
| painting, maybe they'll burn down a city.
| exolymph wrote:
| If it goes through, they'll just use Instagram Stories and
| Reels instead. Possibly also Snapchat.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Something I find odd is the focus on "data security" in basically
| all media coverage and politician statements. Is that what's at
| issue, or is it the influence the CCP has over people through tik
| tok? Securing customer data isn't really what's at issue... It's
| the fact that the CCP have one algorithm for its own people that
| pushes and popularizes science, economics, and other good
| subjects but for other countries like the USA it's basically the
| polar opposite.
|
| Data security is a red herring. The true danger is that the CCP
| and business are one and the same, the CCP is in a Cold War with
| the USA, and the CCP will do whatever it can to gain any
| advantage it.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Something I find odd is the focus on "data security" in
| basically alal media coverage and politician statements. Is
| that what's at issue, or is it the influence the CCP has over
| people through tik tok?
|
| Notice, for the sake of high level rationalism, that this is a
| false dichotomy.
|
| CCP influence over TikTok is a subset of the bigger problems:
|
| - TikTok, or _the medium it operates on_ , is extremely
| persuasive, it's the most potent way to spread ideas from one
| mind to another (for example: the beliefs you hold about
| China's intents, _which you do not actually possess knowledge
| of_ ).
|
| - The US government does not have a means to exert control over
| it like the other social media giants.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
| andrekandre wrote:
| > it's the most potent way to spread ideas from one mind to
| another
|
| even more than facebook? any studies/links about that?
| mistermann wrote:
| > even more than facebook?
|
| Well, consider the capabilities of the two platforms, as
| well as the demographics of users, and so forth and so on.
|
| > any studies/links about that?
|
| Not that I know of, but I have a feeling these discussions
| have been held at very high levels of the government and
| various 3 letter agencies, resulting in the mass theatrical
| spectacle we saw in Congress the other day.....did you
| watch any of that? Is it not _blatantly obvious_ that in
| this case, "democracy" is an illusion?
| bostonsre wrote:
| Say the CCP invades Taiwan and the United States does not look
| too kindly on that and helps Taiwan. They could brick a large
| proportion of phones in the United Sates or maybe just monitor
| where US military service personnel are. e.g.:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/andro...
| dathinab wrote:
| There is a simple solution.
|
| _put up proper user protecting rules by law and enforce them
| fairly against any company_
|
| it's simple, fair, and would either ban TickTock due to non
| compliance or cripple it's ability to do whatever they are afraid
| of it doing
|
| the problem is the US Government isn't against the things
| TickTock is doing, it's only against them being done under
| Chinese control
| himinlomax wrote:
| > it's only against them being done under Chinese control
|
| And that's a perfectly fine reason.
|
| We do the same thing with Iran, Russia and others.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Iran, Russia and others.
|
| The proposed law specifies it's targeting China, Iran and
| Russia, as well as North Korea, Cuba and (the Moros regime
| of) Venezuela. It also has rules for adding or removing
| countries from that list going forward.
| Ekaros wrote:
| They actually want that data to exist and the USA companies to
| freely to give it to them when asked "nicely" without any
| warrant or oversight.
|
| They might fear that Tik-Tok might apply some oversight to this
| process...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > without any warrant or oversight
|
| How would that work? A warrant signed off by a judge is
| required to compel companies to comply with requests.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > A warrant signed off by a judge is required to compel
| companies to comply with requests.
|
| It's...not. Administrative subpoenas (some of which have
| their own unique names, like "National Security Letters")
| are a thing, and if legally valid compliance is mandatory.
| Sure, ultimately, if there is a disagreement about validity
| that can be taken to court, and a judge will be involved,
| but that's not the same thing as a warrant.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Interesting. It appears they can only request non-content
| information (metadata). You admit that there _is_
| oversight but you think it 's inadequate?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The federal government is the biggest spender on the
| planet. Sure, if they ask you for some data it wants and
| you refuse, they'll need to resort to legalistic methods of
| forcing you to get that data. Or they can dangle the
| prospect of their spending going elsewhere if you don't
| comply. Can you afford to turn down the largest economic
| entity on the planet?
| zerocrates wrote:
| The state of the law in the US is that information you
| share with a company no longer carries an expectation of
| privacy, so the government can get it without a warrant.
| This is called the "third-party doctrine."
|
| Any areas where higher scrutiny is required have been
| specifically added by statute.
|
| There's been some slight pushback recently against this
| state of affairs from the Supreme Court in the area of
| geolocation data, but the general rule still stands.
| stanislavb wrote:
| And you don't think that China can manipulate public opinion
| and decisions as a bad actor?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| They can, as can everyone else, just in different
| quantities. But you have a very low opinion of people who
| aren't you in assuming that everyone but you is going to be
| brainwashed if you can't decide what they are and are not
| allowed to be exposed to.
| falcolas wrote:
| No more or less than every other social network.
| dragontamer wrote:
| We aren't going to go to war vs the owners of Facebook
| any time soon. But maybe for the owners of TikTok.
|
| China's Navy is already more numerous than the USA's
| Navy, and they include advanced stealth destroyers and
| probably Hypersonic Missiles.
|
| I don't want to be a racist asshole like some others
| online. But there is a geopolitical reality coming
| towards us and we need to start preparing for it. Nothing
| against the Chinese people or their culture or whatever,
| but their leaders have some goals that conflict with the
| USAs goals, and it could turn hot over the next 10 years.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > it could turn hot over the next 10 years.
|
| It could, but it really looks to me like it's the US that
| is trying to make things turn hot, not China.
| dragontamer wrote:
| China has built hundreds of Naval ships and is beginning
| to overtly threaten Taiwan with flyovers.
|
| We all see where this is going. We know Xi wants Taiwan.
| Selling weapons to Taiwan so that they can better defend
| themselves is the moral thing to do.
|
| Its the same thing as how the Russians blame USA for
| "extending" the war in Ukraine. Erm, yeah. That's the
| point. When we see evil and decide to do something to
| stop it, it makes it harder for evildoers to do what they
| want to do. And I think its a good thing to make Taiwan
| harder to get taken over.
|
| -------
|
| All China has to do, to avoid the war... is to not start
| it. Its not like Taiwan is in any position to attack
| China right now or anytime in the foreseeable future.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| > ... we see evil and decide to do something to stop it
| ...
|
| Hilarious. Do you actually believe US foreign policy has
| anything to do with "good and evil," and if so, could you
| explain how this drove the decision to, oh I dunno, bomb
| Guatemala city? Or annex Hawaii? Or arm Saudi Arabia to
| the teeth? Or pick virtually any foreign intervention
| since WWII, really.
| JohnFen wrote:
| True, China's plans for Taiwan are hardly a secret. I was
| speaking about the larger situation, though, not just
| Taiwan.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Shooting down a spy balloon won't start a war. And
| similarly, sending a spy balloon over won't start a war
| either. Both sides (USA and China) are smarter than that.
|
| The only thing that really has a chance to start a war is
| this Taiwan situation. I don't see any room for diplomacy
| anymore.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I never mentioned balloons. In any case, all of this is
| far above my pay grade.
| jamesredd wrote:
| It's not the fault of China that America waged decades of
| war while its industrial base was decimated by the same
| people waging those wars.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'm talking about Taiwan. If China attacks Taiwan, it
| will be as obvious as Russia attacking Ukraine.
|
| And the USA should support Taiwan. Not only because we
| get AMD, Apple, NVidia, Qualcomm, automobile chips, and
| F35 RADAR chips from that island... But also because
| Taiwan is our ally from WW2 days and we have a long
| history of friendship with them.
|
| -------
|
| Let me be clear, once again. Taiwan manufactures Xilinx
| FPGAs that are in direct support to the F35 project.
|
| There is a geopolitical reality here that cannot be
| ignored.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| If only Intel hadn't spent the last 8 years buying and
| slowly starving the only Xilinx competitor that could
| have matched it for capability.
| asdfk-12 wrote:
| The United States recognizes the People's Republic of
| China as the sole legal government of China and
| acknowledges the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of
| China. This is known as the "One China policy".
|
| The United States needs China for industrial and consumer
| goods. Our economy is brittle and will quickly break
| without them. This is the logical result of US policy.
| China clamping down on Taiwan from the official US
| position is effectively China more tightly controlling
| thwir existing territory.
|
| Not even close to what happened in Russia vs. Ukraine
| situation.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| The US One China Policy does not at all say that Taiwan
| is part of the PRC, it rather states that both PRC and
| Taiwan view China as one.
| yannis wrote:
| > It also because Taiwan is our ally from WW2 days and we
| have a long history of friendship with them.
|
| Taiwan during World War II, was part of the Japanese
| Empire...
| dragontamer wrote:
| The Kuomintang were our allies in WW2, and were forced to
| retreat to Taiwan in 1949.
|
| When the famous WW2 Pilot Doolittle did his famous raid
| on Japan and crash-landed in China, it was the Kuomintang
| who saved those pilots and returned them safely to the
| USA, despite the Japanese atrocities that were occurring.
| (Well, Imperialist Japan did capture some of those
| pilots... but the Kuomintang did what they could)
|
| Communist China then took over most of China and forced
| Kuomintang to retreat to Taiwan by 1949. And we call
| those people "Taiwanese" today. Historically, they are
| the rightful owners of China, though they lost the civil
| war.
|
| Today, we're strategically ambiguous to try to not piss
| off China about our different viewpoints of history. But
| we're quickly coming to the point where ambiguity no
| longer helps. We're likely heading for war unfortunately.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > China's Navy is already more numerous than the USA's
| Navy
|
| By number of ships, most of which are close-to-shore
| patrol boats. By volume of ships, the US Navy is more
| than twice as large.
| dragontamer wrote:
| https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/RL33153.pdf
|
| The USA's count of China's ships ignores the 224 close-
| to-shore coast guard ships.
|
| China has 351 surface combat ships, against the USA's
| 294. Yes, our Navy is still superior by capabilities, but
| China continues to mass produce ships, including large
| cruisers and carriers. They are not a threat to take
| lightly anymore.
|
| If we include the 224 coast guard ships, then China's
| fleet is well over 575 ships as of 2022. I'm talking only
| of the 351 combat ships that would likely play a role in
| a hypothetical Taiwan confrontation.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I mean, the US has 243 coast guard ships, if you want to
| be pedantic (ignoring the 1400+ boats less than 65'
| long).
|
| But yes, China keeps producing ships. I have no idea what
| will happen in a Taiwan Straight conflict where we've
| escalated to open conventional war looks like. I imagine
| that the air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missiles
| will be the determining factor.
|
| But there's also a major difference. The US has a blue-
| water navy that can project power globally - enough power
| that it's an open question if the largest country in the
| world with the second-highest GDP can stand up to it in
| their back yard. There's no symmetric threat to the US
| where the Chinese Navy can get close enough to the West
| Coast have a similar threat.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Taiwan is not a symmetric threat situation.
|
| US Navy will have to expose itself to Chinese missiles
| and Chinese Air Force, and those small Missile Patrol
| Boats, to defend Taiwan.
|
| China isn't thinking about attacking Hawaii or the West
| Coast. What China is trying to do in the near term is
| complete its takeover of ... well... what it believes to
| be part of China.
|
| And because various F35 chips are made in Taiwan, its a
| threat we cannot afford to ignore. (Along with all of our
| video game consoles, GPUs, AI Tensor processors, and
| other strategic level computer systems)
|
| Yes, the US Navy is unrivaled. But in a local, regional
| conflict... especially supported by the largest Airforce
| in the world (China has a lot of airplanes), and some of
| the largest ground-based missile forces in the world
| (China also has a lot of advanced missiles), the US Navy
| very well could lose the fight to defend Taiwan.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the US Navy will park on the far side of
| Taiwan and attack stuff outside line of sight. Missiles
| and air force attacks I can see. Those Patrol boats will
| be barely different than land-based missile launch
| platforms.
|
| > supported by the largest Airforce in the world (China
| has a lot of airplanes)
|
| The US Navy has more aircraft than the Chinese Air Force
| does. The US Air Force has like 4 times as many, and can
| stage a good chunk of them over the Straight as well.
|
| South Korea and Japan combined have about as many planes
| as China, and I have no idea if they (or India) get
| involved.
|
| But yeah, I have no idea what happens if it stays
| conventional, and I have no idea how likely it is that it
| stays conventional (and obviously WMDs mean _no one_
| knows what happens). Given the number of fast options
| (e.g. missiles) to sink ships, I imagine we 'll know who
| will win the fight quickly, but it might take months to
| actually slog it out.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| They don't really need to park themselves between
| mainland and China, they already have enough forces
| amassed on the Ryukyus, they don't even need to bother
| using aircraft carriers.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _We aren 't going to go to war vs the owners of
| Facebook any time soon_
|
| Speak for yourself! From my perspective, entrenched
| business interests have very much been at war with the
| people of this country for a long time.
|
| A growing military competitor notwithstanding, the real
| issue we're facing here is that we've based our society
| around this fiction that wealth makes right - under an
| assumption that the wealthy will compete amongst
| themselves to grow their own wealth in a straightforward
| (short term) manner. This framework is utterly unprepared
| for dealing with large (extremely wealthy) actors that
| push in more structured and less immediately profitable
| directions, with the goal of reaping dividends decades in
| the future.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Yes and if european countries are afraid the US is
| leaning on facebook to manipulate their views, they
| should ban facebook!
|
| But if some social media network starts in france, then
| even if it could manipulate users, france probably
| doesn't care because they can "control" it with force of
| law.
|
| This is no different than wanting a domestic steel and
| fertilizer industry. You want powerful entities to be
| under your control.
| epups wrote:
| Ok, so you think the government should police every app
| and if they are developed in a country they consider to
| be adversarial, then they should ban it? Do you at least
| see the potential for abuse here?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Don't put words in my mouth, I didn't say "every" app.
| There are lots of infrastructure you don't want to give
| away essentially. A flashlight app? Yeah that's probably
| fine. Gambling? Sure go ahead chinese companies and take
| people's money for your mobile game. What if splunk was a
| chinese company? For example, I think we should continue
| to discuss whether zoom is trustworthy, didn't they get
| caught routing (maybe accidentally) most stuff through
| china?
|
| Facebook once purposely manipulated depressed kids by
| adjusting what was shown to them in their feed. They
| should have been burned down the second that happened,
| and no country should allow that nonsense, even if you
| trust the american legal system to work. In much the same
| way, we should not trust tiktok, as chinese companies are
| incredibly opaque, so we would have a much harder time
| finding red flags to key us in to any nefarious activity.
|
| In the same way, we probably shouldn't let a secretive
| private company have a thumb on the scale of a
| significant amount of american life. If we only have the
| political capital to ban tiktok right now because "China
| bad" then oh well, sometimes doing the right thing for
| the wrong reason is okay, like when Trump pushed for
| transparency in medical pricing. I don't think a free
| market health system is a workable system, but that was
| still a beneficial step in our current system.
|
| Others say all this talk is cover because the actual law
| being discussed is much more draconian and gross. I would
| not be in favor of that.
| dathinab wrote:
| They are afraid of China getting unchecked access to the data
| and being able to manipulate the recommendation algorithm to
| subtle manipulate to public opinion about some topics.
|
| > apply some oversight to this process...
|
| They don't care about that, they also get the data they need
| from other companies they have much more influence one. Like
| phone companies, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, etc.
| etc.
| mistermann wrote:
| This assumes that the government is sincere in its complaint
| that their concern is about user's data. I think that's cover
| for what they're really concerned about: user's _beliefs_.
|
| TikTok is arguably the most powerful means to spread ideas, and
| people in that line of business do not appreciate outsiders on
| their turf.
|
| The whole TikTok thing itself seems like a distraction from the
| contents of the bill they've drafted under the guise of _only_
| banning TikTok.
|
| Democracy _as it is_ is a giant magic trick, and TikTok is
| pulling back the curtains in it, so it must go.
| creato wrote:
| > This assumes that the government is sincere in its
| complaint that their concern is about user's data.
|
| I watched the hearing. The main concern voiced is
| manipulation of content by the CCP. User data is what cranky
| HN users care about.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > The main concern voiced is manipulation of content by the
| CCP
|
| in what way has the content being manipulated?
| creato wrote:
| I don't know if it has been, and it would be extremely
| difficult to prove one way or the other.
|
| But the potential is obvious. China already heavily
| manipulates content for domestic consumption, and foreign
| information in other contexts. Why would TikTok be an
| exception?
| chongli wrote:
| Complex regulation like that is much harder to sell U.S.
| voters. A lot of Americans are libertarians or libertarian-
| leaning, so their first instinct is to reject regulation out of
| hand, unless it can be shown to be extremely necessary.
|
| Regulation in general is a double-edged sword. While it may be
| great in the short term if your goal is to rein in the bad
| behaviour of large companies, in the long run it can act as a
| pretty effective moat for established companies, preventing
| startups from effectively being able to compete. A lot of
| people attribute Europe's less competitive tech sector (vs the
| U.S.) to an abundance of complex regulations in the EU.
| theironhammer wrote:
| I would agree. I think vigorous anti-monopoly legislation is
| better approach.
| hedora wrote:
| Americans are almost universally against corporate
| surveillance though. (Look at the percent that opt out on
| iOS).
|
| We should pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing right
| to privacy, and it should apply to both the US government,
| and to firms operating withing the US.
| walkhour wrote:
| > put up proper user protecting rules
|
| That is a solution, but there's nothing simple about it.
| Obviously there's an even much simpler solution than coming up
| with what would be a very very complex set of regulations and
| laws, that would have impact across all the industry, and that
| btw tech giants would love. The really simple solution could be
| done tomorrow, without the need of figuring out what "proper"
| is in this case.
|
| Not that what you're saying shouldn't happen, but it's a
| different battle that needn't be intertwined with this one.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > Obviously there's an even much simpler solution
|
| Can you elaborate?
| walkhour wrote:
| Outright banning something very specific is much simpler
| than creating regulation that's going to affect a whole
| industry.
|
| The argument for creating regulation is not that it would
| be simple but that it would be comprenhensive.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Technically I don't think the legislature or FTC can
| cherry pick losers. Though I suppose that's the reason
| for all the discussion around the implications of
| allowing TikTok to continue in light of trade imbalances
| and alleged cultural subterfuge.
| josephcsible wrote:
| If you want a fair and simple solution that applies to all
| companies, how about this? If an American company isn't allowed
| to operate in a foreign country, then don't let companies in
| the same industry from that country operate here. So TikTok
| would be banned here since China bans Twitter, etc.
| [deleted]
| frumper wrote:
| Do you mean companies incorporated in America, or companies
| with ownership stakes in China?
| rvz wrote:
| Massive fine(s) for repeat offences would be even better. The
| EU does it for GDPR and takes companies single digit
| percentage of worldwide annual revenue(s).
|
| The majority of these US companies have already been fined
| like this. The same should happen to TikTok if they want to
| continue to follow the regulations in the US.
| leric wrote:
| [dead]
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I don't understand why China is allowed to have web products in
| our markets but we don't seem to be allowed Google, Facebook,
| WhatsApp etc. in theirs.
|
| We need to just make it a fair playing field and if they want to
| have software startups on the Internet and in App Stores they
| need to open their markets to our products too.
| potsandpans wrote:
| really you don't understand that? fascinating.
| max51 wrote:
| If you don't like how the chinese government operate, you
| probably should not want your government to imitate everything
| they do.
| troad wrote:
| > I don't understand why China is allowed to have web products
| in our markets but we don't seem to be allowed Google,
| Facebook, WhatsApp etc. in theirs.
|
| Because we're a democracy with free speech and open markets,
| and China is not? Banning foreign speech and competition is not
| the victory for our way of life that some people seem to think
| it is.
|
| There _is_ a problem with TikTok - like ALL social media it
| uses opaque ranking algorithms that serve nefarious interests,
| and like ALL social media it spies ruthlessly on its users. How
| about we address those issues, thereby indirectly resolving the
| TikTok issue too?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| There's no such thing as a free market, regulations are
| everywhere. One such regulation that I think is perfectly
| reasonable is that if you want to sell us things we need to
| be able to sell you things. This is largely true with
| hardware (e.g. Apple, Tesla sell into China just fine) but
| most software companies and especially social media have been
| outlawed.
|
| Just because we are a democracy with different values to the
| CCP does not mean we should be taken for fools.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| But we aren't banning foreign speech, we are banning a
| foreign platform for information dissemination. I don't see
| anyone promoting not allowing Chinese citizen's posts to be
| viewable in the USA. That is what banning foreign speech
| would look like.
| boomlinde wrote:
| Since the sudden apparent concern for users' privacy IMO casts
| doubt on the intent, I think discussion on this issue should
| start with determining whether we should take those concerns at
| face value. Is there a legitimate concern for privacy or is it
| just another form of economic warfare? Are the governments
| protecting you as an individual or are they protecting FAANG?
|
| There is little point in discussing this if we are all just
| pretending that it is an issue that it's not.
| synergy20 wrote:
| from another perspective: open internet does
| not live in a vacuum. and the world is not perfect. China
| has banned so many US applications starting more than one decade
| ago. a free and open platform only works when all players
| in general are following similar rules, if a few big players
| exploit the system and you do not act about it, you're a fool and
| doomed.
|
| One example is that, you're rich and liberal and you feel for the
| poor, that does not mean you will share your luxury house with
| them or pay more tax voluntarily, point is that, there is never a
| pure open internet, and there is no pure anything, everything has
| a limit.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| "We need to ban TikTok to protect users and the open internet!"
|
| 1 year later
|
| "Keeping a service owned by the CCP that spies on people in
| hostile countries and purposefully feeds them garbage and
| incorrect information is against the open internet!"
| lakomen wrote:
| Exactly this
| lm28469 wrote:
| > The claims that TikTok will become a covert Chinese Communist
| Party (CCP) propaganda channel are similarly possible but
| hypothetical.
|
| Isn't the claim the opposite ? tiktok china (douyin) is all about
| propaganda, education, tech, nationalism, success, &c. while the
| international version is dumb challenges, addictive content,
| memes &co
|
| > Douyin vs TikTok also differs in terms of popular content. The
| most popular on Douyin is definitely educational content, with
| videos helping to improve skills and grow personally, while on
| Tik Tok the most popular is narrating videos, which is a great
| opportunity for artists, singers, and music producers. Therefore,
| global TikTok is more art-based, with musicians, dancers, and so
| on, while Douyin is skills and lifestyle-tips-based, with
| automatic voiceovers with no personal touch.
|
| https://marketingtochina.com/differences-between-tiktok-and-...
|
| > "It's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing
| kids' development, and they make their domestic version a spinach
| version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest
| of the world," Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, and
| advocate for social media ethics, said of China's approach to
| TikTok.
|
| https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...
| Jochim wrote:
| I get almost no music or dance based content on TikTok. It's
| algorithm almost exclusively returns videos on topics I'm
| interested in. Usually a mix of politics, science, cooking,
| crafts, cat, and couples content.
|
| The simple explanation as to why content popularity varies
| across countries seems to be that there are cultural
| differences at play. Frankly, it feels like a lot of people are
| simply uncomfortable with seeing their cultural values
| reflected back at them.
| capableweb wrote:
| I have no hate for TikTok, I'm sure it's useful for many. But
| I tend to get quickly bored of echo-chambers (HN included
| sometimes), where if I like some content, doesn't mean I just
| want to see content like that.
|
| I need to "reset" my history of YouTube sometimes after I
| "spend" watching 3-4 videos of some topic, and now my YouTube
| is overrun with just content related to that, instead of
| different topics.
|
| TikTok is guilty of the same, where after using it for a week
| or two, I basically see no other content than content related
| to a couple of videos I watched longer than others.
|
| I liked how the internet was before, where I stumbled upon
| content wildly different from each other, and could acquire
| new tastes, instead of just being served what the algorithm
| have decided I should surely forever like.
| Jochim wrote:
| I agree that it can be pretty samey at times. Although,
| I've found it much better at delivering a wider variety of
| content than Youtube, where my recommendations consist of
| videos that:
|
| * I watched once, 12 years ago.
|
| * Sit in recommended for a week or more, despite my obvious
| lack of interest in them.
|
| * Relate to some subset of recent topics.
|
| It's strange how static Youtube recommendations appear to
| be as well. I often see the same set of Youtube Shorts for
| a few days at a time.
|
| I do miss when forums were more popular. It's nice when you
| stumble across one that's still going.
| powerapple wrote:
| China has passed a law to allow user to disable algorithmic
| recommendations. It probably is not in place yet, but
| that's may be something you are looking for.
| capableweb wrote:
| What is really want is a algorithm that does the opposite
| of what current social media does. "You liked this
| content? Here is some content that is on the opposite
| side of what you might like, just for you to discover new
| stuff", but that's less about regulation and legislation
| and more about companies willing to do something
| different than the rest.
| Reimersholme wrote:
| [dead]
| djha-skin wrote:
| TikTok is _not_ the open internet. IRC, self-hosted blogs, the
| fediverse -- _that_ is the open internet.
|
| Banning a walled garden is "fair game" as far as I'm concerned.
| They excercise controll over their users but don't like it when
| they're controlled.
| [deleted]
| cabirum wrote:
| The US can not tolerate competition.
|
| Tiktok gained audience and market share because it happened to be
| a better product in its niche. Inventing any excuses to ban it is
| unadulterated hypocrisy.
|
| All the words like "censorship", "free", "CCP", "national
| security", "china bad" are just euphemisms for childish
| protectionism of an oversized ego.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| They made a better opium that happens to also track and read
| the minds of users.
|
| Some of us think all social media is trash for the mind and
| society, and think it's doubleplusungood when a hostile foreign
| power controls the algo.
|
| You're implying that I root for Instagram. That's not the
| angle.
| wpasc wrote:
| Let's say TikTok was the same exact company founded in another
| country, do you believe that the conversation about banning it
| would be the same? With some exceptions (maybe Russia, for
| example), I seriously doubt it.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Ok. Why can't we use Google and Facebook in China again?
|
| Ah yes, because China can totally tolerate competition.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Friendly reminder that the TikTok ban is _actually_ the Restrict
| Act, and _that_ is a much larger, more aggressive and powerful
| piece of legislation that 's being pushed through than just a
| "TikTok Ban":
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
| jhallenworld wrote:
| The latest enemies list:
|
| (i) the People's Republic of China, including the Hong Kong
| Special Administrative Region and Macao Special Administrative
| Region;
|
| (ii) the Republic of Cuba;
|
| (iii) the Islamic Republic of Iran;
|
| (iv) the Democratic People's Republic of Korea;
|
| (v) the Russian Federation; and
|
| (vi) the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela under the regime of
| Nicolas Maduro Moros.
| t-writescode wrote:
| To add, sections 9 and 10 read to me (very paraphrased)
|
| "Any telecom, etc, product where someone in the parent post's
| list has partial ownership, including voting stocks and has
| >= 1 million users"
|
| So, that includes a _lot_ of video games (Genshin Impact,
| League of Legends, Gunfire Reborn, etc) and also Reddit and
| Epic Games, maybe? I 'm sure an argument would be made that
| since the CEO of Telegram was born in Russia, it would count,
| too, somehow.
|
| Edit: whoever downvoted the above comment, that's literally
| section 8B
|
| Addendum: I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a layperson trying to
| read this thing.
| concernedsoft wrote:
| It's pretty scary. I wrote down some thoughts on this with
| regard to general purpose computing:
| https://concernedsoftwareuser.github.io/software-freedom/
| didip wrote:
| I never use TikTok, but banning it seems fair game. China banned
| a lot of apps made in the US.
| abirch wrote:
| They banned them because they knew the US Government would
| probably use the data, either by asking the companies nicely or
| by using NSA.
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